tim's experiment

Goodness so much ethical advice! One might think, at the risk of giving some offence, that the head of China’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong was channelling the Dalai Lama.

Our Legislative Council, said Mr Wang Zhimin in a visit to the chamber, should cherish rationality, togetherness and patriotism as “core values”. Mr Wang also opined that all Hongkongers treasured stability and harmony.

One item missing from Mr Wang’s lexicon of praiseworthy values: truthfulness. This is just as well, because he seems to have some problems in the area of this item.

Earlier in the week he achieved territory-wide headlines with the observation that “Hong Kong is the only place in the world without national security legislation.” The obsequious English-language media termed this a “harsh comment”. But it is not a comment at all. It is a statement of fact, which can be investigated to see whether it is true or false.

This is easier if you separate it into two parts. The first part is the assertion that every place in the world outside Hong Kong has national security legislation.

This is the sort of assertion I have been warning would-be journalists about for years. Unless you have diligently researched the 300 or so places which have some sort of separate legal existence it is dangerous to use the word “every”. What this statement means, in the absence of said research, is that you cannot think of a place which does not have national security legislation. And that is not the same thing at all.

In the old pre-Google days the hazard attached to this sort of generalisation was that it might attract the attention of the academic who has made it his life work to study the incidence of national security legislation, and he would write to your newspaper pointing out the places which do not have it.

Having used the word “every” you are then left with no alternative to a humiliating apology. For this reason the word “most” is generally preferred.

Of course in these wired days people who are sceptical about wild generalisations do not have to wait for a learned scholar to pour cold water on them. Is there really no place without national security legislation, I wondered? Only one is needed to demonstrate that Mr Wang was talking through his hat.

And after some thought about likely candidates I found one at the first attempt. The Isle of Man has a separate legal system of its own and also a searchable data base of its legislation. It has no national security legislation. This does not seem to be doing it any harm.

The second part of Mr Zhang’s error lies in the assertion that Hong Kong itself has no national security legislation. I have been battling this error for at least a decade and I thought a year or two ago that I was making progress, because some left-wingers started suggesting that people they disapproved of should be prosecuted for sedition.

Briefly Mr Wang will be less prone to embarrassing mis-statements if he asks a suitably qualified minion to study the Crimes Ordinance (Cap 200) sections 6, 7 and 9-14, followed by the Official Secrets Ordinance (Cap 521).

If you compare the situation there revealed you find that of the items ordained by the notorious Basic Law Article 23 (laws … 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) everything is already covered except for the last bit about foreign political organisations.

Restrictions on links to overseas bodies are certainly not something which everybody has except Hong Kong. On the contrary they are generally found only in countries which are authoritarian, paranoid or both, like Hungary, Poland, Singapore or… well, China.

This sort of thing might well be covered in a law to regulate political parties, but I fear it will be a long time before we see one of those. Chinese Communism is like Judaeo-Christian religions: you are required not only to believe in your God but to disbelieve in all the others. The Party is the Communist Party. Other parties are gatherings of misguided unbelievers and should not be sanctioned by law.

I am puzzled by Mr Wang’s problems with accurate descriptions of our legal situation. Surely before being posted to Hong Kong a senior official will be provided with a detailed briefing, which if not enough to ensure complete persuasion will at least fend off embarrassing errors?

And if not, perhaps a few words from existing members of the Liaison Office staff would not go amiss. They could, for example, advice Mr Qiao Xiaoyang that appeals to the sanctity of the Chinese Constitution do not go down too well here.

This is because Hong Kong people are familiar with the way in which the Constitution is observed and respected on the mainland. Article 35, for example, says that “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.”

Clearly a work of fiction.

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To Japan last week for a Scottish dancing event (I realise that sounds a bit odd: another time) and a bit of tourism, which took me to the grave of Tokugawa Ieyasu, revered as the bringer of unity to Japan after a period of civil turbulence, and the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which ruled the country for 250 years.

Actually there is some doubt about what is in this particular grave. Ieyasu was first buried somewhere else. According to legend his remains were moved to Nikko, where I may or may not have visited them, a year later. As this is supposed to have happened in 1617 it is difficult to check.

Suggestions that one or both of the graves should be opened for a peek at the contents have been rejected, so the doubts persist.

Never mind. Downhill from the grave and the cluster of very beautiful temples built round it by pious, or propagandistically-inclined, descendants, there is a museum. The museum shows movies, and one of them is a rather charming animation in the Japanese style on Ieyasu’s life.

This is probably intended for children. But it is the only offering with English sub-titles.

Of course such depictions involve some, shall we say airbrushing? You could level a similar objection to James Clavell’s “Shogun”, in which Ieyasu appears in a rather sympathetic form, thinly disguised under the name of Toranaga.

In reality, he lived in violent and treacherous times, and was not most people’s idea of a dream son-in-law. According to his Wikipedia page he was “not very well liked or personally popular, but he was feared and he was respected for his leadership and his cunning.”

He claimed to have fought in 90 battles, which was perhaps an acceptable total for a long life in that era. As well as these stag slugfests the victims of his homicidal side included an alarming number of women and children, including his first wife and the 8-year-old heir of a rival. Well, times have changed.

Part of the museum’s biographical movie has the young Ieyasu asked by a picturesquely aged instructor (think Pai Mei in Kill Bill) which of three attributes a state could do without: abundant food, an army, or honour.

His answer to this question, “an army”, is correct. The second question is which of the three should be discarded next. His answer “honour”, because men cannot live without food, is wrong.

The aged instructor says that men with food but no honour are no better than pigs.

One may well doubt whether this story, even if it came from Ieyasu himself in later life, has been embroidered. Only the sexist language is clearly 17^th century.

But never mind the history. What left me gobsmacked was the notion that children now visiting museums should be encouraged with a straight face to take the view that honour is more important than wealth and power.

To Western eyes that seems a pleasing but antiquated idea.

I realise that there was no Golden Age in which European people were motivated only by matters of honour, or morality, or ethics. People respond to a variety of motives and, with few exceptions, greed is generally one of them.

But those of my compatriots who participated in the Second World War generally regarded this as a useful and meaningful experience, despite the sufferings and the loss of friends involved, not because it enriched the country – which it didn’t – or preserved the Empire – another disappointment – but because it was the right thing to do in the circumstances.

“The right thing to do”? How old-fashioned that sounds.

Our century suffers from what is known in Germany as the “Adam Smith problem”. This is shorthand for reading Smith’s famous “Wealth of Nations”, which celebrates the emergence of collective economic success from individual self-interest, without also reading the “Theory of Moral Sentiments” which explores the reasons why people do not in practice always behave selfishly.

We have of course come a long way in explaining moral behaviour since Adam Smith, who believed that the mechanism he described had been created by God to keep men on the strait and narrow path.

But his basic conclusion was right: people are honourable because they wish to be thought well of by their surrounding community, and hence, having internalised that community’s values, by themselves.

This rather simple idea explains many of our apparently intractable modern problems. Globalisation, for example, appears to be immoral precisely because it merges into one competing network many different ethical communities.

This produces a race to the bottom. People who are loyal to their workers are outcompeted by unscrupulous exporters of jobs. Mobile phones made in prosperous welfare-providing Finland, where workers have rights, cannot compete with those assembled by child slaves in China.

Toxic financial innovations, like leveraged management buy-outs or junk mortgage collections, are eagerly exported from places where they are barely acceptable to places where they were once not acceptable at all.

This is fostered by loyalty to economics. The Economist’s country reviews are carefully researched and exquisitely well written. But they rarely fail to come to the conclusion that the country concerned needs to free its labour markets and open its borders more to international trade.

Then there is the matter of Hong Kong budgets. These are based on the notion, assiduously propagated by the Chicago school of economics as the unlikely intellectual apologists for Ayn Rand, that the poor are poor because they are lazy, stupid or both.

This goes down well with the millionaires whose company and approval our senior civil servants find so congenial, because it implies that the rich are rich because they are industrious and intelligent.

So we get budgets which allocate more money to the rich – as “investment in the future” – in a variety of guises, and less to poverty alleviation: “sweeteners” which merely encourage the poor in their idleness and depravity.

We can also consider the tricky matter of relations between Hongkongers and China. This is not an economic problem. Hong Kong went from poverty to prosperity during the 40 years in which it got little help from the UK and none at all from China, which was busy exploring variations on lunacy with a Marxist flavour.

This has left us with a moral community incompatible with Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, which requires a quasi-religious belief in whatever the Party line currently may be.

This becomes starkly apparent in the current row over what Benny Tai may or may not have said at a conference in Taiwan. Prof Tai’s attackers say that he said “Hong Kong might consider independence.” Prof Tai’s defenders point out that this consideration was conditional on the achievement of a “democratic China”.

A democratic China is one of those interesting combinations of words, like “a tropical snowstorm” or “Hong Kong’s gold medallist in Olympic cross-country skiing”. We know roughly what it would look like but we expect to see it right after some South Korean genetic manipulator announces the creation of the first flying pig.

In other words, Prof Tai’s statement was about as hypothetical as a statement can be. In fact in a democratic China outright independence would not be particularly attractive. If you said, on the other hand, that if being part of China meant submission to a brutal despotism with no respect for the rule of law, Hong Kong might be attracted to independence, then that would be subversive.

But these distinctions are lost on local lefties, who are required to believe that Communism in China is not only admirable, but immortal.

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