tim's experiment

Found some of my students from the Mainland the other day, wearing those little red scarfs which you see kids wearing in China propaganda posters. It turned out this was a polite protest.

I gather that the City U student union was holding its election of officers when it emerged that three candidates from the Mainland had been Young Pioneers and one had actually been a member of the Communist Party itself. The other candidates then withdrew and the election had to be postponed. Readers who are not familiar with the way these things are done at Hong Kong universities should bear in mind that the students do not run for office as individuals. The people who are interested sort out the jobs between them and then run as a team. The only opposition is from apathy. Finding that some of your team members had undisclosed interesting pasts is under these circumstances, I suppose, a reasonable justification for peremptory withdrawal from the proceedings.

This was not the way my Mainlanders saw it, though. They saw the whole thing as “discrimination against Mainlanders”. It seems that if you are a promising student on the Mainland it is impossible to avoid the Young Pioneers. Comparisons with the Pope’s membership of the Hitler Youth are perhaps relevant here. I suppose it is not advisable to refuse an invitation to the Ciommunist Youth League, if it arrives. And then as you get older the Party membership follows.

I am reminded of the tussle among the occupiers of Iraq over what to do about former members of the Baath party, which uncritically supported the regime of Saddam Hussein. Some of the occupiers pointed out that membership of the party was virtually a prerequisite for many jobs so people joined with no particular commitment to the party’s ideology, such as it was, or to Mr Hussein personally. The view that prevailed, unfortunately, was that Iraq should be treated to a process analogous to the deNazification of Germany after World War 2. This process made a great many unnecessary enemies and also crippled the administration of government, power, public transport and other services.

Behind all this lies Hong Kong’s fundamental ambiguity on the question of the Communist Party and its role here, if it has one. Some leftwing bigewigs are, we must suppose, Party members. If so they do not disclose it. Mr CY Leung’s evasions on this topic are considered something of a blot on his suitability for elected high office. It is often written that membership of the Communist Party is illegal in Hong Kong. I have never come across a law to this effect. If the people who write this merely mean that the local branch has not been registered under the Societies Ordinance then that is true, but easily remedied. Communist Party members presumably feel that it would not enhance their standing in Hong Kong society if their membership were known, and I think they are right to think that.

But to apply that to visiting students seems, if discriminatory is too strong a word, at least unfair. People join many things when they are young, and as no doubt the Pope would point out, they sometimes have little choice. However I suspect the problem of the City U students is not that they had past memberships, but that they had concealed them. When running for office the sooner your embarassing baggage is opened to public view the better. See performance by Henry Tang of recent date.

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Our leaders are proceeding inexorably to the next phase of the plastic bag ban, which will extend it to a variety of shops not already covered. This is a good time, then, to consider what has already been achieved, or not, as the case may be.

The original purpose of the ban on free bags was supposed to be to help the environment. The ban would do this by reducing the amount of plastic used to make bags, and by cutting the amount of plastic winding up on Government landfills in the form of bags which have been used and discarded. Has it achieved these objectives? Not at all.

What has happened is that the old flimsy biodegradable bags, which were given away free, have been replaced by the new Dreadnought model which is not biodegradable at all and is considerably bigger. The government has given different figures for the reduction in the number of bags produced by the new system, so let us take the highest one, which is 90 per cent. Now clearly whether the policy has reduced the amount of plastic consumed and later discarded depends on whether the new bags contain ten times more plastic than the old ones. If they contain ten times more plastic then the 90 per cent reduction just leaves us where we were. In fact they contain 30 times more plastic. This means that ten new bags have as much plastic in them as 300 old ones. So despite the reduction in the number of bags the amount of plastic wasted and land-filled has trebled.

This is officially regarded as a success. I wonder what failure would look like. And we have not considered the fact that a lot of the old bags were reused as garbage bags, a purpose for which many of us now buy rolls of plastic bags which are not included in the official figures for the reduction achieved. The other week the official concerned wrote to the SCMPost that the scheme was a success because it had produced a change in “shopping culture”. People now often carried a resusable bag. But that was not what was offered before the scheme started. If legislators had been told that the purpose of the scheme was to change “shopping culture” while trebling the amount of used plastic in landfills then they would not have approved it.

Still, this line of argument offers interesting possiblities for defenders of other government deficiencies. Our air pollution, for example, may be worse but it has caused a change in “breathing culture”. Numbers of vulnerable people have stopped breathing. Ah, the sweet smell of success!

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Regular readers have probably had enough of me complaining that European cities manage to have classy low-rise centres full of historic buildings, while Hong Kong has ugly 30-story office blocks sitting on top of three storeys of expensive shops. So here’s a variation: Chinese cities can manage it was well.

Recent gap in posts was because I was away in Xian. The tourist attraction which everyone knows about in Xian is the Terracotta Warriors. Actually they are an hour’s drive out of town, but don’t let that put you off: they’re well worth a visit. Xian itself, though, also has its attractions. The centre of the city is enclosed by a historic wall. Apparently in the 70s this had been used as a source of free bricks for so long that only a wall-shaped mound of earth was left in many places. The city then decided to restore it to its original condition and it is now a magnificent structure, about five storeys high and wide enough at the top for walking and cycling. Inside the wall there are a lot of old, and therefore small, buildings and a serious effort has been made to keep the new ones down to the same altitude. There is also a linear park which runs for miles between the wall and its moat. The park is used for exercise (and for other things, judging by the number of posters advocating safe sex), the moat for boating and fishing. The whole show provides miles of wonderful walks – or if you prefer of cycling. It is a credit to the city council.

Why can’t Hong Kong do these things?

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The newly forged extra connection between the District Councils and the Chief Executive election has, or so we are told, produced added interest in the DC elections. Perhaps it has. But there is a cost to this.

Consider the dilemma faced by an old friend of mine, who lives on Hong Kong Island. The sitting councillor for her constituency is a relative of a leader of his party, and appears to have no other claims to fame. He is neither active nor visible. The rival candidate from another party was young, a woman (solidarity!) and so keen that she had already set up an office in the district and started working on local issues. The third candidate, an independent, was a complete mystery. You have probably already guessed the problem. Which party, after all, can afford to set up offices for prospective councillors who do not yet have a seat and the expenses that go with it? My friend has to choose, effectively, between a Democrat deadbeat and a lively lady from the DAB, a party she would not normally support unless the only alternative was Pol Pot. The interests of the locality are pulling one way, the prospects of the winning candidate participating in important central political matters push the other.

In my neck of the woods we have another version of the same problem. Our sitting member is likable, enthusiastic and has had some notable successes in such minor matters as are accessible to a council member, like flower beds and bus routes. His rival was a lady instantly recognised by my wife as the rather unhelpful lady who runs one of our local shops. We also had a mystery candidate, of whom I know only that she cannot spell. There were three English words on her leaflet: “The Indepednet Candidate”. As you have probably guessed our local star is a DAB man. Mrs Grumpy is from the Civic Party. Mystery Miss presumably hopes to represent the Dyslexic Party. I firmly believe that local enthusiasm and service should be rewarded. On the  other hand the DAB has recently confirmed its status as the political pits with a campaign of racist demagogy over the residence rights of domestic helpers. The party doesn’t suck. It stinks.

I was left with the thought that whoever both of us voted for we were going to be ashamed afterwards. In countries were democracy is not an issue the solution to this sort of problem is not to vote at all. This will be interpreted as a sign of despair at the quality of the candidates on offer. In Hong Kong, however, it is interpreted as a vote against having elections at all. So it is important to vote, even if  you use a pin … or hold your nose … when you actually make the choice.

Still, once again constitutional jiggery pokery takes all the fun out of what should be a joyous occasion. It is nice to be able to vote, but the proceedings are so comprehensively fixed that it feels like voting in an Iranian presidential election.

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Your applause, please for the winner of this year’s Marie Antoinette Memorial Let Them Eat Cake Medal for Outstanding Ignorance of How the Other Half Lives. We need not wait another two months because it is inconceivable that any other contestant could better the mark set on Wednesday by David Pannick QC.

Mr Pannick was appearing for the government in an appeal against a decision of the Registration of Persons Tribunal. The appellant was a Filipino lady who has been in Hong Kong since 1991 and has a 14-year-old son who was born here and knows no other home. In 2008 she applied for permanent residence and was refused. For the lady, a domestic helper, it was argued that she had taken Hong Kong as her home, was a member of a church here, engaged in charitable activities, and was regarded as a member of her employer’s family. She had given up her right to vote in the Phillipines and no longer had a home there.

Mr Pannick, for the government, said that this was not enough. The lady concerned should have taken “positive steps” to adopt Hong Kong as her residence. An example was to own a flat in Hong Kong, he said.

Now pick yourself up off the floor while we consider a few things it would be nice to say to Mr Pannick. We could say, for example, that a single mother living on a domestic helper’s salary might be pushed to buy a flat in Hong Kong. Indeed many people on much more than a domestic helper’s salary would dearly like to buy a flat in Hong Kong but cannot. Would he accept a dog kennel? Or we could entertain ourselves by thinking of other ways in which a domestic helper might show her Positive Enthusiasm for residence in Hong Kong, like owning a racehorse, joining the Hong Kong Club, sending her son to Yew Chung International School or employing an expensive expat twit to argue her case instead of the local lady provided by Legal Aid.

The law is not an ass, we are often told. But some lawyers…

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The death of Muammar Gaddafi, as well as offering relief to hordes of insecure journalists who are not sure how to spell his name, seems on balance a Good Thing. Though difficult to take seriously, the late dictator had a great deal of blood on his hands. So why, one wonders, is so much international angst being expressed at the possibility that the captured dictator was unceremoniously shot, rather than being paraded before a trial of some kind?

Actually his end was of his own choosing. If he had gone while the going was good, while he still controlled most of the country and had something to haggle with, he could have arranged a comfortable retirement in some friendly country with immunity from prosecution and access to at least some of his ill-gotten gains. If he had negotiated a surrender of Sirte formally with the surrounding government forces he could have been sure at least of a safe trip to the Hague and a fair trial. If he held on to the bitter end the chances were always that his eventual capture would be an informal affair.

Traditionally, at least in movies, this would involve someone saying “come out with your hands up” and the defeated combatant being conveyed politely to the rear. Actually this is not very realistic. People who have studied the rather undocumented matter of surrender on the battlefield reckon that about half of attempts to do this are successful. This, at least, held for the Western fronts in the two world wars. It was generally much harder to surrender on the Eastern front and in the Pacific extremely rare. As Winston Churchill pointed out, a man who surrenders in a tactical situation is someone who was trying to kill you and now asks you not to kill him. Sometimes the answer is no, or as they used to put it in the British Army, “Too late, mate”.

This holds true only for the infantry. When naval warfare shifted to long ranges in the 1890s it became difficult to “strike the colours”, or signal an effective surrender in any other way, so enemies were generally bombarded until they sank. Submarines had no practical provision for prisoners or prizes, so the only attempted concession in the early days was the convention that the crew of a ship should be invited to take to the boats before it was sunk. This arrangement did not last long. As for the airmen, of course, it is simply not possible to surrender to an aeroplane, even in the rather unusual event that it is bombing an entirely military target.

Unfoirtunately this has meant that successful surrenders have become increasingly rare, a problem exacerbated by the bloodthirst of some civilians. I still remember Donald Rumsfeld saying on television, a propos of some Afghan city, that “America is not in the business of accepting surrenders”. Indeed it isn’t. It is rather in the business of hi-tech assassination. Whether you approve of this is I suppose a matter of opinion. But as nobody seems to think it worth complaining about drone attacks it seems a bit hypocritical to lament the summary justice administered to the Lybian dictator. Goodness knows he had it coming.

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Like most people in Hong Kong I have had some difficulty in raising any excitement over the upcoming Chief Executive election. I do not, of course, have any real incentive to make a decision because I do not have a vote. Since the vast majority of the population is in the same boat the campaigning is likely to be rather a yawn. Even if you do have a vote the matter will be decided elsewhere. Reliable rumoures have it that Henry Tang has the Beijing seal of approval, so the race is his, unless he does something awful. None of the ladies being touted as potential candidates has a hope. The electorate consists largely of elderly businessmen. Among their other deficiencies this group is overwhelmingly prejudiced against the idea of women in power. So the race is effectively between Henry and CY Leung, and that only if Henry makes too many mistakes. Well neither of them is officially running yet but he has already managed a few.

Faced with this two-horse race most of us are in a quandary. We have never met either man but the word on the street is that Henry is dumb but likeable, while CY is neither.  Under these circumstances it seems most people will plump for Henry on the grounds that the CE has little real power in our system but someone nice would be less irritating as a constant presence on local TV screens.  Some people will probably change this view after what happened last week, when both non-candidates were taken on a rural ride.

Both men were invited to a get-together with the Heung Yee Kuk. Now the Kuk is endearingly honest about its purpose in life, which is to further the enrichment of rural landowners. Both men were also correctly advised not to bore their audience with talk of wealth gaps, technology hubs, housing shortages or social policy. What the Kuk wanted to hear was what the candidates proposed to do, if elected, for the aforementioned rural landlords. And its votes would be cast accordingly. The proceedings were, in fact, something of an auction.

Mr Leung, to his great credit, virtually refused to participate. He said that an administration led by him would proceed with the development of the frontier closed area. This is a good idea which should have been done years ago and will probably be done anyway, whoever wins. It will be good for the territory and for the New Territories, but lacks electoral appeal for rural landowners who do not happen to have holdings on that strip. Henry, on the other hand, bidded vigorously. He said he would support raising the height limit on village houses (currently three stories) to five or six. This, he said, would help to solve the accomodation shortage in villages.

This was an astonishingly irresponsible and ill-informed thing to offer. It is irresponsible, because all the rural scoff-laws who have already put extra floors on their village houses will now suppose that if they can defy the law for another year or so Henry will legalise their extensions. Meanwhile officials charged with enforcing the law will have to contemplate the distressing possibility that any illegal structures they remove in the near future will simply be put back after Henry has paid his election expenses. It is ill-informed because the Small House Policy and the Kuk’s enthusiasm for it have nothing to do with any shortage of accomodation. The purpose of the Small House Policy is to distribute large sums of money among a small hereditary group of villagers, many of whom no longer live in the village.

The right to build a house is usually sold long before the house is constructed. The going rate (known as the ding) fluctuates but is usually around half a million bucks. This will be paid to the inheritor of the rights by the developer who – it’s a small world – may often be a member of the Kuk. The resulting house will be sold. Most villagers no longer wish to live in villages. If you walk much in the New Territories you will come across whole villages which have been completely abandoned. Many of the people who claim the right to build a small house no longer live in Hong Kong, never mind a village. Those people you often meet in villages who speak fluent English with a Birmingham accent have just come back to the territory to claim their half a million, which inconveniently involves staying for a few weeks. If the person who builds the house wishes to continue to live in the village he will build not a unified house, but three small flats. This will usually be obvious from the location of the staircase. He will then live in the ground floor and rent the other two to outsiders. He will never need to work again.

Now of course this racket will be twice as enriching for everyone concerned if the houses are doubled in height. For the rest of us the picture is less attractive. I fear I can feel myself drifting towards the “Anyone but Henry” camp and I do not think I am alone.

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We have all, I suppose, been enjoying the detailed accounts of a divorce case in the newspapers over the past week. The case involves a couple who (I presume by order of the court) cannot be named. The squabble is basically over money, which has led to a great deal of detailed discussion of lavish lifestyles, but there have also been some excursions into the unhappy couple’s love life. It seems he is a real estate tycoon with a rich daddy, which narrows the field considerably, so I suppose lots of people know who is being talked about. But I don’t, so if you find out it was not from me.

The proceedings bring to mind a great scandal of the 1930s, involving the then Duke and Duchess of Argyll. The Duchess wanted a divorce, which in those days was not granted on such meagre pussy-footing grounds as “irretrievable breakdown”. The seeker of divorce had to prove what was called a matrimonial offence, the usual candidates being cruelty, desertion or adultery. The Duchess went for cruelty, and this involved her giving evidence over several days of the “Hunnish practices” to which she was subjected by her husband. I am not sure quite what this euphemism meant in the 1930s, but clearly the Duke’s bedroom tastes were extensive and eclectic, running well outside conventional copulation in the missionary position. Newspapers at the time found this irresistible and of course as it was part of the proceedings it could all be reported. Even the Daily Telegraph devoted a whole page per day to the Duchess’s account of her ordeals. After the case it was decided that rich people should not be required to spread their love lives over the newspapers to get a divorce (poor people could not afford to divorce in those days) so a law was passed restricting reports of divorce proceedings to a few bare bones.

In due course this law was copied in Hong Kong, as was customary in those days. And it is still with us. It is called the Judicial Proceedings (Regulation of Reports) Ordinance, aka Chapter 287. Here is the relevant part:

(1) It shall not be lawful to print or publish, or cause or procure to be printed or published-

(a) (Repealed 68 of 1995 s. 6)
(b) in relation to any judicial proceedings for dissolution of marriage, for nullity of marriage, or for judicial separation, any particulars other than the following, that is to say- (Amended 80 of 1997 s. 85)
(i) the names, addresses and occupations of the parties and witnesses;
(ii) a concise statement of the charges, defences and counter-charges in support of which evidence has been given;
(iii) submissions on any point of law arising in the course of the proceedings, and the decision of the court thereon;
(iv) the summing-up of the judge and the finding of the jury (if any) and the judgment of the court and observations made by the judge in giving judgment. (Amended 68 of 1995 s. 6)

Now I take that to mean that you can publish the list, and only the list. Interesting details of arguments with Daddy, of for that matter arguments between Mr and Mrs, are out. In fact the evidence is out, unless the judge is kind enough to include generous quantities in his summing up. On the other hand the names and addresses of the parties are clearly supposed to be in. And this is as it should be. Marriage and its dissolution are both official events which should be public. So why are we being treated to lots of apparently illegal reports and an apparently extra-legal ban on names? I have no idea. I have written a letter to the editor of the SCMP about this but under the circumstances they may not wish to publish it. We shall see.

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Some months ago the Hong Kong Journalists Association published a carefully researched and reasoned complaint, that the police publicity machinery was not working. Incidents which could and should have been reported promptly in the press were being delayed in the PR pipeline until they were no longer of interest. The HKJA’s complaint landed with a soundless plop in the deep well of public indifference. No politicians took up the matter, official spokesmen denied there was a problem. End of story, we all thought, at least until a noteworthy specimen comes along. This has now happened.
Actually the HKJA was quite right. The system has changed. In the old days police activities were not announced by the police PR Bureau, though that organisation is quite large. News organisations illegally eavesdropped on the police radio channel. As some newspapers also had radio-controlled cars waiting on the street for interesting photographic opportunities they frequently arrived at the scene of some newsworthy incident at the same time as the emergency people, if not before. Under these circumstances there was no question of newsworthy items going unreported. Reporters generally questioned the emergency services men at the scene. Neither the police nor the reporters used the police PR people, who as a result all developed other ways of using up their time.

Then the police radios switched to a new system, in which the signals are encoded. Listening in is no longer possible. So unless the police wish to publicise an event they can sit on it while a typed report makes its way through the system, leading eventually to a copy appearing on a desk in the PR department, where they are all already busy doing other things. This is not a plot, just a natural result of changing from the old way of doing things to a new piece of technology. In the last week the results have become clear.

First we had the case of the man who was going around stabbing people at random. Nobody was warned about this interesting new hazard. No announcement was made until — days later —  a suspect was arrested. This was followed by a similar case involving a man who was molesting children. Again nothing was made public for days. Clearly the system is broken. Officers actually involved in the cases sounded as apologetic as they are allowed to be under the present regime, in which the word “sorry” is banned. This is an unsatisfactory situation, and not just from the public safety point of view. A force which is allowed to use lethal force on the public’s behalf cannot expect to be allowed to operate in secret. It should expect, indeed it should welcome, continuing scrutiny. The extent and nature of the problem are now clear. Whether anything will be done about it remains to be seen.

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Our glorious leader seems to be losing contact with reality. Here he is, dog-end of term of office measured in months, would-be successors jostling in the wings, and what does he tell us? He’s going to unveil solutions to Hong Kong’s big long-term problems.

This would have been a good plan six years ago. After all the problems which Mr Tsang belatedly recognises as problems have been around for a long time. What are Chief Executives for if not to devise solutions to long-term problems? While we were fiddling about with trivial constitutional changes, creating jobs for new layers of poliltical placemen, charging ahead with fabulously expensive infrastructure projects, and helping developers to push people out of empty buildings, and so on… We, or rather you, could have been confronting the housing problem, the growing wealth gap, the ageing population, and perhaps the air pollution and the historic buildings and the lawlessness of the New Territories as well. Some of these problems can be put down to history. Some of them, alas, can be put down to Mr Tsang. Putting the chairman of the Heung Yee Kuk on Exco, for example, was a bizarre decision. Did Mr Gaddafi refuse the offer?

Mr Tsang is now, I am afraid, in no position to tackle long-term problems. Long-term problems require long-term solutions. But Mr Tsang does not have a long term left. He is a lame duck. This will be vigorously denied by the duck in question, as it always is. Unfortunately lameness is not a matter in which the duck has a choice. It’s like infidelity – everyone knows except the victim. The lameness of the duck is not a criticism of the holder of the office concerned. It is a natural consequence of the way the world works.

Consider. Mr Tsang has only a few months to go. As an ex-Chief Executive he will no longer have the power to reward supporters or to punish opponents. Avid shoe polishers will spurn his Oxfords and save their brushes for boots with some tread still on them. Acolytes who were willing to bruise their foreheads before Mr Tsang will now grovel to another emperor. Within days of Mr Tsang’s retirement people who treated him with the deference due to deity will be explaining what a duff performer he was. That is, I am afraid, the way some people are. It is not a pretty spectacle.

So let me, in my usual contrarian way, say something nice about him. Extending the $2 public transport ride for fossils to seven days a week is a decent and helpful gesture. Very welcome. Thanks a lot. I will never say that you never did anything for me.

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