tim's experiment

Here is an everyday story of Hong Kong employment. A large corporation, finding itself employing a large number of unskilled people on menial manual work, decides to outsource the operation to a number of contractors. This makes no immediate difference to the employees – they are simply transferred from one employer to another.

But the arrangement is cheaper. Why is it cheaper? Because the employees, having in legal theory been fired and rehired, are no longer entitled to a number of benefits, like severance and sickness pay, which are calculated on the basis of length of service. Moreover, because the contracts are re-awarded every two years the peons whose work is the object of the exercise will never qualify for these benefits on the scale which was clearly intended by the original legislation. In other words this is a classic story of an employer using a legal wheeze to deprive his employees of their dues, and thereby to save money.

By now you will be wondering which of the usual suspects I am going to name as the perpetrator of this rousing piece of chicanery. But this is where the story, which can be found in its full glory on Page 3 of the latest Sunday Post, gets interesting. Because the perpetrating employer is none of the numerous local taipans notorious for their ingenuity in finding new ways to grind the faces of the poor, water the workers’ beer and generally demonstrate that great fortunes are based on great selfishness and greed. Not at all. The perpetrator in this case is none other than our rich and generous government. And the victims are the ladies (as they usually seem to be) who sweep our streets in a rather old-fashioned way with giant brooms. This is all the province of the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department, the very same hotbed of bureaucratic inefficiency whose hordes of uniformed myrmidons descend on any eatery rash enough to put a table on the pavement outside, and which takes six months to issue a routine restaurant licence.

The best bit is still to come. At the end of the story our intrepid reporter Jennifer Ngo (who will I fear be sweeping streets herself if she keeps writing this sort of story in the present climate) as a matter of course asked the department concerned for its side of the story. The only comment the department would make was that the outsourcing policy was “designed to ensure the best use of public money”. This is right up there with the MacDonalds non-apology as one of the PR catastrophes of the year. I am sure I speak for the vast majority of taxpayers when I say that our hopes for parsimony in the spending of public money do not run as far as expecting the government to cheat its own staff.

What an obscene spectacle we are presented with here! Imagine all the things going on simultaneously: Henry, then FS, is expanding his house to accommodate his wine collection; Lufsig is adding the tenth illegal adornment to his two houses on the Peak; Rafael is blowing millions on a Shanghai floozy; Donald is riding in millionaires’ yachts; several tens of worthless political flunkies are being added to the government on ridiculous salaries; billions are being blown on unwanted and overblown megaprojects; while down in the streets of Sham Shui Po a Mrs Fok, who plies a broom on our behalf, is being robbed of basic employment benefits to save a few pennies.

As it happens I know our local street sweeper quite well. When I kept office hours my morning dog walk coincided with her daily appearance at the top of Sui Wo Road. She is small, exuberant, not much given to spending money on dentists but very conscientious. She has been doing the job for at least 20 years. Just think of the genius who noticed the money that could be saved by wriggling out of paying sick pay to an employee like this! Then ponder the terms and conditions of employment this desk warrior is enjoying. And then weep, or vomit, according to taste.

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Well goodness me, some unexpected people have decided that it is time to oppose tyranny. They are being rather selective about it. We are not invited to oppose the nearby regime which tortures and murders its opponents, censors its media and bullies its neighbours. Oh no. We are invited to reject the “tyranny of the minority” which refers to the inconvenient constitutional fact that if all the democrats vote against sham universal suffrage then it will not pass. This piece of oratorical overkill had its first outing from the pen of Sir David Akers-Jones. One tries not to get too “ad hominem” in these matters but I cannot resist the thought that Sir David, after a long and successful career in the administration of colonies, seems to have come by his distaste for tyrannical minorities rather late. The same can be said of the politico who took up the theme and the phrase the following day. This gentleman was a Legco member of the Functional Constituency persuasion. Consequently he has long been a beneficiary of the split voting system, which means that any proposal rejected by the functional constituency group is defeated, even if a clear majority of members have voted for it. This has happened quite often in the past few years and I do not recall the gentleman concerned making any objection.

Anyway the label is misconceived. If the drafters of the Legco voting arrangements had intended amendments to our constitutional arrangements to be decided by a simple majority of members voting then they could have said so. It is common in these matters to require some kind of super-majority, and this in turn inevitably entails the possibility that a proposal supported by a simple majority will not be passed. The reason for arrangements of this kind is to ensure that proposed amendments are supported widely, and not just by a bare majority. The minority who vote against an amendment are not being tyrannical. They are merely exercising the rights conferred on them by the constitution. The fact is that the proposed changes to the CE election arrangements are not widely supported. The only reason they have any hope at all of passing Legco is because of the number of the People’s Puppets who sit in there. If the proposals can’t pass without that much help then their failure is well-deserved.

Of course that will not stop some people blaming the democrats. Indeed there was a fine illustration of the lengths to which the government’s press poodles will go to blame the democrats, in today’s Post. Michael Chugani was complaining about high property prices. These are, apparently, all the democrats fault. The argument goes like this – instead of acting up, throwing fruit and agitating for more democracy the democrats could have been agitating for lower home prices. Therefore it is all their fault. No blame attaches to the responsible minister. No blame attaches to the CE who promised us all cheaper homes if he was elected. No blame attaches to the millionaires who conspire to keep prices high All the blame goes to the democrats. This involves willfully ignoring two inconvenient points. One is that the democrats did not stir up Legco proceedings in the name of more democracy; they were agitating for an adequate and universal old age pension. One can argue over whether high home prices are a more important social issue than poverty among the aged, but the latter is a respectable issue worth complaining about. The second point Mr Chugani has apparently forgotten is that the democrats in Legco have no power. Even if they devoted the entirety of their efforts to complaining about home prices there would be no consequences. Indeed the government will reject any suggestion, however worthy, from the democratic camp precisely because it comes from the democrats, and implementation might earn them political credit.

There is far too much of this partisan crap in the Post these days. Will someone please start a real newspaper in English?

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I have always felt that comments on Hong Kong matters should be offered rather carefully by those of us who can escape the consequences of our advice by moving to another country. This is clearly not a widely held view, but there it is. There is a role for outsiders: our view may allow us to spot lies and misdescriptions; pointing such things out is useful. But I am regularly irritated by citizens of free countries who feel moved to write to the South China Morning Post editor offering advice to Hongkongers, usually of a rather timid kind. It is not for us to urge Hongkongers to fight for what they believe in. But it is also not for us to urge them to surrender without a struggle. Still, there we are. At least foreigners in Hong Kong can be expected to have some idea of what they are talking about.

I was, however, moved to incandescent rage by a piece authored by one Tom Plate. Mr Plate – Professor Plate, actually – does not live in Hong Kong. He has never lived in Hong Kong. He lives in Los Angeles, where he enjoys such rights as the right to vote in elections, and indeed the right to run in them. Prof Plate feels, however, that these may be essential for Americans, but for lesser breeds without the law something more authoritarian may be perfectly acceptable. He has written admiring biographies of Lee Kwan Yew, Thaksin Shinawatra, and Mahathir Mohamad.  Condescension or racism? Perhaps a bit of both.

Prof Plate’s take on Hong Kong matters is wasted on the South China Morning Post. It would fit Xinhua. The economy “soared” after 1997 (I could have sworn there was an Asian financial crisis about that time) and we were all apparently deliriously happy until an argument blew up over the voting arrangements for the CE. Not having been here, Prof Plate has apparently not heard of previous arguments about national security, national education, milk powder, locusts and what have you. He presents the choice as between elections with a nominating system which produces candidates who “love China” (which he optimistically interprets as meaning “more or less supported Beijing”) and “opponents in Hong Kong wanted a wide-open, free-swinging nomination process.” This was, Prof Plate believes, far more democracy than Beijing could stomach. At this point in his musings democracy suddenly appears in quotes, it being apparently a local delusion here that free elections are a part of democracy.

Prof Plate then outlines the decision of the National People’s Congress, which he characterises as an “unsurprising and not so awful compromise.” Which is, if you’ll pardon the expression, pure unadulterated horse shit. The arrangement is not a compromise at all. It is in fact the most extreme of the proposals put forward for consideration in Hong Kong, having been raised months ago by the FTU, a Beijing mouthpiece. Prof Plate thinks the democrats at this point “went bonkers” (what does this man teach?), despite the fact that Beijing was trying to meet the democrats at “some halfway point”. From where to where, one wonders?

Prof Plate has a serious claim to be the most ill-informed person to grace the SCMP’s letters page for some time. He supposes there were no elections in Hong Kong before 1997, which is not true. He supposes that Chinese officials never comment on the internal affairs of other states, which is nonsense. He thinks the Xi Jinping administration is moderate, which is a bit premature. And he has a nice line in political platitudes like “it’s rare that one side or the other gets everything it wants”, as if Hong Kong people were insisting on a whole loaf instead of half of one, when they haven’t actually been offered anything yet except a big fraud.

Please people, if you live in the home of the brave and land of the free, refrain from writing op ed pieces for overseas newspapers urging the merits of cowardice and slavery.

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The question how to elect the next Chief Executive is not an insoluble problem. Even if you accept that what is not in the Basic Law is not acceptable and there must be a nominating committee and the nominating committee must look rather like the existing election committee … the situation is not hopeless. People generally do not want or expect a completely free and fair election. The problem is that if the nomination process is totally fixed then the ensuing exercise of universal suffrage is meaningless. So we want to see a reasonable range of competing candidates offering meaningful alternatives. We do not want to see a process which produces a choice between two matched millionaires with unblemished records of grovelling to the Liaison Office, toxic personalities and no administrative ability, distinguishable only by the size of their illegal basements.

Now I do not believe that the constraints imposed by the Basic Law make a reasonable choice impossible. Some suitable reforms of the election committee and some sensible arrangements for its procedure could produce a system which, while a long way short of public nomination, ensures that candidates with substantial support are fairly considered. So far, though, apart from a few voices crying in the wilderness, nobody seems to be working on this. And the committee currently preparing its views on the matter could well make it impossible. Of course the committee is not helped by the fact that it is working on the basis of the SAR Government’s thoroughly misleading report on the matter. Still, let us be more specific. If there is a requirement that all candidates secure the support of half of the nomination committee then the situation will be beyond repair. The nomination committee will not be a nomination committee; it will be a vetting committee. No sensible democrat could vote for a proposal incorporating this feature.

The conservative (which means pro-Communist – it’s an upside down world) forces seem to be relying on the notion that the general public will be vigorously in favour of anything they come up with. This is unlikely. To take an extreme example, we can all see that if the universal suffrage election featured one single candidate personally selected by the incumbent, then it would be no improvement on the present system. This may seem an unlikely scenario but it used to be so common in Latin America that the technical term for it is Spanish: candidato unico.  Possible electoral arrangements can be arranged on a scale with candidato unico on one end and maybe the system which made Boris Johnson the Mayor of London on the other. The question which then arises is where on the scale does a system move from worse than nothing to better than nothing, and where in relation to that point are we heading. And I fear we are heading for the wrong place. A lot of people will feel that the present system, which allows a genuine debate between different views preceding a fixed election, would be better than a system in which the choice of candidates was fixed and no real discussion was likely at all – bearing in mind that we are not going to get a real choice either way.

After all we know where we are with Lufsig. He is a puppet but a public puppet. Allowing his successor puppet to masquerade as the people’s choice  is not an obvious improvement.

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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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