tim's experiment

The row over the Po Leung Kuk’s so-called leadership training camps casts an interesting light on Hong Kong’s obsession with militarism and uniforms. Overseas readers: students who have been to the camp complain about being made to eat grass as a punishment, lay in mud, and be grabbed and shouted at.

Actually the camps are clearly not doing leadership training. If you want to get a grant to take your students away for a few days (but not far enough away to call it a study tour) the easiest thing is to say you are offering leadership training. Nobody knows what it means but it sounds like something useful. I must admit to perpetrating this innocent deception myself.

Fortified by the training provided by the Hong Kong Scouts, for whom I was a voluntary leader, I decided to take all my journalism students who were willing away for a few days, so that the editors of the student newspaper might forge relationships with the reporters in a context less fraught than working on stories. We called it a leadership training camp on the grant application because I couldn’t think of anything else.

After the first one I ditched formal sports and one or two other things which had not worked too well, and consulted some books on educational camps. In following years we settled on mostly team-building exercises, which are fun, physical, interesting and useful if you want people to get to know each other in an uncustomary environment. Team-building exercises involve giving a large group a task and letting them get on with it. If facilities permit you can have two or more groups and make a competition of it, but this is not essential. On the many videos posted by survivors of the Po Leung Kuk camp I found some of my old favourites.

Leadership training is quite different. For this you need a much smaller group with a designated leader. After completing the task you examine the way the group performed, how the leader helped, or didn’t, and what worked, or didn’t. The result should be that members of the group have some idea of what effective leadership would look like in a small group. You then repeat the exercise with different tasks, and leaders. Some European universities offer leadership courses. Oxford actually offers a Diploma in Leadership. This is not done at a camp in the country.

So it’s not leadership. What the Po Leung Kuk has fallen for is the supposed advantages of military training. Nor should this come as a big surprise. When the Jockey Club announced it would pay for an upgrade of the camp site, the club’s website said the facilities would include “a three-storey, 196-bed hostel block with lecture halls, an assault course (!), a parade ground with flag podium, and camping and barbeque facilities.”

I don’t know what it is about Hong Kong people. They seem to love this stuff. My age group in the UK, saved from conscription only because it was abolished just before we reached it, regarded the military as a trap from which we had been rescued just in time. Hong Kong people, on the other hand, seem to enjoy wallowing in it.

As we do not have an army (the PLA garrison spends most of its time in Shenzhen) the “patient zero” for this disease is the Hong Kong Police Force. Their parades are magnificent. They have two full-time professional bands. And they are assiduously copied.

The only uniformed government department which does not have a band for parade purposes is the Fire Brigade. They borrow the police one. All the uniformed groups do parades except the English-speaking part of the Scouts, who are allowed to be pacifist. The biggest band in Hong Kong belongs to the Saint Johns Ambulance Service. Nurses do passing out parades in the full Florence Nightingale. Large numbers of adults dress in uniforms of their own devising and disappear into the countryside to shoot polystyrene pellets at each other. We are a city of reluctant civilians.

So we get the PLK camp offering, as the PLK Grandmont Primary School tells its parents, “marching, leadership training, self-management and self-challenge training.” Parents at PLK Ngan Ko Ling College are told that “we sincerely invite parents to join the passing out ceremony.” Parents at PLK Tong Nai Kan College are told of “marching training.”

And we get pictures like this:

Clearly there is a fundamental misunderstanding at work here. Basic military training is not leadership training; it is followership training. The recruit is stripped of his civilian identity. He is relieved of his possessions, his clothes, even his hair (resemblances to the induction habits of our Correctional Services are not a coincidence). His time is not his own; everything is decided for him by the organization, and his personality is reconstructed with its central feature his relationship to and membership of the unit. The procedure can be seen in all its dubious glory here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3kyZsijUWo

Harsh treatment is justified by the need for the recruit to learn, as one general put it, that life includes pain and hardships, most of which are not distributed fairly. Clausewitz said that war is the domain of exertion, suffering and danger. The more of these you can import to the training, the better prepared the troops will be.

This approach, even in a very attenuated form, is totally inappropriate to the education of Form Five students, and if inflicted on primary kids is in my opinion difficult to distinguish from child abuse. That is not to say that there is no place for challenging experiences. I used to take my scoutlets on a vessel called the Adventure Ship Huan. The captain was a very impressive character with advanced qualifications in both navigation and youth leadership. The kids would have walked through fire for him and so would I. Among other attractions was a sort of climbing course which led round the rigging. This was quite intimidating; I tried it. The kids were also encouraged, at one point, to jump off the highest part of the ship into the water. There was no shouting, no punishment, and no suggestion that refusal would be something shameful, but as far as I remember everyone managed both tasks in the end, and walked a bit taller when they got off the boat as a result. You don’t have to be a drill sergeant.

Another objection to the military paradigm is that it is technically illegal. I am indebted to one of my legal friends who pointed out to me that under Section 18 of the Crimes Ordinance it is an offence if a person “trains or drills any other person in the use of arms or the practice of military exercises or evolutions” without the permission of the Governor or the Commissioner of Police. Clearly this covers foot drill, which is a military exercise, if an obsolete one. The name of the assault course speaks for itself. Many weeks ago I did try asking the Police Public Relations Bureau if anyone in Hong Kong had been given the necessary permission but I have not yet had a reply. So this may be another of those laws which the Department of Justice no longer thinks it worth enforcing.

A further point which may worry parents is that it seems the camp, at least as supplied to Po Leung Kuk schools, incorporates what some of us call national education and some of us call brainwashing. The Tong Nai Kan School website, for example, promises “marching training, national education and field-trip challenges to develop students’ leadership skills, team spirit and further foster a sense of belonging to the school and our nation.” Lo Kit Sing College says to parents that “The aims of the training are to arouse students’ patriotism and nurture their leadership and team spirit.” Po Leung Kuk Number One W. H. Cheung College says that “The training camp aimed at enhancing self-confidence, discipline and cooperation among students through national education and outdoor adventure activities such as wall climbing.” Whatever you think of national education as a school subject, the sort of teaching approach which is appropriate for citizenship education is totally different from that used in “outdoor activities such as wall climbing”, and the two are unlikely to cohabit happily.

We are told that a committee of the Po Leung Kuk is now reviewing the training programme. So some suggestions:

1. People with unfulfilled military ambitions should be kept well away from the kids.
2. Skip the politics. See above.
3. This activity is listed by all the schools I could find expressing an opinion on the matter as compulsory. It should be voluntary. This sort of thing is not for everyone.
4. Not for primary, please.

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Before the blogger’s trembling feet lies a lethal minefield. I did not intend to write about the chairman of the Equal Opportunities Commission and a startlingly ill-chosen address at an International Women’s Day event. But we have now been treated to an entertaining piece of self-flagellation by the SCMPost, which published a provocative piece on the subject of women’s dress choices and felt obliged not only to withdraw and obliterate it (too late – on the internet your blunders go on for ever) but also to provide a cringe-worthy explanation. This included the astonishing announcement that its “editorial and company values”, include “We welcome diverse views and never shy away from controversial issues.” This will be news to the many former Post columnists in Hong Kong.

So to work. By sheer coincidence I have been reading a book called “Singled out”, by a lady previously unknown to me, Virginia Nicholson. This is not so much a history book as the sort of thing you can write after you have researched a television programme. Which doesn’t make it any less interesting. Ms Nicholson’s topic is a sociological by-product of the First World War. Britain suffered no invasion or air raids worth speaking of, so the threequarters of a million or so people killed, and the roughly equal number so seriously wounded as to carry the effects with them for the rest of their – probably short – lives, were concentrated in one age group. And they were, overwhelmingly, men. The effect of this on the surviving women was, by the standards of the time, devastating. One of Ms Nicholson’s interviewees recalls the headmistress of a girls’ secondary school in Bournemouth addressing the sixth form in 1917: “I have come to tell you a terrible fact. Only one out of ten of you girls can hope to marry … It is a statistical fact. Nearly all the men who might have married you have been killed.”

By 1921 this had been confirmed by the official census, leading to newspaper headlines referring to “2 million surplus women”. Some writers saw this as a threat. The Daily Mail – even in those days staking out the low ground of journalism – said the “superfluous women are a disaster to the human race”. It was not, though, a disaster for those who thought women should have choices rather than being condemned, as they had traditionally been, to marriage at all costs and in all circumstances. With so many “surplus” women it was inevitable that many of them would seek other outlets, and at least some of the predictable opposition was muted by the realization that the answer to the question “Why don’t you get married?” was probably lying under a headstone in Flanders.

The upshot of this was a widespread smashing of barriers. In the two decades between the wars women became engineers, scientists, stockbrokers, university teachers, barristers, archaeologists, and many other things which they had never explored before. This was not to every man’s taste, of course. At a safe distance one can be charmed by the story of the university lecturer who insisted that women students should sit behind the podium so that he could not see them. But this, along with the vote, was the first Great Leap Forward, at least in the UK.

The second one I was actually around for. When I was very small my mother took the view that the way to keep small boys out of mischief was to teach them useful things, so I was instructed – with various degrees of success – in all the varieties of housework. In those days this was done with very few mechanical aids, none of which were electric. Much of it was very time-consuming. So I did the daily stuff, lay and light fire, deal with resulting layers of dust, shopping – which involved a daily visit to some or all of the fresh food specialists who provided meat, fish, vegetables and bread – make beds, (the duvet had not been discovered) beat carpets and so on. Washing was traditionally done on Monday and hung in the garden. Other more occasional items included darning socks (at which I was not good) and making the Christmas pudding, which for some reason was done in September so that the pudding could meditate on its coming fate for three months, preserved from rot by the copious quantities of booze which were part of the recipe. The unmistakable effect of all this work was that unless you could afford servants being a housewife was virtually a full-time job. This gradually changed as many of the jobs were mechanized and in due course my mother happily returned to the world of work, liberated by the fridge, the Hoover, the washing machine, the electric fire and the supermarket.

This brings me to the EOC head, Professor Alfred Chan Cheung-ming and his speech on International Womens Day. In case you were wondering, Chan is a professor of social gerontology (whatever that is) at Lingnan University. The professor said that women have two possible careers in Hong Kong, in the workplace or at home. I wouldn’t dispute the truth of that, but a prudent speaker would at this point be aware that he was playing with fire. Professor Chan proceeded to ignite himself. Men did not treat women equally in the workplace (which could charitably be taken as a complaint) but women were not concerned about equal pay (cue sirens). He went on with the point that elderly people tend to be cared for by women, because they are more attentive, and he expected to be cared for by his daughter, not his son, because “men need to work”.

Seven women’s groups promptly started a petition calling for Prof Chan to be fired. There is certainly something to be said for the idea that the chairman of the Equal Opportunities Commission should be at the forefront of thinking on the matter of gender equality, rather than merely describing it, even if we acquit him of encouraging prejudice.

I suppose there may have been a respectable point buried in the speech somewhere. It is true that prejudices endure, and not all of them unambiguously favour men. A married woman with no job is a homemaker. A married man with no job is unemployed. But this hardly qualifies as a suitable theme for International Women’s Day. It would be interesting to know what Prof Chan’s daughter thinks of the idea that she is going to be a geriatric nurse when he needs one. Surely the lady has plans of her own?

The piece in the Post by Mike Rowse (formerly of HKinvest, Harbourfest etc) was I fear a deliberate provocation. Mr Rowse was perfectly well aware that it would go down very badly with some people. The idea of the piece was to praise ladies whose cold-weather clothes choices allow Mr Rowse to admire their legs. I am not sure what the Post’s apologists mean by “objectification”, but it appears to be what happens every Sunday in the more fashion-orientated parts of the Magazine section, where the female clotheshorse of the weekend is referred to in captions simply as “model”. Evidently the Post got a lot of complaints about Mr Rowse and collapsed in a heap. This did not happen on other occasions when the Post got a lot of complaints. Some collapses come easier than others.

Hong Kong is not the only place where people get into this sort of trouble. I remember the President of Harvard being unseated because of some rather technical statistical observations about the dearth of women in science. This was an affront to his staff because it did not repeat the obvious truth of the matter, which was that the scarcity was due to rampant discrimination by male pig scientists. Then there was the Home Secretary in the UK who was propelled from office after making the rather obvious point that some rapes were more serious than others and this might explain some of the observed variation in sentences.

What these events have in common is a preoccupation with words rather than actions. One American writer recently complained that this seemed to be a matter of replacement rather than addition – that people of a progressive disposition spend time eagerly policing the public discussion which might more usefully be spent on useful political work. Or to put it another way, if half of the energy spent on “denying platforms” had been spent on denying Donald Trump…

Well perhaps that is an American problem. What bothers me is the creeping encroachment on the borders of what we used to call free speech. Noam Chomsky has said that “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” And if Chomsky is too subversive for your taste his remark is a near-paraphrase of the US Supreme Court judge who stressed the importance of “not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.” Clearly by these standards calling for the suppression of a speech or the firing of its author because they do not reach the highest standards of inter-gender fairness and impartiality is an over-reaction. We can all see that freedom of speech is diminished when some bandit chief in Beijing announces that it does not include the freedom to discuss independence. No doubt the freedom to discuss the attractions of the miniskirt to elderly men is not as important as the freedom to discuss independence. But it is the same freedom, and those who attack it do the same injury.

And the injury is not just theoretical. It has become very difficult to discuss some issues. Here are two which I suggest columnists should avoid unless they are, like me, safely retired and writing for pleasure. The first one is, does the disadvantage attached to being a woman as such still need the attention which it rightly attracted when society’s norm for the female sex ran mostly to “barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen?” We have woman prime ministers, a woman Chancellor of Germany, we have woman presidents, or had until two of them came unstuck recently. A majority of Americans voted for a woman president, though that was not what they got. Then there is the looming prospect of Carrie Lam… This is not to say, of course, that the playing field is entirely level. I was personally rather shocked by the bias against women academics, or at least the more feisty ones, which lurks in Hong Kong universities; in newspapers, where everyone’s work can be seen by everyone else, people are taken on their merits, at least in the humble strata where I worked. The main complaint about what 19^th century liberals called “a career open to the talents” now seems to centre on the shortage of women in company boardrooms. Well if you look at the top of organisations what you see reflects decisions made 30 years ago, when things were perhaps a bit different. But it is surely too simplistic to say that since 50 percent of the population is female, any employment area with a lower figure is a festering hotbed of discrimination. There may be some jobs which appeal more to men than to women. Women may rightly feel that there is not a lot to be said for a career in the business world, which is in Nassim Taleb’s memorable summary “inelegant, dull, pompous, greedy, unintellectual, selfish and boring.”

I am not trying to persuade you that the time has come to stop worrying about prejudice against women in appointments of various kinds. What I urge you to worry about is that when the time does come it will be very difficult for anyone to say so. And this has costs. Most people only have so much time and energy to spend worrying about social issues and what is spent on one topic is not available for another.

Let us take another potential problem. In the days when protesting women flung themselves under racehorses and chained themselves to the Downing Street railings it was clear that the many egregious injustices inflicted on women were manmade in the most literal sense of the word. Arguments about “women’s nature” were clearly spurious then and there is a curious antiquarian whiff to Prof Chan’s assertion that women are more suited to caring activities because they are “more attentive”. Still, as equality marches forward and science increases its understanding of human nature, we can expect to find some differences, possibly quite trivial, which are inherent in the physiological structures of the two genders. The man or woman who makes this discovery will I fear be deterred from announcing it by the near-certainty of a storm of abuse. In modern societies there are advantages to being an oppressed minority and they will not be relinquished lightly.

Now it will be said in defence of the critics of Prof Chan that they are not seeking to suppress his opinions, they just think that his opinions are incompatible with his job as the chairman of the Equal Opportunities Commission. And we can go along with that, while wondering if the same people would have said the same things had his tactless observations related to, say, Pakistanis.

Mr Rowse is a more difficult case in some ways, because he was obviously enjoying the thrill of provocation. It’s like those young people who wave the colonial flag at demonstrations, not because they support colonialism but because the flag annoys people they don’t like. I would not have written what Mr Rowse wrote but defenders of freedom of speech cannot pick and choose. Mr Rowse’s opinion was legal and honest. The SCMPost is free, if it wishes, to dispense with his services to avoid further embarrassment. But trying to delete the piece retrospectively protects one “value” at the expense of another. For years sundry Post columnists have been telling us that there is no self-censorship in Hong Kong. Well there is now.

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The Great Police Rally on February 22 was missing two things usually found on occasions of this kind. The first was the letter of no objection to a public protest from the police. Several commentators noticed this, though I am not sure it was necessary. The Police Sports and Recreation Club, where the rally was held, is open to policemen and their families. It is also open to former policemen and their families, auxiliary policemen and their families, civilian employees of the police and their families, and even some civil servants with police-related duties … and their families. So long is the list that it once, many years ago, included me. If the members of what is legally, I suppose, a private club, wish to hold a large meeting on a matter of public concern on the premises I am not sure that this needs anyone else’s permission.

On the other hand it seems that the rally was open to the public. The only people specifically excluded were journalists. So perhaps they should have had the letter. Michael Chugani, in one of his bursts of hypocrisy-hunting, said that anyone who objected to the meeting but did not object to Occupy must be a hypocrite. But surely this must cut both ways. Anyone who objected to Occupy but did not object to the police rally must also be a hypocrite, which suggests that Mr Chugani could get his hypocrisy hunt off to a flying start by looking in the mirror.

The other thing missing from the proceedings on February 22 was the usual report from a police wet blanket that the attendance was much smaller than that claimed by the organisers. The organisers claimed an attendance of more than 30,000. Well in the absence of an official figure let us see what we can do. The crowd was spread over two pitches, one soccer and one rugby. Both of these are quite small, though. If you look on Google earth you can see that they are small compared with the public pitch next door, let alone the nearby pitch in the Mong Kok Stadium.

Football pitches vary. But using the tennis courts on the nearby club roof as a yardstick I estimate the two pitches as about 50 yards by 70, which means the space available was altogether about 6,500 square yards.

Looking at the many news pictures of the happy event it is apparent that once you got away from the stage the crowd was quite dispersed, and in distant corners there were no people at all. So I suggest we can reckon a bit over one person per square yard on average, which would give an attendance on the grass of about 8,000. A lot of faces can be seen at windows in the buildings which overlook the pitches, but these are only four stories high, so it is difficult to believe that there are more than maybe a couple of thousand altogether there. This would give us a total actual attendance of about 10,000, which has about the usual relationship with the number claimed by the organisers, who tend on these occasions to be optimistic.

Of course not all of these people were members of the force. In fact the reporter from the SCMPost, who was apparently not excluded with the other journalists, possibly because he was a foreigner, wrote that most of these present seemed to be retired.

This is not to deny the strength of the feelings expressed at the rally. But we need some perspective. Not all the people there were police people. Those present were not a majority of the force, either. It is reassuring to know that the taste for mass chants of “Fuck your mother” is a minority one. A more modest figure might also have spared us the item in one of the international agencies which reported without comment that organisers claimed 38,000 of Hong Kong’s 22,000 police had attended.

The point of this excursion is not to minimise the levels of dissatisfaction and resentment in police circles, which I understand are quite high, and relate to a number of causes besides the sentences passed on the errant seven officers. The point is that the rally, and some eager editorials in the more leftish media, have been used to give the impression that the sentences concerned have met with widespread disapproval.

I do not think this is the case. Most Hong Kong people seem to think that the convictions were inevitable and the sentences reasonable even if one might, as a soft-hearted layman, have passed less stringent ones oneself. But this sort of deception has real consequences, because people in places like Beijing do not have access to independent media and may confuse coverage in the sort of media which you can access over the boundary with the truth.

This brings me to Professor Tian Feilong, the author of an extraordinary piece of work published in Ming Pao and the Post the other week. Prof Tian is a pillar of the Beihang University’s Law School. Readers who are familiar with my opinion of what passes for the Chinese legal system will understand why I found this choice of career intriguing. So desperate are news websites for pictorial material that we were even treated to a picture of the professor. Let me gratify those feminists who complain that only women in the news get their appearance reported by noting that the professor seems to have a weight problem and a face made for radio. This of course has nothing to do with the merits of his opinions. Socrates, in his day, was also described as fat and ugly.

Prof Tian started with the idea that the sentencing had sparked a public backlash, and ascribed this to the fact that the police miscreants were in jail while the protestor they beat up was not. This sent a “strong message that the presiding judge’s moral support lay with the protestor.”

He went on to say that “The excessive punishment for the seven officers, at a time when Hong Kong society is in chaos, has prompted a rethink of the value of the rule of law and how it can support the city. Then there are questions about the nationality of the judge, the rationale behind the ruling, impartiality, and possible political motives behind the ruling.”

This is nonsense. Let us start with the “strong message”. The sentences meted out to protesters and errant policemen are not related to each other. They are related to the crimes of which the person concerned has been convicted. For a protester to resist arrest is illegal but not a major crime. For a policeman having arrested a suspect to tie him up, carry him away to a dark corner and beat him up, on the other hand, is a serious affront to law and order, which requires that those in charge of enforcing it should themselves obey the law.

The judge in the policemen’s case had to consider a number of factors in passing sentence. There is the “tariff” which provides an indication of what sentences for particular crimes should be. There are the points made in mitigation by defending counsel. There is the attitude of the accused, who did themselves no favours by seeking to elude responsibility for their actions by trying to discredit the overwhelming evidence against them. But the sentence imposed on the victim was not and is not relevant. If policemen beat up a suspect who has been guilty of some trivial offence it does not mean that the sentence for them must also be trivial.

Prof Tian has some odd ideas about the law, as you would perhaps expect in view of the rather odd features of the Chinese legal system on which he is no doubt an expert. Social protest movements are extraordinary events, he writes, so “the judge should have differentiated the powers that police are allowed to use in such situations from those normally allowed.”

This is not really a legal argument at all. The judge should follow the law. If the law specifies some police power and not others this is a matter for the legislature, not for judicial inspiration. It is also totally inconsistent with the facts of the case on which Prof Tian was commenting. We all understand that in major public events the police need and use powers which would not be appropriate in their everyday work. Most people, even most demonstrators, accept that at times when a lot of people are trying to go one way and the police are trying to make them go another there will be some application of force, not all of it in entire accordance with police general orders or the law. In moments of excitement people on both sides of the barricades may lash out.

This, however, has nothing to do with the case of the seven policemen. Their crime was not a bit of over-enthusiasm with the boot or the pepper spray in a moment of public order crisis. Their victim was securely in police custody. Social protest movements are not so extraordinary that they require us to allow policemen to truss people in custody, carry them away to dark corners and kick the crap out of them. The rule of law requires obedience from policemen as well as protestors. The seven knew they were doing something illegal. That is why they posted a look-out.

Prof Tian now has the wind in his sails, though, and proceeds to complain that judges in Hong Kong are inadequately monitored and supervised. And at this point it becomes clear what his problem is: he knows nothing about the Hong Kong legal system at all, and supposes it to be like the mainland one.

In Hong Kong, unlike the mainland, all trials are public. They are open to the scrutiny of any citizen and the press is admitted as a matter of course. In Hong Kong, unlike the mainland, the defendant is allowed a lawyer who places his interests first, and does not have to fear that doing so will put him in the same predicament as his client. Said defending lawyer will, if the judge in the case does not come up to scratch, or even if he does, advise a convicted defendant to appeal, whereupon the case will be considered afresh by three other judges. This hearing also will be public. The judgment will be published and will appear on the Judiciary website.

In short Hong Kong has an excellent “oversight mechanism”. It is called publicity. Prof Tian makes the astonishing claim that Hong Kong’s legal system “deviates from what a modern legal system should be like”. I fear he thinks it should be more like China’s. Perish the thought.

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