tim's experiment

You don’t get many complaints from the DAB, but there is one issue the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment etc has made its own: glass escalators. We have been here before. The DAB has a Women’s Affairs Committee. From time to time before it has complained that the architecture of some staircases or escalators makes it possible for men to see more than a gentleman ought to see when the installation is used by a lady not wearing trousers. Some of the cads concerned even take pictures. This  curious preoccupation with the possibility of illicit knicker glimpses has now blossomed into an annual survey.

The number of places to which the survey objects has “more than doubled”, said The Standard. It has gone from seven to 19. The committee’s chairman, Elizabeth Quat, said that the places on the list were only the tip of the iceberg. Well if she really means that it seems rather a scandalous waste of everyone’s time to put out the survey results at all. Count them properly or shut up. I also have some misgivings about providing people with a list of the best places for this sort of thing. I am sure none of my readers is interested in looking at underwear but just in case, apparently the peepers’ paradises are the Ping Shan Tin Shui Wai Public Library, the swimming pool in the same place (not a City of Sorrow for everyone, apparently) the Hong Kong Central Library, four MTR stations – Tin Shui Wai (again!) Long Ping, Kam Sheung Road, and Hung Hom – and several shopping malls of which Hysan Place and Popcorn were named.

This is a strange problem for the DAB ladies to get their knickers in a twist (to coin a phrase) about. It appears to be totally victimless. The usual response that the committee gets from shopping malls is that nobody has complained. And why should they? Being beheld by a man is perhaps, if you notice it at all, mildly irritating. But in the end, what harm is done? It is difficult to believe that the activity which bothers the DAB ladies is as common as they think it is. After all a preoccupation with underwear is an unusual sexual foible. Most of us get no excitement from a surreptitious upskirt view. And many of those eccentrics who do would not, I fancy, wish to spend a lot of time lurking round escalators in the hope of getting a glimpse. After all if you really want this sort of thing the internet will provide plenty.

One also has to wonder about the DAB women’s committee’s priorities. If this is a social problem it is a tiny one. is the committee so steeped in complacency and admiration for our government that it sees no need for research or action on issues like domestic violence, child-care, sexual harassment, exploitation, discrimination against women at work …? The DAB from time to time announces the results of some dubious survey which has revealed that Hong Kong people are concerned about livelihood issues, not politics. Have the DAB’s students of public opinion tried asking women what issues they would like more work on? And if they did, how many women asked for action on transparent escalators?

Goodness I did not expect this. The students are on holiday, the staff are attending to their research or conferencing (which is what we call being on holiday in academic circles) political punch-ups continue at their usual level but somehow the question of who should be the next president of Lingnan University is still filling columns. Some of them quite interesting and some of them not.

Let us start with a piece by one Ronald Teng, who, we are told, is the founder of MEA, a promoter of liberal art education. Readers who wish to know more about MEA should not waste their time Googling it. Having sorted out a way of eliminating Middle East Airlines and the Ministry of External Affairs (India) I still could not find any web presence with these initials except the Medical Education Association, which doesn’t sound like liberal arts to me.

Anyway, to business. Let us start with the bad news. Mr Teng may know a lot, but he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. So we were treated to this “If you look at how other (that is, foreign) universities select their president, you will  find that representatives of the student union are not allowed in the board of governors’ or trustees’ meeting. Even when they are they have no say in the selecting of the president, or any official.” The nice thing about sweeping statements of this kind is that they can be falsified by the production of one counter-example. This one will do: when I was the President of the Student Union of the University of Lancaster in 1970-71 I did in fact sit ex officio on the University Council and I was a member of the committee which selected the next Chancellor of the University.

Slightly less erroneously, but not much, Mr Teng also devoted a good deal of space to the demolition of the view that Presidents, or Professors, should be elected by the students. Nobody is asking for that. Mr Teng says that students are “stakeholders” but not all stakeholders are created equal. A fair point. But stakeholders come in different guises. The students are not just the stakeholders of the university, they are its clients. Their wishes are important and should be considered. A university ignores their preferences at its peril. There are, after all, other universities.

Having said which Mr Teng was spot-on in his main point, which was that it was extremely ill-judged of the new president to refer in his opening speech to the Chairman of the University Council as “his boss”. This betrays such a serious misunderstanding of the way the system is supposed to work as to suggest that the new Pres, Professor Leonard Cheng, was not such a good choice after all. Universities are supposed to be autonomous organisations pursuing academic ideals. Their government is divided between a Senate, which represents the academic side, and a Council, whose responsibilities are purely practical. The purpose of the Council is to provide expertise in such matters as personnel, finance and construction, about which academics are generally uninformed. The Council should have nothing to say about teaching or research – in other words the important outputs of the university. It is a servant, not a master. It is true I suppose that institutions which used to be private colleges or polytechnics may not be quite up to speed on this point. They should be working on it.

And so onwards and upwards to the Post’s editorial writing department, where odd things were going on this morning. The Post’s person with a pen thought that Prof Cheng was well known in academic circles. This was “probably why (CY) Leung sought his advice when drafting his campaign platforms…” But nobody can be criticised for having his advice sought. The complaint is not that Prof Cheng was asked but that when he was asked he said yes. Being on a campaign team is not like being on a government advisory body. It is not public service. It is a personal help to the person who is trying to get elected. People are entitled to suppose that if Prof Cheng agreed to be on Mr Leung’s advisory team it was because he approves of Mr Leung and what he stands for. After all I am also quite well known in local academic circles. If Mr Leung had invited me to join his team I would have told him to … well, I would have refused.

The Post then opines that “the truth is that Cheng … has gone through a well-established selection mechanism,. which takes in to account academic excellence and leadership rather than political considerations. There is no evidence to suggest that due process has not been followed. To suggest otherwise does not do justice to those who played a part…” This may be the truth, but for less gullible observers the question has to be “how do we know?” We do not see the process. We do not meet the people. We are not told who was considered or who was rejected or why. We are simply presented with the result. And the result looks suspicious.

I fear that the Post and its people have not yet got the full measure of what is bothering local university students, which is the growing suspicion that the government is filling top university posts with its friends, supporters and fellow travellers. In the long run this will pave the way for the emasculation of those parts of the universities which deal with controversial current issues and the expulsion of academics whose views do not fit in with the Leung worldview. The new OU chief is a member of the NPC, the Post notes. So, oddly enough, is Prof Cheng’s “boss” the Chairman of the Lingnan University Council. Are we beginning to see a trend here?

Interesting piece in Pravda today about the selection of the new president of Lingnan University. This was written by an authoritative source, Bernard Chan, who conveniently for this topic happens to be the Chairman  of the Lingnan University Council. As such, Mr Chan says, he “oversaw” the selection process. Unsurprisingly, in Mr Chan’s view, the process was entirely without fault or flaw. This leaves Mr Chan with the small problem of how to explain the fact that some of the university’s students are unhappy with the appointment. This is easily achieved by accusing some students of giving the media and their fellows a “rather inaccurate version of events”. This is summarised (with the use of the rather ominous weasel word “essentially”) as being that the new president, Leonard Cheng, was chosen “at short notice for his political opinions and that student opinion was never sought”. Mr Chan goes on to claim – though he does not give examples – that there were other “inaccuracies” and then launches into the political stratosphere with the claim that the storm in his particular teacup is symptomatic of “deepening intolerance within the wider community”.

Let me say at this point that I approach this little schemozzle in a spirit of complete impartiality. People whose opinion I respect speak highly of Professor Cheng. Mr Chan seems from his public writings to be intelligent, open-minded and well-intentioned, at least by the standards of Exco and the NPC, on which he sits. And if there is any truth in the rumour that the new president is going to close the Cultural Studies Department that is OK by me. When I hear the words Cultural Studies, to adapt an old joke, I reach for my Browning.

Having said which, it seems that Mr Chan has engaged in the venerable trick of putting words into his opponents’ mouths, which always makes it easier to win an argument. It does not matter too much to anyone whether Mr Chen was chosen “at short notice”. A bad choice made at leisure is still a bad choice. Mr Chan’s account of the selection process suggests a spectacular waste of time and money. The “search committee”  – Heaven forbid that we should restrict our recruitment to people who want the job badly enough to apply for it – started work last November. Unfortunately this is the last date Mr Chan supplies so we do not know how much time it spent on “consulting stakeholders” about the desirable qualities of a new president. It then conducted a tendering exercise to select a “recruitment company”. The company approached 384 potential candidates. All this activity was meaningless. Bear in mind that in selecting a university president the field of serious candidates is quite small. We exclude people who do not have a Chinese surname (rule one: no gwailos), people from the mainland (politically sensitive), and people over 60, as it is embarrassing to appoint someone past the age at which his colleagues are required to retire. This brings the field down to a few people currently working in America and a few people currently doing senior administrative jobs in Hong Kong universities. This is why so many “global searches” for senior university jobs produce such distinctly unglobal results. The serious shortlist had five names on it, which could be considered quite good in the circumstances, and two rounds of interviews got the number down to one. It would be interesting, though no more, to know at what stage Prof Cheng’s name appeared.

The point about this process from the student point of view, though, is that it is all private. This is routinely defended on the grounds that nobody will apply if there is a danger that he will be known to have been rejected. But there it is. All you get is the result. Having a student observer on the selection committee reduces the number of people who are kept in the dark by one, which is not much help. Accusing people who say that “student opinion was never sought” of inaccuracy is a bit rich under these circumstances. OK, one student’s opinion was sought. only a few thousand to go.

Now, having disposed of these irrelevancies, we get down to the nitty gritty, which is the fear that Prof Cheng was chosen because he was one of CY Leung’s ten-man advisory panel before the CE election. Mr Chan says he was not aware of this. Apparently he takes little interest in politics – an unusual trait in an Exco member. He concedes that “some of my colleagues on the search committee” did know. Mr Chan at this point turns to mind-reading, Noone mentioned it because they did not consider it relevant, he says. This is a tricky little number. If the matter was not discussed how do we know people did not consider it relevant? People’s mental processes are not always obvious, even to themselves. Students are I think entitled to feel unreassured.

Mr Chan, possibly sensing that this is not his strongest point, departs hastily for a friendly irrelevance. Is it, he wonders, acceptable that candidates should be ruled out because of their political activities. This is “intolerance”, he says. “Do we want a climate where academics avoid advising politicians for fear of damaging their careers?”

This is standing the argument on its head. Nobody is suggesting that being an adviser to a politician should be a bar to academic preferment. What they are saying is that it should not be a boost to promotion chances either. One is tempted to ask Mr Chan, rhetorically as it were, if it would be acceptable to have a government which distributed jobs to its friends and supporters. But the trouble is that we do have such a government. Numerous people have found their way onto sundry advisory, consultative and indeed decision-making bodies for no visible reason other than that they supported Mr Leung. The consultative machinery has been turned into a retirement pasture for DAB carthorses. It may well be that this deplorable tendency stops at the gates of Lingnan University. but some suspicion is entirely understandable. Mr Chan, who is up to his ears in the establishment, is not, I fear, the man to  allay it.

Nor is his boss. Priceless quote in today’s press from CY Leung “I work in perfect harmony with Mrs Lam, the team of principle officials in the accountability system, and all civil servants”. Come on Mr Leung, give yourself a chance. I am quite prepared to believe that rumours about Carrie Lam being unhappy are exaggerated, but there is no perfection in this world and in large organisations under constant public scrutiny harmony tends to be thin on the ground. Ludicrous levels of optimism not helpful.

Dear Uncle Sam,
I understand that many of your legislators are upset because young Mr Snowden was not arrested before he left us, even though your government had sent to Hong Kong an application to have him detained and extradited. It seems there was some deficiency in the documentation attached to your application and consequently Mr Snowden was free to leave. Some people in Washington apparently think this is all the result of a devious plot to annoy them, hatched in Hong Kong, Beijing or even Moscow. These speculations are very wide of the mark.

As any resident of Hong Kong could tell you, an attempt to extract from our government anything more complicated than a postage stamp invariably provokes a request for a document which you haven’t got with you and didn’t know you needed. The documents demanded range from obvious items like a photocopy of your ID card, two passport photos and a proof of address, to tricky exotica like your birth certificate, or your wife’s birth certificate, or your mistress’s birth certificate … This is just the way our bureaucrats work. Your documentation was treated the same way as everyone else’s. Of course we all nurture the friendliest feelings towards your country, but procedures are there to be followed and it is in all cases up to the applicant to ensure that he presents the necessary documents in the appropriate order. If he doesn’t then the application fails.

Incidentally I notice that the US government also has an interesting appetite for unnecessary paperwork. Just the other day someone who is applying for a Green Card on the strength of his status as the spouse of an American citizen asked me for a letter to say that I had witnessed his wedding. Apparently the certificate provided as part of the proceedings does not meet your requirements. Maybe your arrest warrants don’t meet ours.

All right, I know many horse racing people are nice types, attracted to the business by the opportunity to work with horses. And if there were no racing the horse population of the world would be considerably smaller.

Still sometimes the attitude of people around racing to the animals on which the whole game depends is disgusting. I am resigned to the fact that any horse too injured to return to the track is promptly shot. Owners are greedy heartless creatures whose participation in the sport rarely has anything to do with liking horses, and they do not want to pay for the upkeep of invalids.

Still, callousness about animal suffering reached new heights on the back page of yesterday’s Post, where under the by-line of Alan Aitken a five-horse pile-up on the track was reported. The report was, quite properly, mainly focussed on the jockeys who fell off as a result of the crash. One of them broke two limbs. But we did not stop at him. we were treated to a total of 14 paragraphs explaining exactly what happened to whom, with what consequences, what the other jockeys remembered of the incident and who would be riding again, when.

Only thing I was left wondering was: what became of the horses? You had to turn to the Standard for the low-down on the real victims here – after all the jockeys are volunteers. Three of the horses had bruises. Two of the horses had more serious injuries and were shot. Nice game, isn’t it?

It is brave of Mr Snowden to blow the whistle on his country’s spies, but the story does not come as a big surprise. This sort of thing has been going on for decades. Nor am I impressed by the suggestion that it is subject to some kind of judicial oversight. I suppose the arrangement in America is that if you wish to intercept one named individual’s mail, email, phone calls or whatever with a view to later prosecution then you have to get a court order. But that is not most of what is going on.

Huge quantities of electronic traffic are being hoovered up and searched for signs of subversive activity. We all know roughly how this works. The people who accommodate this blog often remind its author (who doesn’t usually bother) of the importance of putting down a few keywords. This ensures that the person who is searching for the topic you have covered can find it.

People who are really keen on attracting traffic take advantage of the way computer searches work. In the early days of the internet most of the commercial sites were selling porn. In order to attract customers using search engines they generally included a large slab of prose which consisted simply of 57 synonyms for “sex”. Sometimes these were repeated several times. Later they discovered that they could conceal this part of the site from customers by the simple wheeze of printing it in white type on a white background. The computer search engine still read it but the visitor, unless he highlighted the text by accident, did not.

Now whatever miraculous means the American spies and codebreakers use to collect the millions of bits of internet which they wish to scour for items of interest, in the end they are going to have to come down to something rather similar to sort out the possible wheat from the much more numerous chaff.  So if for example I insert here some such meaningless phrase as “terror bomb avenge Osama blow up White House death to America” the computer will pick this out as a potentially interesting item. Hi guys! Sorry. False alarm.

This does not actually do me any harm. But it would be foolish to suppose that this is always the case. Many people find themselves mysteriously banned from flying, for example. Others have bombs dropped on their houses. Some of them find the police taking a mysterious interest in their innocent activities. Some people whose illegal projects are in the dream stage are offered help by bogus co-conspirators who, when the fake bomb is planted, then arrest everyone concerned, to the great credit of the law enforcement agency concerned.

So there is a cost to this sort of thing. A gentleman who wrote to the Post last week put his finger on the heart of the matter (though he proceeded to draw the wrong conclusion) when he said that in the hunt for lawbreakers it was sometimes necessary for innocent people to be questioned, and even detained. Indeed it is. But it is expected, in civilised societies, that the inflicting of inconvenience of this kind will be proportionate to the seriousness of the crime involved, and the chances of the technique solving it. We do not arrest the whole population in the hunt for a shoplifter.

There was a time when an important legal principle stated that it was better for 100 guilty people to go free than for one innocent one to be punished unjustly. This now seems to have been replaced in the USA by the view that it is better for 100 innocent foreigners to be killed than for one American to be endangered. Americans must feel safe from terrorism, even while they sacrifice thousands of their fellow citizens every year to the absurd notion that it is a human right to have a gun in your pocket.

When Mr Obama says that Americans do not need to worry about being unlawfully snooped on he leaves open the possibility, indeed the certainty, that the rest of us should be very worried indeed. Yet human rights are supposed to be universal. Can you have a black man as President and still be racist? I suppose so.

I am fed up with people saying and writing that the CE’s lack of popularity is not his fault; it is the result of a faulty system which would not work whoever was in charge of it. This is rubbish.

It is of course true that the system does not help. Hong Kong people want the CE to be someone they like, trust and admire. Beijing, which in practice is in a position to fix the election, wants someone which it likes and trusts. Unfortunately someone who is popular with Hong Kong people will for that reason be distrusted in Beijing, and similarly a CE who makes frequent visits to Beijing will not be trusted in Hong Kong, even if actually he gets his orders from the local Liaison Office. The trips are a treat.

Clearly this means that being the CE is a demanding job which requires considerable agility and in which universal acclaim is an unlikely fringe benefit. That does not mean it has to be the catastrophe which we now behold. It is not just that CY Leung is widely regarded as a slippery customer who lied his way into office, or that he has shamelessly used the public appointments system to pack his cabinet, and many other places, with obsequious mediocrities. Though both those things are true. It was sad last week to see the press coverage of the newly appointed President of Lingnan University. The lucky gentleman concerned is widely known as a friendly soul and a proficient academic administrator with an excellent record in his previous job as a Dean. That cut no ice with the political commentariat, who zeroed in as one man on the fact that the gentleman concerned had been a Leung supporter in the CE election. A spokesman for the appointing committee pointed out that they had not asked any of the candidates about their political affiliations. No doubt this is true. Unfortunately some people’s political affiliations are widely known. And jobs for the boys and girls has become a government theme song.

But it is also worse. Mr Leung has an uncanny knack for saying the wrong thing. On Sunday, for example, he announced that the plans of the Occupy Central movement were clearly illegal and would be treated as such. In our system it is not for the executive, or the Chief Executive, to decide what is legal and what is not. That is a matter for the courts. Maybe Mr Leung has been licking the nearest available jackboot for so long that he thinks all legal systems work the mainland way, in which the political leadership decides who should be jailed for ten years and the courts merely follow their instructions. In any case, Mr Leung’s own legal record hardly suggests a strong commitment to the rule of law. The unfortunate fact is that we are saddled with a CE who cannot urge people to obey the law without a good many of us getting an irresistible urge to giggle.

Actually we don’t know what form Occupy Central will take yet. Protests, even those including civil disobedience, can take a variety of forms, ranging from a short sit-down in an already pedestrianised Sunday street to an attempt to storm the Stock Exchange in trading hours. It is by no means certain that the best response to the methods eventually selected will be a violent one and it is no means certain that the end result of it all will be disorder, tear gas, pepper spray, street battles etc. Given the current levels of distrust, though, it is not a good idea for the government to make pessimistic predictions.  If Mr Leung predicts blood in the streets now there will be a suspicion, should it materialise, that this is because the forces of order were following bloodthirsty orders from him, and not because of over-enthusiasm on the part of the protesters. Mr Leung may feel that his reputation could get no worse. This is not the case. Tanks in Statue Square, anyone?

I have been reading a lot lately, possible as a form of escape from the frustrations of Hong Kong politics, which seem to revolve endlessly round the same unanswerable question – how can you ensure freedom in a region of an unfree country.

So to books: this involved the pleasant task of revisiting Qiu Xiaolong. I first discovered Mr Qiu quite by accident in the Baptist University bookshop. Seeing a paperback with a colourful cover lurking amid all the solemn academic stuff I picked it up to ask what a nice girl like you was doing in a place like this. It turned out to be a mystery novel, Mr Qiu’s first. Now I am a bit picky about mysteries. When I was a kid I learned to read very early (my mother taught me, as was customary in respectable working class households in those days) and I developed a ferocious appetite for books. My parents desperately bombarded me with paperbacks in an effort to keep up and being pretty indiscriminate I read most of them. So at various times I read Sherlock Holmes, of course, Agatha Christie, who I thought over-rated, Chandler, Ellery Queen, whoever wrote the Saint books, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, and so on and on. Generally this did not survive adulthood, though I will read a Dalziell and Pascoe instalment any time I find one, And Mr Larsson’s trilogy is wonderful. Anyway I was interested enough to rescue Mr Qiu from academic exile and take him home.

The test of success for a mystery novel is whether, besides the mystery, it works as a novel. Are there interesting characters, are you drawn into an imagined world? Mr Qiu passes this test with flying colours. His novels (there are now six – I have them all) all concern a Shanghai cop, Chief Inspector Chen. He has a sidekick, of course, one Detective Yu, whose wife – a resourceful lady – is the only consistent female character. Inspector Chen has various romances but something always comes along to preserve his bachelor status. Generally in each book there is a murder, sometimes more than one. Inspector Chen has to navigate between police work and politics. Surprisingly often he is helped by his hobby – he is a poet and a serious student of Chinese literature. Mr Qiu lectures in this subject at an American university. He left China in 1989, which may or may not be significant, but he is clearly allowed to return because Shanghai is updated as the books go by. The books are highly recommended. They remind me of the work of H. H. Kirst, a German author who seems to have dropped out of favour lately, but whose books, at their best, explore the problems of a good man living in bad times — in his case Nazi Germany — and how to reconcile the desire to serve, the desire to see justice, and the desire to do the right thing in a politically poisonous environment.

One of the curious things about Mr Qiu’s books is the fixation with food. Meals are described with care and in detail. Frequently we are told about the preparation and the ingredients. This is not a plot device, except for one memorable scene in which Inspector Chen tries to get a serial killer to confess by bombarding him with “cruel dishes” in which animals are boiled alive, or otherwise abused. Generally though, this food thing is a part of the background. People are preoccupied with food. Every man his own Michelin guide. Meals, even street snacks, are described and relished in exquisite detail. I thought this was just a personal quirk – an attempt, perhaps. to achieve credibility by bombarding the reader with details.

Well perhaps not. This summer my wife and I are planning a cruise down the Danube. This is a luxurious and leisurely affair suitable to elderly retirees (thank you Alex) with the emphasis on culture and history. In preparation for this one of our friends loaned me a copy of Danube, a highly praised though now somewhat dated book by Claudio Magris (translated from the original Italian) recording a journey down the river and exploring the “tumult of history, literature and mythology” to be encountered on the way. Actually this is not the same as our trip – Magris is a land traveller and we will be on a boat. Also some of his descriptions are now hopelessly out of date because the book was written in the early 80s when many of the Danube countries were still in the Warsaw Pact, or if you prefer the Russian empire. This gives the book a poignant feel, because the author constantly comes across traces of that vibrant Middle European community through which the Iron Curtain had plonked itself.

Now, when we get to Bulgaria Magris wonders why his guide, a young lady called Kitanka, is so cheerful dspite the distressing circumstances of her country. And he considers a theory advanced by Vasov (I have no idea who Vasov is but apparently he wrote about life in Bulgaria when it was ruled by the Turks). “Oppression, he writes in his novel-epic of Bulgaria, has the privilege of making people’s happy; for when the political arena is closed, society seeks consolation in the immediate good things of life, in wine drunk under the trees, in love …”  I suppose good food would come into this category. So perhaps Mr Qiu is being observant rather then creative when he gives intelligent and moderately prosperous Shanghainese people an inordinate interest in the good things of the table.

And perhaps I shouldn’t be so rude about Hong Kong politics. At least we still have politics. And we have good food as well.

An interesting little storm has been stirred up – by Jasper Tsang of all people – about the problems of Exco. The basic problem of Exco is that nobody cares what it thinks any more. The fact that a proposal has been approved by Exco falls with a soundless plop into the well of public indifference. Even Legco members are not impressed.

The standard explanation for this, at least in the circles in which Jasper moves, is that it is much harder to impress Legco now that it has been politicised. They look back to a golden age before 1997 when Legco was more biddable, and hence approval by Exco was effectively the last hurdle which most policy proposals had to surmount. The fault is not in Exco, but in the circumstances which now surround it.

This is much too easy. Legco was not the only thing which changed in 1997. The change in Exco was more subtle. Under the colonial system Exco contained two groups. One was the government’s senior apparatchiks – the Chief Secretary and so on. The other was a group of people who were effectively (though not officially) ex officio — that is to say they were appointed because of the jobs they held. In some cases (the Commander British Forces, for example) this was quite explicit. In others (the Hong Kong Bank Chairman of the day) it was fairly shameless. In yet others it was more subtle (the representative of local millionaires). These people had certain characteristics in common. They did not owe their positions to the grace and favour of the Governor of the day.  They were eminent in their own fields and did not particularly need his praise and approval. Consequently their advice – though no doubt not disinterested – was at least free from fear. Membership of Exco was not a career pinnacle for this group. Many of them no doubt regarded it as a chore.

I do not suggest that the resulting advice was excellent. Sometimes it was abysmal. When the UK legalised homosexuality Hong Kong would normally have followed suit. This desirable reform was delayed for decades because the then representative of the local millionaires claimed that Chinese people “did not do that sort of thing.” Nor do I suggest that this willingness to entertain outsiders is a tribute to the open-mindedness of Governors. As they were imported outsiders it was simply not possible for them to fill Exco with friends and supporters. But at least Exco’s view was independent. It was a fresh look which did not duplicate either the civil service consensus or whatever bee was currently buzzing in the Governor’s bonnet. Exco’s powers to oppose were very limited. Requiring the Governor to give reasons in writing for overruling them sounds like a rather trivial obstacle, though no doubt the news that the Governor was at odds with the locals would have gone down very badly with his employers in London. Still, Exco approval meant something. It meant that a group of mature and reasonably intelligent people from a wide range of backgrounds had looked at a proposal and found it good, or at least not bad enough to make a fuss about. What does approval from Exco signify now?

Well the short answer is nothing. Chief Executives still have the apparatchiks to rely on. The other group now comprises the CE’s assorted sidekicks, supporters, sycophants and small horses. Many of them are career politicians or would like to be. Being on Exco is a huge social step up for them (and a business boost for some) so continued membership is highly desired. It also appears that at least some of them are vetted by the PRC Liaison Office in Hong Kong. There was an intriguing little story the other day relating that Mr Alan Lee had been asked by a Mainland official if he could suggest any new Exco members. He duly offered a name. Weeks later he heard that the individual concerned was regarded as unsuitable. Now Mr Lee has been around for a while. He knows how official minds work and we can I think take it that he did not nominate a conspicuous member of the Martin Lee Fan Club. So one wonders what the problem with his nominee was.

Tracing Exco’s problems back to 1997 obscures the fact that some of them are of recent vintage. The various friends and supporters recruited by Messrs Tung and Tsang may not have been inspiring, but at least they were more or less honest. It appears that many of Mr C.Y. Leung’s most enthusiastic supporters backed him because they were, or expected to be, in trouble with the law. No doubt in such circumstances membership of Exco helps. It hardly increases public respect for the administration, though, and leaves you wondering about Mr Leung. Has the poor man no real friends?

A nasty little accident befell Mr Alex Lo the other day. Mr Lo has often provided provocation for a piece here, because the poor man has to write every day. This is a lot. Bernard Levin used to write three days a week. In my prime I could manage seven columns a month. Mr Lo has to do his thing on Page 2 five days a week, so thought is sometimes a touch hasty. Anyway on Monday he did a piece on the international story which announced that Hong Kong people were global leaders in racism. It then transpired that there was a mathematical error in the original information. So Hong Kong people are not racist after all. On Tuesday Mr Lo apologised and will, perhaps, be more sceptical about social science in future. Still, this is the sort of accident which could happen to anyone. As a columnist you comment on what appears in the news. If that turns out to be wrong then you comment may turn out to be unjustified. It’s a normal hazard.

However on the tail of his musings on racism Mr Lo wandered into another matter. Hong Kong people, he said, like to “direct their animus towards the mainland Chinese”. This was not racism by the dictionary, but “just as shameful”. And he went on “we think we are just morally, politically and culturally superior, mostly because we know little or nothing about what’s really happening on the mainland beyond cliched narratives found in the mass media.” I cannot resist the thought at this point that the last sentence qualifies as a cliched narrative in itself.

I am not sure which part of this to disagree with first. Let us start with the cliched narratives. Turning to the China pages on the same day we find stories on pollution in Beijing, graduate unemployment, the suspected hijacking of a fishing boat by the North Korean navy, local governments cracking down on environmental protests, an academic suggestion that the Chinese Communist Party would be healthier if there was an official way to leave it, a graft scandal, and a long story about a security equipment exhibition which notes among other things that China spends more on internal security than it does (officially) on defence. This is a normal day’s crop, I suppose. And it would, perhaps, lead Hong Kong people to suppose that in some ways we are superior, because we have the rule of law, fair elections and freedom to protest, and in other ways we are not. That does not look like a particularly misleading picture to me. China is a police state. That is not a cliched narrative; it is a fact.

In any case, why should we suppose that Hong Kong people get most of their ideas about the mainland from the mass media? Most Hong Kong people are free to visit the mainland any time. Many of them do so at least once a year. Some of them go much more often. Mainland friends, relatives, fellow students and recent immigrants are all over the place. It seems to me extremely unlikely that “we know little or nothing” except what we can glean from the media. In fact most people have no difficulty in detecting that the picture of the mainland presented in, say, the China Daily is missing some important features.

Trudging on through the errors we come to the claim that having a jaundiced view of mainlanders is not quite racism but just as bad. No it isn’t. Racism is a poison which leads to prejudice, discrimination and oppression. Having a derogatory stereotype about people from some parts of your own country is a minor sin as long as you can keep a sense of humour about it. Flanders and Swann’s satirical song about the superiority of the English over the other inhabitants of the British Isles can be found here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdY1Y5XNJBY&list=PLDF3C913CACF01915

Hong Kong people do, I agree, have a somewhat derogatory stereotype about mainlanders who turn up in Hong Kong. This has nothing to do wtih ignorance of the mainland. It is because of the spectacle of whole blocks of flats sitting empty while the mainland moneylaunderers who own them wait for prices to go higher, of whole streets devoted to selling overpriced luxury goods, and people behaving badly on public transport. Like all stereotypes this is unfair, and like most stereotypes it contains a grain of truth. Most of us have been elbowed aside by a pushy PTH-speaker on the MTR by now. But this sort of friction is an almost universal consequence of mass tourism. When I worked in Blackpool they had a thing about Glaswegians. The Glaswegian reputation for excessive drinking and ensuing violence was not entirely unjustified. During the relevant fortnight the Glasgow police used to send a deputation down to the Blackpool railway station so that those of their regular customers who were already fighting drunk when they got off the train could be sent straight back home. But on the whole people did not take this too seriously and sober Scots were treated just like anyone else.  The situation is more delicate if the visitors are conspicuously well off. As a student my favourite holiday playground was Yugoslavia, as it then was. It was important when visiting there to establish that you were not German. The Germans visited in large quantities and they were all much better off than the average local citizen. This does not go down well.

So in some ways it may be convenient that Hong Kong people are not too impressed by mainland visitors. At least we are not jealous. We love our locusts.