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Sadly, Olympic gold may not lead to a political podium finish

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 18, 2025| Leave a Comment »

​The only part of the recent Legco election which cheered me up was the success of Ms Vivian Kong.

This is not because I warmly support her political views. I know nothing of what she thinks, but my rule in these matters is that the vetting and selection of candidates is now so effective that anyone allowed to run can be considered someone I would not wish to vote for.

On the other hand Ms Kong’s gold-winning Olympic efforts tickled the memory because I, too, was once an épéeist.

My career was much shorter and less glorious than hers. I was recruited at short notice by the Lancaster University fencing team because the league in which they played (North Lancashire had a fencing league? I was surprised too) required every team to include one épée person.

I had no relevant experience. Perhaps they thought someone who was used to waving an oar about would be able to handle the épée, which is heavier than the other two sport fencing swords, and has much simpler rules.

I expected to be massacred every week, but in practice it appeared that many of the other teams had a similar shortage of épée specialists, so I did reasonably well apart from the rare occasions when I came across a real épée person who knew what he was doing.

The following year such a person appeared at Lancaster U so I retired to do other things. But fencing can be recommended. I enjoyed the ritual side of it, and for a military historian it is a treat to practise a skill which was cherished by soldiers for centuries.

Ms Kong says she has learnt a great deal from her career as a professional sportsperson. She is a bright spark, has two real degrees and is working on a third. But the track record (if you’ll pardon the phrase in this context) of sporting superstars in politics is not impressive. Huge if rather patchy survey here.

Clearly winning an Olympic medal requires an impressive amount of dedication and toil, typically spread over years. Putting the legendary 10,000 hours in to acquiring one highly specialised skill must teach something. But how much of that is transferable?

It appears that a lot of former sportspeople have reached, and no doubt loyally served their respective communities in, what you might call the foothills of politics. In small countries they may hope for ministerial posts connected with youth or sports. But getting on the podium is much rarer.

There are examples of political gold medal winners, though none of them actually managed an Olympic gold as well. There is Lester Bird, a distinguished cricketer who became prime minister of Antigua and Barbados, or George Weah, who after playing for many of the best football clubs in Europe became president of Liberia.

Combat sports have a mixed record. Khalimaagiin Battulga, a star of Sambo (nor did I; here it is) later became president of Mongolia. The boxing champ who went on to become president of Uganda was the appalling Idi Amin.

Hong Kong citizens hoping for a livelier Legco will note with approval that Ms Kong has at least excelled at something outside of politics, and hope that she does not drop her current day job.

An ominous trend in Hong Kong politics is the rise of the full-time politician who does nothing else, and indeed in some cases has never done anything else.

Looking at the list of Legco candidates, for example, of the 161 hopefuls 28 described themselves only as “district councillor” and 16 offered only “lawmaker”. Some of the jobs offered were also political (NPC member, trade union official) and some of them did not look as if they would take much of the candidate’s time (company director).

More than a third of those actually elected did not have a “day job”: ten district councillors and 23 “lawmakers”. We must suppose that some of the others will decide to give up, or become part-timers, in the professional activities they have declared, once the rather generous remuneration provided for Legco members hits their bank balances. Other pursuits may be difficult to combine with regular meetings. Lam Ming-fung, for example, is a “vessel captain”.

So I suppose that in the end quite a lot of our representatives will be spared any contact with life as it is lived by the average voter. This is perhaps a pity when it seems the average voter was not terribly impressed by them.

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Being bitten is not so painful. Can’t say the same for the treatment

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on December 3, 2025| 3 Comments »

I owe regular readers a word of explanation for the recent silence in this space. I was bitten by a dog.

This is not, in the great scheme of things, a big deal. People are being starved in Gaza, massacred in Sudan, arrested in Hong Kong. My problem was minor. But it wasn’t minor for me.

In the first place, for a while I could not type. In fact I had for a week a taste of what my father (his right side paralysed by a stroke) had to put up with for two decades. The hand I usually do things with was not available (I am left-handed) and the other one turned out to be incompetent. Even eating was an embarrassment.

The actual experience of being bitten – small teeth sinking into my hand – was not that traumatic. As a promiscuous petter of other people’s dogs I have always known that something like this was possible. The person walking the dog, who was not the owner and had not been warned about his charge’s homicidal propensities, was more upset than I was.

The treatment is another matter. My local GP sent me to the Chinese U hospital, which for some obscure reason they prefer to call the Chinese University Medical Centre. It has an Emergency Medicine Department. Is there something behind this preference for different labels? Do they not want accidents?

Anyway the standard treatment for dog bites these days involves keeping the wound open for a week or two until any chance of infection can be excluded. I do not dispute the medical justification for this, and indeed it has worked as intended. But if you judge the efficacy of a medical procedure by the amount of pain involved then this one really gives you your money’s worth.

Every day I was wheeled into the ominously numbered Room 13, where a nurse (you only get a doctor for the needlework) would squirt disinfectant into my holes, wipe them with the surgical version of those sticks with a cotton bud on the end which people stick in their ears, and stuff them with lint, which would be pulled out at the beginning of the next day’s session and examined for evidence of corruption.

The nurses were all skillful professionals who were kind, careful and as gentle as the circumstances permitted. They were all women young enough to be my grand-daughters. So etiquette, at least for males of my vintage, demanded that a stoical indifference to pain should be deployed, or at least simulated.

Post-operative recovery was aided by a fun fact about the CUMC: it has a super coffee bar. If you’re down that way it’s “worth a detour”, as the Michelin people used to say.

Long-term consequences? My left hand is now fully functional, though it still has some interesting scars. I have noticed that at some sub-conscious level I no longer feel so confident around dogs. Some furry friend I have been fondling for months will come bouncing up and my hand twitches a bit, and avoids his mouth. This may pass, I hope.

It would be unfair to blame a whole breed for the actions of one individual but I am avoiding him and his relatives anyway. I am confirmed in my suspicion that pedigree dogs, like thoroughbred racehorses and Hapsburg emperors, are often inbred and consequently may land on the mental health scale somewhere between “highly strung” and “barking mad”.

Adopt an interesting local mixture from one of Hong Kong’s many dog rescue organisations and you will not get an entry in the canine Almanach de Gotha, but you will also not finish up with a psychopooch.

Happily I am still on cuddling terms with the lovely Lemon:

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Education and Chat GPT: time for a return to the bad old days?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on October 26, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Happily I retired from the university teaching scene before Chat GPT and his mates came along, because it has apparently made life rather difficult.

Generally the most subtle assessment method, at least in the humanities, is the essay. You set the topic, send the student away, and assess the resulting masterpiece a week later.

People in other necks of the woods have other choices, of course. Mathematicians can be asked to tackle a problem on the spot. Subjects which consist primarily of absorbing a lot of memorable material can be tested with multiple-choice questions, which have the additional advantage that they can be graded by a computer.

The most picturesque assessment method was applied to trainee aircraft engineers. The class assembled at 9 am and each member was presented with a small engine. At 1 pm the examiner returned, by which time the engine had to be dismantled entirely into its component parts. The class then had lunch, then reassembled to reassemble their engines.

At 5 pm the examiner returned and tried to start each engine. If it started first time you had passed, and if not…

But I digress. The problem with setting essays now is that you do not know if the result was partly, or indeed wholly, written by artificial intelligence. This has in turn produced a lot of interest in detection, which is sometimes possible. The person who told me about this problem recalled a case in which the essay included the word “albeit”.

This is not the sort of word which comes up often in sociable chat so the writer was asked what it meant… and could not answer.

Clearly though there is going to be an ongoing arms race here between AI users and programmers, trying to produce ever more convincing forgeries, and teachers and other detectives looking for ways to spot traces of computer composition.

The answer, I fear, is going to be a return to the primitive practices of the past.

When I took my first degree, half a century ago, there was no continuous assessment, multiple choice was regarded as simplistic, and computers were monstrous machines which had to be fed punched cards.

We wrote essays at least once a week and these had to be submitted and discussed, but they were not part of the assessment. There was also a small examination each term intended to reassure your personal academic adviser that you were still alive and working, but this was not part of the assessment either.

After three years of this regime you encountered an ordeal more like the old Chinese civil service exam (in which candidates were locked up for a week and, according to legend, invited to write down everything they knew) than modern gentle testing methods.

Starting on Wednesday we had three-hour exams each morning and afternoon until Sunday, when you had a day off, a relic of the days when universities were mainly intended to train clergymen. The ordeal resumed on Monday and ended at lunchtime on Tuesday, at which point there was an understandable tendency for the survivors to get resoundingly drunk.

The actual examination was quite Spartan. You were allowed (times had changed) to use a Biro. The paper was white and completely blank. People were agitating for lined paper, to help authors whose writing tended to diverge gradually from the horizontal as they got down the page. This came eventually, but too late to help me.

There was a list of about a dozen questions, of which in your three hours you were expected to attempt four. As the marks available were divided equally between your four answers it was an elementary point of exam technique to get to four somehow.

There were no “open books”, bringing in notes of any kind was cheating, and the examiners were not – with rare exceptions – the people who had taught you. We were not asked our opinions of the teachers, but because the examiners were applying consistent standards, the outcomes of individuals and groups could be compared.

This was a stressful system and I would not recommend copying it in all its details. It favoured glib bullshitters and people who could write quickly. It was a great preparation for journalism, which is perhaps not a recommendation.

But as AI tramples its way across the academic landscape it may be time to rediscover the merits of putting the students in a room with paper, pen, questions and a time limit. At least you know who has written what.

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A yacht economy, certainly, but no subsidies for rich men’s toys please

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 16, 2025| Leave a Comment »

That pitter patter of little feet you heard after the policy address came from a herd of hogs heading for the public money trough, which naturally follows the announcement of a new hub. Consider the government’s newfound enthusiasm for the “yacht economy”.

The policy address had barely finished echoing down the corridors of power before a spokesman for the Boating Industry Association was pushing a list of “supporting facilities” which visiting yachts would require and which, it seemed, he expected the government to provide at the taxpayers’ expense.

According to a report in the Standard the association’s chairman, Lawrence Chow, clearly had a longer list in mind but started with “landing facilities, public restrooms and waste collection stations”.

Over this issue hangs a small technical confusion. The government, and the Standard’s headline writer, referred to “anchorages”. Mr Chow referred to “berths”. These are not the same thing.

An anchorage is a place where a yacht can drop an anchor. It needs a lot of water space round it for this and communication with the shore requires another, smaller, boat … or for the really affluent owner a helicopter. This is not a great boost for tourism. Also you would not wish to be on an anchored yacht in a typhoon.

A berth is a place where the yacht can tie up next to a jetty or pier, and its occupants then merely have to step ashore or, if the yacht is really big, walk down a gangplank. This is obviously much more convenient and places which take the “yacht economy” seriously all have facilities of this kind.

Most of the government actions announced so far consist of removing bureaucratic obstacles. Yachts will, for example, no longer be required to have a reserved berth before they arrive. Skippers will be able to take the exam for local waters remotely. And so on.

We have not seen so much detail about how the proposed “five new anchorages” will be produced, but I take it what what this actually means is five new marinas.

Clearly there will have to be some official contribution in the shape of space: a patch of water on which a marina can be built and a patch of land next to it for the necessary “facilities”. There is no reason why the operator of the marina should not provide everything else at its own expense, or indeed pay a reasonable fee for the land and water. After all users of the marina will be paying. Operating a marina is a commercial enterprise.

If visitors require public restrooms and waste collection stations it will be in the interest of the operator to provide them, and the resulting increase in custom will provide a reward.

There are two reasons why the government should be extremely careful to avoid the appearance that it is subsidising this activity. The first is that it would be undignified, indeed obscene, for a government which cannot afford to provide its elderly citizens with a decent pension to use public money to subsidise millionaires’ recreational activities. Or to put it in words of one syllable, rich men’s toys.

The second reason is that it would contrast rather fiercely with the government’s indifference to the possibility that Hong Kong people who are not millionaires might enjoy boating activities. Walking along the edge of Tolo Harbour is a pleasant experience but it is also frustrating. There is sunshine, there is a gentle breeze, there is a large expanse of more or less clean water but … no boats.

Ma On Shan, Taipo and Shatin are large populous towns on the edge of the harbour and the grand total of boating facilities offered to their inhabitants is … zero. There is a Taipo Boat Club but since the construction of the Tolo Harbour Highway it has been exiled to Tai Mei Tuk, which is miles away.

It would be nice to have a “yacht economy”. Could we not have a “dinghy economy” as well?

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On Mr Trump’s aspirations to nobility, or Nobelity

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 13, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Quite the mind-boggling headline of the week announced (wording varied in different places of course) that the government of Norway was bracing itself for some retaliation from the USA if American President Donald Trump was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Well no doubt it would be good if all international statesmen were eager to qualify for the Peace Prize. On the other hand there is a widespread suspicion that Mr Trump’s ambition owes little to a passion for peace and much to resentment of the fact that Barack Obama got one.

Students of the history of international relations will no doubt have noticed already that standards drooped when the professional diplomats were elbowed aside by national leaders, whether elected or hereditary. But this is surely a new low.

I may be biassed. It is true that English culture traditionally sets a high value on modesty and self-deprecation. One may hope for honours but one does not ask. There is a character in one of CP Snow’s novels who is a senior civil servant and thinks he is due for a knighthood. So instead of signing with an initial he starts signing with his full Christian name (John Smith instead of J. Smith) in the hope that his seniors will see fit to put a “Sir” in front of it.

This is regarded as a serious, if amusing, character defect and the knighthood does not materialise.

The press pioneer Alfred Harmsworth had better luck. To the suggestion that he should agitate politely for a peerage he famously replied “When I want a peerage I shall buy one like an honest man.” He did later (without paying) become Lord Northcliffe. When I worked for the Derby Evening Telegraph we still had a rather poor portrait of him in the hall.

The presentation of honours in Hong Kong has never caused much controversy. The colonial ones were not taken very seriously because they were … well … colonial. Their post-handover replacements have not established themselves as a big deal.

I once did a rough study of the arrival of honours in the Legislative Council. It appeared that if you were a loyal supporter of the regime there was a fairly predictable time-line along which, as long as you survived re-election, you would travel from Justice of the Peace through bauhinias of various colours. One DAB member seemed to be stuck on the launch pad, as it were. I suspect he had refused to participate.

I am not aware of any similar study of how life treats those who go “seeking the bubble reputation” through the consultative apparatus.

There were some misgivings a few years ago when some people with qualifications in engineering adopted the pretitle “Ir”, which works like “Dr”. The “I” is because the title originated in French. Lawyers suggested that they should perhaps put in a bid for “Lr” before the librarians grabbed it.

Some people disapprove of this sort of thing. One of the idols of my youth was Charles Carter, who was the first Vice Chancellor of Lancaster University. Mr Carter was a devout Quaker and spurned titles of any kind. He always signed, and described himself, as plain Charles Carter and I only discovered that he was entitled to both Dr and Prof when I got a look at correspondence from polite outsiders.

He did tell me – a point lost on holders of honorary degrees in Hong Kong – that such honours should only be worn in the premises of the university awarding them. So if you have an Hon Doc, whether or not you earned it or “bought one like an honest man”, it should not be on your business card.

Anyway all this suggests that there may be an easy way to propitiate the unpredictable Trump. Countries which wish to bow before the president should look into the possibilities of honorary degrees, orders, knighthoods, perhaps (lucky old England) even a Lordship.

Alternatively, at the risk of punishment, they could refer him to the work of Thomas Gray:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,

         And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,

Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.

         The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

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Travel trade illusions: sportfests are good for the economy and travellers want to shop in airports

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on October 1, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Goodness, a whole page in Monday’s Standard was devoted to Routes World, an international conference held in Hong Kong.

Routes World is an annual get-together for people building and running airports. It is held in a different place each year. Hong Kong was a happy host because links with other airports can help its ambition to become, or remain, an international air transport hub.

This is one of the more plausible of our hub ambitions, which now number about 20. What is the collective noun for a multiplicity of hubs? A hubbub? A hubble bubble? A hubris?

Most of the Routes World proceedings were no doubt routine conversations about things only interesting to people in the industry, or with a morbid fascination for the economics of airports.

It does seem, though, that the travel business suffers from some shared delusions. This is not surprising. Many professions have them. Journalists had a shared delusion for a long time that their consumers were mainly interested in accurate information. Now that the internet is up and running it has become clear that most people find inaccurate information much more interesting.

One of the air people’s shared delusions concerns sports. Consider this offering from Philipe Karat, head of the transport part of the Brazilian Tourist Board. He reportedly said that “Brazil’s experience hosting the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics significantly raised its global profile, attracting more tourists and new airlines…”

This is wildly at variance with the growing consensus among people who study such things that hosting international sports circuses of this kind does not provide an economic boost, the extra income from visitors is grossly overstated, and is off-set by an increase in the number of locals taking holidays abroad to avoid the circus.

As two sports economists put it:


The World Cup coincided with the start of Brazil’s longest recession since the 1930s. That rather undermined claims that it would boost the economy. The impoverished country then had to fork out another $4.6 billion (predictably 50 per cent over budget) to host the Rio Olympics.

Outside the tourism bubble most people now agree that it was a terrible mistake to hold World Cups in Brazil, or in South Africa, since both countries had more important needs than a bit of fun and a temporary influx of foreigners. Brazil, as Kuper and Szymanski put it, “sacrificed a little bit of its future to host the World Cup.”

For another interesting delusion we can turn to the panel discussion on “the transformation of airports into sought-after travel destinations”. This is the idea that people will plan flights so that they can visit airports they particularly fancy.

As one speaker put it, “If passengers can enjoy a comfortable and pleasant shopping experience at Hong Kong airport there would be little incentive to seek transit through … other destinations.”

Someone needs to grab these people firmly by the ear and explain that air passengers are not looking for a “comfortable and pleasant shopping experience.” In fact attempts to turn air travel into a shopping experience are more resented than appreciated.

The preoccupation with lucrative retail outlets leads to difficulty in finding the things which travellers really need, like bags or electrical adapters. And the comfort and pleasure will not compensate for a poor range of goods on offer. Hong Kong airport would be a more attractive destination if it had a decent bookshop.

It is a basic axiom of international air travel that all airports are very much the same. The differences between them pale into insignificance compared with matters like the date and time of the flight, the intended destination, the impact of a mid-journey change, if any, and above all of course the price of the ticket. The flight, we hope, will be comfortable and pleasant. The airport merely has to be efficient.

I have been processed through a wide variety of airports. The only one I would really like to transit through again is Istanbul, which has excellent local shops starring Turkish Delight and paklava with a wide variety of colours and ingredients. But I am not going to choose Turkish Airlines just so I can taste these delicious marvels again.

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Same-sex marriages law: Legco veto is not the last word

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on September 17, 2025| 1 Comment »

The continuing controversy about the recognition of same-sex marriages conducted overseas is depressing.

After all, underneath all the political and legal skirmishing what we have here is a government with few limits on its power, which is exerting itself vigorously to curtail the rights of a tiny minority. Do you know any same-sex married couples? Quite. Neither do I.

Interpretations of the saga vary widely. Pretty much everyone agrees that the original judgement of the Court of Final Appeal – that the government was at at fault for not recognising in some way the status of same-sex couples – came as an unpleasant surprise.

The government has had considerable success in persuading our supposedly independent judiciary to lend a receptive ear to its legal efforts, however questionable. We are regularly reassured about judicial independence. Indeed this happens so often that the standard reactions tend to run from Hamlet’s mother (“The lady doth protest too much”) to Mandy Rice Davis (“He would say that, wouldn’t he?).

Anyway, a rare moment of judicial innovation, cushioned by the provision of a two-year deadline.

Needless to say, most of the two years passed with no sign of thought or action. As a journalist I am in no position to criticise this: in our business waiting until the deadline looms is common if not compulsory. Bernard Levin actually wrote an amusing piece about his work as a theatre critic, in which the review had to be delivered the same evening of the performance, but the deadline varied depending on the amount of advertising in the newspaper.

Mr Levin noted that if advertising was abundant and the deadline early, he got down to work as soon as he returned to the office. If advertising was short and the deadline late, on the other hand, he wandered round the office cadging biscuits and distracting colleagues until time and adrenaline prompted the writing of the necessary piece.

So no complaints from me about the delay. Actually there seem to be very few things the Department of Justice can do in less than two years, no doubt a tribute to the care devoted to its work.

And this brings us to the resulting proposed piece of legislation, which would have given same-sex spouses the right to authorise medical procedures and decide on the disposition of the remains of deceased partners.

This did not sit well with the government’s usual supporters (nobody else is allowed in Legco) who vetoed it last week.

At this point views diverge considerably. Some take the cynical view that the bill was never intended to pass and the Legco proceedings were a charade intended to put the judges in their place, while demonstrating that the council was “not a rubber stamp”.

A more idealistic view has it that the decision was a fine example of the legislature performing its allocated function under the “separation of powers”, a constitutional theory routinely denounced as inapplicable to Hong Kong by Beijing officials in the past.

Personally I find both views unconvincing. Clearly the officials responsible for getting the bill through Legco wanted it to pass. Whatever positive spin could be put on failure afterwards it would still be a failure. I believe also that the government wanted it to pass.

The trouble is that “want” in the English language covers a lot of territory, from “Do you want sugar in your tea?” to “Do you want your cancerous foot amputated?” There was desire, but not too much desire.

Consequently legislators knew what they could get away with. They know that if a recalcitrant group is large enough there will be no consequences. Difficult individuals will not be reelected but a mass clear-out would reveal too many of the strings behind the puppet show.

In fact it seems that the fun involved in a display of independence may have been the main motivation. None of the other reasons given stand up to scrutiny. The idea that the electorate in general has strong views on the topic is obvious nonsense, and in any case legislators do not depend on the electorate any more.

It may be that same-sex marriage is a cause of horror and revulsion among DAB voters, but they are hardly typical; the average age of those busloads turning up at polling booths is somewhere between 80 and dead.

I can find no support for the claim that traditional marriage is the only kind allowed by the Basic Law, whose thoughts on marriage are contained in Article 37: “The freedom of marriage of Hong Kong residents and their right to raise a family freely shall be protected by law.”

However all is not lost. Generally courts will not require people to do what they cannot do. If Legco will not pass a bill that is not the government’s fault. That does not, though, mean the government can sit back and claim that it has fully complied with the court’s order on this topic.

Legco president Andrew Leung commented after the fatal vote that “making laws” was “not the only solution”. Chief Executive John Lee said that the government would explore “administrative means” of complying with the court’s ruling.

Could there, one wonders, be any objection to the government saying that as a matter of administrative practice, marriages lawfully registered overseas would be recognised in Hong Kong regardless of the sex of the parties concerned, a line already followed in housing and visa matters?

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The law protecting fair trials: an obituary

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on September 4, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Readers may be fed up with me complaining about the erosion of the laws restricting the reporting of upcoming court cases. Well, some good news. The erosion has now reached the stage where there is nothing left. I shall not need to return to this topic again.

The law involved is rather unhelpfully labelled “strict liability contempt of court”. The “contempt of court” part means that your conduct is deemed to disturb the administration of justice. The “strict liability” bit indicates that the prosecution does not have to prove that you meant it, only that your publication could have affected the subsequent trial. Its purpose is to ensure that trials are fair.

Long ago the Law Reform Commission published a survey of the law in this area (along with some recommendations which, as usually happens, were ignored) which included this summary:

There are essentially four principal ways in which impartiality of the court may be impaired :

  • by commenting on the personal character of the accused;
  • by publishing an alleged confession by the accused;
  • by commenting on the merits of the particular case; and
  • by publishing a photograph of an accused person in such a way that he can be identified if the question of identity is likely to be in issue.

A website published by the UK government offering guidance to editors and writers gets right down to the basics:

For example, you should not:

  • say whether you think a person is guilty or innocent
  • refer to someone’s previous convictions

The case which offered an overwhelming temptation to some local media was the one involving a man who wooed a woman on the internet, invited her to dinner in a very expensive restaurant and fled after the meal, leaving her to face a bill for $80,000.

Clearly the idea of a meal worth the price of a small car was very interesting, and indeed the bill has been published on the internet. Most of the damage was incurred by the consumption of a very expensive bottle of champagne.

Still, that is no excuse for completely ignoring the law. A column in Dimsum Daily left little doubt about its intentions: “Man Wah $84,000 bill scandal lays bare inside perpetrator’s mind and Hong Kong’s loneliness trap.” Wait a minute. A man has been arrested and we’re going inside his mind?

We certainly are. In the first paragraph he is the “alleged culprit”, but you would not think so from the rest of the piece, which has his full name, a picture (!) details of his previous convictions and a discussion in the light of those details of whether the “alleged culprit” is a psychopath or not.

Would you, if you were facing a court appearance, like the reports of your arrest to include stuff like this?

According to court records *** (name) did not simply lie; he constructed entire worlds. He fabricated alter-egos with supposed triad ties and elite legal credentials, conjured the spectre of surveillance, and threatened women with exposure and harm if they did not comply … During his earlier trial, the court noted his dispassionate precision – threats delivered cooly, details supplied as if omniscient, a cruelty that felt engineered rather than eruptive.

And so on. Ironically at one point the writer asks ”Where does that leave justice?” Pretty knackered, if people are allowed to publish about freshly arrested suspects things like:

What, finally is in *** ***’s (full name) mind? Perhaps the answer is banal and chilling at once. He sees people as instruments, evenings as stages, truth as raw material. He is gratified by the gasp when the cork pops and the bill lands, by the moment his companion realises the script was never about her at all…

I do not see how a publication could put this out at all unless they were all so dangerously ignorant of the law that they should not be allowed near a keyboard, or they were completely confident that the law does not apply to them. Dimsum Daily is said to be a government-friendly publication.

As is the Hong Kong Standard, whose somewhat more circumspect approach – they only gave the defendant’s surname – was nicely encapsulated by the headline “Repeat dine-and-sash suspect may have planned scheme in advance” and a picture captioned “The suspect, surnamed ***, has a criminal record”.

So here we are. We do not have the rule of law. We have the rule only of laws the government likes directed at people it does not like. Integration with the mainland has reached the point where a trial is a mere formality: the formal endorsement of a conviction already announced by the police and reported in government-friendly publications.

I dare say Mr *** is a bad lot who has scammed women before. He is nevertheless entitled to a fair trial and he is not going to get it.

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Why are we so bashful about our names and addresses these days?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 28, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Another week, another “data breach”. These stories follow a fairly predictable trajectory. An embarrassed company – or government department – announces that the “personal data” of thousands of people has been “hacked”.

The Privacy Commissioner is informed, and weighs in with some critical comments on the precautions taken, or not taken, by the data holder. The hacker, meanwhile, is at a safe distance from retribution or punishment, and we are all left to ponder the horrifying possibilities.

But are they horrifying? Last week’s example concerned two Japanese clothing vendors, both new to me, and the lost data comprised, according to rather sketchy media reports, names, addresses and phone numbers, as well as records of what the customers had bought.

Now wait a minute. Many years ago, when telephones were not mobile, and were tethered to the wall by a wire, subscribers to a telephone service were treated to a free book. This was called a telephone directory and included the name, address and number of everyone who owned a phone in your locality, apart from a few eccentrics who for various reasons opted to go “ex-directory”.

If the person you were curious about lived too far away to be in the book you could telephone a woman (it was always a woman) called Directory Inquiries, who had a whole collection of these books. If her range was not wide enough she could, at no extra charge, call her counterpart in the area where your target lived.

If you lived in America you could also (I am indebted to the incomparable Sue Grafton for this snippet) also consult a different directory which listed all the addresses in your area and would tell you who lived in them. You could then look at their tax records.

If a policeman in England stopped you (“just a routine inquiry”) and you gave him your name and address he would not consult the phone book, and computers had not been invented. But in the police station they had a copy of the electoral register.

This was compiled by asking every householder to record who actually spent a specified night in his house, thereby qualifying for the local vote. So your claimed name and address could be compared with the names recorded as residing in your claimed home. If none of them looked anything like yours you had some explaining to do. Anyone could inspect a copy of the electoral register.

In Hong Kong there was even more information available about you if you were a civil servant. Every six months (if I remember correctly) the government published an official phone book, copies of which were eagerly snapped up by journalists.

Large numbers of civil servants appeared in this, along with their official job titles, current jobs and workplaces. At considerably more expense you could buy something called the Blue Book, which listed every government employee, giving his rank, how long he has held that rank and which salary scale he was on. Women of course were also covered but I am too old-fashioned to use “their” as a singular pronoun.

Armed with the Blue Book and the latest government accounts, published as part of the paper avalanche unleashed by the annual Budget Speech, you could establish the exact salary of every civil servant.

When I worked in a local university we were required to provide detailed biographies to be included in course documents, which later moved to the library where anyone could read them. So you can find my early life in the Archives Department at HKBU. Departmental websites routinely include names, phone numbers and email addresses of staff, as in this randomly selected specimen.

Now I realise that there are some pieces of personal data which we would all really like to keep to ourselves. We are sensibly paranoid about credit cards, for example, and would not wish our personal relationships or erotic activities to be a matter of public discussion.

But when it comes to names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, one has to ask, where is the harm? I am a sitting duck for junk email because I still use my old work address. This comes with a reasonably good spam spotting service and I delete a lot of stuff unread. I have no objection to people knowing about my purchases from Japanese clothes shops although I imagine interest in my taste in Uniqlo tees is limited.

Your name and address can be used for “doxing” in which you are held up for general disapproval on the internet. This is a serious problem in times of violent disagreement and a source of genuine fear. But the evil here is not in the widespread knowledge of your home address; the evil is in the existence of people who think it justified and reasonable to come round to your house, harass your kids, throw things at your windows and write four-letter words on your front lawn with weedkiller.

I do not see the existence of these nutjobs as justifying a universal rule that people’s names and addresses should be regarded as a precious secret. Nor, in practice, do most people. When you sign up for a “privilege card” or a loyalty programme you are gratuitously trusting a commercial entity with information about yourself which they will happily exploit and, in many cases, trade. We do it anyway.

Buy one thing online and you will be bombarded for months, or even years, with suggestions for further purchases, not all of them from the original vendor.

Having your intray stuffed is particularly galling if participation is compulsory. Like many drivers l used to have an Autotoll pass. The company concerned topped up my balance occasionally from my bank account, and the transactions were routinely recorded in my bank statements. Then the government took over the tunnel tolls and we were all required to install a new gadget.

On the new system, when I go through a tunnel I am immediately sent an email recording my passage through the tube, and another email recording that my account has been charged the fee. Returning through the tunnel I get two more emails, followed by another one saying that my charges have been consolidated and deducted from the linked account at my bank. This is followed by another email, from the bank, recording that the money has departed.

This seems a very elaborate way of separating me from $16. Do I hear the word bureaucracy?

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A legislative scandal; must we call this toiletgate?

Posted in Uncategorized on August 23, 2025| 1 Comment »

Members of the Hong Kong Legislative Council had a moment of excitement last week, when an empty condom packet was found in one of the Legco building’s toilets.

Readers may share my bewilderment as to why this excited an outburst of political attention. Perhaps legislators, knowing that half the population already regard them as a load of lazy ****ers, were anxious to dispel any rumours that this is literally true.

Initial suspicions were that the toilet itself was the scene of some erotic activity. The toilet concerned is an “accessible” model, which I presume is the currently acceptable euphemism for what in everyday language is known as a “disabled toilet”, although of course the toilet itself is not disabled.

A feature of this kind of toilet is that it has a room to itself; there are none of the gaps at the bottom or top of the doors or partitions often found in regular cubicles. The occupant has genuine privacy. Also there has to be enough floor space for a wheelchair driver to do a three-point turn, so there is room for activities usually undertaken in a horizontal position.

Early reports had it that the Legco Secretariat did not think the find worthy of investigation, but legislators insisted on an examination of video footage. Inevitably there are cameras in the corridors of power, though not, I hope, in the toilets.

The Secretariat then reported that according to the all-seeing electronic eye there had at no point been two people in the toilet concerned. A political assistant, we were told, had been given some fatherly advice about disposal of litter. The Secretariat then considered the matter closed.

This is a little puzzling. Surely the objection – for those who do find it objectionable – is not just to sex in a toilet, but sex in the hallowed precincts of the Legco building. Are we to believe that the user slipped the offending item into his pocket during a moment of passion in a Kowloon Tong love hotel, only to find it later in the working day?

The thing that puzzles me, though, is how this trivial matter came to be reported in the first place. Most of us, after all, on seeing some piece of litter in the bowl, will just flush it away and get down to business.

Is the alert user of a legislative loo expected to isolate the setting as a crime scene and call security? The problem with this is that the finder presumably needs to answer a call of nature, so staying in the toilet without using it is a big ask. Or is the finder expected to fish the evidence out, and then proceed? Perish the thought.

It appears that the solution to this dilemma is clear to digital natives: you whip out your mobile phone and take a picture. And this, it seems, is what happened, because the picture eventually surfaced on the internet, as everything does sooner or later these days.

Let us pause here for a moment of nostalgia. Very few of the corporate giants of my youth have survived into the 2020s, but it seems that Durex is still going strong, serving the needs of those who want pleasure without pregnancy.

Connoisseurs of political scandal have not given up hope, according to media reports. If somebody is having sex with someone we can always look forward to the possibility that one or both of the participants is famous and/or married to someone else.

As a topic for public excitement, though, this rather depends on having a genuine democratic system in which the fate of an erring politician depends on whether the electorate is offended by his crime.

An interesting piece of political writing the other day explored the prospects ahead of Mr Tik Chi-yuen, the only legislator who did not run as a pro-Beijing or pro-establishment candidate. Mr Tik has voted for all the government’s major projects, including the new national security law. But that may not save him.

The revealing final thought was that the decision on the matter will not come from Mr Tik’s electorate. It will come from the Chief Executive. We voters know our place.

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