tim's experiment

Well if anyone is happy this week it should be those leaders of the Umbrella movement who decided not to take the government up on its offer of an updated report on Hong Kong public opinion, to be supplied if the occupation ended. The government went ahead and produced the report anyway. We can now all read the poor mendacious thing, and see just how worthless the offer was. You can get a better deal in a Tsimshatsui camera shop. The detailed deficiencies of the report have been noted in many places. What seems to have slid by unnoticed is that it ends with a resounding and fundamental lie. “It is the common aspiration of the central authorities, the HKSAR Government and the people of Hong Kong to implement universal suffrage … strictly in accordance with the Basic Law and the relevant interpretations and decisions of true NPC Standing Committee.” No it isn’t. The whole point of Occupy Central was to express dissatisfaction with the prospect of implementing universal suffrage on those terms. The SAR government has, as they once said of the restored Bourbons, learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The speeches, the banners, the writings were all wasted. The government still thinks that public opinion is what it wants public opinion to be, and still thinks that if that is not the case then this shameful fact should not be shared with the Central Government.

The problem with this approach is that it leaves the Central Government with no reliable source of information about what is really happening in Hong Kong. This also became manifest last week when Mr Chen Zuoer (who chairs a think tank but is treated for journalism purposes as a person of some consequence) complained that the Hong Kong education system had been “in a mess” during the occupation. This is nonsense. I work in the Hong Kong education system and I know plenty of other people who do too. The education system functioned pretty normally, apart from those schools ordered to close by the government. Even at the university level there was a week when we were boycotted, slightly higher rates of absenteeism in the rest of the term, but nothing like a mess. Mr Chen went on into even more imaginative territory. “How have the young men, who were babies at the handover, become those on the front line who brandished the UK national flag and stormed into our military camps and the government?” he asked.

This would be a good question. Except that at no time during the three months of Occupy Central could anyone be seen, in the front line or anywhere else, brandishing the UK national flag. I recall a few people found their way into the former Prince of Wales complex, now the PLA headquarters. They were not in the front line of anything, they did not “storm” it, and the building is not in the usual sense of the word a military camp, let alone “camps”. Mr Chen also said that Hong Kong is the “only place in China which doesn’t have a National Security law.” This continues a long tradition of China officials spouting errors about the Hong Kong legal system.

We all know that the Basic Law says: “The Hong Kong SAR shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People’s Government, or theft of state secrets, to prohibit foreign political organisations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organisations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organisations or bodies.” Theft of state secrets is covered by Cap 521 Official Secrets Ordinance. Inciting the PLA to mutiny is covered in the Crimes Ordinance Section 6, and Sedition in Sections 9 and 10 (which admittedly still have “the UK” in places where “China” might be a better choice).  There is also a section on Treason, in which Her Majesty mysteriously still reigns. Actually the only things which are clearly not covered are the ones about foreign bodies, and I suggest the reason we don’t have those is because they would be throughly inappropriate to a cosmopolitan international city and the government is perfectly aware of this.

But there you are. These things come and go. A recent mystery is the disappearance of those writers who observed three months ago, with some condescension, that occupiers needed to learn to compromise, politics was the art of the possible, and perhaps the election procedure which was at the heart of the problem could be improved by tweaking the constitution of the election committee, to make it more representative. It now emerges that tweaking the election committee is off the menu, because the local leftists who would be tweaked into a less influential category will not stand for it. Where are the apostles of compromise noiw that we need them? Nowhere to be seen, so far. Also AWOL we have the worshippers of the Rule of Law. The case of the Chalk Girl, who was thrown into a custodial home without any of the usual formalities after being caught drawing flowers on a wall in washable chalk, was a clear violation of the Rule of Law. I quote from Tom Bingham’s popular book on the subject: Ministers and public officials at all levels must exercise the powers conferred on them in good faith, fairly, for the purpose for which the powers were conferred, without exceeding the limits of such powers and not unreasonably.  I also note that the Department of Justice continues to neglect the law covering reporting of legal proceedings, which was flouted by newspapers who passed on official leaks about the identity and family circumstances of the miscreant.

Then we have the Financial Secretary, who is still complaining about the economic harm caused by Occupy Central. This was an interesting speculation in its day, but its day is over. We have the visitor figures, the retail sales figures, the manufacturing and retail business reports, the Hang Seng Index…   it is now possible for anyone who is not either politically motivated or a complete dimwit to evaluate the economic impact of Occupy Central with complete confidence. There was no economic impact. Period.  I do not dispute the obvious problems caused to some individual businesses, but clearly people who did not buy over-priced handbags in Admiralty were free to buy them elsewhere and did so. I realise it is a good career move to blame Occupy Central for everything from bird flu to global warming but the economic charge is easily refuted. Find something else.