tim's experiment

Oh, the irony! On one page of this morning’s newspapers, another irritating lecture from a Beijing bigwig about the importance of the rule of law, and the need for Hong Kong people diligently to observe the restrictions designed to ensure that the arrival of universal suffrage does not disturb our imperial rulers. And on another page, the law flouted, and flouted by the current example of the sort of leader Beijing officials thing we ought to choose.

Let us be more specific. The Beijing bore is vice president Li Yuanchao, of whom we can confidently assert that he would not recognise the rule of law if he found it floating in his bath. This was a “don’t do as I do; do as I say” moment. Business as usual. Meanwhile in Hong Kong our lovely Lufsig was appearing at the opening of a publishers’ conference. Mr C.Y. Leung paid fulsome tributes to the importance of free media, a piece of infrastructure which he believes we still possess. He then ill-advisedly moved on to consider the attack on former Ming Pao editor Kevin Lau. Nothing to worry about there because, as the Standard quoted, “the assailants and others were quickly apprehended on the mainland and turned over to the Hong Kong police.” The version of Mr Leung’s words in the Post is slightly different but just as illegal.

Illegal? Yes indeed. Every beginning reporter learns, and over the years many of them have heard it from me, that once someone has been arrested judicial proceedings have begun, and it is a serious offence to imply in speech or writing that the persons arrested are guilty … or for that matter innocent. I do not know whether the two persons arrested on the mainland are the assailants or not but in either case they are entitled to be treated as innocent until proven guilty. It is scandalous that the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong SAR should express an opinion on this important point while the trial or trials are still pending. Normally one would expect to see the newspapers prosecuted for reporting it, but I fancy under the circumstances everyone is going to pretend it never happened, or pretend that there is nothing wrong because we know the pair are guilty anyway, or pretend that this is an irrelevant little legal point and it is not in the public interest to pursue the matter.

As we move on towards Occupy Central, though, this is going to bring a little problem. Can a Chief Executive lecture us all on the importance of the rule of law while carelessly breaking it on other occasions? This is not just a matter of an illegal vine trellis or two, after all. The offence this time is called contempt of court and people are occasionally jailed for it. I suspect if the Secretary for Justice had said what Mr Leung said then half the legal profession would be baying for his resignation. But as it is Mr Leung himself who has dropped the legal brick I wonder whether anyone will bother. It is already clear that he doesn’t care what we think.

Well I hope none of you were surprised to hear that the great new White Elephant High Speed Railway to Shenzhen is running two years late already. Large projects of this kind often succumb to what is called the Planning Fallacy: over-optimistic assessments of the prospects for early and below-budget completion. Academic controversy continues over whether this is due to an innate bias in the human brain towards optimistic projections of the future, or it should more properly be blamed on unscrupulous contractors who make unrealistic promises, knowing that once the project has started it is unlikely to be cancelled however bad the news gets.

I must congratulate the MTR on contributing to the great tradition of offering limp excuses for rail delays, pioneered by the UK’s former Southern Region, which was often paralyzed by autumnal avalanches of fallen leaves. The MTR’s problem, it seems, is that it rained. What a shock that must have been. Also the tunnelers ran into some rocks under Lai Chi Kok. You can imagine the two great men in their Baker Street flat musing over this item. “See, Holmes, according to the newssheets people who were digging a hole under Lai Chi Kok found rocks there.” The great man took his pipe from his mouth. His lip curled. “Indeed, Watson, and what were they expecting to find, marshmallows?”

The great international example of this sort of catastrophe is the Sydney Opera House. Work on this started in 1958, at which time the budget was A$7million. When the building opened in 1973 it had cost A$102million. A more recent example is the building which houses the Scottish Parliament. Work started in 1997, with the projected cost at GBP40 million. When it was completed in 2004 the estimated final cost was GBP431million.  Rail projects are the specific hobby of a Danish prof called Bent Flybjerg. He been trying to foster more pessimistic planning by beating people over the head with the past statistics, like these: between 1969 and 1998 the average over-estimate of passenger numbers for major new rail projects was 105 per cent. The average (not the maximum, the average) cost over-run was 45 per cent. Interestingly the early casualties did not produce any more caution in the later estimates. the error rate remained the same. This suggests that it is probably the same now.

More recent international examples are equally ominous. Barcelona’s ninth underground line was supposed to cost 1.9 billion Euros. It came in at 8.7 million Euros. The modernisation programme for the UK’s West Coast line was originally supposed to cost between 2 and 3 billion GBP. Revised estimates effortlessly zoomed to 14.5 billion GBP, at which point the track company became insolvent. A new rescue strategy was brought in in 2003 which would, it was hoped,. keep costs down to GBP 8.3 million. These hopes have not been entirely realised; work is still in progress and the final bill is expected to surpass GBP 9 million.  In this company the Edinburgh tram system, which should be opening next month, looks a bargain. When work started in 2006 the budget was GBP 498 million. Final bill with financing costs is expected to be only GBP 1 billion. But this is deceptive. Nearly half of the originally planned network was cancelled to save money.

What can we hope for, then, from the MTR’s Great White Elephant? Well there was no competitive bidding for the contract (our two railway companies having been merged with each other) so the original number offered – $80 billion – can be considered an honest guess. Unfortunately this was considered politically unacceptable so it was massaged down to $68 billion. This is now the figure used in hand-outs and press reports, although the project was not trimmed in any way; all that happened was that some parts which could plausibly be inserted elsewhere in the public works budget – like roads – were excluded from the headline figure on the grounds that they “would have to be built anyway…”  The MTR has now produced a $4billion contingency fund, which is going to cover the latest glitches. So this is now presumably a $72 billion project. It is difficult to believe protestations that the two-year delay now expected will have no further impact on costs.

I infer two things. Firstly about suggestions from Shenzhen that the Hong Kong Government should accept some financial responsibility for disappointing ridership on the already existing line between Shenzhen and Guangzhou: these should be resisted strenuously. Two years may not be the end of it. Secondly there is the position of the responsible minister, who despite  being on the MTR professed himself totally surprised by last week’s news. If I were you, mate, I would resign now. It’s all downhill from here.

It is nice to see that somebody still has a kind word to say for the old colonial government of Hong Kong, which comes in for a lot of gratuitous stick these days. Still I must say that Regina Ip’s piece in the Sunday Post was laying it on a bit thick. I do not doubt that Ms Ip in her career encountered some expatriate civil servants who were humane and intelligent men, genuinely dedicated to doing the best possible job for the people of Hong Kong. There were such people. I met some of them and Ms Ip must have encountered a lot more civil servants than I did.  But are we then to go on and say that “Hong Kong … afforded those elite administrators a chance to build an economic miracle and a successful society by blending the finest of British and Chinese administrative traditions, unencumbered by the divisive, debilitating effects of parliamentary politics”? Let us leave aside the inconvenient fact that most of the economic miracles and successful societies in the world have managed to combine those happy attributes with parliamentary politics. Was the colonial government really the apex of British and Chinese administrative tradition?

This is not how it seemed at the time. No doubt that line about blending the best of the two traditions was a good morale-booster for local recruits, who could hardly be told that they were contributing to the last dying flicker of the glory that was the British Empire. But even Ms Ip’s mentors would, I suspect, be surprised to see this line taken so seriously. After all anyone who has a background in colonial history will recognise in the old Hong Kong system the standard colonial arrangement, in which conservative traditional leaders are recruited to support alien rule by the promise that the wealth and privileges to which they are accustomed will be preserved. No doubt many people thought that Hong Kong was better run than the obvious alternative. But colonial administrators were not all disinterested Platonic philosopher kings. Many of them were a by-word for greed, racism, snobbery, homophobia and above all corruption.

Then we have an interesting passage about the effect of electoral politics on those who practise it. “No geographical constituency legislator could have got elected without honing their (sic) skills in sloganeering, staging public protests, mobilising the masses, attacking their (sic again) opponents and generally all the chicanery of political campaigning,” says Ms Ip. But just a moment, one of the directly elected members for the Hong Kong Island constituency is one Ip Lau Suk-yee, GBS JP, alias Regina herself. So is this a confession that Ms Ip has mastered all the chicanery? Or is she just talking about other people?

I fear Ms Ip is not the only colonial bequest who finds it difficult to understand how a government can manage if it is under public pressure to provide education, health, pensions and such like. Well this is how it works in most of the world: to govern is to choose, and the choices are made by the people who will suffer the consequences, ill or otherwise. Ms Ip has a notoriously tin ear for public sentiment. So does the government of which she is a part. That is its problem. Not the fact that some legislators entertain the sacrilegious notion that the people should get what they want.

Readers may have been wondering, as I have, for many months how the election by universal suffrage of the next Chief Executive was going to be fixed. That it was going to be fixed was never in doubt. We are dealing with democracy with Chinese characteristics here. Elections are only allowed if they can be fixed.

The broad outlines of how this will be done are now clear. The Nomination Committee will be pretty much the same shower who were the electors last time round. Any candidate who wishes to run will need more than half of the votes of the committee. Of course this would leave us with a maximum of one candidate, and we can’t have that. So each committee member will be given three votes, thereby ensuring that there will be three candidates. This will produce three trusted candidates, every one of whom will no doubt be a notorious creep owning at least two illegally-adornment-infested houses in the best parts of town. And we will be graciously allowed to choose between any of them who survives the election period without coming up with some no-no like a noisy mistress or an illegal basement.

This is a preposterous arrangement. Even if the nominating committee were genuine  it would be a recipe for three identical candidates offering a minimum of genuine choice. The nominating committee is in effect a vetting committee. And we can all guess what sorts of candidates will be vetted out. No doubt we will be told that candidates who wear the label of a major political party or have massive visible public support can still be nominated. But they can also still be not nominated, and that is what will happen to any of them who threatens to divert the election from its intended course, which will probably be the re-election of C.Y. Leung.

Any derogation or dilution of this catastrophic arrangement will be presented as a major concession by the comrades to the people of Hong Kong, the implication of this being that we should gratefully shut up and accept the result as a legitimate representative of us all, even if the winner turns out to be Lufsig again.

Next year: how to fiddle Legco.

Sorry if this comes as a disappointment, but 69K is not an interesting new sexual technique. It is the number of our local minibus. The prosaic label does not do justice to the variety and interest of the route. Let us start in the Shatin KCR (if you’ll pardon the expression) station. Emerge at the bus station end. Note that you are still on the first floor. Unfortunately this level of the bus station is reserved for real buses. To get a minibus you have to turn left and go down a long ramp. This brings you to ground level, where you will find a row of minibus stops, and a taxi rank on the far end of it. Why the taxi rank is so far away from the station I do not know, but as a result this station cannot be recommended for people with mobility problems.

The 69K stop is the first one you come to. This is handy. I presume it is not because we have any particular priority – it just happened to be the first route to be set up. Happily the minibus stops are under the fly-over ramp which leads to the aristocratic bus station upstairs, so the queue is usually dry or shady, as you wish. But usually I find a minibus waiting with free seats. This is a prosperous route and runs are frequent, so one does not wait long.  As the driver pulls out observant passengers will note Pai Tau Village on the left. This is one of the primeval parts of Shatin though you would not think so to look at the houses now, because most of them have been turned into shops. On the right we pass the headquarters of the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, which looks rather pompous for this purpose. This is because it used to be the headquarters of the Regional Council (note to younger readers: before 1997 Hong Kong had two councils, Urban and Regional, which were entirely elected. After the hand-over they were abolished. I wonder why.) Meanwhile the shopping mall and office block on your left is mainly notable as the local lair of Ikea. Behind it are the local Government Offices, carefully sited half a mile from the nearest public transport.

We now zoom up a hill towards a bridge which threatens to take us into the centre of Shatin proper, but before we get to the bridge over the railway line we take the ramp off to the left. This leads to a highway named with Hong Kong’s usual flair in these matters “New Territories Ring Road”. Despite its apparently exalted status and purpose this highway only offers two lanes in each direction. It frequently clogs up. Minibuses making the return journey can avoid it by taking to the back streets but the northbound side is usually usable. We roar along here at whatever speed our minibus can manage, but not for long. We take the first slip road and this leads us into Fotan.

Fotan used to be an entirely industrial enclave. The name has something to do with charcoal burning. All the hills round the industrial core (which like the rest of Hong Kong has little real industry left) are now covered in housing estates of one kind or another. Readers who know their MTR will perhaps be wondering at this point why the minibus goes to Shatin when there is a perfectly good train station in Fotan. This would be to ignore a basic fact of Hong Kong transport planning, which is that nothing must be allowed to impede the Jockey Club in its vital work of separating the gullible from their money. So whenever there is racing at the Shatin racecourse (which is not in Shatin) the trains no longer stop at Fotan – they stop at a special station next to the horse casino instead. No doubt when this move was being planned the railway people did not realise that Fotan would not for ever be a purely industrial spot, deserted at weekends. But as a result of their efforts a great deal of diesel fuel is wasted taking people to Shatin to get a train they could easily board in Fotan. So it goes.

As you come into Fotan a huge six-lane highway stretches ahead of you. This goes nowhere and the minibus ignores it, turning left at the first opportunity into a little backwater called Shan Mei Street. Here we are in what passes for downtown Fotan. There is a shopping mall (MacDonalds, KFC and Starbucks are represented) a Post Office, a bus station and two recreation grounds.  The ground floors of the industrial buildings on the left are gradually being converted into shops. The interesting thing about Shan Mei Street is that it illustrates the latest European ideas about road safety, which go thus: you make a road safer not by separating the traffic from the pedestrians, but by providing copious visual clues which tell drivers to slow down. In Shan Mei Street this all happened by accident. The planners clearly wished to do their usual trick and line the road with fences. But they couldn’t. There are too many entrances, exits, bus stops, garages, and pedestrian crossing requirements. So the driver turning into the street (fortunately this requires a sharp turn at each end) is immediately presented with a spectacle of traffic islands, parked cars, buses picking people up and taxis dropping them, and usually the odd hand cart or dreamy pedestrian with mobile phone glued to ear as well. So drivers, unless terminally stupid, slow down and the street is safe. It is, however, extremely busy. Local drivers spurn the six-lane alternative because it has three sets of traffic lights in it.

In Shan Mei Street we come to our first minibus stop. Usually nobody gets off at this point. If you just want to get to the middle of Fotan from Shatin there are easier and cheaper ways, especially if you are already on a train. At the end of the street the minibus turns left into Sui Wo Road, on which it will stay for the rest of the trip. Just up this road is Sui Wo Estate, and here we have the first serious stop, at which quite a lot of people get off. Sui Wo Estate was the first Home Ownership estate in the New Territories. It is spread up the hillside with a lift and footbridge connecting the two halves, so the minibus actually stops twice. A further stop, just round the corner, caters for two private estates, Shatin 33 and Scenery Gardens.

And now the 69K magically transforms itself. Up to now it has been the standard Hong Kong public transport scene: people get on, sit down, and stare at their mobile phones. People will sometimes call out if they want the next stop, but at the early busy stops the driver will usually stop anyway. As we go up the hill, though, the minibus becomes more like the rural branch line depicted in the Ealing comedy the Titfield Thunderbolt (thoroughly recommended – find it here- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8ReXJTD60c).

Suddenly the ride is a social occasion. People getting on greet the driver. People getting off thank him for stopping. Children are encouraged to address him as “uncle”. Passengers talk to each other. The population is now thin but regular and a lot of people know each other at least by sight. The exuberant lady who sweeps our road rides up and down her patch. Many of the riders are now domestic helpers, for the estates up here are generally rather upmarket and employers have cars.   A break from isolation in a house full of foreigners goes down well.

Sui Wo Road at this stage is rather pleasant. Trees and bushes abound and there are occasional glimpses of the Shing Mun River Valley. We pass a special school run by Caritas, which has its own bus fleet and consequently rarely calls for a stop. We pass Shatin College and its associated Primary School on one side, and the Baptist University Staff Quarters on the other. I recall that when this was first built the staff insisted that they wanted a simple number and road designation on the grounds that it was embarrassing enough for non-Baptists (by then in a large majority) to have the religion in the name of the university and they did not want to live with it as well. The university agreed to this but it seems the Post Office did not because the name has stuck. Past the staff quarters  is the most up-market part of the road, a little street called Mei Wo Circuit, which has not only exclusive estates but many houses individually built to architect designs. The place is obviously a big attraction to burglars because it is home to a lot of large and noisy dogs.

A long uphill straight brings us to a small barricaded turn-off. Walkers who pass the barrier can reach the MacLehose trail, Tsuen Wan and other distant attractions. Exhausted hikers can get the minibus down the hill from here, although there is no official stop. The road levels out, passes Greenwood Terrace on the right and Ville de Jardin on the left. Then it does a smart left turn and abruptly stops. This is the end of the line.

At this point, it must be said, the Transport Department’s arrangements have little connection with reality. In theory the minibus stop for the last estate – Ville de Jardin – is further up, on the edge of the large piece of dead end which for decades served as the car park for the nearby Lions’ Look-out. In practice nobody takes any notice of that: the minibus drops its last passengers right outside the estate entrance, and residents going downhill stand opposite. The minibuses did park by the old stop, because it was handy for the clump of bushes which they use as a toilet. No official toilet is available within a short walk of the route.

A year or two ago the Transport people got complaints from some nearby resident that the car park, when empty in the small hours of the morning, was attracting players of noisy car driving games. Why the resident concerned could not just call the police when the noise was bothering him I do not know. Instead we had a public consultation  over the question whether we approved of five mature trees being removed to make room for a roundabout. The answer to the question was “no” and the trees are still there. But we got the roundabout anyway. This is a silly place for a roundabout because it is not a road junction of any kind. The roundabout is just a glorified speed bump. But glorified it is. There are large road markings and signs. Also, the minibus stop, which was not used as a stop, was now in the wrong place. So the Transport genius in charge of this enterprise moved it to the car park, which now in theory no longer exists. The result of all this stupidity is that the new signs and markings are ignored. People park where they used to park and the minibuses stop where they used to stop. Actually we did not need a new roundabout and bus stop. What the place really needs is a public toilet. But that, I suppose, would have to come from another department.

I infer from this that our government’s efforts to collect local opinion are still not terribly successful. I am a frog at the bottom of our local well, but presumably other frogs in other wells can also point to arrangements which testify to the good intentions and ignorance of the officials concerned. We should not pick on the Transport people either. The Ag and Fish’s efforts to curtail the activities of the local monkey population have been hilariously and totally ineffective. If you are visiting the Lions lookout you will see their giant monkey trap, which is now in its second year as an ineffective obstruction in a perfectly good footpath. By the car park which is no longer supposed to be a car park is a large sign saying in both languages that “feeding monkeys causes problems; nature can meet their needs”. But nobody is feeding them at the car park anyway.

In other jurisdictions one might take up matters like these with one’s local councillor but in Hong Kong this presents problems. Your district boarder is also a participant in the CE election. This may explain why DB seats attract a large supply of mysteriously well-funded DAB candidates. This means that in many cases, including mine, the relevant member is someone I would not vote for if the only other candidate was Adolf Hitler. I hear he is good on the local stuff. But is it fair for me to ask him to sort out the monkeys, the roundabout, the toilet, and any other little local problems, when no matter how sincere and successful his efforts I shall be voting for someone else?

I hear that the print version of the SCMPost is now regarded as something rather like me — a technically outdated relic of a past era. Nowadays it’s all about hits, and they only get hits on the on-line version. My source also passed on the interesting snippet that the King of the hit-magnets was Mr Alex Lo, whose daily efforts in print occupy a prime position on Page 2. This is nice for Mr Lo, who as a result is presumably unlikely, at least in the near future, to join the large crowd of Post ex-columnists (declaration of interest: of whom I am one) watching the Decline and Fall with the traditional mixture of terror and pity.  This is not so much good news for readers, however, because as a result they are exposed to a certain amount of — shall we say inaccuracy?

The Post’s budget does not stretch to a fact-checker, apparently. This morning’s offering on the upcoming, or possible not upcoming, Occupy Central manifestation provided a good example. “Wherever such mass protests occurr … they always end in tear gas, pepper spray and batons,” quoth Mr Lo. This is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of fact. And columnists venturing into matters of fact should avoid using words like “always”. I participated long ago in numerous mass protests — how long ago can be gathered from the fact that they were mostly either against the Viet Nam war or the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia — which did not in fact end in tear gas etc. Modern writers can be forgiven for having missed the 60s, but a brief search of the memory banks should have turned up the protests in Hong Kong against national security legislation in 2003, which were massive by any standard, extremely protestant and entirely peaceful.

Opinion is free; facts are sacred; bullshit is bullshit.

OK, I promise – last one on this topic. The Post’s coverage of anti-locust protests continues to explore new areas of journalism. On Sunday there was a mini-protest in Mong Kok. Numbers on these occasions are notoriously unreliable but apparently the protesters were heavily outnumbered by the press. Meanwhile a few blocks away the Voice of Loving Hong Kong, led by chairman Patrick Ko, was collecting signatures for a “we love locusts” petition which they will send to the relevant policy secretary.
So far, pretty normal coverage, with a few quotes from both sides. Only in the last paragraph do we enter the Twilight Zone:
“Halfway through the (anti) protest Ko somehow found himself at the scene. His presence caused a commotion, with protesters hurling insults at him…”

Well reading that must have given a great deal of innocent pleasure to the demonstrators for various causes who have found themselves similarly treated by Mr Ko’s Loving supporters. The bit that bothers me is the “somehow Mr Ko found himself”. After all there is no mystery here. Having got his petition set up Mr Ko, as any normal person would, wanted to know how the opposition’s knees-up was going. Perfectly legal – nothing wrong – easily covered by some such phrase as “Mr Ko arrived”. It seems our reporter was concerned that this might imply to a suspicious mind that Mr Ko had actually deliberately gone where he went. A careful writer, our reporter might suppose, should choose a phrase which could cover other possibilities, like:

Mr Ko was heading into the Mong Kok tube station when he ran into an officious Good Fairy. “You like demonstrations,” she said, “let me send you to another one.” and Poof, Mr Ko found himself …

Mr Ko was abducted by aliens and subjected to experiments unfit for readers of a family newspaper. He was then beamed back to Earth but the careless Spock in charge of the machinery dropped him right in the middle of the protesters…

Mr Ko was struck by a falling object and wandered in a state of amnesia through the streets of Mong Kok. When he awoke, he found himself …

Mr Ko suffers from a rare brain ailment which occasionally leads to him walking helplessly and quite unconsciously towards the nearest public demonstration. When he woke up…

A simpler solution to the writing problem would have been to ask Mr Ko how he came to somehow find himself. As so often these days seekers of this information were better catered for by the Standard. Mr Ko, apparently, told their reporter he was “just passing by”. Sure he was.

Meanwhile my moles tell me that the Post management has banned the use of the words “locust” and “anti-locust” altogether unless unavoidable (which usually means in direct quotes). This is supposed to be part of the Post’s policy against “hate speech”. This is a subtle way of taking the government’s side in the matter. The use of locust is not a piece of hate speech. Locusts do not have any embarrassing habits or satanic connotations. Nor in the Hong Kong contest are they a notorious pest. All most of us know about locusts is that they arrive in huge numbers and consume voraciously. This is a pretty good metaphor for the government’s “let ’em all come” tourism policy and its consequences. Officials do not like being criticised, especially when the criticism is justified. If you haven’t a good answer for the critics it is easier to complain about their language. Support from media lackeys in this matter is very welcome and no doubt will be rewarded in the usual way.

God, it’s worse than I thought. The Post is now prepared to lie to its readers. Today’s front page story on the “Locust protest” was mainly devoted to official condemnations of the view that there may be some number of mainland tourists which is enough, or even too many.
This didn’t leave much room for a brief summary of Sunday’s events, but we got this: “Police intervened after scuffles broke out between the demonstrators and passers-by opposed to the march.” The ordinary and natural meaning of those words is that the march was opposed spontaneously by people who just happened to be in Canton Road at the time, which is manifest nonsense. It was opposed by people who had deliberately set out to provide a counter-demonstration. Anyone who was dubious about this could simply have consulted Monday’s Standard, which featured a very nice picture of the opponents of the march, brandishing large copies of the SAR and PRC flags.

I am prepared to believe that there may still be local people who shop in Canton Road, though they don’t include me. I am not prepared to believe that such people take with them a flag on a pole in case they are suddenly confronted by a demonstration they disapprove of. We have seen enough of the loving Hong Kong people in action to know how they work and what they are trying to do, which is basically to turn any demonstration they disapprove of into a street brawl.  Whether you approve of this or not it should be reported. These are hard times for people who used to work at the Post. What used to be a source of pride is becoming something we would rather keep quiet about. An American newspaper editor once said that when you have a monopoly the difficult thing is not to stay in business but to stay in journalism. Too hard for some, apparently.