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Civil service numbers suggest our happiness may have been exaggerated

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 16, 2024| Leave a Comment »

The finer points of civil servant staffing are not usually a hot news topic. But the latest grim update from the Civil Service Bureau was eagerly covered by both English-language newspapers. This may have been an effort to avoid the alternative story offered the same day about civil service dismissals.

But it was not surprising that different reporters made different choices. The “source” was the Civil Service Bureau’s written replies to questions from legislators in response to the budget speech. These were all published on the same day, involved a great deal of repetition and ran to no less than 362 pages.

Having browsed in this heap of information I think I would have gone for the dismissals as being more interesting. The leading reasons for dismissal from the civil service in the last five years were:

  • Failure to get a COVID vaccination (21 cases)
  • Absence/lateness (20)
  • Shoplifting/theft (18)
  • Sex-related offences (14)

Offences against public order and other protest-related peccadilloes only amounted to six. My personal favourite category was “Others (e.g. illegal gambling, perverting the course of justice, computer-related offences, murder etc)”. It is nice to know that murder is grounds for dismissal, though other punishments are probably more salient to the criminal concerned.

However, to the grim news. This was that, as the Standard put it, “The bureau said on Friday that the number of departures in the civil service increased from over 8,500 people in the year 2018-2019 to over 10,100 people in the year 2022-2023. Among them, nearly 1,000 people were under 30, and almost 3,000 had less than ten years of service.”

This might lead the careless reader to think that civil servants were heading for the nearest exit in droves. Hong Kong has about 160,000 civil servants and the normal length of service for a graduate entrant would be something over 30 years. So you would in normal circumstances expect about 5,000 people a year to leave simply because they have reached the retirement age.

And unless I have completely misunderstood the Civil Service bureau’s tables, that is roughly what happens. More than half of the 10,000 “departures” were because of “retirement” (5,918 out of 10,126 in 2022-3). The category which we should be worrying about is “resignation”, which is much lower but rising (1,863 in 2020-21, 3,863 in 2022-23).

And the worrying thing about this is that if you look at the departures broken down by age groups the figures for 20-50 total 3,479, nearly half of whom are in the 30-40 bracket. There must be at least a suspicion that many of these comparatively young professionals are not just leaving the civil service, but Hong Kong as well.

This in turn suggests that official estimates of the level of happiness produced by recent changes have been somewhat exaggerated.

This is rather born out by the figures for individual departments. The two which are particularly beset by a large number of unfilled vacancies are RTHK and the Police Force.

RTHK had the highest vacancy rate of any government department, at 24 per cent. No wonder they have robots reading the weather bulletin. Indeed, looking at their news output there is clearly a wider role for Artificial Intelligence. Even a dumb computer can rewrite government press releases, which seem to be the favoured news source these days.

The highest absolute number of vacancies is in the police force. The force had 1,180 resignations last year which, looking on the bright side, was lower than the record high of 1,802 recorded in 2019-20.

It appears, unsurprisingly, that life in the force since 2019 has changed, and the arrival of national security and peaceful streets has produced further different changes, leaving quite a lot of police folk feeling that the new lifestyle is not what they signed up for.

In particular the force is, alas, no longer held in the high levels of public esteem to which it believed itself to be accustomed and entitled. It has a large and efficient public relations organisation. But expecting adroit reputation management to obliterate painful real-world memories involving tear gas and pepper spray is to ask more than public relations can deliver.

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On the ethics of the Octopus button

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 8, 2024| 2 Comments »

An interesting ethical dilemma cropped up on my local green minibus the other day. Of course this is unusual; discussions of moral philosophy are not common on the 69K, but there it was.

To understand the issue at stake we must briefly explain that there are three ways in which your Octopus card in the special elderly version, now known as Joyyou, works on public transport. On the MTR your entry and exit are recorded. The machinery knocks $2 off your Octopus and bills the government for the rest of what the journey would have cost.

On big buses the situation is different. Your Octopus is read when you get on, but not when you get off. So the charge assumes that you travel to the end of the line. Of course the fare drops as the end of the line gets closer, but if you get off early that is the government’s tough luck. You still pay $2 but the government is charged for the whole trip, including the part you weren’t on the bus for.

This wrinkle in the system is the source of some anguish among transport officials, because they suspect that some people are avoiding queues or ensuring a seat by getting on unpopular long route buses for short trips.

Minibuses feature a system of their own. There is a button on the Octopus reader. If you press it the default setting – the fare to the end of the line – is replaced. The machine cycles through the possible fares, and if you plan to get off early you can choose the appropriate one.

We Joyyous elderly folk do not have to worry about this, which is perhaps just as well. Our other local green minibus route, the 811, is notorious for the grumpiness of its drivers. This is because it has a complex range of fares, so the drivers are constantly asked which one is applicable by baffled passengers.

Well, on my rare minibus excursions I simply dab the Octopus, which costs me $2. But this, according to our local street philosophers, may be wrong. If I am traveling to the end of the line the government is charged the rest of the fare, which means currently about five bucks. If I am getting off earlier I can push the fare change button and the government will accordingly cough up only the lower fare, minus my $2.

The person who raised this issue suggested that those of us who were not adjusting the government’s contribution according to the length of our trips (I must admit that in my case it had not crossed my mind that this was possible, but still …) were increasing the government’s already considerable financial problems and were accordingly guilty of antisocial behaviour.

This view did not go unchallenged. Some passengers thought that as the government’s money was our money there was no reason why we should not decide to use some of it to support our local minibus company, an important and unsubsidised public service.

Pessimists noted that the passenger getting a $2 trip had nothing to gain by pushing the button, and the driver had nothing to gain by encouraging it. So it was not very realistic to expect people to take the trouble. Underlying these arguments, perhaps, is the changing relationship between Hong Kong people and their government in recent years.

This point seems lost on local lawmakers, some of whom have been dangerously keen to abolish or curtail the whole $2 ride scheme. Be careful, gentlemen. It is the public’s general suspicion that some legislators are there to help the people, and some to help themselves. Cutting benefits to which you are not entitled could put you in the second category.

Admittedly the scheme is expensive. It is expected to cost a total of about $6 billion this year. The introduction of a senile card with a picture of the holder is expected to curtail fraud considerably.

But everyone knows why the costs have gone through the roof: it was Carrie Lam’s foolish decision to lower the age of eligibility to 60. Most people aged 60 are still working, officially or unofficially. Someone who is still commuting five days a week could easily make 20 subsidised trips a week, before he starts on leisure or shopping trips. After the change was made the number of subsidised trips a day almost doubled, from 480,000 a day in March 2022 to 890,000 in March last year.

But withdrawing or curtailing benefits of this kind has problems of its own. It is a commonplace of behavioural economics that losses produce more pain than the pleasure produced by gains of similar size. This means that if you give the public something, and then take it away, we do not all return to where we started. We are all pissed off.

So we have here an interesting dilemma for the Financial Secretary. Still, looking on the bright side, Hong Kong is well placed to weather the coming increase in the proportion of elderly people in the population. This is because, compared with many other advanced societies, it is extremely sparing in providing pensions.

The only non-mean-tested benefit is the fruit money, which is paltry. The other benefits, which are less paltry, are only for those who can prove their poverty. So must of us dinosaurs do not get much for our years of dutiful taxpaying. Cheap rides are welcome. If the government wants to reduce the costs of the scheme without offending beneficiaries in the 60-65 age range, it might consider switching the concession off during rush hours.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 18, 2023| Leave a Comment »

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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