Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Hong Kong’

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

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on May 11, 2024| 1 Comment »

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.

The BBC observed that peaks in online interest in the song “correlated with government press releases, comments, legal moves…” It is perhaps time for our leaders to contemplate the possibility that if they stop kicking this hive the bees will sleep…

Read Full Post »

Surely the national security loopholes were not as big as this?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on April 1, 2024| Leave a Comment »

It seems to be a rule nowadays that no criticism from overseas of our local national security arrangements can be allowed to pass unchallenged, or indeed uncondemned. This is fair enough, although no doubt it would be fairer if local criticism were still allowed.

No doubt there are many matters in this area on which intelligent people might politely disagree. We are all entitled to our opinions. But, as a great editor of the Guardian once put it, comments are free but facts are sacred. I do not wish to express any opinion on the merits of recent legislation. Its defenders, though, should be discouraged from rewriting history.

This brings us to Mr Ambrose Lam San-keung, who recently penned a piece for the China Daily defending the latest legal changes against criticism from the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute. The institute, said Mr Lam, has made “unsubstantiated claims” about the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance.

Mr Lam then canters through the usual whataboutisms – some Western countries provide no protection for whistleblowers, some limit the right to choose counsel, and so on. And then we come to this:

“No country would allow any seditious speech or publication that incites mutiny, disaffection, hatred, violent acts, or disobeying laws. No country would allow any association to provide training in using offensive weapons or military exercises without the government’s permission. No country would accept any assembly that aimed at sabotaging public infrastructure.

Surprisingly, before the enactment of the Ordinance, Hong Kong enjoyed “freedom” of incitement, sedition, unlawful military training, and sabotage of public infrastructure. As a result, riots broke out in 2014, 2016 and 2019.”

China Daily, April 1

I take this to mean that, in Mr Lam’s view, Hong Kong had no laws against incitement, sedition, unlawful military training or sabotage of public infrastructure, and this absence caused the riots in 2014 (sic), 2016 and 2019. This is an “unsubstantiated claim”.

Leaving aside the questionable matter of cause and effect – I do not recall any rioter explaining his malfeasance as a protest against the absence of relevant laws – the matter of large legal absences is easily dealt with:

  • Incitement and sedition were first criminalised by the Seditious Publications Ordinance of 1913. The ban was extended to acts by the Sedition Ordinance of 1938 and the whole matter was wrapped up in the Crimes Ordinance in 1971, at which point inspiring disaffection or mutiny in the disciplined forces was added. We may note in passing that the sedition offence was abolished in the UK in 2009 as archaic, infringing valuable freedoms and “used by other countries as justification for the retention of similar laws which have been actively used to suppress political dissent and restrict press freedom.” Present company excepted, of course.
  • Sabotage of public infrastructure was covered by the law on criminal damage, which resides in the Crimes Ordinance Section 60. It includes: “A person who without lawful excuse destroys or damages any property belonging to another intending to destroy or damage it or being reckless as to whether it would be destroyed or damaged is liable to imprisonment for 10 years. If a person destroys or damages any property … intending to endanger the life of another or being reckless as to whether the life of another would be thereby endangered is also guilty of this offence and is liable to imprisonment for life.”
  • The law on unlawful military training is also in the Crimes Ordinance, at Section 18, under which it is an offence if a person “trains or drills any other person in the use of arms or the practice of military exercises or evolutions” without the permission of the Governor or the Commissioner of Police.”

Mr Lam is an educated member of a learned profession so we must accept that when he writes rubbish he really believes what he says, and is not merely spouting propaganda “being reckless as to whether” it is true or not.

Disturbingly, he is also a member of the Legislative Council. His latest writings give rise to some doubt as to whether all members of that body had even a superficial knowledge of the existing law when they agreed to substantial amendments of it.

More disturbingly still, Mr Lam sits in the council on behalf of the legal functional constituency. He is in fact a lawyer. You might think that other members would expect learned and accurate advice from him about upcoming and existing legislation, and that opinions on these matters which fall from his lips would be particularly influential for non-legal members.

In his defence, I suppose, Mr Lam might blame the copy editor who worked on his offering, which will cut no ice with me because I used to be one. Or he could say that he did not mean what he appeared to mean and I have perversely insisted on using a literal meaning which was not what he intended.

Legislators – and lawyers – should be careful in their choice of words.

Read Full Post »

New National Security law is open to abuse; lawmakers should fix it

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on March 11, 2024| 2 Comments »

The thing that worries me about the proposed local national security legislation is that it seems to have been drafted with scant consideration of the likely consequences in practice. After all our judges and prosecutors have already had national security legislation to play with for three years, and some things have become obvious.

For example, the arrangement for bail in national security cases is in theory that the magistrate must be satisfied that the defendant is not going to commit another national security offence if released pending trial.

As the organised opposition, or even the organised criticism, has been trampled into the dust and the revised constitution no longer offers a role for dissident politicians you would think this was a fairly easy condition to satisfy. In practice the prosecution invariably opposes bail and in the vast majority of cases bail is refused.

Similarly under the existing national security law the Secretary for Justice may – but does not have to – ask for a juryless trial before three national security judges. On every occasion so far when a jury trial might have been appropriate the prosecution has in fact opted for a juryless trial. It is difficult to believe that this is entirely unconnected with the pleasures of having three judges of your own choice deciding on the success of your prosecution. Accordingly it seems likely that this is now a routine practice and there will never be a national security trial before a jury.

Turning to the new proposed “Article 23” version we can see number of areas where something similar may be expected to happen.

Consider for example the proposed exemption from the rule that a suspect in custody must be charged or released within two days. This will be replaced by an arrangement under which a senior police person can ask for 14 days of uncharged custody to allow inquiries to proceed, with the possibility of further renewals for seven days at a time.

In other jurisdictions this is a rarely used option which comes up in cases where the prosecution would have to rely on, and disclose in open court, evidence obtained clandestinely or from an overseas source. It was introduced in a panic after a raft of terrorism cases, and it was and is clearly understood that it would be used seldom, in cases where there was a real concern about what the arrested person might get up to if released.

No such condition is incorporated in the proposed law here. In the light of practice so far you have to be very optimistic to dismiss the possibility that arrested suspects will be subjected to an ordeal practically undistinguishable from indefinite detention without trial or charge. The police will always find it convenient to have the suspect to themselves for two weeks. They will also find it easy.

The limit on detention is of course a limit on police powers, and it is intentionally so. It is an important protection for suspects who, in the end, may not be charged at all, and if charged may in the end be acquitted. We can all think of cases in which it would be necessary and desirable that a suspect should be detained for more than the stipulated couple of days without charge. In practice, though, that is likely to become a rule, rather than an exception.

I have similar misgivings about the proposed restrictions on suspects’ right to choose their own lawyers. Once again we can all think of scenarios in which this might be a useful power, and might be used to prevent a serious breach of public order. Once again we have to wonder whether it will be used as rarely as these unusual scenarios imply.

Or there is the curious proposed arrangement under which national security prisoners would not be eligible for early release on the same terms as other prisoners. This is curious because we must supposed that the existing arrangements for early release include an assessment of the inmate’s chances of reoffending if returned to the outside world.

Asking the Commissioner for Correctional Services to certify in addition that the prisoner will not reoffend against the national security legislation places a civil servant with no relevant expertise in a hot seat, from which the most comfortable exit will be to refuse to release the person concerned. Which is perhaps the intention.

Then there is the question of “absconders”. An absconder, properly understood, is someone who has been charged with an offence and flees the city to avoid trial. On the other hand Hong Kong people have the right to emigrate if they wish to do so and there is nothing in law or morality to suggest that they have a duty to return to Hong Kong if the authorities later decide to charge them with an offence.

As before we can all think of rare occasions when a more flexible interpretation of this would be useful, and there would be some legitimate purpose in the proposed laws against people having anything to do with an “absconder”. We can also see scenarios in which a sensitive government, stung by criticism in an overseas country from a Hong Kong exile, would charge him with an offence, issue an arrest warrant and classify him as an “absconder” on the basis of actions or words which were perfectly legal in the place where the actor or speaker did or spoke them.

Of course defenders of the proposed legislation will say that we should trust officials to do the right thing and not abuse powers which are clearly open to abuse. But our government has form in this area.

The rule of law requires that the powers conferred on officials should be used in good faith for the purposes for which they were intended, as Lord Bingham put it in an important book on the subject. But this is not what we see in Hong Kong. Here we see opposition coffee shops submerged in an avalanche of sanitary inspections, inconvenient bookshops driven out of business by a similar sort of bureaucratic persecution, and huge tax bills landing mysteriously in the letterboxes of organisations that have had the temerity to ignore calls for their dissolution in the government’s poodle press.

Legislators should approach proposed legislation on the basis that if a power can be abused it will be abused, and adjust it accordingly. Critics condemn the new patriotic legislature as a puppet parliament, a congress of complacency full of people who have never seen a government proposal they didn’t like. The new national security bill is a chance for legislators to prove the critics wrong. Or not.

Read Full Post »

On the Wais and wherefores of tourism

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on February 28, 2024| 1 Comment »

The MTR has opened a new shopping mall in Tai Wai, naturally next to the station, called the Wai. This has now displaced Festival Walk as my destination for the weekly Big Shopping Spasm. Oddly, the attraction is not what is there, but what is not there.

In many ways the Wai is much like other malls. It was designed in the modern shopping mall style, which seems intended to maximise the chances of visitors getting lost. All the floors are different shapes; there are few straight lines; escalators are distributed randomly.

The entrance to the car park is also discouraging. You drive four stories down a long and winding spiral road featuring narrow spaces and tight turns. Within days of the mall opening the walls of this road were generously decorated with scrape marks and paint deposits by errant drivers.

The supermarket is, even by Hong Kong standards, a weird shape. Few of our supermarkets follow the boring Western style of floor plan, a large rectangle. The Wai’s supermarket (a Marketplace, Wellcome’s version of Taste; usual local stuff but cosmopolitan decadence also catered for with sushi, choice of cheeses, large wine department etc) is shaped like a deformed dumbell.

What is not there? The tourist traps. There are no international vendors of make-up, perfume, or brand-name handbags, no offerings of watches with real clockwork for the price of a small car, no gold shops. In at least six visits I have only seen one wheeled suitcase.

I have no prejudice, racial or otherwise, against mainlanders. But tourism is an industry which brings benefits to some people and costs to others, a point which seems lost on our government. There is such a thing as enough. Places with Pinterest-worthy attractions have discovered this and acted accordingly. Venice, for example, restricts cruise liners. Barcelona is discouraging Airbnb. Yosemite rations access.

I do not suggest anything like that for Hong Kong. But official dreamers need to recognise that outside the developer hegemony, which has a vested interest in astronomical shop rents, most local people regard visitors to the city like visitors to their home: welcome in limited quantities and at limited times… as long as they behave themselves.

Tourists who congregate at particular spots, as they tend to do, can quickly become an unwelcome part of the scenery. Hong Kong U students have been complaining of tourists gate-crashing their lecturers and photographing the proceedings. I know where this is going. Oxford and Cambridge colleges routinely refuse to admit visitors at all.

Photogenic spots generally may lose their allure if they become a perpetual crowd scene.

This may be a problem which is on the way to solving itself. My early journalism career was spent mostly in fading resorts on the coast of North Lancashire. Morecambe was at the time the butt of cruel jokes. Sample: if you die in Morecambe they prop you up in a bus shelter to make the place look more busy. Blackpool was part-way down the slope which has left it, according to current reports, in many ways the most deprived town in England.

One of the symptoms of decay was a chorus of complaints from local hosts of various kinds that people were no longer coming from a long way away, and as a result visitors did not stay overnight. Most visitors were from nearby towns; they ate their fish and chips, had a few beers and went home the same day.

Another symptom was the increasingly frantic efforts of the local authorities concerned to find some interesting new attraction which would renew the flow of overnight visitors. These rarely seemed to make much difference. Is any of this beginning to sound familiar?

Of course tourist towns can go up as well as down. Historians of the European spa enthusiasm noted the way in which particular spots would suddenly become top destinations after a visit from the Tsar, or the invention of a new bogus water cure. Tourism is like the restaurant business: you are at the mercy of fickle consumers, wafted by the winds of fashion. However good the food, next year’s hot item may steal your customers.

So the search for the secret sauce goes on. Unfortunately it is difficult to be confident that a magical new ingredient will come from an establishment run by mainland officials and recycled policemen. Holiday destinations, like Homeric heroes, are judged by what they are, not by what they do. Hong Kong used to be regarded as a fun place. Now it is not. A shortage of firework displays is not the problem.

Read Full Post »

Time for the Director of Audit to stick to his knitting?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 19, 2024| 1 Comment »

Regular readers will recall that a couple of months ago I complained that the Director of Audit had devoted the resources of his department to some nit-picking criticisms of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

I thought there was a danger that this might look like a contribution to the general barrage of abuse from government-friendly quarters which had led to the departure of the university’s vice chancellor.

However it appears from the director’s annual report that this is not what is going on at all. What is going on is a violation not of the separation of powers but of an even older principle: the division of labour.

The Director of Audit, Nelson Lam Chi-yuen, is not a career civil servant. Before he was appointed to his present post by Carrie Lam in 2022 he was an accountant, his political experience limited to membership of the usual sort of consultative bodies and six months on the Legislative Council.

This may explain why he apparently supposes that senior civil servants are free to devote themselves to whatever work they think might be important and interesting, regardless of whether this is their appointed function, or whether it may in fact be someone else’s.

Mr Lam devoted a quarter of his annual report to his efforts to improve the protection of national security, including his farcical foray into the Chinese University. He is reported as complaining, in a newspaper interview, that “government departments and other public organisations either failed to prioritise the national security law or did not fully comply with the government’s requirements.”

“These departments and organisations are at risk of violating the law,” he said.

It seems I am not the only scribe who thought that Mr Lam’s self-appointment as a sort of national security Witchfinder General was straying a bit off-piste, as it were. Why, he was asked at the inevitable press conference, was his department no longer keeping its traditional focus on an audited body’s proper and effective use of money?

His reply deserved quoting in full: “Efficiency and effectiveness refers to whether the audited body abided by the law or not. If they have failed to do so that means they are doing a poor job. If they have broken the law, that would also involve money,” Lam said.

Which of course is rubbish. It is perfectly possible to impair national security without involving money. Effective spending of money is not the same thing as abiding by the law. And ineffective spending may be perfectly legal. Contrariwise there are many things which will eventually involve money if left unchecked, which we do not expect auditors to explore. If the drains in the Central Government Offices are blocked it will eventually cost money; we do not on that account expect the Director of Audit to explore the official sewers.

There are already elaborate mechanisms in place to ensure that government departments and public bodies accord appropriate attention to national security and obey the relevant laws. We have national security police, our shy guardians from over the boundary, the Secretaries for Security and Justice, and so on.

Mr Lam’s formulation that departments and organisations are “at risk” of breaking the law tells us, and should tell him, that he should be leaving law enforcement to police people and lawyers who will have a better idea of whether the risk is real or imagined.

The flip side of the Director of Audit developing a new national security hobby is that it will reduce the resources devoted to his proper function, which is ensuring that government spending is honest and effective.

Nobody else has the knowledge, experience and powers to do this job properly. Amateur observers have no right to extract answers from recalcitrant departments, and potential whistleblowers in the civil service may well be restrained by the thought that whistleblowing is rarely a good career move.

Mr Lam’s innovation in this area is the idea that “not everything has to be audited at once”, so any new policy will be given a few years before it is audited. By which time, surely, it will be too late to do anything about it?

An unintended light on the new approach was shone by Mr Lam’s concluding remark that “the Audit Commission is not trying to pick on the government’s mistake, but trying to step up the government’s accountability and service quality.”

Well perhaps it would be a good idea if someone in the government was trying to “pick on the government’s mistake”, because critics from outside it are “at risk” of breaking the law, as Mr Lam might put it.

And some errors become evident long before a few years have passed. The West Kowloon Cultural District, for example, is tottering towards bankruptcy because its two big museums operate at a loss, as museums generally do, and no arrangement has been made yet to fill in the resulting financial gap.

There is talk of an MTR-like solution, in which the cultural district will go into the business of developing expensive flats. This raises an interesting question. Allowing rail companies to develop the land over and around their stations is justified as allowing the rail operator to share in the extra wealth that it generates when it opens a station. Whether this is an acceptable way of financing a cultural district is perhaps a different matter.

Then if Mr Lam is not too busy he might look at the Express Rail link. It seems most of the travellers on this wonderful innovation are only going to and from stations in nearby Shenzhen, for which purpose a high-speed rail link is inappropriate and ludicrously expensive.

No doubt readers will be able to think of other items which are more worthy of Mr Lam’s sleuthing skills than the Chinese University bookshop. Directors of Audit have traditionally had a high degree of freedom to pursue whatever issue attracts their attention. But freedom, as we are so often reminded these days, has limits.

Read Full Post »

The Messi mess: fun, but a distraction from more important things

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on February 7, 2024| Leave a Comment »

A rare moment of public preoccupation has hit Hong Kong as a result of the incident which would in due course probably be called Messigate by the popular tabloids, if we had any left.

The hero of this debacle is Mr Lionel Messi, a footballer of sublime gifts who is now getting a bit long in the tooth. As footballers sometimes do at this stage of their careers he has moved from the highly competitive European scene to the US of A, where the football is worse but the money is better. Not so much a swan song as a goose with golden eggs song.

So Mr Messi now twinkles his agile toes for a new club called Inter Miami. The name is a straight lift from a legendary Italian club, Inter Milan. Inter Miami is not yet legendary.

But Mr Messi is, so when a local lifestyle magazine, backed by a government grant and official approval for the staging of “mega events”, arranged for Inter Miami to come and perform in Hong Kong there was great excitement among soccer fans.

Many of them had the opportunity to watch a training session or to see Mr Messi from a distance. Less publicly, for a six figure sum people could get close enough for a selfie and a few words, although as Mr Messi is from Spanish-speaking Argentina the communication may have been a bit disappointing for everyone concerned.

The high point of the whole exercise was a friendly match against a Hong Kong team assembled from the local performers. More than 30,000 spectators turned up for this, paying between $800 and $4,000 for the privilege.

I was not one of them. Inoculated by five years as a professional watcher of football matches I am rarely tempted and “friendly” games in my experience usually disappoint. One of the reasons for this is that professional athletes are surprisingly fragile and reluctant to risk their livelihood in encounters which are merely entertainment. So there is a tendency for people to drop out at the last minute if they get a twinge somewhere.

And so, alas, it turned out on this occasion. Inter Miami did their stuff, and saw off the Hong Kong team handily, but they did so without the assistance of Mr Messi, who was down as a substitute but was not used.

Many of the spectators were extremely offended, and a speech at the end of the match from Mr David Beckham (who used to be a footballer but nowadays is famous for being famous) was booed.

Cue outrage on all channels that fans bad been scammed. The internet frothed with bitter complaints. Some irate fans resorted to the Consumer Council. Column inches were devoted to Mr Messi’s medical symptoms and history. Academics were interviewed.

After the organising magazine announced that under the circumstances it would not collect the government subsidy our leaders could wade in. Secure, for a change, from charges that they had misplanned an event or wasted the taxpayers’ money, they were free to express warm solidarity with disgruntled fans and call for money to be returned to them.

Which is all very well, and has provided a great deal of harmless media fodder. It has also, rather regrettably, consumed a large chunk of the rather small period allowed for people to comment on the up-coming national security legislation.

This is a pity. I was surprised by a recent offering in China Daily’s English version from Prof Lau Siu-kai. Prof Lau is an emeritus professor of sociology (a polite academic way of saying retired) and a consultant to the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies, a think tank where democratic ideas are drowned.

Those of us who were here at the time will remember as the high point of Prof Lau’s career his prediction in 2003 that the July 1 march would only attract 30,000 or so people, which turned out to be about 500,000 people light.

However if you want to know what the government is plotting then Prof Lau is your man, so I waded through his thoughts on “colour revolutions”. This involved a very elaborate string of definitions, understandable in a way because Prof Lau could hardly be expected to use the common-sense definition, which would be something like “a popular movement aiming at the overthrow of a despotic regime”. For Prof Lau a colour revolution is a Bad Thing.

He then proceeded to explain how the national security law would prevent colour revolutions in Hong Kong. Which included some interesting observations. For example:

…It will no longer be possible for political groups to freely participate in the leadership, planning, organization and mobilization of a “color revolution”. The Ordinance will stipulate: “If the Secretary for Security reasonably believes that prohibiting the operation or continued operation of any local organization in the HKSAR is necessary for safeguarding national security, the Secretary for Security may by order published in the Gazette prohibit the operation or continued operation of the organization in the HKSAR,” and “If a local organization is a political body and has a connection with an external political organization, the Security for Security may by order published in the Gazette prohibit the operation or continued operation of the local organization in the HKSAR.

This seems a little stark. No obligation to tell the society first, or give it a chance to explain itself; no avenue for appeal? It also seems a bit unnecessary. In 2018 the police withdrew registration as a society from the Hong Kong National Party on national security grounds. We are plugging a non-existent loophole.

Then there is this:

…It will be difficult for hostile forces to spread false information to slander the central government and the HKSAR government, to instigate hatred, division and opposition in society, and to instigate, lead and organize unrest.  That is because they would be committing the offense of espionage under the Ordinance, which includes “colluding with an external force to publish a statement of fact that is false or misleading to the public, and the person, with intent to endanger national security or being reckless as to whether national security would be endangered, so publishes the statement; and knows that the statement is false or misleading.

I quite see why one might wish to have a law against false statements, although this already seems to be covered by the sedition offence which we already have. But, at least in English, I do not see how this can be classed as espionage. This is a concern because espionage is generally treated as a very serious matter, whereas publishing a statement might in some circumstances be a fairly minor offence, if for example the publication was seen by very few people.

It used to be said that the British Army was always preparing to fight the last war, not the next one. Something rather similar seems to be afflicting our government. The HKJA is “not recognised” because of two disagreements in 2019, a play is cancelled because the founder of the drama group tweeted something in 2019, a legislator making reasonable points about tourism and police work is accused of speaking “dangerously” and sounding like some of the things that were said in … 2019.

Now we have national security legislation which appears to be an attempt to criminalise anything and everything people did in 2019 which didn’t please the government. The fear of an encore is unwarranted. The people who wanted the five demands have got the message. They are going or gone. Relax.

Read Full Post »

Accident, emergency or error: money is not the issue

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 24, 2024| Leave a Comment »

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.

Read Full Post »

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

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 16, 2024| 1 Comment »

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.

Read Full Post »

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

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on January 10, 2024| 1 Comment »

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.

Read Full Post »

Efforts to regulate parking: a fine mess

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on January 3, 2024| Leave a Comment »

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.

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »