tim's experiment

You know, to paraphrase Dirty Harry, with all that excitement I have plumb forgotten the number of Lufsig’s illegal structures. What was the number of unauthorized adornments Chez Leung? Was it, as the old song has it, 12 for the 12 apostles, 11 for the 11 who went to heaven, or 10 for the 10 commandments? Whatever the number was, it was too many for a man to subsequently stand up and pontificate publicly about the importance of obeying the law. Mr C.Y. Leung knows perfectly well that there is a compromise between obeying the law and not obeying the law: the one he used himself. You disobey the law until it becomes publicly known and an electoral liability, then you obey and perpetrate a cock and bull story about your “mistake”. Michael Chugani’s hyper-sensitive hypocrisy detector must be ringing all its bells at this point. Whether that produces any published results remains to be seen.

Another man with numbers problems is my old friend Robert Chow Yung. The point which he seems to have overlooked is that comparing one number with another number only works if both the numbers were collected the same way. Farmer Giles says he has 200 animals on his farm: 50 cows, 50 sheep and 100 chickens. Farmer Jones responds that he has 2000 animals on his farm: 50 cows, 50 sheep and 1,900 cockroaches. Clearly it would be foolish to conclude from this exchange that Farmer Jones is in some way in the lead. But Mr Chow just cannot resist counting the cockroaches. I do not know whether more people support Occupy Central or the Campaign for Peace, Silent Majority … whatever it calls itself this week. I do know that no useful conclusions can be drawn by comparing the number of people who participated in the “plebiscite” and the number of people who participated in the “petition”, because the conditions under which names were collected were quite different. Mr Chow’s lot were willing to accommodate tourists, children, and people who wanted to “vote early and vote often”, as they used to say.  This produces a higher number at the cost of making comparisons impossible.

The same goes for today’s march. Numbers of marchers on these occasions are notoriously difficult to establish and even more difficult to interpret. But whatever number we eventually accept it cannot be usefully compared with the turn-out on June 4 or any other date, because on those earlier occasions the number was not affected by shameless offerings of bus rides, museum visits, lunch boxes or free post-protest dinners.  We do not need to explore the possibility of undue pressure being exerted by employers, or offers of actual cash: what is readily admitted is enough to prevent this event from being compared usefully with others in which bribery was not on display.

Still on numbers of people at protests we come to the curious aftermath of the pro-p0lice demonstration the other week. All these years we have supposed that the police were politically neutral, and the reason why their estimates of numbers were always much lower than those provided by organizers of the event concerned was something entirely innocent: maybe the police counting method was more conservative. But after the pro-police demonstration the normal order of events was reversed. The police number was about twice as big as the one offered by the organizers. This was a small demonstration – the organizers’ figure was 2,000 and something – so there is a desperate shortage of innocent explanations for this. It seems that the police figures are just wild guesses like everyone else’s, and like everyone else the police tend to see what they want to see.

Finally we come to the week’s most surprising number, the majority for a vote of no confidence in the chairman of the Law Society. This was followed in all channels by the information that the rules of the Law Society do not require a chairman to resign if a vote of no confidence is passed. This brings to mind the story, for which I am indebted to Bernard Levin, of the domestic helper who came home one day to find an alligator in the bath. She resigned, explaining that “I cannot work in a house with alligators. I did not mention it because I did not think it would come up.” I am sure the drafters of the rules of the Law Society never considered the question of what would happen if a motion of no confidence in the chairman was passed. They assumed that the chairman, as any gentleman would, would resign. Off you go, Ambrose.

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I am sure Grenville Cross, SC, honorary Law prof at HKU, and a former Director of Public Prosecutions, is a nice man. I do not doubt that he is an agile lawyer, kind to children and dogs, and so on. His besetting problem is the inability to foresee how the stuff he puts out will be interpreted and understood by people taking a different point of view.

This is a rather roundabout way of approaching his piece in the Post last week about Deferred Prosecution Agreements – or DPAs – which he urged the Law Reform Commission to introduce into Hong Kong as soon as possible. A DPA is a euphemism for an arrangement in which the prosecution agrees to drop its case if the defendant coughs up a large sum of money. It was invented in the USA where many regulatory bodies are under pressure to produce enough income in fines to cover their running costs, and a bit extra to counter the argument that their activities are a waste of money. Mr Cross’s version has some restrictions not applied in other places – it would only be applicable to “corporate entities” for example – and comes festooned with elegant curlicues about considering the company’s efforts to comply with the law and the effect on employees and shareholders. But basically what it comes down to is that if you are charged with a complicated commercial crime you can buy off the prosecutor.

Understandably Mr Cross made no mention of the most conspicuous recent example, the dropping of the prosecution of Bernie Ecclestone – who is effectively the owner of Formula One and was accused of bribing a banker – in return for a payment of US$100 million. Nor did he mention the most conspicuous temptation attached to the arrangement from the prosecutor’s point of view – that it can be counted as a “win” without entailing the uncertainties of an actual trial and its risk of a humiliating outcome.  Complex commercial cases are a bit of a lottery. How much nicer just to have the whole thing sorted out privately between the lawyers.

The objection to this sort of thing is that it is not the way the law is supposed to work. If you are arrested in some Asian countries it is customary to offer to “pay the fine now”. This works just like a DPA. No trial takes place; no criminal conviction is recorded; the policeman collects the contents of your wallet. The objections to the procedure are obvious. Not least is the danger that the policeman may arrest people on flimsy grounds in the hope that they will “pay the fine now” and enrich him.

The law, according to an ancient dictum, is no respecter of persons. We are all supposed to be treated alike. In practice this is a hope rather than a fact. As Anatole France put it, “in its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.”  Protesting your innocence, moreover, can be expensive. According to legend there was a courthouse in Ireland which dispensed with the usual statue of a blind lady with a sword in one hand and scales in the other; instead it had a cow with one man pulling it forward by the horns, one pulling it back by the tail, and a lawyer milking it. Still, we do our best. And one of the ways we do our best is to avoid as far as possible the introduction of legal loopholes which are only available to rich defendants with expensive lawyers.

A “corporate entity” is, when you come down to it, a joint enterprise by a number of people. It doesn’t spring into existence miraculously. It has founders, owners and managers. Generally speaking you have to be rich to be one of them. The fact that they may be inconvenienced or impoverished if the company is prosecuted is not an unfortunate by-product; it is the object of the exercise. Those who give the company life and action are responsible for its behaviour. They are not innocent by-standers.

And there is a flagrant double standard here. If you rob a bank the prosecution will not offer you the option of going to prison for a few years, no conviction recorded, no trial… But if the bank robs you that is precisely the offer which prosecutors will make, modified only by the fact that as the bank cannot go to prison the punishment will be a fine.  The whole arrangement reeks of class privilege. Prison is for oiks and lesser breeds. Gentlemen who err should be allowed to sort it out privately with other gentlemen who went to the same university.

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Strange feeling of daja vu while I was reading Michael Chugani’s column this morning. Mr Chugani was complaining, with some justice, that the complaints about “white terror” from democrat enthusiasts seemed a bit overblown. Three of them had received razor blades through the mail. Mr Chugani thought this was pushing the language a bit, and so perhaps it is. Certainly I had read somewhere that someone else thought the same thing.
Then the penny dropped. Mr Chugani’s supporter of the day before was … Mr Chugani. In his column in the Standard, “Brush up your English” Mr Chugani had claimed that the word had been misused, gave some examples of correct use, castigated one of the razor blade recipients and finished up with an attack on Mrs Anson Chan. Well if you can’t agree with yourself, how can you expect anyone else to?
I do not question the merits, or the ethics, of using the same idea for columns in two competing newspapers. Freelancers do this all the time, I understand. Nor do I question Mr Chugani’s right to exercise his critical faculties mainly on language use by the pro-democracy camp. Mr Chugani’s feelings about democracy look increasingly like the average Hongkong millionaire’s feelings about marital fidelity: he’s vocally in favour of it but unwilling to take any practical action to bring it about.
What I do question is whether it is acceptable, in a column aimed mainly at people wishing to improve their English, to provide instead a piece of flagrant political propaganda. If Mr Chugani found a school teacher of English urging his students to Occupy Central he would be outraged.
There are two other dangers to this. One is that the unwary reader may be hoodwinked into supposing that linguistic virtue and political virtue are the same thing, which is clearly nonsense. The second is that elementary linguistic points may be overlooked in the rush to make a political point. White terror should not properly be used for attempts to victimise pro-democrats, not because the attempts are not very serious, but because white terror is only white if it is instigated by or on behalf of conservative or reactionary regimes. The correct term for terror inflicted by communist parties, governments and their supporters is “red terror”. There are plenty of Chinese examples, which Mr Chugani will no doubt get round to next week.

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I would like to know what has happened to all those commentators who were so eager to pick holes in the methodology of the Occupy Central referendum, and indeed before that in the methodology of the Hong Kong University’s Public Opinion project.  Occupy Central was a particularly popular target. A person who cared to buy a second phone card specially for the purpose could, horror of horrors, vote twice. Foreigners who had Hong Kong ID cards could vote. Dark suspicions were fostered. Lau Nai-keung dismissed the whole exercise as obviously fraudulent because the number of participants was so high.

Now we have the Silent Majority, alias the Alliance for Peace and Democracy, both of which seem to consist of Mr Robert Chow and a large pile of someone else’s money. Their signature campaign has passed muster with all those picky types who thought the Occupy Central people were not being careful enough. Mr Chow openly boasted that he thought tourists and children should be perfectly entitled to sign up. Precautions against duplicate signing were non-existent. Employers were invited to distribute signature forms to their staff, a gesture which could easily be misinterpreted. As Mr Chow’s claimed total passed the 900,000 mark I waited patiently, but in vain, for Mr Lau to dismiss it as too big to be convincing. I have written a letter to the Post pointing out that Mr Chow is about 3 million signatures short of his claimed world record, but whether it will see print remains to be seen.

Meanwhile down at HKU they announced that Lufsig’s approval rating had improved. And surprise surprise nobody wished to examine the detailed results or question the methodology of the survey. Clearly there are a lot of people around whose views on matters of this kind generally depend mainly on whether the item under consideration coincides with the current Liaison Office line.

This brings me to Mr Michael Chugani, who announced at the end of his latest diatribe against the democrats that his commitment to democracy was beyond question because he had called for it before the handover. This is not how it works, Michael. Before the hand-over calling for democracy was an entirely cost-free activity. Indeed as the great day approached some of the more paranoid PRC people thought the Hong Kong government was encouraging it. Calling for democracy now, on the other hand, is thoroughly unpopular with a wide range of usual suspects including the management of the Post and ATV. People who work for either organisation or both should accept that the pay cheque has some intangible costs attached to it.

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What has got into Regina Ip? Rather good piece on the back of the Post spoiled by a resounding piece of language abuse at the beginning. Ms Ip said that an “atmosphere of violence” had set in and was poisoning the atmosphere in our city. She then proceeded to list the symptoms, none of which actually involved violence.

We were offered five sentences starting “Violence in the form of…”, followed by one beginning “Also, violence in the form of…” If we may abbreviate this stirring piece of writing a bit, the forms of violence bothering Ms Ip are:

1. Calls for a peaceful occupation of Central.

2. “Extreme positions” on the method of electing the Chief Executive.

3. Filibustering in Legco.

4. Attempts by young radicals to storm the Legco building.

5. Verbal abuse of mainlanders.

6. And also … students insulting the guest of honour (the Chief Secretary) at an APA graduation day.

Now many of us may be hard put to provide a dictionary definition of “violence”, but we know it when we see it and we are not looking at it here. Calling for an occupation of Central, violent or otherwise, is not violence. It is speech. Positions on the methods of electing the chief executive, whether extreme or held obstinately or not, are opinions. They are not violence. Filibustering is purely verbal phenomenon, as are unkind comments on mainlanders. There is nothing violent about turning your back on the person awarding your degree if you find your institution has appointed to its highest post a politician you despise. The storming of the Legco building sounds more promising, though violence against buildings hardly justifies the attempt to identify a new atmosphere.

So what is violence? Violence is Loving Hongkong thugs turning up at other people’s demonstrations in the hope of starting a fight. Violence is chopper-wielding assailants attacking newspaper editors. Violence is policemen pepper-spraying children in moments of excitement. None of these items appeared in Ms Ip’s list, oddly enough. So it appears that basically for the purposes of her piece “violence” is just a word you attach to people you disapprove of. I suppose this is the sort of linguistic manipulation they teach you at Harvard.

A more sophisticated version of the same thing comes near the end of Ms Ip’s piece, after a rather good tour of current discontents about the wealth gap, real estate hegemony, and education. The argument over CE elections, we are told, is whether “we are willing to support the national goal of safe-guarding sovereignty, security and developmental interest, or insist on going the other way.” And what exactly is “the other way?” Are those of us who would like genuine elections really (objectively?) against sovereignty and in favour of insecurity? Does Ms Ip suppose that any method of choosing our CE which gives people a genuine voice in the matter will imperil national sovereignty? The national sovereignty of the UK is not endangered when the Mayor of London is elected by the people of London. The US does not wilt when State Governors are elected by the people of the states concerned, without the candidates being vetted by the Federal government. India and Japan have local elections free from manipulation by the central authorities. And what has security got to do with it? I hope Ms Ip is not the source of those paranoid fantasies with which the China Daily entertains its readers, in which malign foreign interests are constantly scheming to subvert Hong Kong. The truth is less exciting. Overseas countries do not care about Hong Kong. When people overseas hear about Hong Kong, most of them think it is in Japan.

And what, I wonder does Ms Ip have in mind by “developmental interest”? This looks suspiciously like “the interests of developers”. Well I suppose we can all agree we’re not in favour of that.

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Look people I no longer expect to get a publication which could be mistaken for one of the world’s great newspapers, but can we please avoid decisions so crass that they spoil the day.

The back page of the Sunday Post is usually a pleasant read. At the top is a long thoughtful piece which manages to be a bit different from the daily stuff. Sometimes we get Regina complaining that all her Exco colleagues are dumb. This week it is Philip Bowring, who is original and interesting, as usual. Across the middle we have a decorative string of pictures recalling the events of the week. Down the middle column we have “quotes of the week”, which vary for the good reason that is some weeks good quotes are plentiful and in others they are thin on the ground. Bottom right this week we have a piece on the mainland media by Cary Huang, which explores changing attitudes to eating dogs. Good reading so far.

This brings is to the bottom left corner, where there is a piece which exemplifies the continuing merits of newsprint. When you read a piece like this you can throw the newspaper away in despair — not something you would wish to do with your iPad. The offending item is a piece by one Amy Feldman — no details of her provenance supplied — about the problems of selling silver cutlery. Eh?

It seems in the 50s, way back where Ms Feldman comes from, married couples were often given a box of knives, forks etc, in Sterling silver. This is silver adulterated with enough other metals to make it strong enough to cut a potato and hold an edge. I presume Ms Feldman comes from the USA. Indeed readers of The Help (excellent book by Katheryn Stockett – read it if you get the chance) will suspect that Ms Feldman comes from the part of the USA where domestic help was available on terms barely distinguishable from slavery. Because Sterling silverware, especially in fancy shapes, takes a lot of cleaning.

Ms Feldman’s parents were among the lucky recipients and now wished to dispose of the present. Ms Feldman goes on for 22 paragraphs on the ins and outs of disposing of silver cutlery, before coming to the unsurprising conclusion that selling it to a scrap merchant works quite well. And the question which arises is: who cares?

I suppose something like three quarters of the Post’s readership regard knives and forks as something you come across in Western restaurants. Many of the rest are not American, or are American but do not have parents who were married in the 50s, or have parents who did not get the present, or have parents who wish to keep it. In fact my guess is that the number of people in Hong Kong who might have a personal interest in this topic is probably in single digits. The management of the newspaper should apologize to the tree which was sacrificed for this meaningless piece of non-journalism. I do not blame Ms Feldman. No doubt there is a publication somewhere where this item fits in perfectly. It just isn’t in Hong Kong.

I am left to wonder what further editorial brainwaves we can look forward to:

Cooking: Ten nifty things you can do with left-over yak milk

Pets: what to feed your pregnant lama

Fashion: What the well-dressed reindeer herder is wearing this year

Homemaking: Pimp your igloo!

Time: Obsolete wind-up watches you can buy for half a million bucks

Oh, sorry. That last one is already a regular feature in the Magazine

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The so-called Silent Majority, which is neither silent nor a majority, has made a video, which is circulating in the usual internet places. This is a lavish production, complete with animations and computer graphics, dedicated to the idea that Occupy Central with Peace and Love will bring Hong Kong to a standstill in a matter of hours. It’s called “They can kill this city”, runs four minutes and describes itself as “a Silent Majority production”. It is palpable nonsense. It is distressing to hear, in the English-language voice-over, the unmistakable tones of Mr Robert Chow Yung, for many years regarded as an honest journalist. The whole thing is a tribute to the generosity of the unseen millionaire who has financed this sordid enterprise from the beginning, and his willingness to pay people to lie on his behalf.

The facts about Occupy Central go like this. The plan ostensibly is to have 10,000 people turn up in Central, there to sit in the road. Peace and Love being on the menu, active interference with passers-by is not intended. This is a lot of people – the equivalent of a small Infantry Division or a large Battalion in a continental army – and would normally require a further force of hundreds to provide its needs for food, drink, sanitation etc. I suppose the organisers are going to avoid this logistic Matterhorn and expect their supporters to supply themselves, thereby gratifying those Chambers of Commerce who object to the whole idea on the grounds that it will be bad for the business of restaurants and pavement hawkers. This suggests that the 10,000 figure should be regarded as an aspiration for peak hours rather than an on-going prediction. Probably in the small hours of the morning the remaining protesters will be outnumbered by the police.

However for the purposes of the Instant Death video we shall ignore this, because their thesis is that fatal territory-wide blockage will occurr in a matter of hours, if not minutes. Let us note, firstly, that a complete blockage of traffic through Central is not going to happen. If we have 10,000 people sitting in the road they will occupy – give or take a bit – 10,000 square yards. This means that they will occupy a square 100 yards on each side, or some distortion of that basic shape. A crowd derives its strength from the consciousness of its own numbers, so we are not going to have little knots of protesters scattered here and there. We shall have one more or less cohesive lump. If it is 400 yards long it will be only 25 yards wide. At this point blockages can be cleared rather easily by small numbers of arrests so that is probably as thin on the ground as the demonstrators can afford to get. If you look at a map of Central you can see basically three East-West routes. One of these is Connaught Road, a six-lane monstrosity which would be a difficult target by itself. The Instant Death video seems to expect that the main target will be Des Voeux Road, because is has stalled trams in the picture. But this would not be very effective unless the blockage was accomplished at its junction with Queen’s Road Central, which would otherwise provide a convenient by-pass. But in that case (the Google map has a convenient scale in the bottom-right corner) even including Chater Road would be a stretch and doing anything serious to Connaught Road would be out of the question. Looking at the map one also observes that people who wish to go round Central without visiting it can detour via the mid-levels or the new Central reclamation. The point of all this is not to deny that the occupation of Central could cause a great deal of inconvenience. But it reveals as a stupid attempt to deceive the public the notion that within an hour or so of the demonstration beginning there will be queues of people waiting to get to Central blocking the Western and Causeway Bay tunnel entrances. Traffic will get through, albeit slowly. In any case, the arrival of a queue at a tunnel exit does not mean, as the video script puts it, that we have “lost the tunnel”. The other half of the tunnel is still perfectly functional. The part going to Hong Kong Island may have problems. There is often a hold-up already at the Causeway Bay exit when the queue for the Happy Valley fly-over trails back into the tunnel, forcing people who have no desire to visit Happy Valley but are stuck in the outside lane to crawl until they get to the end of the double white lines. Cautious motorists may avoid this tunnel. The Western one, which has three lanes to play with and only one lane going to Central, will clearly still be perfectly usable by people who wish to go to destinations other than Central.

This is not enough for the Instant Death crowd, though. They have the queue stretching up through Kowloon until we “lose” the Lion Rock Tunnel as well. This is prime bullshit, if you’ll pardon the phrase. If the worst predictions come true, Central is jammed solid and traffic is backed up to two of the three tunnels, motorists are not going to flock lemming-like towards Central by their usual routes. Many of them will doubtless opt to stay at home. People will adapt. Hongkongers are not stupid. Consequently they will regard the whole video as a hilarious piece of nonsense.  It assumes that everyone will try to do what they usually do, except for those who switch to the MTR, which the video makers expect to collapse under the extra load. Nobody is allowed to adapt, take reasonable precautions, change their habits or — a popular solution — I fancy, take the first day of “occupation” off. Anyone would think Hong Kong had never had a typhoon.

Much money mis-spent. Serves him right.

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One of the distressing things about the Leung administration is that listening to its admirers usually makes you even more suspicious than you were before.  Consider the piece by Tammy Tam in last Monday’s Post. Ms Tam was detailing the Leung camp’s response to questions about whether it was really a good idea to have Leung supporters parachuted into a variety of government-appointed positions.

Ms Tam’s view of this seems rather confused. Mr Leung, she conceded, was seen as having a weak cabinet. Now he was determined to place allies and aides in his inner circle. No complaints so far. Mr Leung has appointed more policy secretaries, sidekicks, consultants and PR flacks than any of his predecessors. But that is his right. Policy secretaries and their hangers-on are there to implement the CE’s policies. But Ms Tam was not talking about the inner circle in this sense at all. The posts she had in mind were the chairperson ships of the Airport Authority, the Trade Development Council, the Independent Police Complaints Council and the body which runs Science and Technology Parks. This is not the inner circle of Hong Kong public administration by any means. One can perhaps make a case for a political figure running the airport aurhority. But the Police Complaints Council?

I am not at all happy with the idea that these people are “Leung fans”. Mr Leung is in the unfortunate position of Henry VIII in “A Man for all Seasons”, who observes that “There are those like Norfolk who follow me because I wear the crown, and there are those like Master Cromwell who follow me because they are jackals with sharp teeth and I am their lion, and there is a mass that follows me because it follows anything that moves”. Kings do not have fans or friends. Mr Leung’s misfortune is that he has been the darling of the Liaison Office since before it was the Liaison Office. He is a walking conduit to the advantages that being in the favour of our colonial masters can bring. If seeking a friend he would have to find someone who was uninterested in money or power, but prepared to get along with someone who thought of little else. It’s a tall order. Still, some of his appointments may turn out well. Let us hope so. I had some misgivings about Ms Tam’s idea that this process of “appointing people he can trust” was a way to “get things done”.

Oh yes? Looking at the recent history of the MTR and the prime collection of compliant mediocrities that the government has appointed to its board, I fear that this may be a way of not getting things done. Some of these jobs do require more extensive talents than the ability to say yes. Anyway, intelligent people can disagree about these matters.

Where it seemed to me Ms Tam’s choice of words wandered in a lamentable direction was in her discussion of Mr Jack So Chak-kwong, who is the chairman of the Trade Development Council but is apparently to swap jobs with the newly appointed chairman of the Airport Authority next May. There was no mention of the possibility that this curious arrangement might result in both organisations being effectively paralysed for a year. We were, though, invited to note that Mr So was a nominator of Henry Tang in the Chief Executive election. This really does not call for any comment or explanation. Hong Kong dos not have two warring parties. The difference between the two candidates in political terms was barely visible, leaving the election to be decided by their levels of success in concealing illegal structures. There is no reason why supporters of Mr Tang in the election should not take office under Mr Leung, just as no doubt supporters of Mr Leung would have been willing to serve under Mr Tang. Ms Tam, however, feels that “So took a stand for true democracy, putting aside the campaign bickering to support the current administration for the good of Hong Kong”. This is preposterous. Mr So is not taking a “stand for true democracy” by accepting the results of the Chief Executive selection process, which was specifically and successfully designed to be as undemocratic as possible. I do not know what Mr So thinks of democracy, but at a time when people are making genuine efforts to stand for it he can hardly claim to be a democratic standard-bearer because, having nominated one rich lay-about, he is prepared to work for another.

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