tim's experiment

A Dutch historian, Pieter Geyl, was interned during the Second World War, and passed the time by writing, from memory, a book about the different ways in which Napoleon had been treated by French historians.

After a short interlude to tidy up and check his quotes this was published in 1949, under the title “Napoleon for and against”, and instantly became a classic. It is the text which everyone refers to when they want to make the point, now verging on a platitude, that history is not a search for some elusive motherload of incontestable facts with which everyone will eventually agree.

On the contrary, historians are people of their times, and their writings reflect their own contemporary preoccupations and prejudices. The present pollutes the past, just as the past pollutes the present. In the 1830s Napoleon was a later version of Charlemagne. In the 1940s he was an early version of Hitler.

There are of course facts on which everyone can agree. No future historian will ever dispute that Hong Kong was handed over to Chinese rule in 1997. But as soon as you move on to what that event meant, entailed, or came from, then different people will look at the same event and see it in different ways.

So I was amused by the announcement that there is a Hong Kong Chronicles Institute, which is going to splurge $780 million on the production of a Hong Kong Chronicle, which will record our history over the last 7,000 years.

The chairman of the Institute, Mr Tung Chee-hwa, (yes, our first CE) said the chronicles would be “accurate and objective”, according to the Standard. Also engaged in this enterprise is Mr Bernard Charnwoot Chan (yes, the convenor of the Executive Council) who is quoted as saying “There is no endorsement from the government. We are independent.”

This rosy view of the matter was rather spoiled by the additional information that “Beijing’s top official in Hong Kong, Luo Huining, is one of the honorary patrons.” The other honorary patron mentioned is Carrie Lam, our much-loved Chief Executive. How independent can you get?

There is no such thing as accurate and objective history. If there was, though, you would not expect to find an organisation headed by people like this to produce it.

Give them credit for ambition, though. The “chronicles” will run to no less than 66 volumes. Even with 7,000 years to play with this seems a bit ambitious. Some comparable efforts:

• The Cambridge History of Britain occupies four volumes, no doubt helped by the fact that it only starts in 500AD.
• The Cambridge History of the US has reached 11 volumes and is not yet finished, though work started in 1982.
• The Oxford History of England was produced between 1934 and 1986, eventually comprising 16 volumes plus a joint index.
• The Penguin History of Europe runs to seven volumes, starting with the Trojan Wars but finishing, so far, in 1949. 

So I would not bet on the 66th volume coming out on schedule in 2027. No doubt the budget will come under some strain as well. One third of it comes from the usual suspects: the Jockey Club, banks, property companies, Li Ka Shing Foundation. Curiously we were not told where the other two thirds were coming from.

And who, one wonders, is going to read this thing? I am a glutton for history books, but 66 volumes? I am afraid the involvement of so many government heavyweights reduces confidence in the reliability of the eventual product. After all one of the features of the last few months has been the industrious rewriting of recent history.

Take, for example, the famous Yuen Long MTR station incident on July 21 last year. At the time this was described (in the SCMP) as follows “At least 45 people were injured in unprecedented late-night violence at a Hong Kong railway station on Sunday, as a rampaging mob of men in white T-shirts attacked black-clad protesters and passengers indiscriminately. No police officer was in sight as dozens of men, who witnesses suggested were triad gangsters, stormed into Yuen Long MTR station.”

By the time the supposedly Independent Police Complaints Council reached it the event had already been changed to a “stand-off” between two groups who are treated as equals: the white-clad men outside the paid area and the people in black inside it, in which the eventual attack on the MTR train is treated as an unexpected result of “provocation”.  

This is a legally blind way of looking at the two groups concerned. Nobody has suggested that the passengers arriving in the station that night were looking for some men in white to beat up. Whatever they had been doing earlier – no doubt some had protested legally, some had protested illegally, and some just happened to be wearing black because it’s a popular colour – when they reached the station they were just a crowd of law-abiding citizens going home.

The men in white, on the other hand, were not would-be passengers who were prevented from going into the paid area by the presence of a hostile band of protesters. They had come to the station looking for a fight.

Wading through a small lake of details about the police response, which was slow and timid, we come eventually to this:  “The IPCC notes that live stream news reports on the confrontation between the two groups, one clad in white and the other in black, invariably featured with prominence persons in white attacking those in black outfits.” 

Well how about that! What can we deduce from this interesting imbalance in “prominence”? Note that a livestream is by definition not edited. You point your camera at what seems most exciting and whatever happens happens.

The IPCC seems to have trouble with the idea that if most of the footage showed people in white attacking those in black then that was probably because the people in white, who had assembled armed for the purpose, were doing the attacking.

This trend of treating the whole affair as a brawl between two groups of consenting adults has now reached its logical conclusion. As well as sundry persons who were presumably once in white shirts we also have people who were in the black shirt group charged with “rioting”.

Then we come to the interesting incident at Nam Pin Wai in which a senior police person patted, petted, or possibly merely redirected, a person in a white shirt. This has been a huge preoccupation with police spokesmen and apologists ever since. The IPCC offers an elaborate – and of course innocent – explanation. The explainers fondly suppose that if they can see off this bit of video they can refute the accusation that there was “collusion” between police and triads.

This is an error. True some people drew the obvious conclusion from the late arrival of police rescuers at the station that the police were not in a hurry to protect and serve anyone who was wearing black. True too that the person in white who was petted, or redirected if you prefer, would if he had been wearing black in Causeway Bay have been treated to a faceful of pepper for failing to follow police orders.

But these features of the evening would not have led so many people to the same conclusion if it had not been for the history of Yuen Long, a place where everyone knew who the bandits were but somehow they were never arrested.

This was not entirely due to police failure. Very senior officials strenuously discouraged police inquiries into the activities of rural bigwigs, because the “administration” valued the support of such people. It was assumed erroneously that village potentates who were allowed to play with fireworks, eat dog, hold gambling parties and other peccadilloes would not seek to enrich themselves from the numerous opportunities which immunity from the law opens up.

Collusion can take many forms, and it does not necessarily imply joint enterprises or cooperation. The history of Yuen Long is of a tacit “live and let live” approach to rural criminality which has persisted for decades. Do not expect to read about this in the Hong Kong Chronicles.

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It has been obvious for a long time that the COVID epidemic would make a mess of Christmas. But it turned out to be unexpectedly traumatic all the same.

Usually the way of it chez Hamlett is that we order a large turkey, and also a large ham. Some 20 or 30 friends then come round to consume the result of a long day’s cooking, exchange presents, drink too much and engage in other conventional festive rituals. Well that was obviously not going to happen this year.

In fact as there were only going to be four of us it was immediately obvious that no plausible turkey would be small enough.

No problem, said the chef – who for these purposes is me. When I was very young the idea of universal cheap turkey had not yet arrived. Meat of all kinds was still expensive, rationed or both. So the extended Hamlett clan assembled at my parents’ place and my agricultural Uncle Philip arrived with a large whole chicken, which he plucked and gutted in our kitchen. And that was the festive bird.

So we would have a roast chicken. Now although I cook at least once every week I have no experience of buying whole chickens in Hong Kong. I prefer boneless thighs, which are easy to cook and reasonably cheap even if the packaging is embellished with glowing descriptions of the luxurious life and lavish diet enjoyed by the deceased bird.

I do not have the necessary thick skin to choose a live chicken and have it butchered while I wait, still less to buy a live bird and carry it off to be executed, plucked and drawn at home. This was the standard arrangement used by our neighbours when we lived in a rural village. Some people had a small hen house in which condemned prisoners could spend their last days.

Call me a softy if you like. My idea of a chicken for human consumption is a nice clean package on a supermarket shelf which is already naked and dead.

All the chickens offered in Hong Kong shops appear to be very small. This was not a problem. We would buy two. We selected a couple from the supermarket shelf which were neatly packaged in the usual plastic tray and film, and put them unopened in the fridge.

On the day of the feast my son arrived to help, as he usually does. I had lined up a Gordon Ramsey recipe which required a rather elaborate stuffing and was working on that while he unpacked the two chickens.

A wail of dismay greeted the first piece of bad news. Our dead chickens still had their heads on. At this point I became very busy with the stuffing. There was some discussion of the rival merits of decapitation with a sword – we keep one in the house for dancing purposes – or an axe. Did Henry VIII worry about this? Would it be least upsetting if one of us held the bird up by the head and the other one took a wild swipe?

We settled for something conservative with the usual kitchen chopper. Then another interesting discovery. The chickens still had their feet. These were removed without too much trouble.

My renewed tussle with the stuffing was then interrupted again. There were some internal parts still inside the chickens. This was not the usual polite arrangement found in commercial turkeys, in which the parts you might wish to use to make the gravy are inside the bird, neatly enclosed in a plastic or paper bag. 

The internal parts were spectacularly gory and still attached to the inside of the bird. At this point my interest in the stuffing became all-absorbing. All I could offer was the possibly unhelpful suggestion that my son, who is an enthusiastic watcher of hospital soap operas of the ER kind, should regard this as an opportunity to practise an emergency operation.

My son is a good soldier on these occasions, and continued to work on removing the sundry bits found inside the chickens, while expressing serious doubts about whether he would ever want to eat chicken again.

Quite what gets left and what gets removed remains a mystery. There was no sign of a heart, or of the digestive system, which I assume takes the form of a long tube. We thought there was a liver and possibly two kidneys there somewhere. Also there were some mysterious spongy bits on the inside of the rib cage which may have been the remains of the lungs.

Finally we had our two chickens stuffed, seasoned and in the oven. Fortunately they had to stay there for an hour and a half, during which time traumatic memories of their internal plumbing had dimmed and we both managed to eat them.

Still, this was not so much a celebration of Divine Grace or the Winter Solstice as an unexpected lesson in the merits of vegetarianism. There is a moral here for squeamish consumers: if buying a whole chicken in Hong Kong look closely; you may get more of the chicken than you really want.

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I am still worrying about the implications of a story the other week, which recorded that a shop selling face masks had closed because of fears that its wares might contravene the new national security law.

One of the controversial items was a yellow mask (a subversive colour?) bearing the initials FDNOL.

It appeared from the attached picture that these letters were so small as to be barely visible to the naked eye. But some national security enthusiast had noticed them, and deduced that they were supposed to stand for one of last year’s popular slogans: Five Demands Not One Less.

I do not recall that the five demands actually included anything hostile to national security. One of them, the withdrawal of the extradition bill, had already been conceded. The withdrawal of the word “riot” in official descriptions of one event was a purely verbal request, and the idea of an inquiry into policing was quite popular even in pro-government circles.

Lots of countries have occasional amnesties without imperilling their security, and democracy is, after all, described as a desirable destination in the Basic Law. So the slogan seems to suffer from guilt by association with the people who like it, rather than any intrinsic legal problem.

Anyway I shall leave that question to more learned pens. What bothers me is the ambiguity involved in criminalising a set of initials. These are always ambiguous. Good example the other week of someone who ended a sympathetic email to a bereaved friend LOL, thinking it meant Lots of Love, only to discover that the recipient decoded it as Laughing Out Loud.

After all FDNOL could stand for a variety of things besides five demands etc. Fidel’s Definitely Not Our Leader, perhaps. Or Fearful Ducks Nest On Lampposts. How about Fairies Dance Near Our Lodgings?

I quite see that you might jump to a conclusion on this matter if you saw the fatal letters waved at a protest demonstration. But in tiny letters on a face mask? The national security law is frighteningly ambiguous, but is there not a venerable legal principle (encased, as such principles tend to be, in a bit of Latin), which goes “De minimis non curat lex”, usually translated as “the law does not concern itself with trifles”?

The other sensitive slogan presents even more problems. This is “Free Hong Kong, revolution of our times”. whose Chinese version has already sprouted a variety of interesting disguises.

The English initials present an opportunity for serious ambiguity. In the first place the “Free” character in Chinese is sometimes translated as “Liberate”. Hong Kong in some publications is one word. So for this part of the slogan we could have FHK, LHK, FH or LH.

The revolution part has other possibilities. Anyone for a patriotic tee-shirt urging us to ROOT for Hong Kong?

The trouble with getting excited about subversive abbreviations is that some people will regard it as a challenge. New formulations will appear. For DAB haters we could have FTDAB. Fans of our glorious leader might like OLIASC. For the footloose: IM OK BNO.

Whether these would be acceptable as number plates is an interesting question. As it happens I was a member of the number plate vetting committee for many years (an underpaid but entertaining job) and I cannot recall any plausible pretext for refusing BE WATER. The Transport Department has banned it anyway.

Well of course the times are a-changing, and this is happening quite fast. The ink was barely dry on my piece about the need to consider when to leave when it emerged that people migrating to the UK under the BNO scheme would not be able to take their MPF money with them. Or as a number plate might put it BNO NO $$$.

The news that various people’s bank accounts have been frozen also had a chilling effect (sorry).

It would be nice if our leaders discouraged amateur witch hunters from looking too zealously for possible national security violations. Initials have a meaning only to people who are already politically activated one way or the other. We were told when the national security law first appeared that of course nobody would be prosecuted merely for waving a banner or shouting a slogan. 

Well that turned out to be a good joke. But we are not ROTFL.

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I have been reading “Fake Law”, by an English barrister who operates under a pseudonym to avoid accusations that writing books about the legal system is a way of advertising his services.
In it he laments the widespread ignorance of the finer points, or indeed many of the less fine points, of the law among journalists and politicians, and the resulting circulation of false or misleading ideas about how the legal system works.
I do not know how long it took him to collect the examples of this trend in England. Most of the examples offered concern issues which have not come up here, like the effect of economies on the Legal Aid system, the circumstances in which a court may rule that medical treatment is not in the interests of a dying child, or the role of juries in rape cases.
Still if he ever runs out of material in England he will find a copious supply of odd legal comments in Hong Kong. Some examples from the last week or so come to mind.
Let us start with Mr Ho Lok-sang, who pens pieces at the rabid end of the pro-government spectrum for the China Daily’s English language edition. Mr Ho is upset that Ted Hui escaped to Denmark, having gathered as the eighth summons dropped through his letterbox that someone in Hong Kong was out to get him. Mr Hui was on bail.
“The legal principle when dealing with bail applications is quite simple,” says Mr Ho. “The primary consideration is the defendant’s likelihood of absconding.”
That is totally wrong. The primary consideration when dealing with bail applications is that the applicant has not been convicted, is presumed to be innocent until a trial decides otherwise, and that consequently he should be left at liberty unless there is a strong case for keeping him in custody for some reason, one of which might be the likelihood of absconding.
This is the correct approach and if it is adopted there will inevitably be occasions when the defendant manages to disappear. That is not a reason for piling on the magistrate concerned.
On this erroneous basis Mr Ho proceeds to some vigorous judge abuse.
Three magistrates and one judge are explicitly accused of political bias. Mr Ho offers an entertaining contradiction by asserting at the beginning of one paragraph that there is “righteous public indignation in response to Hui’s escape” and at the beginning of the next that “Hong Kong people are not upset over Hui’s escape”.
Nevertheless, apparently, “some members of the public now see the judiciary, or at least some magistrates and judges, as part of the conspiracy to allow these rioters and activists to escape justice by granting them bail and permission to leave Hong Kong.” And they should be investigated by the ICAC.
Mr Ho is in some danger of discovering that it is still a common law offence to impute corrupt motives to judges. But then perhaps he isn’t, because this is the sort of law which is rather neglected where the pro-government press is concerned.
For an altogether more polite and upmarket form of judge abuse we can turn to Mr Henry Litton, who has turned his retirement into a one-man campaign for shorter judgments of a kind which he agrees with.
Like Mr Ho, Mr Litton starts with an obvious error. Last year the police force, he says, was “the target of extreme violence”. Dear me, no. I have a master’s degree in extreme violence. The course was called War Studies.
This is also basically irrelevant. We do not have collective punishment, and we should not have collective excuses either. Whether any particular police action represents an appropriate use of force depends on the individual circumstances.
You may have supposed that Mr Litton’s occasional appearances in print were aimed at rectifying some error in the way Hong Kong judges approach matters concerning the Basic Law and the PRC constitution. No such matters arise here. The case concerns whether the police force should be required to display individual numbers so that they can be identified by members of the public, and whether the existing system for dealing with complaints about the police is satisfactory.
The judge decided that the police should display numbers and the system was unsatisfactory, which will strike many observers as common sense conclusions. Mr Litton disagrees. There is much dissection of parts of the judgment. Mr Litton complains that it is 66 pages long.
Well judgments are printed in a very wasteful way, and lawyers generally do not have the gift of brevity. Mr Litton, alas, took up so much space on more important matters that he did not have room to expound on the dangers and merits of having very senior retired judges commenting on cases which are still open to appeal.
Curiously it seems that besides the judgment’s contents — “the stuff of comic strips, of fairy tales” — his most cherished objection is that the Commissioner of Police will ignore it. This is a plausible prediction but hardly the judge’s fault, one might think.
Mr Litton proposes a few simple rules to avoid future outrages, the last of which is that “The courtroom is no place for debate with lawyers”. Really? What are lawyers for if not to perform in courtroom debates? We may be heading for a system in which the only role of defending counsel is to help the prisoner at the bar to draft his confession. But let’s not rush it.
Now we come to the strange affair of the Duty Lawyer Scheme noticeboard. The controversial corkboard is located in the Shatin Magistrates Court. A website called “Save HK” printed a picture of said notice board, complaining that it had “pro-protester items pinned on it, including one entitled Hong Kong Protest ABC.”
This provided an opportunity for DAB lawmaker Holden Chow to leap into action, asking for “disciplinary action in light of the breach of neutrality inside court buildings.” Putting up posters which support illegal protests with inflammatory slogans was “a despicable action which damaged the reputation of the Judiciary.”
Well there is no such thing as a rule on “neutrality” in court buildings. We expect the judge or magistrate to be neutral. The police, prosecution and defence are not. The Duty Lawyer Service is not part of the Judiciary and it is not expected to be neutral because its role is to help defendants who cannot afford a lawyer.
Many recent defendants have presumably been protesters so you might think it a good idea for the Duty Lawyers to have some idea of what the protests were about and what the protesters thought they were doing. Still, the service is funded by the government so the posters were removed. A spokesman for the service said the “individual staffer involved was severely reprimanded”.
Looking at the actual posters it is difficult to see what all the fuss is about. The “protest ABC” is a cartoon-like joke: A is for Angry, B is for Be water, C is for Crowdfunding, D is for Demonstration, E is for Extradition Bill and so on. Each letter has a little sketch: the Extradition Bill for example has what appears to be a dead duck.
There are a lot of functional notices on the board and two red bannerets of the kind people put on their doorposts at Chinese New Year, which I cannot read. And there is one poster on which the only clearly legible phrase is “Freedom was a basic human right.” Is that “deemed subversive” now, I wonder. Has “free” become a dirty word? This is going to be a problem for publishers in the future. Free is a four-letter word beginning with F. But F*** already means something else.

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The 13-month prison sentence imposed on Joshua Wong has rightly attracted a lot of attention. This has rather overshadowed a less spectacular but still interesting matter, which is what happened when he was first detained back in November.
When you are remanded in custody in Hong Kong you are taken to a place called the Lai Chi Kok Reception Centre. This name is not a mere euphemism for Lai Chi Kok Prison; it recognises an important difference.
People who are remanded in custody pending trial are not convicts. The remand is not a punishment because in our system you are presumed to be innocent until the trial. Keeping people in custody before the hearing is supposed to be a rather reluctant concession to some practical needs: to ensure that the defendant turns up, does not repeat the crime, and does not interfere with potential witnesses.
When I was still a full-time reporter I used to receive occasional suggestions from people who had been unwilling guests at Lai Chi Kok that conditions there were scandalously Spartan. The official response to requests for comment on this was that the facilities were simple because stays were expected to be short.
In that respect, alas, times have changed. It used to be supposed in the vast majority of cases that the defendant had a right either to a speedy trial or to be freed on bail while the prosecution got its act together.
Standards in this matter have slipped. I notice that by the time Mr Tam Tak-chi stands trial for a number of legal antiques alleging “subversion” he will have been in custody for nine months.
Anyway back to Mr Wong. It seems, according to a “ letter from prison” on his Facebook page, that on his arrival in the Reception Centre on November 23 he was X-rayed. The correctional X-ray interpreter decided that there was some unexplained object in his stomach.
The nature of this object was apparently quite unclear. It “could be drugs, rings or gold and silver objects”, he was told.
He was then placed in a cell on his own. The cell light was on at all times. He used a blindfold to sleep, but was woken every four hours to have his blood pressure and oxygen saturation checked. He was not allowed the usual hour of outdoor exercise.
He was required to defecate … to hell with the euphemisms … he was ordered to shit on a plate. This had to be handed to a Correctional Service person who checked the output for drugs, rings, gold and silver objects etc. After the inspection of the plate Mr Wong was required to sign an “isolated observation form”, whatever that is.
He had to pee in a washbasin. It did not have running water. He was subjected to further X-rays. He was not allowed to see the results but they cannot have shown very much because after three days no gold and silver objects or other treasures had appeared. So it seems there was nothing unusual in Mr Wong’s stomach at all. He was then allowed to mix with the other prisoners, take exercise, etc.
This story raises a number of questions of the kind which one might once have hoped would be asked by some alert Legislative Councillor.
The first one is: are all new arrivals at the Reception Centre routinely X-rayed? This is a medical procedure which usually requires the patient’s consent. There are hazards attached to exposure to X-rays, which is why if you have one in a hospital the camera operator invariably leaves the room before the actual picture is taken.
They do not have to worry about undetected pregnancies in Lai Chi Kok, because the Reception Centre only admits males. Still, some people may be harmed by exposure. And after all, a remand prisoner is not a convict. He does not have the right to leave; that does not mean he loses all his other rights as a citizen and a human being.
If the X-ray is not applied to all new arrivals it raises another question: why was Mr Wong singled out for the privilege? Mr Wong is, whatever you think of his politics, a fully paid-up member of the middle classes. He is an unlikely dope dealer. Why anyone would want to smuggle personal jewellery into the Reception Centre is not clear.
Then we may wonder what is with the recurring visits for tests of blood pressure and oxygen saturation? Was this a medical necessity? Did the repeated X-rays show anything, and if not why did Mr Wong’s solitary confinement continue?
Interpreting X-rays is notoriously tricky. The matter has been much studied and error rates in the range 20-40 per cent are commonly found. More disturbingly, in one experiment where the radiologists were offered the same X-ray picture again they disagreed with themselves about 20 per cent of the time.
I shall not name the rather prestigeous and expensive Hong Kong hospital which, having sent me home with a clean bill of health, telephoned the next day to say that on a second look at my X-rays they had detected a broken leg. It happens.
If, when it happens, you are confined to a toilet for three days with the light on and constant interruptions, you are entitled to wonder what is going on. And if you have in fact eaten nothing abnormal you may wonder, when the X-ray is repeated, whether any of the people looking at it know what they are doing.
I have some good friends in the Correctional Services Department. The department has an improbable enthusiasm for Scottish music. I am sure most of the correctional people are humane and benevolent individuals sincerely trying to do the best they can for the people in their custody. I recognise also that the staff at Lai Chi Kok cannot choose their guests, some of whom are a rough bunch.
However you need more faith in the milk of human kindness than I can muster to look at the way Mr Wong was treated and shake off the suspicion that someone in Lai Chi Kok thought it would be a good idea to give him a hard time because of who he is. This is not supposed to happen.

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