tim's experiment

It is becoming increasingly easy to believe that judges of the Court of Appeal are beamed down to us from another planet, where they spend the early part of their lives completely insulated from life as most people live it in Hong Kong.

Consider the judgement of their lordships in the recent case of Mr Donald Tsang’s appeal against his conviction for misconduct in high office.

I have no quarrel with the rejection of his appeal against conviction. It is a nice irony that the man who vandalised our public housing system should be brought low by a penthouse flat for his own use. Let them eat subdivided apartments, as Marie Antoinette might have said.

Nor can there be any quarrel, I suppose, with the reduction of his sentence to one year. A year is a long time. It would be nice to see more awareness of this in the cases of poor and non-famous people who are jailed for decades at the urging of the same judges.

What had me choking on my port (I was on holiday in Portugal when this came out) was the way their lordships dealt with the matter of costs, which went like this:

On the reduction of legal fees, the judges said although Tsang and his wife had around HK$50 million in their bank accounts, their savings must have been significantly reduced after hiring top lawyers in three trials. They said Tsang is unlikely to start another career and can only resort to what is left of his savings and pension.“Financially, the Costs Order may have a crippling effect on the applicant,” the judges said.

The judges seem at this point to be assuming rather a lot. I have some difficulty in believing that Mr Tsang, who in his well-publicised socialising with millionaires must have received a good deal of financial advice, has kept the entirety of his savings in bank accounts.

One has to wonder about the possibility of other assets which can be monetised without too much trouble. Are there really no Ming vases, no gold bricks, no shares in the British Virgin Islands or in Virgin Islands of other nationalities?

Clearly at Mr Tsang’s age there can be no question of another career in the usual sense, but does that really mean no hope of other income?

Well let us follow the judges in assuming that there will be no paid motivational speeches, no directorships in the gift of Mr Tsang’s former friends, no book contracts and no advisory posts.

The question we are left with is this. Is someone aged 73 to be regarded as “financially crippled” if his financial reserves are reduced from $50 million to $45 million by an order to pay $5 million in legal costs?

Let us suppose that one of the Tsangs can be expected to live to 100. This means that the $45 million has to last for 27 years. We will ignore for the purposes of this calculation the year or so Mr Tsang may spend in a rather Spartan hotel at our expense. So the Tsangs, or the surviving Tsang, will have to get by on $1.6 million a year or $138,000 a month. This may usefully be compared with the average monthly salary in Hong Kong, which is – according to the relevant department — $15,897.

The Tsangs will also, of course, qualify for two lots of fruit money (bringing their monthly income up another $6,000 or so) cheap trips on public transport, medical vouchers and other goodies showered on us old folk by our generous leaders.

Alternatively they might wish to invest their remaining $45 million and live on the proceeds, which would come, at a modest 4 per cent yield, to $1.8 million a year or $150,000 a month. Another possibility would be an annuity along the lines of the government’s recently announced HKMC Annuity Plan. The plan itself, actually, is clearly intended for people even more financially crippled than the Tsangs, because the upper limit is only $1 million.

Assuming, though, that a private sector version of equal generosity could be found with no upper limit on the amount purchased, the Tsangs’ nest-egg would earn a guaranteed lifetime monthly income of $278,000 (if the life concerned is Mrs Tsang’s) or $316,000 if we decide Donald is a better bet.

The details are, in any case, not too important. Suffice it to say that the Tsangs will clearly not be reduced to collecting cardboard boxes for a living. The incidence of legal costs frequently results in unfairness. This is generally treated as an unavoidable deficiency in the system which cannot be remedied without greatly reducing the income of lawyers, and hence cannot be remedied at all.

It would be nice to think that from now on litigants who would be financially crippled by an order for costs will be spared the full rigour of the system. But this case was not, perhaps, a good place to start this new arrangement.

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You have to wonder how these things happen. China has never been a democracy. Its citizens have been subjected to a stream of propaganda for decades expounding the merits of communism in its current form, whatever that may be at the time.

And yet, last week, a nameless young woman – name for Twitter purposes @feefeefly – posted a video of herself splashing ink on a “Chinese dream” poster of president Xi Jinping. She then turns towards the camera and says “I oppose Xi Jinping’s tyranny.”

Later the same day she posted pictures of police officers apparently taken through a door peep-hole. “Right now there are a group of people wearing uniforms outside my door. I’ll go out after I change my clothes. I did not commit a crime. The people and groups that hurt me are the ones who are guilty,” she said.

And the rest, probably, is silence. A short discussion in the office concluded that this story, label on Twitter the Ink Girl, would probably not yield further installments. Professional detachment is obligatory in these conversations. But some speculation about future updates is allowed.

Was this lady, we wondered, perhaps – as we used to say before mental illness became an acceptable item for the media menu – one or two sandwiches short of a picnic?

Did she have a dissident boyfriend she wished to impress? Or knowing the likely consequences, was she suffering from some secret sorrow and indulging in a sort of state-assisted suicide?

Privately, I thought it was a pity nobody was around at the ink-splashing site to take her quietly on one side and say “Go home, pet. It’s not worth it.” And then I thought, with some misgivings, that probably people had thought much the same sort of things about Sophie Scholl.

Ms Scholl is fondly remembered in Germany as one of a group of students who started distributing leaflets denouncing Hitler and his party in 1942. Early in the following year she was caught doing this in Munich University, where she was a student.

She was accused of treason, tried, convicted (isn’t the Rule of Law wonderful?) and executed by guillotine on the same day. Among her last recorded words are a note to her mother, which concludes: “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”

Of course the parallels are not exact. The Ink Girl, as far as we know, was not part of a group. President Xi, though he has a fine collection of concentration camps, has not embarked on mass gassings, as far as we know. I decided after some thought not to put “yet” anywhere in that last sentence, but as Lord Acton said, “absolute power corrupts absolutely” so things could still get worse.

Thinking about these things puts the problems of Hong Kong’s opposition in perspective. People with inconvenient principles may lose their jobs and have occasional encounters with thugs in the street. But as long as you steer clear of the Public Order Ordinance politics is not a blood sport. Yet.

Times were hard for political dissidents in 1943. Very few of the group of resisting students survived the war, and at the time it seemed that their gesture was scarcely audible amid the catastrophe which was engulfing Europe.

Yet today Ms Scholl is regarded as a national hero – indeed among the younger generation as the national hero. Streets and schools are named after her.

I do not know what will become of those local leaders who now happily work for our new imperial masters, content with their five-figure salaries and free housing, loyally spouting the latest variation on “four legs good, two legs bad”. But I fancy they will not get many roads named after them.

And meanwhile, on the same day, it was announced that China wishes to have Chairman Mao’s Mausoleum added to the UNESCO Cultural Heritage list. What a pity they can’t put Adolf and Uncle Joe in there as well and have an internationally famous collection of stuffed mass murderers.

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We all know the government does not look forward to the July 1 march as one of its happy days. The march is generally summarised as “for democracy” though it often attracts a wide variety of interests and causes.

Most famously, many years ago, the march swelled to a monstrous size and concentrated on opposition to proposed national security legislation, which was dropped soon after. This was a rare success. Calls for democracy remain unanswered.

Recently the government has taken to putting obstacles in the way of the march, with quibbles over routes and fund-raising stalls, not to mention the Victoria Park football pitch problem.

The pitches in the park (which are tarmac, not grass) were the traditional assembly point of the march. For the last two years they have been occupied on the relevant day by a “charity” which is clearly one of those sprouts which the Liaison Office produces in local flower beds when it reproduces vegetatively, under ground, like a potato plant.

But this year, a first. After the march we were told that the government had put out an official statement complaining about the slogans people were shouting on it. The relevant paragraph went like this: “The spokesman reiterated that chanting slogans which disrespect ‘one country’ and disregard the constitutional order or which are sensational and misleading was not in line with Hong Kong’s overall interests and would undermine its development.”

This was widely reported as a comment on slogans which had been shouted, and which the government disagreed with. This interpretation was encouraged by the headline supplied, which went “Government responds to July 1 procession”.

The thing which puzzled me was how the government, or “a spokesperson”, heard slogans, interpreted them, and evaluated their importance. I presume that one maverick protester shouting “Xi out” would not produce the predicted effect on Hong Kong’s interests.

On the other hand a constitution which can be changed – and frequently is – must surely imply a right for the common citizen to have and express an opinion on what further changes would be desirable. This is not in itself disrespectful. As Michael Kinsey put it in a rather different context “We honour our friends by challenging them when we think they are wrong. It shows that we take them seriously.”

What would the government consider a sensational shout? What would it consider a misleading one? And how does the harm to Hong Kong’s interests ensue? I suppose that 364 days of the year nothing people shout in Victoria Park affects Hong Kong’s interests one way or the other. Why should July 1 be different? How many people does it take to reach the “harm” threshold, and who counts them?

It is of course possible that in the hearing of the government spokesman, but outside that of the numerous reporters covering the event, someone committed some terrible verbal offence by referring to the Chief Executive as a “feckless c***” or President Xi as Winnie the Pooh, which he apparently dislikes violently.

But the only shouts I could find reported were “end one-party dictatorship,” “Hong Kong people, keep going,” and “reject the deterioration of Hong Kong.” Clearly the first and last of these were not expressions with which the government would agree. But they hardly seem worthy of a whole press release.

And at this point I looked at the press release concerned. This can be found here: http://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/201807/01/P2018070100546.htm, and is mostly concerned with providing a barrage of good news, incorporating all the current Liaison office hot items: Belt and Road, Pearl Delta, etc., and all the official feel-good titbits.

The paragraph about slogans comes right at the end of a release that runs to something over 400 words and could easily be mistaken for an extended grovel to our new colonial masters. The early part is not new, though the government’s own news website, which knows a political minefield when it sees one, prudently chose the headline “Gov’t says Hong Kong is stable, prosperous”. This accurately reflects the overall content of the release, though perhaps lacking what sub-editors used to call the “read me” ingredient.

The thing which struck me as suspicious about the whole enterprise came right at the end. It said “Ends/Sunday, July 1, 2018. Issued at HKT 17:33”

Wait a minute. This is a government which to put a lift on a pedestrian footbridge takes the sort of time in which any self-respecting pharaoh could erect a small pyramid. It takes six months to hold a by-election, two years to decide whether to raise a tunnel toll.

The march started at 3.00. Are we to believe that the spokesman was in attendance then, heard horrifying slogans, sped to government HQ (Central) or the Information Services Department (Sheung Wan), spoke, someone else then wrote the release, submitted it to the usual seniors whose approval is required, some of whom are not the sort of people you can find in their offices on Sunday, and whacked it on the wires, all in two and a half hours?

I realise that “respond” is an ambiguous word. If you are lucky enough to attend a church which still uses the old Book of Common Prayer you will come to parts of the service which go like this:

Priest: O God, make speed to save us.
Answer: O Lord, make haste to help us.

The answer is given by the congregation and this is technically known as a “response”. Of course it is not a response to what the priest has just said. It is planned in advance and was in fact written in 1552.

It seems to me that the government press release was also planned in advance and written, at the latest, the previous day. We must not be distracted by the “spokesman”. This is just a literary device that sounds more approachable than saying “the government said in a statement” or some such verbiage.

In practice the media treat it as much the same thing. RTHK’s story from the same press release was headlined “Govt criticises calls for end of one party rule”.

The interesting thing about the spokesman is that he is said to have “reiterated” that he did not approve of chanting slogans. When was this, one wonders, and what does it do for the message to claim that the nameless and quite possibly fictitious orator was repeating it?

Whatever the answers to these questions the description of the whole affair as “responds to July 1 procession” was clearly misleading. It was taken to mean, as its authors should have expected and I fear must have intended, that the government had written the press release after hearing the slogans. Which was not true. That’s not PR, or spin, or propaganda; it’s deception.

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