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Why do govt press releases read as if they were written by a computer?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on September 19, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Malcom Gladwell is a great populariser of scientific obscurities, so we now all know that in order to achieve proficiency in almost any worthwhile pursuit you have to put in 10,000 hours of practice. Or alternatively, it now appears, you can outsource the grunt work to a computer and just claim the credit.

This has led to much discussion in the places on the internet where writers gather – that is real writers who produce novels, not mere scribblers like me. The question is how much help can you get from Artificial Intelligence and still regard the resulting output as your work.

Having done my 10,000 hours long ago I have resisted the temptation to dabble in AI-aided composition. But I see there is a tricky question here. If I ask the computer to – say – write an epic poem in the style of Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel” on the recent ownership of Chelsea Football Club, and the result is a resounding success, who deserves credit? Clearly the piece has not been written by Dryden. He died in 1700. But it hasn’t been written by me either.

A similar dilemma arises with blame. If you invite ChatGP to write a piece in the style of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” about the recent history of Hong Kong, it is quite possible that a national security judge will consider the resulting work to be subversive. But he can’t jail the software.

These are extreme cases, I suppose. What bothers the writers is the intermediate case in which the author has had some help, and the question is how much is acceptable before the participation of AI has to be acknowledged on the cover.

After all even dinosaurs like me accept some help. I tune out or switch off comments on my grammar or sentence length. But I pause for a moment after writing words with tricky spelling like accommodation, embarrassment, or Philippines, to see if the tell-tale red line appears to indicate that I have missed a double consonant somewhere.

This certainly does not call for specific acknowledgement. We all know the spell-checker jokes. Serious publishers still employ human editors. What about a detailed plot line and story structure, passed to the computer with instructions to flesh it out as a racy romantic potboiler fresh from the desk of Betty Bodiceripper?

And would it then be another new novel if you fed in the same materials but told the computer you wanted a serious exploration in the style of Albert Camus of the dilemmas of the human condition in the 21st century?

The problem for most of us (as opposed to writers) in all this is that it is becoming difficult to read anything published after 2013 without the lingering suspicion that much – or even all – of it is the product of an agile microchip.

This brings me to a particularly interesting literary form, Hong Kong government press releases condemning some outrageous comment made by a politician or newspaper overseas.

Anyone who has wrestled with our government’s efforts to provide services over the internet will happily dismiss the thought that our leaders have developed sufficient digital fluency to outsource the production of these little masterpieces to a computer. It is, though, perhaps a problem that they so often look like the output of an AI programme urged to produce a “Hong Kong government press release rejecting foreign interference in the style of a Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conference in Beijing”.

Anyone who reads all of these things will be unable to suppress the suspicion that the unnamed “spokesman” responsible is getting in a bit of a rut. The language is always the same: “slander and smear” “lies and hypocrisy”, “government will resolutely discharge its duty”, “violation of international law”, “bound to fail”.

You may wonder if we are here in the presence of a standard PR technique, writing a press release by digging out an old one and updating the names. This does not seem to be the case. On the other hand the consistency of the tone, bitter resentment and anger, is very striking. The “spokesman” seems to be making a conscious effort to sound as if he is purple in the face, with steam coming out of his ears.

It may be a problem that in the old colonial days the government spokesman wrote his rebuttals and refutations in English, and they were then translated into Chinese. Now, it appears, they are written in Chinese and then translated into English. The result comes across as rather blunt.

Chinese writers are much less influenced than Western ones by the desire for “elegant variation”, which leads even eminent publications like the Economist to inflict “the black stuff” on readers because it does not wish to use “oil” twice in the same paragraph.

This may in turn be due to differences in culture and education. In cultures with alphabetic languages, like this one, words are regarded as a substitute or symbol for an elusive underlying idea. In cultures with ideograms, like Chinese, the ideograms are the idea. So in a European university asking the student to report Saint Augustine’s views on virtue in her own words is a test of learning. Asking a Chinese student to report Confucius’s views on the same topic in her own words would be sacrilege. Who are we to improve on the words chosen by the Master? Learning was traditionally demonstrated by the ability to recite the Analects from memory.

The rather limited vocabulary employed in official corrections may have a more mundane explanation. Although printing with movable type was a Chinese invention the Chinese language presents serious problems for printers, because so many characters have to be available. Putting a piece together while picking from thousands of characters is hard work and writers were expected not to to make it harder by choosing from a wide range of words.

Nowadays the computer has solved this problem but English newspapers are still following conventions inherited from the old printing methods and so perhaps other people are too.

Anyway the point which our spokesman may consider worth pondering is that turning on the extreme indignation every time eventually becomes ineffective, and even risible. It may be too much to ask that you consider the possibility that some criticisms may have merit, but could we at least try to be – shall we say – more Harris and less Trump?

One might also wonder whether every criticism needs the same response, or indeed any response at all. I realise that you may fear that silence in the face of fierce attacks will be mistaken for indifference, or even assent, but surely there are some quarrels not worth picking? It is very regrettable that the New York Times was not impressed by the new National Security Exhibition Gallery. But if you hadn’t replied, would anyone have noticed? The same might be said of the British Foreign Office’s six-monthly report on Hong Kong. We all know what this is worth by now.

And you might have waited a bit before taking aim at the Hong Kong Economic Trade Office Certification Act, after it passed the US House of Representatives. Despite its name this is not a law. It is what we call a Bill: a piece of proposed legislation which still has to go through a long and arduous process before it becomes law. On average the proportion of proposed laws which make it through the US legislative process to the statute book ranges between two and nine per cent, with the lower figures coming when, as now, the two houses are controlled by different parties. Figures here.

Clearly the US legislature is not at all like ours.

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Stand News case is a chilling reminder to opinion writers

Posted in Uncategorized on September 9, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Well, now it’s over and we can comment on the Stand News case we may note first of all the existence of a concept common in the academic circles where the fine points of free speech are explored: the chilling effect.

This refers to the tendency for expansively drafted laws restricting free speech for impeccable reasons to have an effect beyond the territory they are aimed at; the new rules restrict or discourage activities which they were (at least as presented by their drafters) not supposed to cover.

The chilling effect is alive and well in Hong Kong, and drastically curtailing the sort of journalism to which local consumers have access. Outside the government’s cheerleader chorus writing for government-approved media, opinion writing has become a rare and nervous activity. If it is written, editors are nervous about running it. Willing writers are on offer overseas, but publishers are unsure of the legal risks of using such sources, so offers are usually refused.

We are often told that publications merely have to obey the law, which is well known and perfectly clear. Oh yes? Yet in the Stand News case Judge Kwok Wai-yin acknowledged that in an earlier judgment on the “sheep village” books he had said that sedition must involve intentionally inciting others. He has now changed his mind, and the offence requires mere “recklessness of the consequences”. So all you suckers who perused the earlier judgment in the hope of finding out exactly what the law was were wasting your time.

In fact if you are interested, even perusing the law itself is not much help. Traditionally it was supposed that seditious content must be so extreme as possibly to inspire violence. If violence was not implicitly advocated there was no sedition. This condition has apparently lapsed. It is in any case specifically excluded by the relevant part of the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, where the revised law on sedition now resides.

The law is ostensibly politically neutral. Social critics can say that if you outlaw resistance you are defending the status quo, but the idea of sedition looks only at public order consequences. You would not, however, gather this from looking at the output of its local defenders.

Virginia Lee, writing in the English-language version of the China Daily, notes that the Stand News output was scrutinised for “illegal ideologies”. Goodness. Last time I was in Festival Walk’s excellent bookshop I noted with some amusement that on one shelf potential readers could consider the works of Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump. So which ideologies are illegal?

Fu Kin-chi, writing in the same publication, elucidates: the court “determined that the media outlet’s political ideology was ‘localism’ and its editorial policy was to promote ‘local autonomy’ in Hong Kong – both terms are an [?] euphemism for ‘Hong Kong independence’”.

I am not sure whether the equation of localism with independence was part of the court’s determination or Mr Fu’s, but in either case it is bilge. Localism, for many of its followers, was more cultural than political: an attempt to preserve Hong Kong’s language and lifestyle from overzealous attempts at updating and aligning with the mainland. Most of those who took a more political angle did not seek independence, whose practical difficulties and general implausibility were obvious. Local autonomy is not the same thing as independence and attempts to obliterate the difference are just an attempt to give a dog a bad name before hanging it.

Returning to the old definition of sedition, this involved efforts to “bring into hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection against” the Hong Kong government. There is nothing about illegal ideologies there. This was long supposed to set a high bar for the prosecution. Hatred is an extreme emotion. Many, perhaps most, people do not have strong enough feelings about political or constitutional matters to “hate” anything. Mere distaste or criticism was not enough. The words complained of must actively encourage resistance or rebellion.

National security judges have steadily diluted this to the point where vigorous criticism of one piece of legislation is enough, especially if it happens to be the National Security Law.

The definition in the new Safeguarding National Security Ordinance has been diluted even more. Protection is extended to a new range of potential victims, including the local Liaison Office, the local branch of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the local PLA garrison. We then go through much the same verbiage as in the old Crimes Ordinance section on this topic, until we come to two new bits:

(e) an intention to incite any other person to do a violent act in the HKSAR;

(f) an intention to incite any other person to do an act that does not comply with the law of the HKSAR or that does not obey an order issued under the law of the HKSAR.

Judge Kwok will no doubt note with some concern that “intention” is clearly required, which suggests that his innovative “reckless disregard” approach may have been a poor idea.

Connoisseurs of carelessly drafted legislation will note that (f) is open to very wide interpretation. I did not realise, the other week, when I wrote that owners of small dogs and suitable bags could travel with them on the MTR in defiance of the railway rules, that this was a possible offence. Does an “order issued under the law” cover anything a policeman says to you?

Clearly this new law received all the careful scrutiny you would expect from a friends-only legislature working in a hurry. Nice work.

But I don’t hate you.

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Anyone for badminton … nudge nudge wink wink?

Posted in Uncategorized on September 1, 2024| 1 Comment »

Teaching young teenagers about sex is a tricky matter. It has to be attempted, because otherwise curiosity will lead potential pupils to the steamy parts of the internet, where you can claim access to “adult” stuff by simply clicking on a “yes” button.

But avoiding potential pitfalls is not easy, as the Education Bureau has recently discovered. One wishes to describe the machinery accurately, as it were, while subtly discouraging premature experiments in its use.

The Bureau’s efforts came in for a good deal of criticism. One of the potential problems is that your efforts to foster celibacy will launch a fleet of risqué jokes. The new curriculum’s suggestion that people should sublimate lusty urges by playing badminton gave a harmless pursuit a new sexy edge. Inviting someone for a game will never be quite the same again. And what will they say when they discover that the English name for that little fluffy thing they bat backwards and forwards is “the shuttlecock”?

Another danger is that the message will be sullied by well-intentioned statements which are visibly unjustified by reality. The new curriculum says that pre-marital sex is regarded in society as “deviant”. Really?

Still, if our government has problems with conventional sex, they are as nothing compared with its problems with the constantly growing list of alphabetic alternatives, which has now, in The Guardian at least, reached LGBTQIA+.

It is understandable that in the search for patriotic placeholders very little attention was paid to candidates’ attitudes to unconventional sexual preferences. But as a result some of the newly minted public figures combined a laudable enthusiasm for national security with distinctly old-fashioned attitudes to LGBT etc.

This was most visible in the history of the Gay Games, which followed a trajectory reminiscent of the Post-SARS Harbourfest, starting with general jubilation about an event which would put Hong Kong on the map, and concluding with bitter recriminations about wasted money and foreign influence.

More surreptitiously the new puritanism is gradually affecting the parts of the government which interact, or ought to interact, with the community of people with minority sexual tastes or preferences.

For example, the Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau (curiously) is in charge of an Equal Opportunities (Sexual Orientation) Fund which, since 2015, has supported NGOs working in this area.

For the current financial year its budget dropped by almost half. Many groups had funding cut or deleted altogether. The fund went from supporting 18-24 groups to supporting just ten. Also, among the survivors are three groups, all founded by the same person, offering “conversion therapy”, a scientifically disreputable attempt to turn gay people “straight” much cherished by religious groups.

Funding for AIDS prevention work (which comes from the Health Bureau) has also been cut. And the Equal Opportunities Commission has dropped its earlier enthusiasm for legislation against discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Like other NGOs which do not attract official support those working in this area find it difficult to hold events in public places or to book venues for private ones. Fund-raising has withered because of the legal hazards, particularly if the funds come from overseas.

These changes are ominous for the communities concerned. No doubt government funds are shorter in these deficit-haunted times, but the fact that cash can still be found for fundamentalist nonsense suggests that something else is at work. There is also a worrying implication in all this for all of us.

After all NGOs catering for the needs of sexual minorities are not in themselves political. Encouraging people to feel comfortable in their preferences is not subversive. Distributing health education materials and free condoms is not a threat to national security.

Are we approaching a new reality in which any NGO not wrapped in the tentacles of the local establishment is going to be frozen gradually out of existence? Fairness, like justice, must be not just done, but seen to be done.

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Security chief’s view of media ethics is simplistic and erroneous

Posted in Uncategorized on August 21, 2024| 1 Comment »

Here is a puzzle. The other week Yazhou Zhoukan, a news magazine which has baffled foreigners’ efforts to pronounce its name properly since the early 1990s, hosted an event and invited a guest to address the assembled multitudes.

The guest was the Secretary for Security, Chris Tang. This is a strange choice. In the days when I was often invited to or running such things you usually got the Director of Information Services. This person at least had some knowledge of media matters, although I recall interviewing a freshly minted one on an RTHK programme who was suffering not so much from stage fright as from television terror.

On particularly important occasions you might get the Secretary for Home Affairs, who was responsible for the government’s media policy. Occasionally more prestigious people than me might be able to rope in the Governor/Chief Executive. Nobody thought the Secretary for Security would be relevant.

Mr Tang is also an odd choice because he takes a rather jaundiced view of media matters and his oratorical repertoire does not extend to the “soft answer that turneth away wrath”. Indeed his thoughts about reporting tend towards Trumpism with Hong Kong characteristics: complaints about “false news”, and warnings of the wrath to come.

True to form he turned up with a complaint about an unnamed newspaper and an unnamed columnist, instantly recognised by connoisseurs as a reference to Ming Pao and Johannes Chan, who writes for the paper on legal matters.

And he warned that no protection from trouble could be obtained by a precaution widely adopted among the Chinese press of putting at the end of an article a rubric stating that if a piece is critical it is “is meant to point out mistakes or flaws in the system, policy, or measure… The purpose is to facilitate the correction or elimination of such mistakes or flaws … there is absolutely no intention to incite hatred, disaffection or enmity against the government or other communities.”

This is a rough summary of part of the old Crimes Ordinance definition of sedition, incorporated with minor changes in the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, which states that pointing out flaws etc. with a view to their correction shall not be regarded as seditious. Sober discussion of public policy is still allowed.

Actually I do not think any of the newspapers which have adopted this precaution suppose that it provides any protection as such. It is more a pre-emptive reminder to readers in the law and order industry that some speech does still have legal protection. Clearly if the article preceding the precaution calls for the overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party or the assassination of the Chief Executive then legal consequences will still ensue.

Mr Tang’s message was that “overseas columnists” had “deliberately misinterpreted government policies or official speeches and misled readers.” If a newspaper “condones such writers and their biased essays, it will have corrupted society and created divisions.”

Editors had a responsibility to ensure that a publication was “fair, objective and unbiased,” he concluded.

Well the short answer to that is that the search for fairness and objectivity does not seem to trouble the media which are in fact or in practice in the government’s pocket. Is Ta Kung Pao fair and unbiased? Is the China Daily?

The long answer is that this is a simplistic answer to a very complex question. Issues of public policy often do not lend themselves to a treatment which will satisfy all the stakeholders involved.

A good example is the controversy which Mr Tang may have had in mind. Prof Chan, who as a former Dean of the Hong Kong University Law Faculty may be supposed to know something of what he writes about, opined that recent legislation limiting national security prisoners’ access to early release schemes might infringe their human rights.

The government reply, which was attributed to the Correctional Services Department but appeared to come from the same Outrage Factory as similar complaints on other matters, said that Chan’s essay was “factually inaccurate” because early release had “never been a guaranteed right under the laws of Hong Kong.”

But this is based on a misunderstanding. Of course a prisoner did not have a guaranteed right to early release, any more than someone who takes a driving test has a guaranteed right to a driving licence. But the early release schemes are not a mysterious present bestowed by the CSD on deserving inmates. They are regulated by statute and rules. So it is at least arguable that changing the rules after the prisoner has been convicted is a violation of his right to be dealt with according to the laws in force when he committed the offence.

The reply went on to say that Chan had “misled readers to believe that if a [prisoner] is not granted remission … it would be tantamount to receiving a heavier sentence and a breach of the Hong Kong Bill of Rights.”

Here we may have a linguistic problem. It is I suppose true that whether a prisoner is refused early release, or granted it, in either case the sentence remains the same. The prisoner allowed release is still expected to conform to rules about supervision, residence and good behaviour. If he violates the conditions of his release he can be recaptured to serve the rest of the sentence inside. So in that rather pedantic legal sense is true that a prisoner who is refused early release is not receiving a heavier sentence.

On the other hand in the ordinary everyday use of language someone who is expecting to be able to apply for early release after two years and then discovers that because of a change in the rules he is going to be behind bars for three is likely to regard this quite legitimately as “tantamount to receiving a heavier sentence.” Cambridge Dictionary definition of “tantamount”:  “being almost the same or having the same effect as something, usually something bad.”

When you get to complex matters of opinion the idea of being “fair, objective and unbiased” does not get you very far. In reporting on simple conflict situations fairness can be supplied, or at least simulated, by giving equal attention to both sides: workers and employers, Tories and Labour, prosecution and defence, Manchester United and Liverpool (unless you are working for a Liverpool paper).

Objectivity is regarded as a myth by philosophers. I cherish the memory of a student orator in a debate at the London School of Economics who provoked much mirth by announcing his intention to discuss the “objective situation as I see it”. Well we can all only see the objective situation as we see it. For reporters objectivity is a style: third person voice, no evaluative or emotional words, all facts attributed to sources or speakers and so on.

Unbiased is code for agreeing with the speaker. Are we supposed to be unbiassed with regard to crime, domestic violence, traffic accidents, genocide…?

There is also an important difference between the writing of facts and the writing of opinions. Facts, as an early editor of the Guardian put it, are sacred. In their pursuit fairness and objectivity are legitimate targets, however elusive in practice. Opinion writing is another matter.

The writer of an opinion piece is seeking to persuade. Being fair to your opponent may help you to be persuasive, but is not compulsory. Of course you will not be objective and you will certainly be biased. But opinions are specifically protected in the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance Section 24 (4) (a) and (b), which both include the phrase “give an opinion”.

Let us see if we can put this in a way which will help Mr Tang. That Mr Tang is the Secretary for Security is a fact. That Hong Kong would be a happier place if someone less abrasive was doing the job would be an opinion.

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Yet another Olympics but some new events: rows over gender and sex offenders

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on July 30, 2024| Leave a Comment »

There was a woman in Penfold Park the other day wearing a tee-shirt displaying the words “Another fucking Olympic games”. We must bear in mind, of course, that she may not have read it carefully before buying it, of if she did, did not understand the message or recognise the F-word.

Still, this is not a unique sentiment. It is a feature of the great international sportfests that the number of people who travel to the site of the event in the hope of watching the proceedings is more or less matched by the number of people who take a holiday from their homes to avoid the visiting crowds.

It would perhaps not be fair to apply this crudely to the current Olympics in Paris, because Paris notoriously empties itself of locals on July 14 (when the school term finishes) and is generally inhabited only by people who cater for visitors until sometime around the end of August.

Still, it must be recognised that the Olympics are something which people can have enough of. My dim memories of media coverage go back to the Melbourne summer games in 1956. Looking at the list I do not seem to have registered the winter versions at all.

There is a certain rhythm to these things. When the host city is chosen there is a whiff of scandal. Then there are the first of the pained noises about the budget which will continue until well after the games, because the bid budget always turns out to have been imaginative when it hits reality.

In the run-up to the great event there are some cliff-hanging stories around the possibility that some vital piece of infrastructure will not be ready in time. Then there are arguments in most countries about selection. Hong Kong’s version of these used to concern some athlete who was eligible but did not – um – look Chinese and was not selected. We seem to have outgrown this particular problem. There continues, on the other hand, to be subdued muttering about the number of Hong Kong Olympians who moved to the SAR after narrowly missing inclusion in the China team.

During the games there will be the usual dust-ups about refereeing, cheating, tactless winners and tactless losers, surreptitious efforts to help the home team, and so on. These will be off-set by magical moments of sportsmanship and joy. On the whole most of the media people and all of the officials will conclude that the games were a success, whatever that means, except for Munich 1972, marred by a massacre.

The host city will then be left to pick up the bill, which can be enormous – Montreal (1976) took decades to pay off its Olympic debts. Los Angeles (1984) seems to have been unique in actually showing a profit. There is also the question whether all the facilities specially built will, as the boosters predict, be useful afterwards. Here also outcomes vary. London (2012) seems to have found a use for all its Olympic erections; Athens (2004) still has weed-infested sports sites which were never used again.

Social scientists have determined that the economic benefits of hosting the games are overstated and probably non-existent, while they do give a lot of harmless pleasure to the population of the host city while they last. This is a difficult attraction to sell politically and bids to host have become sparse.

The current games, I notice, have already produced two rows of a kind to which we were not treated in the 20th century. The first concerns woman boxers who used to be men.

This did not come up in the old days, partly no doubt because there were no woman boxers. I recall some carefully phrased expressions of suspicion about well-built Russian women in the throwing events. The two boxers at the centre of the current row were excluded from the last Olympics. But the organising body for Olympic boxing was changed after a refereeing scandal and the new one revised the rules.

I confess to being non-plussed by the moral issues involved. It is an important moral principle that all people should be treated the same, and if they wish to be women they should be allowed to be women. On the other hand it is also an important principle that athletic contestants should be fairly matched, and in some sports, including boxing, being a man for the first 15 or 20 years of your life apparently confers a big advantage.

My Solomonic solution would be to ban boxing altogether as being a depraved pursuit unfit for decent human beings, who ought to be repelled by the idea of beating someone else unconscious. But that is not going to happen.

The other very 21st century contribution is the row over the Dutch volley ball player – unashamedly male – who was convicted some years ago, when he was 19, of having sex with a 12-year-old girl.

In England, where he did it – they met on-line, of course – this is treated as rape, and he was accordingly sentenced to several years in jail. After some months, though, he was returned to Holland, where consensual sex with under-age partners is, though still illegal, regarded less seriously. So he was released soon after.

The question which then arose from several directions was whether it was acceptable for such a person to be in an Olympic team. The Dutch view is that the man concerned has expressed remorse, served his time, recognised the error of his ways and is entitled to be treated like any other citizen who is good at volleyball.

The contrary view is that the man is a paedophile and should be shunned athletically, presumably for the rest of his life, as an inappropriate role model for young people who may regard Olympians as examples of behaviour to be emulated. Objectors also claim that having him on the court, pitch or whatever is upsetting for victims of sex crimes generally and his victim in particular

I confess to finding it easier to find a side to agree with in this one. Criminals who have done their time and expressed a decent level of reform and regret are entitled to be treated as ordinary members of society. If we are to bar convicted sex offenders from the Olympics what happens when some team turns out to include a bank robber, a mugger, a retired member of Islamic State or a fencer who honed his sword skills by beheading adulterous women in Saudi Arabia?

Note that the latter competitor will not have been jailed. A global sporting festival will include people from a variety of different backgrounds and legal regimes. Attitudes to sex are particularly fraught with geographical variations. The idea that some sex offenders should be treated to life-time ostracism is a Western thing.

As for the argument that this is all unfair to victims, I discern a whiff of hypocrisy. The fact is that there is a fairly small following for three-a-side volleyball, and the Dutch team is not particularly prominent. The player concerned has been in the international side since 2017. Nobody would have noticed his inclusion if nobody had made a fuss about it.

Update: There is an error in this piece. I supposed, and wrote, that the two boxers in a row over their hormone levels were people who had been born as males and transitioned to female. This is not the case. Both the women concerned were recognised and registered as female at birth and have gone through the rest of their lives as women. Their elevated testosterone levels are a result of a rare medical condition. The dilemma remains the same: does the effect of this produce so much unfairness, or danger, that the two athletes should be barred from competition? But opinions about the merits or otherwise of gender transition are nothing to do with it. Thoughtful piece in the Guardian here.

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What have the Consumer Council and Wall Street Journal in common? Timidity

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on July 20, 2024| Leave a Comment »

The Consumer Council is a curious creature. It is, according to its ordinance, not a part of the government. It is, though, according to the same ordinance, required to follow any written instruction from the Chief Executive. And it is, of course, governed, so far as the actual council governs anything, by government appointees.

This is not usually relevant to the council’s work, which is to help consumers with individual complaints and publish reports on topics relevant to consumption. The reports are a reliable source of news, though sometimes seem to be trying rather too hard.

Some of the “safety hazards” of which the council warns us are rather remote. A recent survey of bottled drinking water, for example, worried about bromates, chemicals often found in water which has been chemically purified.

Bromates pose a cancer risk. On the other hand if you drink a daily two quarts (or half a gallon) of bottled water at the upper end of the range allowed by food regulations, your lifetime cancer risk goes up by about two in 10,000 (according to the New York State Health Department).

Other risks which agitate the council are rather obvious. A report on beer, for example, warned that consuming large quantities regularly will make you grow fatter. This will not have come as a great shock to the beer-drinking community.

And so to last week, when the Council departed from its usual confident, if nit-picking, tone to engage in a full-court grovel before a mainland company which had complained about a report on bottled water.

The company, Nongfu Spring, is rumoured to be owned by China’s richest man. In view of the hazards attached to being China’s richest man this is probably a malicious report circulated by his enemies. Still, it is a big company, so we may suppose it to be well-connected.

The council had reported that a sample of Nongfu’s mineral water had a bromate content of 3 micrograms per litre, which coincides with the upper limit in the European Union standard for some water products.

It also made some mildly critical comments on the taste and mineral content, and gave the sample four and a half stars (out of five). Clearly this upset Nongfu, but if you want to dispute and downgrade a report you keep off the subjective stuff and go for the science.

In a strongly worded letter the company complained that the EU standard was inappropriate, and the sample tested was not, as the council had supposed, “natural mineral water” nor “purified drinking water”.

Instead it was in a category recognised by mainland food regulations, “natural drinking water” and met the standards required on the mainland for this category. If not offered a correction and apology the company would take “further action”.

It also complained that it was inappropriate to use food standards from outside Hong Kong, and as the water was produced on the mainland, mainland standards should apply.

Following a meeting the council, usually a robust defender of its conclusions, collapsed in a heap, apologising, reclassifying Nongfu’s masterpiece as five stars, and stressing that all the samples it tested were prefectly safe to drink, as indeed it had stated in its original report.

This is disappointing. Firstly it is important and useful that the Consumer Council should be able to consult and use a wide range of standards from outside Hong Kong. There are many matters for which there is no local standard. Also the phrase “mainland food safety standards” produces a little mental crashing of gears, the kind you get from concepts like “truthful Donald Trump”, “Swiss seamanship” or “Hong Kong’s beloved government”. We can do better.

Secondly, water is water. Nongfu Spring’s business model involves fostering confusion on this point. The company’s website offers Drinking Natural Water, Drinking Purified Water, Natural Jokul Mineral Water, Drinking Natural Water (Suitable for children and nursing mothers), Natural Mineral Water (containing lithium), Drinking Natural Spring Water (suitable for tea making), and Natural Mineral Water in three different kinds of bottle (sports caps, glass and zodiac).

Oddly enough there is no product called “natural drinking water” and people who hawk products called “mineral water” should not be surprised if mineral water standards are applied to them. How can we expect the Consumer Council to stand up for consumers if it is too timid to stand up for itself?

Also an unexpected contender for the traditional white feather this week was the Wall Street Journal, which summarily fired a reporter, Selina Cheng, for accepting the post of chairman of the local Journalists’ Association. Ms Cheng said she had been warned against “advocating for press freedom in a place like Hong Kong.”

Is this the real Wall Street Journal, proprietor R. Murdoch, home in New York, safely headquartered in the home of the brave, land of the free? Alas, so it is. Indeed some people have suggested that the WSJ already has one reporter languishing in a communist jail and is reluctant to risk having another in the same plight. Ms Cheng would not, if such a thing came to pass, be the first JA chairperson to see the inside of a prison.

I know US newspapers have a thing about reporters displaying political preferences. But even the WSJ apparently regards advocating for press freedom as acceptable, in places where there is press freedom – an oddly self-defeating condition. Also Mr Murdoch is famously hostile to unions of any kind.

Still. Ms Cheng’s union activities were not likely to clash with her professional work covering the car and energy industries in China. And the WSJ will soon be free from worries about hostility in Hong Kong because it is moving to Singapore.

In response to inquiries the WSJ borrowed a famous line from embattled government departments and refused to discuss individual cases. It also said it was “a fierce and vocal advocate for press freedom in Hong Kong and around the world.” Bullshit. Had chance. Blew it.

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Eating outside: a must-try experience which is fading away

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 17, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Let us now praise legislator Judy Chan (New People’s Party; Electoral Committee constituency) for what appears to be an effort to make sense of the government’s policy on food served in the street or, as the official phraseology has it, “fixed-pitch and itinerant hawker stalls selling food with local characteristics.”

In this laudable pursuit Ms Chan put down a written question. Indeed she did not just put down a question, she composed a mega-question. Short story writers have managed with fewer words. After a little warm-up paragraph the question consists of ten sub-questions, some of them with multiple prongs and alternatives: is the government doing X and if so how many times in the last three years and if not why not?

This literary brick dropped into the lap of the Secretary for Environment and Ecology (cool new job title, if I may say so) Tse Chin-wan, a recycled environmental civil servant. Mr Tse’s equally lengthy reply exemplifies the rule in these matters: the longer the question the less you learn from the reply.

The problem here is that one of Hong Kong’s traditional attractions is the street restaurant, or dai pai dong, which offers tourists the alluring prospect of a local meal in the open air. Years ago you found them all over the place. Luard Road, Wanchai, for example, a much wider road than the traffic required then as it still is, was reduced to two lanes by a row of stalls on each side.

Over the years they have gradually disappeared. This does not appear to be the result of lack of custom. Most observers diagnose a classic case of official hostility. The official line, as articulated by Mr Tse, is that if there are any “suitable proposals which are supported by the relevant District Councils, the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD) will give consideration with an open mind.” He did warn that it is “very challenging to identify suitable sites.”

Many people who used to sell food in the street have been relocated to “cooked food centres” in municipal buildings. They are usually upstairs from the wet market (diners with delicate stomachs should avoid walking past the butchery horror show) and feature wet tiled floors, bare concrete walls and a lot of fans because there is no air conditioning.

In my experience the food in these places is OK but the ambience is not. The toilets often leave a lot to be desired too, though I must add in fairness that the facility in the Kennedy Town market is fragrant, floral and wins prizes.

A long time ago I joined a small group who met regularly on Friday nights at a place in Fotan which is probably not, in official terminology, a dai pai dong because it has a real kitchen with mains water and electricity. It gave you the flavour of the experience, though, because the tables extended gradually through the evening onto the territory of the adjacent bus station, so you would eat, weather permitting, sitting in an unused minibus stop.

This was a pleasant arrangement and gradually caught on with our friends, so that on some Fridays the group required two 16-people tables, to the great delight of the lady in charge of promoting the sale of Yan Jing beer. This is the state beer of China, though, in the opinion of many experts, not as good as Tsing Tao.

There was, though, constant trouble with the FEHD. A uniformed squad would arrive and terrify the operator of the establishment with threats of huge fines if a table wandered outside the area officially designated for dining. Their van would sit nearby, occupied by a driver who was sometimes spotted doing unmentionable things with his nose.

At knocking-off itme, which I think was eight o’clock, the uniforms would get in the van and go home. People who arrived earlier would often stand around waiting for the hour of liberation and amusing themselves by developing new insults for the FEHD, or Food Gestapo as we called them.

This was apparently standard procedure in many parts of Hong Kong. Many government departments have little foibles which do not really make sense. The Transport Department will not entertain speed bumps. The Police Force, though it has long abandoned the system under which retiring sergeants were expected to own large parts of Toronto, still has a thing about the ICAC, and so it goes on.

The FEHD is, for some reason, peculiarly hostile to dining in the open air. There are, of course, some potential problems with street food hawkers, involving things like noise, hygiene and rubbish, but this does not explain the department’s visceral hostility to people eating in the open air, even if the food is coming from a pefectly respectable restaurant and the space is not being used for anything else.

As a result Hong Kong has always been a problem area for open air dining, unless you get away to somewhere rural or an outlying island. And dai pai dong are an endangered species. There are only 17 left.

As tends to happen with endangered species they are now being eagerly touted to foreigners as an attraction. “Eating at a dai pai dong is a must-try Hong Kong experience and you can’t call yourself a real foodie if you haven’t dined at one,” chirps the Tourism Board on its social media.

Two of the Cooked Food Hawker Bazaars where the board suggests you can enjoy this experience are officially described as “temporary”. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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Where the law rules, and where it doesn’t

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on July 6, 2024| 1 Comment »

One of the strange things about the much-cited rule of law in Hong Kong is the way it swiftly dissipates as you move north from the Lion Rock Tunnel.

The New Territories is famous for its exceptions. The Small House Policy (under which male villagers can build a house, supposedly for their own use) is a racket. It has been a notorious racket for 50 years and has the additional drawback of being grossly discriminatory against women. It continues.

The construction of illegal additions to small houses is another flourishing area. Occasionally terrible threats are issued but somehow nothing comes of them and most rural villages, viewed from the air, offer a rich variety of unauthorised fourth floors.

Most people in Hong Kong are not allowed to celebrate the New Year with their own fireworks. Villagers are not covered by this. When I lived in a rural village I recall sitting on my balcony looking down the valley and seeing occasional bursts of firecrackers, followed by plumes of smoke drifting across the landscape. It was like living in Beirut.

I also noticed a suspiciously transient dog population. Eating dogs is not allowed in Hong Kong. Where were all these large black dogs going? I got on very well with my neighbours, by contributing to the village welfare fund and not asking tactless questions.

Anyway with this background in mind I was not horrified or disgusted by the latest legal triumph, the use of applications to use agricultural land for boarding kennels, as a way to cover it in concrete, with a later switch to something more lucrative and industrial.

This was discovered by a careful piece of freelance research by Liber Research Community. HKFP report here.

Reporting on issues of this kind is a delicate matter. One wishes to show readers an actual specimen of the abuse in progress. But this is fraught with danger. One may well suspect that Farmer Wong was not being frank when he applied to build a refuge for homeless dogs on one of his fields. Proving that his application was bogus is another matter even if, two years later, the field is covered with the remains of dead cars. Maybe the homeless hounds were not as numerous as Mr Wong thought.

On the other hand, looking at the overall figures it is depressingly clear what is going on. The researchers looked at 60 sites which had been approved for boarding kennels, of which 19 appeared to be accommodating dogs, 31 were not and ten remain a mystery.

They had no difficulty in finding sites which had completed the process from approval for animal boarding use to approved industrial use. What boggles the mind is the apparent failure of the officials involved to see what was going on.

Consider: between 2015 and 2017 the annual total of applications for planning permission to run animal boarding establishments was seven. Between 2018 and 2020 it averaged 16. The average for 2021-3 was 35. That means that in the last three years more than 100 applications have been filed to run animal boarding places in the New Territories.

Spokespeople for the Town Planning Board say that there is nothing wrong with people moving on from animal boarding to other uses provided they have the proper permission, and offered to inspect relevant sites.

But you have to ask yourself what these people were thinking. Is the market for dog hotels booming on a scale to justify doubling capacity every three years? Or have rural residents acquired a sudden sensitivity to the needs of strays?

The SPCA estimates that Hong Kong has a dog population of some 200,000, which clearly entails some exciting business opportunities. But a study of owner spending on pets found no detectable figure for boarding or hotel costs. Clearly most owners manage to cover holidays by leaving their pets with friends, family members or the domestic helper.

Moreover many boarding kennels operate quite happily in ordinary industrial or commercial buildings in the urban area. Only the owners of large dogs (like mine) need to worry about whether their canine friend will have access to open space.

I do not suggest that the New Territories are a criminals’ paradise. Nor do I wish to encourage paranoia. But a sudden surge in the popularity of a rather exotic land use application should surely have raised a red flag? Would it perhaps help if the protection of the rural environment attracted a small fraction of the law enforcement zeal devoted to the activities of subversive buskers, or the wearers of political tee-shirts.

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School inspections: is it ‘How can I help?’ or ‘Impress me or die”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 29, 2024| 1 Comment »

School inspections are a funny business. They sit on an obstinate paradox which makes it difficult to have confidence in the results.

An experienced observer can glean quite a lot about a school from walking the corridors: are the students cheerful and well-behaved; what is on the walls? Our observer can gather more from looking at documents: are the teachers planning and conferring, do they attend development courses, are they well qualified for what they are doing? But really if you want to evaluate what is going on you need to visit the place where education actually happens: the classroom.

This is where we trip over the paradox. The classroom is usually populated by the class and the teacher. Add an inspector and you are no longer looking at a normal lesson. The teacher usually knows the inspection is coming and can be tempted to put on a bit of a show.

Less obviously the class may respond to the presence of a stranger. When I did my teaching practice (a long time ago) my classes were fairly riotous. It was an all-boys school, and all the boys knew I was the lowest form of teaching life, and would be leaving after one term anyway. But by a kind convention, during the assessment visits from my tutor everyone behaved impeccably. Teaching briefly became easy.

The important variable in an inspection is the attitude of the inspector, which can range from “How can I help?” to “Impress me or die!” The gentle end of the spectrum can be found in the autobiographical works of Gervase Phinn, who was an inspector in the more photogenic parts of Yorkshire. The harsh end of the scale led to the tragic case of Ruth Perry, a primary school head who killed herself after being told that an inspection would lead to the school being downgraded from “outstanding” to “inadequate”.

Local inspections have generally languished in obscurity until last week, when the Education Department started publishing fairly detailed reports on individual schools. These demonstrated an impressive level of patriotic enthusiasm. Schools were rated on how far they had integrated national security into the curriculum, and whether they had introduced the required national education subjects.

The inspectors also, rather bizarrely, gave their verdicts on the quality of the flag raising ceremonial and the singing of the national anthem. Some schools were chided because the singing was not loud enough.

Public ire ensued, mainly because so many of these criticisms were levelled at two schools catering for “special needs”, the currently acceptable euphemism for children mentally or physically ill-adapted for conventional school life. Many observers, including me, thought that teachers in this demanding field probably had more urgent things to worry about than staging routine patriotic performances.

Special needs teaching is much more difficult than the conventional stuff and demands extraordinary patience, sympathy and persistence. It is one of life’s major injustices that money and prestigious titles (Professor Hamlett to you, Sunshine!) are showered on those who teach a carefully selected audience of consenting adults, while the saintly qualities required of special needs teaching go unheralded and unrewarded.

Having been loudly scolded on-line the Education Bureau subtly shifted its position. If children could not learn about the Basic Law and other constitutional matters they could at least be taught to sing the national anthem.

The bureau said “March of the Volunteers” had “a distinctive rhythm, a high-pitched melody, majestic force and embodies the courage and indomitable fighting spirit of the Chinese nation. Schools have a responsibility to let students understand the etiquette and attitude required when performing the national anthem, so as to cultivate students’ national identity and respect for the country.”

This really does not address the basic question, which is whether teaching primary school kids to sing this particular tune “loudly” is a good use of educational time. After all the anthem was intended as a film score, not a school tune. The rhythm is difficult, the range wide, and there is much variation in both.

The British national anthem (God save the King … or Queen as the case may be) provides an illustrative contrast. It is a plodding, simple tune. It can be played on anything from a kazoo to the Mighty Wurlitzer and everyone who has been required to play it recognises that it is terminally boring. The March of the Volunteers is more exciting, more interesting and more demanding. Some professional musicians have had trouble with it.

I imagine few schools have a band capable of providing the backing so what is proposed is a sort of communal karaoke with a sound track. Students who have not been attending, or not been attending to, lessons in Putonghua will also find they are effectively required to sing in a foreign language.

Under the circumstances complaints about the volume of the singing seem ill-advised. Different halls have different acoustics. Primary school kids are not opera singers and a common reaction to uncertainty about the tune or the words is to drop the volume. As we cannot switch to an easier song we will probably have to put up with this.

Anyway students will survive a few extra singing lessons. Whether the March of the Volunteers can stand this sort of treatment is another matter. Somewhere around the 30th repetition it will cease to embody the “courage and indomitable fighting spirit of the Chinese nation” and come to embody only the Education Department’s enthusiasm for repetitive and boring patriotic performances … by other people. Do you think school inspectors start the week by singing the national anthem together?

No, I don’t think so either.

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Security chief, red rag, bull … journalists?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 25, 2024| Leave a Comment »

What is it, one wonders, about Chris Tang, the Secretary for Security, and the Hong Kong Journalists’ Association? Mr Tang, after all, has a lot on his plate. He is responsible for repelling every threat to peace, order and national security in Hong Kong. The latter, we are often told, needs constant alertness and attention. Yet it seems Mr Tang is never too busy to have a go at the HKJA.

The Association is a small voluntary body aiming to serve and protect the interests of people working in journalism. It does the usual things: seminars, workshops, occasional dinners and the odd press release on relevant matters. It has sometimes run a football competition.

Let me declare, if this counts as an interest, that I was a member for many years. When I first arrived in Hong Kong the JA was a bit of an expat hobby. It was founded by two foreigners in the 70s after a scandalous incident in which the Fire Brigade – which in those days, like the police force and for similar reasons, did not welcome press coverage – turned its hoses on the reporters assembled to watch a performance.

In those days people arriving to work in the humbler parts of Hong Kong journalism (I had been recruited by the Standard) did not join the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, which regarded people merely writing for local consumption as peasants. You joined the HKJA for the serious stuff and the Press Club for fun.

The Press Club ran a Wanchai bar situated beguilingly between a night club where frustrated rich men could meet mercenary fast ladies, and a motel in which the ensuing relationships could be consummated. Once a year the JA and the Press Club jointly organised a ball, which was what you might call a colourful occasion, both in dress and behaviour.

During the 80s there was a growing culture clash between the two organisations, which led to the HKJA dropping out of the ball and running its own annual fundraising dinner, a more respectable event. The Press Club was rescued from its continuing flirtation with bankruptcy by an unfrocked accountant called Len Dreaver and eventually dropped the Ball. The club closed altogether in 1997 because so many members had left Hong Kong.

After that the HKJA was really the only game in town, unless you could afford the FCC and had a taste for its somewhat expat alcoholic ambience.

During the ensuing 20 years or so I do not remember any particular tension between the HKJA and the Security Branch. There was a period in which I was regularly recruited to do a session on media relations with officers approaching promotion; after each session we of course had some open discussion, and this often featured complaints about inaccurate or intrusive reporting.

I imagine in most places with a free press you would get the same sort of thing. We would then go on to laments about the absence of a complaint mechanism for people upset about their treatment by the media, to which I would reply that we would be quite happy to have a complaints procedure as long as it was modelled on the police one.

This was all good clean fun and embodied the commonsense truism that the relationship between press and police will always involve some conflict because the objectives of the two groups sometimes coincide and sometimes don’t.

This brings us to 2019 when relations understandably became a bit strained. Mr Tang was then in charge of the police. The HKJA, like any journalists’ union worthy of the name, eagerly pressed for access to events and against violence inflicted on its members.

Since that time Mr Tang has resoundingly condemned the association and all its works on several occasions, questioning who it represents, who it gets its money from and whether it should be invited to press conferences on relevant matters. He has accused it of “infiltrating schools” and defending people who swore at policewomen. At one point he suggested the association should publicise its entire membership list, a curious suggestion from a government which condemned the publication of national security judges’ mere names as “doxing”.

This barrage gave the understandable impression, in the context of the times, that the HKJA was expected either to disband itself, like the Professional Teachers Union, or elect a more “patriotic” – or more tactfully “neutral” – leadership, like the Hong Kong Bar Association.

And so to last Friday, when the HKJA elected a new leadership, and Mr Tang rose to the occasion with “Looking at [the list of candidates], it looks more like a foreign journalist association to me. Most of them are journalists from foreign media, some are freelancers, some are not even journalists and their organisations have engaged in political activities.” Mr Tang was disturbed that the executive was light on representatives from local mainstream media.

Actually this has always been a problem, if it is a problem. Many mainstream media proprietors are violently opposed to trade unions generally and particularly to trade unions which seek to represent their employees. The JA leadership has consequently always been a bit overweight on the non-profit-making parts of the media business, like RTHK, and underweight on major media groups in private ownership. Insert the usual suspects here.

One must add that over the last five years or so the mainstream media have much diminished, and are now heavily outnumbered by the directly or indirectly state-owned sector, and the voluntary castrato chorus whose owners like a quiet life.

Many journalists who are still trying to pursue the activity in its traditional form may now feel that their lives are exciting enough without accepting office in an organisation which is clearly in the government’s crosshairs. In fact two members of the executive put in their resignations between the end of nominations and the counting of the votes.

Still, the question who is a journalist seems to be one about which one can think of more reliable sources than Mr Tang. Bernard Levin memorable pondered in one piece whether journalism was an art, a craft, a trade, a confidence trick or a disease. Each of these theories would lead to a different definition but none of them supports the suggestion that entry to the profession should be monitored by a retired policeman.

What seems to me worthy of comment and universally overlooked is that Mr Tang’s preoccupation with the HKJA has apparently led to spying on it. No doubt the identities of the candidates and their professional activities were transmitted to voters. But Mr Tang is, I presume, not an HKJA member so he was not entitled to see them.

Commenting on the antecedents and character of the candidates looks dangerously close to the sort of intimidating letter which concludes with some such phrase as “we know where you live”.

So I salute the incoming executive, who are no doubt well aware that one mis-step could bring them a long encounter with the government’s correctional servants. As Sophie Scholl wrote: “How can we expect righteousness to prevail if there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause?”

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