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Next national security improvement: no studying overseas?

August 5, 2026 by timhamlett

There are worrying signs that the new nationally secure future will include increasing efforts to discourage – and in due course perhaps to forbid – Hong Kong students from studying overseas.

First symptom spotted by people who take an interest in these things was an article in the Hong Kong Standard’s on-line version, headed “Foreign schemes use free travel to recruit elites to disrupt Hong Kong”.

I have a great sentimental affection for the Hong Kong Standard, where I enjoyed some of the happiest working years of my life, but the paper seems to have fallen on hard times, and Standard standards have slipped.

The piece in question is clearly a matter of opinion, and should have a by-line, but does not. The headline is followed by four pictures, which should have captions, but do not. One of them appears to be a welcome seminar for participants in an overseas study programme, one appears to be a police press conference, and two are of unidentified individuals.

The story itself appears to be based heavily on the imagination of the author. There is not a single named source. Factlets are attributed to “some political figures”, “political figures”, “a political figure”, “the outside world”, “the political figure”, “reports”, “informed sources”, “it is estimated”, “a fact known to everyone in those circles”, and “political figures” again.

The piece concludes with a fierce attack on the Hong Kong Journalists Association which appears to have no factual basis and is not attributed to anyone but the anonymous author. Who, I suspect, is also “a political figure”.

In short what we are looking at here is a piece of what is known technically in journalism education circles as crap.

The author cites four exchange programmes as providing opportunities for “external forces” to “instill hostile Anti-China and Hong Kong-disrupting ideologies”. Three of them are explicitly sponsored by the US State Department and no doubt purvey surreptitiously such seditious notions as freedom, democracy and the rule of law. The idea that they are specifically directed at China., much less Hong Kong, is silly. List of some victims of the International Visitor Leadership Program here.

The other is the Chevening Scholarship scheme, parented by the UK Foreign Office. But this does not provide a programme; scholars pursue Master’s courses of their own choice. Ironically, alumni are claimed to strengthen UK-China relationships.

However “political figures” also has it in for Harvard U’s Nieman Fellowship, and the fellowship programme at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, whose sins were to accommodate respectively Bao Choy and Ronson Chan. The objection, I fear, is to foreign travel and overseas study as such.

Consequently it was disturbing to read on Monday that Jardine’s educational trust has decided to end a scheme which provided scholarships for students to attend Oxford and Cambridge Universities. The trust will instead expand opportunities for students to attend “leading universities” in the Asian region. Could that, I wonder, mean China?

I think “political figures” is grossly over-estimating the effect of free study trips. I have some history here. For many years two organisations, one UK and one German, have cooperated to hold the annual Koenigswinter Conference (Koenigswinter is a small town near Bonn, which was the capital of West Germany when the thing started) where movers and shakers from both countries get together to discuss matters of mutual interest.

It also has a youth version for future movers and shakers, the Young Koenigswinter Conference, which is held in Berlin and to which, way back in 1969, I was invited. Clearly the identification of future movers and shakers was a bit awry here.

Anyway we had the usual “sugar-coated traps” as “political figures” would put it: travel and accommodation were free, lectures, tours and seminars thrown in. Clearly the hope was that we would emerge with a higher opinion of Germany and particular good will towards West Berlin, a Cold War flashpoint recently walled off from the eastern part of the city.

Did this happen? I doubt it. The thing which most impressed the English contingent was the slot machine in the entrance hall of our castle, which dispensed cans of beer. As the sale of booze in England was still surrounded by restrictions on places, times and ages this was a pleasant surprise, and the machine did a lot of business. Personally I had some very pleasant international relations with a student from Freiburg called Monika.

Our actual deliberations on the Anglo-German relationship were inconclusive. The basic and insoluble problem was that for most of our elders the major event of their life was World War 2, in which Germany had provided the opposition. Indoctrination wilts in encounters with recent history.

This probably applies to Hong Kong as well. “Political figures” should beware of attributing inconvenient opinions to foreign influence. Events usually trump ideology.

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Keeping up the good news stories: prosecuting bookshops

July 19, 2026 by timhamlett

Another day, another embarrassing story about Hong Kong. Our city has become a dangerous place for independent bookshops. Secretary for Security Chris Tang says his forces are not targeting any particular sector. Indeed. Only three boookshops have been raided so far this year.

So independent bookshops have just been unlucky. Well we have to believe officials when they say these things. They are honourable men. So are they all, all honourable men…

One does rather cringe, though, at the idea of newspaper readers all over the world seeing the picture of a bookshop staff (teeshirt: I am a bookshop staff) being led in cuffs out of her workplace. Quite apart from the distressing thought of a young woman being led off for trial on dubious charges, why do our national security police look so scruffy?

I suppose there may be some reason why raids on delinquent bookshops cannot be done by cops in full uniform, but if there are to be plainclothes could you boys at least tuck in your shirts, and maybe iron your trousers? I also have some misgivings about the Adidas product placement.

Mr Tang, meanwhile, continues to spout nonsense. Booksellers must be responsible for the books they sell, he says, “just like merchants selling food have to make sure their food won’t make people sick. That they are not selling poison and not breaking the law.”

This is a totally false analogy. Someone selling food has complete control over the situation. The cafe owner or chef chooses the ingredients and the preparation method. It is entirely right that he or she should be held responsible for not poisoning people.

Someone who runs a bookshop does not write the books. I find it hard to believe I had to write that. Unless the bookshop is vanishingly small the person running it does not even read the books. This is simply not possible. Some books are very hard work. Is “War and Peace” subversive? Don’t ask me; I have never managed to finish it. It is not the philosophy that loses me, but the fact that in Russian novels every character has at least three names.

It is interesting to compare Mr Tang’s hardline approach with the law on obscene publications, passed in gentler times, which provides a defence for people who “had no reasonable opportunity to inspect the article the subject of the charge; and had reasonable grounds for believing that article was not obscene.”

After all there is no reason to suppose that people who work in bookshops are bent on breaking the law. I imagine a polite notification that a particular book was, in the official view, subversive would result in the swift disappearance of the denounced volume. This would be sad, but not as sad as losing the whole bookshop, which seems to be the government’s objective.

Mr Tang rejected suggestions that it would be useful to supply booksellers with a list of banned works, saying that this would only “help criminals”. This seems an odd thing to say. After all it is generally considered a good idea that people should know in as much detail as possible what is the law which applies to them.

We do not see signs on our streets saying “Speed limit: guess!” or “Possibly no parking”. Providing a list need not imply that anything not on the list is legal. It would simply provide guidance to book vendors trying to work out what is allowed and what is not.

Mr Tang’s other objection to a local Index Librorum Prohibitorum (the name of the Papal version, abandoned in 1966) is that people producing banned books could simply change the title of the book. This is so far off the mark as to suggest that Mr Tang’s encounters with literature have been quite limited. The title of the book is its name, the label by which the eager reader identifies it.

If we change the title to hide the book from Mr Tang’s minions, we also hide it from potential readers.

What is really worrying nat sec enthusiasts may be the thought that a list of forbidden books would provide good publicity for some otherwise obscure works, and people with a taste for subversive literature could order copies from overseas booksellers. Books you cannot buy from shops in Hong Kong might soar up the Amazon bestseller lists.

This is not a totally implausible fear; “The one they tried to ban” has sold a lot of books. But what does that tell us about the relationship between Hong Kong’s government and people?

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Message to prosecutors: children should be treated as children

July 10, 2026 by timhamlett

The Department of Justice continues to find ways to spoil my breakfast. Consider the case of Ms Ami Chan, which was heard in the Eastern Magistrates Court earlier this week.

Ms Chan was arrested in 2019 (yes, it’s one of those cases) although she was not accused of rioting. The case revolves round the contents of her rucksack, which included two laser pointers and two cans of spray paint. A rare hit from “stop and search” policing.

Nothing further happened until 2021, when Ms Chan, still a free woman without convictions, moved to Australia, where she has lived and worked ever since.

However earlier this year she returned to Hong Kong and was then arrested and charged with the offences involving her unruly rucksack. Nothing remarkable so far. Cases dating back to 2019 are still coming before Hong Kong courts, although apparently the government now accepts that most of the thousands of people who were arrested will never be charged with anything.

Why am I bothered? Because at the time of her arrest Ms Chan was aged 15. She was a schoolgirl, a juvenile in the eyes of the law. Now she is an adult, appearing in an adult court and facing possible adult penalties.

This is not supposed to happen. The law sensibly has a less abrasive approach to juvenile defendants than it does to adult ones. There are differences in procedure and also in the penalties which can be imposed in case of a conviction. There are also reporting restrictions.

This system only works if prosecutors get their act together in a reasonably quick fashion and get the case into court while the juvenile is still a juvenile. When I was a court reporter we still covered juvenile cases (the public is not admitted but media reports of a limited kind are allowed) and the hearing commonly occurred within weeks of the alleged offence.

I do not recall any case in which the prosecution of a juvenile took so long that the matter had to be heard in an adult court. This routinely occurs in Hong Kong.

In defence of the prosecutors it will be said that Ms Chan was responsible for some of the delay because she could not be prosecuted while she was not in Hong Kong. That is one way of putting it. After all Hong Kong citizens are not required by either law or morality to hang about in Hong Kong waiting for the justice machinery to churn through their paperwork if they have things to do elsewhere.

I note also that in 2021, when she left, she will already have been 17, on the brink of legal adulthood. The further five years have sufficed only to remove her from the further protections provided by the Court of Appeal’s sentencing guidelines for people under the age of 21.

I express no opinion about Ms Chan’s guilt or innocence, on which the magistrate is now pondering. I do believe that having fallen so far below the standards expected of prosecutions in cases involving children the Department of Justice should not have brought this case at all.

The department’s guidelines for prosecutors (echoing numerous human rights instruments, including our local one) say that defendants are entitled to a trial within a reasonable time. What the department’s denizens seem to have trouble getting their heads round is that this may vary with the age of the accused.

It may be acceptable (God help us) to keep an adult waiting for seven years. For a juvenile even seven weeks could be considered excessive. Faced with a kid in trouble the case needs either to be diverted into a high-speed channel from the bureaucratic pipeline where it has to float along with the rest of the legal excrement, or fished out and dealt with promptly by whoever owns the relevant in-tray.

Depriving young defendants of the benefit of the provisions expressly provided for them is a rank and undisputable injustice, whether it is perpetrated as a deliberate abuse or an unintended result of a sluggish system. Children should be treated as children.

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Freedom of expression? Blessed are the pessimists

June 27, 2026 by timhamlett

For a fairly depressing experience, try reading the Court of Final Appeal’s decision on the question whether it is acceptable for the government to make it a crime to encourage people not to vote. Of course it is all right. This does not come as a surprise. As Alexander Pope put it, “Blessed are the pessimists, for they shall never be disappointed.” The judges’ conclusions lived down to expectations.

Well I do not propose a critique of the decision. This would be pointless. The law is, in the end, whatever judges decide it is.

The interesting thing about the judgment written by Chief Justice Andrew Cheung, and unanimously endorsed by his colleagues, was what was said, or implied, about what you might call the surrounding area. Granted that the restriction on advocating election boycotts was an acceptable restriction on freedom of speech, what areas are we left with?

Consider, for example, a generalisation during what you might call the warm-up phase: “Debate and discussion during an election period concerning whether to vote, for whom to vote, and whether the election is being conducted openly, fairly and honestly are plainly matters of importance.”

May we deduce from this that having allowed the government to curtail discussion of whether to vote, judges will in future defend the right to discuss whom to vote for, and whether the election is open, fair and honest?

There are, I think we can infer from the turnout in the last district polls, among us some deluded citizens who think the elections were neither open nor fair, and as that is the case the question of honesty does not really arise. They may think that the electoral system merely pastes a rather ineffective figleaf over an entirely predictable exercise of China’s undisputable and unlimited sovereignty, that a Chief Executive “election” with only one candidate lacks a certain je ne sais quoi in democratic respectability

But if one of these unfortunate people were to express this view in a public forum, what would happen? Our government’s reaction to public criticism of any kind, even from its most dogged supporters, tends to fall in the range between tetchy and outraged.

It also appears that with so many recycled police people in the administration, the reaction to opposition is like that of the man with a hammer to whom every problem looks like a nail. Ungrateful people and organisations should be arrested and charged. If there is no convenient law permitting this we should explore the uses that can be made of inconvenient ones, so independent bookshops get raided, independent news outlets get tax demands, independent restaurants are inspected…

This seems a long way from the world inhabited by Chief Justice Cheung, who observes that the law on boycott calls “is confined to the election period and to acts of public incitement. At other times and on other occasions, the right to freedom of expression remains unaffected.”

Does it indeed? I suppose private incitement enjoys a certain amount of freedom because it is private. As the old Lancashire saying has it, “what the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over.” As a potential practitioner of public incitement, though, I remain unconvinced by the time limit. Would 1,000 words on the deficiencies of Hong Kong elections under the current system pass unnoticed if published outside the election period? Would it make any difference if they were in Chinese? Would it make any difference if they had been written by some reviled target figure like Ted Hui?

Far be it from me to suggest that the Court of Final Appeal has erred. It is difficult though to acquit the court of the charge of complacency. Freedom of expression is an endangered species and it would be nice to think judges would protect it. Perhaps this was not a suitable case for a demonstration of judicial zeal for the defence of an important human right. Perhaps there will never be a suitable case…

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Small regulation causes big punch-up. Seconds out!

June 17, 2026 by timhamlett

We do not, thank goodness, have a local equivalent of Multiple Martial Arts on the White House lawn. But sensation seekers in search of a good punch-up can always depend on the relations between the Hong Kong government and its overseas critics.

So to an interesting piece of micro legislation, the Safeguarding National Security (Procedural Matters) Regulation. The main purpose of this, we are told, is to “clarify” what is a case involving national security.

This point is supposed to be covered by the local nat sec ordinance’s Section 7, but that masterful work, after naming three sets of legislation, concludes with “other offences endangering national security under the laws of the HKSAR”. Which offences might those be? According to the regulation this will be decided on a case-by-case basis by the HKSAR Chief Executive, who will issue a binding certificate which the court concerned must follow.

This is not new. The CE has this power under Article 47 of the 2020 nat sec law. The local nat sec law, aiming for patriotic overkill in this as in other matters, also specifically authorises the CE to create new offences, punishable with large fines or seven years in jail.

So does the new regulation change anything? Well in the Blue Corner we have the Washington Post editorial board: “At China’s behest, the city says people can now be charged retroactively for crimes that didn’t exist when they allegedly committed them… Under updates which took effect this week, the city’s chief executive can classify any case as a national security crime under the 2020 law, even when the alleged offense was committed before that law took effect.”

The board also points out that “Being charged with a national security offense carries enormous consequences for defendants. They can be jailed immediately and held for longer pre-trial detention periods. They are denied the ordinary presumption of innocence and denied bail. And they can be denied their choice of lawyer…”

In the Red Corner we have the HKSAR outraged press release department and a full deployment of the usual vocabulary: irrational anti-China stance… double standards … hypocrisy and double standards … ignorance of facts … falsely and maliciously claimed … betrayal of the basic tenets of responsible journalism …shocking, irresponsible and totally unacceptable behaviour … dirty tricks … bold-faced lies to smear the HKSAR.

The spokesperson (who is not, in my view, qualified to comment on what might or might not be responsible journalism) did get in some factual stuff, which went like this: “the Procedural Matters Regulation has no retrospective effect at all. It does not create any new offence or alter the penalties of any offence. It certainly does not turn any lawful conduct into an offence. It is not applicable to legal proceedings that are concluded.”

The spokesperson thought that this would be obvious to anyone who studied the regulation and observed the relevant Legco meetings. Well pardon me for not observing the Legco meetings. What legislators say in meetings is not law and what officials say they will do with upcoming law changes often turns out to be unreliable.

However we can look at the regulation and here we have to award some points to the spokesperson. It does not create new offences, it does not (at least not directly) alter the penalties for offences and it does not turn lawful conduct into an offence, which means the same thing as not creating new offences.

Defenders of the Washington Post, on the other hand, are not helpless. They can point to the regulation’s Section 2(a), which provides that the CE’s certificate is valid “regardless of whether the act was done or the prosecution was brought before, at the time or after the HK National Security Law came into operation.”

I take this to mean that if you are charged with an offence allegedly committed in 2019, before the Nat Sec law’s appearance in 2020, the CE can still by certificate turn this into a national security case, to be conducted under the nat sec case procedure. In many jurisdictions the idea of a seven-year-old offence being wheeled into court would be outlandish but here we still have thousands of people who were arrested in 2019 and have been neither charged nor told that they will not be.

So what can we conclude from all this? The Washington Post clearly did not put its misgivings about the regulation accurately. The regulation does not make something illegal which was not illegal before, and in that sense is not retroactive. On the other hand the Post has a point: changes to procedure may be retroactive and these have important implications for defendants.

The SAR’s spokesperson was too busy throwing abuse to consider this point. Would it be too much to hope for reasoned debate about matters of this kind?

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Man throws subversive leaflets from high place: now where did we hear that before?

June 4, 2026 by timhamlett

History, it is said, does not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. This may explain the sense of déja vu that crept over me when I read about the case of Mr Raymond Wong – a 55-year-old construction worker, not the former newsman of the same name – who appeared in the Kowloon Magistrates Court a couple of weeks ago.

The charge against Mr Wong was that he had on two occasions thrown home-produced leaflets, or in legal language “paper sheets written with statements”, from the vicinity of his 12th floor public housing flat into the public area of the estate.

The first time many of them were picked up by an irate district councillor, on the second by a staff member of the estate’s management. Quite how this led to Mr Wong was not explained in court but police eventually discovered his fingerprints on two of the offending items.

Mr Wong was then charged with violating the local national security law, on the grounds that the words on the leaflets were seditious. The first batch called for action against corrupt police people, which I suppose is automatically seditious because it implies that there are corrupt police people, which of course is not true.

The second batch of leaflets included the phrase “liberate Hong Kong; do not vote”. Curiously Mr Wong was not charged with discouraging voters, though that is an offence. Worse, we may suppose, was the fatal phrase “liberate Hong Kong”, when as we all know the law presumes that Hong Kong is already as liberated as it wishes to be.

Mr Wong sensibly pleaded guilty and will be sentenced on June 9.

Meanwhile I was haunted by the thought that scattering subversive leaflets into public places had come up somewhere before. And after some searching I found it in Geert Mak’s book, “In Europe”. Mr Mak was assigned by the Dutch newspaper he worked for to spend a year touring Europe while also touring the continent’s 20th century history. The resulting pieces were published as they were written in the newspaper, and assembled into the book, which is excellent though now a bit dated, afterwards.

So in due course Mr Mak reached Munich, a city with a complete set of capital city kit because it used to be the home of the Kings of Bavaria. One of them lent his name to the local university, the Ludwig-Maximilian Universitat. Apparently this is a rather bombastic piece of architecture.

Let me now hand the microphone to Mr Mak:

“Here at the university is where it all converges: the pompous stairways, the pseudo-Roman statues beside them (in reality, two Bavarian kings in costume) the stupendous dome covering the hall, but also the wispy innocent desperate little pamphlets that the students Hans and Sophie Scholl let flutter down from the galleries here on 18 February 1943 ‘In the name of Germany’s young people we demand restitution by Adolf Hitler’s state of our personal freedom …’. They had spread tracts and left behind graffiti on earlier occasions as well: ‘Freedom’, ‘Down with Hitler’. That was all the White Rose did. This time, though, they were caught by the caretaker and turned over to the Gestapo. Four days later they were beheaded.”

Now nothing like that could happen here. We do not conclude national security cases in four days. We take four years, which may or may not be an improvement but is certainly different. We do not do capital punishment.

We do not have to worry about our personal freedom, at least as long as we refrain from daring stuff like appearing in the vicinity of Victoria Park with a piece of red string or an inflated question mark.

Still, it should not be a matter of rejoicing that we have joined the club of countries where the channels of public communication have been so choked by fear and restrictions that citizens who wish to express their views are reduced to scattering anonymous leaflets.

Our government seems to have inherited the thin skin of our notoriously sensitive police force. Now even legislators – carefully vetted patriots to a man or woman – are complaining that any comment on government policy which falls short of a rousing endorsement is branded as dishonesty or worse by official spokesmen.

No doubt government policies are usually well chosen and efficiently implemented. Still, our leaders should perhaps take a word of advice from Oliver Cromwell, who famously wrote to one set of obstinate opponents: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”

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My clock deceived me, but then nowadays machinery does that all the time…

May 30, 2026 by timhamlett

The other night I was deceived by my clock. I should perhaps explain that Chez Hamlett we still have a clock which hangs on the wall. This habit originated many years ago when our son was very small and insisted on a cuckoo clock.

The rather annoying mechanical bird expired quite quickly, thank goodness, and the empty hook was taken over by a silent station clock with a pendulum. The pendulum was purely ornamental and stopped working a long time ago without affecting the function of the clock.

The station clock finally grew tatty after decades of faithful service and was replaced by a simple, and cheap, version from Ikea; this is nothing fancy and just has the basic 12 numbers and two hands.

The clock is easily visible from my desk so I tend to use it despite the competition provided by my wristwatch, computer and telephone, all of which will happily tell the time if asked.

So it came about that I was watching a particularly riveting episode of Killing Eve on Netflix, and this was followed by another riveting episode, and another, during which time apparently stood still. Surely it could not still be 10.30? Indeed it was not. The clock had stopped and needed a new battery.

This was harmless enough. I no longer have to get up to go to work so a late night is nothing to lose sleep over, as it were. It was chastening to find how easily you could be deceived by a simple piece of machinery, even when it was easy enough to check.

Of course there was no malice here. The clock was not being mischievous. Phones, keyboards and mice all need attention to their electricity needs and will refuse to perform unless regularly fed. Battery-operated items of the traditional kind need changes, the car needs petrol, and so it goes.

Yet this is the age of deceptive machinery. This is not a completely new thing. Stalin used to have purge victims painted out of official photography. People wondered whether Robert Capa’s shot militiaman was really … well, shot. One news photographer of my acquaintance admitted that he always took a small stuffed toy on disaster assignments because pictures of ruins looked so much more poignant with an abandoned plaything in them.

The distinguished war photographer Tim Page mused in his memoirs whether it was acceptable to photograph a dead soldier under a poncho, and if so whether it was also acceptable to rearrange the poncho to improve the picture.

At a more homely level I once congratulated the chief photographer of the Morecambe Visitor, where I was a naive and newly recruited sports editor, on the frequency with which he and his colleagues managed to capture the goal-scoring moment, with the ball flying past the goalkeeper’s flailing fingers. He then explained that this was due to technical skill rather than timing; the diving goalkeeper was genuine but the ball was inserted in the darkroom while the picture was being printed.

On the whole though, with due allowance for the possibility that people posed when they knew they were being pictured, photographs were regarded as more or less reliable records of what people did and looked like.

I was always more suspicious of TV and film, because of early exposure to the amount of setting up and technical preparation involved in quite simple bits of moving picture. If the scene was supposed to be “real” you were to some extent dependent on the honesty of the enterprise, and needed to remember that out of the picture were “the crew”. Over the years the crew has shrunk. In my early RTHK days there was a producer/director, cameraman, sound man, lights man, man in charge of the props, just in case any were needed, and the driver of the van required by all these people and me. Nowadays you may be interviewed by a reporter with a phone.

Anyway we have changed all that. The moment when I realised that you could no longer rely at all on video came when I watched a Youtube video of cats doing Olympic dives off a springboard. This was not an attempt at deception – nobody was going to buy the idea of human-sized cats – it was just a display of what you could do with AI.

Which is, it seems, practically anything. Nothing can be relied on any more. Idiots who believe Hillary Clinton runs a pedophile ring out of a Washington pizzeria can now order up a video of Mrs C ushering dazed kids into the basement for unmentionable purposes.

Lying by machinery has now become so common that they seem to be genuinely frightened of each other. How else can we explain the constant insistence that the ordinary human netizen should prove he or she is “not a robot”.

This is infuriating. The usual test used to be a mosaic of nine tiny pictures, which you were supposed to tick if they had a bicycle or a traffic light in them. Sometimes they wanted you to look for a ”crosswalk”, something unknown to English English. But until you had passed the picture test you could not Google it.

We now seem to have moved on to a bit of cursive writing, which you are supposed to decipher and type in the space provided. I imagine this is difficult for any robot; it regularly defeats me. Alternatively you can listen to something and type that.

The resulting burst of sound is completely incomprehensible. I must in fairness acknowledge that this may be because my VPN places me in a carefully selected and very neutral Scandinavian city. I do not speak Swedish. What tangled webs we are all weaving these days.

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Five-year plans, however important, are not a suitable topic for lampposts

May 2, 2026 by timhamlett

One of the changes I have noticed since our last – shall we say popular? – district board was replaced by a more salubrious patriots-only gathering is that we now get decorations on Shatin lampposts.

This adds to public gaiety, no doubt, but has limited effectiveness as a communication medium because the banners have to be quite small and the lampposts are quite tall. So you can’t really get any words in.

Early attempts in this area avoided the legibility problem because they were put up in celebration of anniversaries. All you could really see was a big number, but as you were seeing the same number in all sorts of other places it was quite obvious what we were supposed to be celebrating.

The latest effort did not involve a number. Looking up at it while waiting for the traffic lights to change I could not make out anything at all. My research assistant deployed her mobile phone, took a picture with the telephoto feature working flat out and announced that we were celebrating China’s 15th five-year plan.

Happily I was able to catch up with this important matter when I came across a much bigger offering on the same theme outside an MTR station. It seems we are urged to “Pro-actively align with the 15th five-year plan” and “Follow a holistic approach to development and security”.

I hesitate to criticise the work of other writers but I cannot resist the thought that the author of this offering needs to give some thought to finding the sort of language which means something concrete and sensible to the man in the street, who is rarely told to pro-actively align with anything, or indeed to follow a holistic approach to it.

Most English people of my generation are not bowled over by the idea of five-year plans. This is partly because rigid adherence to erroneous five-year plans caused two of the 20th century’s most catastrophic famines: in Ukraine 1932-3 and in China 1958-62.

It is also no doubt partly because UK governments have rarely attempted economic planning of this kind and the rare experiment (in the early years of the 1964 Wilson government) was not a success. The Treasury (which is what they call the Finance Ministry in the UK) has never developed a wish to run plans itself, but certainly does not want anyone else doing it.

Besides the history there is the philosophical objection, usually attributed to Friedrich Hayek, to government direction of the economy. This maintains that official intervention is an infringement of freedom and also obscures the useful information provided by prices set in the marketplace.

Whatever you think of five-year plans, though, one does have to wonder if they really call for the sort of mass public participation that the campaign on lamp-posts and MTR stations appears to be seeking. Even if we replaced proactive alignment and holistic approaches with something more democratic in tone it is far from clear what the average Hong Kong person can do to further the doubtless laudable aims of the national plan.

Apparently we are going to have our own five-year plan in due course, some time later this year. No doubt this will be a very valuable indication of what Hong Kong should be doing to further national objectives. Perhaps it would make more sense to wait for it.

A separate question is whether the compulsive adornment of lamp-posts with announcements of public interest is a welcome innovation. Perhaps it is a dulce et decorum thing that citizens should be reminded of historic landmarks and invited to join in democratic festivals.

But there is a cost to hanging things on lampposts and district board members need to consider whether the message they are trying to get across really suits this particular mass medium. If the only thing you can get in at a legible size is two digits then the merits of proactive alignment and holistic approaches should be advertised elsewhere. There is no point in hanging a message on a lamppost if people need a pair of binoculars to read it.

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An old joke with topical resonance

April 27, 2026 by timhamlett

Reading the latest news I find myself recalling an old Russian joke. It must be an old joke because it features an attempt to assassinate Leonid Brezhnev, who died in 1982. This joke is entirely fictitious and has no real people in it, living or dead.

It goes like this:

Yesterday a madman attempted to assassinate our leader Leonid Brezhnev. The attempt failed. As soon as he produced his weapon the assailant was overwhelmed by a crowd of bystanders shouting “Give me the gun! Give me the gun! Let me do it!”

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Keeping ‘Five dumplings not one less’ off local menus

April 17, 2026 by timhamlett

The Hong Kong government’s attitude to the rule of law is interestingly ambiguous. It wishes to claim credit for being a law-abiding government, but it does not want to sacrifice for this purpose the achievement of other desires.

This implicit conflict is nicely wrapped up in the matter of restaurant licences. In any sensible jurisdiction there are some requirements for restaurant operators, intended to ensure hygiene and other worthy food-related objectives.

However these days all government departments are expected to show their enthusiasm for national security. So last year the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department, which licenses restaurants, treated licence-holders to a letter warning that licences would be revoked if holders or their “related persons” engaged in conduct against national security or the public interest.

Now the FEHD has form in the matter of using existing regulations to pester or persecute restaurants which the government, for some basically political reason, does not like. So there were complaints that what was effectively a new licence condition was too vague, and consequently open to abuse.

Not so, the Chief Executive told a news conference. “Offending conduct means any offence that endangers national security, or acts and events that are contrary to national security and public interest in Hong Kong. It is very clear,”

But it is not very clear, because two very different things are being mixed together. An offence that endangers national security is a criminal matter. Conviction takes place in a public court and is a matter of record. A restaurant owner convicted of such an offence may feel that losing his licence is the least of his problems, but he can read the law and look at the way it has been applied.

He will avoid traditional menu items like Five Dumplings, Not One Less, or Three Hamburgers; Revelation of our Thyme. “Related persons” will be urged to behave themselves. But what does the public interest require?

This mystery persists in the latest version of the licence, which has a clause we can consider in full:

“I shall ensure that no act or activity engaged or involved in by me or any of my related persons (include the directors, officers, employees, agents and sub-contractors) may constitute or cause the occurrence of an offence endangering national security under the National Security Law or other laws of the HKSAR, or conduct is otherwise contrary to the interests of national security or the interest of the public (including public morals, public order and/or public safety) of Hong Kong.”

As tends to happen in very long sentences the grammar wilts a bit in the closing stages and seems to require either the insertion of “that” after conduct or the deletion of “is” in the same place. But this does not affect the meaning, which still leaves the question over what might be in the public interest.

There are some legal glosses on the phrase, though unfortunately they are not particularly helpful. Some restrictions on media stories can be waived if publication is “in the public interest”. Judges tend to be quite conservative about this but the general rule seems to be that the public interest is served by stories which expose iniquity (in a broad sense) or stories which alert the public to hazards which they need to know about.

In contract law it is well established that contracts will not be enforced if their effect is not in the public interest. Once again this does not come up very often – judges are even more hostile to unenforced contracts than they are to muckraking journalists – but traditionally contracts have not been enforced if they concern gambling or commercial sex.

The morals/order/safety part seems to have been inspired by the part of the Bill of Rights Ordinance which specifies the purposes for which the government may restrict freedom of expression. This suggests – a worrying thought – that the government intends to use threats to restaurant licences to restrict freedom of expression, and proposes if anyone complains to rely on the permitted restrictions.

This may not fly in court because the Bill of Rights Ordinance also requires that restrictions should be specified by law and necessary in a democratic society. Clearly legal language is being used here, but perhaps as an adornment rather than a substantial signal.

Where does all this leave us? Well one theory is that the government wishes to increase its options in efforts to suppress businesses which supported the wrong people in 2019. Asked if this was the case Mr Ronnie Tong, a government adviser, replied last year that it was “hard to say”.

Another theory is that the unstated purpose is to reinforce the existing routine practice under which food outlets which have accepted bookings from organisations the government does not like tend to cancel them at the last minute.

Maybe it is just that the “public interest” is one of those elusive philosophical concepts like “soft resistance” which puzzle the public but are perfectly clear to recycled policemen and the people who write the front page of Ta Kung Pao.

The other remaining puzzle is why restaurant licences have been singled out. All government departments, we are told, have an obligation to support national security. But the numerous other licences issued for various purposes by different departments have not been amended in the same way.

Yet.

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