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Accident, emergency or error: money is not the issue

January 24, 2024 by timhamlett

Our government is now grappling with a policy dilemma of the kind which is, sadly, particularly difficult for regimes which have dispensed with such luxuries as electoral politics and independent media: what sort of health service do we want?

This is the matter of principle behind the public musings of officials and politicians – including Chief Executive John Lee – about whether there should be an increase in the small fee charged to users of the Accident and Emergency departments of public hospitals.

At the moment this is fixed at $180. This has crept up over the years. The reason given for further tinkering is the number of people turning up in accident and emergency departments with conditions which are neither the result of an accident nor an emergency.

Officials describe this as “abuse” of the service. Let us note first of all that unjustified visits to local hospitals in some number are to be expected. After all potential patients are not doctors. It may be obvious to the medically qualified that the situation is not urgent; the patient may sincerely believe that it is.

Looking back on my personal record I can count six A and E visits: two in which I arrived in an ambulance, two which led to either stitches or immediate admission to a ward, and two cases of “abuse”. One of these was a request for help with a disintegrated and very painful tooth. The doctor could not provide anything stronger than aspirin for out-patients, and suggested washing my mouth with Scotch whisky, which worked. The other was a panic attack over a possible medicine mix-up, which had not in fact taken place: the young man fished out of the psychology department to help me was kind enough to say that I was right to seek help, just in case.

I infer from this unscientific sample that even a responsible citizen well enough off to use private facilities and happy to do so will in the long run develop some A and E visits, about one third of which will turn out to be unnecessary.

As a parent one also tends to be alarmist. Small children are generally not very good at describing their symptoms, if they can talk at all. I imagine few parents have not on occasion rushed to the nearest hospital, with an ensuing anticlimax. Many of us, including me, have also incurred barely hidden disapproval from a doctor who thought we should have come sooner.

The conclusion from all this is that even in a perfect world there will be quite a lot of arrivals in A and E which turn out to be erroneous. Whether the incidence is unusually high in Hong Kong we have not been told. I note, though, that in England, where emergency service is free, this was not a frequent complaint at all.

What seems to be bothering the Secretary for Health is the thought that people are deliberately choosing their local A and E because it is cheaper than a private GP. One idea he is toying with is to put the A and E fee up to the minimum sum a private doctor might charge for a visit. Another is to have a sort of sliding scale: if you arrive in a pool of blood it’s cheap, if you arrive with sniffles you pay extra.

This suggests some confusion about how our medical system is supposed to work. In the colonial days health was a matter of markets for the rich and charity for the poor. The poor did not do very well out of this.

Then Sir Murray Maclehose was sent to Hong Kong with instructions to turn the city into a colony of which a UK Labour government need not be ashamed. This produced, as well as a lot of public housing, an expectation that there would be enough clinics and hospitals to provide, at least for the grassroots, a service as good as that provided to the prosperous by the private sector.

This did not produce an imitation of the British National Health Service, in which most doctors are paid and hospitals built by the state, and treatment is generally free or nearly free. Nor did it follow the model popular in Europe, with health insurance provided at the public expense for everyone who could not afford their own.

It did embody the progressive consensus that, as the philosopher Michael Sandel puts it, “there are some things that money should not buy”. Patients could choose to “go private”, but inhabitants of both sectors assured them that the medical procedures offered were the same. Private hospitals offered nicer surroundings and, as one doctor told me when considering a range of private venues for an event which I would anyway sleep through, “a Coke costs more in the Mandarin than in 7-11 but it’s the same Coke.”

The consensus that our health system should offer nearly free care to anyone who needed it was somewhat corroded in the 2000s, when some senior officials seem to have come under the influence of Milton Freidman, or indeed of Ayn Rand. Charges were introduced for some expensive medicines. One can only feel grateful that the health machinery was not subjected to the same surreptitious sabotage as the public housing programme.

But where we are is still, in principle, a health service which provides a full range of services to anyone who needs it, at affordable or no cost. I infer that it is quite inappropriate to compare the cost of an A and E visit with the cost of a visit to a private doctor. It is not the job of the government to drum up business for private practitioners.

If excessive reliance on A and E is a problem, the solution should be to divert people with minor complaints to the district clinics set up to deal precisely with out-patient problems. They are generally even cheaper. The money is not the issue here.

There was an interesting piece in one of the public prints last month by two researchers of the Our Hong Kong Foundation, in which they pointed out that old people were particularly likely to turn up in emergency rooms (as indeed they are to turn up in hospitals generally) but experiments by the Housing Association and others had shown that with guidance and help at home seniors could be persuaded to greatly reduce their A and E appearances.

The authors also made some other good suggestions. In the evening the options for people feeling ill are quite limited. Clinics close, private doctors knock off work. The hospital may be the only place open. This is a good point. The only medics working evenings in our neck of the woods are vets.

Another interesting idea is to provide an out-patient clinic next to the emergency facilities to which patients in need of less dramatic help can be politely shunted.

No doubt these and other helpful suggestions would all cost money. They still seem more attractive than extracting what will in effect be fines from elderly hypochondriacs. And the more expensive you make a hospital, the more likely it is that patients who really need treatment will delay it for financial reasons.

If money is a problem, though, the government could reconsider the arrangement under which Accident and Emergency service is provided absolutely free to civil servants, former civil servants and former civil servants’ spouses.

This would have the added advantage that decisions about raising fees would be made by people who would themselves have to pay them, which always helps.

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Hong Kong’s universities: number going up, quality?

January 16, 2024 by timhamlett

An amusing coincidence last week. A kind friend sent me an interesting op ed piece from the China Daily about recent events at Harvard University, where the president recently resigned under pressure from major donors.

The writer of this piece mentioned, in passing, how lucky we were that such a thing could not happen in Hong Kong, because our universities enjoyed autonomy and were immune to interference from the government.

I proceeded to breakfast and the morning paper, which announced that the Vice Chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong had resigned a few days into what was supposed to be a three-year contract.

The resigning V.C., Rocky Tuan, made all the usual polite noises: honour to serve… time is ripe… grateful to all concerned for their support. The chairman of the university council also made the usual polite noises: university is grateful … outstanding leadership, etc, etc, etc.

And behind all this, as the local media reported with varying degrees of candour, was a four-year campaign by the pro-government camp to get rid of Prof Tuan, who had, in 2019, not found the safe course for university leaders in a time of crisis, which was to hide in the office and say nothing.

It is not entirely clear which of Prof Tuan’s indiscretions was unforgivable. Was it an expression of sympathy for his rebellious students? Or was it his statement in an open letter of a fact then widely acknowledged but now almost unspeakable: that some of the policing of protests had entailed more than a smidgeon of gratuitous violence from the forces of order?

Unlike the other local universities Chinese University was difficult for the government to pressure, because a majority of its council members were actually staff of the university itself, a legacy of its origins as a refuge for academics fleeing the liberation of the mainland.

This was changed by getting the Legislative Council to amend its governing ordinance, reducing the proportion of staff and increasing the proportion of outsiders, most of whom are government appointees. A similar change was reported last week in the ordinance governing the Baptist University. This was explained as providing “accountability to the public”, as if the public were going to appoint anyone to anything.

Defenders of the government will say that this does not amount to government intervention. The change to the Chinese U constitution was proposed by three members of the University Council. This will not wash. The three members are also members of the parties acceptable to the government: one DAB, one FTU, one Liberal.

In any case it does not matter whose idea it was. Having reformed Legco so that it is full of government supporters the government cannot escape responsibility for what happens in it. Nothing passes in Legco without the government’s approval.

It appears to be our leaders’ wish that nothing should happen in local universities without their approval either. This objective is to be achieved by appointing to university councils people who are willing to abuse their position.

It is an error to suppose, as a writer for the Standard did recently, that all changes in a university require the “approval of the university’s governing council”. Universities are supposed to be governed on a joint basis. Academic matters are to be decided by the Senate, financial and real estate ones by the council.

As teaching and research are the main functions expected of a university this should mean that most of the governing is actually done by the Senate. It is a long time since I was a member of a university council but I do not think this has changed, in other places. Certainly we did not aspire to fire the University Secretary, as the “reformed” Chinese U council did, or to veto a candidate for a deanship, as the University of Hong Kong council did.

It is difficult to feel optimistic about the future of Hong Kong universities generally if they are to be the playthings of political appointees who are unwilling or unable to respect the limits of their powers and rights.

We are, it seems, going to stress quantity. Another private university was recently born, so little Hong Kong now has 12 universities. On current trends it will soon be easier to find a university here than a branch of the Hong Kong Bank.

Quality may be another matter. The occasional publicised incidents in which some luckless academic is fired, refused admission to Hong Kong or chased out by a wave of ominous publicity on the front pages of the pro-government press are just the tip of a large iceberg, comprising people who have been made to feel uncomfortable and unwanted because their opinions, or research activities, are not in tune with the new reformed times.

They leave. The idea that eager replacements will appear is perhaps a bit optimistic. News travels slowly in academic circles but it travels eventually. Many overseas universities now have at least one staff member who worked in Hong Kong for a while … and has the scars to show for it.

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Imported minibus drivers must be tested as rigorously as the local ones

January 10, 2024 by timhamlett

Was I the only person a little disappointed to find that among the first wave of “talents” to be invited to cross our newly porous border with the mainland was a fleet of minibus drivers?

I understand the attractions of importing talent, recruiting potential geniuses, attracting the future architects of artificial intelligence with Chinese characteristics, and all that stuff. But minibus drivers?

Well, disappointed or not the government is now accepting applications in a scheme which is supposed to produce 900 mainland minibus drivers, and a further 800 drivers for coaches and cross-border buses.

I do not subscribe to the paranoid (or politically motivated) view that our government has been spooked by the wave of emigration and is now trying every possible means to fill Hong Kong with mainlanders to make up the numbers and replace the ungrateful flown birds.

Clearly a much older syndrome is at work here. Ever since the old colonial days Hong Kong governments have paid diligent lip service to market forces. But they have never plucked up the courage to tell any group of businessmen, however small and modestly important their business may be, that if they are short of labour the solution is to increase wages.

The scheme does not seem a particular safety hazard, although when I was last on the mainland some of the driving was … shall we say exciting? Driving on the wrong side of the road is not a difficult adaptation on one condition: that the vehicle you are driving is appropriate to the new system. The steering wheel needs to be on the other side. A mainland driver in a Hong Kong minibus should be able to adapt very quickly.

We can also take comfort in the thought that there is a test to be passed before you are allowed to drive a minibus. Last week the Standard quoted the Transport Department as reporting that so far six of the imported drivers had taken the test, and four of them had failed.

This is by no means a disgraceful performance. The pass rate for Hong Kong drivers taking the test was only 17 per cent in 2022, slightly lower last year. Clearly the test is quite demanding, and so it should be.

Consequently it was a bit disturbing to read that leaders of the minibus industry expected all the failed drivers to “retake the test” (Hong Kong Taxi and Public Light Bus Association chairman Chow Kwok-keung) or “makeup tests would be arranged in seven days so the drivers can be on the road as soon as possible” (Tse Cheuk-yu, owner of Hop Fat Light Bus).

Just a minute gentlemen. There are basically two theories of tests and examinations, both of which are erroneous. One holds that anyone can pass the test if he works hard enough. This led to large numbers of Chinese man spending many long years in vain attempts to pass the old civil service exam.

The other regards the test as as measurement of innate and unchanging qualities. So England subjected 12-year-olds to an 11+ examination which sorted them into grammar school sheep and secondary modern goats, ostensibly for the rest of their school careers. This was not a success. My university roommate had failed it. The Scholastic Aptitude Test in the US is supposed to be similarly static, but research has revealed that students can achieve a worthwhile improvement in their scores simply by taking it twice.

So in the real world we have to accept that success in any examination or test depends on at least two things: the amount of work the candidate puts in and the qualities which he or she possesses which are relevant to the activity being tested.

From this point of view the existence of a 17 per cent pass rate for the minibus drivers’ test is rather reassuring. Clearly there are some people who should not be minibus drivers, and the test is successfully excluding them from the profession.

We lay people may not be sure exactly what the problem might be. Is there some subtle requirement for a kind of hand/eye coordination not found in pedestrian life, a feel for machinery, an unflappable personality?

Whatever it may be, I trust the examiners will not be swayed by the industry’s urge to get warm bodies into driving seats. When I was teaching there was an unstated expectation that we would try to ensure somehow that students who were spending large sums in the hope of getting a particular qualification would get what they thought they were paying for: the degree or diploma at the end of the course.

This had no ill effects because employers had plenty of evidence to go on (the transcript, or a degree classification) if they were interested in the educational attainments of potential recruits. No doubt medical or flying schools are more careful, or so one hopes.

Driving tests are an important contribution to the safety of road users. Tests for the drivers of buses and other large vehicles are particularly important. They should be rigorous and that implies that some people will fail. One or two resits may be acceptable for those hampered by nerves, language problems or an unusually stringent examiner. But not everyone can be a minibus driver.

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Efforts to regulate parking: a fine mess

January 3, 2024 by timhamlett

One of Hong Kong’s endearing historical oddities is the continuing presence of a First Class section on trains plying the tracks formerly known as the Kowloon Canton Railway.

There were some fears that when the line was extended to Hong Kong Island and the carriages were replaced, leading to longer journeys and shorter trains, the First Class would disappear. No other MTR line has one. But it is still there. I am a regular, though not entirely guilt-free, user.

And so it came to pass, as King James’s committee put it, that I noticed the fixed penalty for traveling First Class, without first doing a little ritual with your Octopus and a “validation” gadget, had risen from $500 to $1,000.

Is that rather a lot? Difficult to say. My anecdotal impression is that most of the people caught by the MTR inspection teams are either in my age group or mainlanders, which suggests that they perhaps misunderstood the requirements of the system rather than were making any serious attempt to cheat. On the other hand they must also have overlooked the copious signage which the MTR provides.

The obvious standard for comparison is the fixed penalties for other offences not under the jurisdiction of the MTR Corporation. But this presents a rather disorderly scene. There is a tendency for fines to be revised upward occasionally in the light of inflation. Also the more recently imposed ones tend to be bigger.

So smoking in a public or prohibited place will cost cost you $1,500, a level set in 2009. Shopkeepers who fail to charge their customers for plastic bags can be charged $2,000, which dates from the same year. Requirements on mask wearing and public gatherings, introduced during COVID, attracted fixed penalties of $5,000.

Various public cleanliness rules have been with us for a long time, but the penalties were updated last year, and now run to $3,000 for littering, spitting, bill sticking and failure to tidy up after your dog, with $6,000 for obstructing a public place or unlawful waste disposal.

The one anomalous area concerns traffic. Fixed penalties for speeding and other minor offences range from $230 to $1,000, though some of them also come with penalty points. Scandalously the cost of a parking ticket is $320, a level which has not changed since 1994.

I am not a huge fan of the Transport Department but this particular anomaly is not their fault. In 2017 the department proposed to raise the fixed penalty to $500. The government’s guaranteed majority in Legco, generally a compliant bunch, kicked up a fuss.

The department modified its suggestion to $400, but the relevant Legco sub-committee still rejected it, on the grounds that the government “should provide more parking spaces first”.

The then Secretary for Transport promised to continue to “discuss with Legco and stakeholders” what to do about this. But since then it seems that Legco and the stakeholders have stood firm in their view that parking should be subjected only to trivial penalties.

In fairness to some of the Legco members it seems they were concerned about commercial vehicles getting tickets during deliveries or overnight parking. On the other hand there seems no obvious reason why the government should be responsible for providing nocturnal accommodation for trucks and vans, whose buyers should have known in the first place that they would need to keep them somewhere.

Anyway the result of the level of fines is lively discussions on websites where car owners gather, about the attractions of parking illegally and paying the fines as they come in, rather than coughing up $6,000 a month, which is the going rate for a parking space in some estates.

I conclude that the MTR’s fine is reasonable, comparatively, while the level of parking fines is a sick joke. It is unacceptable that humble droppers of litter should be fined $3,000, which is a substantial proportion of many people’s pay packets – or two months’ income if you are trying to live on your “fruit money” – while drivers, an affluent bunch in general, are treated with such deference.

Notice also some mind-blowing figures in the budget. The government expects to collect $1.27 billion in parking fines in the current year. This will involve the issuing of no less than 3.9 million tickets, on average a bit more than four for every registered vehicle in Hong Kong. Clearly as a way of deterring illegal parking the whole system is a lamentable failure.

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Your right to a lawyer: another domino falls?

December 30, 2023 by timhamlett

We hear little of what goes on behind the scenes in the national security part of the police force. So small snippets of evidence are interesting. A couple of recent offerings suggest that an important right is being eroded.

The right to unfettered access to a lawyer is not disputable. It is mentioned in the Bill of Rights Ordinance which states at Article 11 (2) (b) that everyone charged with a criminal offence has the right to “adequate time and facilities for the preparation of his defence and to communicate with counsel of his own choosing.”

The Basic Law has Article 35: “Hong Kong residents shall have the right to confidential legal advice, access to the courts, choice of lawyers for timely protection of their lawful rights and interests or for representation in the courts, and to judicial remedies.”

These rights are explicitly confirmed in the national security law, which states at Article 5 that “A person is presumed innocent until convicted by a judicial body. The right to defend himself or herself and other rights in judicial proceedings that a criminal suspect, defendant, and other parties in judicial proceedings are entitled to under the law shall be protected.”

There is nothing in the national security law’s Article 43, which deals with police powers, to suggest that any new right is being conferred to deprive defendants and others involved in legal proceedings of their right to counsel.

This is something of a global consensus. At the risk of provoking local defenders of the law and industry who dislike international comparisons, the position of the European Court of Human Rights has been summarised as: “Restrictions on access to legal advice are permitted: (i) only in exceptional circumstances; (ii) must be of a temporary nature; (iii) must be based on an individual assessment of the particular circumstances of the case; and (iv) must have a basis in domestic law, which must regulate the scope and content of any restrictions.”

The UN’s declaration on the Basic Principles of the Role of Lawyers (you find all sorts of odd things on the internet) opens with “All persons are entitled to call upon the assistance of a lawyer of their choice to protect and establish their rights and to defend them in all stages of criminal proceedings.”

In more homely terms, as Vanessa Place puts it in a book about her work as a lawyer for nasty people: “Fellow cons will be the first to volunteer to crack a rapist’s skull, but will never question the scumbag’s right to a defence.”

And the government’s official advice, offered on its webpage, is that “You have the right to free legal advice (legal aid) if you’re questioned at a police station. You can change your mind later if you turn it down. You must be told about your right to free legal advice after you’re arrested and before you’re questioned at a police station.”

This is the legal situation. It seems to me to be rather at variance with details which have emerged about two conspicuous cases. The first concerns Agnes Chow, a former political figure of some consequence who was on police bail, though not charged with anything, until she made a curious deal with the national security police.

She would attend a day trip to Shenzhen, featuring educational visits and a lot of photography, and sign a letter of regret and contrition. In return for this she could have her passport back, and sign up for a degree course in Canada.

In due course she arrived in Canada and then announced that she was not coming back. Multiple interviews followed, naturally, and the one with AFP included this background detail: “I was told by the police not to tell any people… not my lawyer, not my family, not any of my friends,”

I take it from this that throughout the negotiation and implementation of the arrangement Ms Chow had no access to a lawyer whatsoever. It may be that there are some circumstances in which national security requires suspects to be discouraged from reporting the details of their cases to friends who may also be suspects, but “not my lawyer”?

It is particularly disturbing that this absence of legal advice continued through the signing of the letter. I was politely chided by the HKFP’s meticulous subediting department for describing this as a “confession” in an earlier piece, but the fact is that it was drafted by a policeman and not vetted by a lawyer, so it was at best a dangerous document. Presumably the expressions of regret included some description of what was regretted, and this may well have involved admissions which could have landed Ms Chow in further trouble.

I now turn to another recently famous interviewee, Mr Tony Chung. Mr Chung was in a slightly different situation. He had served his time for a national security offence, was released early, as well-behaved prisoners usually are, and as usual in these circumstances was still under “supervision”.

This is done in other places by a probation officer, but in Hong Kong is apparently a matter for the Correctional Services. Mr Chung obtained permission to visit Japan for a holiday, and fled to the UK, where he intended to apply for political asylum.

The CSD people are understandably a bit aggrieved that their sincere efforts to ease Mr Chung back into society have been spurned. But it seems he was also under the supervision of the national security police, who periodically interviewed him with a view to gathering information about his friends.

Once again it seems clear that there was no lawyer present at these interesting interactions, which Mr Chung found rather stressful. Again we have a background snippet, this time from the BBC: “A confidential declaration he signed before his release from prison restricted him from disclosing the interactions with the national security police to any third parties, including lawyers, he said.”

This will not do, in my opinion. I realise that police people tend to regard lawyers as an irritating obstruction to the pursuit of public peace. But the law is the law. People involved in involuntary interactions with the police are entitled to have a lawyer present. Requiring them not only to engage in such interactions without counsel, but also not to consult a lawyer afterwards, is oppressive. And, I suppose, illegal. Quis custodet?

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Survey of Hongkongers’ emigration views reveals a surge in the urge to leave

December 18, 2023 by timhamlett

Some people at the Chinese University of Hong Kong are still living dangerously. I infer this from an interesting piece of research, reported in a carefully phrased piece in the Standard.

This opened on what you might call a government-friendly note, announcing an “upsurge of citizens planning to live on the mainland”. This was not quite born out by the ensuing story but of course we must not blame the reporter (Marcus Lam) for that.

His first paragraph put it less strongly: “One in five Hong Kong residents wish to live in the mainland…” Even that may have been pushing it a bit. Later the desire to wander had been diluted to “would like to live in the mainland”, which sounds rather hypothetical. Still, no doubt the original question was in Cantonese anyway.

So, a boost for integration with the Greater Bay Area, exploration of opportunities in the motherland, and other worthy official aspirations, then.

Indeed it is. The number of people with an urge to move north has almost doubled, according to Chinese U’s Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, to 20 per cent. Further paragraphs explored the reasons cited: living costs, poor environment, pricy housing and, for some people, the stressful pace of life in our city.

On the other hand, halfway down the story we came to another interesting titbit, the proportion of the 708 people sampled who reported a “desire” to emigrate, which was 38 per cent, more than nine percentage points up from the figure last year.

Overseas attractions cited: more space, freedom, friends or family members already there, and cheaper living costs. Top dream destinations: UK, Australia, Canada and Taiwan.

The intriguing thing about all this is the surprising way things are moving. Of course the mainland has become a more attractive option as COVID-related travel restrictions fade into the background. The option has also been eagerly pushed as a patriotic choice, good for regional development and career opportunities etc.

Emigration on the other hand has not been encouraged at all, and in many cases involves having your MPF funds stolen. Despite this thousands of people have already done it, and this bunch of ungrateful malcontents are now presumably beyond the reach of Chinese U pollsters.

So it could be considered rather ominous that the number of people dreaming of a semi-detached in Sutton, or some similar distant paradise, is still growing, and now comprises more than a third of the population.

Most of those surveyed thought this was a worrying trend for Hong Kong, and only eight per cent of them had a “positive outlook on the SAR’s long-term development”. However the indefatigable Mr Lam did manage to find an upbeat ending: according to the census people the net population of the city is still increasing by about two per cent a year, with 173,000 incoming migrants easily outnumbering emigrants. One can only hope that all these new arrivals liked what they found.

Really this is a sad story. When Hong Kong was a precarious colony, a third world enclave with high hopes, of course many people thought or dreamed of moving on to somewhere more prosperous.

As those high hopes were realised many people changed their view of the place, and came to see Hong Kong as a city with its own culture and values, in which one might hope to spend a rich and rewarding life, raise kids and participate in a lively community.

In just a few years the picture has changed again. This is now “Happy Hong Kong”, as the official propaganda puts it, where more than half of the population wishes to live somewhere else.

One can sympathise with our leaders, in a way, because it has become very difficult to establish what people think of them. This is, of course, mostly their fault, with news outlets shuttered, inconvenient individuals jailed or exiled, and political positions reserved for government supporters. The chorus of approval is deafening. Are people really happy? It has become very hard to tell.

Indeed, you have to wonder, as the local Red Guards complete their take-over of the Chinese University’s governing council, how long the Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies will be allowed to go on conducting surveys which may produce embarrassing results.

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Agnes Chow and the rule of law: pot, kettle, black…

December 7, 2023 by timhamlett

Our leaders are awfully upset about Ms Agnes Chow. Ms Chow, if you have been abroad for a few days, was a young and charismatic leader of the protest movement when such things were still allowed.

Lately she has been free but on bail awaiting trial on a national security charge. It emerged last week that during this period she was taken by the Nat Sec police on a one-day tour of Shenzhen, featuring visits to a museum about the glories of modern China and to the headquarters of a mainland megafirm. She then penned a letter of confession and apology and, apparently as a reward for this act of contrition, was given back her passport, which she had handed over to the police under her bail conditions.

She then flew to Canada and promptly announced that she had no intention of coming back. Cue expressions of outrage, accusations of dishonesty and scorn for the rule of law, and promises that she will be “a fugitive for the rest of her life”.

The idea that Hong Kong people will be moved to horror and revulsion if somebody stays abroad to avoid a national security trial is a bit of a stretch.

Anyway the multiple channels condemnation has not entirely dispelled the suspicion that the national security people – as opposed to our political leaders, who have little control over them – may not have been entirely surprised or unhappy with this turn of events. Ms Chow would perhaps be a lesser problem for them as a traumatised exile in Toronto than she would be as a popular martyr in a Hong Kong women’s prison.

The strange thing about the official response was the frequency with which the “rule of law” was mentioned. Because what happened to Ms Chow does seem rather unusual by the standards of places where the rule of law is taken seriously.

I am puzzled by the assurance from government apologist and senior lawyer Ronny Tong that there is nothing to see here because bail conditions are routinely a matter for negotiation between defendants and policemen. I can see there may be room for some give and take when the bail is from the police, not a court, but compulsory tours outside the jurisdiction? Written confessions?

Those of us who fear that we may in future need the information will wonder how this actually works. Do the Nat Sec police appear suddenly at your home and whisk you off to the mainland for a bit of brain washing?

Or does the avuncular station sergeant to whom you have to report every week phrase it as an offer: “How would you feel about a free one-day trip to Shenzhen? Of course we’d have to give you your passport back for a while…”

Then there is the letter of contrition and confession. Is this done on police premises and is your presence there voluntary? Is advice offered: “I don’t think ‘misguided’ quite fits the bill; let us use ‘despicable’”?

What, one wonders, was really the purpose of the whole exercise? Chief Executive John Lee’s version is that the police were trying to “show leniency”. But that hardly seems to explain the compulsory tourism, which included, according to Ms Chow, an awful lot of photography. And what use was to be made of the letter?

Actually I am not too concerned about the tourism aspect, as long as the tourist is allowed to return to Hong Kong at the end of it. But if we are going to boast about our enthusiasm for the rule of law then negotiated confessions, with rewards offered – like access to a passport and, in effect, an escape route – should not be on the menu.

Haggling with the accused over her police bail terms is one thing. Eliciting a signed confession is quite another. While this important piece of authorship was in progress, could Ms Chow consult her lawyer? Was a lawyer present at all? Was she given the usual warning about self-incrimination?

If our leaders wish to preserve what they perceive to be Hong Kong’s international reputation as a haven of the Rule of Law, this requires more than ensuring that overseas business bods can get a fair shake in civil disputes with mainland companies. It also requires diligence in the protection of the rights of citizens accused of criminal offences.

Leaving aside the – shall we say unconventional – features of the national security law, further attention might usefully be bestowed on the matters of pre-trial publicity, the right to legal advice, and speed. Consider Judge Andrew Chan, who recently told 47 defendants, most of whom have already been in custody for three years, that to deliver a verdict at the end of their trial he and his colleagues would need “three to four months”, with “no guarantees” that it would not be longer. This is carrying judicial contempt for the value of other people’s time too far. Try harder.

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The Audit Commission’s turn to be sucked into the cesspit

December 1, 2023 by timhamlett

One of the recurring sad features of recent years has been the way that government branches previously regarded as professional and impartial have been sucked into the cesspit of partisan persecution of people the government does not like.

The epidemic has now progressed so far that it is easier to list the few survivors. One of which used to be the Audit Commission. For many years the commission engaged in the entirely apolitical pursuit of financial glitches in the smooth working of public administration.

Amid some bleating from the victims, it cautiously spread its purview from the counting of beans to the more delicate question of whether their spending was producing the desired results.

It has not previously felt it necessary to extend its activities to local universities, possibly because they are not financed in the way in which government departments are. Universities get a block grant from the UGC. It is up to them what they do with it. Also the objectives of a university are difficult to define. Unblocked drains or solved crimes can be counted. The inculcation of wisdom or the creation of knowledge are harder to quantify.

Still, no doubt we can all do with an audit. But if universities were to be added to the list there was a trap for the unwary. They should not have started with Chinese U. It is difficult to say whether this choice was a consequence of total political naivety or a high level of political conformity, but the message should have been clear.

Chinese U has become something of a target for the more lurid wing of the CPC fan club. It is the only university to have had its constitution tinkered with, the only one whose choice of Vice Chancellor was criticised. The ICAC is looking into a research centre. The Director of Audit should have been aware of the danger that taking up this topic would look like one of those inter-departmental pile-ons previously inflicted on independent bookshops and insubordinate media outlets.

I am not sure why Chinese U attracts so much attention from the People’s Puppets. It may be due to its origins as a refuge, half a century ago, for academics who correctly supposed that they would have a better time in colonial Hong Kong than in “liberated” China. Or it may be due to the perception, for which there is no evidence, that Chinese U students were unusually rebellious in 2019.

Like the Polytechnic University, Chinese U was geographically unlucky, being next to an important transport artery. This made confrontations inevitable and consequential. Whether Chinese U students were more rebellious than their counterparts in universities less strategically positioned we do not know. We also do not know how many, or even if any, of the protesters who engaged in disorderly behaviour at Chinese U were actually students of the university. Ignorance is, alas, no bar to prejudice.

Just in case we didn’t get the political message the audit report zeroed in on national security matters. Apparently the university did not include in tenders or contracts a clause saying that the relationship could be cancelled for national security reasons.

The question which this raises is: why should it? Endangering national security is a crime. If the university suspects that one of its paperclip suppliers is endangering national security its proper course is to notify the police. Whether a crime has been committed is a matter for the courts. Taking your business elsewhere should wait. Universities do not include in their contracts clauses forbidding the employee from engaging in murder, fraud or illlicit sexual relations with students. That is not generally regarded as a deficiency.

The auditor also stated – and if he did not realise how this would be reported he should have done – that none of the university’s 33 food outlets had a food business licence. This is because they do not need one. Food outlets catering only to staff and students do not need a licence.

Aha, says the auditor, but some of them were serving people who were not students or staff. Apparently the auditor’s underlings took the trouble to trot around the campus and see where they could get served. This is a bit unfair. Chinese U is in the middle of nowhere. Outsiders turning up in its catering outlets are not a problem.

Then we come to the bookshop. The bookshop was, apparently, selling some small items which were not books. So? Also the contract with the bookshop said it should not engage in “unlawful” action but did not mention national security as such, and the university had not supplied the bookshop with any “guidelines” on avoiding national security risks.

The funny thing about this is that the bookshop is operated by Commercial Press, a firm well connected with the local state organs. I can think of some criticisms of Commercial Press – which operates the only bookshop left in Shatin – but indifference to the requirements of national security is hardly one of them.

I realise that the higher ends of accountancy are a cerebral, or even surreal, area, but they surely do not require the abandonment of common sense. The auditor complained that the university had not followed in all its intricate details the usual tendering process in arranging for two bank branches.

Could this be, one wonders, because there are only two banking networks in Hong Kong and the university, like other similarly isolated places, wanted one branch from each of them?

The complaint that many of the people offering retail services on the Chinese U campus have been doing so in the same way for years, with no change resulting from tenderings or renewals, has a simple explanation.

Offering services on university campuses in out-of-the-way places is not a road to riches. Most of the potential customers are only there for 30 weeks of the year. It is more like working on a luxury yacht (boss on: work like dog; boss off: nothing to do), than a conventional retail experience.

I confess that when I lived in a village near Chinese U I occasionally visited their supermarket. It is very small, even by Hong Kong standards, and was never busy. I may have dropped in for a cup of coffee once or twice. Sorry.

Unaccustomed as I am to agreeing with the Standard’s Mary Ma (whoever that is this week) I think she made an important point the day after the audit story hit her front page. The Audit Commission is supposed to “make sure public resources are used properly and effectively”. This latest exercise suggests that it is not setting a good example.

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Our CE wants more non-local students in Hong Kong universities, at what cost?

October 21, 2023 by timhamlett

According to reports the Chief Executive is going to propose doubling the proportion of “non-local” students which Hong Kong universities are allowed to admit to undergraduate courses.

This is intended, according to “sources”, to turn Hong Kong into a higher education hub. Another hub? Are we getting a bit hub-happy?

The move will raise the share of non-locals in the student body to 40 per cent, or from the current 15,000 to – presumably – something in the region of 30,000. To put it another way of the 15,000 UGC-funded bachelor’s degree places available each year the number reserved for non-locals will increase from 3,000 to 6,000.

The announcement came tricked out with some painfully obvious efforts to spin it in a nice way. The admission of local students, the “sources” said, would not be affected because “non-locals enroll through non-JUPAS avenues”. This is nonsense. The way in which local students will be affected has nothing to do with the admissions system. They will be affected because 3,000 places which were previously available to them will be offered instead to other people.

Universities, said “sources” would be encouraged to recruit students from Southeast Asian countries and “regions participating in the Belt and Road initiative to avoid the non-local quota being monopolised by mainland students”.

At the moment three quarters of the “non-locals” admitted are from the mainland.

This is likely to continue to be the case. Local universities now have lots of experience of recruiting students for “self-funded” (or as they say in the outside world, profit-making) post-graduate courses. The mainland market has many advantages.

The main one is that it is big. Advertise in a few publications, put up a decent web page, turn up at three or four “higher education fairs” in big cities, and you are contacting a very large number of potential customers.

Other markets are small, further away, have few people rich enough to contemplate sending their children to Hong Kong for four years – even if we are covering tuition – and need to be addressed in different local languages.

So mainlanders it will be. This is not a complaint. During my teaching years I encountered three waves of mainlanders and they were all generally nice kids in different ways.

We started with a few carefully picked individuals on lavish scholarships. They were selected with great care and although some mainland academics said rather snootily that of course they wouldn’t send their very best students to Hong Kong, detecting academic promise in 17-year-olds is not an exact science and these students were excellent.

They were often the most successful student in their classes and went on to win prizes and scholarships.

The next wave was not selected. They were the offspring of parents who could afford it. They were a pleasant enough bunch but a lot of them seemed to have come to Hong Kong primarily for the shopping. The result was unexpected. My local students had been quite happy to see mainlanders hogging the academic limelight and seemed to regard them respectfully as interesting freaks with a deficient sense of work-life balance.

The appearance of women (few local men and no mainland ones choose journalism) who dressed in what they supposed to be the height of fashion even on working days managed to spark in some locals a competitive spirit which had not been provoked by the academic stars. Although many local students still dressed like – well, like students – sartorial standards in my classes leapt upwards.

The third wave was the intake to our local version of the taught master’s degree. They were an educated bunch obviously. A degree was a requirement. Many of them seemed to have been very lucky in their English examinations though.

One year I was lucky enough to have a Norwegian student who spoke fluent putonghua and reported to me after the first class that the mainlanders had been horrified at how difficult my accent was. There is nothing wrong with my accent. I was a paid broadcaster for many years. I can only conclude that this is what happens if you ban the BBC.

Anyway the fact that many of the new non-locals will be mainlanders is not the main problem. Clearly 3,000 places disappearing from the JUPAS system would make it harder for locals to get places. If the places are not taken from the JUPAS system then universities are going to have to cater for a larger population.

Two Legco members offered comforting thoughts. Chow Man-kong (education) who works at the Ed U, thought the quota should go up to 50 per cent, adding that many lecture halls were big enough to accommodate a few more students. Prof Chow had not been reading the small print. If the quota goes up but the student population does not there is no need for larger lecture halls.

Ling Nan Prof Lau Chi-pong said the influx would not hinder local students’ search for dormitories as “These non-locals would have to settle their accommodation before coming here and Hong Kong’s public transport system is well developed.” But he added incoherently “no matter how far the students live, the universities will have to take care of their accommodation.”

Clearly some people, possibly including the Chief Executive, have not sorted out the details yet. Will the increased quota require a decreased quota for locals? If not, will the universities be provided with more money? UGC courses are massively subsidised. Do we really want to spend oodles of money on educating other people’s children? Will the non-local students have priority for student dormitories, upon arrival or for the whole course?

Above all is there a market for this? Prof Chow suggested that the government should set up a centralised student recruiting agency, which suggests a certain lack of confidence. This would “target top students and those from the middle class”. An interesting notion. Does Prof Chow’s university, one wonders, prefer students from the middle class? And is that even legal?

The problem which nobody dares to mention, of course, is that the attractions of Hong Kong as a high education destination for mainlanders have wilted somewhat of late. Our universities used to able to offer subjects like history, politics and journalism in ways which simply could not be found in mainland universities. Nowadays, not so much. We still have business, I suppose. This will perhaps in due course be revised to make it palatable for patriots. Capitalism with Chinese characteristics?

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Hong Kong U row brews some Nobel rot

October 10, 2023 by timhamlett

Michael Brock was a sympathetic and thoughtful teacher who guided me through 19th century English politics. I always tried to follow his example when I became a teacher myself.

But the most important thing he taught me was not about English politics but about university politics. We were discussing some obviously fatuous decision of the University Senate, and I expressed bewilderment that so many people who in their academic work were dispassionate and logical, could be so prejudiced and irrational when running the university in which they worked.

This was an error, Mr Brock said in his gentle way. The fact that people could think dispassionately and logically in their work did not mean they would think dispassionately and logically about anything else.

We had stumbled across what is now a commonplace of psychology: mental habits are, as they now put it, domain dependent. Habits and processes from one area will not necessarily influence others.

So we find that there are university professors who believe in fairies, cold-eyed financial analysts who carry lucky rabbits’ feet, and so on. This problem afflicts even the most eminent scientists. Linus Pauling is a good example. He won the Nobel Prize for his work in chemistry, and the Peace Prize for his efforts in global politics. He spent much of the later part of his life campaigning, in defiance of any serious evidence, for the idea that massive doses of vitamin C could cure the common cold, and cancer.

Mention of the Nobel Prize brings us to the local example which brought this matter into my head. I have been following, from a safe distance, the small scandal which has arisen at Hong Kong University, where a whistleblower, or possibly some whistleblowers, have alleged that the President and Vice Chancellor has been violating some bureaucratic rules on the spending of money.

I know no more of this than we can read in the newspapers and nothing in this item should be interpreted as implying any opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the P and VC, Zhang Xiang.

As often happens on these occasions some interesting snippets emerged into the light of day. One of the matters in dispute concerns a project to refurbish the private dining rooms reserved for senior staff. There are three of them. Am I alone in thinking three is perhaps a bit excessive?

Anyway the P and VC deployed lawyers and a private PR company, the University Council set up a small committee to look into the matter, and into this bubbling brew stepped Professor Fraser Stoddart, alias Sir James Fraser Stoddart, a global authority on the structure of molecules, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2016 and a freshly minted Chair Professor at HKU.

Apart from musings on international academic culture which I shall not visit, Prof Stoddart made two points in an open letter. The first one concerned one of the whistleblown complaints: that President Zhang had hired a headhunting company to look for a new vice president and medical dean, without going through the usual tendering process.

“I think organisations often have small windows to attract top talent and if they follow the rules and use Google search they may lose the desired individuals,” the prof was reported as saying. “Speed is of the essence. It has to happen literally in hours. It has to happen in hours. Not days, not weeks, not months. It has to happen in hours and things are not at HKU.”

University administrators all over Hong Kong then had to pick themselves off the floor on which they had been rolling while laughing. This is just not the way these things are done in Hong Kong and it probably shouldn’t be. The appointment of a vice president usually takes up to a year involving what is called a “global search”.

It must be said that the results of the global search are often disappointing. Since there is an unofficial expectation that the successful candidate will have a Chinese name and already be doing a similar job elsewhere the list of serious candidates often comes down to a few people who are already vice presidents or similar in US universities, or even a Hong Kong one.

Still, administrative cultures vary; it is not uncommon for people used to the way things are done in other places to find Hong Kong procedures frustrating. I happily plead guilty to occasional bursts of barely suppressed rage myself. But it is the way things are done here.

I suspect the underlying problem here may be that Profs Zhang and Stoddart are used to the way things are done in America. Hong Kong organisations generally – not just the universities – tend to have elaborate procedures, often adopted on the advice of the ICAC, intended to banish any whiff of nepotism, favouritism or corruption. This is an objective to which most Hong Kong people subscribe with enthusiasm. I hope the rules were followed. If they were not the council is quite right to take the matter seriously.

Prof Stoddart’s other point was about whistleblowing. He said the complaints should be ignored because “Anonymous letters and emails are not worth listening to, much of which are probably fabricated.”

This is not good enough. Of course people who wish to complain about the P and VC of their university are going to do so anonymously. Hong Kong’s protections for whistleblowers are very sketchy and in any local institution presidential enthusiasm for frank public discussion of alleged errors is limited.

If complaints cannot be made anonymously and investigated properly on that basis they will not be made at all. The Police and ICAC accept anonymous complaints for similar reasons. University councils should do the same.

I see Prof Stoddart was only appointed by HKU on September 3 of this year. A bit early, perhaps, to be participating in this sort of affair?

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