Well, now the majesty of the rigged pseudo-democratic process has spoken, and CY Leung has been anointed as the new CE here. One fears for the future, one fears very much. If any good came out of this, it is that foreign media paid attention for the very first time to the massive fraud that this election really is. I hope it will now be impossible for that silly little CNN twit Cristie Lu Stout to blather on about how "Hong Kong has a democratic system, and elects its own leaders" (a formula no doubt written by one the Beijing-friendly managers of the HK studio...) Most of the world was completely unaware of what a mere bit of managed political theater this 'election' is. Maybe I should move to East Timor, or South Somalia, where I could actually have some say in who serves in my government.

Enough. The weather in the country park has been quite nice for a week or so, so I managed to get out on the weekends and do some walking:



This is Ko Tong Hau (Long Harbor) from the hill at Pak Tam Pass, just up the road from my village. (Actually, I can hardly believe I have been here for nearly a year.) Above the bay in the middle, is a deserted village called To Kwa Peng. This is the place where developers have bought up almost all the land, and wanted to build 67 houses for 'indigenous villagers' who were desperate to return from London, San Francisco, New York, etc., and live in Hong Kong again...well, the application for planning was rejected for very good reasons; so now, refusing to accept defeat (since the shadowy developer has clearly already incurred losses by paying part of the money to the villagers upfront before permission was given) a new application for 17 houses + sewage treatment plant (!) has been made.

At the viewpoint, there is a photograph mounted on an explanatory tablet which was probably taken 10-15 years ago. It shows the land around To Kwa Peng completely overgrown by jungle. Notice how today it has all been cleared....interesting considering there is no road to the village, only a narrow concrete path.

My new political slogan: "I don't CY we should put up with this."

It's hard to know just what to say about the Henry Tang mother-of-all-illegal-structures scandal. Phil Bowring's piece in the SCMP yesterday said about all that needs saying. Tang is a child of money and privilege, who thinks he is above the law. He is a liar, and has no integrity. He is, as popular feeling has it, extremely stupid. As always, Hong Kong deserves better than this for a new Chief Executive. But as Al Jazeera pointed out last night, the polling system is so rigged by Beijing, that there is still a good chance he will pull the job in the end. At least they are willing to point that out, not like CNN where that annoying little apparatchik in designer clothers, Kristie Lu Stout, is always saying that "Hong Kong is democratic and elects its own government". Make me laugh.

What's interesting is the level of popular outrage, which is sometimes a crude substitute for actual political power. It seems to me that one thing that unites Hongkies and Mainland compatriots is a kind of servile schadenfreude when the local Mandarins are shown to be what everyone already knows, deeply corrupt and great criers of crocodile tears when caught out. There is a wonderful Wong Jing film from the 1990s, Chinese Torture Chamber Story, which is mostly about sex but has a kind of kinky take on the classic stories of corruption exposed by the righteous judge, which gave it a obvious but satisfying narrative arc. In Chinese popular literature, this was usually Bao Gong, Justice Bao, who went around like a Chinese Perry Mason (though he was judge, prosecutor, and jury all in one) solving mysterious cases and gladdening the hearts of the masses by rewarding virtue and punishing evil. Yes, it was all a fairy tale, but that doesn't stop one wishing for a bao gong to clean up this mess.

And here's the locus delicti, a few blocks from my office:

 

We also now finally understand that the polling scandal I wrote about in my last entry, was not initiated by Tang himself but was part and parcel of a panic which seized elements in the HK government in reaction to Tang's poll numbers which were sinking even before this latest scandal. Once again, they were worred what Ah Yeh (Beijing) would think. No wonder that ex-Dean is still on staff at Baptist University (he apparently was given a substantiated chair professorship from the day he arrived), and why the matter is being hushed up by the University's president. Bring on Justice Bao.

Academic scandals in Hong Kong used to be about the two main forces of progress that move the world, money and sex. Not anymore. Now bank and bedroom peccadilloes have been pushed aside, and it's 'politics', such as it can be in a profoundly undemocratic place as this, which appears at the root of recent brouhahas on campus.

Earlier scandals fell into two main patterns. The larger part by far usually involved some sort of fraud or embezzlement of funds by a university staff member. This was typically the housing allowance which was, through a complex series of sales, assignments, false leases, transfers of interest in property, and other legerdemain, paid out for a property which was in essence being 'rented' to the owner him (or her-) self. Financial crimes are punished more severely than any other in Hong Kong, so I imagine there are still some ex-Associate professors sitting in Stanley Prison with no aircon for years, while people convicted of dangerous driving causing death (as vehicular manslaughter is known here) are out and about and getting behind the wheel again. The sex crimes were depressingly ordinary, the occasional embittered lover (usually female) rounding on her much older ex-lover /teacher, and suddenly a two-year consensual affair was, hey whaddaya know? redefined as sexual harassment.. University staff here have so little real influence, that there were a few, but a very few, cases of influence peddling where someone hired his girlfriend/wife/sister/mistress for a no-show job, so, you see, even some of the sex-linked stuff was really about money in the end.

But now the scandals are all about politics, and the interference with pollsters (who are trying to report on the truth) by politicos (who are trying to manipulate it.) There have been many of these over the past 10 years. The latest story of this sort that refused to die involves the visit of Vice-Premier Li Ke-qiang [who he??] to Hong Kong University last summer, as part of the school's centenary celebrations. The visit turned into a PR nightmare when protesters were roughed up, the former Governor of Hong Kong seated on the end of the second row of seats, and the Pok Fu Lam campus briefly turned into a police state. A review committee found that the police used 'unreasonable force' in dealing with protesters, and that the University president, Tsui Lap-chee, was responsible for 'administrative blunders' which led to a virtual lock-down on campus during the visit, the imprisonment in a stairwell of some of the protesting students, and generally a sudden taste of Tiananmen Square in Hong Kong for one afternoon.

Tsui didn't wait long last Fall to announce that he would not seek a renewal of contract. This was deemed 'surprising', but was this really a form of taking responsibility for the debacle, which has permanently damaged the University's reputation? Not at all. He is making his exit without doing any such thing. What I find confusing, is the persistent rumor that somehow Beijing is behind his exit. What would Beijing get out of this? He is a nonentity in Mainland circles, and anyway he managed the ridiculous bit of political theater Beijing required very well. You'd think they'd be thanking him and making him a member some prestigious Mainland academic-political body, such as the Academy of Social Sciences. Watch this space.

Another scandal which has blow up of late has to do with a pollster at Hong Kong Baptist University. He released incomplete data on the 'race' [sic.] to become the new CE between Henry Tang and CY Leung. The data showed Tang had closed the gap between them further than, in fact, he had at the time. The pollster claimed at first that he released the data early because he wanted the press to pay attention to it 'before the election in Taiwan took over the news'. This quite unbelievable claim was quickly shot down when it was revealed that a member of Tang's staff had called him and (it is presumed) applied the thumbscrews. Or did she? The pollster in question is a Mainland Chinese, by the way. So now, HKBU has a committee investigating...not whether political pressure was applied, and not the much-worse scenario of  whether the pollster voluntarily agreed to release incomplete data with a view to influencing public opinion in way known to be approved of by Beijing, but rather (wait for it) whether the poll's methodology was correct. Talk about diverting criticism from its proper target.

Sometimes I am glad that I will be 90 in 2047, deus vult. And sometimes I am glad that I am unlikely to face political pressure for playing a wrong note, missing a cue, or adding up marks incorrectly.  

Another long drought, and now I am up to almost 8,000 hits I suppose it is because life in Hong Kong has been so dull and predictable that there has been little to sound off about. But I have been watching with a kind of curiosity mixed with exasperation at the rising tide of complaints and protests by Hong Kong people against Mainlanders...in particular, because this was inevitably going to happen, it's just odd to see what set it off -- the Dolce and Gabbana Affair. I have had some personal experiences here.

A couple of years ago I was in a mall in Central, and with two friends visiting from the Philippines. We happened to want to take a photo, and we were outside, oh, I don't remember, but if it wasn't Dogs&Garbage, it was another designer-rags store. I had barely got my camera up, when a beefy security guard rushed out in a belligerent posture and shouted "NO PHOTOS!!!" I debated arguing with the guy, but it seemed he was 'just following orders', so there was no point in even trying to reason with him. The same thing happened when I was in a mall in Bangkok in 2008, security guards yelling at me for taking pictures. Admittedly, both of these incidents happened indoors, not outdoors. Then, a couple of years ago, I recall an article in The South China Morning Post, which described how even SCMP photographers were being stopped from taking pictures from the skybridges in Central (no one seems to recall that now, which is very odd...)

All this leads me to think that the truth about the D&G affair is not really being told. It seems D&G (and probably a lot of other merchants) have two, incompatible policies. One, is NO PHOTOS. The second, is that you never say NO to Mainland Chinese. So, the way this panned out was, that they very stupidly rationalized this policy by telling some Hongkies that only Mainlanders could take photographs. And now they are paying the price.

But I have the sense that an evil genie has been let out of the bottle. The anger now being directed at  Mainlanders by Hong Kong Chinese has been building up since 1997. It has little to do with designer stores acting heavily on people taking snapshots. It is almost nothing to do with people eating on the MTR (I would be rich if I had a dollar for every time I have seen a Hongkie eating on the subway; feeding children is a favorite way to violate the rule) ; and the rage against Mainland mothers taking advantage of having their kids born here is only a symptom of a much bigger problem.

What Hong Kong people are mad about is something they cannot see, largely because -- buying in to a certain extent to the 'One China' myth -- they cannot understand how other Chinese people can actually be The Other. They are exasperated because what 1997 delivered was not a return to China, but a re-colonization of Hong Kong by the Mainland. When one stops for a moment, and considers just the cultural portfolios of Great Britain on the one hand, and the PRC on the other, one sees immediately that this was a very bad bargain, and serious trade downwards in virtually every area of life and society.

So, now that we're good and mad, who are we gonna lynch over this? The blame game is probably pointless, but it might make sense to think who might be responsible. Without doubt, the unaccountable and inept Hong Kong government since 1997 is largely to blame for exacerbating an already bad deal. Forced by Beijing to maintain the crushing peg to the US dollar, the HK government has twiddled its thumbs while presiding over the ruin of many HK SMEs operating on the Mainland; and the rise in the value of the RMB has given given an economic edge to compatriots visiting from over the border which has rapidly translated into a boorish, imperialist arrogance that smacks of an 'occupying power.' Looking back to 1984, Margaret Thatcher certainly sold Hong Kong down the river, and this rising tide of civil conflict here is just part of her ghastly , never-ending legacy of destruction. And Tung Chee-wah probably made things much worse than they had to be by signing up for a Disneyland that was not wanted and completely unsustainable without opening the floodgates to Mainland Chinese.

It will be interesting to see how the HK Government works to put the lid on all this. With the CE 'election' coming up, major social unrest is the last thing they need. I see another cash handout coming in the next budget. 10,000 dollars, anyone???

Immense span of time no update. I was away from HK for a full month this year, visiting the US and Canada. Most of this was family obligations and research. I come back and, lo and behold, nearly 7,000 people have visited this page! IProbably significant that I still only have one friend...

Out here in Sai Kung Country Park the panic among the villagers to beat the HK Government's new stricter policy on building is palpable...two weeks ago I walked to my car and found a large truck blocking my car, full of bricks and building materials, and two unfamiliar cars parked in the area. The guy in charge told me he had 'rented' the space from the 'owner' for an unspecified period of time so her could build a house up on the lane at the back of the village. Never mind that he could not tell me the owner's name, or how the owner could 'rent' him a space already rented to me...anyway, it's a big hassle for 4 months or so while his crew of amateur builders works on that tiny lot. Today I wound up walking from my car to the path through a slurry of very wet concrete, and it will probably get worse. In other places, the Heung Yee Kuk is whipping up a frenzy of torpor with the comically unbelievable claim that all the villagers who emigrated to the UK in the 1960s were really only doing it so that they could save enough money to build a house on 'their' land...never mind that this was before the Small House Policy came into effect. The idea that all these retired restaurant owners want to return to Hong Kong is one of those lies that, if repeated often enough, many people might just start believing...

Anyway, my trip to the US was enough to make me a bit nostalgic for 'home', except that this is my home now. I'm an alien there now, I'm a legal alien here ( pace Sting.)The whole thing is summed up in this ancient Roman statue from the Getty Museum in Santa Monica, Satyr with a Mask...

He's playing a character, but he is violating the whole concept of the illusion of masks and acting by sticking his hand through the mouth...I love it. An actor who rejects acting, who rejects aleination. Maybe I am making too much of it, but I thought it was pretty cool. And you can't find this sort of thing in Hong Kong.

OK I promise to update this more often, but it would be nice to have some more friends...