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Eating outside: a must-try experience which is fading away

July 17, 2024 by timhamlett

Let us now praise legislator Judy Chan (New People’s Party; Electoral Committee constituency) for what appears to be an effort to make sense of the government’s policy on food served in the street or, as the official phraseology has it, “fixed-pitch and itinerant hawker stalls selling food with local characteristics.”

In this laudable pursuit Ms Chan put down a written question. Indeed she did not just put down a question, she composed a mega-question. Short story writers have managed with fewer words. After a little warm-up paragraph the question consists of ten sub-questions, some of them with multiple prongs and alternatives: is the government doing X and if so how many times in the last three years and if not why not?

This literary brick dropped into the lap of the Secretary for Environment and Ecology (cool new job title, if I may say so) Tse Chin-wan, a recycled environmental civil servant. Mr Tse’s equally lengthy reply exemplifies the rule in these matters: the longer the question the less you learn from the reply.

The problem here is that one of Hong Kong’s traditional attractions is the street restaurant, or dai pai dong, which offers tourists the alluring prospect of a local meal in the open air. Years ago you found them all over the place. Luard Road, Wanchai, for example, a much wider road than the traffic required then as it still is, was reduced to two lanes by a row of stalls on each side.

Over the years they have gradually disappeared. This does not appear to be the result of lack of custom. Most observers diagnose a classic case of official hostility. The official line, as articulated by Mr Tse, is that if there are any “suitable proposals which are supported by the relevant District Councils, the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD) will give consideration with an open mind.” He did warn that it is “very challenging to identify suitable sites.”

Many people who used to sell food in the street have been relocated to “cooked food centres” in municipal buildings. They are usually upstairs from the wet market (diners with delicate stomachs should avoid walking past the butchery horror show) and feature wet tiled floors, bare concrete walls and a lot of fans because there is no air conditioning.

In my experience the food in these places is OK but the ambience is not. The toilets often leave a lot to be desired too, though I must add in fairness that the facility in the Kennedy Town market is fragrant, floral and wins prizes.

A long time ago I joined a small group who met regularly on Friday nights at a place in Fotan which is probably not, in official terminology, a dai pai dong because it has a real kitchen with mains water and electricity. It gave you the flavour of the experience, though, because the tables extended gradually through the evening onto the territory of the adjacent bus station, so you would eat, weather permitting, sitting in an unused minibus stop.

This was a pleasant arrangement and gradually caught on with our friends, so that on some Fridays the group required two 16-people tables, to the great delight of the lady in charge of promoting the sale of Yan Jing beer. This is the state beer of China, though, in the opinion of many experts, not as good as Tsing Tao.

There was, though, constant trouble with the FEHD. A uniformed squad would arrive and terrify the operator of the establishment with threats of huge fines if a table wandered outside the area officially designated for dining. Their van would sit nearby, occupied by a driver who was sometimes spotted doing unmentionable things with his nose.

At knocking-off itme, which I think was eight o’clock, the uniforms would get in the van and go home. People who arrived earlier would often stand around waiting for the hour of liberation and amusing themselves by developing new insults for the FEHD, or Food Gestapo as we called them.

This was apparently standard procedure in many parts of Hong Kong. Many government departments have little foibles which do not really make sense. The Transport Department will not entertain speed bumps. The Police Force, though it has long abandoned the system under which retiring sergeants were expected to own large parts of Toronto, still has a thing about the ICAC, and so it goes on.

The FEHD is, for some reason, peculiarly hostile to dining in the open air. There are, of course, some potential problems with street food hawkers, involving things like noise, hygiene and rubbish, but this does not explain the department’s visceral hostility to people eating in the open air, even if the food is coming from a pefectly respectable restaurant and the space is not being used for anything else.

As a result Hong Kong has always been a problem area for open air dining, unless you get away to somewhere rural or an outlying island. And dai pai dong are an endangered species. There are only 17 left.

As tends to happen with endangered species they are now being eagerly touted to foreigners as an attraction. “Eating at a dai pai dong is a must-try Hong Kong experience and you can’t call yourself a real foodie if you haven’t dined at one,” chirps the Tourism Board on its social media.

Two of the Cooked Food Hawker Bazaars where the board suggests you can enjoy this experience are officially described as “temporary”. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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Where the law rules, and where it doesn’t

July 6, 2024 by timhamlett

One of the strange things about the much-cited rule of law in Hong Kong is the way it swiftly dissipates as you move north from the Lion Rock Tunnel.

The New Territories is famous for its exceptions. The Small House Policy (under which male villagers can build a house, supposedly for their own use) is a racket. It has been a notorious racket for 50 years and has the additional drawback of being grossly discriminatory against women. It continues.

The construction of illegal additions to small houses is another flourishing area. Occasionally terrible threats are issued but somehow nothing comes of them and most rural villages, viewed from the air, offer a rich variety of unauthorised fourth floors.

Most people in Hong Kong are not allowed to celebrate the New Year with their own fireworks. Villagers are not covered by this. When I lived in a rural village I recall sitting on my balcony looking down the valley and seeing occasional bursts of firecrackers, followed by plumes of smoke drifting across the landscape. It was like living in Beirut.

I also noticed a suspiciously transient dog population. Eating dogs is not allowed in Hong Kong. Where were all these large black dogs going? I got on very well with my neighbours, by contributing to the village welfare fund and not asking tactless questions.

Anyway with this background in mind I was not horrified or disgusted by the latest legal triumph, the use of applications to use agricultural land for boarding kennels, as a way to cover it in concrete, with a later switch to something more lucrative and industrial.

This was discovered by a careful piece of freelance research by Liber Research Community. HKFP report here.

Reporting on issues of this kind is a delicate matter. One wishes to show readers an actual specimen of the abuse in progress. But this is fraught with danger. One may well suspect that Farmer Wong was not being frank when he applied to build a refuge for homeless dogs on one of his fields. Proving that his application was bogus is another matter even if, two years later, the field is covered with the remains of dead cars. Maybe the homeless hounds were not as numerous as Mr Wong thought.

On the other hand, looking at the overall figures it is depressingly clear what is going on. The researchers looked at 60 sites which had been approved for boarding kennels, of which 19 appeared to be accommodating dogs, 31 were not and ten remain a mystery.

They had no difficulty in finding sites which had completed the process from approval for animal boarding use to approved industrial use. What boggles the mind is the apparent failure of the officials involved to see what was going on.

Consider: between 2015 and 2017 the annual total of applications for planning permission to run animal boarding establishments was seven. Between 2018 and 2020 it averaged 16. The average for 2021-3 was 35. That means that in the last three years more than 100 applications have been filed to run animal boarding places in the New Territories.

Spokespeople for the Town Planning Board say that there is nothing wrong with people moving on from animal boarding to other uses provided they have the proper permission, and offered to inspect relevant sites.

But you have to ask yourself what these people were thinking. Is the market for dog hotels booming on a scale to justify doubling capacity every three years? Or have rural residents acquired a sudden sensitivity to the needs of strays?

The SPCA estimates that Hong Kong has a dog population of some 200,000, which clearly entails some exciting business opportunities. But a study of owner spending on pets found no detectable figure for boarding or hotel costs. Clearly most owners manage to cover holidays by leaving their pets with friends, family members or the domestic helper.

Moreover many boarding kennels operate quite happily in ordinary industrial or commercial buildings in the urban area. Only the owners of large dogs (like mine) need to worry about whether their canine friend will have access to open space.

I do not suggest that the New Territories are a criminals’ paradise. Nor do I wish to encourage paranoia. But a sudden surge in the popularity of a rather exotic land use application should surely have raised a red flag? Would it perhaps help if the protection of the rural environment attracted a small fraction of the law enforcement zeal devoted to the activities of subversive buskers, or the wearers of political tee-shirts.

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School inspections: is it ‘How can I help?’ or ‘Impress me or die”

June 29, 2024 by timhamlett

School inspections are a funny business. They sit on an obstinate paradox which makes it difficult to have confidence in the results.

An experienced observer can glean quite a lot about a school from walking the corridors: are the students cheerful and well-behaved; what is on the walls? Our observer can gather more from looking at documents: are the teachers planning and conferring, do they attend development courses, are they well qualified for what they are doing? But really if you want to evaluate what is going on you need to visit the place where education actually happens: the classroom.

This is where we trip over the paradox. The classroom is usually populated by the class and the teacher. Add an inspector and you are no longer looking at a normal lesson. The teacher usually knows the inspection is coming and can be tempted to put on a bit of a show.

Less obviously the class may respond to the presence of a stranger. When I did my teaching practice (a long time ago) my classes were fairly riotous. It was an all-boys school, and all the boys knew I was the lowest form of teaching life, and would be leaving after one term anyway. But by a kind convention, during the assessment visits from my tutor everyone behaved impeccably. Teaching briefly became easy.

The important variable in an inspection is the attitude of the inspector, which can range from “How can I help?” to “Impress me or die!” The gentle end of the spectrum can be found in the autobiographical works of Gervase Phinn, who was an inspector in the more photogenic parts of Yorkshire. The harsh end of the scale led to the tragic case of Ruth Perry, a primary school head who killed herself after being told that an inspection would lead to the school being downgraded from “outstanding” to “inadequate”.

Local inspections have generally languished in obscurity until last week, when the Education Department started publishing fairly detailed reports on individual schools. These demonstrated an impressive level of patriotic enthusiasm. Schools were rated on how far they had integrated national security into the curriculum, and whether they had introduced the required national education subjects.

The inspectors also, rather bizarrely, gave their verdicts on the quality of the flag raising ceremonial and the singing of the national anthem. Some schools were chided because the singing was not loud enough.

Public ire ensued, mainly because so many of these criticisms were levelled at two schools catering for “special needs”, the currently acceptable euphemism for children mentally or physically ill-adapted for conventional school life. Many observers, including me, thought that teachers in this demanding field probably had more urgent things to worry about than staging routine patriotic performances.

Special needs teaching is much more difficult than the conventional stuff and demands extraordinary patience, sympathy and persistence. It is one of life’s major injustices that money and prestigious titles (Professor Hamlett to you, Sunshine!) are showered on those who teach a carefully selected audience of consenting adults, while the saintly qualities required of special needs teaching go unheralded and unrewarded.

Having been loudly scolded on-line the Education Bureau subtly shifted its position. If children could not learn about the Basic Law and other constitutional matters they could at least be taught to sing the national anthem.

The bureau said “March of the Volunteers” had “a distinctive rhythm, a high-pitched melody, majestic force and embodies the courage and indomitable fighting spirit of the Chinese nation. Schools have a responsibility to let students understand the etiquette and attitude required when performing the national anthem, so as to cultivate students’ national identity and respect for the country.”

This really does not address the basic question, which is whether teaching primary school kids to sing this particular tune “loudly” is a good use of educational time. After all the anthem was intended as a film score, not a school tune. The rhythm is difficult, the range wide, and there is much variation in both.

The British national anthem (God save the King … or Queen as the case may be) provides an illustrative contrast. It is a plodding, simple tune. It can be played on anything from a kazoo to the Mighty Wurlitzer and everyone who has been required to play it recognises that it is terminally boring. The March of the Volunteers is more exciting, more interesting and more demanding. Some professional musicians have had trouble with it.

I imagine few schools have a band capable of providing the backing so what is proposed is a sort of communal karaoke with a sound track. Students who have not been attending, or not been attending to, lessons in Putonghua will also find they are effectively required to sing in a foreign language.

Under the circumstances complaints about the volume of the singing seem ill-advised. Different halls have different acoustics. Primary school kids are not opera singers and a common reaction to uncertainty about the tune or the words is to drop the volume. As we cannot switch to an easier song we will probably have to put up with this.

Anyway students will survive a few extra singing lessons. Whether the March of the Volunteers can stand this sort of treatment is another matter. Somewhere around the 30th repetition it will cease to embody the “courage and indomitable fighting spirit of the Chinese nation” and come to embody only the Education Department’s enthusiasm for repetitive and boring patriotic performances … by other people. Do you think school inspectors start the week by singing the national anthem together?

No, I don’t think so either.

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Security chief, red rag, bull … journalists?

June 25, 2024 by timhamlett

What is it, one wonders, about Chris Tang, the Secretary for Security, and the Hong Kong Journalists’ Association? Mr Tang, after all, has a lot on his plate. He is responsible for repelling every threat to peace, order and national security in Hong Kong. The latter, we are often told, needs constant alertness and attention. Yet it seems Mr Tang is never too busy to have a go at the HKJA.

The Association is a small voluntary body aiming to serve and protect the interests of people working in journalism. It does the usual things: seminars, workshops, occasional dinners and the odd press release on relevant matters. It has sometimes run a football competition.

Let me declare, if this counts as an interest, that I was a member for many years. When I first arrived in Hong Kong the JA was a bit of an expat hobby. It was founded by two foreigners in the 70s after a scandalous incident in which the Fire Brigade – which in those days, like the police force and for similar reasons, did not welcome press coverage – turned its hoses on the reporters assembled to watch a performance.

In those days people arriving to work in the humbler parts of Hong Kong journalism (I had been recruited by the Standard) did not join the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, which regarded people merely writing for local consumption as peasants. You joined the HKJA for the serious stuff and the Press Club for fun.

The Press Club ran a Wanchai bar situated beguilingly between a night club where frustrated rich men could meet mercenary fast ladies, and a motel in which the ensuing relationships could be consummated. Once a year the JA and the Press Club jointly organised a ball, which was what you might call a colourful occasion, both in dress and behaviour.

During the 80s there was a growing culture clash between the two organisations, which led to the HKJA dropping out of the ball and running its own annual fundraising dinner, a more respectable event. The Press Club was rescued from its continuing flirtation with bankruptcy by an unfrocked accountant called Len Dreaver and eventually dropped the Ball. The club closed altogether in 1997 because so many members had left Hong Kong.

After that the HKJA was really the only game in town, unless you could afford the FCC and had a taste for its somewhat expat alcoholic ambience.

During the ensuing 20 years or so I do not remember any particular tension between the HKJA and the Security Branch. There was a period in which I was regularly recruited to do a session on media relations with officers approaching promotion; after each session we of course had some open discussion, and this often featured complaints about inaccurate or intrusive reporting.

I imagine in most places with a free press you would get the same sort of thing. We would then go on to laments about the absence of a complaint mechanism for people upset about their treatment by the media, to which I would reply that we would be quite happy to have a complaints procedure as long as it was modelled on the police one.

This was all good clean fun and embodied the commonsense truism that the relationship between press and police will always involve some conflict because the objectives of the two groups sometimes coincide and sometimes don’t.

This brings us to 2019 when relations understandably became a bit strained. Mr Tang was then in charge of the police. The HKJA, like any journalists’ union worthy of the name, eagerly pressed for access to events and against violence inflicted on its members.

Since that time Mr Tang has resoundingly condemned the association and all its works on several occasions, questioning who it represents, who it gets its money from and whether it should be invited to press conferences on relevant matters. He has accused it of “infiltrating schools” and defending people who swore at policewomen. At one point he suggested the association should publicise its entire membership list, a curious suggestion from a government which condemned the publication of national security judges’ mere names as “doxing”.

This barrage gave the understandable impression, in the context of the times, that the HKJA was expected either to disband itself, like the Professional Teachers Union, or elect a more “patriotic” – or more tactfully “neutral” – leadership, like the Hong Kong Bar Association.

And so to last Friday, when the HKJA elected a new leadership, and Mr Tang rose to the occasion with “Looking at [the list of candidates], it looks more like a foreign journalist association to me. Most of them are journalists from foreign media, some are freelancers, some are not even journalists and their organisations have engaged in political activities.” Mr Tang was disturbed that the executive was light on representatives from local mainstream media.

Actually this has always been a problem, if it is a problem. Many mainstream media proprietors are violently opposed to trade unions generally and particularly to trade unions which seek to represent their employees. The JA leadership has consequently always been a bit overweight on the non-profit-making parts of the media business, like RTHK, and underweight on major media groups in private ownership. Insert the usual suspects here.

One must add that over the last five years or so the mainstream media have much diminished, and are now heavily outnumbered by the directly or indirectly state-owned sector, and the voluntary castrato chorus whose owners like a quiet life.

Many journalists who are still trying to pursue the activity in its traditional form may now feel that their lives are exciting enough without accepting office in an organisation which is clearly in the government’s crosshairs. In fact two members of the executive put in their resignations between the end of nominations and the counting of the votes.

Still, the question who is a journalist seems to be one about which one can think of more reliable sources than Mr Tang. Bernard Levin memorable pondered in one piece whether journalism was an art, a craft, a trade, a confidence trick or a disease. Each of these theories would lead to a different definition but none of them supports the suggestion that entry to the profession should be monitored by a retired policeman.

What seems to me worthy of comment and universally overlooked is that Mr Tang’s preoccupation with the HKJA has apparently led to spying on it. No doubt the identities of the candidates and their professional activities were transmitted to voters. But Mr Tang is, I presume, not an HKJA member so he was not entitled to see them.

Commenting on the antecedents and character of the candidates looks dangerously close to the sort of intimidating letter which concludes with some such phrase as “we know where you live”.

So I salute the incoming executive, who are no doubt well aware that one mis-step could bring them a long encounter with the government’s correctional servants. As Sophie Scholl wrote: “How can we expect righteousness to prevail if there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause?”

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Hong Kong’s worst ever riots? Read the history

June 14, 2024 by timhamlett

Ronny Tong’s graduation from a producer of occasional pro-government soundbites to a fully-fledged writer of op-ed pieces will no doubt raise the literary quality of local journalism, but calls for one piece of advice.

At the risk of sounding like everyone’s favourite Fawlty Towers episode (“Don’t mention the war”) I would suggest not mentioning the 1967 riots.

Mr Tong thought it germaine to controversies about national security law cases that in 1967 the colonial government had prosecuted some people for subversion. This is a fairly unhelpful analogy in any case, because that was the old unamended subversion law with a maximum penalty of two years in prison.

It also subverts a key message propagated by fans of the new approach to national security: that the events of 2019-20 involved unprecedented quantities of gore and vandalism.

A recent piece by Lau Siu-kai, for example, featured “The riots in 2019-20 were some of the most violent, bloody, significant, lengthy and destructive in Hong Kong’s history.” The anonymous author of defensive government press releases said in a recent offering that “During the Hong Kong version of ‘colour revolution’ in 2019, massive riots and violence occurred incessantly.”

Well, someone has not been studying their history very carefully. The most violent and destructive riots in Hong Kong history probably occurred in 1956, triggered by tensions between supporters of the two sides in the then recent Chinese Civil War.

When the teargas cleared a total of 59 people had been killed, more than 500 injured and some 6,000 arrested, though only 2,200 of the latter were eventually charged with anything. Property damage was estimated at US$1 million.

The only rival to this as a public catastrophe was the 1967 outbreak, also an offshoot of then current mainland events, which at the time included the Cultural Revolution.

The 1967 riots left 51 people dead, ten of whom were policemen and 22 of whom were shot by the forces of order. More than 800 people were injured. Many of the injuries were caused by home-made bombs, of which 1,100 were planted, as well as 7,000 bogus ones to keep the authorities on the hop.

Police arrested 4,979 people, of whom 1,936 were eventually convicted. Statistically minded readers will notice that the number of arrests was about half that recorded in 2019-20. This probably reflects the size of the police force, which more than doubled between 1969 and 2019.

Clearly in its effects both human and economic the 1967 outbreak dwarfs our recent difficulties. The government hastened to implement reforms to address the grievances discovered by a commission of inquiry into comparatively minor riots the previous year. It also changed the law on riot, introducing the prosecutor-friendly version we now enjoy, which is something of an international scandal. Even the Singapore version provides more protection for defendants.

Businesspeople panicked in large quantities, and optimistic property types set themselves up for life by buying at bottom prices the landbanks of fleeing emigrants.

Another aspect of the 1967 outbreak which sheds an interesting light on current affairs is that by a little over two years later all those convicted had been tried, sentenced, collected the usual discounts and been released, a landmark signalled by the release of a hapless Reuters journalist who had been held in Beijing as some sort of hostage for 27 months.

In short, compared with previous outbreaks in Hong Kong the 2019-20 unrest was not so much an outbreak of massive violence as an extended piece of street theatre: violent, dangerous and athletic but, like professional wrestling, not actually homicidal.

The only death, apart from a handful of protest suicides, was of an elderly gentleman who wandered between two hostile groups who were throwing bricks at each other. The government tried hard to attribute the fatal brick to the protest camp by prosecuting a protester, but he was acquitted because there was no evidence that he had actually thrown a brick at all. So the political affiliations of the projectile remain a mystery.

Some of the injuries were serious and some of the property damage was no doubt expensive. But “massive and continuous violence”? Surely we can all learn to love the national security law and its local offshoot without pretending that the city was a mass of blood and flames before they arrived.

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The trial of the 47: would it really be the end of the world if the CE had to resign?

June 5, 2024 by timhamlett

Well we have been waiting four years for some judicial explanation of an enduring mystery, and we’re still waiting. What could possibly be wrong with holding a primary election?

We have some progress. Looking at the outcome of the Trial of the 47 primary participants it appears that it is not the primary as such which is the problem. The problem is what you say you’re going to do afterwards.

Leaving aside the lurid things which some candidates said or wrote in the exciting pre-election atmosphere the basic plan was to pursue the “five demands” of the 2019 protests, and if necessary to that end to vote against the government’s budget bill. This would activate a process specifically designed by the Basic Law drafters to deal with the possibility of irreconcilable differences arising between Legco and the Chief Executive, and contained in BL Article 52.

The three national security judges entrusted with this case seem to have found this quite horrifying. There would be “dire consequence” from “persistent vetoing of budgets” leading to “serious adverse consequences on the operation of the government”.

This is a recurring theme. Convicting Kalvin Ho the judges said that: “We are sure that [Ho] knew that indiscriminately vetoing of the budgets would result in a constitutional crisis and the ensuing paralysing effect on the operations of the Government.”

Helena Wong “must be aware that indiscriminate vetoing of the budgets would result in a constitutional crisis with the effect of paralysing the operations of the Government.”

On Leung Kwok-hung, “As a former LegCo member and a veteran politician, we were sure that he was fully aware of the dire consequence of persistent vetoing the budgets by the majority members of the LegCo. No doubt he would have known that it would cause serious adverse consequences on the operation of the Government,”

The amateurs were if anything more extreme. Mark Pinkstone’s gloatpiece for the China Daily observed that “The successful candidates would veto the government’s budget and other crucial bills after gaining control of the LegCo, thus forcing the chief executive to step down, making the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government inoperable, and thus causing a constitutional crisis. That is subversion, an attempt to overthrow the government, the epitome of anarchy.” Another writer in the same publication said the by-election plotters would have caused “chaos.”

All of this is, actually, nonsense. No doubt some of the 47 defendants would have been quite happy with the idea of a constitutional crisis, chaos, or even anarchy. But to consider this even a remote possibility is to underestimate the care with which the Basic Law was drafted.

The easiest way to look at this may be to go through the possible outcomes one by one.

The first one, obviously, is that the democrats do not achieve a majority in the Legco election. In that case there is no problem. The second possibility, also harmless, is that they do win a majority but this is swiftly corroded by that magical process by which former pillars of the British colonial establishment turn into fervent admirers of the Chinese Communist Party. I have no idea how this is done but it happens too often to be a mere coincidence.

The next possibility is that the democrats do achieve a majority and submit their demand for the “Five Demands”. Our three judges, with impeccable hindsight, say that the government would never have agreed to these. But suppose that the government gives ground on those demands which are within its gift. There will now be a temptation for some of the more dilute democrats to declare victory and desist from opposing the budget. Because the next step is that under BL Article 50 the Chief Executive may dissolve the council. Newly minted councillors will lose their status and perks while these are still a fresh and pleasant experience. Nobody can persistently veto anything. Reject one budget and you have to be elected again, or not.

If there is no compromise, then, we have a new Legco election. Maybe the democrats lose this time, in which case the new Legco passes the budget and chaos is averted. If the new council also refuses to pass the budget then the Chief Executive has to resign under BL Article 52.

This is presumably the point at which in Mr Pinkerton’s view the SAR becomes “inoperable” or there is, as the judges put it, a “paralysing effect on the operations of government.” But this event is provided for. Under BL Article 53 the outgoing CE is temporarily replaced by the “Administrative Secretary, Financial Secretary or Secretary of Justice” in that order of preference, and a replacement CE must be chosen within six months.

Meanwhile, in the absence of a budget the acting CE can under BL Article 51 ask the Legislative Council for “provisional appropriations according to the level of expenditure of the previous financial year”. If there is no Legco present the CE can approve such appropriations without anyone else’s help. If Legco is present, but unhelpful, it can be dissolved again.

In other words, no crisis, no chaos, no anarchy, no government grinding to a painful halt. I realise that the selectors of national security judges have other things on their minds than picking the brightest bulbs in our local judicial chandelier, and three years of rampantly prejudicial publicity have not helped. Some of the more excitable defendants clearly expressed themselves in apocalyptic terms, but it is a commonplace political observation that promises in primary elections are generally diluted when the candidate has to present himself to the electorate in general, and diluted even more if he or she actually gets elected.

Still, the situation seems to be that in the 1990s it was considered acceptable, in extreme cases, for a chief executive to be forced to resign by a partly elected legislature, and in the 2020s this has come to be regarded as the end of the world. Perhaps the Basic Law should be updated to reflect this.

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Electric cars and the danger of whispering death

May 27, 2024 by timhamlett

Electric cars are a wonderful invention, reducing pollution and the demand for oil. They are also killers.

The main problem is that they are so quiet. Blind people, animals and those trusting souls who walk through car parks while checking their mobile phones, all rely on the noise of an approaching car to warn them of its existence.

Electric and hybrid vehicles, at low speeds, are virtually silent, or at least inaudible over normal levels of noise around them.

People have been complaining about this since the 2000s, when people who follow these things noticed an increase in accidents involving blind pedestrians. Eventually blind people noticed it too, and in Europe there were heartrending stories of blind folk stepping unawares before oncoming electrics to their doom. And in the UK, where the difference between god and dog is just a matter of spelling, heartrending stories of guide dogs obediently walking into the path of a vehicle when instructed to do so by an owner who did not realise anything was coming.

The earliest mention of this that I can find in Hong Kong was a piece in the SCMPost in 2016, reporting that the local blind community had drawn attention to the problem and called for electric vehicles to be fitted with noise-making machinery.

The following year there was a question in Legco from Kenneth Lau, who occupied and still occupies the Heung Yee Kuk’s hereditary Legco seat, about the matter. The then Transport Secretary, Anthony Cheung, replied that “the Government has on the one hand relayed the wishes of visually impaired persons to local suppliers of electric vehicles, requesting them to proactively introduce suitable sound alerting systems on their electric vehicle models to ensure the safety of road users. On the other hand, the Government is closely monitoring the development of relevant international standards.”

We may well doubt whether the wishes of visually impaired people cut much ice with local suppliers of electric vehicles, but relevant international standards have now materialised in many other places.

Accordingly in 2021 the Transport Department announced that it would amend the relevant regulations. All new electric or hybrid vehicles are now required to have what is known technically as an Acoustic Vehicle Alert System or AVAS.

This is not a particularly onerous requirement because it coincides with similar regulations applicable in Europe and the US. Electric cars should now be emitting artificial noises at speeds up to 10 kph (above which the noise of tyres on road is supposed to be enough) and also when reversing.

This requirement has been surprisingly controversial on the websites where drivers gather and share gripes. Some of them argue that the rule is unnecessary and point out that very luxurious petrol cars are as quiet as electrics already, which is no doubt a great consolation if you are run over by one.

However according to the latest research the situation is worse than you might think. The Guardian reported last week on a survey which covered 32 billion miles of battery-powered motoring and 3 trillion miles of the petrol-powered stuff. The conclusion was that if you were driving an electric in an urban environment you were three times as likely to hit a pedestrian as petrol-propelled drivers were.

The researchers carefully noted that the absence of sound might not be the complete explanation for this; electric drivers tend to be younger, and hence more accident-prone. Also a battery adds considerably to the weight of a car, and so to the distance it takes to stop.

Still the case for noise-making machinery seems to be pretty persuasive. Which leaves one question: why have I yet to hear any artificial noise coming from an electric or hybrid car in Hong Kong? I live in a fairly up-market area, where Teslas are popular and are regularly replaced. I have several times heard an electronic wailing noise which indicated that one was reversing. But when going forward they are still silently creeping up on me in car parks.

At this point we enter the realm of speculation. Some cars have an on-off switch for the AVAS. It is supposed to switch itself on automatically when you start the car but if you find the noise annoying, as some people do, you can switch it off immediately.

A more worrying possibility is that vendors are offering to quietly disable the system if owners do not want it. In the US they are not allowed an on-off switch. Would people be so irresponsible as to post on-line videos on how to disable this safety system? You bet they would.

I do have some personal history on this. For some years I drove a Prius, before all this had come up, and I did occasionally have hairy moments in which people who had not heard my whispering approach tried to throw themselves under my wheels. AVAS systems were not yet offered. A pity.

But now they are. If your car has one, please for goodness sake use it.

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In the UK a year’s delay is a possible abuse of legal process. In Hong Kong it’s business as usual

May 22, 2024 by timhamlett

It is nice to know that we still enjoy the rule of law, as we are constantly reminded. Still there are some important differences between the rule as practised in Hong Kong and what happens in other places.

This was brought home to me last week by reports of the legal problems of Sam Kerr. Ms Kerr is a woman footballer of extraordinary gifts who plays for Chelsea Women and Australia, the country she comes from. Last season’s output here – this year she has been sidelined by a knee injury.

Ms Kerr went out with friends and team-mates to celebrate her team’s victory in the Women’s FA Cup last year and had a few – well perhaps more than a few – drinks, leading to a dispute with a taxi driver and an ensuing dispute with a policeman.

The sequel to this rather routine sequence of events illustrates the different treatments accorded to the normal man in the street, famous footballers, and famous female footballers, when they succumb to the effects of alcohol.

When I was a court reporter people who got drunk in public places were routinely charged with what we called D and D, or Drunk and Disorderly. There were cases most weeks but we did not have to report many of them because the defendant was usually from outside our circulation area.

People who got drunk in public places were either itinerant street sleepers who drank in public because they could not afford to get plastered in a pub with the respectable alcoholics, or holidaymakers who drank in public because they did not want to stop when the pubs closed for the afternoon break which was legally required in those days.

The trial proceeded more as a ritual than a debate. The arresting officer would recite from memory the traditional description of the arrest: “the defendant was shouting and waving his arms about. When I approached him he smelled of alcohol. His eyes were glazed, he was unsteady on his feet and his speech was slurred. I concluded he was drunk.”

The arresting officer would then read out the defendant’s reaction to being arrested, which was often rude though occasionally amusing. I cherish the memory of “Go away and leave me alone or I shall call a policeman.”

The defendant, usually lawyerless, would then offer some mitigation or explanation, with a pledge of future sobriety. After one particularly eloquent promise of future abstinence the presiding magistrate said, quite gently, “Yes. That is what you said last time.”

The defendant would then be sentenced to a small fine, which meant if he was penniless, as he usually was, a few days in prison for non-payment.

If the person concerned is more famous, naturally, this harmless ritual may or may not be changed. Male footballers, like male politicians, are generally expected to be enthusiastic drinkers and would generally have to do something quite attention-grabbing to set the legal wheels in motion.

The situation of women is rather different. After long deliberation the prosecutorial machinery decided that Ms Kerr should be charged on the basis of her “verbal” on being accosted by the arresting cop with “causing racially aggravated harassment, alarm or distress to a police officer.” It may be – the prosecution and defence differ on this point – that she called him a “stupid white bastard.”

Perhaps I am getting old, but I do not remember policemen being so sensitive when I lived in London. In Australia “bastard” is almost a term of endearment, I presume the policeman was not shocked to discover that he was “white” and stupidity is in the eye of the beholder. Ms Kerr may well be sensitive about race; she has ancestors from India.

Anyway this was not the feature of the case which had me rolling on the floor laughing. The odd feature of the case was that her legal team was planning to claim the charge should be dismissed as an “abuse of process” because she was not charged for a year.

Good grief! A mere year? How unlike the life of our own dear justice system. A year in Hong Kong is nothing. The Secretary for Security recently told legislators that the time for a protest-related case to work its way from first appearance before magistrate to conclusion in District Court is “generally from 300 to 400 days or so”.

A team of researchers from the University of Georgetown commented in 2023 that:

Defendants must wait an exceptionally long time to reach trial. We found that more than 41.8 per cent of protest cases take more than a year to complete, with an average wait of 343 days, but this number almost certainly underestimates the true situation as it only includes counts that have completed; those with the longest wait times have now been waiting for well over two years.

And some of them continued to wait. Trials relating to the storming of Legco and disorders at Chinese U, both in 2019, came up last year. A man charged with posting subversive Facebook messages in 2020 was tried only last week. The famous 47, after first hearings at which most of them were refused bail in March 2021, are still awaiting a verdict, as are staff of Stand News, a case also started in 2021.

Probably the current record-holder is Benny Tai, who was charged in July 2021 with election offences committed in 2016. But the competition is lively. The latest prosecution arising from the Yuen Long incident was brought only this year. Of the 10,000 people arrested at one time or another in 2019 there are still at least 8,000 who have not yet appeared in court.

These inordinate delays should not have come as a surprise. Senior barristers warned in 2021 that the justice system could not handle the volume of cases brought to it by a policy of leaving no suspect unprosecuted and no pound of flesh uncollected. They suggested that prosecutors should not pursue cases in which no violence was involved.

This suggestion was not well received. So here we are. Legal delays are not so much feared as expected. The Director of Environmental Protection was recently asked if the government feared its latest development brainwave would be challenged in court. He said “Every judicial review will bring harm to the whole of society. No matter who wins or loses, it will take a long time, often years, to complete.”

Well it takes years to do anything. We have already had one case in which the convicted defendant walked free at the end of the trial because his time already spent in custody exceeded the prison term to which he was sentenced.

Part of the problem may be that Hong Kong judges are used to working rather slowly. They take long breaks. Hearings start later and end earlier than most peoples’ working days. At the end of the trial the judge or judges may take months to produce a decision.

This owes something to the prosecutors’ evident aversion to juries. In a jury trial the question of guilt or innocence is answered by the jury and the judge goes straight on to passing sentence. If there is no jury he must not only determine guilt but give written reasons for doing so. These will be carefully examined by the defence and, possibly, the Court of Appeal. So some care is understandable.

Still, there is someone responsible for all this, and that is the Secretary for Justice, Paul Lam. Mr Lam recently assured us all that we are free to criticise the government so he will presumably not mind my saying that he presiding over a disaster area. Faced with a shortage of capacity in the justice factory he has failed either to expand the staff, speed up the production line or reduce the production quota. So the unfinished work is piling up.

The DoJ’s Prosecution Code says that, “The prosecutor must be alert to the rights of an accused which are relevant to the prosecution process, including equality before the law, the rights to have confidential legal advice, to be presumed innocent, and to have a fair trial without undue delay (my italics) under Basic Law Articles 25, 35 and 87 (Bill of Rights Articles 10 and 11).

Is that requirement really satisfied if the defendant can fit in a four-year degree between arrest and verdict?

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We should not be expected to pretend that press freedom has survived recent changes intact

May 15, 2024 by timhamlett

A strange, indeed barely believable, controversy has erupted over a question which appears hardly disputable: whether Hong Kong still enjoys the degree of press freedom that it did before 2020.

Nothing has changed is the official line pushed by official government spokesmen in Beijing, echoed by local gaslighter general Grenville Cross in newspaper pieces. For the opposite view we have Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontiéres or RSF if you are subject to Quebec Province language laws) who are the compilers and curators of the relevant international league table, the World Press Freedom Index.

The message provided by the index is stark. Two decades ago Hong Kong was right up there among the respectable countries to which one might wish to emigrate, at number 18. In 2023 it was number 140 out of 180 countries covered. This year it improved to 138. The compilers gloomily noted that this was not because Hong Kong’s score had improved, but because some others we must now consider rivals had deteriorated.

As a result we have now surpassed South Sudan, Syria, Ethiopia and Lebanon. That is the sort of company in which we now find ourselves.

I realise that compiling tables of this kind is not an exact science. Indicators have to be selected, turned into numbers and aggregated. During this process choices have to be made and different choices will produce different results.

On the other hand it is difficult to believe that any subtle adjustment of the methodology would produce much alleviation of a 120-place drop down the table. People are free to wonder about the details: are we really worse than Bolivia? They may argue that things could be worse. China, after all, sits in place 172 this year, rescued from a lower slot by massive deterioration in Afghanistan, Syria and Eritrea.

However the complacency crew prefer simply to ignore all this. They also ignore some rather obvious anecdotal milestones. When the News of the World was caught in criminal mischief its owner, Rupert Murdoch, was summoned to a hearing in the House of Commons. He was not paraded through his newsroom in chains.

When the Hong Kong Standard was found to have fraudulently faked its circulation figures the owner was not prosecuted at all. The explanation, vigorously propagated by Mr Cross in his previous role as a government lawyer, was that such a prosecution might have resulted in the owner, Sally Au Sian, closing the newspaper and putting hundreds of its employees out of work.

The 900 or so journalists and many other workers who have lost their jobs due to the current spate of prosecutions will no doubt wish that this consideration still found favour in the Department of Justice. Mr Cross, like his successors, seems to have discarded it.

I still encounter working journalists from time to time, as well as people who used to be working journalists, and there is a clear consensus in the profession that times have changed. Indeed a common topic of conversation at journalists’ gatherings these days is who will be next for closure, jail or exile.

Perhaps this is too pessimistic. Mr Cross’s argument, shorn of some wolf warrior points about British hypocrisy, rests on two feet. One is that press freedom is protected by the Bill of Rights, the Basic Law, the National Security Law and its local supplement. The other is that large numbers of media organisations still have “a presence” in Hong Kong.

To take the second point first, this is not an indication of anything except, possibly, that Hong Kong is an easier place for journalists than the mainland, hardly a tribute to our “vigourous media scene”. The figure cited is for December of last year, so it does not include recent departures like those of Radio Free Asia and the Asian Wall Street Journal. Also the inclusion of a “public service broadcaster” in the scene hardly does justice to recent changes at RTHK.

But the legal side is Mr Cross’s speciality and here we are perhaps entitled to be most disappointed.

The Bill of Rights Ordinance was a genuine attempt to entrench notions of human rights in the Hong Kong legal system. It failed. Judges, possibly sensing an attempt to lure them into a political minefield, refused to cooperate. Attempts to rely on the newly codified rights were usually rejected on the grounds that the ordinance merely enumerated the rights that were protected under the existing law. The only substantive effect of the ordinance was the deletion of some “reverse onus” arrangements, under which the defendant was in some circumstances required to prove his innocence instead of the usual arrangement under which the prosecution has to prove guilt.

Judges have been equally unreceptive to suggestions that the provisions about rights in the Basic Law should be interpreted as invalidating any existing law which violates those rights. The national security law is, of course, above local supervision and any attempt to limit its purview would be over-ruled by Beijing.

It is a characteristic of legislation that it supersedes whatever was there before it so the local Article 23 legislation is not going to be much help in court either. Hong Kong, in short, has very fine verbal protections for freedom of the press, but they are in practice no help at all. They are like the similar protections in the PRC constitution. The talk is there; the walk is not.

This is regarded as a commonplace item of information outside Hong Kong and the idea that press freedom in the territory has been curtailed neither originated in nor is confined to the British Foreign Office. It is no doubt held with particular enthusiasm by the three freelance journalists who were refused admission last year, as well as the RSF representative who was barred more recently.

It may well be that things could be worse. We do not have prior censorship yet. The number of apps mysteriously absent from the Apple store matches the number in Russia, but not the much higher number in China. I can still write that we do not live on Planet Cross.

It may also be that national security requires sacrifices, and a reduction in the degree of press freedom available is one of them. I wouldn’t dare express an opinion on that. It is not my nation. But cake cannot be simultaneously had and eaten. Maybe the destruction could have been worse. Maybe it was worth it. But we should not be required to pretend it has not happened.

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‘Glory to Hong Kong’ is going the way of Barbra’s mansion

May 11, 2024 by timhamlett

In 2002 a geologist called Kenneth Adelman started a project in which he documented coastal erosion in California with a series of aerial photographs, uploaded to the internet and still visible here.

In 2008 he was sued by the owner of a coastal property, Barbra Streisand, who claimed $50 million for invasion of privacy, and asked for an order for the removal of photograph no. 3850, which included her clifftop home:

As a lawsuit this was not a success. Mr Adelman counter-sued under a California law against SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. Ms Streisand lost and was ordered to pay her opponent’s costs, which came to US$177,000. An order to remove the offending picture was refused.

As a way of preserving Ms Streisand’s privacy this was not a great success either. Before the case blew up “image 3850” had been viewed six times, including two visits from Ms Streisand’s lawyers. More than 420,000 visits were recorded in the month after the case hit the headlines. Everyone now knows where she lives.

In her memoirs Ms Streisand blames her lawyer for attempted overkill. She says she would have been quite happy just to have her name removed from the caption and that was all she asked for. The bid for $50 million in damages was not her intention. No comment.

However the curious result of this affair is that Ms Streisand enjoys a curious form of long-term fame which has nothing to do with her undoubtable proficiency as a singer and actress. The “Streisand effect” is used for attempts to suppress something which achieve the perverse effect of making it more widely known. The effect has a Wikipedia page.

The local relevance of all this is that future updates of the page may well include the Hong Kong government’s long-running efforts to banish the protest song “Glory to Hong Kong” from the internet.

This ditty, a popular item in shopping mall singalongs back in 2019, caused acute pain to local fans of the new order because for a while people who Googled “Hong Kong national anthem” found it at the top of their list, and as a result some people erroneously played “Glory” to salute the achievements of Hong Kong teams in international sporting contests.

The problem, it seems, was that Hong Kong did not have a national anthem – we use the China one – and the website explaining this was only available in Chinese. This has been fixed. Google searches now find a link to the Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau website, where the situation is explained in English.

This is, however, still not the top result. And this is where Ms Streisand’s legal misadventure becomes relevant. The top results are reports of the Hong Kong government’s efforts to ban the song globally, endorsed by the Court of Appeal last week.

I am personally quite an admirer of “Glory to Hong Kong,” both as a piece of music and for the sentiments expressed in the words, which are mostly not about the subversive “revolution of our times” but about “freedom”. Senior judges, it appears, have now noticed that “free” is a four-letter word.

But these qualities are not what has made the song famous. What has made it famous is the government’s efforts to expunge it from the internet. Alas, this horse has now bolted. It is not just out of the stable but over the horizon.

“Glory” now appears in the most unlikely places, including the public piano in Saint Pancras station. Hongkongers who are reassured by Ronny Tong’s learned opinion that it is legal to “have it at home” can download the necessary chords for home performances with guitar or ukelele. But if I understand Mr Tong’s advice correctly the performance must not be audible to your neighbours.

The prospect of the latest appeal hearing catapulted the song up the download charts again. Many international media reported the matter, often providing a link for consumers who wanted to know what the fuss was about.

Data from Google trends, which measures the frequency of search queries, show upticks in interest which correlate with times when the song has been misplayed at sporting events, irate government reactions and ensuing legal attempts to ban it altogether. It is perhaps time for our leaders to contemplate the possibility that if they stop kicking this hive the bees will sleep…

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