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Posts Tagged ‘history’

On Mr Trump’s aspirations to nobility, or Nobelity

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 13, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Quite the mind-boggling headline of the week announced (wording varied in different places of course) that the government of Norway was bracing itself for some retaliation from the USA if American President Donald Trump was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Well no doubt it would be good if all international statesmen were eager to qualify for the Peace Prize. On the other hand there is a widespread suspicion that Mr Trump’s ambition owes little to a passion for peace and much to resentment of the fact that Barack Obama got one.

Students of the history of international relations will no doubt have noticed already that standards drooped when the professional diplomats were elbowed aside by national leaders, whether elected or hereditary. But this is surely a new low.

I may be biassed. It is true that English culture traditionally sets a high value on modesty and self-deprecation. One may hope for honours but one does not ask. There is a character in one of CP Snow’s novels who is a senior civil servant and thinks he is due for a knighthood. So instead of signing with an initial he starts signing with his full Christian name (John Smith instead of J. Smith) in the hope that his seniors will see fit to put a “Sir” in front of it.

This is regarded as a serious, if amusing, character defect and the knighthood does not materialise.

The press pioneer Alfred Harmsworth had better luck. To the suggestion that he should agitate politely for a peerage he famously replied “When I want a peerage I shall buy one like an honest man.” He did later (without paying) become Lord Northcliffe. When I worked for the Derby Evening Telegraph we still had a rather poor portrait of him in the hall.

The presentation of honours in Hong Kong has never caused much controversy. The colonial ones were not taken very seriously because they were … well … colonial. Their post-handover replacements have not established themselves as a big deal.

I once did a rough study of the arrival of honours in the Legislative Council. It appeared that if you were a loyal supporter of the regime there was a fairly predictable time-line along which, as long as you survived re-election, you would travel from Justice of the Peace through bauhinias of various colours. One DAB member seemed to be stuck on the launch pad, as it were. I suspect he had refused to participate.

I am not aware of any similar study of how life treats those who go “seeking the bubble reputation” through the consultative apparatus.

There were some misgivings a few years ago when some people with qualifications in engineering adopted the pretitle “Ir”, which works like “Dr”. The “I” is because the title originated in French. Lawyers suggested that they should perhaps put in a bid for “Lr” before the librarians grabbed it.

Some people disapprove of this sort of thing. One of the idols of my youth was Charles Carter, who was the first Vice Chancellor of Lancaster University. Mr Carter was a devout Quaker and spurned titles of any kind. He always signed, and described himself, as plain Charles Carter and I only discovered that he was entitled to both Dr and Prof when I got a look at correspondence from polite outsiders.

He did tell me – a point lost on holders of honorary degrees in Hong Kong – that such honours should only be worn in the premises of the university awarding them. So if you have an Hon Doc, whether or not you earned it or “bought one like an honest man”, it should not be on your business card.

Anyway all this suggests that there may be an easy way to propitiate the unpredictable Trump. Countries which wish to bow before the president should look into the possibilities of honorary degrees, orders, knighthoods, perhaps (lucky old England) even a Lordship.

Alternatively, at the risk of punishment, they could refer him to the work of Thomas Gray:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,

         And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,

Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.

         The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

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A row over relics? How 16th century!

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on May 8, 2025| Leave a Comment »

With all due respect for what seems to be an unusually charming and harmless religion, it is surprising, for me at least, to see a public row over Buddhist relics. I thought that was a Christian thing.

I recall when I was still a student enjoying Albert Finney playing Martin Luther in the play of the same name, lamenting that “Jesus Christ had 12 disciples and 15 of them are buried in Germany”. John Calvin, the most austere of Protestant reformers, was similarly baffled by the numbers, writing that if all the relics were catalogued it would be found that “every apostle has four or more bodies and every saint two or three.”

Erasmus was also suspicious: “What would Jerome say,” he wrote, “could he see the Virgin’s milk exhibited for money; the miraculous oils; the portions of the true cross, enough, if collected, to freight a large ship?”

And indeed the field does seem to attract the unscrupulous, like the man who claimed to have found the coffin of Jesus’s brother (he allegedly had four brothers and a sister). This manifest forgery was at least surfaced plausibly in the Holy Land. What can we say for the enterprising individual who claimed he had found part of Noah’s diary … in Michigan?

Anyway the story which sent me scurrying down all these historical by-ways concerned a stash unearthed in India by a colonial official in 1898. This included a pot inscribed with the claim that it contained some of the bones of Buddha, which according to the usual unreliable sources were distributed to various pious monarchs after his cremation. There were also other boxes and a variety of small jewels.

The finder was not the keeper. Colonial attitudes to such matters had improved by this time and the finder passed the lot to the Imperial Museum in what was then called Calcutta. The bones were then passed to the nearest Buddhist Monarch, the King of Siam. Some of them have since been exported to various Buddhist centres, where they are venerated. The finder, though, was allowed to keep some of the jewels on the grounds that they were straight duplicates of other items in the collection.

These were then passed down his family until last week, when it was announced that they would be auctioned in Hong Kong. Cue bitter complaints from India’s (aggressively Hindu) government, after which the auction was postponed for negotiations.

The jewels are, according to the Indian government’s complaint, “inalienable religious and cultural heritage of India and the global Buddhist community.”

Well I am not sure about the cultural heritage. Most of the pieces appear to be very small and not much worked. It may be, of course, that like the profusion of gold bees found in the tomb of the early Frankish king Childeric I, the jewels were attached to a garment which has since rotted away.

The religious claim rests on two questionable pedestals: that the interred bones were in fact those of the Buddha, who had died at least 200 years before the burial (estimates of the date vary) and that the jewels are “relics” because of their entirely posthumous physical proximity to the remains.

Inevitably these two questions have been rather overshadowed by two other issues: whether items which found their way out of colonies while they were colonies should be the property of the liberated former colony, and whether it is appropriate that items of sacred significance to some people should be offered in the market place as cultural commodities for purchase by non-believers.

The would-be vendor, Chris Peppé, says he has done some research and in Buddhist circles these items are not regarded as sacred relics. It appears that Buddhists are not as keen on the whole relics idea as Catholics used to be.

This may be so. But I fear few readers will have been impressed by Mr P’s claim that the family looked into donating the jewels to a temple or museum but decided that an auction was “the fairest and most transparent way to transfer these artifacts to Buddhists.” Too convenient.

Also I must say that historically the idea of “relics” was by no means confined to remains of the body of the holy individual concerned.

The Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony, for example, had a famous collection of more than 5,000 relics. This included a piece of the Saviour’s beard, the inevitable particle of the Virgin Mary’s milk, Saint Anne’s thumb and 76 pieces of “bones from holy places which on account of faded writing can no longer be read and identified.” But there was also a twig from the burning bush, “one piece of the diaper in which He was wrapped, one piece of the straw on which the Lord lay when he was born” one sample each of the gold and myrrh presented by the three kings and no less than 32 fragments of the Holy Cross.

The collection was shown to the public for the last time in 1522, but the souvenir catalogue, with illustrations by Lucas Cranach, can be seen in museums. Which is perhaps where this whole story belongs.

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Who wears the trousers in Hong Kong’s prisons … and who wears the shorts?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 18, 2025| Leave a Comment »

One of the interesting consequences of the way the law has worked since 2020 is the arrival in Hong Kong prisons of many inmates rather different from the usual inhabitants. A large influx of young, articulate and educated criminals whose offences are, if not explicitly political, well off the usual sex, violence and greed track has shone light into some neglected corners.

Practices hallowed by decades of history have been challenged, with interesting results.

The latest episode in this series stars Ms Chow Hang-tung, who has been enjoying correctional hospitality since 2021 and is currently awaiting trial on national security charges.

We may note in passing at this point an unintended consequence of the way national security cases work. Those convicted are not eligible for the usual discounts for good behaviour. So they can enjoy attempts to stick it to The Man without the apprehension which keeps conventional prisoners quiet – that The Man will, if provoked, perhaps find ways of sticking it to them.

Ms Chow’s complaint, which was aired in the High Court last week, is that prison clothing policy is discriminatory between the sexes (or if you prefer genders) because male prisoners are allowed to wear shorts in the summer, and female prisoners are not.

The resulting hearing was a good illustration of the way in which legal reasoning and conventions can take us a long way from the messy reality of the real world.

Of course nobody can stand up in court and say that Ms Chow is not really motivated by the minor unpleasantness of being trapped in long trousers through another of Hong Kong’s sweaty summers. She has noticed that the Hong Kong authorities are exploring every legal avenue in their determination to give her a hard time and is retaliating as best she can.

Nor would it be polite for counsel for the government to admit that the ban on shorts defies common sense, and is the legacy of decisions made decades ago when ideas about dress were rather different and sexual discrimination had not been invented. In those days respectable women did not wear shorts in the street while uniformed men had a summer get-up involving shorts.

The uniformed types have pretty much dropped shorts, but in civilian contexts women now wear them all the time. Ms Chow’s suggestion is nevertheless unwelcome, because it comes from her. Good order and discipline in local prisons is endangered if the Correctional Services Department is coerced into changing a rule by an uppity inmate.

So we can expect to see the government fight this all the way to the Court of Final Appeal, just as it did Leung Kwok-hung’s challenge to prison haircut rules.

One can only sympathise with the legal eagle, senior counsel Mike Lee, in charge of defending the prison uniform rules. Mr Lee argued that the ban on shorts resulted from consideration of a “basket of considerations” arrived at in decades of departmental consideration and experience. This had revealed, according to a CSD psychologist, that there were “inherent differences” between men and women. The women, consequently, did not in the department’s view wish to be allowed to wear shorts.

The saga will no doubt continue. I would respectfully suggest that Mr Lee drop the argument that uniform wearing is an essential part of maintaining “custodial discipline”, because this leaves him open to the question why custodial discipline in male prisons appears to be compatible with allowing shorts as an option.

I was also not impressed by the analogy to school uniform which, in Mr Lee’s view, “fosters a sense of learning” as “education is the prime objective”. Few educators subscribe to this view of uniforms, which are generally defended as concealing differences of wealth among students and fostering esprit de corps.

In any case some of the most successful education systems, like those of Finland and Denmark, do not require school uniforms at all. I note in passing that some of the most successful prison systems do not require uniforms very much either.

Another point I have some difficulty with is the suggestion that the department is defending the rule on long trousers because the prisoners like it. I know and admire quite a lot of correctional people – the department was at one time a hotbed of enthusiasm for the Great Highland Bagpipe – and I acknowledge the idealism and humane sentiments which animate much of the department’s work. But a prison is not a democratic institution and the whole concept of punishment involves NOT giving the prisoners what they want, which in most cases is to go home.

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The rule of law and the rule of lies

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on March 3, 2025| 3 Comments »

People who have been complaining about how slowly the legal system works in Hong Kong can draw some comfort from its latest success: an outstandingly swift performance in the gentle art of rewriting history.

This goes on all the time, of course. Mediaeval baronial brawls are recycled as wars of national liberation starring Mel Gibson. Revered founding fathers turn out to have had a sideline impregnating their own slaves because mixed race babies were more valuable. Historians reluctantly admit that much-admired monarchs were secretly gay.

But this usually takes centuries. Not, however, in the courtroom of national security specialist District Court Judge Stanley Chan – a generous provider of material for critical judge-watchers over the years – who was passing sentence last week on seven men accused of rioting during the Yuen Long incident on July 21, 2019.

That was six years ago, a long time for a criminal process but a mere blink in the evolution of history.

Those of us who were here at the time will remember the Yuen Long incident. It was extensively videoed by mobile phone owners. One reporter live-streamed an attack on her. The BBC reported:

Dozens of masked men armed with batons stormed a train station in the Hong Kong district of Yuen Long on Sunday. Footage posted on social media showed the masked men, all in white T-shirts, violently attacking people on platforms and inside train carriages. Forty-five people were injured, with one person in a critical condition.

The Guardian’s correspondent had:

Men dressed in white T-shirts, some armed with sticks, entered the Yuen Long MTR station and stormed a train, attacking passengers, according to footage taken by commuters, journalists and Democratic Party politician Lam Cheuk-ting. Witnesses said the attackers appeared to target black-shirted passengers who had been at an anti-government march earlier in the day.

And it was not just the capitalist press. A few days later the China Daily referred to:

…savage indiscriminate attacks on protesters and passengers in the train cars and the platform at Yuen Long station last Sunday. The attack, causing injury to 45 people, was widely denounced …

Oddly enough the government at the time refused to classify the incident as a riot. And indeed it was not what the lay person usually means by a riot – vandalism, protest, confrontation with the forces of order – and more an exercise in assault and battery on an industrial scale by an armed and uniformed mob.

A curious feature was the absence of police people. Men in white tee-shirts armed with sticks had been marauding in the streets of Yuen Long all day, threatening anyone who looked as if they might be a protester. When they appeared inside the station the MTR staff promptly called the police, who did not show up for half an hour. As the station is only a short walk from the local police station this was embarrassing.

A few days later the then Chief Secretary apologised to the public for the fact that the police response had not met expectations. The apology was bitterly denounced by both the police staff unions.

When Chris Tang became police commissioner (yes, that one: now the Secretary for Security) he unveiled the new police line, initially suggested by Junius Ho, which was that the conflict was due to Lam Cheuk-ting, who had intensified the tense atmosphere and so provoked the fight.

On the day of Lam’s arrest this had developed further, and the whole incident was described as a clash between “two evenly matched rivals”. The video and photographic evidence was “one-sided” and the reporting was “biased”. It could be considered a bit strange that the police have developed a narrative which they offer with such confidence, because the one fact about the incident that everyone agrees with is that no police people were present.

It appears as a result that Judge Chan was heavily reliant on video evidence, a worrying thought because – as police spokesmen used to remind us whenever footage surfaced of their colleagues kicking the crap out of someone – such films are subject to a variety of interpretations.

Anyway in Judge Chan’s reasons for passing sentence the police story finally achieved escape velocity and freed itself from the gravitational pull of reality. There were, in Judge Chan’s view, not one but two riots, one for each side. The men in tee-shirts would have engaged in nothing more than Ghandian non-violence if they had not been provoked by the first riot.

The provocation seems to have consisted in calling them gangsters. Judge Chan did not believe Mr Lam, whose “chief provocateur” status earned him a three-year sentence, was there to “monitor police actions”. Well that was just as well. The police actions came later. We do not enjoy the rule of law. We enjoy the rule of lies.

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Hong Kong’s worst ever riots? Read the history

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 14, 2024| 2 Comments »

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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