tim's experiment

Throwing bricks at people is dangerous, illegal and wrong. This is a proper first reaction to the Fishball Riot. The scenes on television were disturbing and distressing. Strong feelings are understandable.
In due course, however, we need to move on from strong feelings to rational consideration of why these terrible things happen. A lot of people seem to be in no hurry to get on to this. There has been much creative use of language to describe the rioters: animals, louts, savages, barbarians, “lumpenproletariat” in an up-market variation supplied to readers of the Business Post, “separatists” for fellow-travellers, and in what the SCM Post hilariously described as a “searing indictment”, terrorists — according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
Looking for causes is not the same thing as exonerating the rioters. But if we want to avoid recurrence of such things in future we need to do better than the George W Bush level of analysis, which stops with a sigh of satisfaction at something along the lines of “they hate us because we’re good and they do it because they are evil.” We also need to do better than planning to ratchet up the level of force: more pepper spray, more tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, bean bags, live ammunition … I do not want to put ideas into people’s heads but there are more extreme things rioters can do than throwing bricks, and more violent responses will trigger mutual escalation.
We may well suspect – though as a number of cases are now going through the courts it would be a nice concession to the rule of law if we refrained from saying so too often – that some people in Hong Kong would like a riot, or at least are happy to behave in a way which risks starting one. That may be a necessary condition for having a riot, but it cannot be a sufficient one. Most of the time Mong Kok is as tranquil as the rest of Hong Kong. If your previously tranquil family pet bites someone you will want to know why, not because you wish to exonerate it or suggest that biting people is OK, but because you want to avoid it happening again and understanding must precede prevention.
Any large event involving lots of people must have multiple causes. Identifying the spark is important, but we also need to know why the situation was explosive. I here explore, in no particular order, features of the situation which helped to make it inflammable.
Mong Kok is an interesting and colourful part of Hong Kong with more of a distinctive identity than many others. It’s young people, in particular, are referred to as “MK” boys and girls. No doubt much of the difference is illusory. Mong Kok also has another oddity: it has no district board. There used to be a Mong Kok District Board. The government did not like the people who were elected to it. So the Mong Kok DB was merged with two others to form a constitutional monstrosity called Yau Tsim Mong. I do not suggest that the population of Mong Kok has been seething with suppressed fury over this ever since. But spending of public money tends to follow boundaries. We may be skeptical about the effects of “community-building” efforts in grubby suburbs like Wong Tai Sin or Sham Shui Po, but at least they are attempted. In Mong Kok they are not.
The Food and Environmental Hygiene Department is a recurring problem. Public hygiene used to be a matter for the Urban and Regional Councils so the department was supplied with a reasonably coherent account of what the public wanted and expected from it. Although – or rather because – they were elected democratically both the councils were abolished soon after the handover. Departments were then left to get their feedback from the District Councils, which are of course numerous, cover very different areas, and in any case these days spend most of their time funneling public money to Left-wing organisations. This means the FEHD is left without much guidance. The Leisure and Cultural Services lot have a similar problem, but people don’t in general feel strongly about culture. They do feel strongly about the FEHD because one of the roles which it has selected for itself is to suppress any attempt to sell or serve food in the street. As a result the department’s minions are widely hated, even by respectable members of the middle classes. A lot of people who are not interested in politics in general or localism in particular would have no hesitation in joining a defence of fishball hawkers against the FEHD.
The New Year “amnesty”. A variety of laws have traditionally been, in effect, suspended over the Chinese New Year period. The most obvious example is parking. People are not ticketed if they park in normally illegal places outside estates while doing their regulation visits. It’s a sensible concession.
The decision to disturb an arrangement of this kind should not be taken lightly. It may be resented. In the 80s there were annual stories at this time of the year of police raids on illegal seasonal gambling events in New Territories villages. The villagers often responded violently and sometimes the raiding party had to be rescued by the Riot Squad. In the 90s there was much bitterness when traffic wardens decided that the usual amnesty did not apply to roads in the vicinity of the Che Kung Temple, which is much visited at New Year. This presented a particular problem for drivers because the temple’s own large car park was commandeered by the police for their own exclusive use. Later there was controversy when the then police chief in Fanling announced that the traditional blind eye to seasonal fireworks would no longer be turned on his patch.
No doubt some changes in these matters are necessary and desirable, but apparently street fishballs were offered this year without problems in other districts. Some sleeping dogs are better undisturbed.
Occupy in Mong Kok. Characterising the Fishball Riot as Occupy 2.0 was a piece of mischievous deception. But it draws attention to an important piece of history. Mong Kok was never part of the plans for Occupy Central. No preparations were made and nobody was trained. The occupation of Mong Kok was a spontaneous reaction to the Teargas Festival. It was not particularly based on non-violence as a matter of principle, and the opposition to it was not non-violent either. In Mong Kok occupiers were often abused and beaten by civilian vigilantes who, although they looked like the sort of people the government did not want on the District Board, seemed to be on surprisingly good terms with the police. When the occupiers of Central politely folded up their tents and returned to their studies, the occupiers of Mong Kok instead switched tactics. There were regular “shopping” events in which protesters temporarily occupied some spaces. Counter-demonstrators appeared and there were regular scuffles. Some of the people who had been politicized by their experience in Mong Kok went on to other protests.
What happens at demonstrations. I do not think anyone who follows this topic objectively would dispute that the police approach to protests became a good deal more brusque during the period when the management’s response to any incident, no matter how untoward, was that “our boys can do no wrong”. The use of chemicals became less nuanced and more common, followed by the incidence of other forms of violence. Someone complained last week that the people who turned up in Mong Kok were “prepared to riot” because they had masks, goggles, helmets and body armour. This is a totally unwarranted inference. People who go to protests these days expect that they will sooner or later, however pacific their intentions, be pepper-sprayed or beaten or both. They dress accordingly.
I fear that far more people are being radicalized by experiences of this kind than by localist or other controversial propaganda. Their personal experience of the law enforcement machinery is not pretty, and the aftermath is not pretty either. No doubt most public order offences are dealt with by the courts in an entirely impartial and non-political way. But it is the outlying cases, the extreme ones, which people remember. The outlying cases comprise, say, the lady who was jailed (jailed!) for assaulting a cop with her bosom, and the Superintendent whose flailing at passers-by with his official tickling stick produced no criminal proceedings at all. It is perhaps a pity, under the circumstances, that a spokesman for the policemen’s union publicly advanced the view last week that for police to throw bricks at rioters was a legitimate form of self-defence.
The legitimacy of the regime. In the immediate aftermath of the handover in 1997 it appeared that the Hong Kong Government, though it was not chosen by Hong Kong people, was nevertheless at least a genuine government, not a mere conduit for instructions from elsewhere. This illusion (or if you prefer this reality) has become increasingly hard to sustain over the years.
In concentration camps they economise on guard manpower by having people who are known in German as kapos. They are prisoners, but in return for extra food and other benefits they perform all the internal management of the camp. All the real guards have to do is police the boundary and count the inmates occasionally. If you are an inmate your kapo is a person of enormous consequence. He can make your life easy or intolerable. The real guards will not intervene if he kills you. At the same time he is not a person you respect. He has made a corrupt and selfish bargain with the authorities, who concede no important powers in return. He cannot change the rules, the policies or the circumstances. He is himself, in the end, still a prisoner.
I am afraid that repeated demonstrations of the impotence of our leaders, culminating in the kidnapping of the booksellers and the spineless response to it, have eroded the public view of the people in power in a way which they do not yet realize. We see the suits, the thrones, the chauffeur-driven cars and the bauhinias in various colours. We hear the speeches, the promises, the declarations of important principles and essential values. We should be seeing pillars of the community. But in the end we behold a bunch of kapos.
Of course in a Mong Kok context this is rather cosmopolitan stuff. The moment when Lufsig finally lost it was probably when he refused to support the Hong Kong football team if it was playing China.
Events on the night. An “incident” which lasts for 10 hours cannot just be regarded as the inevitable consequence of one event or one person. It is a dialogue or a contest between the forces of disorder and the forces of order. Rioters are responsible for riots. But policemen are responsible for suppressing riots and if the riot lasts well into the next morning we are entitled to wonder if some better move might have concluded the matter earlier.
This is a tricky area. We do not know exactly what happened and we probably are not going to be told either. The inquiry, if any, will be internal. It is dangerous to jump to any conclusions from watching video clips, though that doesn’t seem to have stopped a good many people. The clips come in three categories.
The ones which I presume are earliest show a small group of traffic cops, clearly neither dressed nor trained for riot control, surrounded by a hostile crowd. The effect is rather like those colonial military catastrophes in which a British battalion finds itself suddenly surrounded by a horde of angry locals. The traditional remedy is to form a square, but you can’t really do that if there are only a few of you. The forces of order conduct a dignified retreat until one of them appears to trip over a piece of debris and fall. He then becomes the main target. Ambrose Lee thought this was particularly deplorable but it is what usually happens. Winston Churchill noticed the same thing at the Battle of Omdurman. One of the traffic people then fires two shots into the air. Well what goes up must come down, but in the circumstances this seemed a reasonable thing to do. It was more disturbing to see the same gentleman pointing his gun at the crowd afterwards. One of the few items of gun lore I managed to extract from my father (ex-SAS but shy about it) is that you should not point a firearm at anyone unless you want to kill them. I am a bit surprised that this rather basic point is apparently not mentioned in the police manual on the subject. Still in a hairy moment we all get excited. The only thing you have to ask about this part of the proceedings is why a small group of traffic policemen were there in the first place. Given the history of public order in Mong Kok this would hardly be a sensible response to a report of brawls over fishball stalls.
The second set of videos has a larger body of policeman retreating under a hail of missiles. This seems an unfortunate compromise, because it means the people throwing missiles are constantly advancing onto territory strewn with the stuff they have already thrown once, which they can now throw again. No doubt there are reasons, doctrinal or practical, why neither a static defence nor a rapid retreat was acceptable.
Later, I presume, we get the full gear riot squad in action. Apparently this came rather late in the proceedings. According to one report when they were finally called in there was a long delay while they went to Fanling to collect their kit. I suspect someone will eventually conclude, with impeccable hindsight, that there was a failure somewhere to comprehend the seriousness of what was going on. Perhaps in the longer run someone may also conclude that the idea of having crowd control based in Fanling is obsolete. Given the technology available to the man in the street these days it means the crowd can gather a lot quicker than the controllers.

And so… What can we conclude from all this? On the night, we were unlucky. Some small differences in the geography or the timing and the evening might have passed peacefully. On the other hand those people who claim to be completely surprised have not been paying attention. People have warned regularly of rising levels of frustration, alienation and violence in public places ever since Occupy ground to its fruitless conclusion.
Public figures and commentators who have got their horror and disapproval off their chests need to turn to some more constructive cogitation. Riots do not come out of nowhere and ordinary citizens do not turn into rioters out of some spontaneous degeneration of the conscience. Something is wrong with the relationship between government and people. Fix it.

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Curious piece in Pravda the other day by Prof Sun Kwok, who is the Dean of Science at the University of Hong Kong. Much of this was about matters so specialised to university teaching that you wondered why the editors had been willing to run it. The headline provided, “Teachers shouldn’t strive to be their students’ best friends”, offered a whiff of illicit erotica which was not present in the article, which actually was a sustained attack on the teaching evaluation system whereby students are invited at the end of the course to give some formal feedback on what they thought of it.

Prof Sun’s approach to this matter illustrated two permanent features of university life: the complete indifference of academics to academic research about their own activities, and their total failure to apply to the day-to-day management of their activities the sort of intellectual rigour which one hopes they apply to their scholarly activities. Teaching evaluations by students are well-known to have some features which call for care and sophistication when they are being interpreted as a sign of teaching quality. Nobody, one hopes, is dumb enough simply to take an average score as the end of the matter. Indeed having vented his prejudices about bribery and students preferring the easy and familiar Prof Sun indicates some willingness to look at the scores and their distribution for a more complex picture. He is also, like most of us, interested in the comments which are provided along with the scores. Still it is a bit disturbing that someone in his senior position is basically disposed to dismiss his only source of student feedback as the product of corruption and idleness. Compared with other sources of information the students have one unique advantage: they have been in the classroom while the teaching was going on. The alternatives to formal feedback are informal feedback and informal feedback relayed by third parties. Or to put it shortly, gossip.

Prof Sun disputes this. He says he can tell which teachers are good and which are not. He looks at contributions to curriculum development, suggestions for teaching methods, developing demonstrations and participating in student academic activities. These are all activities outside the classroom. They do not necessarily indicate a talent for teaching. Prof Sun is dallying with a well-known psychological quirk, the illusion that people’s qualities are more consistent and congruent than they really are. There also seems to be a risk that ambitious faculty members will be more assiduous in activities which are clearly visible to their Dean than in those which are only visible to their students. He says that “peer observations” are a better way to judge teaching quality than “numerical schemes”. But there are no peer observations inside Hong Kong classrooms. University teachers never watch each other’s work. Peer observation is a euphemism for gossip, or good performance in the committee room.

I have collected a lot of teaching evaluations in my time. Some of them were very nice. I once had to tell a class that they should not put things like “we all love Tim” in the comments sections because this might be misinterpreted. I also have occasionally had comments which were so cutting that they caused me acute anxiety for months about whether I was doing the right thing. But on the whole I find people who complain about the system are those who consistently get low scores, and I do wonder if perhaps Prof Sun is reacting to criticism, or the fear of criticism, of the sort of scores people are getting in his faculty. If so, the remedy is not to abolish the scoring system but to improve the teaching. This might start with recruitment. I suppose that Hong Kong U, like most local universities, usually hires people on the basis of their record and potential in research. Clearly if you are looking mainly at other matters you will occasionally recruit poor teachers. Why should this be surprising?

Hong Kong U students have been a turbulent lot lately. Science students are usually docile but if the degree of contempt for their opinions exhibited by Prof Sun is widespread then the turbulence may also be unsurprising.

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The French government which seized power in 1848 became notorious for paying people to dig holes, and paying other people to fill them in. This was considered a controversial way of reducing unemployment even then, and the government concerned was soon overthrown by Napoleon III. However its spirit lives on in Frederick Ma Si-hang, the chairman of the MTR Corporation. Mr Ma has been campaigning for the Legislative Council to fund the cost over-runs of the MTR’s baby, the Express Rail Link. You might have thought that Mr Ma would have devoted some attention to the alleged merits of the project: its important role as a link, a tourist attraction, an architectural ornament, or whatever. But, at least according to the items in last week’s newspapers, Mr Ma did not take this course. Instead he warned that up to 7,000 people in the construction industry would lose their jobs if the project was aborted.

This struck me as a rather odd use of language. It is a commonplace in the construction industry that workers are taken on for a project, with no guarantee of continued employment after the work on the project stops. Whether the project is finished or cancelled does not make any difference; when work stops you’re on the street. So these 7,000 people for whose prosperity Mr Ma expresses such concern are the people who would have been sacked without apology or compunction last year if the project had finished on time. They are still working because it is running late. It is not necessarily their fault that it is running late, but the fact that they are still working on it is in a sense an unexpected bonus. The question is whether they get an extra two or so years added to the expected contract period or only one. This is no doubt a matter of considerable importance to the people concerned but it hardly seems to merit the “jobs at stake” headlines which Mr Ma was angling for.

Mr Ma’s other original contribution to the argument was the suggestion that if the project were cancelled then international contractors might “give Hong Kong a bad name.” I can believe that. International contractors would no doubt like to believe that Hong Kong people are a bunch of gullible suckers who will continue to pour money into a hole in the ground however late or over budget the hole may be. Does having a bad name means having a reputation for axing projects which are missing the date and price promised? Bring it on.

Also weighing in on the construction industry’s employment needs last week was the president of the Hong Kong Construction Subcontractors Alliance, Lawrence Ng San-wa. Mr Ng picked up a broader brush, complaining that the Legco log-jam was threatening the approval of a large number of government projects. If these were cancelled the Construction Industry Alliance had estimated that 20 per cent of the 400,000 people who work in the sector could be thrown out of work. Picking up this point Mr Ng asserted that “taking into account the family members of those affected employees, the affected people would be as much as 1.4 million”. This casts an interesting light on family sizes in the construction sector. One fifth, or 20 per cent, of 400,000 people is 80,000. If we divide Mr Ng’s 1.4 million affected family members by 80,000 we come to an average size per worker of 17.5. This is not terribly convincing. Even if we assume that every construction worker is married and supports both his and his wife’s parents we are still asked to believe that the average number of kids in construction families is 11.5, compared with 1.5 for the population generally. Are people in the construction industry breeding like rabbits? Or does Mr Ng need a new calculator?

Together with the talk we also had some figures. The upshot of these is that we can still save something over $10 billion by cancelling the rail link. And that disregards the possibility that the vacant hole in West Kowloon can be turned into something that makes better economic sense than a loss-making railway line. So the question before Legco is quite simple. Do we want to blow another 10 billion on a political gesture masquerading as an infrastructure or can we think of something else to do with the money? I fear we all know what the eventual answer will be.

Meantime Messrs Ma and Ng need to get their heads round the point that the purpose of government infrastructure projects is not to provide employment to workers in the construction industry. If the nicest thing you can think of about a project is that large numbers of people are employed building it, many of us will suspect that its other merits are imaginary.

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While you were paying attention to the Policy Speech and other trivia, the government slipped an interesting announcement past the public nose. Or at least I think it did. The Post managed a confusing paragraph which started: “The government has proposed increasing the electoral expenses limit for the 2017 Chief Executive election from HK$13 million from the previous HK$16.3 million because of rising costs.” I suppose that what the paper intended to say was that the proposal was to lift the limit from $13 million to $16,3 million. Do they still have sub-editors? The second half of the paragraph recorded Emily Lau’s opposition to the move. And that was it.

Now, let us look at the election. There are and must only be (see Basic Law) 1,200 electors. This suggests that the candidate, assuming he has $16 million to waste, can donate, or treat, each voter with $13,583. This is surely grotesquely excessive. And actually the situation is worse than that. Only 601 votes are needed to win, so a candidate who is careful to identify voters who are persuadable and disregard the others can increase his spending per vote to $27,000. An interesting pastime offers itself here: how many CE electors can you think of who would vote for Pol Pot if they would be paid $27,000 for doing so.

I do not suppose there is any danger of the election being corrupted. We all remember that in the closing stages of the last campaign some electors complained that they had not been told who to vote for. This deficiency was swiftly remedied and that was how we got Lufsig. The fact is that a large group of electors — whether they are actually a majority is immaterial — will vote according to instructions from the Liaison Office. Without support from this quarter no candidate stands a chance. With it, no candidate can lose.

So why does the government want to encourage, or at least allow, candidates to spend pots of money on campaigning? Clearly, this is an effort to deceive the public as to what is going on. There will be meetings, there will be manifestos, there will be speeches, there will be leaflets. Candidates will tour the territory explaining to people who have no vote what they will do if elected. Pollsters will assess the public’s view of the candidates. Pundits and bloggers will comment on their rival attractions. And all this is a smokescreen behind which the Liaison Office will make its choice, as it has always done since the job was taken from the Queen of England. If you want to be elected you have to put up a show, to perpetrate the delusion that this is a real election in which the public view of the candidates has a role. It doesn’t.

You may say, I suppose, that if rich idiots want to spend pots of money on a political pantomime that is their business. The government is merely allowing nature to take its course. But I think raising the limit sends an important message: this is a job for which only millionaires or the friends of millionaires can apply. The advantage of having a small electorate should be precisely that it is easy for any candidate to address the voters. He only has to communicate with 1,200 people. If rival candidates are going to be allowed to shower the electorate with money, though, he is going to be at a considerable disadvantage. Our Marxist masters are curiously fond of rich people.

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Some weeks ago we were regaled with a warning from the World Health Organisation. The WHO is a worthy body whose proper role is to coordinate the response to international epidemics like SARS or Ebola. This leaves it with a problem commonly found in armed forces in peacetime – how to look busy when there’s no business. The WHO’s solution to this is effectively to invent epidemics. It picks on some health threat which national governments could easily spot without assistance — medical research is published, like the other scientific stuff — and issues a global warning. The last but one concerned bacon and other preserved meat dishes like sausages. They were, we were warned, carcinogenic. That is to say consumption of large quantities would increase your chance of getting cancer. This was greeted in the press with predictable headlines along the lines of “sausages in same category as smoking”.

This is nonsense, of course. It is like saying that because you need a Dangerous Goods Licence to transport diesel fuel then diesel is in the same category as nitroglycerine. This was a predictable error and you have to suspect that the WHO did not try very hard to prevent it, because if you want to look busy then press coverage helps. On the whole the local medical community was not terribly impressed by the idea of carcinogenic bacon. There are degrees of danger and it seems the danger from this item is quite low. As long as you’re not having smoked meat with every meal you can probably dismiss this one from your list of health worries.

A week or two later came another WHO warning. This one concerned not bacon, but booze. In other respects it was rather similar. The risk of cancer, even if you were a major consumer, was quite low. Oddly, though, the medical reaction was quite different. There ensued a press conference by the Hong Kong Medical Association which called for stern measures to reduce consumption of the new carcinogen. Health warnings should be printed on bottles. Punitive taxes should be introduced to curb consumption. And so on. One of the assembled medics made the hilarious suggestion that people who liked beer should try fruit juice or soda water instead. It is difficult to believe that people can make suggestions about public policy in a state of such complete ignorance. People do not drink beer because they like the fruity taste or the bubbles. They drink it because, in the words of an old Irish drinking song, “it makes me feel content and happy”. This does not happen with fruit juice or soda water because of the absence of alcohol.

I have been opposing the persecution of smokers for many years. This is not because I smoke or because I think smoking is good for you, but because the urge to regulate other people’s pleasures is at least as addictive as smoking and just as dangerous. The urge seems  to be an occupational disease in the medical profession. And when the smokers have been driven to extinction the funhunters will move on to other joys which can be banned, restricted, made expensive or discouraged in public places. Drink is a prime target because it is not just consumed, but enjoyed. Health fanatics are like Macaulay’s Puritans who opposed bear baiting not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. Bacon is boring. Booze on the other hand is a disreputable pleasure popular with proletarians.

People have been drinking alcoholic drinks for thousands of years. The perils of over-indulgence have been known for nearly as long. It is of course proper if some new danger is discovered that we should be warned of it. It is also desirable that drinkers should be treated to the occasional reminder of the tragic destinations to which chronic wallowing can lead. What is not desirable is that minor discoveries should be used as a pretext for tightening regulations which many of us find quite acceptable as they are. Well-intentioned recommendations are welcome. Coercion is not.

I also note that something between 50 and 70  per cent of all medical “discoveries” are revealed by further research to be fictitious. So if you want to continue to believe in red wine as the health drink of the 21st century there’s still hope.

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Well folks you may not be planning to move to the mainland but it seems the mainland is coming to you. There is an old saying in military circles that if something bad happens once it is luck, twice is a coincidence … and three times is enemy action. Now that five people in succession have disappeared from the same publishing company we can exclude coincidence and assume that our Red brothers have taken a hand in matters.

Even C.Y. Leung can see the appalling consequences of having mainland policemen grabbing people in Hong Kong and bundling them over the border (unless, presumably, they do it in the express rail station) but that is not the worst of it. After all one illegal arrest could be put down to the over-enthusiasm of an underling. Clearly all five people have been arrested – or if you prefer kidnapped – because of things they had done in Hong Kong. And this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. One country two systems, the Basic Law, and all that are meaningless if conduct which is not an offence in Hong Kong can lead to your arrest on the mainland … or of course in Thailand. It is no doubt very provocative and naughty that you can buy in Hong Kong books which would be banned on the mainland if someone tried to publish them there. But that is and must be a consequence of Hong Kong preserving its legal system and the rights which that system protects. If the mainland really wants to prevent its citizens getting a whiff of freedom it can stop them coming here. But if you walk into the sea you cannot avoid getting wet.

If anyone doubted that we were looking at a Communist Party operation they could draw confirmation from the amazing and disreputable performance in Legco of Mr Ng Leung-sing, Mr Ng is regarded as pro-China and we must suppose he needs to be because he is the chairman of an off-shoot of the Bank of China. He sits in Legco for the Financial functional constituency, who must I suspect find him faintly embarrassing. His main claim to fame recently was a request for a government scientific investigation into the possibility that lead in tap water was good for you. Mr Ng’s role in current events was to provide that indispensable ingredient in denunciations of counter-revolutionary intellectuals, a lurid allegation of sexual misconduct. A nameless business friend had apparently told Mr Ng that all the booksellers had been arrested because they were in the habit of taking clandestine boat trips to the mainland to visit prostitutes there.

The implausibility of this scurrilous tale is exceded only by its slanderous quality. Councillors are immune from defamation suits while speaking in the chamber. It is a gross abuse of this necessary right to use it to denigrate individuals on the basis of non-existent evidence. Mr Ng staggered on to equally disreputable argument that it might be an infringement of the victims’ privacy to investigate what had happened to them.

I suppose this sort of thing goes on on the mainland all the time. People disappear. Lurid stories of sexual misconduct are told about them. They confess, sometimes on television. There is a show trial. This has been happening n in China for 50 years. And we all thought that, for 50 years at least, it was not going to happen here. Is it time to think again?

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It is nice to see columnists earning an honest crust without working too hard. But there are limits. The standard comment on the question whether mainland customs and immigration people should be stationed in the Kowloon terminus of the white elephant is a splendid exercise in missing the point.
We usually start in a tone of bemused irony, wondering why people are making such a fuss. We state that there should be no problem in out-going passengers doing their immigration thing for the mainland in Kowloon. We visit London, where passengers travelling to Paris can go through French immigration in St Pancras station before boarding the Eurostar. We visit various international airports where passengers travelling to the US can go through “pre-clearance” before boarding the flight. What could be simpler, we ask rhetorically. Then if we are of a pro-establishment disposition we complain that the pan-democrats are just trying to sabotage the railway because they don’t like C. Y. Leung. And all of this, except the last bit, is demonstrably true. And all of it misses the point.

Of course there is no problem is a mainland official stationed in Kowloon telling people that they may board the train if they have the necessary documents to visit the mainland, and that they may not do so if they lack the paperwork. The mainland official has two options – to allow boarding or not to allow boarding. This is not a great exercise of state power. Airline staff routinely check that their passengers have at least got a passport before boarding the plane, and refuse to carry those who have not. The worst thing which can happen to intending visitors to the People’s Paradise is that they have to cancel their trip. This would happen anyway if the immigration post was somewhere else. Nobody has lost anything. If there is a mainland customs officer functioning at the station he can confiscate minor items like copies of Apple Daily, and refer serious attempts at smuggling to his Hong Kong counterparts. Again, nothing new, nothing controversial.

We cannot, however, say the same about passengers travelling in the other direction. A passenger on the flying white elephant is in Hong Kong territory as soon as he crosses the border. In the territory of the SAR mainland security people have no official status, no right to carry guns, no right to make arrests. Moreover a person on the surface over the white elephant – which is one long tunnel, that is why it is so expensive – enjoys all the rights accorded to Hong Kong residents by the Basic Law, the Common Law, the various relevant ordinances and so on. He has the right to a lawyer if arrested, to habeas corpus if arrested for something which is not an offence against Hong Kong law, and even (sorry Henry) to judicial review if disadvantaged by an administrative decision he disagrees with. If mainland customs and immigration officials are working in Kowloon, though, we have a curious inconsistency. In the shopping mall over the station you are in Hong Kong, subject to Hong Kong law, and fortified by Hong Kong rights. Are we to say that two floors down on the arrivals platform you are not in Hong Kong, not subject to Hong Kong law, and not protected by Hong Kong rights?

The arriving passenger is, by definition, coming from the mainland. The mainland does not enjoy the rule of law and its residents do not enjoy the rights and privileges to which Hongkongers are accustomed. Mainland officials functioning in the station are not going to apply Hong Kong law. The whole point of their presence is to apply mainland law, such as it is. Suppose we have an arriving passenger who is, in the view of some mainland official, not allowed to leave the country. The immigration officer will presumably tell him that he cannot leave … well, the part of the station where the mainland immigration people do their stuff. Is he under arrest, in our usual sense? Is he, as he would be if arrested in Nathan Road, entitled to a lawyer and a date with a magistrate? Probably not. He will be invited to take a train back to the mainland. Or perhaps he will be bundled onto the next train back whether he wishes to do so or not. Perhaps trains travelling in a northerly direction will have a special custodial carriage for people who got to Kowloon but discovered that they were still in China and not allowed to leave. Sooner or later one of these people will, on his return to the People’s Paradise, be subjected to the usual show trial and shot. Are we, at that point, going to be happy?

Some of us will no doubt find this scenario uncontroversial, because they will assume that the person forced back over the boundary will probably be a mainlander anyway. No doubt that will usually be the case. But it doesn’t have to be. Are we going to tell Hong Kong residents that they are not actually in Hong Kong, legally speaking, until they have cleared the mainland Immigration people in a Kowloon basement? An even more interesting case will come up when a real foreigner is captured. It will then be pointed out that in the sundry examples of immigration people working extra-territorially they do not, in other places, screen in-coming passengers. Better for all concerned, I submit, if the outgoing passengers go through the formalities in Kowloon and the incoming ones in Shenzhen, where the train is going to stop anyway. The same people will be arrested, but not on our patch.

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We must all be grateful to the Catholic Monitors on Legislative Councillors. I am not sure why Catholics should be particularly keen on monitoring councillors. Would they refuse the help of a Protestant volunteer? Never mind. Since 1998 the monitors have produced an annual report on the work of legislative councillors and this provides some interesting insights. Inevitably media reporting of this admirable effort tends to concentrate on who is the Laziest Legislator, a title for long held by David Li, then by Timothy Fok, and now securely in the possession of Lau Wong-fat.

Unfortunately the monitors do not report in English. The results of their efforts as translated by Google are very difficult to follow. But in principle what happens is this: the legislators are assessed on five measures: how often they were absent, how many questions they asked, how often they spoke, how often they voted and how many motions or amendments they proposed. Obviously it would be easy enough to pick holes in this methodology but the overall result is quite consistent from year to year, which suggests that it is measuring something substantial. This year Mr Lau was the winner again (or loser, however you want to look at it) with five “disadvantages”, which I take it means a low or bottom score on all five of the items listed above. Joint runners-up were two Functional Constituency lay-abouts with four disadvantages, followed by one councillor with three. This was Ronny Tong, who we may infer was practising for his up-coming retirement from the scene.

The monitors went on to criticise the president of Legco, Jasper Tsang, for deviating from the necessary levels of impartiality by conferring with pro-establishment legislators over Whatsapp during a debate, and some rulings on motions. They also provide an analysis of councillors’ levels of industry compared by party allegiance and by whether they were elected or functional. Unfortunately Google translation does not handle tables well so I cannot offer any further information on this interesting area.

I can, however, warn faithful readers not to waste their time by seeking further information in the pages of the South China Morning People’s Daily, where the report on the activities of the Catholic Monitors is preposterous. I appreciate that the reporter had a problem. The results of the monitors’ efforts do not vary a great deal from year to year. Generally the same councillors do the least work, by the monitors’ measures. The pro-establishment camp shows up as a bit lazier than the opposition, mainly because the pro-establishment camp contains so many functionals, who are clearly the laziest by this measure. In fairness we should note that many of them have other jobs, while the DAB and pan-democrat people are usually full-time politicos.  That is not at all to say that the list is useless, or the work wasted. Few readers of this year’s report will dissent from the monitors’ view that Mr Lau has passed his “sell-by” date.

Still, however desperate the reporter may have been, the result of his efforts was unfortunate. Looking at one of the five categories he found two pan-dems in it. The category is the “proposing motions and amendments” one, in which, quite understandably, some members do not feature at all. Both of the pan-dems with zero scores are “super seat” members, who might be expected to be industrious. So this could be surprising. On the other hand it is only one of the five measures. So it can hardly justify the first paragraph of the story, which is “Two pan-democrat “super seat” legislators have been listed, along with the usual suspects from the pro-establishment camp, as the laziest members of the legislative session.” This is not just a poor choice. It is wrong. Being wrong it led to the even more catastrophic headline “Pan-dem duo named ‘laziest’ lawmakers”, which is so bad it is difficult to characterize it as anything but a lie. Clearly the person who wrote the headline had not read the story carefully, a disturbing habit in a sub-editor.

The story goes on through the matter of not moving motions, noting that the inactive also included Mr Lau and three Liberals. It does not mention the other people in this category, who included two DAB people and the man who squats for the Financial Services Industry. We then get comments from the Monitors, and an explanation of super seats, before we explore the category of casting votes. Here we find low scores for Mr Lau (of course), one of our two “laziest” pan-dems, and two other democrats (one of them Ronnie Tong). There were a total of seven lawmakers in this category, so we are again left with three missing. Apparently the reporter thought we would not be interested. Or perhaps the policy at the SCMP these days is not to report anything unless it can be used to slag off the pan dems. By a final irony the last paragraph of the story contains what the monitors actually wanted to report: “overall… the group identified Lau, non-affiliated Dr Leung Ka-lau and Cheung Kwok-che of the Liberal Party as the worst offenders.”

So in effect the story comprises 12 paragraphs of propaganda with one paragraph of news on the end. It seems the new owner of the newspaper aspires to improve its China coverage, which is apparently still prone to regard China as a communist state. I think you have to be pretty paranoid to see any bias against China in the paper these days. Its coverage of local politics, on the other hand, is increasingly a travesty of journalism. Would any under-employed Catholic monitors like to take on the local media?

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Did the earth move for you? As Hemingway might have put it. It did for me. Last week a local District Court Judge jailed 11 New Territories villagers and a would-be developer for misrepresentation and perjury. Their crime was to apply for the right to build a “small house” under the policy which allows the male descendants of indigenous villagers to build such a house for their own use. The villagers had in effect handed over their right to build a house to the developer in return for a sum of money. The developer would then build the houses and sell them to people who might not be indigenous at all. Of course the government departments to which various people applied under the scheme were not told that this was going on. How this interesting arrangement came to light remains a mystery. After a civil case this week which also involved the Small House Policy the Lands Department had the brass face to issue a press release saying that it would “cooperate with law enforcement agencies in following up suspicious cases of small house applications”.

The funny thing about all this is that this sort of abuse of small house applications has been going on under the noses of the relevant departments for at least 30 years. About a decade ago the late Kevin Sinclair wrote a comprehensive complaint about the matter. He outlined the racket, the procedure and the terminology. The price of signing the documents to claim the right to build a small house is apparently known as the “ding”. When Mr Sinclair wrote his piece the “ding” was half a million bucks. In the latest cases it seems to have come down to something between $100,000 and $200,000. This suggests that the Lands Department’s vigilance has not yet produced a shortage of willing participants in bogus arrangements.

Of course Mr Sinclair was not claiming a scoop. Many people had known and said for many years that most of the applications to build a small house under the policy came from people who had no intention of living in the resultant property, or indeed in some cases in Hong Kong. When I lived in a New Territories village it was commonplace to meet “villagers” with fluent English and conspicuous Manchester accents who made no bones about the fact that they had only returned to Hong Kong to collect their “ding” and were hanging about waiting for the few weeks required to process the application. Small houses, if you look at them closely, usually turn out to have been built as three flats. This means that the owner, if he does live in the property, can inhabit the third at the bottom and let the rest.

At some villages, including the one which Mr Sinclair lived in, it was very easy to see what was going on. There was the village, still inhabited by the villagers, and there was a cluster of “small houses” outside the village, all of which had been sold to outsiders. All this was clearly a violation of the government’s intention in introducing the policy. Nobody at any time suggested that it was illegal.

I remember way back in the early 80s editing a story for the Hong Kong Standard which reported that a member of the Heung Yee Kuk had complained that not only was the policy being abused, but some members of the Kuk were among the abusers. For some reason he found this surprising. At about the same time my brother moved into a pristine, freshly-minted small house which had clearly been built under the programme. Some nifty legal work was required to get round the restrictions on early sale. He also had to do quite a lot of building work on the house because of the three flat syndrome.

People have occasionally suggested that the whole arrangement is sexist – which it clearly is: daughters do not inherit the same right. They have also complained that it results in untidy and incoherent development round villages, which is plainly true in many cases. They have complained that the government originally promised that if the scheme was abused it would be cancelled, which turned out to be as unreliable as official predictions about the effect and use of new legislation commonly are. Put not your trust in princes. There have also been complaints that the huge quantity of land which the government has reserved for this purpose could be put to better use.

Defenders of the scheme cite the bit in the Basic Law about the traditional rights of New Territories residents, which is hardly relevant because there is nothing traditional about the Small House Policy. It is also defended as a prop to the traditional way of life, but this is not born out by observation at all. On the contrary in many cases the owner of a new small house is able to give up work of all kinds and devote the rest of his life to counting money and playing mah jong. When I lived in a New Territories village my neighbours had been scrupulous in observing the rules. All the houses in the village still belonged to the clan, with the exception of mine, which had been exempted because in the Post Office’s house numbering exercise it was allocated the ominous number 44. Villagers made admirable efforts to preserve their traditions, even though most of them commuted to work in the urban area. They were also very hospitable. Efforts to preserve traditions were, though, not helped by the fact that many families depended more on the rental income from their upper floors than on paid work. And agriculture had been abandoned completely.

Still, whether you like the Small House Policy or not, the idea that it is illegal to apply when you have no intention of living in the resulting house comes as a bombshell. Was it always illegal? And if so why did nobody come unstuck before? Abuse has for decades been rampant, public, conspicuous and regularly reported. Was this, one wonders, one of those areas where the “law enforcement agencies” got the message from senior officials that their best efforts were not wanted? If you enjoy conspiracy theories you can contemplate the possibility that the new policy of prosecuting bogus applicants will end the Small House Policy as we know it, and this is Uncle Fat’s punishment for missing his chance to vote for sham democracy. That is too complicated for me. I think it was just that the thieves fell out and someone blew a legal whistle. Still, relevant departments should take note. We do not want to wait 40 years for the next case.

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Lurking somewhere in the bottom of the copious election coverage was a little phrase which caught my attention, and should perhaps have caught more from other people. Nakade Hitsujiko, a candidate in Tai Kok Tsui, wished to have on his election material, which is printed and distributed free by the Registration and Electoral Office, the slogan “build Hong Kong city state”. The slogan was removed by the REO. Mr Hitsujiko, who changed his name from Chung Ming-lun before the election, was what we press scribes tactfully refer to as a “colourful” candidate, occupying a point somewhere on the spectrum between Martin Bell and Screaming Lord Sutch. That is no reason for depriving him of the rights enjoyed by other candidates, and the question which arises is: by what right does the REO censor candidates’ election material?

The REO’s view, reportedly, was that the slogan “violated the Basic Law”, and in particular that part of it which states that Hong Kong is an inalienable part of the People’s Paradise. I have several problems with this. The first is that the Basic Law, along with the bits about inalienable membership of the motherland, also states that citizens of the SAR have freedom of speech. What that means in most jurisdictions is that people are free to argue peacefully for changes to the constitutional arrangements, however fundamental they may seem to be. Citizens of Texas are free to agitate for secession from the Union, citizens of the UK are free to call for the abolition of the monarchy, and so on. The Basic Law does not state that no citizen may utter any phrase or publish any slogan which is inconsistent with the Basic Law itself. What is not forbidden should be allowed, in our system.

Another way of looking at it is to visit briefly that platitude which states that freedom of speech is not total. It may be restricted in pursuit of other important purposes. These are enumerated in the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the Hong Kong Bill of Rights Ordinance, and concern things like the protection of reputation, the right to a fair trial, public order and national security. Clearly the only one which can arise in this context is the last, and I do not see how anyone could argue with a straight face that China’s safety is threatened if the phrase “Hong Kong city state” finds its way onto a District Council election leaflet. After all Hong Kong’s status is not a matter which is going to come up in District Board meetings anyway. Mentioning it serves the useful purpose of giving electors a clearer idea of the thoughts and character of the person soliciting their votes. I realise that quite a lot of candidates do not wish the electorate to know too much about them, supposing that their cuddles with Communism might be an electoral liability. But it is no part of the REO’s job to make this compulsory.

It should also be born in mind that the slogan “build Hong Kong city state” does not necessarily imply secession from China. It is common in federal systems to have states which are still part of the country. California and Bavaria are examples. A city state does not have to be like Singapore, with its own flag, anthem, army and UN seat. There are other models. Something like the old “Imperial Cities” in the Holy Roman Empire might suit, for example: the possession of a charter securing rights to self-government in some areas and a direct allegiance to the emperor rather than his regional representatives. Someone who hankers after a Hong Kong city state might yearn for independence. Or he might yearn for that high degree of autonomy in everything except defence and foreign policy which at one time we were told we were going to get.

In fact at some risk of violating the Basic Law, at least in some people’s view, we might go further and say that all the large successful countries in the world have federal systems of one kind or another and it would be greatly to China’s benefit if its political culture was encouraged in that direction. All the countries to which one might wish to emigrate are either small or federal or (Switzerland) both. Looking at the 5,000 years of China’s history we must suspect that, under the smooth surface of official history, the years of disorder and multiple centres of power were times of dynamism and innovation, and those in which power was precariously held in the centre saw stagnation and stasis, culminating eventually in a successful foreign invasion. The repression required to suppress dissent inevitably also suppresses innovation and creativity.

Still, these larger considerations have very little to do with the question before us, which is whether the REO, finding a reference to “Hong Kong city State” in an election leaflet, has a right to remove it. Clearly it does not. We may concede some right to object to matter which is obscene, blasphemous or defamatory. But an election is an exercise in free choice and that choice should be as unfettered as possible. Also there is no legal right for the REO to interfere in this way. The despair-inducing thing about all this is that the REO’s record in defence of electoral honesty in other matters – like voter registration – is abysmal. And what is the point of putting a retired judge in charge of these things if they are just going to make up the rules as they go along.

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