tim's experiment

I did not start this blog so that I could chronicle the Decline and Fall of the South China Morning Post. But the demise of our once fabled English-language newspaper is turning into a saga with all the ingredients of Greek tragedy, including a growing sense of terror and pity among the audience.  I do not propose to bore you with my thoughts on the internal row over why the death of Li Wangyang only merited two paragraphs. Every newspaper in town except the Post has wallowed in this story.

What bothers me is the collapse of quality control on the op ed page where long thoughtful pieces entertain readers who have finished the letters. I have noted with mounting dismay the frequency of long dimwitted diatribes from some Shanghai businessman who thinks everything up there is wonderful. I do not expect to get any political sense out of businessmen.  But on Tuesday we plumbed new depths. The article was called “Leung’s election a vote of confidence in Beijing” and it was written, we were told, by a Prof at the Peking (sic)University’s Centre for Hong Kong and Macau Studies. Jiang Shigong, the author of the piece, is apparently the deputy director of the centre. Careful readers of the biographical details will have noted that he was for four years a researcher at the Central Government’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong. A card-carrying apparatchik put out to grass then.

This article was the sort of thing which gives Social Science a bad name. A modest array of well-known facts was adorned with a monstrous inverted pyramid of implausible interpretation. Prof Jiang’s thesis is that since the handover Hong Kong people were “full of fear, distrust or even hostility towards the Central Government’s exercise of sovereignty in Hong Kong”. This is a startling departure from the usual official left-wing line, which has historically been that Hong Kong people were beside themselves with joy at the handover. I know this was the official line because when I disputed it in a column one of the Legco comrades tried to get me fired. Prof Jiang now says that this fear,  distrust etc., have dissipated, because Hong Kong people generally preferred CY Leung as a candidate for CE to the owner of Hong Kong’s largest illegal basement.

On the strength of this rather feeble preference for the least toxic of the two serious candidates Prof Jiang “feels the heartfelt acceptance of Chinese sovereignty in Hong Kong”. Or as he put it in a paragraph which suggests academia rather than journalism as a future career, “the 2012 popular election was … undoubtedly a popular endorsement for the central government’s exercise of sovereignty in Hong Kong. It symbolised that Hong Kongers had officially and psycho-culturally acknowledged the central government’s sovereignty, so that Hong Kong was not only reunified with mainland China in the legal aspect but also in the hearts of the people.”  This is unmitigated hogwash, as anyone who lives in Hong Kong ought to know.

In case you deo not want to take my word for this, on Wednesday’s City pages there was a bulletin from the real world where you find out what people think by asking them. This was headlined “Mistrust of Beijing at post-1997 high”. It had been written by a real journalst, and reported that according to the latest research by the usual people at Hong Kong U, 37 percent of the people polled said they distrusted Beijing. This was 3 percent up since last March, before the CE election. Researcher Robert Chung cited several recent incidents (Bo Xilai, Chen Guangcheng, Li Wangyang) as accounting for the decline in trust. Dixon Sing, a political scientist (they’re all over the place) at the HKUST, said that “The results show that Hong Kong people have an impression that the communist party is intolerant of dissent and is willing to resort to high-handed repression. The intolerance and repression are a world apart from Hong Kong’s core values.”

So there you are. Political Science seems to produce different results when it is done in Beijing and when it is done in Hong Kong. Journalism on the other hand, as practised at the South China Morning Post, is rapidly becoming less ambiguous.