tim's experiment

Splendid piece of investigative journalism in the last Sunday Pravda. The reporter, Ms Joanna Chiu, had a simple but fruitful idea. She rented a segment of a subdivided flat for a month. Actually she only lasted a week but in the conditions that is nothing to be ashamed of.

I had better insert here that, as far as I know, Ms Chiu has never been one of my students. If she had been she would have got my standard line on investigative journalism (a field in which, long ago, I could claim some eminence) which is that there are a lot of good stories which do not require a great deal of money, connections or Deep Throats. You just have to think of them. This was an excellent example. Anyone could have done it. The secret of success is to be the person who thinks of doing it first.

The details of life in a subdivided flat were fairly harrowing. Let us say that it did not come as a great surprise when Ms Chiu, fleeing her hell hole to spend the night in the nearest all-night Big Mac Parlour, found a lot of other people doing the same thing.  Clearly Hong Kong has a large number of sleazebag landlords who are happy to rent out cubicles which are unsafe, unsanitary, barely habitable and grotesquely over-priced.

The question which now arises, of course, is whether it is acceptable to have one of these sleazebag landlords as the political appointee in charge of buildings matters.  The answer is obvious, and is unlikely to come out any different if you accept what seems to be the usual excuse these days and say that actually he is only the sleazebag’s husband.  I am beginning to think I would rather have kept the guy who had done interesting things with his rent allowance. Come to that I am beginning to wish I had cast my non-existent vote for Henry. But it’s too late for all that.

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An interesting moment in the patriotic voyage to the Diaoyu Archipelago came when the police boarded the patriotic protest trawler. Previous protest odyssies had ended at this point in a burst of law-enforcement based on the notion that trawlers are meant for fishing, and so are not designed, or more importantly licensed, to carry passengers. On this occasion, we were told, the Forces of Order boarded the trawler. The inhabitants of the boat, it transpired, had locked themselves in the wheelhouse and refused to admit the floating plods. Fearing that they would be carried into international waters, where they have no jurisdiction, Hong Kong’s finest unboarded the trawler, returned to their own boat and watched the protest pirates sail away. This was either a politically-directed charade or the most humiliating moment in the history of our police force since …  the last time a Commissioner of Police apologised.

Happily the Force’s reputation was to some extent restored on Monday. A member of the public called the police to  report that a dog had been left in its owner’s car with the windows closed, and that the dog seemed distressed. Police found that the car was locked. Like the island protesters, the dog did not unlock the door. The police in Yuen Long, however, are made of sterner stuff than their Marine counterparts. They broke a window, and rescued the dog. The dog was taken to a nearby dog hospital, where it was declared dead. The owner was arrested when she returned to the car, and will be charged with cruelty.

Clearly there is a need for some exchanges of expertise here. Perhaps the person in Yuen Long who knows how to break windows can be seconded to the Marine Police, where he can spread the word that trawlers have windows. Meanwhile the Marine moron who doesn’t know how to break windows could be transferred to Yuen Long, where his limitations may cause the odd dead dog but will not lead to international incidents.

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I do not claim that the Joint Declaration on Hong Kong’s Future and the ensuing Basic Law of the Hong Kong SAR are my daily reading. Still I assert with some confidence that the division of labour in the running of Hong Kong affairs was very clear on one point: foreign policy is a matrter for the Central People’s Government. So what on earth did C.Y. Leung think he was up to when he summoned the Japanese Consul to his office for an earful about Those Islands?  If Hong Kong’s Chief Executive wishes to express concern about the plight of Hong Kong citizens detained in other countries, fine. The Japanese Consul has a telephone. It might be more to the point to call his head office anyway. Summoning a diplomat personally to your office is technologically obsolete. It is preserved as a signal-sending gesture in international diplomacy. But Hong Kong has no role in international diplomacy. So there is no excuse for Mr Leung masquerading as Metternich or Castlereagh and a good reason for not doing it: it looks pompous and ridiculous.

I have some sympathy for the people who say we should give Mr Leung a little while to show what he can do before we all start throwing fruit. But the fact is that he has already shown what he can do. The new administration seems to have two themes. One is a strong pong caused by the reluctance of so many members of the new team — led regrettably by Mr Leung himself — to be forthcoming about their financial interests, and the discovery that some of them did indeed have something to hide. The resulting whiff of sleeze is, no doubt, partly a result of score-settling by people who wanted a Chief Executive with a large basement. Still, standards do not seem to be high. Anyone who cannot remember what was going on in his property because he left such matters up to his wife should be out on his ear.

The other theme of the new bunch is lurid nationalism. The trip to the Daoyius was a spectacular piece of self-dramatisation. I particularly enjoyed the report that the intrepid voyagers might starve because half of their food had been swept overboard. People have been fishing from Hong Kong for decades with no reports of food being washed overboard. Floating kitchens are much like land-based ones: indoors with food cupboards. Only on political voyages do monster waves catch the food sunbathing on deck.  This trip was a prime example of the classic agitation techniques: propaganda by deed and provocations. Propaganda by deed involves performing a conspicuous and preferably illegal action which dramatizes the political situation to which you object. Provocation meens trying to trigger an act of repression which will put your antagonist in the wrong. Having dabbled in this sort of thing myself I do not like to see it wasted. Anyone who thinks the ownership of a few uninhabited rocks is an important political issue needs to get a sense of proportion.

But it seems Mr Leung and several well-known fellow-travellers actually helped to finance the expedition. I do not buy the line that the whole thing was a surrogate job on behalf of the People’s Government. The PRC does not need to go to such elaborate lengths to start a shoving match with the Japanese Coast Guard. It  has plenty of fishing boats. I am afraid this is just another instalment in the attempt to play the nationalism card by a team which sees no other plausible route to popularity. Personally I do not like nationalism. This is a widespread sentiment in Europe where we have seen the movie and know how it ends.

Island activists who want to start a war should first take a trip to the north of France, where there are still more than 2,000 British war cemeteries. There is a similar number of French war cemeteries, among which I particularly recommend the Ossuary at Verdun. This large building contains the battlefield debris left by soldiers who were not only no longer identifiable by name but had been so dismembered that they could no longer be assembled into complete sets of parts. Obviously a certain amount of guesswork is involved in working out how many people may have contributed to the collection but the figure usually given is 130,000. Taking provocative trips to disputed islands is not conducive to a peaceful solution to the problem. It is conducive to a violent solution. We may have had criticisms of the first two Chief Executives but at least they did not try to start a war on our behalf.

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Two fallacies have been widely propagated about the new Diploma of Secondary Education. The first one is easily disposed of. This is the claim that the new Liberal Studies subject can be considered a success because most students managed to pass it. Now it is true that the whole enterprise would have been a disaster if students had failed the exam in large quantities. After all, many universities require it. But avoiding disaster hardly counts as success. Saying that most people pass the exam is like saying a boat floats. It’s a good start, and better than the alternative, but more is needed before we start congratulating ourselves. Among the possible explanations for the encouraging pass rate is that the exam was rather easy or was graded with a generous eye. The purpose of a new subject is not to provide another exam which students can pass. I am not sure exactly what the purpose of Liberal Studies is, but it will be a year or two before we even have an inkling of whether it has made any difference. Will next year’s university students perhaps be more liberally studious than their predecessors? What do you think?

The other error was more grandiose. This was committed by those reporters who totted up the number of people who had achieved the minimum number of passes required for university admission, and noted that the number of university places available was considerably smaller. This was written up on the basis that large numbers of people had “qualified for” university but would be deprived of the benefit for which they had qualified because of the shortage of places. This is placing far too much faith in universities’ ability to encapsulate their various requirements into a set of examination grades. The minimum requirements for admission are just a bureaucratic convenience, a way of reducing the potential pool of candidates to manageable proportions. Many programmes will actually have higher requirements, or more detailed ones, than the minimum. Popular programmes will use exam results to shrink their own pool of applicants, so that the practical minimum for the course you want may be much higher than the minimum standard agreed for all universities. The minimum is set so that even the least fashionable institutions will have a pool of eager applicants. It tells us nothing about the people who reach it, or don’t reach it.

Nobody who has thought seriously about the matter supposes that every student without exception who reaches the minimum standard would enjoy, benefit from, or even successfully complete, a university education. The converse is also true. Some students who fail to reach the minimum standard are in fact perfectly capable of university studies and now the system is a bit more flexible many of them get the chance to prove it. One of my most outstanding students had failed all her A Levels but gained entry to a HND course with her AS language scores. She transferred to HKBU on the strength of her excellent performance in the Higher Diploma and did very well.  Examinations are a very rough and ready way of measuring people.

Personally I wonder if it might be better if fewer people went to university. I notice they are now getting complaints in America – where more than half the population goes to university – that there is a serious shortage of people with technical and engineering qualifications. Mass higher education means lots of people having general education degrees which do not prepare them for demanding jobs. In the light of this it could be considered rather ominous that the arrival of 3-3-4 education in Hong Kong has been accompanied by a wave of enthusiasm in local universities for … general education. Ever since the government decided to go from having three universities to eight the newly elevated institutions have been shedding practical professional subjects in favour of more theoretical and academic ones. My university has decided to drop Physics. Too difficult to get good students. We’re still doing Sociology…

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There was a gloriously confusing piece on the op-ed page of Pravda last week, on the topic du jour, national education. Really this is not a very interesting topic. The government paid oodles of money to a bunch of left-wingers to produce a set of teaching notes which are propagandistic garbage. Ap0logists trying to wriggle round this obdurate core of fact often get themselves into undignified positions.

So to last week., The writer was a lady whose only claim to our attention, according to the little note at the end, was that she graduated from the London School of Economics. She trotted out the usual line that many countries have national education. Oddly enough we are never actually given any names in this connection, which leaves the reader with the suspicion that either there are not that many countries which have national education, or the countries which go in for this are places we might not wish to imitate, like North Korea. There is a dangerous area of ambiguity here, actually. In most countries children do pick up a lot of material which might, if you were anxious to make sure they didn’t miss any of it, be categorised as national education. It is a common complaint about history lessons that they concentrate on the home country and its immediate vicinity. Geography is a bit more cosmopolitan, but not much. Local field trips are easier. Literature classes tend naturally to focus on the national language and its authors. And so it goes on. I was not subjected to national education. We did, though, in the normal course of events, pick up a reasonable amount of Brit history, geography, etc, as well as such patriotic trappings as the origins of the national flag and the words of the national anthem. It doesn’t have to be a separate subject.

Actually, if I may digress for a moment, primary schools are not supposed to do separate subjects any more. The modern way is to have what is called a topic tree. Say the topic for this term is trees, so we have a trees tree. We will do the biology of trees, the economics of trees, literary references to trees, King Charles’s oak, the giant Sequoia and whatever else the teacher can think up. Perhaps each child will bring in a twig and make a model dug-out canoe. While this is going on the basics of reading, writing and counting will be painlessly absorbed as a fringe benefit. Or so the theory goes. One of my son’s teachers once told me that in her experience there were only two “topics” which worked: dinosaurs and ancient Egypt. They were always a great success. Others did not spark much interest. She had not tried trees. Anyway into this happy scene we are now going to insert a period devoted to a government-ordained syllabus. There will be no exam. Do I hear snoring?

Enough detours. The nub of last week’s article was that the nation was not the same thing as the state. This is a typical piece of sociological slight of hand, in which a well-known word is given an arbitrary new meaning, whose implications can then propel a small fleet of research outputs. Most of us know what a nation is. It is a political entity with a flag, a UN seat, a president (or monarch in old-fashioned examples), an army (Costa Rica excepted), a passport and a football team which appears at least in the preliminary stages of the World Cup. There is a school of sociological thought, however, which uses “nation” for smaller groupings distinguished by the possession of a distinctive language and culture. This enabled our writer to point out, rather unhelpfully, that Britain consisted of three “nations”: Scotland, England and Wales. Hong Kong was at present, she observed, a separate “nation” which did not regard itself as part of the Chinese “nation” and the purpose of national education was to remedy this.

This is the sort of thing which happens when you mess about with the language. The Chinese “nation” is a nation in the traditional sense, posessing flag, passport, president, UN seat etc. It is not a “nation” in the other sense, in which Hong Kong might well be a “nation”, having a distinctive culture and language. China the nation state also incorporates numerous “nations” in the trendy sociological sense with their own language and culture. Actually the people who use “nation” in the way we are invited to use it here generally do not believe that the “nations” they discover should be pressured or propagandized into submerging themselves in other “nations”, or in larger political entities. On the contrary they generally infer that the culture and language of the “nations” they identify should be preserved and protected, as variations on Gaelic are, with varying degrees of success, in the British Isles.

So I suspect the people at LSE would be rather surprised to find their ideas pressed into service to support the imposition of national education on Hong Kong schools. But if you’re desperate…

If there is a moral to be drawn from all this it is that the local left-wing fraternity should not be allowed to dabble in the education of those children fortunate enough to have escaped their school system. In order to achieve eminence in left-wing circles it is necessary to amputate the political balls and check them in at the Liaison Office in a jar. This leaves the victim in no condition to contribute to civic education for people who are still intact.

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With a group of friends the other night we were comparing our housing arrangements.  One of us who described his flat as “typically Hong Kong” has 700 square feet. These he shares with his wife, three kids, grandmother and domestic helper. People who are not familiar with the Hong Kong housing scene might wonder about the helper. Those who are familiar will know that in order to rent or buy a flat, even of this modest size, you need two incomes, so help is indispensible. She is required to live in your flat by the Immigration Department.

If you take the footbridge which leads from the Shatin wet market to the public housing estates northeast of it, you will see some public housing “units” which have rightly been left empty and unfinished because nobody would wish to live that close to the passing crowds. Each “unit” is about the size of my carport. They are supposed to accommodate a family of four. People in Lancashire provide larger spaces for their whippets.

And this is the great unmentioned feature of housing in Hong Kong which is missed out in international comparisons, or in learned ponderings on whether we have a bubble or not. Hong Kong does not provide most of its people with what would be considered elsewhere a reasonable amount of space. It then charges them astronomical sums for the rabbit hutches on offer. Living in a house is a privilege reserved for plutocrats and indigenous villagers.

When I was a kid my family lived in public housing. Strictly speaking it was not a council house — a point in which my mother took some pride — because we rented it from the Development Corporation which was then building Crawley. The difference was rather theoretical. It had, as the estate agents would put it, kitchen, bathroom, two receps and three bedrooms. I suppose altogether there were about 2,000 square feet, including the garden shed and the space which was always provided in those days for your coal. There were gardens at front and back. Looking at it on Google streetview now I see that some later occupant built a garage in the back garden. There is still plenty of room, There is also a car parking space in the front garden, and some enthusiastic Chief Executive candidate has built a large extension on what used to be the dining room. No doubt he had planning permission. A glance at estate agents’ websites in the same town suggests that houses like this can be had for about 150,000-200,000 Pounds, say something between 2 and 2.4 million Hong Kong dollars. It would perhaps be unfair to compare this with the “dream house wi private gdn” advertised in today’s Pravda, at an asking price of $72 million. Crawley is not in London. If you don’t mind the commute there is a house on offer in Taipo for $8.8 million. This is a bargain but there is no garden. A house in Saikung offering 2,100 squ feet and lots of garden (“could keep a horse”)  is going  for $25m.  Houses in my own estate were reported a few months ago to have reached a resistance level at $20 million, above which apparently the cut taken by the government and the legal profession goes up painfully. However it seems we now continue onward and upward and one seller is asking $24 million.  Compared with my former home in Crawley the house is slightly bigger but the garden much smaller.

The result of all this is that for most people in Hong Kong there is no realistic hope of living in a house. Living in a flat is beyond the means of many. Actually owning a home of any kind is a distant dream unless your daddy’s rich or your employer is a bank, a bandit or the government. People in their 30s are living with their parents because they have no other choice.

This is not an accident. Nor is it a result of Hong Kong’s shortage of space. It is a result of government policy. The government is hooked on high land prices, so it runs the land market in a way which keeps prices high. Contemplating the approach of the C.Y. Leung administration it seemed the one thing we could hope for was that he would change this. He’s worked in the business, he should know what the problem is. The solution is no secret. The government has, after all, lowered land prices before when it wished to. Land sales need to be conducted on a regular basis, instead of only putting a site on the market when a big developer asks for it. Sites for sale need to be smaller, so that some contestants from outside the charmed circle of the usual suspects can be involved. And the government needs to run a vigorous and effective public housing programme, involving both sales and rent. These are affordable measures which have worked before.

But there is no sign of them being attempted this time, at least so far. Instead the government is apparently planning to tackle a symptom while ignoring the disease. There will be some kind of “youth hostel” for people who no longer wish to live with their parents. This is an interesting idea, with a lot of potential problems attached to it. To start with, running a hostel for adults is not like running a boarding school. Will there be visitors? Will there be overnight visitors? Will there be a bar? Will there be a smoking room? Will there be a contraceptive vending machine? This idea could lead to a lot of arguments. The other question is who will run the hostels. I fear we shall see the appearance of a well-connected left-wing organisation designed to divert government money into politically-correct pockets, like the one which produced a garbage national education syllabus. The question of who actually gets to stay in the hostel will then become politically delicate.

And in the end, this is a panacea. What is required is a general move in the direction of lower prices and lower rents. This will involve treading on some toes. The government should start trampling. If it solves this problem all the other little foibles will be forgiven. And if not, not.

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Considering that Hong Kong prides itself on enjoying the rule of law. it comes as a surprise to find that a whole category of laws have been allowed to fall into disuse from neglect.

Some months ago I complained that the reporting in the Hong Kong media of an unusually interesting divorce case had clearly breached the ordinance which purports to regulate the reporting of divorce proceedings. The law says that certain things may be reported, and no others. In this case the judge first made an order that some things should not be reported, though they are on the list permitted by the Ordinance. Later in the case he seems to have dropped the order, and everything was reported, including many interesting items which were not supposed to be. My letter to the editor of Pravda asking what as going on was neither responded to nor printed.

I tried sending an inquiring email to the Department of Justice. After a few days pause for thought this produced the reply that the Department only considers prosecutions in cases referred to it by the police. The responder added rather gratuitously that the department was not in the business of giving legal advice to inquirers. This was quite unnecessary. It is widely believed that the department is staffed almost entirely by people who are too lazy or too stupid to make it in the private sector. Nobody who has a choice will seek legal advice from them. All I wanted to know was what the department was doing about this particular ordinance, and the answer was essentially: nothing.

This conceals a change in policy. When I was an editor the Legal Department, as it then was, regularly monitored newspapers. A short detour into media law is necessary here. The two big hazards for newspapers are libel and contempt of court. Libel cases are pursued by the victims, if they can afford it; contempt cases are usually initiated by the judge in the court concerned. But there is also a set of restrictions imposed by statute on the reporting of various kinds of court cases. In juvenile court reports you may not give any clue to the identity of the defendant. In committal proceedings, as in divorce cases, there is a list of permitted items and everything else is banned. In cases involving sex you are not supposed to give clues to the identity of the victim. If a juvenile appears in an adult court jointly charged with an adult you are supposed to conceal his identity, which may lead to a very complicated situation. Anyway, when I was an editor these restrictions were policed by the then Legal Department. Newspapers which infringed were cautioned and even occasionally prosecuted. This kept the relevant laws in people’s memories and they were generally observed.

Contemplating the rather unhelpful reply from the Department of Justice I wondered what was going on. One possibility was that a popular judge on the brink of retirement had dropped a brick and everyone was pretending not to notice. However last week I ran into a very experienced court reporter and I was told that the situation is actually more serious.

The Department of Justice has stopped monitoring newspapers. As a result if you infringe the statutory restriction on reporting, you are neither cautioned nor prosecuted. Consequently they are infringed with increasing frequency. Details are reported from commital proceedings which should not be; people who should not be pictured (like the mother of a rape victim) are pictured, clues to the identity of juvenile victims of sex offenders (like the school they attended) are given. And nothing happens. All the restrictions outlined above have effectively become dead letters. I did ask some police friends if they were monitoring newspapers for infringements of this kind and they rolled on the floor laughing.

I suppose there is an argument that in this wired age the idea that information can be suppressed by keeping it out of newspapers is a quaint antique. If it’s not in Apple Daily it will be on Youtube or Facebook. So why bother? This may be a good argument for abolishing the laws concerned. But that is not what is going to happen. Actually I have seen this movie before so I can tell you what will happen. The situation will continue to deteriorate steadily until a case comes up involving some well-connected individual who really doesn’t want publicity. The Department of Justice will then swing into action and prosecute offending media, pointing out that the laws concerned are of great antiquity and should have been observed. There will be a wave of public revulsion and the defendants’ pleas that the law has not been enforced for two decades will fall on deaf judicial ears.

So it will all end in tears. In the meantime Hong Kong is not a good place to be a rape victim.

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Talk about the law’s delays. You will recall the case of the cyclist who stopped at a traffic light and was rammed (as we can now say, the proceedings having finished) by a car driven by a senior retired policeman. The cyclist was charged with careless cycling and not having a bell. He pleaded guilty to the bell. Hearings over the careless cycling seem to have occupied at least three days, spread over a month or more.  As Hamlet said, “Rightly to be great, Is not to stir without great argument, But greatly to find quarrel in a straw, When honour’s at the stake.”  Even given that honour was at stake, though, this seems an awful lot of fuss for a rather trivial matter. Anyway I gather that readers in distant territories where the Hong Kong newspapers do not circulate are agog for the result of the proceedings. So here it is: the cyclist was aquitted.

And now that the thing is over we are free to comment, as we were not before, that common sense rebels at the notion of prosecuting a cyclist who is run over by a car driver. What nonsense! The driver, in his defence, said that the cyclist “just appeared in front of him”. This inspired in at least one reader the thought that this is what things do when you are not paying attention. There is apparently no prospect of the driver being prosecuted, though if the cyclist was not careless that leaves only one possible culprit. It seems that members of the law and order industry stick together. The magistrate made no order as to costs, so being innocent turned out to be rather expensive. As the fines for careless cycling are fairly trivial, cyclists who are run over by retired cops would probably be well advised to plead guilty.

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Well I suppose someone has to keep jumping on this error or we shall see it all the time. Spectacularly erroneous piece about human rights in Pravda last week.

It was perched rather insecurely on a speech by a failed Canadian politician to a conference in Latvia. Why this gentleman was elevated to the status of a spokesman for “the West” I am not sure. He said, apparently, that Russia and China represented the biggest strategic and moral challenge to the Western democracies. I would have thought this was rather obvious. These are big countries, heavily armed, pursuing a social model which is different from the democratic one. This is not good enough for Alex Lo, though, who believes that Russia and China are just being picked on because  “the West”, or that part of it for which Canadian  nonentities speak, “needs an enemy to maintain its own ideology”.

Mr Lo went on to wonder whether China could not “try to achieve freedom and betterment for its citizens by striking out on its own path?” This rather avoids the question whether freedom and betterment are actually the main priorities of an insecure collective dictatorship, but the worst is still to come. Freedom, said Mr Lo, comes in many guises: social, political, economic, moral and religious. He then expressed willingness to give up “the purely formal right to vote” in return for freedom from hunger and the freedom “to dream of a better future”.

Now let us see what is going on here. Human rights do indeed come in many guises. They are, however, generally considered to come in a hierarchy: some are more important than others, because they are a necessary prerequisite to enjoying any rights at all. The right to life, for example, is the most important and fundamental freedom because without it you are dead and freedom from hunger or freedom to dream are no longer any use to you. Now people who criticise the absence of human rights in China are not complaining that there are no elections. Still less are they complaining that China does not follow the lines of “Western democracy”. Democracy comes in many forms and people who would like to see a democratic China would be quite happy if the Chinese model turned out to follow those of the Phillipines, Japan or India, which are not Western at all. The basic complaint about human rights in China is that the citizens do not enjoy even the most basic ones. They may be killed, tortured or imprisoned without trial by, or with the active connivance of, the state.

Note an interesting point here. If Mr Lo wishes to exchange the right to vote for the right to dream there is a certain symmetry there. He gives up something; he gets something. If, on the other hand, he abandons the fundamental rights to life, to a fair trial, or not to be tortured, then he sacrifices nothing of his own, because as an overpaid columnist on a pro-China Hong Kong newspaper these things are unlikely to happen to him. He is prepared to trade other people’s suffering for a better life for himself.

We must at this point concede that in recent years the protection of fundamental human rigthts, even in countries which can reasonably claim to have invented them, has wilted. Murder by drone, for example, is a clear violation of the right to a trial of the intended victim, and the right to life of the “collateral damage”, the current euphemism for dead innocents. Water-boarding and other mistreatment of terrorist suspects is clearly torture and clearly wrong. Jailing people on suspicion for a period (as in the UK) or indefinitely (as in Guantanamo) is an obvious violation.

Governments everywhere are very good at thinking of reasons for curtailing their citizens’ rights. They do not need newspaper columnists to do it for them. This is why the right to vote is not “purely formal”. If you have a vote you can turf the bastards out. And if not, not.

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