tim's experiment

So glad the NPC meeting and associated gabfests are over. The front page of the Post has been thoroughly irritating, featuring a succession of daily leading non-stories from Beijing, evidently selected on the basis that any story from the NPC, however boring and irrelevant, must be accorded its official status. It’s like reading the China Daily.

Mind you it’s not as boring as watching the proceedings on television. I had a strange sense of deja vu when ATV treated us to a glimpse of the hall. Rows of elderly heads bent over some mysterious piece of paper, all with pen in hand. What were they doing? Surely they don’t all follow the printed version of the speech to make notes when the speaker diverges from the script? Yet they were obviously doing something important, because not one of them was reading a newspaper, listening to an MP3 player, texting messages on his mobile phone or playing a video game. Clearly not a university lecture, then. The sense that I was watching something eerily familiar was no help when I tracked it down. The scene reminded me of the time long ago when I worked as a bingo caller. Rows of elderly heads, pen in hand, eyes glued to a piece of paper … But I presume the delegates were not playing bingo, though no doubt they were hearing a lot of meaningless numbers and some of them will get rich. I suppose they must have been voting. This is a surprisingly unanimous affair. So unanimous, in fact, that if the “no” vote gets into double figures it is a major news event, though the total number of votes is in the thousands.

This brings me to the point I was discussing with a local editor the other day. He was worried about some of the usual cliches which appear in the Western media. Was it China’s second peaceful transfer of power, he wondered? Surely there had been more than one before? Feeling dubious about this he had deleted the phrase wherever it occurred. I told him I thoroughly approved of this policy because power was not transferred at all. It had become increasingly clear that Jiang Zhemin was still pulling the strings, and would continue to do so until he popped his clogs, just as Deng Xiaoping had done. Only the puppets were being changed.

My friend had, though, kept – despite some misgivings – the standard phrase “China’s rubber-stamp parliament”. On this we disagreed. The NPC is not a rubber-stamp parliament. It is just a rubber stamp. It has none of the characteristics of a parliament. Not even the name. This is an advance on many other Chinese institutions, whose names are thoroughly confusing. When teaching mainland students about the Hong Kong legal system I have to explain as tactfully as possible that China does not have a legal system in the sense that this label is understood in the rest of the world. The courts are not courts, the law is not law and the judges are not judges. The only part of China’s legal structure which conforms to the label is the prisons.

This is harmless enough as long as everyone knows what the underlying reality is. Unfortunately the flow of propaganda sometimes leads to confusion in the strangest quarters. One of the Post’s non-stories announced that the new Secretary/President had urged Hong Kong people to “unite behind CY Leung”. This betrays a serious misunderstanding of the way things work in places where people are free to form their own opinions. Hong Kong people do not want to be behind CY Leung, or for that matter in front of him or anywhere else in his vicinity. He is widely regarded as a duplicitous weasel who only got the job because Henry dropped the ball. This is unfortunate. It will not be remedied by fatherly advice from the leader of a regime which depends on 100,000 secret policemen to stay in power.