tim's experiment

The whole of the Hong Kong commentariat – or at least that segment of it which likes banks and the Hong Kong government – has been churning out explanations for Joshua Wong’s mysterious difficulty in opening a bank account at HSBC. As often happens when the destination to be reached by an argument is more important than the means for getting there, the two leading innocent explanations flatly contradict each other.

On the one hand we have the apologists for the banking sector, explaining that Mr Wong’s status as a high-profile person would mean his account, if he were allowed to open one, would need constant supervision and attention. No doubt this is necessary to ensure he does not join many famous people in sending his money to Panama.

On the other side we have people who, perhaps, do not like banks but really dislike Mr Wong. They say that Mr Wong, far from being a high maintenance celebrite, is a nobody. He is a young man with no job and no income. Why would a bank anywhere want such a customer?

Well times may have changed but I found this last question easy to answer. Mr Wong is a student. Banks have long since realized that by being nice to people while they are students they can snare customers whose future prospects are bright, however poor they may be now.

When I was a student this recruitment of the poor but promising was conducted with enthusiasm. All the banks advertised in student publications, however disreputable the other contents of those publications might be. All sorts of goodies were offered as an inducement to setting up an account. Indeed having inherited the family connection with Barclays before I reached university I rather resented the fact that I could not qualify for any of the presents.

The University of Lancaster’s then small and isolated campus had two bank branches, which in those days averaged out at about a branch per 1,000 or so students, which seems rather generous. Also generous was the general attitude to overdrafts. The manager of the Nat West branch, who was particularly famous as a willing lender, once explained to me that his employers accepted that his branch should not be measured by any of the usual banking metrics: its job was to recruit grateful future customers.

Universities continue to enjoy this sort of service, though. Baptist University also has two bank branches. As banking in Hong Kong is almost entirely a duopolous enterprise split between the HSBC group and the Bank of China fleet we can hardly expect more.  I suspect that if Mr Wong had turned up at a university branch where penniless young people are the standard cannon-fodder he might have opened an account without anyone noticing.

This may of course be quite wrong. One of the strange features of Hong Kong life is that although banking is supposed to be a fiercely competitive business one hears many complaints nowadays from people less newsworthy than Mr Wong of how difficult it is to open an account.  Perhaps both explanations are true. They don’t want you if you are rich and famous – too much trouble – or if you are poor and obscure – no money, no profits.

Certainly there is a particular problem for small businesses wishing to open a business account. Banks do not make it easy and will often flatly refuse. I have heard several sad stories of people tramping the streets of Central in search of a bank which was willing to take their business.

Indeed a popular view in start-up circles is that this would be a better route for government aid than the usual loans, advice, start-up parks and what have you. To boost business creation what they need is a simple bank, doing the simple stuff – cheques, deposits, credit cards – and skipping the investment advice, “financial products”, insurance disguised as financial products, and other efforts to diversify in the direction of rich customers. It should be willing to open an account for anyone with a business registration certificate, an ID card, and a deposit. It should have no connection with New York, so the American authorities can be told what to do with their FATCA forms.

It is one of life’s little paradoxes that the same bank which paid multi-million dollar fines for doing business with Mexican dope fiends is now threatening to close the accounts of harmless charities if they cannot prove they are not American.

Meanwhile what is poor Mr Wong to do if he really wants to open a bank account? Well there’s always the British Virgin Islands. They, it seems, are not fussy.

What’s wrong with independence? Clearly under present circumstances it is a very long-term objective. But if that is really a politician’s dream there is a lot to be said for him saying so, rather than creeping along pretending to be something else until the right moment comes, if it ever does.

There is one attraction for Hong Kong’s younger generation: merely mentioning independence produces the sort of reaction from the people we love to hate which you would expect if you produced a string of garlic at a vampire wedding. Surely there must be something to be said for an idea which our real estate moguls and mainland puppetmasters are lining up to condemn?

While we are on this aspect of the subject, a prize for tactlessness for the billionaire who said that “Hong Kong had been returned to its rightful owner.” Hong Kong is not just a piece of land. It is people. People do not have owners unless they are slaves.

But I digress. We may acknowledge the truth of the criticism that independence is “not what most people want”. I suppose this is true, but the problem is that what most people want is the high degree of autonomy and “Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong” which we were promised many moons ago. Unfortunately this does not seem to be on offer at the moment. Independence is like the Mark Six: for a small price you can dream for a few hours.

Now let us dispose of a few small items. The fact that the Basic Law states that “Hong Kong is an inalienable part of China” is not relevant here. Even the most despotic regimes suffer from one limit on their power: they cannot bind their successors so they cannot control the future. History is full of arrangements which were intended to be permanent and weren’t. Law describes the present.

We can also rule out the possibility of sedition. Contrary to the view often expressed by left-wing dimwits and Beijing officials, Hong Kong does have a law on sedition and it is contained in the Crimes Ordinance Sections 9-14. Of particular relevance to our present topic is Section 9 (2) (b), which states that an act, speech or publication is not seditious if all it does is “to point out errors or defects in the government or constitution of HK as by law established or in legislation or in the administration of justice with a view to the remedying of such errors or defects.”

We also need not linger over the argument that independence is impossible because “China will never allow it”, see above, and without that approval we would run out of water, be over-run by the PLA etc. Clearly any practical route to independence will include somewhere along the way the consent, however reluctant, of the Chinese government of the day, and the willingness to make sensible arrangements for the resulting new relationship. No doubt an independent Hong Kong, even if that independence ran as far as a new flag and a seat in the UN, would have to tread warily round its giant neighbour. The situation would be rather like that of Finland in relation to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Independence always has limits, at least for small countries.

The more interesting argument is the one which goes, or implies, that if Hong Kong became independent this would be to the detriment of China, and a sacrilegious trespass on the Holy Ground which has been forever ruled by Beijing. I propose to approach this in a rather round-about way. On the internet you can find interesting animated maps in which 2,000, or even more, years of history pass in a couple of minutes. I think it is a good idea to show one of these to students of international relations, to make the point that all borders except those which consist of a seashore are in the long run temporary and transitory arrangements. The European version of the map comes with a commentary from me, drawing attention to the periods when half of France was in England, half of Italy was in Austria, half of England was Danish, and so on. We note the appearance and passing of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Duchy of Burgundy, and more recent mayflies like Yugoslavia. The Asian version of the map does not come with a commentary from me, because I don’t know enough Asian history. But a conspicuous feature of the comings and goings is that there is clearly no such thing, historically, as an eternal China. Kingdoms come and go, expand and contract, foreign empires take over and expire in their turn. In fact modern China seems to be the largest version on offer. The current government’s view of this matter seems to be that any territory which at any time acknowledged the rule of a mediaeval despot in Beijing is to be regarded as historically Chinese. The merits of, and reasons for, a Communist regime trying to reconstruct a hereditary feudal empire are too complex a matter to go into here. But it does seem that the historic Chinese empire exerts the same sort of mysterious attraction which led European statesmen, for some 1,400 years, to seek some sort of restoration of the Roman empire. The only person who got close (the Emperor Charles V) eventually recognized the futility of the project and divided his empire in his will. But the notion survived in the Holy Roman Empire – famously neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire – until Napoleon killed it off at the beginning of the 19^th century.

The trouble with this sort of ambition is that what worked as an ancient empire may not work as a 21^st century state. Modern political assumptions include the expectation and hope, to say the least, that people will be ruled by arrangements to which they have broadly consented. Historic empires relied on force. A more serious problem is practical. When empire involved nothing more demanding than an occasional exchange of gifts between rulers there was no practical limit on size. If the government of a modern state aspires to the full range of functions, on the other hand, then size may be a serious problem. China is the only country of its size which does not have a broadly federal structure – that is to say with states or provinces which have a vigorous separate existence from the central government. The only other possible exception – hardly a happy portent – is Russia.

It is tempting to offer as a wild generalization that it is probably impossible to govern China satisfactorily in its present form. There must either be a devolution of powers to the provinces or a reduction in size. And if neither of these options is chosen voluntarily then it is likely that one or the other will be imposed by events.

That may be over-stating the position. But we can surely at least agree that agitating for more autonomy for Hong Kong is not an attempt to sabotage China. If anything it is an attempt to wean the country off the notion that long-term progress can be made in a situation where the central authorities select a target and provinces are expected to hit it. Our surprisingly numerous local Hayek fan club seem to overlook one point about the great man’s critique of attempts to steer markets: he wasn’t attacking Keynesian economics, he was attacking centralized state planning.

Well we shall see. What we shall see is how confident people feel about the rightness of their views, because it is lack of confidence which leads to calls for suppression of dissenting voices. If independence is a stupid idea then nobody will vote for it and there is no harm in a political group calling for it. We may give them some credit because, as John Stuart Mill put it, an idea which is never challenged changes from a living truth to a dead dogma. If there turns out to be substantial support for independence then it will perhaps get into the heads of our real rulers the idea that the present arrangements are not what we signed up for.

I notice one of the regime’s academic running dogs the other day pointed out that “a high degree of autonomy” does not mean “complete autonomy”. This is true. But it must mean something substantially more than we have now, in which it appears that the only matters on which our government exercises untrammelled discretion are the provision of lifts at footbridges and non-slip finishes on the floors of public toilets.

Well it’s nice to know that owners of valuable dirt have their rights protected in Hong Kong. This was demonstrated last Sunday. Earlier this month a pile of dirt 10 metres high was discovered in a field near Tin Shui Wai. This is a big heap. Think beached Titanic.

Protests from local residents produced no sign of official action.

A group of protesters turned up on Sunday, thinking they might collect a few bags of the dirt heap and deposit them on appropriate government doorsteps.

However the arrival of the protesters was closely followed by the arrival of the police, who arrested them on suspicion of theft. Theft?

I must say this came as a bit of a surprise. About the same time as the megapile of dirt appeared in Tun Shui Wai somebody started dropping off small piles of construction debris on the grass next to the car park at the top of Sui Wo Road, where I live. I would have thought that anyone who picked up some of it and took it away would be doing a public service.

Surely the law does not regard it as an offence to pick up something which someone has thrown away? The exuberant lady who cleans our road finds a lot of tins and packets, especially after weekend nights. I suppose they all have a potential value to someone, but at some point surely private property becomes public litter.

Clearly the megapile in Tin Shui Wai contains no ordinary dirt. This is designer dirt. Having matured for a few years in a New Territories field it will become Vintage dirt, commanding a monstrous premium from dirt connoisseurs.

In the meantime it would be nice if the dirt owners conformed to the law, which at least in theory regulates where such owners can leave heaps of their property to undergo the maturing process.

It seems that as in so many matters in the New Territories the law is, if not completely helpless, at least extremely sluggish about this sort of thing.

The relevant Permanent Secretary, who happens to be the disreputable but durable Paul Chan Mo-po, said that three departments were “strictly following up the matter”, but were engaged in gathering evidence and investigating the law.

This brought immediately to mind a rare moment of enlightenment in the colonial Legco, when a member responded to a rather similar problem by relating an old Chinese proverb: If one monk is in charge of getting the water he brings two buckets on a pole over his shoulder. If two monks are getting the water they bring one bucket on a pole between them. If three monks are supposed to get the water we have no water.

Clearly Hong Kong has no lack of competitiveness when it comes to providing a supportive environment for the dirt industry. Dirt owners can be assured that they can park their property wherever they like.

If the resulting heap annoys nearby residents, never mind. They will be invited to play pass the parcel with three government departments, leaving your heap to ferment in peace. If on the other hand some local miscreant threatens to take a shovel to it, then the cops will be on his case right away.

Isn’t the rule of law wonderful!

People have been complaining about the deteriorating standards of behaviour among the young since Socrates was executed for corrupting the youth of Athens with the notion that truth was the highest good. Rioting, like other strenuous sports, appeals mainly to people in their late teens/early 20s, so recent events have provoked much speculation about what is wrong with our young things.

For up-market tastes there are the offerings of Prof Richard Wong, which appear rather incongruously on the back page of the SCMP’s business section. Last week we had Hegelian historicism and post-modernism. This week German romanticism, the decline of Liberalism and post-modernism again. I confess to some doubts about this approach. I do not claim to understand those noisy discussions which fill the air in Mong Kok teahouses but I do not believe they are devoted to the rival merits of Hegelian historicism and Popper’s criticism of them. Post-modernism is a purely academic construction with no points of contact with the real world. It asserts that there is no such thing as truth so all beliefs are valid, depending for their status only on the fervour with which they are held. This is the sort of thinking which, as Nissam Taleb puts it, people with jobs in the real world leave for the weekends. Most of us cling to the belief that there is a real world, that some words explain it better than others, that actions have consequences and these can to some extent be predicted and evaluated.

For a cheap and cheerful explanation of current events, on the other hand, we can always depend on Rita Fan, who said that young people were being led astray by “bad media”. This seems an unkind slur on the Hong Kong media, most of which have already bowed to the wind from the north and some of which are actively fanning it. In any case this explanation flies in the face of a great deal of research which has revealed that media really have very little effect on what people think and even less on what they do.

Somewhere in between we have the complaint that our young people “do not understand China.” I find this extremely hard to believe. In the first place Hong Kong is the only place in China where the media are allowed – if they wish, and some of them don’t – to report China matters as honestly as they can. If you want to understand China then Hong Kong is probably the best place in the world to do it, because you can avoid the avalanche of official lies. Also, a great many people in Hong Kong come from China, and most of the rest have visited it, often frequently. Anyone who is in the least bit interested can feast on personal experiences of China, his own and other people’s. I believe Hong Kong young people know China very well. They know it is a rising power with a growing economy. They also know it is a nasty police state which combines traditional despotism with modern technology to promote the compulsory pretence that it is loved and admired.

Another interesting suggestion puts the blame on the Liberal Studies subject, now compulsory in all schools. This, we are told, gives teachers — who are all rabidly pro-democracy as we can see from the people they put in Legco — the chance to corrupt young minds with unhelpful Western notions. You know the sort of thing: that we are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or that our government should observe and implement the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Shocking stuff. But this surely overstates the affection which most schoolkids feel for the material being shovelled over their desks. University students, in theory, are encouraged to think independently, leading to a regrettable tendency to think things which their elders disapprove of. But for most of the school population this is a distant dream. The purpose of the Hong Kong education system, as they experience it, is to reduce the number of people eligible for university to a manageable number by eliminating them and their friends from the queue.

Some observers have pounced on the fact that many of those arrested during or after the disturbances were unemployed. If only we could create jobs for these idle young men then all would be well, they think. But this is surely confusing a symptom with a cause. Of the people who feel dissatisfaction some will grumble to their friends, some will protest peacefully, some will protest robustly. People with jobs and families are likely to stop at this point. Those with neither will be more tempted to go on to rioting, because they have little to lose. That does not mean they are the only people who are dissatisfied. The other day I was chatting with a young man who would not under any circumstances riot. He is a civil servant in one of the more socially useful departments and has a promising career ahead of him. As we picked our way through the freshly-constructed desert between the old Star Ferry pier and the new one he suddenly said “Hong Kong is dying. No. Hong Kong is dead.”

Why do people with extensive education and impeccably law-abiding instincts feel this? I suppose because the old colonial government, with all its flaws, had the useful characteristic that its main objective was a happy and prosperous Hong Kong. The territory was a historical embarrassment to the UK, not an opportunity for exploitation. Governors were expected to run a system which produced levels of social welfare consistent with European ideas, and left to get on with it. We now have a government which presumably wishes to see a happy and prosperous Hong Kong, but that is not its main objective. Success is not achieved by pleasing Hong Kong people. indeed dismal poll ratings roll off our leaders like water off a duck’s back. Success is getting a pat on the head in Beijing. Unfortunately happiness and prosperity are not a simple matter. The idea that they can be achieved as a happy by-product from a government prostrating itself before a distant tyrant is not very promising.

Before we get to the meat of this week’s diatribe, a word of apology. I understand that students of journalism in a number of local universities have been invited to consume my scribblings about journalistic commentary and the right to a fair trial. As a result I have made two columnists famous for alleged neglect of this important matter. This is not entirely fair to them because I have since discovered worse things going on in the China Daily. And I dare say readers of Chinese newspapers could also come up with interesting examples. None of them, I fancy, would be as terrifying as a recent burst of creativity by Mr Tony Kwok Man-wai, who is – rather worryingly – a former deputy commissioner of the ICAC.

Mr Kwok last week published an article on a pro-Beijing news website called Speakout Hong Kong in which he urged readers to “hunt down” the judge (strictly speaking a magistrate) who had allowed bail for Raymond Wong, when Mr Wong appeared before him on rioting charges. The object of the hunt was to “see whether there is evidence to prove [the judge] and his family’s relationship to pro-democracy parties”. This was, by the standards laid down by the Court of Appeal in the Oriental Daily’s scandalising the court case, a clear infringement of the law. Mr Kwok seems to have had some thoughts along these lines also, because this version of the article was soon replaced by a more diluted version, in which he called for the establishment of a “court watch” to record and publish the names of judges who gave “unreasonable” sentences. Mr Kwok explained that the early version was a draft which had been published by Speak Out HK in error.

I must admit to some difficulty in working out such an error might happen. If the early version was a draft, why send it to Speak Out HK at all? In the world of WordPress such a misunderstanding is avoided by having the word “publish” printed on the button which publishes your story. This button is a long way from the different button called “save draft”. I do not know what software Mr Kwok was using but some arrangement of this kind must surely be pretty universal. Never mind, digital latecomers like Mr Kwok, and me, must be allowed the occasional fat finger.

Mr Kwok then went on to explain that the tone of his earlier draft was influenced by the fact that he “really felt angry” that the judge had granted Mr Wong bail. He thought this was inappropriate as Mr Wong had been “hiding since the Mong Kok events” which led to the case. Woops. We do not know Mr Wong had been “hiding”. He had left home to stay with a friend. Staying in the address where you usually live is a right, not an obligation. People leave home for a variety of reasons: they may need a break from their voluntary work, they may wish to elude the media for a few days, they may feel in danger of a sudden irresistible urge to smuggle themselves over the border to help the mainland police with their inquiries for three months. We should not speculate. Mr Kwok’s words are clearly prejudicial.

His view of the matter is also based on a fallacy. The defendant who appears before a magistrate prior to his trial is entitled, as we all are, to be presumed innocent until he pleads or is found guilty. The request to remand the prisoner in custody accordingly is a request for an innocent man to be deprived of his freedom and should be refused unless clearly justified. Although “granting bail” sounds like a favour it should be the usual arrangement. The two circumstances justifying exceptions are where the defendant can plausibly be shown to be likely to flee, or to interfere with witnesses. A remand in custody is not supposed to be a punishment, or an expression of society’s disapproval of the alleged offence, or a vindication of the efforts of the forces of law and order. The magistrate in Mr Wong’s case was clearly entitled to the view which he took of the matter. As a retired senior security official Mr Kwok’s emotions are understandable. But surely someone with his background should know the rules?

He also really has a bee in his bonnet about this court watch thing. For in the latest SCMPost, there he is on the op-ed page, under the headline “Hong Kong should welcome trend of citizen-led court watchdogs”. This is a headline, so not Mr Kwok’s responsibility, but it summarises his effort quite well. Court watches are “very common” around the world, says Mr Kwok. Around the world, it turns out, means the US, with one example from Canada and one from Poland. The merits of court watches, he says, are that they enshrine the principles that “all judges, as public officials, [are] subject to public accountability”, and “it should also uphold freedom of expression”.

Mr Kwok points out, quite rightly, that we are all entitled to discuss the performance of judges. He then introduces the case of New York Times Co vs Sullivan, which is hardly relevant. “Although this US case law does not apply in Hong Kong,” says Mr Kwok, “it does set an international standard…” Which is nonsense. No other jurisdiction in the world is as expansive in its definition of freedom of expression as the US. But even the US does not now meet the standard of the Sullivan case, which was decided at the height if the civil rights movement and was so expansive that the Supreme Court has been making exceptions to it ever since.

This is not really the issue anyway. Nobody is suggesting that criticism of judges should be banned. Many observers will suspect, though, that the destination towards which Mr Kwok is inviting us to travel is a system of blue-ribbon vigilantes monitoring politically-tainted court cases and hurling public abuse at judges who do not share their politicised view of the matter. The overseas examples are rather different from this. Most of them are in the US, where the idea of judges being answerable to the public is widespread and indeed many judges are actually elected. This leads, perhaps, to rather high standards of judicial eccentricity and some monitoring may be justified. It must also be noted that most court watch organisations are interested in family law or domestic violence cases, and are motivated by the fact that this sort of case is often subject to a variety of reporting restrictions which commonly result in them not being reported at all. Unless some citizen volunteers take up the job, nobody is watching.

This is hardly the case in Hong Kong, where interesting court cases are still routinely reported. What is not routine in Hong Kong is the idea of public officials being subject to public accountability. On the contrary it is the routine experience in Hong Kong that public officials are not accountable to the public at all. Indeed in spite of the so-called “accountability system” it appears that they are not accountable to anyone, or at least not to anyone in Hong Kong. Mr Kwok seems to be perfectly happy with this arrangement. I wonder why he wants to make an exception of judges…

Every year I take a group of students on a tour through the parts of the Hong Kong legal machinery which concern the media. This week, as luck would have it, we have reached the matter of contempt of court. The purpose of this part of the law is to ensure that an accused person has a fair trial. The method used to obtain this objective is a prohibition on the media publishing material which suggests that any person who has been caught up in the legal mincing machine is guilty – or for that matter innocent. This is a question to be decided by the courts without any help from the media.

The law on contempt is only one of the provisions designed to do this. I have complained before that many of the others have suffered from gross neglect lately. The Department of Justice does not monitor newspapers, as it used to do when it was called the Legal Department. Consequently infringements are not noticed or punished. Media outlets which restrain themselves as the law requires find that they look stupid. Lessons are learned.

As a result standards decline. Consider the case of Mr Ray Wong Toy-yeung, who was arrested on Sunday and charged with rioting. Any reporting of this matter is governed by the law on what is called “strict liability contempt”, which means that the newspaper is liable whether it intended the offence or not. The law states that from the time when legal proceedings are “imminent” we must not publish anything which produces a “real risk of substantial prejudice” to the proceedings.

Now let us see how this rule is observed in the SCMPost these days. On Tuesday Mr Alex Lo decided to write about the Hong Kong independence movement. Nothing wrong with that. In fact on this topic I suspect Mr Lo and I are in entire agreement. But Mr Lo’s forays into discussion of public issues are often spiced with a little personal venom. The HKU Staff Association, for example, were characterised in his column on the university’s autonomy and related matters as junior lecturers motivated by envy of their elders and betters. The group of academics who urged an independent inquiry into the fishball riots were not just misguided. They were mostly “assistant professors or associate professors without PhDs.” So it does not come as a complete surprise that Mr Lo’s “take” on seeking independence included a good deal of personal denigration of Mr Wong, who on the previous page could be seen flanked by two policemen and wearing a bag over his head.

Mr Wong, said Mr Lo, was “mesmerised by the sound of his own voice.” After a list of items found in the flat where Mr Wong was arrested we conclude that his “inclinations towards violence and sex are rather pronounced”. And “Those who have tried to justify and explain away the delinquent nature of this movement have helped create this monster.” I suppose it will be argued on behalf of Mr Lo that the “monster” is the movement, not the man. But as his piece starts with the announcement that Mr Wong is a “key figure” in the group I am not sure that this is much help.

The following day there is more interesting reading for legally inclined readers. On the front page we have Mr Wong’s first appearance in court. This comes in the category of “committal proceedings” and reporting is restricted to a list of items which the Post’s reporters scrupulously observe. There is nothing, for instance, about the circumstances of his arrest or possibly incriminating items found at the place where it took place. For these, however, readers only have to turn the page to Michael Chugani’s column, where “I point out that Ray Wong Toi-yeung, convenor of localist group Hong Kong Indigenous, was in a flat with bomb-making chemicals, weapons, drugs and over half a million dollars in cash when police arrested him in connection with the riots.”

This is precisely the sort of writing which the law is supposed to prevent. Actually, if Mr Wong had been arrested in my house the police could, had they wished, have found bomb-making chemicals, weapons and drugs. I do not keep that much cash around the place. Many household chemicals can be used to make bombs. I have two swords, one used for Scottish dancing and one souvenir of a visit to the Shaolin Temple. And at my age, taking pills is a way of life. But in any case the house is mine, not Mr Wong’s. What Mr Chugani is pointing out is that he believes Mr Chow to be guilty, precisely the matter which is supposed to be left up to judges.

It may be, I suppose, that even as I write these words the Department of Justice is swinging into action to protect Mr Wong from the stream of rampantly prejudicial coverage which is being squirted in his direction. If so I apologize. But years of inaction have lowered expectations. Can Mr Wong be assured of a fair trial, unsullied by prior publicity which assumes his guilt? Readers may feel that Mr Wong deserves little sympathy. But if he is not protected by the presumption of innocence, then neither are the rest of us. Anything to say, Rimsky?

Throwing bricks at people is dangerous, illegal and wrong. This is a proper first reaction to the Fishball Riot. The scenes on television were disturbing and distressing. Strong feelings are understandable.
In due course, however, we need to move on from strong feelings to rational consideration of why these terrible things happen. A lot of people seem to be in no hurry to get on to this. There has been much creative use of language to describe the rioters: animals, louts, savages, barbarians, “lumpenproletariat” in an up-market variation supplied to readers of the Business Post, “separatists” for fellow-travellers, and in what the SCM Post hilariously described as a “searing indictment”, terrorists — according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
Looking for causes is not the same thing as exonerating the rioters. But if we want to avoid recurrence of such things in future we need to do better than the George W Bush level of analysis, which stops with a sigh of satisfaction at something along the lines of “they hate us because we’re good and they do it because they are evil.” We also need to do better than planning to ratchet up the level of force: more pepper spray, more tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, bean bags, live ammunition … I do not want to put ideas into people’s heads but there are more extreme things rioters can do than throwing bricks, and more violent responses will trigger mutual escalation.
We may well suspect – though as a number of cases are now going through the courts it would be a nice concession to the rule of law if we refrained from saying so too often – that some people in Hong Kong would like a riot, or at least are happy to behave in a way which risks starting one. That may be a necessary condition for having a riot, but it cannot be a sufficient one. Most of the time Mong Kok is as tranquil as the rest of Hong Kong. If your previously tranquil family pet bites someone you will want to know why, not because you wish to exonerate it or suggest that biting people is OK, but because you want to avoid it happening again and understanding must precede prevention.
Any large event involving lots of people must have multiple causes. Identifying the spark is important, but we also need to know why the situation was explosive. I here explore, in no particular order, features of the situation which helped to make it inflammable.
Mong Kok is an interesting and colourful part of Hong Kong with more of a distinctive identity than many others. It’s young people, in particular, are referred to as “MK” boys and girls. No doubt much of the difference is illusory. Mong Kok also has another oddity: it has no district board. There used to be a Mong Kok District Board. The government did not like the people who were elected to it. So the Mong Kok DB was merged with two others to form a constitutional monstrosity called Yau Tsim Mong. I do not suggest that the population of Mong Kok has been seething with suppressed fury over this ever since. But spending of public money tends to follow boundaries. We may be skeptical about the effects of “community-building” efforts in grubby suburbs like Wong Tai Sin or Sham Shui Po, but at least they are attempted. In Mong Kok they are not.
The Food and Environmental Hygiene Department is a recurring problem. Public hygiene used to be a matter for the Urban and Regional Councils so the department was supplied with a reasonably coherent account of what the public wanted and expected from it. Although – or rather because – they were elected democratically both the councils were abolished soon after the handover. Departments were then left to get their feedback from the District Councils, which are of course numerous, cover very different areas, and in any case these days spend most of their time funneling public money to Left-wing organisations. This means the FEHD is left without much guidance. The Leisure and Cultural Services lot have a similar problem, but people don’t in general feel strongly about culture. They do feel strongly about the FEHD because one of the roles which it has selected for itself is to suppress any attempt to sell or serve food in the street. As a result the department’s minions are widely hated, even by respectable members of the middle classes. A lot of people who are not interested in politics in general or localism in particular would have no hesitation in joining a defence of fishball hawkers against the FEHD.
The New Year “amnesty”. A variety of laws have traditionally been, in effect, suspended over the Chinese New Year period. The most obvious example is parking. People are not ticketed if they park in normally illegal places outside estates while doing their regulation visits. It’s a sensible concession.
The decision to disturb an arrangement of this kind should not be taken lightly. It may be resented. In the 80s there were annual stories at this time of the year of police raids on illegal seasonal gambling events in New Territories villages. The villagers often responded violently and sometimes the raiding party had to be rescued by the Riot Squad. In the 90s there was much bitterness when traffic wardens decided that the usual amnesty did not apply to roads in the vicinity of the Che Kung Temple, which is much visited at New Year. This presented a particular problem for drivers because the temple’s own large car park was commandeered by the police for their own exclusive use. Later there was controversy when the then police chief in Fanling announced that the traditional blind eye to seasonal fireworks would no longer be turned on his patch.
No doubt some changes in these matters are necessary and desirable, but apparently street fishballs were offered this year without problems in other districts. Some sleeping dogs are better undisturbed.
Occupy in Mong Kok. Characterising the Fishball Riot as Occupy 2.0 was a piece of mischievous deception. But it draws attention to an important piece of history. Mong Kok was never part of the plans for Occupy Central. No preparations were made and nobody was trained. The occupation of Mong Kok was a spontaneous reaction to the Teargas Festival. It was not particularly based on non-violence as a matter of principle, and the opposition to it was not non-violent either. In Mong Kok occupiers were often abused and beaten by civilian vigilantes who, although they looked like the sort of people the government did not want on the District Board, seemed to be on surprisingly good terms with the police. When the occupiers of Central politely folded up their tents and returned to their studies, the occupiers of Mong Kok instead switched tactics. There were regular “shopping” events in which protesters temporarily occupied some spaces. Counter-demonstrators appeared and there were regular scuffles. Some of the people who had been politicized by their experience in Mong Kok went on to other protests.
What happens at demonstrations. I do not think anyone who follows this topic objectively would dispute that the police approach to protests became a good deal more brusque during the period when the management’s response to any incident, no matter how untoward, was that “our boys can do no wrong”. The use of chemicals became less nuanced and more common, followed by the incidence of other forms of violence. Someone complained last week that the people who turned up in Mong Kok were “prepared to riot” because they had masks, goggles, helmets and body armour. This is a totally unwarranted inference. People who go to protests these days expect that they will sooner or later, however pacific their intentions, be pepper-sprayed or beaten or both. They dress accordingly.
I fear that far more people are being radicalized by experiences of this kind than by localist or other controversial propaganda. Their personal experience of the law enforcement machinery is not pretty, and the aftermath is not pretty either. No doubt most public order offences are dealt with by the courts in an entirely impartial and non-political way. But it is the outlying cases, the extreme ones, which people remember. The outlying cases comprise, say, the lady who was jailed (jailed!) for assaulting a cop with her bosom, and the Superintendent whose flailing at passers-by with his official tickling stick produced no criminal proceedings at all. It is perhaps a pity, under the circumstances, that a spokesman for the policemen’s union publicly advanced the view last week that for police to throw bricks at rioters was a legitimate form of self-defence.
The legitimacy of the regime. In the immediate aftermath of the handover in 1997 it appeared that the Hong Kong Government, though it was not chosen by Hong Kong people, was nevertheless at least a genuine government, not a mere conduit for instructions from elsewhere. This illusion (or if you prefer this reality) has become increasingly hard to sustain over the years.
In concentration camps they economise on guard manpower by having people who are known in German as kapos. They are prisoners, but in return for extra food and other benefits they perform all the internal management of the camp. All the real guards have to do is police the boundary and count the inmates occasionally. If you are an inmate your kapo is a person of enormous consequence. He can make your life easy or intolerable. The real guards will not intervene if he kills you. At the same time he is not a person you respect. He has made a corrupt and selfish bargain with the authorities, who concede no important powers in return. He cannot change the rules, the policies or the circumstances. He is himself, in the end, still a prisoner.
I am afraid that repeated demonstrations of the impotence of our leaders, culminating in the kidnapping of the booksellers and the spineless response to it, have eroded the public view of the people in power in a way which they do not yet realize. We see the suits, the thrones, the chauffeur-driven cars and the bauhinias in various colours. We hear the speeches, the promises, the declarations of important principles and essential values. We should be seeing pillars of the community. But in the end we behold a bunch of kapos.
Of course in a Mong Kok context this is rather cosmopolitan stuff. The moment when Lufsig finally lost it was probably when he refused to support the Hong Kong football team if it was playing China.
Events on the night. An “incident” which lasts for 10 hours cannot just be regarded as the inevitable consequence of one event or one person. It is a dialogue or a contest between the forces of disorder and the forces of order. Rioters are responsible for riots. But policemen are responsible for suppressing riots and if the riot lasts well into the next morning we are entitled to wonder if some better move might have concluded the matter earlier.
This is a tricky area. We do not know exactly what happened and we probably are not going to be told either. The inquiry, if any, will be internal. It is dangerous to jump to any conclusions from watching video clips, though that doesn’t seem to have stopped a good many people. The clips come in three categories.
The ones which I presume are earliest show a small group of traffic cops, clearly neither dressed nor trained for riot control, surrounded by a hostile crowd. The effect is rather like those colonial military catastrophes in which a British battalion finds itself suddenly surrounded by a horde of angry locals. The traditional remedy is to form a square, but you can’t really do that if there are only a few of you. The forces of order conduct a dignified retreat until one of them appears to trip over a piece of debris and fall. He then becomes the main target. Ambrose Lee thought this was particularly deplorable but it is what usually happens. Winston Churchill noticed the same thing at the Battle of Omdurman. One of the traffic people then fires two shots into the air. Well what goes up must come down, but in the circumstances this seemed a reasonable thing to do. It was more disturbing to see the same gentleman pointing his gun at the crowd afterwards. One of the few items of gun lore I managed to extract from my father (ex-SAS but shy about it) is that you should not point a firearm at anyone unless you want to kill them. I am a bit surprised that this rather basic point is apparently not mentioned in the police manual on the subject. Still in a hairy moment we all get excited. The only thing you have to ask about this part of the proceedings is why a small group of traffic policemen were there in the first place. Given the history of public order in Mong Kok this would hardly be a sensible response to a report of brawls over fishball stalls.
The second set of videos has a larger body of policeman retreating under a hail of missiles. This seems an unfortunate compromise, because it means the people throwing missiles are constantly advancing onto territory strewn with the stuff they have already thrown once, which they can now throw again. No doubt there are reasons, doctrinal or practical, why neither a static defence nor a rapid retreat was acceptable.
Later, I presume, we get the full gear riot squad in action. Apparently this came rather late in the proceedings. According to one report when they were finally called in there was a long delay while they went to Fanling to collect their kit. I suspect someone will eventually conclude, with impeccable hindsight, that there was a failure somewhere to comprehend the seriousness of what was going on. Perhaps in the longer run someone may also conclude that the idea of having crowd control based in Fanling is obsolete. Given the technology available to the man in the street these days it means the crowd can gather a lot quicker than the controllers.

And so… What can we conclude from all this? On the night, we were unlucky. Some small differences in the geography or the timing and the evening might have passed peacefully. On the other hand those people who claim to be completely surprised have not been paying attention. People have warned regularly of rising levels of frustration, alienation and violence in public places ever since Occupy ground to its fruitless conclusion.
Public figures and commentators who have got their horror and disapproval off their chests need to turn to some more constructive cogitation. Riots do not come out of nowhere and ordinary citizens do not turn into rioters out of some spontaneous degeneration of the conscience. Something is wrong with the relationship between government and people. Fix it.

Curious piece in Pravda the other day by Prof Sun Kwok, who is the Dean of Science at the University of Hong Kong. Much of this was about matters so specialised to university teaching that you wondered why the editors had been willing to run it. The headline provided, “Teachers shouldn’t strive to be their students’ best friends”, offered a whiff of illicit erotica which was not present in the article, which actually was a sustained attack on the teaching evaluation system whereby students are invited at the end of the course to give some formal feedback on what they thought of it.

Prof Sun’s approach to this matter illustrated two permanent features of university life: the complete indifference of academics to academic research about their own activities, and their total failure to apply to the day-to-day management of their activities the sort of intellectual rigour which one hopes they apply to their scholarly activities. Teaching evaluations by students are well-known to have some features which call for care and sophistication when they are being interpreted as a sign of teaching quality. Nobody, one hopes, is dumb enough simply to take an average score as the end of the matter. Indeed having vented his prejudices about bribery and students preferring the easy and familiar Prof Sun indicates some willingness to look at the scores and their distribution for a more complex picture. He is also, like most of us, interested in the comments which are provided along with the scores. Still it is a bit disturbing that someone in his senior position is basically disposed to dismiss his only source of student feedback as the product of corruption and idleness. Compared with other sources of information the students have one unique advantage: they have been in the classroom while the teaching was going on. The alternatives to formal feedback are informal feedback and informal feedback relayed by third parties. Or to put it shortly, gossip.

Prof Sun disputes this. He says he can tell which teachers are good and which are not. He looks at contributions to curriculum development, suggestions for teaching methods, developing demonstrations and participating in student academic activities. These are all activities outside the classroom. They do not necessarily indicate a talent for teaching. Prof Sun is dallying with a well-known psychological quirk, the illusion that people’s qualities are more consistent and congruent than they really are. There also seems to be a risk that ambitious faculty members will be more assiduous in activities which are clearly visible to their Dean than in those which are only visible to their students. He says that “peer observations” are a better way to judge teaching quality than “numerical schemes”. But there are no peer observations inside Hong Kong classrooms. University teachers never watch each other’s work. Peer observation is a euphemism for gossip, or good performance in the committee room.

I have collected a lot of teaching evaluations in my time. Some of them were very nice. I once had to tell a class that they should not put things like “we all love Tim” in the comments sections because this might be misinterpreted. I also have occasionally had comments which were so cutting that they caused me acute anxiety for months about whether I was doing the right thing. But on the whole I find people who complain about the system are those who consistently get low scores, and I do wonder if perhaps Prof Sun is reacting to criticism, or the fear of criticism, of the sort of scores people are getting in his faculty. If so, the remedy is not to abolish the scoring system but to improve the teaching. This might start with recruitment. I suppose that Hong Kong U, like most local universities, usually hires people on the basis of their record and potential in research. Clearly if you are looking mainly at other matters you will occasionally recruit poor teachers. Why should this be surprising?

Hong Kong U students have been a turbulent lot lately. Science students are usually docile but if the degree of contempt for their opinions exhibited by Prof Sun is widespread then the turbulence may also be unsurprising.

The French government which seized power in 1848 became notorious for paying people to dig holes, and paying other people to fill them in. This was considered a controversial way of reducing unemployment even then, and the government concerned was soon overthrown by Napoleon III. However its spirit lives on in Frederick Ma Si-hang, the chairman of the MTR Corporation. Mr Ma has been campaigning for the Legislative Council to fund the cost over-runs of the MTR’s baby, the Express Rail Link. You might have thought that Mr Ma would have devoted some attention to the alleged merits of the project: its important role as a link, a tourist attraction, an architectural ornament, or whatever. But, at least according to the items in last week’s newspapers, Mr Ma did not take this course. Instead he warned that up to 7,000 people in the construction industry would lose their jobs if the project was aborted.

This struck me as a rather odd use of language. It is a commonplace in the construction industry that workers are taken on for a project, with no guarantee of continued employment after the work on the project stops. Whether the project is finished or cancelled does not make any difference; when work stops you’re on the street. So these 7,000 people for whose prosperity Mr Ma expresses such concern are the people who would have been sacked without apology or compunction last year if the project had finished on time. They are still working because it is running late. It is not necessarily their fault that it is running late, but the fact that they are still working on it is in a sense an unexpected bonus. The question is whether they get an extra two or so years added to the expected contract period or only one. This is no doubt a matter of considerable importance to the people concerned but it hardly seems to merit the “jobs at stake” headlines which Mr Ma was angling for.

Mr Ma’s other original contribution to the argument was the suggestion that if the project were cancelled then international contractors might “give Hong Kong a bad name.” I can believe that. International contractors would no doubt like to believe that Hong Kong people are a bunch of gullible suckers who will continue to pour money into a hole in the ground however late or over budget the hole may be. Does having a bad name means having a reputation for axing projects which are missing the date and price promised? Bring it on.

Also weighing in on the construction industry’s employment needs last week was the president of the Hong Kong Construction Subcontractors Alliance, Lawrence Ng San-wa. Mr Ng picked up a broader brush, complaining that the Legco log-jam was threatening the approval of a large number of government projects. If these were cancelled the Construction Industry Alliance had estimated that 20 per cent of the 400,000 people who work in the sector could be thrown out of work. Picking up this point Mr Ng asserted that “taking into account the family members of those affected employees, the affected people would be as much as 1.4 million”. This casts an interesting light on family sizes in the construction sector. One fifth, or 20 per cent, of 400,000 people is 80,000. If we divide Mr Ng’s 1.4 million affected family members by 80,000 we come to an average size per worker of 17.5. This is not terribly convincing. Even if we assume that every construction worker is married and supports both his and his wife’s parents we are still asked to believe that the average number of kids in construction families is 11.5, compared with 1.5 for the population generally. Are people in the construction industry breeding like rabbits? Or does Mr Ng need a new calculator?

Together with the talk we also had some figures. The upshot of these is that we can still save something over $10 billion by cancelling the rail link. And that disregards the possibility that the vacant hole in West Kowloon can be turned into something that makes better economic sense than a loss-making railway line. So the question before Legco is quite simple. Do we want to blow another 10 billion on a political gesture masquerading as an infrastructure or can we think of something else to do with the money? I fear we all know what the eventual answer will be.

Meantime Messrs Ma and Ng need to get their heads round the point that the purpose of government infrastructure projects is not to provide employment to workers in the construction industry. If the nicest thing you can think of about a project is that large numbers of people are employed building it, many of us will suspect that its other merits are imaginary.

While you were paying attention to the Policy Speech and other trivia, the government slipped an interesting announcement past the public nose. Or at least I think it did. The Post managed a confusing paragraph which started: “The government has proposed increasing the electoral expenses limit for the 2017 Chief Executive election from HK$13 million from the previous HK$16.3 million because of rising costs.” I suppose that what the paper intended to say was that the proposal was to lift the limit from $13 million to $16,3 million. Do they still have sub-editors? The second half of the paragraph recorded Emily Lau’s opposition to the move. And that was it.

Now, let us look at the election. There are and must only be (see Basic Law) 1,200 electors. This suggests that the candidate, assuming he has $16 million to waste, can donate, or treat, each voter with $13,583. This is surely grotesquely excessive. And actually the situation is worse than that. Only 601 votes are needed to win, so a candidate who is careful to identify voters who are persuadable and disregard the others can increase his spending per vote to $27,000. An interesting pastime offers itself here: how many CE electors can you think of who would vote for Pol Pot if they would be paid $27,000 for doing so.

I do not suppose there is any danger of the election being corrupted. We all remember that in the closing stages of the last campaign some electors complained that they had not been told who to vote for. This deficiency was swiftly remedied and that was how we got Lufsig. The fact is that a large group of electors — whether they are actually a majority is immaterial — will vote according to instructions from the Liaison Office. Without support from this quarter no candidate stands a chance. With it, no candidate can lose.

So why does the government want to encourage, or at least allow, candidates to spend pots of money on campaigning? Clearly, this is an effort to deceive the public as to what is going on. There will be meetings, there will be manifestos, there will be speeches, there will be leaflets. Candidates will tour the territory explaining to people who have no vote what they will do if elected. Pollsters will assess the public’s view of the candidates. Pundits and bloggers will comment on their rival attractions. And all this is a smokescreen behind which the Liaison Office will make its choice, as it has always done since the job was taken from the Queen of England. If you want to be elected you have to put up a show, to perpetrate the delusion that this is a real election in which the public view of the candidates has a role. It doesn’t.

You may say, I suppose, that if rich idiots want to spend pots of money on a political pantomime that is their business. The government is merely allowing nature to take its course. But I think raising the limit sends an important message: this is a job for which only millionaires or the friends of millionaires can apply. The advantage of having a small electorate should be precisely that it is easy for any candidate to address the voters. He only has to communicate with 1,200 people. If rival candidates are going to be allowed to shower the electorate with money, though, he is going to be at a considerable disadvantage. Our Marxist masters are curiously fond of rich people.