tim's experiment

The back page of the Post’s Business section is now the only part of the paper still publishing thoughtful and controversial material, so it seems churlish to complain about any of it.  I have managed to restrain myself in the face of the little campaign being waged against 7-11, which is apparently unpopular in Lan Kwai Fong. Barflies realize that the local bars retail for $60 a drink which you can buy in a supermarket or a convenience store for five bucks. So the more frugal ones are in the habit of tanking up with a few carry-outs on the pavement outside a 7-11 before they hit the hang-outs for big spenders. This is no doubt very upsetting for Fong bar-owners, but as a reason for changing the law on alcohol licensing which affects the whole territory it seems a bit thin, not to say parochial.

More provocative, though, was a long piece this morning by one Peter Guy, who is described as a former international banker. In it he laments that American banks are being subjected to regulation designed to limit risk taking and over-generous salaries. “Arbitrarily limiting bank pay,” he says, “will drive away the smartest and most innovative people away (sic) from finance.” To which I think the shortest answer is: thank goodness. We have seen what the smartest and most innovative people can do and it produced a global financial catastrophe. Bring on the mediocrities. They can hardly be worse.

A somewhat longer answer would be that arbitrarily limiting – or indeed limiting in any other way – bank pay will not drive away the smartest and most innovative. It will drive away the people whose main motivation is greed. There are plenty of smart and innovative people in the world who are not bankers. I realize that people in the business itself need to convince themselves that their extraordinary pay levels reflect some magical quality of which they are the sole owners. But this is nonsense. People choose their careers for a variety of reasons. Perhaps if banks were not besieged by applicants who want to retire as millionaires in their 40s they could recruit some people with more idealistic aims in mind.

And this brings us to the matter of regulation generally, which in Mr Guy’s view is turning banking into a boring dead-end job. There is no mystery about this. Bankers used to be trusted. Mr Guy notes that the public now “respects lawyers more than bankers,” an alarming thought. Your banker used to be someone like your doctor or lawyer, who are bound by a code of professional ethics to put their clients’ interests before their own. Your lawyer’s recommendations should not be influenced by the prospect of fat fees and your doctor is not allowed to prolong your illness to increase his income. Bankers used to be the same. Times have changed. If you read the works of Michael Lewis, Greg Smith or Neil Barofsky it is clear that at least in American investment banks – the ones Mr Guy is worried about – the client is no longer the recipient of faithful service. He is a sheep to be fleeced. Bankers will happily sell you an instrument which is not only not in your interest; it has specifically been designed to fail so that they can make money by betting against it. Caveat emptor, as swindling TST camera shops used to say. Bankers are now regulated for the same reason that the members of other disreputable professions are regulated – because if left to themselves they get up to mischief. This is perhaps not the sort of thing that local bankers wish to read. Other denizens of the Business section might find it quite entertaining, though.

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Now what have we here, a new youth movement? Well sort of. Weird story in Monday’s Post of an event the previous day: a new youth group had been inaugurated in the PLA naval base on Stonecutters Island (which is of course no longer an island) but only selected media (Wen Wei Po and CCTV) were actually allowed in to watch. There were plenty of other people there though, we were told. C.Y. Leung was there, the director of the Liaison Office was there, along with the Education Secretary and the chairman of the Youth Commission, one Bunny Chan Chung-bun. Mrs Leung, who goes for official purposes by the name of Regina Tong Ching-yee, was also present, and according to the Post’s source — the lucky reporter from Wen Wei — is the group’s “commander-in-chief”.  The organisation behind this happy event, a non-profit company called the Hong Kong Army Cadets Association, had been registered the previous Thursday, which seems to be cutting things a bit fine. This meant, though, that the group’s articles of association were available to reportorial reading, and they included to “encourage the youth of Hong Kong to be aware of their responsibilities and obligations as Chinese citizens.” To join you have to be aged over six. The Post’s report came with a picture of some young things on a bus, wearing a green uniform with a shoulder badge advertising the “Hong Kong Army Cadets”. It seems that little thought has been bestowed on the uniform, which follows the lamentable local practice of including a beret as headgear, despite this titfer being totally unsuitable to our climate. A few other details: Tung Chee-hwa (yes, that one) is the group’s Hon President. Mrs Tung is an honourary adviser, whatever that means. The group has three Honorary Patrons: C.Y. Leung, Liaison Office honcho Zhang, and the PLA garrison commander, Major General Tan Benhong. Bunny Chan of the Youth Commission doubles as the chairman. Lots of top people on the notepaper, then.

The following day, though, it appeared that they hadn’t actually got round to many members yet. The 200 “members” who turned up were not all members, if indeed any of them were, the Post reported. One young person, named Jackie, said he had been recruited via a Facebook posting on a page for people who had been to a PLA summer camp. The recruiting was being done by non-profit group called the Concerted Efforts Resource Centre. The deal was that if you participated in the opening ceremony you could keep the uniform. Another non-member said that 120 people from his school had attended on the understanding that they were spectators. The Post had tried without success to contact Tai Tak-fung, the president of Concerted Efforts. He is, surprise surprise, a businessman and member of the CPPCC … and a director of the Cadets Association.

Clearly this was not quite the sort of public launching that the people behind this interesting effort had in mind. So on Tuesday some explanation was attempted. C.Y. Leung, we were told, had defended the proceedings, saying that it was everybody’s duty to “serve the motherland”, as members of the association had sworn to do. This was the first indication that the assembled non-members, or some of them, had been swearing strange oaths. We were also offered an extended interview with Chairman Bunny. Mr Chan is something of a political landmark: as well as chair of Youth Commission, he is chair of Kwun Tong DB, Jockey Club member, textiles, JP, Bauhinia Baubles in two colours … the usual stuff. This extensive career of social climbing has not taught Mr Chan the art of coming up with plausible excuses. The association chose the PLA naval base for their performance because it was rent-free, he said, and the consequent restriction on press admission was an unfortunate consequence of that. As if an association with CY, the liaison office and a full cast of local sycophants on board could not have found a free playground somewhere to which the public has access.

According to Mr Chan the association was formed by “young people who took part in a military summer camp for Hong Kong youth”. How they managed to recruit him, Mr and Mrs Leung, Mr and Mrs Tung, The Secretaries for Security and Education, General Tan and the Liaison Office godfather he did not explain. Nor did he explain who had paid for 200 uniforms. He did say that “several dozen” people had been sworn in, all of whom were university students. The summer camp graduates had “learned marching skills in the camp and wanted to impart the skills to young people so they could get fit and strong,” said Mr Chan.

The China Daily, meanwhile, put a more explicitly political cast on the matter.”Through drills and training camps, the new voluntary uniformed youth group aims to promote civic awareness,”  it said on Monday, adding cheerfully that this was the city’s “first uniformed youth group to follow Chinese foot drill protocols.”

So what have we here? Well it seems that about 200 young things turned up on Sunday, at least 120 of whom were Form One students where were bussed in to make up the numbers but were kitted out in the group’s uniform. Of the remaining 80 or so some were part of the scenery but something in excess of 36 took the oath, whatever it was. Some of us feel safer not taking C.Y. Leung’s word for anything. Mr Chan did not really explain how the association had brought together a group of young people who wanted to help other youngsters to “get fit and strong” with a band of local patriotic worthies who wanted to use drill to promote civic awareness. So we are I think entitled to feel a certain suspicion is warranted about who wooed who.

However we can now consider the important question raised by all this, which is does Hong Kong need another y0uth group devoted to the joys of foot drill, and if so is this association a plausible way of providing such a thing. Now foot drill, in anyone’s protocol, is a tricky topic. Some people, of whom I am one, quite enjoy doing it. Others, of whom I am also one, enjoy watching it. However apart from its merits as entertainment, foot drill is a dubious area. It was a life-and-death battlefield skill until about 1870. It now has no practical purpose outside itself. Some people say it inculcates discipline and team spirit, though whether these qualities transfer themselves off the parade ground is not clear, and is perhaps unknowable. Some people say that units which are good at drill are also good at fighting, but this is probably because they care enough to want to be good at everything they do. For the organisers of basic military training foot drill has the merit of being easy to arrange, time-consuming and permitting a very high ratio of students to instructors. Nobody has ever suggested that it promotes “civic awareness”. It is, though, surprisingly (at least to me) popular with youth and other uniformed groups in Hong Kong. This covers not only the explicitly paramilitary ones like the Boys Brigade or the Adventure Corps (which used to be a British Army off-shoot) but also organisations devoted primarily to good works like the Scouts, Saint Johns, the Red Cross, and the Civil Aid Services. They all want to do passing out parades modeled on the Police ones, which in turn are modeled on the British Army ones. I suppose this is harmless enough. Certainly it means that the supply of foot drill opportunities for young people probably already exceeds the demand.

As well as foot drills we are also to be offered “camps”, and this brings me to another matter. Frankly if the association is going to stick to university students they can do what they like. Students are adults who can look after themselves. If on the other hand they are going to recruit members from age six up, then other questions arise. When I was a youth leader (no names, no packdrill, but we Did Our Best) we were not allowed out unsupervised until we had done a succession of  training courses spread over two years, with further specialist modules required if you wanted to take the kids away on camp or other residential holidays. Skills are required and problems come up which people outside the education business will not have met before. It is nice to know that these people have the Secretary for Education and the chairman of the Youth Commission on side but is there anyone involved who has actually been a youth leader of any kind before? I know there has been a lot of enthusiasm for flag-raising groups in left-wing circles since the government started subsidising youth groups, but at least they are based in schools, and presumably run by teachers whose skill and morals are subject to some monitoring.

Well the Army Cadets may turn out to be a Potemkin youth group intended only for the entertainment of CCTV viewers, in which case no harm will be done. Certainly the curiously shy approach adopted so far does not resemble a recruiting drive. However, if the association is going to be a full-fledged youth group catering for all ages and both sexes then I hope the organisers will remember Edith Cavell’s immortal words: “patriotism is not enough.”

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Well if anyone is happy this week it should be those leaders of the Umbrella movement who decided not to take the government up on its offer of an updated report on Hong Kong public opinion, to be supplied if the occupation ended. The government went ahead and produced the report anyway. We can now all read the poor mendacious thing, and see just how worthless the offer was. You can get a better deal in a Tsimshatsui camera shop. The detailed deficiencies of the report have been noted in many places. What seems to have slid by unnoticed is that it ends with a resounding and fundamental lie. “It is the common aspiration of the central authorities, the HKSAR Government and the people of Hong Kong to implement universal suffrage … strictly in accordance with the Basic Law and the relevant interpretations and decisions of true NPC Standing Committee.” No it isn’t. The whole point of Occupy Central was to express dissatisfaction with the prospect of implementing universal suffrage on those terms. The SAR government has, as they once said of the restored Bourbons, learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The speeches, the banners, the writings were all wasted. The government still thinks that public opinion is what it wants public opinion to be, and still thinks that if that is not the case then this shameful fact should not be shared with the Central Government.

The problem with this approach is that it leaves the Central Government with no reliable source of information about what is really happening in Hong Kong. This also became manifest last week when Mr Chen Zuoer (who chairs a think tank but is treated for journalism purposes as a person of some consequence) complained that the Hong Kong education system had been “in a mess” during the occupation. This is nonsense. I work in the Hong Kong education system and I know plenty of other people who do too. The education system functioned pretty normally, apart from those schools ordered to close by the government. Even at the university level there was a week when we were boycotted, slightly higher rates of absenteeism in the rest of the term, but nothing like a mess. Mr Chen went on into even more imaginative territory. “How have the young men, who were babies at the handover, become those on the front line who brandished the UK national flag and stormed into our military camps and the government?” he asked.

This would be a good question. Except that at no time during the three months of Occupy Central could anyone be seen, in the front line or anywhere else, brandishing the UK national flag. I recall a few people found their way into the former Prince of Wales complex, now the PLA headquarters. They were not in the front line of anything, they did not “storm” it, and the building is not in the usual sense of the word a military camp, let alone “camps”. Mr Chen also said that Hong Kong is the “only place in China which doesn’t have a National Security law.” This continues a long tradition of China officials spouting errors about the Hong Kong legal system.

We all know that the Basic Law says: “The Hong Kong SAR shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People’s Government, or theft of state secrets, to prohibit foreign political organisations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organisations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organisations or bodies.” Theft of state secrets is covered by Cap 521 Official Secrets Ordinance. Inciting the PLA to mutiny is covered in the Crimes Ordinance Section 6, and Sedition in Sections 9 and 10 (which admittedly still have “the UK” in places where “China” might be a better choice).  There is also a section on Treason, in which Her Majesty mysteriously still reigns. Actually the only things which are clearly not covered are the ones about foreign bodies, and I suggest the reason we don’t have those is because they would be throughly inappropriate to a cosmopolitan international city and the government is perfectly aware of this.

But there you are. These things come and go. A recent mystery is the disappearance of those writers who observed three months ago, with some condescension, that occupiers needed to learn to compromise, politics was the art of the possible, and perhaps the election procedure which was at the heart of the problem could be improved by tweaking the constitution of the election committee, to make it more representative. It now emerges that tweaking the election committee is off the menu, because the local leftists who would be tweaked into a less influential category will not stand for it. Where are the apostles of compromise noiw that we need them? Nowhere to be seen, so far. Also AWOL we have the worshippers of the Rule of Law. The case of the Chalk Girl, who was thrown into a custodial home without any of the usual formalities after being caught drawing flowers on a wall in washable chalk, was a clear violation of the Rule of Law. I quote from Tom Bingham’s popular book on the subject: Ministers and public officials at all levels must exercise the powers conferred on them in good faith, fairly, for the purpose for which the powers were conferred, without exceeding the limits of such powers and not unreasonably.  I also note that the Department of Justice continues to neglect the law covering reporting of legal proceedings, which was flouted by newspapers who passed on official leaks about the identity and family circumstances of the miscreant.

Then we have the Financial Secretary, who is still complaining about the economic harm caused by Occupy Central. This was an interesting speculation in its day, but its day is over. We have the visitor figures, the retail sales figures, the manufacturing and retail business reports, the Hang Seng Index…   it is now possible for anyone who is not either politically motivated or a complete dimwit to evaluate the economic impact of Occupy Central with complete confidence. There was no economic impact. Period.  I do not dispute the obvious problems caused to some individual businesses, but clearly people who did not buy over-priced handbags in Admiralty were free to buy them elsewhere and did so. I realise it is a good career move to blame Occupy Central for everything from bird flu to global warming but the economic charge is easily refuted. Find something else.

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Thought-provoking piece by Michael Chugani the other week, on the question “why do the pan-democrats hate C.Y. Leung so much?” Mr Chugani’s suggested answer to this question is because Mr Leung doesn’t care what they think of him, unlike his predecessors – who in Mr Chugani’s view did care.

This is not on the face of it a very good theory. I do not personally believe that the pan-democrats as a group “hate” Mr Leung. Many of them undoubtably feel that his policies are bad. Some no doubt find his personality unattractive. Some people who would acquit him of these two charges find his appearance disconcerting. Still in these times when we are all trying to get along it should surely be possible to urge someone to resign without being accused of hatred. I also have problems with the other leg of Mr Chugani’s theory, that previous Chief Executives cared what the pan-democrats thought of them. Certainly they did not give that impression at the time. Relations were perhaps less confrontational in the sense that a proposal from a pan-democrat would not have been dismissed out of hand merely because of its source, as it would be now. There may have been more willingness to socialise. But the fact is that since 1997 the government has had a built-in majority. It does not need to care what the pan-democrats think because it does not depend on their support.

On reflection, though, I think Mr Chugani has put his finger on something important. Mr Leung’s problem is that he gives the impression that he doesn’t really care what any of us think about him. This is not only a matter of indiscreet remarks about the need to keep the poor out of policy-making influence, though of course such things do not help. Nor is it just a matter of Mr Leung’s dependable inability to rise to any occasion where a few conciliatory words might bring people together. I winced, for example, when the student umbrella leaders announced a hunger strike in an effort to win talks with the government. One did not expect the government to capitulate. But some signs of regret at the possibility of idealistic young people starving themselves to death might have gone a long way. Instead Mr Leung produced the tired and no longer relevant line about the Basic Law and committee decisions as a pre-requisite.

Of course the public persona of an official or a politician may have very little to do with his real personality as revealed in private. C.H. Tung came across as an amiable old buffer who did not really want the job but was doing his best. Whether this was accurate is neither here nor there. It went down well anyway. Donald Tsang was widely beheld as an ambitious senior civil servant (and ambition is not a sin in a senior civil servant) who had the misfortune to reach a level which required qualities he did not possess. What they had in common  was that both men appeared to care what the world thought of them, even if that was not their main guiding star.

The disconcerting thing about Mr Leung is that he doesn’t care what any of us think about him, at least in appearance. In private, for all I know, he is kind to children and dogs, the life and soul of any party and a model of surreptitious benevolence to deserving causes. His public persona is as a sociopath. This is not a trivial matter. The thing which differentiates humans from other animals is their ability to work together. This is a trait bred in us over millennia and requires that the group should discipline itself. Otherwise free riders will be more successful than those who sacrifice their individual interests for those of the group, and altruism will disappear in the face of cheats’ greater success in reproducing their genes. So being concerned about your reputation in the rest of the group is a fundamental human trait. Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, suggests that it is the primary motivation for good behaviour. Robin Dunbar, in Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, suggests that the primary purpose of language is to regulate behaviour by exchanging reports of vice and virtue in others.

The result of this is that people find it disconcerting and repellent, at a subconscious level, if the people they interact with do not seem to care what other people think of them. An important piece of personality is missing. We cannot expect Mr Leung to display a populist touch. Someone who has made a multi-million dollar fortune by dancing in the space between the property developers and the mainland government is obviously not painfully sensitive about what people think of him. Mr Leung’s love affair with the Liaison Office dates back a long time – to long before there was a Liaison Office. He nailed the CCP flag to his mast when the Party’s most recent achievement was the Cultural Revolution. The 30 years of growth came later.

Still Mr Leung could do better if he, or his advisors, remembered that actions speak louder than words. Borrowing the “never mind the human rights, look at the economy” line from our Red Brothers would be all right if lots of Hong Kong people were actually benefitting from the economy. Nobody can object to a leader who wants to concentrate on “livelihood issues”. But Mr Leung’s concentration falls well short of disturbing the vested interests to which he is beholden. He laments the poverty of many elderly people. A sincere attempt to involve this problem would involve a universal pension. That is not what we are going to get. Dismantling the privatisation of the street sweeping industry would have been cheap, appealing and effective. We are not going to get that either. Similarly you don’t score any points for noticing that housing is a mess, though having been on the Executive Council when this mess was made Mr Leung counts as a rather late convert to this view. No doubt the shortage of land for public housing is an important facet of the problem. The solution to it ought to involve concessions from at least one of the three great holders of under-used land in Hong Kong: the PLA, the Jockey Club and the Hong Kong Golf Club. Instead we are going to dislodge a few farmers. This can be turned into a very complicated issue but for people who take a distant view which concentrates on the forest rather than the trees the situation is rather simple. Mr Leung cares, but he doesn’t care enough to tread on any toes in his efforts to do something about it.

I do not think Mr Leung is hated. He is stuck in the same situation as Henry VIII in the Shaffer play, A Man for all Seasons: “There are those like Norfolk who follow me because I wear the crown; and those like Master Cromwell who follow me because they are jackals with sharp teeth and I’m their tiger; there’s a mass that follows me because it follows anything that moves.” Henry yearns for the approval of someone who is known to be honest. If Mr Leung is suffering from similar yearnings he is doing a good job of keeping them to himself.

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I embark on this piece with some trepidation. Some people will say that this is the wrong time to write anything which could be considered critical about the Hong Kong Police. They have come through a difficult period with credit and should be accorded public support. On the other hand one of the things which a difficult period does is to shine a light on trends which in normal times remain obscure. And those of us who like and admire an institution must still recognise that the exploration of a rosier future must start with the identification of current thorns.  Many police people are sincerely devoted to the service of the community. They include some of the most admirable among my former students, the police and journalism being regarded locally as two rival destinations for ladies with lively minds who do not wish to spend their career at a desk. So if this seems critical it is affectionately critical. A struggle is taking place for the soul of the police force which is too important to be left to the force itself or (heaven forbid) its immediate political masters.

Of all the viral videos which clogged our screens during the Umbrella upheaval the one which stuck in my mind was not one of the teargas shots, or the pepper spray, or the occasions when protesters were not perhaps as non-violent as they should have been. It was the occasion when a policeman, visibly unprovoked, took a random unprovoked swipe with his stick at a member of the public in Mong Kok.

As luck would have it I was at a meeting of an animal welfare group the day before this surfaced when the conversation turned to an upcoming visit to Hong Kong by Cesar Millan. Mr Millan is otherwise known as The Dog Whisperer after the television programme of that name in which he reforms psychologically disturbed dogs, often by changing the behavior of their owners. It seems that some dog appreciation groups in Hong Kong will not be entertaining Mr Millan, because they object to one of his training activities: he sometimes hits the dogs. Nobody suggests that he boots them across the room or causes actual injury, but they occasionally get something fairly up-scale in the way of a sharp tap. Most of us agreed that this was perhaps being a mite too purist, given that Mr Millan does deal with some seriously disturbed dogs. Still it is a good principle, recognized by dog helpers generally, that you should not hit them. It does not help.

Fresh from this discussion I was confronted with the now-famous video clip in which a policeman could be seen lashing out at a civilian with that implement which is known as a baton when used by the police or a club when used by criminals. There was no suggestion that the civilian concerned was attacking the police, or indeed disobeying their instructions. It appeared actually that he was doing his best to go in the direction required, hampered only by his efforts to keep himself between his girlfriend and the police. I infer from this that a good deal of laying on of batons or clubs seemed likely, if indeed it had not already taken place.

This was during the disorders in the evening after the clearance of the blockages in Mong Kok. Clearly this was an exciting scene. Under these circumstances it is only to be expected that some participants will regard crowd control as a contact sport. Young men on both sides will get excited and excitement will lead to bad choices, as it often does. But the policeman in the video was not an excited young man. He was in fact, we were afterwards told, a Senior Superintendant. I wondered how it had come about that so senior a person thought it appropriate to treat an ordinary member of the public in a way which would be regarded as controversial if applied to a deranged dog.

The answer is that in some respects we still have a colonial police force. This is not supposed to be insulting, but it reflects an important distinction. Many years ago I heard a short explanation by Sir Robert Mark, who was then a recently retired Commissioner of Police for London, of the differences between police training and military training. The soldier, he said, was taught to be part of a team; the policeman was taught to act alone.

And indeed this is something taken for granted in countries with a well-established rule of law. The policeman is not the representative of an alien authority; he embodies the community’s consensus that the law should be obeyed, and moves in a supportive environment. His key skills are self-reliance and self-control. His primary source of authority is moral. Force is a necessary back-up, not a first resort. Its use in the control of large crowds represents a fracture between the police and the citizenry they serve, and accordingly is to be avoided, and indeed will usually be unnecessary. No doubt times have changed since the legendary 1923 FA Cup final, when the pitch was cleared by a single policeman on a white horse, but the underlying message remains: the policeman acts as an individual and depends first on his moral authority as the personification of society’s consensus on what is acceptable.

The soldier, by contrast, is focused on his immediate surroundings and is supported primarily by his bonds with his team-members. He is sustained, in moments of excitement and danger, not by patriotism or idealism but by the desire to appear as a man among men in his section or fireteam, and not to let his comrades down. The soldier does not need to embody any of his community’s aspirations, and may even not share its nationality. The French Foreign Legion fights for France and the Gurkhas fight for Britain. The recruitment of foreigners to police France or Britain would be unthinkable.  The military spirit infuses a tribal solidarity which in turn validates the use of force against outsiders. This is its purpose.

Colonies come in two types. Those in which the native inhabitants are marginalized or exterminated can import the police habits of the colonisers, whatever they may be. But in those colonies where the indigenous population heavily outnumbers the empire-builders the only option available is a police force run on military lines. The police force, in other words, does not reflect and embody the community’s consensus. The community is subject to alien rule imposed by force. If the police force is recruited locally then its members must be persuaded to transfer their first loyalty to their unit and their colleagues. This is what military training achieves as a matter of course.

And this is I fear the way the Hong Kong police force still works. Indeed some of its members take a pride in the fact that it is still a paramilitary force, without giving much thought to whether a paramilitary force is appropriate and desirable in a sophisticated modern city. Its training is military (lots of buzzcuts, strenuous exercise, footdrill and firearms training), its tactics are military (shoulder to shoulder lines with the ranged weapons behind; if the officers were on horseback it could be an 18^th century battlefield), and its mindset is military: we are us and they are the enemy.  The resulting mutual loyalty is an engaging feature but it is achieved at the expense of the force’s bonds with the rest of us. The public are not a client to be served but a problem to be solved. “Order” is the objective. Its usual companion in cliche, “law and…” is not mentioned.

This is perhaps not a good time to be looking critically at our police force. But moments of stress reveal problems which are otherwise latent and invisible. Why is tear gas a first resort and police negotiators only appear on the morning after? Why, 17 years after the handover, do police stations still have little turrets on them? Why is the standard patrol in my peaceful part of the world six (six!) officers in a LandRover? Why does the Commissioner of Police think “sorry” is a four-letter word? How can we convince this fine body of men and woman that they are not the Seventh Cavalry and we are not the Sioux?

Under the public surface of the Force I suppose these matters are actually being debated. Do they wish to be a police service or a gendarmerie? But this is not a matter of import only to police people. The public has a right to voice in the matter and I suspect their preferences would be clear.

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I don’t know which is more worrying: the signs that the Hong Kong government has no idea what to do next or the signs that our Mainland masters are devoting much thought to the topic. Our local leaders marked the end of their ordeal in two ways: Mr C.Y. Leung made a rare public appearance to “announce the end of the occupation” as one newspaper put it, though why he should pronounce the end of something he did not start and did not finish was beyond me. The other sign of normal service being resumed was an appearance by the Commissioner of Police, who was considered too inflammable for public consumption while the excitement was in progress. Apart from those two we had some suggestion from the Secretary for Enriching the Real Estate Industry that his constituents should be unleashed on the country parks, and a lot of touchy-feely stuff about the need to heal wounds, cultivate consensus and pursue the art of compromise. But the underlying theme seems to be that the whole thing was a bad dream and the Establishment will now continue as before.

Meanwhile over the border there is a more determined approach. There was a meeting in Macau last week of a thing called the Chinese Association of Macau and Hong Kong Studies, founded last year and described by our local Pravda as a semi-official think tank. This is a thoroughly misleading label. Nothing in the PRC is semi-official and independent “think” of any kind is strongly discouraged. The association is a conduit through which the wisdom of the leadership is conveyed to academics who may be tempted to write about Hong Kong or Macau.

The wisdom on this occasion was supplied by one Zhang Rongshun, who is (I quote) “vice chairman of the legislative affairs commission under the National People’s Congress Standing Committee”. A man with a big business card, then. Mr Zhang thinks that Hong Kong needs “re-enlightenment” to improve citizens understanding of “one country two systems”. He also thought the latter principle might “evolve” with time. Goodness knows it has evolved already. Some Hong Kong writers found “re-enlightenment” rather an ominous prospect. It sounds a bit like “re-education”, the Mainland euphemism for imprisonment without trial.  The prospect was further darkened by another official observation that “work” was needed on some particular sectors, including the Legislative Council, the media, the universities, and perhaps secondary schools.

I suppose this portends at least a barrage of “soft power” – a stream of visits from performers, sportsmen, astronauts and … if we’re really unlucky … people like Mr Zhang. There will be renewed efforts to boost “patriotic education”. More public money will be poured into dubious enterprises like the local organisation devoted to teaching youngsters how to raise and lower the national flag. Raising and lowering the flag is on the syllabus of every Cub Scout pack and it can be taught in one hour flat. I used to do this. Most of that time is spent on some tricky folding and rope work which is not used in Chinese style flag-raising anyway. The organisation devoted to promulgating this art in local schools is just a way of putting the government money-teat in the mouths of ardent leftists.

But I fear we will also see more use of the black arts. Some of the “sensitive sectors” identified will be treated to some kind of purge. There will be behind-the-scenes efforts to discredit or demote people who are not seen as having an enlightened view of one country two systems. Many people have complained in the last ten weeks about the shortage of identifiable leaders for the Umbrella movement. It is not surprising that the movement is short of leaders when you consider what is likely to happen to them. Their computers will be hacked, their phones tapped, their businesses blacklisted and their home visit permits revoked. Their backgrounds will be scoured for discreditable information and the occasional one will be attacked in the street to discourage the others. We will all pretend that these occurrences are a complete mystery, perhaps to be put down to amorous indiscretions or unpaid debts. This is willful blindness. The mainland government is accustomed to spending more on internal security than it does on defence. Bearing in mind the absence in the internal security bill of expensive toys like battle tanks or aircraft carriers, this translates into a lot of bodies and there is no reason to doubt that many of them are now enjoying the delights of living and working in Hong Kong.

So just in case my name comes up somewhere let me save you guys some shopping time. There is nothing interesting in my computer; the movies are mostly paid for and all legal in their countries of origin. There are some unpublished columns but as they were rejected by the China Daily you will already have copies of them. I have been married to the same woman for more than 30 years and have no mistress. I have a lengthy criminal record comprising speeding, parking, failing to stop for a red light, driving down a bus-only lane and crossing a double white line. Not all at the same time. My house is 30 years old and I expect some of the changes made during that period were unauthorised. They are, however, less numerous than Mr Leung’s so you won’t be able to do much with that. I have never worked for any government though I did once apply, without success, for a job teaching history at the Royal Naval College. I have nothing to do with the  British Consulate; they do not even send me a Christmas card. I am not on the payroll of the CIA. I don’t know why they are discriminating against me. I may have said something rude about George Bush.

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One of the irritating habits of Marxist ideologues, which I remember from my distant days as a student politician, was their insistence that they knew what you wanted and why better than you did. You might suppose that you were calling for some particular reform. This was a delusion; “objectively” you were supporting the oppression of the workers by suggesting that their plight could be alleviated by something short of revolution. You might suppose that you were opposing the Vietnam War, which was a big issue in those days, but actually you were a “bourgeois pacifist” who had fallen short of the correct position, which was “principled solidarity with the Viet Cong.”

In its mainland version this syndrome frequently extends to insisting that your real intentions were different from the stated ones, coupled with a refusal to explain what those intentions were, because you already really know that. This is a difficult argument to deal with, particularly on the mainland itself, where it is usually followed by a lengthy prison sentence.

Now if we look carefully at Occupy Central, or the umbrella movement, whatever you want to call it, some things are clear to most observers. The immediate objection of the protesters is to the arrangements for the next C.E. election, which are basically that instead of fixing the vote our imperial rulers will fix the nomination. This is not an improvement on the existing arrangements and not what we were led to expect. Behind this immediate cause is disgust with a society arranged for the benefit of a few rich families and run by a curious alliance between them and the Stalinist regime in Beijing. Among the distressing results of this is the increasing poverty of most Hong Kong families and the distressing prospect facing local 20-year-old men that by the time they can afford a home their girlfriends will be too old to have babies. It is indisputably a rather disorganised movement so there is room for dispute about how much particular parts of this picture motivate particular participants. But for those of us who have no interest in either changing the electoral arrangements or disputing the hegemony of the Real Estate Developers Association there is a simpler solution. The umbrella people must be aiming for something else.

The crude version of this, designed for the Robert Chow Supporters Club, was that the whole thing was a result of devious foreigners funneling money to local subversives. For a while we were offered a smoking gun in the shape of some Washington foundation — apparently enjoying the blessing and possibly the money of the US government —   which had been supporting the local democrats. Then it turned out that the same foundation had been supporting the DAB. So the foreign plot story has subsided.

The replacement was wheeled out on the back page of Sunday’s Post by Regina Ip. This is the thoughtful, well-spoken, up-market, Harvard-educated version of the latest conspiracy theory, which is that what the students “really” want is independence from China. Ms Ip has a rather different view of the whole matter from most of us. Occupy Central has, in her recollection, erupted in a “ferocious manner” (all those nasty injuries caused by protesters throwing themselves onto police clubs) causing “damage to the economy, cleavages in family and society and a body blow to Hong Kong’s reputation as a safe and law-abiding city”.  Well the cleavages are a matter for argument, the body blow is disputable, and the damage to the economy is imaginary. But let that pass. “Among former senior officials,” we are told, “a view has emerged that Occupy was inevitable.” And this is because the protest was “not really about democracy”.

Evidence? “In the past year, in several editions of Undergrad, the official publication of the University of Hong Kong Students’ union, contributors have advocated ‘self-determination’ by members of the ‘Hong Kong race'”. At this point my mind reels. Are all these “former senior officials” regular readers of Undergrad? As someone who used to supervise a student newspaper which was a course requirement, I also wonder how many times this official publication comes out. Last issue was last May, according to the website. The one before that was the previous May. So there haven’t been “several editions”. And that’s it, on the strength of this flimsy observation (can it not be, one wonders, that Undergrad occasionally prints pieces which are not approved student union policy?) Ms Ip leaps straight to the conclusion that “the Occupy demonstrators are effectively saying no to China’s sovereignty over Hong Kong.” Further bilge follows, to the effect that an ungrateful child is spurning a loving parent … the usual stuff.

But we should not put up with this. The Joint Declaration promised “a high degree of autonomy”. Clearly it was at that time recognised on all sides that autonomy was not an on-off switch. One might have a high degree of autonomy or a low degree of autonomy or various degrees in between. Given this, it is entirely to be expected and accepted that there will be disagreements over whether the degree of autonomy currently being conceded is high enough. Accusing people who want more autonomy of wanting complete independence is just a way of giving a dog a bad name before hanging it. One might as well accuse Ms Ip of wanting complete subservience to the will of Chinese officials. A charge for which this particular article provides a good deal of supporting evidence.

Observers of this scene may feel that Hong Kongers, or at least those who manage to get their views into the South China Morning Post, are making heavy weather of a rather simple situation. China is no longer an impoverished nasty police state. It is now a moderately rich nasty police state. But it is still a nasty police state, so of course people who have any choice want as little to do with it as possible. There is no such thing as a “Hong Kong race”. Nor is there an indulgent motherland on which political decisions are made by benevolent Confucian sages.  People identify with institutions which work for them. The question raised by Occupy is whether the Hong Kong government is in that category. Every time Ms Ip takes up her pen she manages to suggest that the answer is no.

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It is difficult to sustain one’s usual optimism about the future of Hong Kong as you watch our leaders clinging stubbornly to their delusions. It is now a well-established conviction among establishment types that the Occupy wave is receding, that the population has returned to its accustomed loyalties, and that in a few weeks when the last tents have been removed from the last highway, everything will be as it was before. This has reached a telling point where the Chief Secretary offered further talks on the government’s preferred basis – that all significant points have been conceded in its favour in advance. This is now regarded as magnanimous.

This is a dangerous error. So it is perhaps worth making a few points:

The fact that 80 per cent of the population now thinks the occupations should end does not mean that having weighed up all the circumstances they think the occupations should never have started, still less that they support the government’s stand on the usual issues. Most of them, in fact, are broadly sympathetic souls who wish the protestors well and think this particular tactic has run its course. They understand and share the underlying feeling of the whole movement that a government answerable only to local millionaires and a distant despot cannot meet the needs of a sophisticated modern city.

It is a commonplace of social movements that in the first instance they are led by someone or some people who urge the superior effectiveness of asking nicely for what you want. If this does not work, then such leaders are likely to be elbowed aside by people who wish to ask less nicely. There are signs of this happening already.

The rule of law and a minibus company are an incongruous combination. Another quote from the much-quoted Lord Bingham: “litigation does not, on the whole, lead to happiness.”

Large numbers of young people are now perhaps too frustrated and exhausted to go on sleeping in the streets. After a few days or weeks back home they will be less exhausted, but more frustrated. Young minds will then turn to other ways of making their point by disturbing the peace. It is not for me to put ideas into people’s heads, but 10,000 determined and disciplined activists could certainly do things which would make our leaders wish they had encouraged the street sleepers to stay put.

The government’s Legco puppets went to a lot of trouble to discourage any possible repetition of the “by-election as referendum” tactic. This now looks a mistake. Legislators of a democratic disposition will of course wish to be seen as dedicated to the cause for which the on-street amateurs have given so much. If this wish is deprived of one obvious means of expression it will resort to others which may be less welcome.

This generation of students, like every other one, has in its turn to make the disillusioning discovery that some honorable members are not honorable, that some Justices are not just, and that many senior civil servants are happy Quislings who would with equal willingness have served Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin or Mao Zedong.  But the generation which has grown up since the handover has had to get its head round the fact that they were surrounded by lies: that the handover had ushered in a new era of happiness and prosperity, that our motherland loved us, that Hong Kong was governed by its people, that its leaders were popular, that its elections were fair, that the law was no respecter of persons, that diligence and intelligence would be rewarded and that there was some hope of you buying a flat to live in before your girlfriend was too old to have babies. They have discovered their dissatisfaction and they have discovered their power, to embarrass if not to force changes. These discoveries cannot be undone. As the great military theorist Clausewitz put it in a rather different context, it is difficult to restore limits which consisted mainly of ignorance of what was possible.

In short, re-opening the streets is a tactic. Strategy requires reform and the redress of grievances. Instead we have a government two senior members of which — the Chief Secretary and Chief Policeman — are now considered too provocative to be displayed in public. O tempora o mores.

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You know the rule of law is in a bad way when the Secretary for Justice starts making it up as he goes along. Newspaper readers this morning were regaled with the news that the police would be justified in helping bailiffs to clear occupiers because refusal to comply with a civil court injunction was a “collateral criminal act in contravention of the rule of law”. Which is, with the deepest respect, nonsense. It is a fine example of the BBB (Bullshit which Baffles Brains) intended to excavate the government from a hole of its own making. Contravention of the rule of law is not an offence. Failing to comply with a civil court injunction is not an offence until certain formalities which are still in progress have been completed. Outsourcing the clearance of the occupiers to a few loony lefties working on a private basis was a stupid idea in the first place. Reintroducing the police in this way will place everyone on the street in an impossible position, including the policemen.

But a lot of people have been making it up as they go along lately. We will pass quickly by the limp explanation provided by Superintendent Teargas (real name still an official secret) for his actions on the first night, though it is still being recycled. Kindness also requires us to linger only briefly on Mr Grenville Cross’s latest output, which ended an unblemished record of courtly legal discourse with a burst of venomous partisanship. Mr Cross asserts that the reason the NPC Standing Committee was so uncongenial in designing our future electoral system was the rejection of Article 12 legislation in 2003, which is unprovable, to say the least. The suggestion that some people wanted the police officers who were allegedly seen on television beating up a civilian to be hung, drawn and quartered was an exaggeration. And if Mr Cross looks up a standard textbook on media law he will find that if, as he concedes, the policemen had “not even been charged with an offence” then it was perfectly within the “legal niceties” for concerned citizens to urge that charges should be brought.

I shall also not discuss in detail Ms Regina Ip’s claim that the present arrangements for electing Legco conform to international standards. This was so obviously wrong that I thought it must have been a misprint. But no correction has appeared. Perhaps Harvard University should consider asking for its degree back.

For fiction dressed as fact, though, Felix Chung is in a class of his own. Mr Chung is a vice chairman of the Liberal Party and a Legislative Councillor. He is also extraordinarily gullible. In an article called “Internal damage” which called, as so many do, for an end to the occupation, Mr Chung cited figures which had apparently emerged from a meeting of the Commerce and Economic Development Bureau with sundry commerce and trade associations. Some of the items reported were difficult to check. Some of them should have aroused suspicion. A survey conducted by a business association, for example, found that the majority of SMEs had been either affected or severely affected by the occupations. More than 60 per cent said their turnover had dropped by 40 per cent or more. The Federation of Hong Kong, Kowloon and New Territories Hawkers’ Associations reported a drop in business for their members of 70 per cent!

Now let us compare these horror stories with a few numbers. The majority of Hong Kong’s population, including me, lives in the New Territories. They have not been in the slightest affected by the occupations, which have involved a large piece of Central and small pieces of Causeway Bay and Mong Kok. A further large slab of the population lives in the belt of North Kowloon running across from Tsuen Wan to Cheung Kwan O. They have probably visited the Mong Kok site to see what was going on but have not been prevented from buying what they want to buy in any way. Shops and hawkers of the SME kind are not selling Italian handbags or expensive perfumes whose sales might suffer from the erosion of the buying mood. They are selling food and clothes which people need on a regular basis. It appears that one of two things has happened here. Either the business associations lied fluently in an effort to tell the Commerce and Economic Development Bureau what it wanted to hear. Or some important details were missed out when their complaints were passed on. Either way if Mr Fung was not blinded by partisanship or stupidity he should have smelled a rat.

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Not funny as in humourous, funny as in weird. Reading some of the things written about the injunctions to clear occupied spots and the failure of protesters to comply, one is transported to a strange world. I realise that to lawyers as a matter of professional faith and indeed professional self-preservation the orders of judges are something to be taken extremely seriously. On the other hand to see failure to comply with an order from a civil court as marking the end of rule of law seems somewhat lacking in common sense. People disobey the law all the time. Our CE has illegal structures, our business potentates double park in Central, our Department of Justice fails to enforce laws which might affect its friends in the media business, and so on. The stress on the injunctions also seems to rely on a certain amnesia.

People have been saying for months that Occupy Central would be illegal if it happened. Indeed the more lurid left-wing writers maintained that even arguing – never mind demonstrating – for public nomination was illegal because there was no such thing in the Basic Law. When the occupation started there were further complaints that it was illegal, and if there was any remaining doubt the occupiers were sprayed with noxious chemicals by the police violence, I beg your pardon force. So the occupation has always been illegal. Illegality is an on-off sort of thing. An action is either legal or it is not. If it is illegal then a ruling by a judge cannot make it more illegal. Or so, I am sure, the protester in the street believes.

Actually there is already a lingering whiff of injustice about this injunction business. The first injunctions were supplied without any attempt to hear arguments from those who were present and eager to oppose them. When they were renewed there was again “no time” to hear the other side. Is there an argument for the other side? It seems to me that there certainly is.

Consider: the public roads are built, owned and managed by the Hong Kong SAR Government. From time to time some of these roads are closed for a variety of purposes: road works, fairs, firework displays, New Year’s Eve, processions, to add security to international conferences and so on. Now if you are a bus company which is inconvenienced by road works you do not seek an injunction against the company that is digging the hole. You seek an injunction against the government. Of course the government did not organise the Occupy Central movement. But it has sufficient physical force to remove the protesters if it really wants to. The fact that they are still in occupation is the result of a political decision: that the political costs of a display of state violence sufficient to empty the streets would be unacceptable. Whether you agree with that decision or not it is clearly a decision which can and should be made by the government, and not by a bus company or a judge. Whether it clears the demonstrators or not the government remains the authority in charge of roads and complaints of inconvenience should be laid on its doorstep. This is a political matter, not a legal one, and a legalistic approach is likely to be politically unhelpful.

The rule of law is important. But it requires that the law should know its limits. There are some matters which are not amenable to purely legal solutions. Judges traipse in political minefields at their peril – and ours.

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