tim's experiment

If you only plan to read one book this year, please consider Poverty in the Midst of Affluence, by Leo Goodstadt. This is not happy reading. In fact reading it made me extremely angry. Mr Goodstadt is to be commended for getting through the whole book without resorting to the violently abusive prose which his information would have inspired from a less respectable writer, like me.

The book sets out to answer the question why, as Hong Kong has grown richer over the last 20 years, the social problems associated with poverty have become more conspicuous. The answer is not pretty. He records how, in the closing years of the colonial administration, the civil service reluctantly, with much back-sliding and occasional sabotage, created a welfare state, in which medical help was virtually free at the point of delivery, large numbers of needy families were provided with public housing at reasonable rents, decent education was available to all and a start had been made on meeting the needs of the indigent elderly. He goes on to show how this structure was surreptitiously dismantled, mainly though not only in the period of Donald Tsang’s tenure as CE. This was accompanied by recurring criticism of the whole notion of “welfare” and the deliberate demonization of anyone who needed to receive it.

It is distressing to recall that many of us simply did not realize that this was going on. Mr Goodstadt notes that constitutional matters were taking a lot of attention, but that is really no excuse. What were our media doing, for example, when the government dismantled the public housing building programme, disbanded the teams who knew how to do it, and handed over the Housing Authority’s land bank to private developers? Was nobody connecting the dots and seeing what was going on here? We now find ourselves in a situation where it will take five years to produce any new public housing. This is one of the areas where defenders of CY Leung say he inherited a mess. But do not waste your sympathy on weasel-face: it’s his mess. He was the Convenor of the Executive Council at the time.

The frightening thing to me is the way in which it has now become possible to advance in public arguments not taken seriously since the 18th century. For example we are told that the erradication of poverty is impossible. Now this does, it is true, depend on how you define poverty. If your poverty definition is the bottom 10 per cent of the population then some people will always be there. But Hong Kong’s definition is a percentage of the average household income. There is no iron law of economics or anything else that says there have to be some people below this line, unless of course the percentage is 100. In fact some countries which measure poverty as a percentage of average income have virtually eliminated it. In Sweden, for example, the poverty rate is three percent.

Nor is it true that, as one appalling letter writer put it the other week, poverty has to be painful because otherwise people would not work. People work for a variety of reasons and countries where the fear of actual starvation has been eliminated do not find that work stops. Actually this is a red herring, although one of great antiquity. Back in the time of the first Elizabeth people who did not want to contribute to poor relief complained that their money was going to “sturdy beggars”.  Officials and politicoes, including Mr Leung, have been happy to encourage the impression that Hong Kong’s modest social security offerings were seducing the workforce from their proper allegiance to underpaid employment. Actually most unemployed people in Hong Kong (it varies a bit from year to year – about 80 per cent) do not claim social security and most of the people who do claim it are not available for work because they are too old, too sick, disabled or children in families headed by people who are disabled, sick etc. This is another area where a vigilant media might have done a better job. Some of the official statements on this topic were grossly misleading. On the strength of them the proportion of government expenditure devoted to social security payments was halved between 2001 and 2011.

Another newly popular antique is the notion that any interference in the terms under which people are employed is a distortion of the labour market, a threat to economic efficiency and destructive of jobs.  As far as destroying jobs are concerned this is a lie masquerading as a prejudice. The point has been extensively researched. Minimum wage laws do not result in lower employment rates. Probably this is because in the real world the job market is very different from the much-simplified (but useful) model developed for the purposes of classical economics. As for regulating the terms of employment, we should not forget what employers are capable of if greed is given full rein. The argument that employment conditions should be left to the benevolence of employers and market forces was, I think, first advanced against an act passed in 1788 to regulate the chimney sweeping industry. It prohibited the employment of children under eight for this purpose and also stipulated that they should not be sent up a chimney while the fire was lit, a precaution which was apparently often overlooked. Employees need protection. This should no longer be disputable.

In closing may I welcome Mr Goodstadt’s critical look at what has been going on in the field where I still occasionally work, higher education. Before the hand-over successive governors had sought to expand the proportion of the school population going to university by increasing the size and number of the UGC-funded institutions. After the handover the expansion of higher education consisted of making the degree a four-year course instead of three years. The only increase in student numbers was the launching of the Associate Degree, a new qualification, unloved, unwanted, unsubsidised and unclear in its purpose. All the local universities started offering ADs as a money-making enterprise. Many of them keep the AD students on a different campus to avoid any possible contamination. Moving from the AD to a real degree is not encouraged and under the new four-year arrangement the lucky student who makes the change will take five years to get a degree which used to be offered in three. Education generally has become increasingly expensive, with the predictable result that children from poor families rarely reach local universities, which have become a semi-compulsory finishing school for the middle classes.

Some months ago I wrote in this blog that government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich was continuing. Readers of Mr Goodstadt’s excellent book will discover how true this is.

A moment of enlightenment this morning while reading Alex Lo’s piece in the Post. I have been impressed for a long time with his ability to keep writing five columns a week. This is not a record – someone on the Irish Times, according to legend, wrote six columns a week for 30 years – but five a week is still a lot. Bernard Levin used to do three a week for the London Times, but complained when he stopped that this was too many. I used to have an irregular cycle – one weekly, one fortnightly, one monthly – which meant I occasionally had to do three in a week and it was not easy.  I had a full-time job as well but that was not the problem; inspiration is the critical item, not time.

So here we have Alex churning them out, and I suddenly realised this morning how he economises. There is a standard structure which is used again and again. We start with a local issue. This morning it was Occupy Central’s complaint that the Registrar of Companies had refused to register it as a company because its objectives  – or some of them – were illegal. Mr Lo opined, and this is clearly a good point, that the Occupy Central people were being a little disingenuous in pointing to their legal activities, however numerous. Civil disobedience is what gives the movement its importance and interest, and that is illegal by definition. This takes about half a column. Then we get a bit of international comparison, which gives the writer a chance to show off his cosmopolitan erudition. And then having loaded our tar brush we slap it over all the people we disapprove of, usually defined in very broad terms. Today it’s “many protesters today”, a category so vague that you can say anything about it. More often it’s “the pan-democrats”, although as the P-Ds are not a political party and encompass a very wide range of views this is no real improvement on “some demonstrators” or “many protesters”..

This is a nifty structure which can be used again and again. Start with a small reasonable point, throw in a bit of intellectual decoration, and then blame it all on whichever of your pet hates you feel like. This will save me time in the mornings because now I know how this works I only need to read the first paragraph and the last.

Meanwhile on the op ed page we have an unlikely new star in the local journalistic firmament: Carrie Lam, who has a day job as the Chief Secretary. You would think that having a whole government department devoted to explaining the government line Ms Lam could do without half a page of newsprint. The whole point of journalism is that a professional reporter can get Ms Lam’s thoughts down to about 10 column inches. Reprinting officials’ speeches looks like a way of saving money at the readers’ expense. That is not what bothers me about it, though. After all readers can draw their own conclusions about that question. What bothers me is that the by-line is a lie. Ms Lam does not write her own newspaper pieces, or for that matter her own speeches. This is not the way government works. Senior civil servants have what they conceive to be better ways of using their time. Speeches, articles, and other verbal contributions are written by a PR flunkey. I realise that having an op ed piece by Joe Wong with a little line at the end saying that Joe is the Chief Secretary’s press pusher doesn’t quite have the pizzazz of a piece by the Chief Secretary in person. But there is such a thing as honesty, and pretending that Ms Lam writes for the Post is not it.

I realise that it is now compulsory for the selection of a new University Vice Chancellor to be followed by some sort of row, but current effusions from Hong Kong University are emitting a nasty smell. The new VC is Prof Peter Mathieson. Readers will effortlessly infer from this name that he was not, as it were, raised on congee. He is a Brit. This seems to be the main problem, although all the people who are complaining have managed to avoid stating this explicitly.

Clearest hint came from Prof Ying Chan, who told readers of her blog that the new recruit had “a complete lack of understanding” of Chinese society and history. Prof Chan had an interesting new hint for committees seeking new Vice Chancellors. She went on to say that “if a medical professor from the British city of Bristol, with a population of 430,000, is to parachute into Hong Kong to save our freedom, that’s a big joke.” Now I take it there is no objection to medical professors as such, or to people being parachuted into Hong Kong, as Prof Chan was herself. Nor does there seem to be anything about Bristol which should make it an objectionable source, except for its population. This can simplify the hunt for a new VC considerably. Applications can be rejected out of hand if they come from Cambridge (pop. 123,900) or Yale (New Haven, pop. 130,761). Alas, Europe’s oldest university doesn’t make the cut either. (Bologna, pop. 378,000). This also helps to explain how we got stuck with Prof Chan. She came from New York (pop. 8.3 million).

Prof Chan also questioned Mathieson’s “sincerity” in applying for the post because he had not “tailored his curriculum vitae” for the Hong Kong post. This is a puzzling complaint. After all a c.v. is a summary of your experience and achievements. Updating from time to time, persons with only one life need only one c.v. It is not supposed to be a piece of PR writing. Points specific to the job applied for can be made in the covering letter. Prof Chan seems to be complaining that Mr Mathieson is not dishonest enough for her.

Hong Kong U academics seem to be very preoccupied with c.vs though. The chairman of the Staff Association observed that he had heard from a Medical School colleague that the new VC’s c.v. was “mediocre”. This would have been more illuminating if some details had been supplied. Academics are a jealous bunch. C.vs are rarely assessed as more than “mediocre” unless mutual back-scratching is in progress. One c.v. problem was cleared up on Thursday when Prof Mathieson was open for questions at the university. The bit in his mission description about “helping Uganda” was not left over from an application for another job; he has a long-standing connection with Uganda. God knows it needs all the help it can get.

Other complaints continued to be rather unspecific. Professor Enoch Young, director emeritus (whatever that is) of HKU SPACE (money money money!) expressed “reservations”. Prof Cheng Kai-ming, a former pro vice chancellor, said the new VC “might be a good administrator, but that was just getting the job done. A university shouldn’t be like that.” And what, one wonders, does Prof Cheng think a university should be like? Well he’s an honourary professor at another eight. All of them are on the Mainland.

In a class of his own, though, was Prof Lo Chung-mau, head of surgery and a member of the selection committee. He described the new VC as “ignorant and incapable”, according to the Post. This is astonishingly rude for a piece of academic discussion. One gathers that Prof Lo wanted someone else and was outvoted. Very frustrating, no doubt. But still. Were we not urged by Kipling to “meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same”? Gentlemen should be scholars. And scholars should be gentlemen.

Readers will recall that there was a minor accident at the Sek Kong airstrip over the weekend. A small Cessna was landing and the nose-wheel collapsed. The plane flipped over onto its back. Two of the four people on board were slightly injured. It seems they were lucky. No doubt everyone was wearing a seat belt.

This was a harmless little number providing some decent photo opportunities. Buried in the Standard’s version of it were some mind-boggling statistics: “The Fire Services Department deployed 25 trucks, seven ambulances and 150 officers to the scene.”

Really? 150 officers? What were they thinking? I realise the department needs to be quick off the mark, better safe than sorry and all that, but surely this was a bit over the top. A Cessna training plane like this is the size of a small car. It is not a Jumbo jet. I suppose a good time was had by all but you have to wonder what would have happened if there had been a real emergency elsewhere in the New Territories while this was going on.

On a street level, Hong Kong has to be one of the most corruption free countries in the world. No doubt there are funny things still going on in nooks and corners (anyone for the restaurant business?) but on the whole we have seen the back of the sort of graft where an official charges you an unofficial fee for doing what he is paid to do anyway.

This is a credit to the efforts of many individuals who, most of them unsung and some of them at considerable cost, were prepared to fight this good fight. We seem, however, to have drifted into a situation where junior civil servants are expected to be sea green and incorruptible, while their most senior leaders enjoy the subtler forms of corruption restrained only by shame and the rather remote possibility of embarrassment.

What went through the minds, one wonders, of senior civil servants who were apparently expected to do their best to arrange an audience with the Pope for Donald Tsang? This could not possibly be considered part of the duties of anyone concerned. Even if we concede some diplomatic heft to the Vatican, foreign affairs are expressly reserved to the central government of China. Of course Mr Tsang wished to meet the Pope, as many Catholics do. The idea that it was a function of the Hong Kong Government to arrange this for him was just as dishonest as stealing the paperclips and potentially a lot more expensive. I accept that the Italian gentleman who was acting as an intermediary in the matter was told that the rule of law could not be bent for his benefit. But what if he had asked for some more modest and doable quid pro quo?

Then we come to the distressing spectacle presented by the former head of the ICAC. Watching this sorry individual wriggling in Legco was nauseating. Have Administrative Officers totally absolved themselves from the rule that if you are the Captain you are responsible for the ship? I am not actually worried about the ICAC. The Commission is full of people who  take a firm line on matters of accountability and propriety. One of them was bound to blow the whistle sooner or later. What bothers me is what happens in Departments and Bureaus where the atmosphere is less puritanical. I fear the head of the ICAC was just exercising what he perceived to be the rights of department heads and such like senior people everywhere. Let there be mao tai, he said, and there was mao tai. The books can always be cooked afterwards.

The worrying thing about all this is not just the government money wasted (though that may be considerable) but what it says about our leaders’ relations with rich people they may encounter. The receipt of favours sooner or later leads to the delivery of reciprocal favours. It also leads to scepticism about official decisions generally. The recent decision about a boutique hotel on the Peak, for example, was greeted with shrugs. Nobody believes the official explanation. Of the unofficial explanation – people expect no better.

One also has to wonder how long junior government employees can be expected to behave themselves if they routinely see their seniors pigging it on perks. Not for ever, I fancy.

So many crazy things happening lately I wonder if something deeply serious has gone wrong with the world.

Let’s start with the great Cathay junket scandal. A group of Legislative Councillors, with one hanger-on/family member each, were jetted to Toulon to see an aeroplane emerge from the factory. Side trips to other European destinations were also available. Apparently (I find this barely credible) none of them thought this arrangement would raise eyebrows if it became known. Of course it did. The Post pro-government attack poodles fell noisily on the neck of Albert Ho, on the grounds of hypocrisy in the light of his complaints about similar offences by other people. This little festival lasted until it emerged that all the councillors in the group had either apologised or paid the money to charity or both … except the DAB man. We were also treated to a strange piece by a former journalist saying that junkets were a normal part of doing business. Now let us get the journalists out of the way first. Junkets are often offered to journalists on the grounds that if not offered free an event will not be covered at all. How news outlets deal with the resultant ethical dilemma is up to them. If they are fussy they either refuse or put a note on the story indicating that the writer was entertained. If less fussy they just pass the invitations round the office as a perk. Councillors and senior officials are in a different category. For them the rules are very simple: if you or you employer pays it’s work (or for academics, a conference); If the visitee pays for you it’s a junket; if the visitee pays for you and your wife (or girlfriend if you prefer) and throws in a quick flit to Paris then it’s a bribe. Other interpretations not helpful. Got it?

Then we had the Secretary for Development musing on the merits of allowing housing to be built in country parks. Now I have no objection to officials asking themselves if this would be a good idea, although I think the answer is no. The mind-blowing detail was that the Secretary was wildly wrong (it’s 40 percent not 70) about the amount of land in this category. Now if some humble blogger made an error of this kind we could put it down to laziness. To check the figure you would have to resort to Wikipedia (unreliable) or the government web site (unnavigable) or a rough estimate from a map. But a Secretary is not in this position. If he wants to know how much land is devoted to country parks he can ask a permanent civil servent in the relevant department, who will have the figure at his fingertips. Or he can ask the nearest office lady to dig out the figure for him. Mistakes on this scale make you look dumb.

Still on the land front, letter writers have leaped to the defence of the Hong Kong Golf Club, which occupies a large and convenient swathe of the New Territories. I can see a case for the club having one course, but three? Other writers pointed out that the government’s land shortage was entirely bogus, even without getting round to the two untouchables – the PLA, whose considerable holdings are visibly empty, and the Jockey Club, which long ago promised to give up Happy Valley in exchange for a swathe of Shatin, but then changed its mind. I sympathise with people’s wish to keep things they are used to having, but the distribution of leisure space in Hong Kong is at least as skewed as the distribution of wealth and if that is hampering the achievement of basic standards of housing then there should be no contest. And people who describe the Hong Kong course as “world class” are deluding themselves. The course is too easy for a serious tournament. The players come for the money.

On to the law, where something seriously weird is upcoming in the Court of First Instance. The Director of Immigration is seeking judicial review of a decision of the Immigration Appeals Tribunal. I say nothing of the merits of the case at issue, which concerns a rejected application for an ID card. But what is the director thinking of? The Immigration Appeals Tribunal is a wholly government-appointed entity which has not, over the years, established a reputation for inconveniently robust independence of spirit. Judicial review was not invented so that top officials could appeal against the decisions of their own pet kangaroos. I am surprised the Director appears to have given no consideration to the possibility that if the tribunal did not endorse his position perhaps that is because his position was resoundingly and flagrantly wrong.

Reading the SCMPost every day is like watching the last hour of Titanic. The ship is still recognisable and still more of less on an even keel, but every now and then another row of portholes disappears beneath the waves. We all understand why the China coverage is a bit, shall we say constipated. The paper’s preferences in local matters are not concealed and the sports space devoted to our local horse casino remains scandalous. But the foreign coverage used to be quite reliable. And so it should be; the news agencies do most of the work.

And so to yesterday’s paper, featuring on page A14 a cracking story headlined “Siege man, 107, shot by police”. This story came to us from Arkansas, in the USA, where a 107-year-old had been shot dead by a SWAT squad. He was firing at them at the time. Clearly in the US, where the right to a pistol in your pocket is taken very seriously, age is no bar to gunmanship. Only problem with this story was that I had seen it before.

I had in fact seen it on Page 13 of Monday’s Standard, where it was called “Gunman, 107, killed by cops in shootout”. Unless there were two senile shooters aged 107 and called Monroe Isadore we must conclude that this was the same story. According to the Post’s version, in fact, the reported events happened on Saturday. As there is a 12-hour time difference and we are ahead I presume that means it happened on Sunday our time, or thereabouts, and was on the wires that afternoon.

So what, one wonders, was it doing in the Post on Tuesday? In this world of broadcast news and instant web updates a story this old is hardly worth using at all. Maybe they’re just not trying hard enough. The old slogan “One of the world’s great newspapers” could hardly now be advanced with a straight face. Are we preparing for a new one: Yesterday’s news tomorrow?

Well well. “A blind eye to sexual harassment” was the headline on the SCMPost’s leader, complaining that of 6,000 companies surveyed on their attitudes to the matter and procedures for dealing with it, only 198 replied. “It can be assumed”, said the writer daringly, that the others “did not think much about the issue, or had no policies at all.”

The first question which comes to mind on reading a leader like this is: is the Post itself free from sexual harassment, and if so does it have an effective policy for dealing with it? I am told by people with bitter experience of the matter that the answer to both of these questions is “no”. Leader writers need to be careful about avoiding the throwing stones in glass houses syndrome.

Leaving that aside, I can think of a number of reasons why companies might desist from responding to a survey on the matter, which apparently have not occurred to the writer of this piece. Companies in Hong Kong get a steady stream of questionnaires from government departments. I am myself the sole proprietor of a registered business name. The enterprise consists of me, selling my own services. I regularly receive requests from government departments for information about my arrangements for the safety, health etc, of my employees. If they persist I reply saying that there are no employees. There is just me. Sometimes this satisfies, Sometimes it doesn’t. I am quite prepared to believe that most of the 6,000 companies asked for their policies and arrangements on the matter of sexual harassment simply binned the questionnaire on the grounds that it is no part of their job to provide free information to government departments. Some of them were no doubt very small. Some of them probably had no female employees, so sexual harassment was rather a remote problem. Maybe some of them had no male employees, another convenient arrangement.

I also had some difficulty with the statistics presented as demonstrating that this was an urgent problem. Of the 316 complaints received under the Sexual Discrimination Ordinance last year, more than one-third related to workplace harassment. The validity and seriousness of the complaints were not specified. Complaints of this nature commonly vary considerably, from the outrageous (you will not be promoted unless you sleep with me) to the trivial (a Pirrelli calendar on the wall of someone else’s office). Let us say that there were 100 substantiated and serious complaints among those received. Let us say further that the 6,000 companies surveyed were the entire universe of potential harassment venues in Hong Kong. This means that there was a one in 60 chance of the company you work for having a sexual harassment case last year. Or to put it another way, you could work for a Hong Kong company for 60 years before you could expect to be harassed, if that was what you wished for.

No doubt there are other ways of looking at it. But given that there are perfectly good legal ways of dealing with the serious cases, you have to wonder if this is really a serious problem, or a solution looking for one. It is, however, a serious problem at the Post, I am told. So they might want to consider sorting that out before offering advice to the rest of us.

I apologise for returning again to the topic of Ms Alpais Lam, now referred to for headline purposes as “rude teacher” but the continuing proceedings provide  insights into the way things are going generally round here.
Thursday’s papers reported that, as the Post put it, “School issues formal penalty to rude teacher”. Apparently the school management committee (or possibly the school board, the Post gets less reliable on these important details every week) had met. Its verdict on the matter was couched in terms strikingly similar to a quote attributed to the Secretary for Education three days earlier. Moreover the Education Bureau had also “met”, said the Post, and issued Ms Lam with an official penalty notice. Nobody was saying what the penalty was. Still…

If there was an official penalty at the end of the process then the meeting at the school, whatever its constitutional title, takes on the guise of a disciplinary hearing. The law is reluctant to interfere in disciplinary hearings held by semi-private bodies, but there are some minimum standards which must be observed. These are technically described as the rules of “natural justice” and are designed to ensure basic fairness. The person against whom a penalty may be imposed should be informed of the charge against him or her, the evidence supporting it, and be given the opportunity to confront accusers, address the tribunal, board or whatever hearing the case, and usually to be assisted by a lawyer or friend of his or her choice. It appears that none of these formalities was observed.

So here we have justice with mainland characteristics. The result is announced before the trial by a political figure. The proceedings are in private and the accused plays no part in them. Questions of law and procedure are not so much overlooked as ignored.

Next up, according to the Post, is that a “source close to the government” (readers will gather that I am rather pleased the person who wrote this story was not one of my students) said “the bureau would summarise and analyse the documents handed to them by the school and … the report could be submitted to (CY) Leung by the end of the month”. And the question this raises is: What documents? The school is in no position – and has not given itself time – to do any meaningful investigation of what happened or why. The only source of information it has apart from access to Youtube, which Mr Leung can watch for himself, is a fistful of emails and letters from  Caring Hong Kong nutcases. The only meaningful part of the school’s report can be summarised very easily: “in accordance with your instructions we have punished this troublesome lady”.

Meanwhile further evidence of the selectiveness of this outrage – apparently the Hong Kong Lovers are going to continue to bombard the school  with rubbish until the lady is sacked – in Sunday’s paper which recorded the case of a teacher fired from one school for ‘inappropriate sexual behaviour” who simply got a job in another school. No complaints or recriminations from Hong Kong’s Carers or Lovers when he was eventually caught at it again and convicted. Now if he had sworn at a policeman …

Full marks to Allan Chiang, the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data, for being willing to explain himself. Long letter in Pravda this morning repeating previous points. The man will not shut up. He has considerable chutzpah – Mr Chiang complains that personal names are ambiguous, which is not what he said when he was pushing the line that ID card numbers were a personal secret. But Mr Chiang’s basic problem is that he has lost track of the notion that some things should be public.  And if they are public that means people are free to use or misuse them as they think fit.

Mr Chiang says that the names of people engaged in criminal, civil or bankruptcy proceedings are “made available by government authorities for specific purposes”. This is nonsense. Actually government authorities have nothing to do with it. It is a basic legal principle that justice should be public.

When I first became a journalist this was not the legal fiction which it has become as newspapers got smaller and court lists got longer. I worked for a newspaper called the Morecambe Visitor (which is still afloat and is now online here: http://www.thevisitor.co.uk/). We circulated in Morecambe, a small Lancashire town – seaside resort with a bit of fishing – and the adjacent, even smaller town of Heysham – Irish ferries, nuclear power station. There were also some readers two miles down the road in Lancaster but that was mainly the territory of the Lancaster Guardian. If you appeared before the Morecambe magistrates on any charge more serious than a parking offence this was reported. With, officious data privacy not having been invented yet, your name and address in full. If your case came up before the Lancaster magistrates a reporter from the Visitor (for two years, me) would be there with specific instructions not to miss any Morecambe cases. I could do Lancaster ones if they were interesting and spend the rest of my time distracting, or helping, the man from the Lancaster Guardian. If you were involved in something more serious it would be heard in Preston, where a freelance would cover it for us. Bankruptcy proceedings were held in a lovely mediaeval hall behind Lancaster Castle and were also covered by me. Nothing was made available by government authorities. These were public proceedings and the public had the right to attend or read about them.

Lawyers will tell you that this is so that justice can be seen to be done. Well perhaps. Lawyers are a self-important lot and for them, everything is about them. But clearly this time-honoured system also had the merit of allowing the population generally to know who had been accused or convicted of what. This allowed them to take appropriate precautions. I have no doubt also that for many defendants the attendant publicity was so acutely embarrassing as to be part of the punishment. This point was often offered in mitigation. And this is as it should be. A person is not entitled to a good reputation; he is entitled to an accurate one.

It must be conceded that this is not really the way things work now. Unless you commit a spectacular offence it is unlikely to be reported unless there is some additional newsworthy feature like a famous victim or sex. Crime and bankruptcy are copious, newspapers smaller and readers less interested. But the idea that people who are interested should be deprived of the information because it was only made available for some mysterious official purpose is an error. Mr Chiang would do well to avoid the appearance that he is a participant in the administration’s ongoing war on journalism.

Talking about things which should be public brings me to that curious enterprise, the Silent Majority, which this week splashed out on a second wave of ads in the Chinese press attacking the idea of Occupying Central. Although one of the four known members of this body is styled the Convenor, it appears to have only five members – four glove puppets and Mr Moneybags behind the scenes who wishes to remain nameless. Cynics are free to wonder whether the well-publicised foursome would be so vociferous in expressing their views if they had not met the nameless millionaire. I think this person needs to emerge from behind the curtain and reveal who he is. After all we know there is a lot of money there but our views of its owner will depend somewhat on where it came from, and what interests its owner may share with people who do not approve of civil disobedience. While he or she remains nameless we are free to infer that the person is a contemptible coward trying to manipulate public opinion with his money and ingratiate himself.