tim's experiment

Was there ever really a Phantom of the Opera? No doubt the Paris Opera was and is a complicated building. Also 19th century theatres went in for complicated effects requiring extensive space and machinery under the stage.
But all the same, where would such a person obtain the necessities of life? How would he eat, bath, and toilet?

I have similar misgivings about the idea of a Hunchback of Notre Dame, hiding in an impenetrable maze in one of the towers with his girlfriend. A romantic idea, but the cathedral is surely not that complicated.

When it comes to the Polytechnic University, recently surrounded by policemen, I am not so sure. During my career as a judge of student debates (qualifications: native speaker, car, persuadable) I visited all Hong Kong’s universities. The Poly U stood out as an easy place to get lost in (and having the most outrageously expensive car park).

It is not an easily navigable structure. I am quite prepared to believe that someone could elude detection more or less indefinitely on the campus. He (it is always a he in this sort of story) would be able to nip out at night in search of food and plumbing, returning at dawn to his place of concealment, and await his chance to drop a chandelier on an unsuspecting audience.

After the major evacuation of the campus we were offered a variety of figures for the number of people still in residence, ranging from zero to about 30. It was also reported that some people were still finding their way in, and hence, perhaps, also out. Every time it was announced that the campus was now empty reporters managed to find an interviewee who was still inside.

The traditional way of ending a siege was through negotiation. The besiegers would bombard or undermine the defences until there was in their view a “practicable breach” through which an assault, if attempted, would probably succeed.

At this point the besiegers would invite the defenders to surrender, usually with some added inducement: they would be allowed to leave, possibly with their weapons, or at least with their flags, and go free, possibly with the condition that they took no further part in the war.

The situation at the Poly U was more difficult, because there was no visible leader of the defenders with whom to haggle, if indeed there still were defenders. The police besiegers nevertheless followed the historical precedent by offering a dignified exit: names and pictures to be taken but no arrests.

That is a reasonably carrot. The stick, in the traditional arrangement, was that if the attackers were forced to assault the breach and succeeded then they would massacre the garrison. This was hardly possible in the case of the Poly U, if only because we did not know whether there was actually a garrison or not. What the police offer does show is that it is possible to negotiate with a group which has no visible leader. You announce a move, and wait to see what the response is.

This has proven beyond our political leaders, who have wailed frequently over the last six months that the protesters have no leaders that they can hold talks with. Well the latest elections have fixed that.

Our glorious leader Carrie Lam has commented that the election results have attracted “various analyses and interpretations”. She added that “quite a few are of the view that the results reflect people’s dissatisfaction with the current situation and the deep-seated problems in society.”

Well quite. The question is which aspects of the current situation are the problem. And now there is no need for this to remain a mystery to Mrs Lam. More than 300 district councillors now exist who were elected with the “five demands” on their programme, and in some cases with nothing else.

So she has plenty of people to talk to, if talking is what she wants to do, and plenty of people to listen to, if she would like a new experience.

Meanwhile the pro-government group in Legco managed to insert a measure of venomous fatuity into the proceedings by punishing the two universities which had the misfortune to be geographically convenient to major roads. Funding bids for two projects – one at Chinese U and one at the Poly U – were withdrawn after legislators had expressed “concerns”.

Which legislators? The government is not saying. We were treated to a bit of doublespeak from Ho Kai-ming, of the Pro-Beijing Federation of Trade Unions lawmaker Ho Kai-ming. “The Federation of Trade Unions and I support the development of universities,” he said.

But he was concerned that the new buildings proposed at the Chinese University of Hong Kong would be close to the University MTR station and a highway, and thus posed dangers. He was apparently referring to previous protests at the university, at which protesters threw items onto the railway and the Tolo Highway.

This is silly. There must be easier ways of avoiding future student disorder than redesigning all the local campuses with a view to reducing the opportunities for undergraduate disruption of key transport links. Would Mr Ho like to move the Poly U? It would probably be cheaper to move the tunnel.

No doubt the management of the Poly U are lamenting the unlucky stroke of urban planning which placed them astride the Cross-Harbour tunnel when other urban universities can only aspire to blockages of trivial streets like Junction Road or Tat Chee Avenue. Among the country dwellers, denizens of the Chinese University are now paying a price for their convenient proximity to the railway and possession of their own station.

On the other hand I have listened for years to staff of the University of Science and Technology complaining that the campus is in the middle of nowhere, miles from the urban fleshpots and even from decent shopping. Well every cloud has a silver lining and you folks are now looking at one. Middle of nowhere; nothing to sabotage. Give that university some money.

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One of the distressing features of the past few months has been the increasing resemblance seen by many people between our police force and an occupying army.
Perhaps this is unfair. Perhaps it is unavoidable. That it has happened is beyond dispute. A recent speech by the outgoing Commissioner of Police assured some newly minted cops that they were beloved by the Hong Kong public, citing surveys taken last year.
More recent figures are less encouraging. One recent survey asked respondents to rate their confidence in the Hong Kong force on a scale from zero to ten. Slightly more than half of the respondents chose zero.
People’s view of the police force depends heavily on their most recent encounter with it. When that consisted of a squad of faceless (and numberless) people in head to toe black armour storming into their estate and tear-gassing their dog, well… Not so much an occupying army as an invading one.
Unfortunate and inevitable though this may be, it does mean that this is a most unfortunate time for a renewed emphasis on the paramilitary tone of local police culture. Which brings me to the new C of P’s decision to change the force’s motto.
This used to be “Serving with Pride and Care”. Pride is a nice thing in a uniformed force, and “serving with care” carried the pleasing implication that the force was there to help people, care being something not required by corporations or machines.
The new catchphrase is “Serving Hong Kong with Honour, Duty and Loyalty”. The first part of this is dangerously ambiguous. Which possible Hong Kong are we serving. Is it the people, the government, or the liaison office?
The “honour, duty and loyalty” bit do not help. From a style point of view there is always a feeling that you get a nice rhythm with three items: faith, hope and charity; hatred, ridicule and contempt; liberty, equality, fraternity; fish, chips and peas…
But why this particular trio? According to the some frenzied googling, the phrase first surfaced in a historical novel by one G. P. R. James, published in 1832 and called “Henry Masterton, or the adventures of a young cavalier”. The three qualities cross the mind of a lady contemplating her next move with Mr M.
The trio appears again in an article in the Edinburgh Review of 1855. I cannot resist quoting the whole sentence: “It would be well for us if all our rulers were possessed with the same high feelings of honour, duty, loyalty and devotion which are eminently the characteristics of the country gentlemen of England.”
Very flattering, but no connection with police work. Also off topic is the appearance of the same trio in early editions of “Scout8ing for Boys”.
In 1995 we have a book called “Honour, Duty and Loyalty”. But I do not think the Commissioner of Police had this book in mind because the second deck of the title is “Introduction to National Socialism”. The motto of the SS was “my honour is called loyalty”, a near miss.
We may also exclude a chapter “Honour, Loyalty, Duty” in what appears to be a dungeons and dragons type of game, published in 2017, and an academic effort called “Honour, Duty and Loyalty to Tradition as a ‘Tragic Flaw’ in Titus Andronicus”, for which I have been unable to establish a date.
We will let pass as too obscure for our purpose the motto of the Mexican navy, which happens to be “honour, duty, loyalty and patriotism”.
So where did this trio come from? I suppose it is an adaptation of the well-known motto of West Point (the American training establishment for army officers), which is “duty, honour, country”. If this had been left unchanged the “country” bit would have caused a problem.
The West Point motto was the theme of a famous speech by General MacArthur, much Youtubed, usually with a specially composed but rather dull piece of military music in the background. It was also adopted with approval by both President Bushes. GW, in a lucid moment: “Leadership to me means duty, honour, country.”
The US Army’s official motto is quite long, but often abbreviated on tee-shirts to “Honour, duty, loyalty”, which is where we came in. Our police force now wants to be known as a paragon of military virtues.
I find this a bit disturbing. Many years ago I was invited to give a little seminar on media matters to a group of police people who were on the brink of becoming inspectors. This must have given satisfaction because I was invited back a few times to address embryo superintendents.
After I had done my thing about the media we usually had a general discussion, in which people complained bitterly of being misquoted and I explained that accurate quoting is harder than it looks. Then I was usually told that there should be a body to which people could complain about iniquitous journalism, to which I replied that I would be “quite happy to have a complaints procedure as long as it is modelled on yours”, which did not go down too well.
Another recurring topic was the question, which was floating about at the time, whether the police force should be renamed a “police service” to reflect the post-colonial change of emphasis from control to service. To my surprise everyone, or at least everyone who dared to speak, was violently against the change.
I was assured that the force really liked being paramilitary and had no intention of changing. At the time this seemed rather an academic question. I should perhaps have suggested, but didn’t, that this was a matter which should be decided by what Hong Kong needed rather than what most police people preferred.
Anyway this has now become a highly relevant question. People calling for the abolition or reform of the police force do not want a society with no police. They want a force dedicated to law as well as order, to service as well as force. There are police forces in the world which can keep an acceptable measure of control over street turbulence without resort to constantly rising levels of violence and the deployment of increasingly intimidating weapons. Why can’t we have one?
There is nothing wrong with serving Hong Kong with honour, duty and loyalty; the problem is the things which are left out. Unlike army officers, police people have a duty to the law and the people as well as to the government. Unlike for army officers the question of relations with civilians is not an optional skill for police people; it is the heart of the job.
The job of the military is, as a US Marine memorably put it on his arrival in Iraq, to “do what we are trained to do: blow things up and kill people.” Police people should have other priorities and the motto on their wall should reflect them.

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Well, said my friend when Wednesday night’s race meeting was cancelled, now things are getting serious. As indeed they are. When “public events” generally started on Friday night and subsided gradually around midnight on Sunday, many people were really not much inconvenienced.
Like most Hongkongers I had occasional encounters: a whiff of stale tear gas here, a tricky drive over a debris-strewn road there, a moment of anxiety at a junction which usually has traffic lights but doesn’t any more.
This week, though, the New Territories have become almost as cut off as they were in pre-railway days. Some much-contested roads have become unnavigable. The former KCR has stopped for the first time since the Tai Wai bridge collapsed in, I think, the 50s.
A lot of people are having trouble getting to work, shops are staying closed, whether from apprehension or simple lack of staff, deliveries are not getting through, and buses to some places are unobtainable.
The protests are becoming more “effective”, if the effect you want is to disrupt normal life. This should have been expected. Over the months people have had plenty of time to sort out what doesn’t work, what works and what works even better.
Of the active protesters, the timid and half-hearted have dropped out of the scene; the rash and careless have been arrested or injured; the survivors are careful, bold and keen. This also should have been expected.
This escalation has been matched by a trend to rhetorical excess among the government’s supporters. Last week saw two long diatribes, both by lawyers (which explains the length – conciseness is not a virtue when you are billing by the hour) calling for fiercer action against protesters.
Both started by assuming what they sought to prove. In one the protesters were referred to throughout as “thugs”, in the other as “terrorists”.
Now look, people, it is unavoidable that the groups engaged in nightly conflict should generate rude names for each other. To the police, all protesters are “cockroaches”, to the protesters all police are “triads”. This is a normal human impulse.
It should not, though, be imported into public discussion of policy. With thousands of people milling about the street, intermittently clashing with each other, there will be individuals who make bad choices.
Not all protesters set people on fire; not all policemen shoot people. We need to distinguish between the dramatic and the typical. Most protesters have a pretty good idea of how far they are prepared to go, and turning people into human torches is not on the list. Similarly most policemen want nothing more than to restore order in the way that their training and leadership have told them is correct and lawful.
It may help to keep things in perspective if we remember the Stanford prison experiment. Like most experiments with uncomfortable conclusions, this has come in for a good deal of nit-picking, but the basic story goes like this: a group of 24 students were randomly assigned the roles of guard and prisoner, and put in a simulated prison in a university basement.
The guards had uniforms and mirror sunglasses. The prisoners had humiliating clothing and very basic cells. The experimenter, who played the role of the Warden, admitted afterwards that he may have overdone it a bit. The experiment was supposed to go on for two weeks, but after six days the levels of psychological abuse of prisoners by guards were so high that the whole thing was called off.
The lesson is that people respond to expectations, to circumstances and to uniforms. Particularly, it seems, if the uniform confers anonymity. Your local student protester, if a few years older, might have found himself in a police uniform. It is a popular choice for graduates, especially women who want a career which doesn’t involve desks: many of my students signed up.
The police person, if the disturbances had come a few years earlier or his birth a few years later, might have been out on the streets throwing things. We are all, as Henry Fielding put it, no better than God made us and many are a great deal worse.
The important thing is that our current troubles are not like a war, where the two sides can eventually call it a day, go to their respective homes and have very little to do with each other until passions have cooled a bit.
We are all Hongkongers and we will have to live together when this is over. We need to recognise that the majority of people on both sides sincerely believe that they are pursuing a good objective in the right way.
Our police people believe that order is the foundation of society and their work is vital to maintaining it. Our protesters believe that this campaign is the last chance for Hong Kong to avoid becoming Xinjiang with a seafront.
Whether you disagree with the premises or the conclusions of either side, you must still accept that a well-intentioned citizen may take a different view from yours. There is no need for insults. Lawyers, at least, should know better.

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These are hard times for billionaires, or so I must suppose because the latest edition of The Economist contained two articles in their defence. Apparently in both the US and the UK politicians of a progressive disposition have been rude about billionaires.

Bernie Sanders says they “should not be allowed to happen”. Jeremy Corbyn says that “every billionaire is a policy failure”. A tax increase for plutocrats is in the wind in both countries. Clearly billionaires have a problem, not least the uninspiring example set by the one in the White House.

The Economist, which clearly knows which side its bread is buttered on, says billionaires are OK, but admits to some misgivings about “rent-seeking”. This is the economist’s term for people who get rich by exploiting markets which are hard to enter, or their connections with the government.

If competition is allowed then profits will in the long run be driven down by it, and anyone who clocks a billion has done so on his own merits. With a bit of luck, perhaps.

This does not seem to me to dispose of the matter, unless you subscribe to the rather depressing, and now discredited, Chicago school of economics, which says that the only function of a company is to obey the law and maximise profits.

After all the first quality required to become a billionaire is greed. People who are not blessed with this foible will find other things to do long before they get to their ninth zero.

As Taleb puts it, the advantage of capitalism is that we all benefit from some people’s greed. That does not mean we have to admire them for having this characteristic.

Before wealth became easily confused with virtue it used to be said that behind every great fortune is a great crime. This may be putting it a bit strongly, but we can all think of ways of getting your first billion which do not involve rent-seeking, are not illegal, and of which we profoundly disapprove.

We could start with getting your raw materials from the “South American towns where the miners work almost for nothing,” as the old Dylan song puts it, and come up to date with the merits of having your gadgets put together by child slaves in China.

Bearing in mind that this implies a broader definition of unacceptable behaviour than the economists’ (or The Economist’s) and that the latter magazine admits that a quarter of the world’s great fortunes were acquired unfairly, this suggests that some suspicion of great wealth might be useful and justified.

This is an interesting observation from a Hong Kong point of view. In the opinion of some people, at least, all our local great fortunes come from rent-seeking, because they derive from real estate, an industry which is shamelessly rigged by the government.

No doubt the 12 or so families who are the major beneficiaries of this system are lying low and quietly thanking their lucky stars that the agenda of the Resistance does not, or does not yet, include an attack on “developer hegemony”.

With one resounding exception. Ms Annie Wu aroused the ire of protesters by making a special trip to Geneva to enlighten the UN Human Rights Committee about Hong Kong matters.

Ms Wu came by her wealth honestly. She inherited it from her father. As it includes a large chain of eateries the company concerned has been desperately, and in vain, pointing out that she does not actually run the enterprise. This has not protected it from vandalism and boycotts.

Remarkably, one local commentator thought that Ms Wu’s visit to Geneva showed “courage”. Well no doubt standards of courage are pretty low if you are contributing a controversial column from the safety of Vancouver. Shouldn’t it be called “My Take-off”?

Anyway I do not buy this. Ms Wu flies to Geneva, First Class. She puts up in a five-star hotel, rides in a suitably luxurious limo to the Human Rights Committee meeting and there reads a script which several people – the Liaison Office, the Xinhua News Agency, the SAR Government’s Information Services Department – would be very happy to supply. And then she returns the same way to her Hong Kong home, or palace, to await the arrival of a suitably grateful medal in the mail.

I have more sympathy for the view that boycotting enterprises owned by political pariahs is unkind to their staff. No doubt the innocent youngster who signed up as a trainee barista with Starbucks did not realise that he was entering a political minefield.

On the other hand the people complaining about this were not so vocal when businesses were blacklisted or otherwise persecuted by the Chinese government or its more excitable people. This has been going on for years.

The most conspicuous victim is the Apple Daily. Companies which wish to remain in good odour on the mainland do not advertise in this newspaper. Conversely mainland companies are nudged in the direction of friendly forces, which has resulted in some professionals of modest abilities acquiring much wealth and fame.

When Cathay Pacific was forced into a political purge of its staff by shameless abuse of “safety”, we were told that “if you want to do business in China you have to play by the rules”.

Well it seems that now there are some rules attached to doing business in Hong Kong. It is becoming difficult to be neutral. As the old saying goes, a nun can become a whore and a whore can become a nun. But no woman can be both at the same time.

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