tim's experiment

Legislators have been making a fuss over the inclusion in Hong Kong’s “Top Talent Pass” scheme of a work visa for He Jantui. Professor He has a criminal record, albeit a rather exotic and unusual one: he was convicted of doing unauthorised research after editing the genes of unborn babies.

This was a controversial experiment which many scientists considered premature and ethically dubious. But in many jurisdictions you wouldn’t end up in jail for it.

Complaints centred round the fact that Prof He had, presumably, declared that he satisfied one of the requirements of the talent-hunting scheme, which is that applicants have been working for three of the last five years.

Prof He has spend most of the last five years in prison. This is not, I suppose, entirely incompatible with paid employment. I don’t know if prisoners in China are invited to sew mailbags, paint road signs or do any of the other useful things sometimes offered as paid work to prisoners.

Anyway his visa has now been cancelled, and it is suggested that all future applicants for the scheme, which is supposed to boost our supply of “top talent” by admitting its possessors on easy visa terms, should be required to produce a certificate of no criminal conviction. That looks a bit like over-kill. Such matters are unlikely to come up very often. A swift Googling of the names would suffice to eliminate from contention anyone who has starred in an academic scandal.

A more serious criticism of the whole scheme is its preoccupation with the “world’s top 100 universities”. There are numerous lists ranking universities from which one might choose, so the Immigration Department has compiled its own, with input from four: “Times Higher Education World University Rankings, Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings, US News and World Report’s Best Global Universities Rankings and Shanghai Jiao Tong University Academic Ranking of World Universities.”

Having graduated from a university which was ranked the best in the world by one of those systems last year I hope I can say without being accused of sour grapes that lists of this kind are notoriously worthless.

The idea of ranking universities was launched decades ago by US News and World etc, which originally ranked only American universities. The ranking list has been dogged by controversy for years.

Periodically American institutions have tried to boycott it; it is particularly unpopular with law schools for some reason. Some academics decry the system as a joke, other complain that universities have learnt how to “game the system” to get higher ratings, and some of them have been caught cheating to do so.

The measurement of research output is a contentious area and scoring institutions on “reputation” looks circular. The easiest way to get a reputation is to score well on the ranking table.

Defenders of the system say it gives parents and students the information they need to make informed choices. But it has other purposes. The President of the University of Alberta said it was “time to question these third-party rankings that are actually marketing driven, designed to sell particular issues of a publication with repurposing of their content into even higher sales volume special editions with year-long shelf life.”

The international comparisons are open to similar objections. They also seem to have proliferated categories so that everyone can claim to be good at something: in Hong Kong, for example, HKU says it is “first in Hong Kong” (THES and QS) 10^th in “employability rankings” (QS) and 1^st in “most international universities” (THES). The UST is 2^nd in the list of “young universities” (QS) 1^st in Hong Kong in the employability rankings, and so on. CUHK is first in HK in the US News ranking, 2^nd in HK (ARWU) and 1^st in HK in Reuters Most Innovative Universities. City U is fourth in the young universities list and 1^st in HK in “citations per faculty”. Poly U is 2^nd in HK in “sustainability” (QS). This is a school in which all children win prizes.

The main focus though, in the lists which count for immigration purposes, is on two areas: research and “reputation”. Both of these have problems. The pursuit of research outputs favours the wealthy and, alas, the unscrupulous, who can resort to the subtle manipulations lamented by Stuart Richie in his book “Science Fictions” (a fun read, incidentally) or the blatant cheating recounted in an article in the latest edition of The Economist.

The reputation thing is a bit of a joke. When I was a university teacher I was occasionally asked by one of these ranking organisations to provide a list of universities which in my view were good. Unless you have had a very mobile career this is difficult to do fairly, or at all. I knew which Australian universities could put on a good journalism conference. I had some notion of their journalism teaching. And that was it.

I knew quite a lot about standards of English-language debating in Hong Kong because I was regularly conscripted as a judge. But that only tells you about a small bit of each institution. The HKU team, for example, always seemed to consist of fierce and fluent ladies of a South Asian appearance from the Law Faculty. This didn’t tell you much about the rest of the place.

So I put in a good word for the institutions I had studied at, carefully ignored Cambridge and decided after some thought not to mention the London School of Economics because whenever I write a reference for someone who is applying there they get rejected.

It is difficult to believe that many people put much more thought into this sort of thing, for which you are of course not paid.

In a recent article in “Nature” Elizabeth Gadd (a big wheel in the research assessment industry) said:

“The literature on research management is full of critiques of rankings. Rankings are methodologically challenged — often using inappropriate indicators such as counting Nobel-prizewinning alumni as a proxy for offering a quality education. They favour publications in English, and institutions that did well in past rankings. So, older, wealthier organizations in Europe and North America consistently top the charts. Rankings apply a combination of indicators that might not represent universities’ particular missions, and often overlook societal impact or teaching quality.”

Similar misgivings are expressed by Elen Hazelkorn, a professor at the Technological University of Dublin:

“There are over 18,000 university-level institutions worldwide. Those ranked within the top 500 would be within the top 3% worldwide. Yet, by a perverse logic, rankings have generated a perception amongst the public, policymakers and stakeholders that only those within the top 20, 50 or 100 are worthy of being called excellent.

“There is no such thing as an objective ranking nor a reason why indicators should be either weighted (or given particular weights) or aggregated. Although rankings purport to measure higher education quality, they focus on a limited set of attributes for which (internationally) comparable data is available. This means that most global rankings focus unduly on research and reputation. Rankings are not an appropriate method for assessing or comparing quality, or the basis for making strategic decisions by countries or universities.”

The complaints of inherent bias are confirmed by the Immigration Department’s list, which has 54 universities in the USA, a further 19 in the UK, eight in Australia and six in Canada. There are, for reasons we will not go into, nine in Mainland China. This doesn’t leave much room for the rest of the world and nine countries/territories only have one entry – Argentina (with the only top university in South America, apparently) Finland, Ireland, Malaysia, Mexico, Norway, Russia, Spain and Taiwan. Europe is well represented but only west of the Oder: there is no room for the famous and ancient institutions in the Czech Republic, Poland or Hungary.

In the department’s view there are no top universities in India or the entire African continent. Another odd feature of the “Aggregate Top 100 universities “ list provided is that there are 176 universities on it. Not compiled by a Maths Major, apparently.

A more subtle complaint about this approach is that being a graduate of a top university doesn’t guarantee that you will be a top graduate. Universities which are working on research and reputation tend to treat teaching as a subsidiary activity, to be fobbed off to the inexperienced, part-time, or semi-retired. Star professors will be recruited on the explicit basis that they will not be required to teach undergraduates.

And some American universities manage to combine a reputation for exclusivity with a variety of back doors through which unlikely scholastic stars like George W Bush can enter.

This is known as ALDC admission. A is for athletes, L is for legacies (which means the offspring of graduates) D is for dean’s list (which means the offspring of potential donors) and C is for Children (of the university’s own staff). These categories account for no less than 30 per cent of the students admitted to Harvard.

Then in the UK we have the system by which duplicitous toffs like Boris Johnson find their way to Oxford. Don’t get me started.

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One of the delights of the annual budget talkfest is that the Financial Secretary of the day can hardly avoid the obligation to give unscripted replies to unexpected questions. With occasionally curious results.

Consider, for example, Mr Paul Chan (our current money wizard) on why Hong Kong has not followed some of the Singapore government’s efforts to revive the post-Covid tourist industry, which apparently include a special fund for the travel industry and direct grants to small enterprises.

Hong Kong’s tourism industry was quite different from Singapore’s, said Mr Chan, according to the Standard, “We are way more fun. We have natural mountains and tourists can also cross the border to the mainland.”

Natural mountains? We may think that setting Hong Kong up as more fun than Singapore is jumping over a fairly low bar. Singapore is not most people’s idea of a fun palace. But the Lion city can hardly be accused of seducing tourists with artificial mountains. Or indeed with any mountains at all.

It is a bit strange that Mr Chan, who one might think had some responsibility for the condition of the tourism industry, could think of no more stunning attractions for visitors, or consolations for struggling travel agencies, than geographical features for which the government is not responsible.

While we undoubtably have genuine mountains, moreover, Singapore also has an adjacent mainland to which visitors can resort. I am not sure that Johore is a great visitor magnet, but then Shenzhen is not most people’s idea of a tourism Mecca either.

This is harmless fun, perhaps. For a more serious item we can turn to Mr Chan’s performance in the Legislative Council Finance Committee meeting on his masterpiece, as reported in HKFP.

Legislator Tik Chi-yuen, who is the ONLY person in Legco not elected on a pro-government basis, had questioned the government’s sincerity in pursuing poverty alleviation, there being no allocation for this purpose at all in the budget. Under the circumstances, he said, it would be “very hard” for him to support the budget.

Mr Chan responded with a barrage of the usual platitudes, and then retired to his bunker:

“As a SAR official, I will not be intimidated. [Lawmakers] cannot use their vote of support or opposition to force me into doing something which I think would be inappropriate,” I presume this was originally in Cantonese as the Standard’s version, while clearly of the same quote, is slightly different: “As an SAR official I will not be threatened. I won’t be coerced by votes – for or against – to do something that I don’t deem appropriate.”

Am I alone in thinking that this — in either version — is a bit over the top when presented with the possibility that one, and only one, of the 90 legislative councillors might abstain from voting in support of the budget?

Given the way things are these days, it would be astonishing if an SAR official was intimidated in any way by the thought that anybody might not vote for anything he was doing. The government has nothing to worry about. The new electoral arrangements assure a comfortable — inceed overwhelming — majority is at its beck and call in the Legislative Council. Deliberative bodies which do not share this happy feature have been abolished or suspended indefinitely.

You have to wonder, really, why Mr Chan took the possibility of losing Mr Tik’s support so seriously. Are officials, in the interests of “happy Hong Kong stories” now expected to ensure that all proposals are not just passed, but carried unanimously?

We may have natural mountains, but our political system is beginning to look a bit … shall we say Singaporean?

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The Hong Kong Government continues to exhibit a strange and disproportionate preoccupation with the legal proceedings against Jimmy Lai, the former proprietor of a frisky tabloid not much given to admiring coverage of the administration.

Some weeks ago China’s National People’s Congress Standing Commmittee ruled, at the request of local officials, that Hong Kong courts will need to obtain a certificate from the Chief Executive when considering whether to allow overseas lawyers to represent defendants in national security cases.

This followed a spirited tussle in the courts here, in which the Department of Justice objected to Mr Lai’s plan to instruct a London-based barrister on his behalf. This bout went all the way to the Court of Final Appeal, where the department lost on the rather technical basis that it was seeking to advance arguments which it had not brought up in earlier hearings.

But these days any defeat in the courts for the government is temporary. If appeals fail it will change the law, either through Legco or by seeking an “interpretation” from the NPC Standing Committee.

It is difficult to see why the government is so exercised over Mr Lai’s choice of counsel. His particular case does not, as far as we know, involve any state secrets which should not be shared with foreigners. It appears to centre round some very public expeditions to the USA.

It would be tempting to infer that the squabble is merely a continuation of the campaign to get at Mr Lai by any means available. If he wants something it must be opposed as a matter of principle.

Anyway the latest development was rather predictable and uncontroversial, given the history so far. The department unveiled its proposed local legislation to give effect to the Standing Committee’s “interpretation”.

This will involve an amendment to the Legal Practitioners Ordinance. Courts hearing applications for overseas counsel will have to ask the Chief Executive whether the case involves national security, and whether allowing the proposed gwailo barrister to take the case would jeopardise national security. If the Chief Executive certifies that these two possibilities are in fact realised, then the application to deploy a foreigner must be refused.

I could have swallowed this with a silent grimace, if it were not for the statement accompanying it, which went like this:

The legislative proposal will not have adverse implications on the rule of law, the court’s independent judicial power as guaranteed by the Basic Law, and the party’s right to choose their legal representation and the right to a fair trial.

Paper submitted to Legco

Those of us who wish to believe that our government tells the truth most of the time will have to hope that this statement was originally penned in a more defensible form in Chinese, and badly translated. Because it is plainly not true.

The right to overseas counsel is not a big deal for most of us. It is a small twig on the branch which is the right to the lawyer of your choice, which in turn is a fairly minor offshoot of the right to a fair trial.

The proposed change could legitimately be defended as a minor reduction in defendants’ rights, applicable only in a tiny number of cases. After all how many defendants of any kind can afford to import an overseas barrister, a process which tends to involve First Class travel and a long stay in the Mandarin Hotel, quite apart from the fees?

So you can say, if you wish, that this will affect very few people. For them, though, it is clearly an infringement to the right to counsel of their choice, and an honest government would admit this.

Similarly the independent judicial power of a court is clearly diminished if in a certain type of proceedings it is required to follow the instructions of the Chief Executive. It may not come up often, but when it comes up there is no point in saying that black is white and the jurisdiction of the court is not diminished.

The Department of Justice could have argued – if it allowed its muse to be hampered by such irrelevant considerations as honesty – that the effect of the changes proposed would be very limited, both in the number of instances in which it is likely to come up, and the effect on the proceedings when it does. It could further have argued that this occasional blip in the smooth progress of justice was a necessary price to pay for the important objective of safeguarding national security.

Instead we get the “nothing is happening” argument again.

This sits uncomfortably with the government’s continuing willingness to ignore completely the District Councils Ordinance. Latest explanation for this is that there is no mention of the councils in the Basic Law – which might be said of quite a lot of topics on which all legislation is local – and that work is in progress on a new arrangement which will conform to the Basic Law and ensure that “only patriots rule Hong Kong”.

These are two fat red herrings. Nobody has suggested at any time in the last 25 years that the existing arrangements conflict with the Basic Law. The councils are purely advisory and members no longer have any role in the selection of the Chief Executive, so they do not in any sense “rule Hong Kong”, whether they are patriotic or not.

Still, just in case, they have been required since 2021 to take “an oath … that the oath-taker will uphold the Basic Law and bear allegiance to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China”.

It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the government is simply ignoring the ordinance while it tries to come up with a procedure which looks like an election but returns the right people. This is a difficult task and likely to take some time. In the meantime the rule of law stops at Chapter 547 of the Laws of Hong Kong.

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There was a surprise for government-watchers when it was reported that our new bosom buddies in Saudi Arabia had been told that there were now no COVID-related restrictions here in Hong Kong at all.

This was, at best, a rather slippery use of language. We are still required to wear face masks in public and some individuals – mostly politically inconvenient ones, doubtless by coincidence – have been penalised for appearing bare-faced in public.

I suppose your friendly local nit-picker will say that being required to wear something is not in the strict sense of the word a restriction, It is an instruction. But it feels like a restriction for most of us.

Perhaps the government was just getting a bit ahead of itself. We are expecting to drop the mask requirement any time now. This is a good thing, because one of the less inspiring features of the rule of law in Hong Kong is that you can in theory currently be penalised for not wearing a mask, or instead for wearing one.

This poses a dilemma for the law-abiding which is not one of the “good stories” we are so eagerly seeking these days.

The interesting question for a lot of people will be what happens next. When it is no longer a requirement to wear a mask will people continue to do so most of the time, only in crowded places, or not at all?

Clearly at present there is considerable social pressure backing up the law, at least in places like shopping malls and railway carriages. If in a moment of forgetfulness you have turned up without a mask you will feel naked. And some helpful souls will remind you with interesting gestures that you are missing something.

Personally I always keep a mask folded up in a back pocket for moments like this.

In the open air the situation is a bit more ambiguous. Officially you are allowed, if I understand the advice correctly, to take your mask off while exercising, though not in government facilities for indoor exercise.

My personal observation of the dog-walking and hiking population is that about three quarters of these people wear a mask all the time, or slip one on when they see me coming before I see them. Half of the rest have a mask either worn on the chin or on a wrist, which may be put on as they approach a mask wearer. And the rest have no visible mask, although of course they may have one in a pocket for emergencies like the appearance of a police person.

An interesting thing is the effect of minibus queues. People in such queues are all masked, because the driver will protest if they board naked. So walkers with naked faces coming along the pavement are presented with a small crowd of mask wearers they have to pass, and mask up briefly.

When masks are no longer compulsory the situation will be more complicated. Some people may leave home without a mask. Some may carry one for use if its absence becomes embarrassing. Some will have a personal policy, like masks for malls and MTR; bare-faced out of doors.

This is no mere sociological curiosity, because a small industry has appeared catering for mask wearers. There are for example about six shops within a short walk of the Shatin station which sell nothing but masks.

People who are still sporting the traditional medical model, with its horizontal folds in any colour you like as long as it’s white, are missing the opportunity to make a personal statement.

Masks are now offered in a wide variety of colours and patterns. Some of them are topical: holly for Christmas, rabbits for the Lunar New Year and so on. You can get high-tech ones endorsed by the Surgeon General of the United States, and thin filmy ones which probably do more for your legal status than your health. You can have elastic or ribbons, washable or disposable.

The only variation which appears not to be available is political expression, since an incident two years ago when local sedition-spotters complained about a mask with FDNOL on it in tiny letters.

It is difficult to believe that this flourishing market will survive the removal of legal compulsion. Waves of retail enthusiasm traditionally come and go in Hong Kong. I remember years ago when video game machines first appeared and arcades became as common as rice shops used to be.

Legislators complained that rival offerings of more social utility were being driven out of business by the growth of play places. Age restrictions were imposed kto protect the gullible young. Proprietors were required to allocate a certain amount of space for each machine. Critics complained that the space required for a game machine was bigger than the space allocated to each public housing tenant. But of course the health of the machines was not the purpose of the rule.

Then video gaming migrated to the personal computer and games fans could rot their brains in the privacy of their own homes. Games arcades are now hard to find. I fear the same fate may be in store for mask shops.

From a medical point of view this is probably a shame. Apparently when we were all taking COVID precautions a lot of less publicity-conscious microbes had a hard time finding victims; many seasonal diseases missed their usual appearance.

On the other hand I am told by people who have started travelling again that it is really nice to be surrounded by naked faces. So masks will have to go.

This will leave us with a large supply of unwanted masks, looking for somewhere where naked faces are still not welcome. Well, some places still discourage naked female faces. Perhaps our new friends in Saudi Arabia…?

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Like many English people I have a weakness for underdogs and lost causes. Hereward the Wake against the Normans, Bonnie Prince Charlie against the Duke of Cumberland, John Henry and the steam hammer, the Alamo… Show us a loser and we love him.

But there are limits. Asking, as some people have done recently, for a public inquiry into the Hong Kong government’s handling of the COVID epidemic suggests that the people concerned have not been following the drift of current events at all. This is not an underdog; it’s a dead duck.

There are, it is true, many interesting facets that such an inquiry might look into. Broadly I suppose it would conclude that people had done their best in a difficult situation, beset by conflicting advice from “the science” and messages from a northerly direction which were not always motivated by medicine.

But even if you accept that general conclusion there are many details which would make interesting reading. How did we make a good job of the original unexpected outbreak but make a mess of the Omicron arrival which was predictable both generally (viruses mutate) and particularly (other places got it first)?

It would be really nice to know exactly who were those public-spirited entrepreneurs who sold the government routine items at outrageous prices. Was it really a good idea to devote scarce resources and attention to distributing free Traditional Chinese Medicine on the off-chance that some ancient wizard had stumbled on a cure for virus-born diseases 5,000 years before the virus was invented?

And would the more conventional counter-measures have been more acceptable and effective if they had not been “adjusted” quite so often?

But people dreaming of a public inquiry into such matters have not been up-dating themselves on what is officially known as the “new constitutional order”.

The theory behind a public inquiry is that the government is answerable to the public, that its inner workings should, if interesting, be exposed to public view, and that those exercising power on the public’s behalf should be required to explain and defend their actions.

That is not compatible with the current constitutional arrangement, which is that our government is selected, approved and instructed by the central organs of the Chinese Communist Party. “Our” government is their government. The idea of a public inquiry is based on an incorrect understanding of the real meaning of “one country two systems”, which is that where two possible courses of action are offered we are required to select the right one, which is the one country one.

This would not necessarily preclude a public inquiry, but it would preclude one which satisfied the purposes of such an event. The person or people conducting it would be like Legco, carefully vetted to avoid surprises. Like Legco the consequence would be a widespread lack of interest in its entirely predictable proceedings.

We would be revisiting the old Chief Executive selection dilemma: someone who was popular in Hong Kong would for that reason be unacceptable in Beijing, while someone who was acceptable in Beijing would for that reason be regarded with suspicion in Hong Kong.

This is not to say, though, that opposition from the Liaison Office is solely to blame for the fact that this inquiry is a non-starter. After all our Chief Executive came to us after a career as a practitioner and beneficiary of the police approach to public relations.

This states that all arrestees are guilty, all violence is necessary, all shootings are in self-defence and all visits to vice establishments by senior officers are entirely innocent because Our Boys Can Do No Wrong.

This approach is now being spread to the whole government, which never admits error, never apologises and never admits to changing its mind, because it is without fault or flaw.

Local criticism can be prosecuted as subversion, while overseas criticism can be dismissed as a result of anti-China prejudice or scurrilous attempts by foreigners to hamper China’s rise to its rightful position in the world. This produces a very confident government.

It is difficult to find sympathetic international partners for this sort of view, but not impossible. I notice a large delegation of officials and business bodies visited Saudi Arabia last week in search of opportunities. Some of these were “business opportunities”, which I suppose are no worse there than anywhere else.

Officials also held out the prospect of “legal exchanges”. With a regime which jails critics, executes children, tortures suspects, stones adulterers, amputates thieves’ hands and punishes women for “disobedience”? How nice.

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The news that a Hongkonger had comitted suicide four months after migrating to the UK was tragic. At least it was tragic for most of us. For some people it was an opportunity.

The Standard’s report, for example, effortlessly extended the poor woman’s plight to “HK migrants” generally. The newspaper redeemed itself somewhat the next day with a thoughtful and sympathetic leader pointing out that migration was tough, people should prepare themselves, and part of that preparation was to accept that unless you happened to have some rare and mobile qualification you were probably going to finish up in the sort of job you were not accustomed to.

The Cross we have to bear went through some recent news stories about the UK – inflation, Brexit, strikes, NHS in crisis – and suggested that Hong Kong should offer grants to help migrants to the UK who had come to their senses and wished to return.

This rather overlooked one relevant point. Here Mr Cross is free to slag off the country he came from at the risk of nothing worse than being thought a creep by people whose approval he does not seek.

A Hongkonger in the UK who went through the same newspapers and complained on the basis of their coverage that – say – “the SAR has become a police state with fixed elections, increasingly kangaroo-like courts and a puppet government controlled by Beijing” would be accused, as Tom Lehrer might have put it, of “impiety, lack of propriety, and quite a variety of unpleasant names.” He or she would also be well advised not to return to Hong Kong.

The suicide case was picked up on Wednesday by a nameless spokesman for the China Foreign Office in Hong Kong. His main beef was that the BNO scheme violated the Joint Declaration (the one which was of “purely historical” significance three years ago) but he was also bothered by “Hongkongers’ hardships”, which included “embarrassment and discrimination” as well as despair.

Not to worry. According to another recent migration story disillusioned international bankers are returning to Hong Kong after discovering the drawbacks of London and Singapore. These comprised, apparently, the difficulty of finding servants in London and the fact that Singapore was “boring – you eat in the same restaurant every night”.

I had some difficulty in believing most of this. To start with I am surprised by the suggestion that where these people are posted is governed entirely by their personal preferences. Presumably if your bank wants you in Hong Kong that is where you go, and if not, not.

I also wondered why we were supposed to be reassured. There is no shortage of indigenous financial landsharks. A few foreigners here or there is not going to make much difference.

It is of course flagrantly untrue that you cannot get servants in London. Indeed there are schools in London where people pay through the nose to acquire the skills needed for working as a butler, nanny or cook.

The problem, if there is a problem, is that London does not have the employer-friendly rules which keep Hong Kong’s servants in what some people clearly think is their place. There is no two-week rule, so your servant is not thrown out of the country if she resigns. There is no live-in rule, so your servant can and will refuse to work six 16-hour days a week, or to sleep in the broom cupboard with your dog and/or offspring.

It is also unfair to suggest that bankers posted to Singapore have to eat in the same restaurant every night. The Lion City offers a wide range of expensive dining choices covering most of the international cuisines. It is of course true that Singapore is boring, but that is not because of the food.

Singapore is boring because it has a permanent ruling party which successfully discourages dissent and criticism. This creates an environment in which creative and original people feel unappreciated so they either leave, or abandon public manifestations and cultivate their metaphorical gardens.

These people are trouble-makers to the tidy administrative mind, but they put the bubbles in your public life Prosecco, and without them the product is flat. There is a lesson for Hong Kong here, and it goes a bit further than how we can create a welcoming environment for international business bodies.

Law, order and discipline are wonderful things. But like most wonderful things they can be overdone.

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