tim's experiment

Well well. Here we have the former Head of Surgery at Hong Kong U convicted of a variety of charges, involving altogether $3million, and you might think that the clink of the gaoler’s key was an inevitable consequence, or failing that – the poor old gent is 71 after all – at least a stiff fine. Not a bit of it. Prisoner at the bar, you will be taken from here to a place of public need, there to perform 240 hours of community service. As the convict, Dr John Wong, has passed the retirement age (and I assume Hong Kong U is unlikely to invite him back, under the circumstances) he presumably has ample free time. So this could be considered scarcely a punishment at all. I am indebted to Alex Lo’s excellent piece in Saturday’s paper for the statistic that this comes to $12,500 per hour. Mr Lo also provided details of some cases which made an interesting contrast with Mr Wong’s, in which sundsry humble souls had been less lucky in their judges.

What puzzles me is that parts of the judge’s lengthy explanation for her sentence, or lack of it, seemed to contradict each other. Dr Wong, she said, “could have opted for a lucrative private practice, but he chose to achieve his ideal and spent his whole life working for the less fortunate and to serve the public.” This is very moving, but left me thinking that judges often over-estimate their knowledge of the world. To a young doctor the choice between private practice and a career as a teacher offers pluses and minuses on both sides. There is no guarantee that private practice will be lucrative. You may finish up making a respectable living on a public housing estate serving the public. On the other hand the university offers what is effectively an iron rice bowl, generous perks, long holidays and the chance to pursue your own interests. Generally speaking university teachers who are guilty of theft are not accorded gentle sentences because of their selfless career choices, and I am not sure doctors should be singled out in this regard.

Later on in the judgment we came to the point where Dr Wong had diverted $700,000 from two HKU accounts (a process known to the legally uneducated as theft) to pay for a driver for himself. The judge said this was not done out of greed, but because Dr Wong strongly believed that “the university should have contributed to the cost of his commuting.” I take this to mean that Dr Wong did not qualify for a personal car on the firm and the university refused to make an exception. Actually this is probably a point lost on judges (who are ferried to and from the courts at public expense) but it is the normal arrangement for people to pay to get themselves to work. The most interesting thing comes next, though. The judge said that Dr Wong could not have been motivated by greed, because the court had been told he had a personal fortune of $120 million.

Just a minute. Were we not just allowing in mitigation the fact that Dr Wong had forsworn the lucrative pastures of private practice to “serve the public”?  So where did this $120 million come from? It seems there are two possiblities. One is that Dr Wong came from such a wealthy background that he never needed to worry about money in the first place. The other is that a career serving the less fortunate in the corridors of Hong Kong U is not the exercise in Gandhian asceticism that judges may suppose it to be.

Well there we are, it’s done. No point griping. No doubt the prosecution will decide not to appeal. I cannot say there is much point in sending 70-year-old men to prison. On the other hand it doesn’t do much for 20-year-olds either, but judges do not seem to worry about this so much. I think two observations are in order. One is that judges should be more sceptical about the horrors of working in universities. Everyone who has had a real job before he became a tertiary teacher finds the lifestyle amazingly leisurely. Of course there is no shortage of academics who will tell you that they work really hard. These are the people who have never had a real job. Actually the money is pretty good and people who have marketable skills (like doctors and, ahem, journalists) can do paid work in their considerable free time.

The other point is that this mitigation thing should be taken with a pinch of salt. Of course counsel for the defendant has the right to make whatever points he can in favour of his client. And the defendant is entitled to ask his rich and influential friends to write letters saying what a wonderful chap he is. On the other hand at this point in the proceedings the usual adversarial safeguards are rather lacking. The speech in mitigation does not need to include any witnesses or evidence for its assertions. The flattering letters are not balanced by cross-examination of their writers or an opportunity for the prosecution to drum up letters saying that the wretched defendant is a greedy autocrat who deserves jail. A good case could be made for the view that an educator who steals is committing a serious offence because he is setting a deplorable example to his students. Indeed I believe that in cases where the defendant was younger or less prestigious this point has been made as an explanation for a more vigorous sentence. Justice must be seen to be done. Every time a member of the local establishment gets conspicuously gentle treatment in court a million onlookers conclude that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.  This is a point which seems to escape the Hong Kong judicial mind rather often.

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Considering the amount of assorted skullduggery which goes on in the New Territories, the Heung Yee Kuk is being strangely naive about the consequences of the CE election. This week we were told that the Kuk expected some concessions from the new CE on its hot issues — illegal structures and the Small House racket — in return for supporting CY Leung at the polls. Now let us leave aside as entirely irrelevant in this context the impropriety of election winners rewarding pressure groups or electoral college members in this way. No doubt it happens. I do not doubt that it happens all the time in elections conducted by the Kuk itself. Still, there are some further facts of life to be considered about how this works, in those places where it works.

The trade-in value of election support depends on how much the candidate needs it. In the early stages, when he is trying to establish a name and get some momentum going, expressions of approval are very valuable. Mr Leung was in the early stages a long shot, widely regarded as a mere prop to provide an election-like stage setting for the coronation of Henry Tang. When Mr Tang’s candidacy started to unravel there was still a good deal of reluctance to switch to Mr Leung, partly because people did not feel dignified changing horses too quickly and partly because Mr Leung has some problematic features in many people’s view. So support and praise at this stage were still undoubtably both welcome and valuable. I expect many people who came out for Mr Leung in this period will be tactfully rewarded is some way. So it goes.

However at this stage the Kuk was still in the Tang camp. There was no mystery about this. In the auction for the Kuk’s favours Mr Tang had offered the idea of the nine-story village house. Mr Tang is not a bad man and it may be that this offer was neither as naked or as explicit as the newspapers made it appear. Still, there was no doubt about its effect. The Kuk did not develope a liking for Mr Leung until the closing stages of the race, when Mr Tang had clearly hit an iceberg and the Liaison office was telling those lost sheep who still did not know whom to support that they should go with the public preference. Of course at this stage every sycophant, spear carrier and fellow-traveller on the election committee was with Mr Leung and he would still have been elected by a comfortable margin if the Kuk had stuck to its original choice. Gentlemen, under these circumstances the value of your support was zero. Your prospects of being rewarded for supplying it are similarly nugatory.

Of course this does not mean the prospects for illegal structures and Small House abuses are completely dim. You can try your luck in court. The government may chicken out at the end as it has often done before. But claims on Mr Leung’s gratitude are doomed to fall on deaf ears. When  he wanted it, he didn’t get it. When he got it, he didn’t need it. Thanks for nothing.

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Funny how some predictions do well quietly and some come noisily to nothing. The paperless office, which has been confidently expected for some 30 years, still glimmers on the horizon like one of those legendary mirages which lure desert travellers to their doom. The cashless society, on the other hand, which was often predicted in the 80s and hardly mentioned since, has crept up on us very successfully.

I noticed this the other day because I found a two dollar coin floating around on my desk at home. “I’ll spend it,” I said. “If you can,” replied my wife. And indeed on further reflection I am having some difficulty in working out when I shall get rid of the thing. Until quite recently we made most of our minor purchases in cash. For the big things we might use plastic. Some retailers had their own cards, but they were not very popular, except with employers of domestic helpers. The Octopus was for public transport.

Nowadays at least half of us seem to use Octopus for all the minor stuff. I do not personally like the idea of an Octopus that feeds itself from my bank account, so I do occasionally have to take some money out of the bank. But this comes in big notes – my Octopus is a wrist-watch so I am quite happy to fill it with $500 at a time. I also need notes occasionally to feed the Octopus-like card issued by my favourite coffee shop. I suppose people who drink still probably pay cash in bars, though the more upmarket places will let you run up a bill and then pay with a card. The wet market still runs on a cash basis but how many of us go there often? The only other people still holding out are taxi drivers.

Now my views on taxi drivers are coloured by the fact that at one time long ago I was one of them. This was not a career choice – the newspapers were on strike so I needed a job for a few weeks. Fortunately I was working in Blackpool – to drive a taxi in London you have to pass an examination in local geography called “the knowledge”. It takes as long as a degree and is much more demanding. In Blackpool you were allowed to keep a map in the glove box.  I understand the local objection to Octopus is that it will hit the tips. Taxi drivers feel that most riders will simply wipe the card on the gadget without adding a bit extra, even if this is technically possible. This is a serious matter because taxi driving does not pay very well and the tips, being shared with neither the employer nor the tax man, are an important item. I understand the Octopus people, in a desperate effort to get their machinery into taxis, are proposing to pay $2 a ride themselves for the first two years in lieu of the lost tips. Observers of the local taxi scene think this will work … for two years. The drawback is that if we all know Octopus is tipping on our behalf we will, I suppose, get out of the habit entirely, and even if the drivers revert to cash they will not longer get that little bit extra. Anyway those of us who wish to be kind to taxi drivers will still have a use for a bit of change.

Another possibility is restaurants. I know a lot of people add a tip to the number on the credit card. But I understand a lot of restaurants just treat this as corporate income and do not separate it for donation to the staff. So if you want to tip it is better to give cash and I always do.

So this is what it has come to. Coins are almost only used when you need a small present. When I was a kid it was customary to hide some sixpenny pieces (which were very small and supposedly silver) in the Christmas pudding as a small present for consumers. Little did we know that this sort of use for coins was one day going to be the only one.

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The 360 cable car from Tung Chung to the Big Buddha has now been out of action for a couple of months. No doubt the shopkeepers have been feeling the pain and many visitors have been disappointed. Yet, this time, nobody has been complaining about the management.

This is not what happened when the cable car endured a little spate of opening glitches. There is a habit in Hong Kong, of which locals appear completely unaware, and indeed which appears so natural and inevitable that it seems almost churlish to complain. If something goes wrong there is a tendency to find a foreigner to take the blame. This satisfies everyone except the foreigner conerned, who with luck will leave the territory and be in no position to complain. The habit surfaces in all sorts of places. Education is no bar to it: it is often the outcome of problems in universities (and institutes which would like to be universities). Sometimes, as in the Harbourfest debacle, the foreign scapegoat bites back. More often, as in the airport launch complaints, he has already left us and perhaps does not mind too much what is said about him.

When the cable care had a few initial teething troubles, as new pieces of machinery tend to, a number of people who had shown no previous signs of knowledge pertaining to cable cars opined that the management company, which was Australian, were not up to snuff. The management company was duely fired, and the MTR took over. Everyone was happy. Readers will note that the standard of management appears actually to be no better. Maybe cable cars are harder to run than appears on the surface. Maybe the MTR’s formidable engineering skills are not of the type required. Whatever the reason it appears that the cable car is still accident prone. As there is no longer a foreigner to blame I suppose we just have to put it down to bad luck.

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A llttle snippet stuck in my brain from the Legco debate (as I call it for want of a better word) on the third runway. The government spokesperson gave a figure for the total cost of the new runway, and followed it with a figure for the runway’s contribution to the local economy over the ensuing 30 years.

And the question is, of course, what was this figure worth. Look at it this way. The runway will not be finished for six years. So the official figure purports to tell us the share of the Hong Kong economy contributed by the new white elephant between six years from now and 36 years from now. This prediction comes to you from a government which has consistently failed to predict its own income and expenditure over the ensing 12 months.

There are good reasons why predictions of this nature should be regarded as a joke. Over 36 years your errors proliferate. If you make an error of one percent a year in your estimate, this does not mean that at the end of 36 years your estimate is 36 per cent out. This works like compound interest: the accumulated error will be over 50 percent. Inevitably, there will also be unforseen events of a one-off kind: banking crises, epidemics, volcanic eruptions or whatever. These will blow large holes in your forcast. A serious prediction would at least come with a range. One could pretend to take seriously a figure which came with a caveat that the outcome might vary by 30 per cent either side. But I fear on topics of this kind the official figures are not intended to be honest: they are intended to be propaganda for what the government has already decided it wants to do.

Well I came across an interesting piece of research the other day. An academic had studied all the railway projects in the world over the last three decades of the 20th century. He came up with some interesting figures. The average cost over-run for these projects – not the maximum, the average, was 120 per cent. The average shortfall in the passenger numbers compared with the pre-project predictions (once again note this is an average) was 50 per cent. In other words, as a rough rule of thumb you can expect any railway project to cost twice as much as it was supposed to, and then to attract half the predicted number of passengers. Shares in the High Speed Rail Link, anyone? I have seen no comparable figure for new airports or runways but it does show you that there is a large margin of error here, and most of the errors tend to be in the same direction.

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Fascinating to watch the reactions to our new CE. Anson Chan a belated fount of hostile comment. Regina, I rather suspect, would like a job. Taipan thinks only three of CY Leung’s supporters are capable of becoming policy secretaries (come on, the job’s not that difficult) while other commentators are pencilling names with enthusiasm. Some genius decided that China (a usefully vague word people use when guessing what passes through the collective mind of the Liaison  Office) wanted 80 per cent of existing secretaries to stay on in the interests of continuity. Heaven forbid that there should be any blips in the supply of mediocrity.

Clearly Mr Leung is not going to go short of advice. I am not sure that urging him to keep the tired old team more or less intact is very helpful, and putting forward Arthur Li as a potential appointee is barely short of sabotage. But I shall not add to the discord.

Some advice, though, for everyone else. Do not expect too much. I found a wonderful comment on politics from Michael Oakeshott lurking in a current (highly recommended) bestseller called the Social Animal. The quote goes like this: “In political activity, then, men ssail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.” Success, in short, is keeping things afloat, not finding Paradise.

The other thing to remember is that politics is very much a matter of luck. Some politicians manage to hold power in unchallenging times, some meet challenges for which they are well equipped, and some are overwhelmed by events. Which you get is down to luck.  If Mr Tung had been Hong Kong’s last Governor the territory would still have enjoyed prosperity, and if Mr Patten had been the first CE there would still have been a financial crisis and a SARS epidemic. Mr Leung’s success will depend on many matters beyond his, and our, control.  That of course will not stop us blaming him if things go pearshaped, but that goes with the job too. He wanted it. He’s got it. Fruit will now fly.

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Quite the most depressing feature of the exercise which masquerades as a Chief Executive election has been the growing chorus of complaints from electors that they do not know whom to vote for. This would perhaps be understandable if it was a complaint about the attractiveness of the three candidates. But it is not. The thing which is bothering a surprising number of electors is that they have not received a clear signal from Beijing, and consequently do not know who is the candidate favoured by our imperial masters.

This complaint reached a pathetic crescendo last week with two “electors” complaining on the front page of the usual newspaper that they had not had clear instructions. One of them apparently spoke for the Chinese Medicine group of voters, betraying a degree of sycophancy which perhaps explains why this group was chosen as the source of a surprising number of electors in the first place. The witch doctors are “which?” doctors, willing puppets who will complain if their strings are not pulled vigorously enough.

I can understand voters thinking that Beijing’s preferences are a relevant matter for consideration. After all we all understand that if the winner is Albert Ho then the whole “one country two systems” concept may come under a strain which it is unable to bear. Clearly it is useful if the successful candidate is somebody who is acceptable in Beijing, and will be trusted by our colonial masters not to do a Dalai Lama.

Having said that one would also expect that electors could take on board the idea that if Beijing does not have a clear preference between two of the candidates then this is an opportunity for voters to use their own skill and judgment in the public service. If Hong Kong is ever to make full use of its “high degree of autonomy” we must surely recognise that Beijing’s preferences in matters of this kind may be more sophisticated than a simple preference for one candidate under all circumstances.

Actually my understanding, for what it is worth, of Beijing’s position is that they would prefer Henry Tang but not if he has to be enthroned in the teeth of widespread public disapproval. I would have thought anyone who was bright enough to practice medicine of any kind ought to be able to get his head round that. Sorry boys, Beijing actually expects you to use your own brains and make your own choice. Stop whinging and get on with it.

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Anopther mysterious and fascinating piece of journalism on Friday’s SCMP front page. Headline: “Xi calls for end to chaos and mud-slinging”. Secondary heading: Beijing’s leader-in-waiting (My insertion: Xi Jinping, currently Vice President, is expected to step up soon) tells congress delegates to consider the bigger picture – an apparent reminder to chief executive candidates to exercise self-restraint”. An apparent reminder?

First paragraph: “Vice President Xi Jinping yesterday essentially called for an end to the chaos and scandal-mongering in the city’s chief executive election”.  Well well. When I was a reporter people sometimes called for things. Sometimes, if this was surprising, we reported that they did not call for things. But they did not “essentially call” for things . What does “essentially” mean in this context? Coming later. In the meantime we have a quote from Maria Tam “Xi told delegates to the NPC … not to focus on personal interests but to take care of the overall well-being of the city,” which seems like a harmless and rather unspecific call for self-sacrifice, patriotism and other platitudes. Not, however to our intrepid reporter, who discovered that “Politicians and analysts said that Mr Xi’s remark was code (!) intended to remind the supporters of both front-runners … to refrain from further smear campaigns”. OK, the mud-slinging was in the code; when do we get to the chaos?

Well we don’t, actually. First we get a real quote from Maria Tam, quoting Mr Xi: The vice president said that patriots … should serve as role models to prioritise the overall interests of the country above their personal interests, to stand tall and look at the bigger picture when contemplating the city’s development.” So who says this means “chaos and mid-slinging”? Enter “China affairs expert” Mr Johnny Lau Yiu-sui. Before we get to Mr Lau’s code-breaking, a word about who he is: Google the name and you get a succession of Press pieces in which he is referred to variously as “political pundit”, “Hong Kong-based veteran China-watcher”, and “veteran political commentator”. When you get down to the nitty-gritty, though, Mr Lau is a journalist.

Here he goes on the code: “When Xi asked the people to stand tall and look at the bigger picture, he meant the people should make sacrifices for the greater benefit of society. The series of scandals is not only causing chaos for the election, it is putting Beijing in a difficult position.”  I take it, in other words, that Mr Xi was calling for sacrifices. The mud-slinging and chaos is Mr Lau’s gloss on the situation, effortlessly transferred by sleight of journalistic hand to Mr Xi.

Well we were promised “politicians and analysts” in paragraph 3. Mrs Tam is a p0litician and Mr Lau is an analyst, so we should have one of each to go. Actually we get two more politicians. One NPC deputy said Xi’ s remarks showed the Central government was concerned that the election was becoming an “ungentlemanly contest”. And then we come to our beloved Rita Fan Hsu Lai-tai … who said that Mr Xi was not talking about the election at all!

Now let us sort out one little verbal point first. The use of the words “mud-slinging”and “scandal” should be reserved for cases where the items being slung are phony. Nobody has been spreading scandal about Henry Tang: the emergence of every story is followed by a press conference at which Henry admits all, asks us to forgive him, or his wife, or both of them, and then carries on as if nothing had happened. People who want a CE with a big basement have been trying to come up with something on CY Leung but none of it has amounted to much so far.

Another point: in the days when it was difficult to visit China and even harder to get people there to talk to you, there was a valuable role for people who sat in Hong Kong and provided a verbal sauce to slather over whatever tiny morsels of information you had managed to glean. This is no longer the case. Mr Lau may be right in supposing that the Communist Party leadership fears “chaos” in Hong Kong but he helps nobody by imparting that interesting thought to Mr Xi’s speech. Even allowing for the amount of translation going on in the generation of this story, the resulting exegesis seems to have so fragile a connection to Mr Xi’s reported words that it could have been attached to almost any comment on Hong Kong that was not about our football team.

I realise that many hands go into the construction of a news story. Also I have on occasion, when a front-page lead was wanted and no prime candidate had appeared for the slot, been reduced to a desperate effort to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, as they used to say. Still, there are limits. It seems to me that if readers are told in the headline “Xi calls for an end to chaos” they are entitled to a good deal more than an interpretative quote from another journalist. Mr Xi will soon be the only person in China who can exercise complete freedom of speech. He does not need distant strangers to say on his behalf things he did not say himself. Perhaps the SCMP, also, needs to “stand tall and look at the bigger picture”.

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Another of those little mysteries on Page 2 of the Post today. At the top: the G20 confronts the global economic crisis. On the right, the CE election. At the bottom, Hong Kongers queue for Lady Gaga tickets. In the middle, two academics comment on safety conditions in the Zambian copper mining industry. Eh? I realize that readers of our Leading English-language Newspaper are citizens of the world, cosmopolitan investors with a wide range of outside interests, but even if Zambian copper mining is the thing which floats your boat, why would you be interested in what a couple of local Powerpoint pushers had to say about the subject?
Well the Post team did their best. It seems that safety standards in mines owned by Chinese firms in Zambia had been criticised in a Human Rights Watch report for having unusually low safety standards. I presume this means unusually low by Zambian standards, not by Chinese ones. This is a them versus us story, OK? Chinese firms are being slagged off by Western imperialist running-dogs.
Two local academics will present a paper on their disagreeement with the report next month, the story went on. Actually if you want to read their comments they are already on the internet, followed by a reply from Human Rights Watch, and further comments from them. Agreement remains elusive. The seminar, if you are a glutton for the finer points of human rights in Zambian copper mines, is at the HKUST on March 9. You will not meet me there.
Actually there is more going on here than meets the eye. The two academics, Barry Sautman of the UST and Yan Hairong of the PolyU, have a nice little joint thing going on the Chinese presence in Africa. Many “research outputs” have already hit the presses. Basically they see China as a Good Thing. This will not surprise connoisseurs of Dr Sautman’s output because as well as a “political scientist and lawyer” he is an enthusiastic exponent of the idea that the Chinese government is a benevolent and law-abiding institution shamelessly slandered by Western academics and journalists. He is the sort of foreigner the China Daily cherishes, willing at appropriate moments to be rude about the Dalai Lama, Liu Xiaobo, or anyone who supposes that at some point in its long history Tibet may once have been an independant country.
Diligent searchers of the internet will find the Zambian copper mine controversy already covered in a variety of strange places, including one website whose correspondent in Syria started his latest bulletin with the immortal phrase “The Syrian military yesterday continued their operation to defend the Syrian population from insurgents, which are most heavily concentrated in the city of Homs.”
Readers will I hope by now be nurturing some suspicions that the mine safety aspects of this matter are being somewhat polluted by the political ones. The two complainers have it in their report that the total number of deaths in China-owned mines is lower than in the others, which by itself is meaningless. They go on to the figure proportionate to the number of miners, which is a bit high but not much, then rather muddy the waters by suggesting that low wages at the Chinese mines are because both of them were closed for long periods during the time the casualty figures were being collected. Clearly it is not beyond the wit of man to settle this by examining detailed figures, but this is not what social scientists and anthropologists do. So readers who are really interested in mine safety should probably look elsewhere.
Meanwhile we are left to wonder what the Hell is going on at the South China Morning Post. Upcoming academic seminars on business practices in Africa are not usually regarded as material for the news pages. Drs Sautman and Yan clearly belong on the Op Ed page, if we must have them. Is the new regime trying harder … to compete with the China Daily English language edition?

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A narrow escape last week. I read the story that Donald Tsang had accepted a ride on a luxury yacht from Macau, where he was on holiday, back to Hong Kong. This was within government guidelines for the acceptance of advantages, we were told, because Donald had paid (presumably the millionaire yacht owner) the price of a ferry ticket over the same route. This seemed to me to suggest that either the guidelines, or Donald’s ínterpretation of them, left a good deal to be desired. After all a ride on a luxury yacht is not just a way of getting from A to B. While the hapless victim of the jetfoil companies is virtually trapped in his seat, plied, if he is lucky, with over-priced junk food, the traveller by luxury yacht has a quite different experience. He can get up, walk around, talk to the driver, visit the engine room, bask on the deck or enjoy whatever culinary titbits his host’s generosity will stretch to. Mr Tsang admitted to consuming a “light breakfast”. So I was going to write that Mr Tsang should think again. It was as if he had been offered a flight back from Las Vegas in a private jet, and merely paid the Economy Class fare. Fortunately I was still mulling over this line of argument when some further news emerged about Mr Tsang’s travels. He had, apparently, accepted a ride back from Thailand in a private jet, and he had in fact paid the Economy fare.

Now look, folks, this will not do. If someone presents you with an antique bottle of Veuve Cliquot champagne, you do not discharge your obligations to honest government by paying him the price of the cheapest available bottle of Park ‘n’ Shop plonk. You pay him the market price for that particular bottle or you are accepting an advantage. The market price of a private jet trip is not the same as the price of an Economy Class ticket over the same route. Chartering large yachts is extremely expensive – almost as expensive as chartering a plane – so the price of a trip on one from Macau to Hong Kong is not the same as the price of a jetfoil ticket either.

I realise that the whole thing is potentially a bit embarassing: someone offers you what appears to be a favour and you start waving bundles of money at him. But there is a solution to this problem. Mr Tsang should stop hobnobbing with mainland millionaires altogether. He cannot be so stupid as to suppose that his social cachet in these circles is due to his wit, wisdom or personal beauty. Having a Chief Executive on your boat or plane is good for business, even if the CE is a paragon of honesty. In mainland business circles official corruption is not just anticipated as a possibility, it is assumed.  Mr Tsang is supposed to be solving Hong Kong’s numerous problems, not researching for a post-retirement tome on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

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