tim's experiment

So many crazy things happening lately I wonder if something deeply serious has gone wrong with the world.

Let’s start with the great Cathay junket scandal. A group of Legislative Councillors, with one hanger-on/family member each, were jetted to Toulon to see an aeroplane emerge from the factory. Side trips to other European destinations were also available. Apparently (I find this barely credible) none of them thought this arrangement would raise eyebrows if it became known. Of course it did. The Post pro-government attack poodles fell noisily on the neck of Albert Ho, on the grounds of hypocrisy in the light of his complaints about similar offences by other people. This little festival lasted until it emerged that all the councillors in the group had either apologised or paid the money to charity or both … except the DAB man. We were also treated to a strange piece by a former journalist saying that junkets were a normal part of doing business. Now let us get the journalists out of the way first. Junkets are often offered to journalists on the grounds that if not offered free an event will not be covered at all. How news outlets deal with the resultant ethical dilemma is up to them. If they are fussy they either refuse or put a note on the story indicating that the writer was entertained. If less fussy they just pass the invitations round the office as a perk. Councillors and senior officials are in a different category. For them the rules are very simple: if you or you employer pays it’s work (or for academics, a conference); If the visitee pays for you it’s a junket; if the visitee pays for you and your wife (or girlfriend if you prefer) and throws in a quick flit to Paris then it’s a bribe. Other interpretations not helpful. Got it?

Then we had the Secretary for Development musing on the merits of allowing housing to be built in country parks. Now I have no objection to officials asking themselves if this would be a good idea, although I think the answer is no. The mind-blowing detail was that the Secretary was wildly wrong (it’s 40 percent not 70) about the amount of land in this category. Now if some humble blogger made an error of this kind we could put it down to laziness. To check the figure you would have to resort to Wikipedia (unreliable) or the government web site (unnavigable) or a rough estimate from a map. But a Secretary is not in this position. If he wants to know how much land is devoted to country parks he can ask a permanent civil servent in the relevant department, who will have the figure at his fingertips. Or he can ask the nearest office lady to dig out the figure for him. Mistakes on this scale make you look dumb.

Still on the land front, letter writers have leaped to the defence of the Hong Kong Golf Club, which occupies a large and convenient swathe of the New Territories. I can see a case for the club having one course, but three? Other writers pointed out that the government’s land shortage was entirely bogus, even without getting round to the two untouchables – the PLA, whose considerable holdings are visibly empty, and the Jockey Club, which long ago promised to give up Happy Valley in exchange for a swathe of Shatin, but then changed its mind. I sympathise with people’s wish to keep things they are used to having, but the distribution of leisure space in Hong Kong is at least as skewed as the distribution of wealth and if that is hampering the achievement of basic standards of housing then there should be no contest. And people who describe the Hong Kong course as “world class” are deluding themselves. The course is too easy for a serious tournament. The players come for the money.

On to the law, where something seriously weird is upcoming in the Court of First Instance. The Director of Immigration is seeking judicial review of a decision of the Immigration Appeals Tribunal. I say nothing of the merits of the case at issue, which concerns a rejected application for an ID card. But what is the director thinking of? The Immigration Appeals Tribunal is a wholly government-appointed entity which has not, over the years, established a reputation for inconveniently robust independence of spirit. Judicial review was not invented so that top officials could appeal against the decisions of their own pet kangaroos. I am surprised the Director appears to have given no consideration to the possibility that if the tribunal did not endorse his position perhaps that is because his position was resoundingly and flagrantly wrong.

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Reading the SCMPost every day is like watching the last hour of Titanic. The ship is still recognisable and still more of less on an even keel, but every now and then another row of portholes disappears beneath the waves. We all understand why the China coverage is a bit, shall we say constipated. The paper’s preferences in local matters are not concealed and the sports space devoted to our local horse casino remains scandalous. But the foreign coverage used to be quite reliable. And so it should be; the news agencies do most of the work.

And so to yesterday’s paper, featuring on page A14 a cracking story headlined “Siege man, 107, shot by police”. This story came to us from Arkansas, in the USA, where a 107-year-old had been shot dead by a SWAT squad. He was firing at them at the time. Clearly in the US, where the right to a pistol in your pocket is taken very seriously, age is no bar to gunmanship. Only problem with this story was that I had seen it before.

I had in fact seen it on Page 13 of Monday’s Standard, where it was called “Gunman, 107, killed by cops in shootout”. Unless there were two senile shooters aged 107 and called Monroe Isadore we must conclude that this was the same story. According to the Post’s version, in fact, the reported events happened on Saturday. As there is a 12-hour time difference and we are ahead I presume that means it happened on Sunday our time, or thereabouts, and was on the wires that afternoon.

So what, one wonders, was it doing in the Post on Tuesday? In this world of broadcast news and instant web updates a story this old is hardly worth using at all. Maybe they’re just not trying hard enough. The old slogan “One of the world’s great newspapers” could hardly now be advanced with a straight face. Are we preparing for a new one: Yesterday’s news tomorrow?

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Well well. “A blind eye to sexual harassment” was the headline on the SCMPost’s leader, complaining that of 6,000 companies surveyed on their attitudes to the matter and procedures for dealing with it, only 198 replied. “It can be assumed”, said the writer daringly, that the others “did not think much about the issue, or had no policies at all.”

The first question which comes to mind on reading a leader like this is: is the Post itself free from sexual harassment, and if so does it have an effective policy for dealing with it? I am told by people with bitter experience of the matter that the answer to both of these questions is “no”. Leader writers need to be careful about avoiding the throwing stones in glass houses syndrome.

Leaving that aside, I can think of a number of reasons why companies might desist from responding to a survey on the matter, which apparently have not occurred to the writer of this piece. Companies in Hong Kong get a steady stream of questionnaires from government departments. I am myself the sole proprietor of a registered business name. The enterprise consists of me, selling my own services. I regularly receive requests from government departments for information about my arrangements for the safety, health etc, of my employees. If they persist I reply saying that there are no employees. There is just me. Sometimes this satisfies, Sometimes it doesn’t. I am quite prepared to believe that most of the 6,000 companies asked for their policies and arrangements on the matter of sexual harassment simply binned the questionnaire on the grounds that it is no part of their job to provide free information to government departments. Some of them were no doubt very small. Some of them probably had no female employees, so sexual harassment was rather a remote problem. Maybe some of them had no male employees, another convenient arrangement.

I also had some difficulty with the statistics presented as demonstrating that this was an urgent problem. Of the 316 complaints received under the Sexual Discrimination Ordinance last year, more than one-third related to workplace harassment. The validity and seriousness of the complaints were not specified. Complaints of this nature commonly vary considerably, from the outrageous (you will not be promoted unless you sleep with me) to the trivial (a Pirrelli calendar on the wall of someone else’s office). Let us say that there were 100 substantiated and serious complaints among those received. Let us say further that the 6,000 companies surveyed were the entire universe of potential harassment venues in Hong Kong. This means that there was a one in 60 chance of the company you work for having a sexual harassment case last year. Or to put it another way, you could work for a Hong Kong company for 60 years before you could expect to be harassed, if that was what you wished for.

No doubt there are other ways of looking at it. But given that there are perfectly good legal ways of dealing with the serious cases, you have to wonder if this is really a serious problem, or a solution looking for one. It is, however, a serious problem at the Post, I am told. So they might want to consider sorting that out before offering advice to the rest of us.

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I apologise for returning again to the topic of Ms Alpais Lam, now referred to for headline purposes as “rude teacher” but the continuing proceedings provide  insights into the way things are going generally round here.
Thursday’s papers reported that, as the Post put it, “School issues formal penalty to rude teacher”. Apparently the school management committee (or possibly the school board, the Post gets less reliable on these important details every week) had met. Its verdict on the matter was couched in terms strikingly similar to a quote attributed to the Secretary for Education three days earlier. Moreover the Education Bureau had also “met”, said the Post, and issued Ms Lam with an official penalty notice. Nobody was saying what the penalty was. Still…

If there was an official penalty at the end of the process then the meeting at the school, whatever its constitutional title, takes on the guise of a disciplinary hearing. The law is reluctant to interfere in disciplinary hearings held by semi-private bodies, but there are some minimum standards which must be observed. These are technically described as the rules of “natural justice” and are designed to ensure basic fairness. The person against whom a penalty may be imposed should be informed of the charge against him or her, the evidence supporting it, and be given the opportunity to confront accusers, address the tribunal, board or whatever hearing the case, and usually to be assisted by a lawyer or friend of his or her choice. It appears that none of these formalities was observed.

So here we have justice with mainland characteristics. The result is announced before the trial by a political figure. The proceedings are in private and the accused plays no part in them. Questions of law and procedure are not so much overlooked as ignored.

Next up, according to the Post, is that a “source close to the government” (readers will gather that I am rather pleased the person who wrote this story was not one of my students) said “the bureau would summarise and analyse the documents handed to them by the school and … the report could be submitted to (CY) Leung by the end of the month”. And the question this raises is: What documents? The school is in no position – and has not given itself time – to do any meaningful investigation of what happened or why. The only source of information it has apart from access to Youtube, which Mr Leung can watch for himself, is a fistful of emails and letters from  Caring Hong Kong nutcases. The only meaningful part of the school’s report can be summarised very easily: “in accordance with your instructions we have punished this troublesome lady”.

Meanwhile further evidence of the selectiveness of this outrage – apparently the Hong Kong Lovers are going to continue to bombard the school  with rubbish until the lady is sacked – in Sunday’s paper which recorded the case of a teacher fired from one school for ‘inappropriate sexual behaviour” who simply got a job in another school. No complaints or recriminations from Hong Kong’s Carers or Lovers when he was eventually caught at it again and convicted. Now if he had sworn at a policeman …

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Full marks to Allan Chiang, the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data, for being willing to explain himself. Long letter in Pravda this morning repeating previous points. The man will not shut up. He has considerable chutzpah – Mr Chiang complains that personal names are ambiguous, which is not what he said when he was pushing the line that ID card numbers were a personal secret. But Mr Chiang’s basic problem is that he has lost track of the notion that some things should be public.  And if they are public that means people are free to use or misuse them as they think fit.

Mr Chiang says that the names of people engaged in criminal, civil or bankruptcy proceedings are “made available by government authorities for specific purposes”. This is nonsense. Actually government authorities have nothing to do with it. It is a basic legal principle that justice should be public.

When I first became a journalist this was not the legal fiction which it has become as newspapers got smaller and court lists got longer. I worked for a newspaper called the Morecambe Visitor (which is still afloat and is now online here: http://www.thevisitor.co.uk/). We circulated in Morecambe, a small Lancashire town – seaside resort with a bit of fishing – and the adjacent, even smaller town of Heysham – Irish ferries, nuclear power station. There were also some readers two miles down the road in Lancaster but that was mainly the territory of the Lancaster Guardian. If you appeared before the Morecambe magistrates on any charge more serious than a parking offence this was reported. With, officious data privacy not having been invented yet, your name and address in full. If your case came up before the Lancaster magistrates a reporter from the Visitor (for two years, me) would be there with specific instructions not to miss any Morecambe cases. I could do Lancaster ones if they were interesting and spend the rest of my time distracting, or helping, the man from the Lancaster Guardian. If you were involved in something more serious it would be heard in Preston, where a freelance would cover it for us. Bankruptcy proceedings were held in a lovely mediaeval hall behind Lancaster Castle and were also covered by me. Nothing was made available by government authorities. These were public proceedings and the public had the right to attend or read about them.

Lawyers will tell you that this is so that justice can be seen to be done. Well perhaps. Lawyers are a self-important lot and for them, everything is about them. But clearly this time-honoured system also had the merit of allowing the population generally to know who had been accused or convicted of what. This allowed them to take appropriate precautions. I have no doubt also that for many defendants the attendant publicity was so acutely embarrassing as to be part of the punishment. This point was often offered in mitigation. And this is as it should be. A person is not entitled to a good reputation; he is entitled to an accurate one.

It must be conceded that this is not really the way things work now. Unless you commit a spectacular offence it is unlikely to be reported unless there is some additional newsworthy feature like a famous victim or sex. Crime and bankruptcy are copious, newspapers smaller and readers less interested. But the idea that people who are interested should be deprived of the information because it was only made available for some mysterious official purpose is an error. Mr Chiang would do well to avoid the appearance that he is a participant in the administration’s ongoing war on journalism.

Talking about things which should be public brings me to that curious enterprise, the Silent Majority, which this week splashed out on a second wave of ads in the Chinese press attacking the idea of Occupying Central. Although one of the four known members of this body is styled the Convenor, it appears to have only five members – four glove puppets and Mr Moneybags behind the scenes who wishes to remain nameless. Cynics are free to wonder whether the well-publicised foursome would be so vociferous in expressing their views if they had not met the nameless millionaire. I think this person needs to emerge from behind the curtain and reveal who he is. After all we know there is a lot of money there but our views of its owner will depend somewhat on where it came from, and what interests its owner may share with people who do not approve of civil disobedience. While he or she remains nameless we are free to infer that the person is a contemptible coward trying to manipulate public opinion with his money and ingratiate himself.

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The case of Ms Alpais Lam, who can be found on Youtube excoriating the police for providing a special enclosure in which the Caring Hong Kong loonies could persecute the Falun Gong, continues to provide riveting reading.
Let me first correct all those cynics who suppose that Alpais is another of those notorious Hong Kong made-up Christian names – perhaps a garbled version of the Spanish newspaper El Pais. Not so. There is (where we would be without Wikipedia on occasions like this?) a historical figure called Alpais of Cudot. This lady is officially Blessed, which means she was a candidate for sainthood but didn’t quite make it. This ruling can probably be regarded as final because the original Alpais died in 1211. This is a pity in a way because otherwise she could have been the patron saint of anorexics — her claim to miraculous status is based on the fact (well, the story, if you like0 that she never ate. She was apparently fed miraculously by the Virgin Mary.

Happily our local Alpais looks well-nourished, which is just as well because several people seem to be out to get her. It is not difficult to see why. If you watch the Youtube footage – which some thoughtful soul has kindly fitted with sub-titles – you can see that the dispute with the police is actually an afterthought. The main meat of the speech was a spirited denunciation of the communist party and all its works. This is the sort of thing that some people don’t want to hear.

The Chief Executive’s request for a report, meanwhile, has clearly caused the Secretary for Education some embarrassment. He has, according to yesterday’s prints, passed the request to the school where she works. This was, said Mr Eddie Ng Hak-him, in accordance with “the existing mechanism”, Which will surprise all those readers who thought it was unusual, if not unprecedented, for a Chief Executive to ask for a report on an individual teacher. Come on, Mr Ng. You’re passing the buck.  Ng went on to say that “the school’s management and board of directors are going to hold meetings to study how to best handle the case.” Note the Secretarial split infinitive. “They will file a report to the bureau. The report will offer an updated and holistic report of the whole incident.” What a load of sh … manure.

The school, like other schools, is on holiday. So the management and the board of directors are going to get back to work some time early in September and the directors, following Mr Ng’s distinguished example, will pass the request for a report to the principal, who will, if he has any sense, pass it to a deputy principal. The lucky final holder of the parcel will be in an interesting position. What does Mr Ng mean by “the whole incident”? Is he suppose to consider the Falun Gong protest, the Caring loonies protest against the protest, the decisions of the police, view the videos, and talk to Ms Lam? But wait a minute, that was not what sparked the interest in the first place – what got everyone interested was the later pro-police demonstration and its encounter with a pro-What the F*** counterpart. So perhaps he should cover that as well. What exactly is the whole which he is supposed holistically to cover … or as the Secretary for Education would say to holistically cover? This person, whoever it is, has a full-time job and no legal powers to seek evidence from anyone. Actually it would be good for everyone concerned if the school took a robust line and told the Secretary for Education that what teachers get up to in their summer holidays is none of its business and none of his either. But I fear the meetings “to study how best to handle the case” are going to conclude that something in the nature of a head on a plate is required.

Meanwhile Ms Lam has heard that the Mong Kok District Crime Squad is investigating a complaint by a nameless member of the public (aged 59 – clearly a DAB voter!) that she may have been guilty of “disorderly behaviour in public and obstructing officers in executing their duties.” This is going to be another interesting task. The one thing which any viewer of the video footage can establish to his complete satisfaction is that there were policemen present in very large numbers. So the idea is that an offence or two were committed, but this crowd of constabulary completely missed it, until enlightened by a 59-year-old peasant?

Let me introduce here a note of indelicate pedantry. Strictly speaking  , “What the f***?, though certainly rude, is neither abusive nor insulting. This is because it is not a suggestion or a description, but a question. Not a bad question, under the circumstances. This persecution of Ms Lam is not going to do anyone any good. If it continues I shall nominate her for the Nobel Peace Prize.

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The funny thing about the Chief Executive’s “meet the public” session in Tin Shui Wai was that if you were a mere member of the public it was quite difficult to get in. Buried in the Post’s pre-piece was the interesting snippet that more than half the seats were spoken for in advance. They were wanted for “aides and the media”. This is of course nonsense., There is no need for hordes of aides to sit in the hall and the media can stand at the back as they do on other occasions. Clearly someone wished to ensure that the dwindling ranks of Leung admirers were well represented among the questioners.

And so it came about that one of the people in the audience wanted to express concern about the effect on her children of the discovery that a primary school teacher had sworn at a policeman. Mr Leung effortlessly dragged this easy ball onto his own wicket, “The Education Bureau should submit a report that is fair and impartial on whether the series of incidents would have an effect on our teachers, teaching quality and youngsters,” he said, “It would be a surprise if the government did not take an interest in an incident which has aroused public concern.”

According to another newspaper the Education Bureau is already in contact with the school where the teacher concerned works. Who is there to contact in the middle of August, one wonders. The vice-chairman of Education Convergence, Mr Ho Hon-kuen, said the Chief Executive should leave the matter to the Council on Professional Conduct in Education.

Now look, people, criticising the police, with or without obscenities, is clearly an expression of opinion on a matter of public interest. It is an exercise of the free speech promised to Hong Kongers by the Joint Declaration, the Basic Law, the Bill of Rights Ordinance and (just for a giggle) the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. A teacher outside the classroom and on holiday is no more answerable to the Education Bureau, the Chief Executive or the Council on Professional Conduct in Education than anyone else. She is free to say and do whatever she likes within the law, like a policeman on pre-retirement leave.

I suppose some people will wonder if they want their children to get the idea that it is OK to swear at policemen. But it would be an odd arrangement if this was a test for members of a profession who are allowed to teach lurid notions about gay sex, antediluvian superstitions about contraceptives, and pseudo-scientific claptrap about the dinosaurs lasting until 2,000 years ago.

Actually the police force must take some of the blame for the present rather delicate state of its relations with much of the public. The force has vigorously resisted for years the notion that it should be renamed a police service. They want to be a paramilitary force. I have never been able to find a substantial reason for this preference beyond a childish enthusiasm for fun with guns, but there it is. A paramilitary force is by its nature close to the line which separates it from an occupying army. People do not confuse policemen with monks or social workers because that is the force’s wish. Hard words go with the territory.

If the policemen who work on demonstrations are upset at being sworn at I have a constructive suggestion. Whenever I am stopped for speeding or some other traffic trivia the policeman delivering the ticket is pleasantly surprised that I do not swear at him and often says so. So we should let the traffic cops do the demonstration duty. They’re used to being sworn at.

Meanwhile let us note the rampant hypocrisy being deployed in this area. A few weeks ago I wrote about the case of a primary school teacher who committed an indecent assault and was merely bound over. Those who are bound over admit the facts of the case. Not a word from anyone about the desirability of having a primary school teacher who engaged in drunken gropings of female strangers. The Chief Executive called for no reports, the Education Bureau did not volunteer one, the school said it was a private matter and the Council on Professional Conduct in Education was mute. I infer that this whole swearing at police thing is a political potion brewed up by DAB pilot fish to embarrass people they disapprove of and defend the right of left-wing thugs to disrupt other people’s meetings and protests. Shame on the lot of you. Or as we teachers apparently say these days, f*** you!

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I don’t know what to make of this sign – which if you’re curious can be found in Edinburgh Airport. Is it a symptom of liberation, or of continuing slavery? Who is it protecting from what? Well it’s nice to know the toilets are cleaned by someone.

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Last week the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman again chided Japan for failing to “come to terms with its history”. I think he was upset over the launching of a new helicopter carrying ship, though this can hardly be relevant to present foreign policy disputes because it is a large boat and must have been ordered years ago. Anyway this is a theme to which the Chinese Foreign Ministry regularly returns, usually apropos of some synthetic outrage like a history textbook or a shrine visit. No doubt Japan still has a lot of history to come to terms with. Well we are all warned against throwing stones while living in a glass house, and this is a fine example.

The 20th century was remarkable for huge calamities in which millions of people died: wars, famines, upheavals, massacres, genocide… By the 1950s this led to the coining of a new word “megadeaths”, for the convenience of people who wished to discuss the end of civilisation in the next war without typing “million deaths” all the time. Most of the casualties could be blamed on three remarkable men — or if you prefer remarkable criminals – namely Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Now we all know that Hitler accounted for six megadeaths by deliberately turning killing into an industry. But that is nothing like his total, which depends on how much we put down to his account of the total deaths in World War 2, which ran to 55 megadeaths. Some of these must presumably be allocated to Hirohito. Some also must be put down to Stalin, though he needs no help, having caused a famine (20 megadeaths) and numerous examples of political persecution and ethnic cleansing. Mao is a bit easier to handle. We can spare him a share of the Chinese Civil War (3 megadeaths) because as a head of state he is in a class of his own: the famine following the Great Leap Forward is now reckoned to have produced between 45 and 50 megadeaths in a mere four years. To that we can add another 7 megadeaths from the Cultural Revolution.

The interesting thing about this is not that these three men were spectacularly bad – no doubt others would have done as much evil given the opportunity – but the way in which they are now regarded in the countries they bathed in innocent blood. Hitler is generally reviled. Denying his crimes is a criminal offence in some European countries. Uncle Joe is now regarded even in Russia as an embarrassment. Mao on the other hand still beams down in portraiture on his capital city. People still queue to walk past his remains. One wonders what they say, under their breath. The consequences of his rule have emerged gradually and painfully. Many documents remain concealed. Nobody has been prepared to come to the obvious conclusion that he was a mass murderer on a grand scale.

And this brings me to a curious concept circulating currently, the “Tacitus trap”. This is not a commonplace of Classical studies. Apparently it was discovered by a China scholar in search of a tactful way of saying that many of his countrymen do not share the Chinese Communist Party’s high opinion of itself. Tacitus observed of one of the emperors whose reigns he chronicled that eventually he was so ill-thought-of that even when he did good things they were ignored or misinterpreted. The implication is that the Chinese Government is in danger of being stuck in a “Tacitus trap” despite its economic successes because of unsolved political and social problems. I think this assumes that people have very poor memories. The Chinese government may be in a trap. It is not a Tacitus Trap, it is a Hannibal Lector Trap. When you have been a serial killer for a long time people find it difficult to believe that you have found religion, turned over a new leaf and become a harmless upstanding member of society.

There is an old saying that “Treason never prospers. For this there is one reason. If it prospers, none dare call it treason.” While mass murder is unacknowledged, asking other people to study their history is ill-advised.

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I would like to pay my respects to a Mr “Charlie Chan, Mid-levels” who has taken up a worthy cause in which some of us have been labouring in vain for decades. Mr Chan wrote a letter to the Post commenting on another Chan (Ronnie) who had criticised parts of John Tsang’s budgets as foolish. Basically the two Chans agree in criticising Mr Tsang, but that is not the point which had me cheering over my cornflakes. Mr Chan (Charlie) dealt at some length with the defence of Mr Tsang’s give-aways offered by an “unnamed government source”. He went on to criticise the anonymity, in words on which I cannot improve: “If a government source wants to give information to the public the person should not remain ‘unnamed’. The South China Morning Post should desist from publishing such government quotes unless they are backed by a name and and official position.”

And so say all of us. I think I first made this point in a column in the old Tiger Standard in about 1981. It has come up regularly since. Without effect. Government sources like to be anonymous. It cloaks them in the majesty of spokesmanship even if they are actually rather junior. It allows political appointees to speak without revealing the possible conflicts of interest which seem to be a trade mark of the present administration. And it allows the speaker to lie with impunity, because when he is contradicted by another nameless spokesman later we do not know who he or she was, or whether the first, or the second nameless spokesperson was telling the truth. Or, maybe, neither.

It is a little unfair to blame the continuing attractions of this practice on newspapers. Reporters hunger and thirst for information and find it hard to be picky about where they find it. One of the British newspapers (the Guardian, which being a non-profit-making publication can afford to be high-minded about these things) did for a while boycott the anonymous briefings provided in Downing Street. No other media followed this example. Perhaps it is better that we should regularly be reminded that we are led by cowards and deceivers who are too ashamed to do their speaking in public.

I fear also that Mr Chan is a bit optimistic in expecting any fearless innovations in abrasive journalism from the present leaders of the Post. Still if they are considering his suggestion I happily second it. While they are at it they might also consider the attribution of parts of stories to un-named “analysts”. Today (Tuesday) the lead story was a rewrite with adornments of a Xinhua story (as we call pieces of political propaganda in a mainland context) about a meeting between a senile retired war criminal (Henry Kissinger) and a senile semi-retired despot (Jiang Zemin).

I have no intention of commenting on the content of this story, which was not journalism and so of no interest. From a technical point of view, though, we were given in the first paragraph of the story an interpretation from “analysts”. In the ninth paragraph we had some shameless interpretation – “This is a clear message…” – attributed to nobody at all. In the 17th paragraph (this is not a short story) the unnamed analysts are with us again. In the 19th paragraph we finally meet one analyst, Zhang Lifan, whose credentials are “formerly with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences”, whatever that means. Mr Zhang hovers over the next seven paragraphs, and then we go back to Xinhua. Readers who wade through another six paragraphs of gloop then find the “analysts” in action again.

This leaves readers with real stamina pondering an interesting question. In a story of this length, why were we not told who were the unnamed “analysts” who contributed so much of it? Mr Zhang may be an analyst but he is not “analysts”. I realise there are matters in Chinese politics on which careful people may not wish to speak in their own names. But nobody is going to get into trouble for saying nice things about Jiang Zemin.

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