tim's experiment

The Hong Kong Government continues to exhibit a strange and disproportionate preoccupation with the legal proceedings against Jimmy Lai, the former proprietor of a frisky tabloid not much given to admiring coverage of the administration.

Some weeks ago China’s National People’s Congress Standing Commmittee ruled, at the request of local officials, that Hong Kong courts will need to obtain a certificate from the Chief Executive when considering whether to allow overseas lawyers to represent defendants in national security cases.

This followed a spirited tussle in the courts here, in which the Department of Justice objected to Mr Lai’s plan to instruct a London-based barrister on his behalf. This bout went all the way to the Court of Final Appeal, where the department lost on the rather technical basis that it was seeking to advance arguments which it had not brought up in earlier hearings.

But these days any defeat in the courts for the government is temporary. If appeals fail it will change the law, either through Legco or by seeking an “interpretation” from the NPC Standing Committee.

It is difficult to see why the government is so exercised over Mr Lai’s choice of counsel. His particular case does not, as far as we know, involve any state secrets which should not be shared with foreigners. It appears to centre round some very public expeditions to the USA.

It would be tempting to infer that the squabble is merely a continuation of the campaign to get at Mr Lai by any means available. If he wants something it must be opposed as a matter of principle.

Anyway the latest development was rather predictable and uncontroversial, given the history so far. The department unveiled its proposed local legislation to give effect to the Standing Committee’s “interpretation”.

This will involve an amendment to the Legal Practitioners Ordinance. Courts hearing applications for overseas counsel will have to ask the Chief Executive whether the case involves national security, and whether allowing the proposed gwailo barrister to take the case would jeopardise national security. If the Chief Executive certifies that these two possibilities are in fact realised, then the application to deploy a foreigner must be refused.

I could have swallowed this with a silent grimace, if it were not for the statement accompanying it, which went like this:

The legislative proposal will not have adverse implications on the rule of law, the court’s independent judicial power as guaranteed by the Basic Law, and the party’s right to choose their legal representation and the right to a fair trial.

Paper submitted to Legco

Those of us who wish to believe that our government tells the truth most of the time will have to hope that this statement was originally penned in a more defensible form in Chinese, and badly translated. Because it is plainly not true.

The right to overseas counsel is not a big deal for most of us. It is a small twig on the branch which is the right to the lawyer of your choice, which in turn is a fairly minor offshoot of the right to a fair trial.

The proposed change could legitimately be defended as a minor reduction in defendants’ rights, applicable only in a tiny number of cases. After all how many defendants of any kind can afford to import an overseas barrister, a process which tends to involve First Class travel and a long stay in the Mandarin Hotel, quite apart from the fees?

So you can say, if you wish, that this will affect very few people. For them, though, it is clearly an infringement to the right to counsel of their choice, and an honest government would admit this.

Similarly the independent judicial power of a court is clearly diminished if in a certain type of proceedings it is required to follow the instructions of the Chief Executive. It may not come up often, but when it comes up there is no point in saying that black is white and the jurisdiction of the court is not diminished.

The Department of Justice could have argued – if it allowed its muse to be hampered by such irrelevant considerations as honesty – that the effect of the changes proposed would be very limited, both in the number of instances in which it is likely to come up, and the effect on the proceedings when it does. It could further have argued that this occasional blip in the smooth progress of justice was a necessary price to pay for the important objective of safeguarding national security.

Instead we get the “nothing is happening” argument again.

This sits uncomfortably with the government’s continuing willingness to ignore completely the District Councils Ordinance. Latest explanation for this is that there is no mention of the councils in the Basic Law – which might be said of quite a lot of topics on which all legislation is local – and that work is in progress on a new arrangement which will conform to the Basic Law and ensure that “only patriots rule Hong Kong”.

These are two fat red herrings. Nobody has suggested at any time in the last 25 years that the existing arrangements conflict with the Basic Law. The councils are purely advisory and members no longer have any role in the selection of the Chief Executive, so they do not in any sense “rule Hong Kong”, whether they are patriotic or not.

Still, just in case, they have been required since 2021 to take “an oath … that the oath-taker will uphold the Basic Law and bear allegiance to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China”.

It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the government is simply ignoring the ordinance while it tries to come up with a procedure which looks like an election but returns the right people. This is a difficult task and likely to take some time. In the meantime the rule of law stops at Chapter 547 of the Laws of Hong Kong.

There was a surprise for government-watchers when it was reported that our new bosom buddies in Saudi Arabia had been told that there were now no COVID-related restrictions here in Hong Kong at all.

This was, at best, a rather slippery use of language. We are still required to wear face masks in public and some individuals – mostly politically inconvenient ones, doubtless by coincidence – have been penalised for appearing bare-faced in public.

I suppose your friendly local nit-picker will say that being required to wear something is not in the strict sense of the word a restriction, It is an instruction. But it feels like a restriction for most of us.

Perhaps the government was just getting a bit ahead of itself. We are expecting to drop the mask requirement any time now. This is a good thing, because one of the less inspiring features of the rule of law in Hong Kong is that you can in theory currently be penalised for not wearing a mask, or instead for wearing one.

This poses a dilemma for the law-abiding which is not one of the “good stories” we are so eagerly seeking these days.

The interesting question for a lot of people will be what happens next. When it is no longer a requirement to wear a mask will people continue to do so most of the time, only in crowded places, or not at all?

Clearly at present there is considerable social pressure backing up the law, at least in places like shopping malls and railway carriages. If in a moment of forgetfulness you have turned up without a mask you will feel naked. And some helpful souls will remind you with interesting gestures that you are missing something.

Personally I always keep a mask folded up in a back pocket for moments like this.

In the open air the situation is a bit more ambiguous. Officially you are allowed, if I understand the advice correctly, to take your mask off while exercising, though not in government facilities for indoor exercise.

My personal observation of the dog-walking and hiking population is that about three quarters of these people wear a mask all the time, or slip one on when they see me coming before I see them. Half of the rest have a mask either worn on the chin or on a wrist, which may be put on as they approach a mask wearer. And the rest have no visible mask, although of course they may have one in a pocket for emergencies like the appearance of a police person.

An interesting thing is the effect of minibus queues. People in such queues are all masked, because the driver will protest if they board naked. So walkers with naked faces coming along the pavement are presented with a small crowd of mask wearers they have to pass, and mask up briefly.

When masks are no longer compulsory the situation will be more complicated. Some people may leave home without a mask. Some may carry one for use if its absence becomes embarrassing. Some will have a personal policy, like masks for malls and MTR; bare-faced out of doors.

This is no mere sociological curiosity, because a small industry has appeared catering for mask wearers. There are for example about six shops within a short walk of the Shatin station which sell nothing but masks.

People who are still sporting the traditional medical model, with its horizontal folds in any colour you like as long as it’s white, are missing the opportunity to make a personal statement.

Masks are now offered in a wide variety of colours and patterns. Some of them are topical: holly for Christmas, rabbits for the Lunar New Year and so on. You can get high-tech ones endorsed by the Surgeon General of the United States, and thin filmy ones which probably do more for your legal status than your health. You can have elastic or ribbons, washable or disposable.

The only variation which appears not to be available is political expression, since an incident two years ago when local sedition-spotters complained about a mask with FDNOL on it in tiny letters.

It is difficult to believe that this flourishing market will survive the removal of legal compulsion. Waves of retail enthusiasm traditionally come and go in Hong Kong. I remember years ago when video game machines first appeared and arcades became as common as rice shops used to be.

Legislators complained that rival offerings of more social utility were being driven out of business by the growth of play places. Age restrictions were imposed kto protect the gullible young. Proprietors were required to allocate a certain amount of space for each machine. Critics complained that the space required for a game machine was bigger than the space allocated to each public housing tenant. But of course the health of the machines was not the purpose of the rule.

Then video gaming migrated to the personal computer and games fans could rot their brains in the privacy of their own homes. Games arcades are now hard to find. I fear the same fate may be in store for mask shops.

From a medical point of view this is probably a shame. Apparently when we were all taking COVID precautions a lot of less publicity-conscious microbes had a hard time finding victims; many seasonal diseases missed their usual appearance.

On the other hand I am told by people who have started travelling again that it is really nice to be surrounded by naked faces. So masks will have to go.

This will leave us with a large supply of unwanted masks, looking for somewhere where naked faces are still not welcome. Well, some places still discourage naked female faces. Perhaps our new friends in Saudi Arabia…?

Like many English people I have a weakness for underdogs and lost causes. Hereward the Wake against the Normans, Bonnie Prince Charlie against the Duke of Cumberland, John Henry and the steam hammer, the Alamo… Show us a loser and we love him.

But there are limits. Asking, as some people have done recently, for a public inquiry into the Hong Kong government’s handling of the COVID epidemic suggests that the people concerned have not been following the drift of current events at all. This is not an underdog; it’s a dead duck.

There are, it is true, many interesting facets that such an inquiry might look into. Broadly I suppose it would conclude that people had done their best in a difficult situation, beset by conflicting advice from “the science” and messages from a northerly direction which were not always motivated by medicine.

But even if you accept that general conclusion there are many details which would make interesting reading. How did we make a good job of the original unexpected outbreak but make a mess of the Omicron arrival which was predictable both generally (viruses mutate) and particularly (other places got it first)?

It would be really nice to know exactly who were those public-spirited entrepreneurs who sold the government routine items at outrageous prices. Was it really a good idea to devote scarce resources and attention to distributing free Traditional Chinese Medicine on the off-chance that some ancient wizard had stumbled on a cure for virus-born diseases 5,000 years before the virus was invented?

And would the more conventional counter-measures have been more acceptable and effective if they had not been “adjusted” quite so often?

But people dreaming of a public inquiry into such matters have not been up-dating themselves on what is officially known as the “new constitutional order”.

The theory behind a public inquiry is that the government is answerable to the public, that its inner workings should, if interesting, be exposed to public view, and that those exercising power on the public’s behalf should be required to explain and defend their actions.

That is not compatible with the current constitutional arrangement, which is that our government is selected, approved and instructed by the central organs of the Chinese Communist Party. “Our” government is their government. The idea of a public inquiry is based on an incorrect understanding of the real meaning of “one country two systems”, which is that where two possible courses of action are offered we are required to select the right one, which is the one country one.

This would not necessarily preclude a public inquiry, but it would preclude one which satisfied the purposes of such an event. The person or people conducting it would be like Legco, carefully vetted to avoid surprises. Like Legco the consequence would be a widespread lack of interest in its entirely predictable proceedings.

We would be revisiting the old Chief Executive selection dilemma: someone who was popular in Hong Kong would for that reason be unacceptable in Beijing, while someone who was acceptable in Beijing would for that reason be regarded with suspicion in Hong Kong.

This is not to say, though, that opposition from the Liaison Office is solely to blame for the fact that this inquiry is a non-starter. After all our Chief Executive came to us after a career as a practitioner and beneficiary of the police approach to public relations.

This states that all arrestees are guilty, all violence is necessary, all shootings are in self-defence and all visits to vice establishments by senior officers are entirely innocent because Our Boys Can Do No Wrong.

This approach is now being spread to the whole government, which never admits error, never apologises and never admits to changing its mind, because it is without fault or flaw.

Local criticism can be prosecuted as subversion, while overseas criticism can be dismissed as a result of anti-China prejudice or scurrilous attempts by foreigners to hamper China’s rise to its rightful position in the world. This produces a very confident government.

It is difficult to find sympathetic international partners for this sort of view, but not impossible. I notice a large delegation of officials and business bodies visited Saudi Arabia last week in search of opportunities. Some of these were “business opportunities”, which I suppose are no worse there than anywhere else.

Officials also held out the prospect of “legal exchanges”. With a regime which jails critics, executes children, tortures suspects, stones adulterers, amputates thieves’ hands and punishes women for “disobedience”? How nice.

The news that a Hongkonger had comitted suicide four months after migrating to the UK was tragic. At least it was tragic for most of us. For some people it was an opportunity.

The Standard’s report, for example, effortlessly extended the poor woman’s plight to “HK migrants” generally. The newspaper redeemed itself somewhat the next day with a thoughtful and sympathetic leader pointing out that migration was tough, people should prepare themselves, and part of that preparation was to accept that unless you happened to have some rare and mobile qualification you were probably going to finish up in the sort of job you were not accustomed to.

The Cross we have to bear went through some recent news stories about the UK – inflation, Brexit, strikes, NHS in crisis – and suggested that Hong Kong should offer grants to help migrants to the UK who had come to their senses and wished to return.

This rather overlooked one relevant point. Here Mr Cross is free to slag off the country he came from at the risk of nothing worse than being thought a creep by people whose approval he does not seek.

A Hongkonger in the UK who went through the same newspapers and complained on the basis of their coverage that – say – “the SAR has become a police state with fixed elections, increasingly kangaroo-like courts and a puppet government controlled by Beijing” would be accused, as Tom Lehrer might have put it, of “impiety, lack of propriety, and quite a variety of unpleasant names.” He or she would also be well advised not to return to Hong Kong.

The suicide case was picked up on Wednesday by a nameless spokesman for the China Foreign Office in Hong Kong. His main beef was that the BNO scheme violated the Joint Declaration (the one which was of “purely historical” significance three years ago) but he was also bothered by “Hongkongers’ hardships”, which included “embarrassment and discrimination” as well as despair.

Not to worry. According to another recent migration story disillusioned international bankers are returning to Hong Kong after discovering the drawbacks of London and Singapore. These comprised, apparently, the difficulty of finding servants in London and the fact that Singapore was “boring – you eat in the same restaurant every night”.

I had some difficulty in believing most of this. To start with I am surprised by the suggestion that where these people are posted is governed entirely by their personal preferences. Presumably if your bank wants you in Hong Kong that is where you go, and if not, not.

I also wondered why we were supposed to be reassured. There is no shortage of indigenous financial landsharks. A few foreigners here or there is not going to make much difference.

It is of course flagrantly untrue that you cannot get servants in London. Indeed there are schools in London where people pay through the nose to acquire the skills needed for working as a butler, nanny or cook.

The problem, if there is a problem, is that London does not have the employer-friendly rules which keep Hong Kong’s servants in what some people clearly think is their place. There is no two-week rule, so your servant is not thrown out of the country if she resigns. There is no live-in rule, so your servant can and will refuse to work six 16-hour days a week, or to sleep in the broom cupboard with your dog and/or offspring.

It is also unfair to suggest that bankers posted to Singapore have to eat in the same restaurant every night. The Lion City offers a wide range of expensive dining choices covering most of the international cuisines. It is of course true that Singapore is boring, but that is not because of the food.

Singapore is boring because it has a permanent ruling party which successfully discourages dissent and criticism. This creates an environment in which creative and original people feel unappreciated so they either leave, or abandon public manifestations and cultivate their metaphorical gardens.

These people are trouble-makers to the tidy administrative mind, but they put the bubbles in your public life Prosecco, and without them the product is flat. There is a lesson for Hong Kong here, and it goes a bit further than how we can create a welcoming environment for international business bodies.

Law, order and discipline are wonderful things. But like most wonderful things they can be overdone.

I have been writing opinion pieces and op eds on and off for about 50 years. One gets occasional feedback, sometimes praise, sometimes criticism. I try not to be inflated by flattery or downcast by brickbats. Still, after so long it is nice to get some original advice.

This brings me to the current trial of sundry employees, and the owner, of the Stand News web channel, on charges of sedition. Prosecuting counsel Laura Ng, while cross-examining a former editor, suggested that all commentaries should be “balanced”.

The editor’s answer to this was much more polite than mine would have been. I do not wish to imply in any way the guilt or innocence of anyone on trial in this case, which would be quite improper. No doubt the judge would not be influenced in any way by anything I wrote here anyway.

But in the interests of what is left of Hong Kong journalism we need to establish firmly that it is neither necessary nor desirable that opinion pieces should be “balanced”.

There is certainly a case for balance in news reports. This is why reporters like conflicts which have two clear sides – Labour versus Conservative, strikers versus an employer, the prosecution versus the defence. Balance is achieved by giving roughly the same amount of space and attention to each side.

In more complicated disputes the matter becomes difficult. On environmental matters, for example, there will be a variety of different views ranging from the prophets of doom to the spokesmen for complacency, with many niches and specialities in between.

There is also the question of when a view becomes so outlandish that we can effectively ignore it. Writers about the holocaust do not feel it necessary to include in every piece a paragraph acknowledging that some people deny it ever took place. Space stories do not acknowledge flat earth theories and stories about the British Royals ignore the rival claims to the throne of the descendants of James II.

Other offerings are more difficult to categorise. Are we obliged to note the objections of the small but noisy groups opposing vaccination, fluoride in water, or the results of the last presidential election?

Editorial writers are generally spared these headaches. An opinion piece is supposed to be about an opinion. The editorial – if your news outlet still has one – expresses the opinions of the editor or proprietor. News outlets aspiring to persuasion will attempt a serious tone, and as part of this may acknowledge that on a particular topic their view is not the only one.

By-lined opinion pieces – those with a named author – are free to expound a view.

That does not, of course, mean that gullible readers will necessarily be swayed by it. Let us suppose that some hypothetical columnist believes that the “so-called” Department of Justice is staffed largely by mercenary mediocrities who, having sold their souls for a well-filled iron rice bowl, have little knowledge and less care for the rights on which they are expected to trample.

Readers of this deplorable diatribe do not need a reminder that the Secretary for Justice takes a very different view of the matter. Indeed the secretary has many opportunities to make this clear even if he doesn’t (as the present one does) write op eds for sympathetic news outlets himself.

Balance is achieved overall because we report the secretary’s speeches and print his department’s press releases, on other occasions. This possibility is specifically catered for in the law on court reporting, which recognises that on any one day the proceedings will often be dominated by the prosecution or the defence. Coverage remains ‘fair’ (an important matter for defamation purposes) as long as you cover the other days as well.

Our government puts out a great deal of stuff, which the media generally gobble fairly uncritically. Critics struggle to get a word in.

This brings us to another point about “balance”, which is that it assumes that, outside the media outlet concerned, ideas are competing on a level playing field. This is not the case at all. Governments and other organisations have large operations dedicated to the manipulation of public opinion.

When I was a working reporter we all knew that some of the people engaged in this activity could not be relied on for a straight answer. We printed their lies in the interests of balance and tried to alert readers by the use of verbs like “claimed” or “asserted” where we might normally have stuck with “said”.

These PR people were often under great pressure to get the desired result. In the days when I provided short courses for government information officers I was routinely told that their immediate superiors had no interest in explaining government policy to the public; they expected their information people to stir up personal publicity for the director or secretary concerned.

In the days when hotel coffee shops kept a vat of over-brewed coffee sitting on a hot plate, a reporter (not me, thank goodness) wrote a piece about the low standard of coffee in such places and named names. The hotel identified as having Hong Kong’s most disgusting coffee took immediate action: it sacked its PR person.

Experiences of this kind engender a certain professional skepticism in journalists, a suspicion that unless otherwise stated all idols have clay feet, all emperors have no clothes, and all official statements are deceptive.

Conversely we tend to believe that the poor and oppressed, among their other disadvantages, have few opportunities for getting public exposure for their needs and views. Writing about such issues does not need to be balanced by a detailed account of the responses of the rich and powerful, who need no help.

This is the sort of thing which happens in places with a free press, and it is a concern that it not only does not happen much any more in Hong Kong, but that the forces of law and order seem to find it actually objectionable.

Reading recent court cases it appears that there is now an official view of the events of 2019, based on the observations of the NPC Standing Committee, that the protests were anti-China, pro-independence, and inspired by scurrilous foreigners taking advantage of young Hongkongers whose brains had been addled by the Liberal Studies subject.

Any alternative interpretation can accordingly be prosecuted as subversion. The extradition bill never existed and our policemen are wonderful, OK? Isn’t it wonderful to have a free press!

Last week Hong Kong welcomed the appointment of a new Governor – I beg your pardon, a new Director of the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

The new man, Zheng Yanxiong, was previously the Head of the Office for Safeguarding National Security of the Central People’s Government in the HKSAR. No great policy changes to be expected, then.

The occasion was naturally marked by speeches, and these struck a sunny optimistic note. A typical offering from Mr John Lee: “I am sure that Mr Zheng will continue to co-operate with the HKSAR Government in supporting the promotion of Hong Kong’s integration into national development and making greater contribution to the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

This was followed a day or two later by a distressing announcement, which suggested that perhaps the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation was not as inevitable as Messrs Lee and Zheng thought it was: China’s official population had declined.

In terms of numbers this did not appear to be a big deal – an 800,000 reduction in a population of 1.4 billion – but demographers were gloomy. It is not just the absolute number, apparently, but the implication in terms of the size of different age groups. A large population of the elderly supported by a shrinking population of workers is a problem already for Japan and some European countries. But they started from a more prosperous position than we do.

It is apparently almost impossible to reverse a decline in women’s inclination to have babies, which lies at the root of the problem.

The Western media were fascinated. The Associated Press quoted an American academic as saying that the “looming economic crisis will be worse than Japan’s”.

The BBC spoke to Paul Cheung, Singapore’s former chief statistician, who thought China has “plenty of manpower” and “a lot of lead time” to manage the demographic challenge. “They are not in a doomsday scenario right away,” he said comfortingly..

Reuters quoted demographer Yi Fuxian, who is based in an American university and seems to be the go-to guy for quotes on China’s population figures: “China’s demographic and economic outlook is much bleaker than expected. China will have to adjust its social, economic, defense and foreign policies.”

Reuters is a careful news outlet; it also had an official response: “Kang Yi, head of the national statistics bureau, dismissed concerns about the population decline, telling reporters that ‘overall labour supply still exceeds demand’.”

Beijing correspondents adorned the statistical news with pen portraits of defiantly unpregnant Chinese women and happily childless “Double Income No Kids” couples.

Some of the on-line reporting was less restrained than all this. One financial guru (it is often said that investment advisers are called “gurus” because the word “charlatan” is too long for headline use) said she would give China “two or three years”. She did not make clear whether this was the deadline for the End of Life as We Know It or just the point when China might drop off the menu for international share punters.

Well I am not sure what to make of all this. The immediate effect, as one commentator put it, was psychological. China will shortly cease to be the most populous country in the world. Losing one of your entries in the Guinness Book is perhaps a minor national humiliation. Indeed if the Indian government had got a census together (another POVID victim) we might have discovered that this has already happened. The long run? Anything could still happen.

But there is perhaps a warning here. Countries, like investments, can go down as well as up. The best historical example is perhaps Argentina, which in 1900 was more or less a European-style country in South America, and after a long string of bad choices now looks more like an African-style country in South America.

A more recent example is the UK, which has managed to shoot itself in both feet since the Brexit referendum. Then of course there was the USSR…

We would do well to approach the future with some humility and strive, perhaps, for some flexibility. Current developments, welcome or unwelcome, will not continue indefinitely. Change is inevitable and there is no guarantee that we will see it coming. Integration with China looks a good bet now, but is there a Plan B?

Perhaps the demographic trap will turn out to be a false alarm – all those missing workers replaced by microchips, maybe. But something else will come along. It always does. As Michael Oakeshott put it: “In political activity … men sail 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…”

There is also a telling line on this in one of God’s early works: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

Since the dog and I had a snake encounter last summer Lemon refuses to visit our local Country Park. The rather boring local alternative is walking up and down Sui Wo Road. So after years of passing it unnoticed I now resort regularly to Penfold Park.

Penfold Park is a unique Hong Kong institution. It is not run by the government or local authority. It occupies the space inside the race-track at the Jockey Club’s Shatin horse casino.

Cynics may wonder if the Jockey Club’s haste to install a public park was in any way motivated by the desire to put something in the space before the government noticed that it was not actually needed for horse-racing purposes, and put something less decorative in there.

A close look at the architecture suggests that in the early days someone cherished the idea that some of the less strenuous horse activities would take place there. There is a trotting track, some practice jumps and a clear space on which one might gallop. But I have never seen so much as a hoofprint so I suppose this idea has faded away.

More successful was the idea that this might be a family attraction. There are toilets, a playground for the kids, and plenty of tables and benches for picnics. And on public holidays or weekends with good weather you do see some parties enjoying alfresco meals.

But the main beneficiaries of Penfold Park are dogs. The park is a dogs’ delight, a pooch paradise, Hong Kong’s hound heaven. Most days a visitor without a dog will feel undressed. On holidays there are dog crowd scenes. The park is decorative, with pools, paths, sculpted bushes and artistically clustered trees. But most importantly for dogs it has a very large area of grass.

Municipal parks in the territory have traditionally been adorned with forests of signs discouraging things: smoking, music, ball games, cycling, roller-skating, radio-controlled cars and, of course, dogs.

Regular readers will have gathered that I am not a great fan of the Jockey Club – an addictive vice does not become a virtue when decorated with conspicuous consumption, snobbery and animal abuse – but I have to admit that with the park the club has done a stellar job. It continues to do so – the park is meticulously maintained, bushes pruned, grass cut, fences painted – and offers no prohibitive notices except a small one pointing out that drones are banned on race days, when the park is closed anyway.

This leads us to one fly in the ointment: there is no public transport. The racecourse has a station, but it is only open on race days. There is a large car park and some people come in taxis. This is not a park for poor people.

Bearing this in mind the observant anthropologist can still spot some interesting characteristics of the local dog population, albeit at the more soignee end of the spectrum.

Interesting mixtures like my Lemon are numerous but not in a majority. The pedigree population comes in two categories. There are the display dogs: Old English sheepdogs, Collies, the odd Afghan hound, some spectacular retired (I presume) Greyhounds. Some of these seem rather impractical for Hong Kong’s climate. Two popular choices in this category are Huskies (anyone for three hours’ exercise a day?) and Samoyeds.

Then there is the most numerous group: very small dogs and extremely small dogs. These are mostly miniature Poodles but Yorkies and other midget breeds are also popular.

The size of this group reflects, I fear, the restrictions which many landlords – notably the government – impose on dog ownership in the properties they rent out or sell. A very small dog can be smuggled in and out in a bag. Designed bags for this purpose are a common offering in pet equipment shops. With your pocket pooch in a bag you can also, in flagrant violation of the regulations, take it on the MTR.

Owners in this category go for pedigrees for two reasons. The dog adoption people will refuse to offer you a dog if you live in an estate where they are banned, because too many dogs adopted in these circumstances are returned. So if you want a dog you must buy one.

From the owner’s point of view a pedigree dog is a better bet because you have a good idea of how big the tiny puppy you are looking at is going to be as an adult, a point on which the adoption people may not be very helpful. Most adoption dogs are mixtures so you cannot exclude the possibility of a Great Dane granddad in the family tree somewhere.

This suggests that the blanket ban on dogs in government-controlled estates has a curious and perhaps not very useful effect. It keeps commercial dog breeders in business and hampers the efforts of those organisations trying to encourage the adoption of existing dogs rather than the breeding of new ones.

A more general public policy worry is the number of young couples whose relationship with their dogs suggests that the pooch may be a surrogate for something else. Small dogs are wheeled out in dog strollers, primped in dog beauty parlours and dressed in cute gear. A newly opened cafe in Shatin catering for owners and their (small) dogs seems to be doing good business.

Is there a consensus among the (disillusioned?) young that raising a dog is preferable to having real kids? After all a dog is cheaper, easier to manage, and will never get big enough to want a room of its own. And you don’t have to worry about the merits of kindergarten classes in goosestepping and flag worship.

Romping through the bureaucratic undergrowth the other day I came across a little animal which generally eludes watchers. This is the Advisory Committee on Post-office Employment for Former Chief Executives and Politically Appointed Officials.

I must hasten to add that the subcommittee, though obscure, is not secretive. It produces a steady stream of press releases about its work, which – alas – rarely find favour with media editors. So nobody hears about it.

Generally we are not missing much. The subcommittee vets applications from retiring or resigning political appointees – policy secretaries and their permitted flotillas of assistants – and Specially Appointed Officials, which seems to mean full-time members of the Central Policy Unit, when we had one.

The results are not newsworthy. I cannot find any example in which the subcommittee actually sdvised the government to refuse permission for a job. In every case there is approval subject to some conditions.

In the earliest cases recorded on the subcommittee’s website, which go back to 2012, there is much variation in the conditions imposed, but by the time Ms Carmen Cheung Sau-lai left the job of Political Assistant to the Chief Secretary for Administration in 2014 the committee had settled on a formula which, with some minor verbal elaboration, has been its standard set of terms ever since:

• No representing people or firms in dealings with the government.
• No lobbying.
• No bidding, or advice on bidding, for government contracts
• No divulging secrets.

Of course they do not put it as briefly as that. Item 4 for example comes out as:

“without derogating from her obligations under the Official Secrets Ordinance (Cap. 521), use, communicate or divulge to any person any classified information or information that has come to her knowledge during her office as Political Assistant to Chief Secretary for Administration that is not already in the public domain.”

But you get the message.

So far this is uncontroversial. Of course we do not want former political appointees exploiting their government contacts. Indeed some of us might consider that the “Relevant Period”, as the subcommittee puts it, could usefully last longer than the current one year.

What may concern us, though, is that the subcommittee has of late decided that it has another purpose besides preventing the indecent exploitation of government experience and contacts, and this is to preserve the government from being “embarrassed”.

As far as I can tell this concern first appeared in 2017 when Mr Fung Wai-kwong left the post of Information Coordinator and expressed a desire to start a new career as (horror!) a newspaper columnist. The committee recommended that he should not be allowed to “include in his articles anything in relation to his employment as Information Coordinator which may cause embarrassment to the Government.”

This condition has appeared sporadically ever since, most recently being applied to Dr Law Chi-kwong, who following a stint as Secretary for Labour and Welfare wished to return to university teaching. People who are threatening to teach during the “Relevant Period”, are often, though not invariably, told not to “include in his teaching materials anything related to his office as [insert job title] which may cause embarrassment to the Government.”

People intending to move to journalism, PR or writing books are also often subjected to this restriction.

And the question which then arises is whether a committee dedicated to avoiding “well-founded negative public perception embarrassing the Government” should be restricting the freedom of speech in this way.

Remember that the people affected are already subject to the item quoted above about information which is not already in the public domain. So it appears that the committee wishes further to suppress information which is in the public domain, but may embarrass the government.

The other possible interpretation is that we are not dealing here with information at all, but the expression of opinions about how the government operates or ought to operate.

Whichever way you look at it this item is a restriction on freedom of expression. Indeed the subcommittee itself calls it a restriction. The right to freedom of expression is not absolute, as we are invariably reminded by people coming up with new ways of trampling on it.There are, though, only a few permitted exceptions, and these are summarised in the Bill of Rights Ordinance. Restrictions are allowed only:

(a) for respect of the rights or reputations of others;

(b) for the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals.

Bill of Rights Article 16

I do not see how any of those exceptions could be extended to cover restrictions whose sole effect and intention is to preserve the government from embarrassment.

No doubt there are more worrying freedom of expression issues in Hong Kong than the right of recently defenestrated government servants to give an honest appraisal of their experience, but we must suppose that this subcommittee has legal advice … from government lawyers … from whom we might hope for some sensitivity to the requirements of human rights generally and freedom of expression in particular.

Hope, but not expect.

Something strange happened the other week. Our government, which has spent the last couple of years telling us what to think about life, love, the nation, the president, the rule of law and above all national security, has noticed that the public, also, has opinions.

You are invited to participate in the “public consultation on regulation of crowdfunding activities”. Lengthy document from the Financial Services and Treasury Bureau here.

This procedure was a habit of the old colonial government, and indeed of its post-colonial successors. What usually happened was that the government perpetrated a “consultation paper” on which people were invited to comment. Once the ensuing cacophony of conflicting voices had subsided the government would announce that public opinion was “divided” and go ahead with whatever it originally intended.

This was not by any means an ideal arrangement, but it gave people an opportunity to make their voices heard, even if they suspected that the eventual decision was not much affected by anything they might have said.

It provided also a sort of consent, in the sense that participating in the process implied willingness to accept the outcome, even if it was not the outcome you hoped for. No doubt some mechanism of this nature explains the government’s sudden curiosity about the public’s opinions. The fact of public consultation will imply the fantasy of public consent.

I am not sure that this trick still works. The proposals for regulation are certainly controversial, but it takes many sides to make a rousing debate. After the tremendous efforts expended in the last two years on stifling political pluralism I fear we shall see a demonstration of the soothing effect of jailing the opposition and promoting the people’s poodles.

There will be a resounding chorus of “amen to that” and “you can say that again” with occasional expressions of dissatisfaction from our more lurid Legco members that the proposed new offences are not punishable by hanging.

One or two lawyers who have not yet trimmed their sails to the winds of the times may point out that – even in the view of the writers of the consultation document – most of the possible problems arising from crowdfunding are covered by existing laws. And the document really has very little to say about the most obvious one: some variation on collecting for widows and orphans before blowing the proceeds on fast women and slow horses.

One or two commentators in safe havens overseas will complain that this is another step in the government’s effort to silence dissenting voices, and the proposed regime will just be used to continue “lawfare” against anyone who is not joining the Party party.

They will unkindly point to the absence of any requirement for the proposed Crowdfunding Affairs Office to keep in mind the need to combine the preservation of the public interest with the preservation of the rights to organise, to express opinions, and to solicit support for non-commercial activities.

They will also note that the CAO’s permission will, according to the proposals, provide no protection for people who have it, if “the CAO and relevant law enforcement agencies have reasons to believe that the continued conduct of the activity will jeopardise public interests, public safety or national security, regardless of whether a consent notice has been issued by the CAO, or whether an application to the CAO has been made.”

More sympathetic observers of the scene may see here a government haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere, doesn’t like it and will attract support and cash for saying so.

There is the imaginative bit near the beginning: “some individuals had in the past raised funds from their affiliated groups through the above means, claiming that they would use the funds raised to help people in need, but they turned out to be using the funds for purposes which were unlawful and jeopardised public interests, public safety, as well as national security.” This is the official view of recent history although nobody who has actually been convicted so far appeared to be deploying large sums of money from any source, crowdfunding or otherwise.

Further down we get: “In the absence of regulation, crowdfunding may be used as a means to raise funds or launder money for various types of illegal activities, including those unlawful acts endangering national security or supporting terrorist activities.”

The CAO will consider “whether the nature of the activity and the use of funds would jeopardise public interests and public safety as well as be contrary to the interests of national security.”

And in due course: “The major factors to be considered when giving approval include whether the crowdfunding activity is conducted according to appropriate and sound procedures, whether the individuals involved are reliable, and the risks of the activity giving rise to illegal conducts or endangering public interests, public safety and national security, etc.”

Variations on public interest, public safety and national security are a recurring theme. The whole plan looks suspiciously like an attempt to shut the stable door on a horse which bolted in 2019.

The relevant Secretary, Christopher Hui, did not dispel this impression when launching the new scheme. The only example of problematic crowfunding he could come up with was the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, which helped with the legal expenses of defendants and the welfare of convicted prisoners. Mr Hui skated effortlessly past the fact that there has not been the slightest suggestion that any of the money raised for this purpose was mis-spent. The only offence of which the people running the fund have been convicted is failing to register as a society

The point which made the fund a target, most spectators believe, is the fact that those defendants it aided and the prisoners succoured were among the protesters against the Extradition Bill and subsequent gassings and pepperings.

Personally I am distressed by the evident confusion in the whole presentation between what is unlawful and what is merely in some people’s view undesirable. Clearly fund-raising to support illegal activities is itself already illegal. Persons accused of such a crime will face a court.

National security is a legal concept, albeit a troublingly vague one. Whether an activity will endanger public interest or public safety, on the other hand, is problematic. These are not legal concepts and people’s ideas on the matter are likely to vary.

After struggling through the consultation document we may also notice that there is no mention of a right to appeal a CAO decision.

An interesting inclusion, on the other hand, is the suggestion that the new law will apply to the entire world. Anyone who accepts crowdfunding money from Hong Kong will be covered.

They will be required to submit a “description of the crowdfunding purpose, and fill in a statement indicating that the crowdfunding activities will not involve any (wait for it) activities that would jeopardise national security…” Somehow I can’t see this happening.

Anyway the proposal is interesting, but looks to me too much like a sledgehammer designed and intended to crack a nut which has already been flattened. This sort of thing used to be upsetting. Now I’m numb.

In 1918 the then French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau was told that US President Woodrow Wilson had propounded 14 points to guide the making of peace in Europe, where the first World War was still in progress. Clemenceau responded: “Fourteen points? The Good Lord gave us only ten. And do we abide by those?”

What would he have thought of our friendly local Education Bureau which (to paraphrase another well-known Clemenceau quote) has decided that education is too serious a matter to be left to teachers, and has propounded no less than 70 rules for their guidance?

The Guidelines on Professional Conduct as they are called (but do not take “guidelines” too seriously – penalties for violation can include being banned from the profession for life) replace a marginally more brisk set produced by the Council for Professional Conduct in Education, which used to do this sort of thing, but was recently abolished on the grounds that it processed complaints too slowly. Failure to produce the post-protest bloodbath desired by the pro-government media had nothing to do with it.

So instead of a self-regulated profession we now have teachers who are regulated by a government department, and can be drummed out of the profession by a combination of civil servants and political appointees. Any resemblance to the way these matters were handled in the USSR is no doubt coincidental.

The civil servants responsible for this latest masterpiece have, alas, ignored one of the fundamental laws governing the drafting of codes of practice, ethics, professional conduct and other platitudes. You can, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it in a rather different context, be either quick or dead.

If you go for something short and sweet the people concerned will read it, probably several times. This does not guarantee that they will follow it but at least the thought will cross their minds occasionally. However if you go in for something long and turgid it can be expected that those expected to follow it will read it only once if they read it at all.

The new guidelines are long, platitudinous, repetitive and an odd mixture of aspirations, orders and descriptions of the obvious. Lurking among them are a surprising number of things which teachers are apparently no longer allowed to criticise, including the teaching profession, schools, and “the nation”.

The objectives of education are now to “Foster students’ whole-person and balanced development; nurture in them positive values and attitudes; equip them with the knowledge and skills required to have a foothold in Hong Kong, an affection for the country and a global perspective.”

Observant readers will spot the item which has dropped off this list. “Critical thinking” is no longer on the menu.

The disturbing under-current to all this is the assumption that if teachers stray from the path laid out by government officials then students will follow them into erroneous thinking and illegal behaviour. There may have been something in this way back in the days when the local teacher was one of the few literate people kids would encounter, and the others were either priests or medics.

Modern students have access to a wide variety of sources of information, many of which have considerably more influence on them than their teachers do. It is entirely erroneous to suppose that local student protesters were radicalised by their teachers. This is not possible. A whiff of teargas, on the other hand, is extremely effective.

Many of the guidelines are open to no criticism except that everyone knows about them already – follow the curriculum, don’t grope the students, ask parental permission for outings – and would no doubt have a place in any guidelines worthy of the name.

Unfortunately in other parts there is a distinct whiff of a political purge in the offing, fortified by the whole exercise being presented by a Secretary for Education whose previous hobbies include being vice chair of the pro-Beijing mini-union for teachers.

The new Secretary, Christine Choi, has one pronounced advantage when compared with her predecessor. He was an accountant. She was a teacher, albeit in the part of the education industry which believes nothing happened on June 4^th. She also writes for the newspapers, if you consider Ta Kung Pao a newspaper.

Unlike so many avid government supporters Dr Choi has a collection of perfectly genuine degrees, including a doctorate from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. This is a doctorate in education, which PhD holders disparage as “not a real doctorate”, probably because it has some practical use.

Considering this is all good stuff the usual sources are surprisingly reticent about Dr Choi’s student history. Her Facebook page mentions none of it (only like: Chris Tang, Secretary for Security) and the official government biography just has “she taught in secondary school for more than a decade after 1988”, with credential collection continuing, presumably, on a part-time basis.

The anonymous compiler of her Wikipedia entry has a BA from Hong Kong Baptist University, awarded in 1988. But this cannot be right. BU is where I corrupted young minds for many years, including most of 1988. At that time it was Baptist College, and was not awarding degrees at all. It was nevertheless an excellent establishment in its way; it would be nice to see the qualifications it awarded worn with pride.