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Harry yesterday, gone today

March 22, 2015

Harry Lee Kuan Yew has passed on.

He leaves us just as Singaporeans are finally falling out of love with his People’s Action Party, as I blogged after visiting Singapore last October. It is a pretty good record for someone who started out in politics in the 1950s.

Harry’s departure severs the direct link between south-east Asia’s political elite and its colonial past. (Mahathir is still alive, but he was not a player in the colonial era.) This seems to me to be the key import of this moment. There won’t be another Harry, born into an Anglicised and privileged family, angered yet titillated by colonial power, driven to reinvent himself as a true Chinese (and struggle to learn the Chinese language that was foreign to him as a kid), then striving to find a happy medium as Singapore’s leader somewhere between Asian nationalist and American lickspittle. He opted for a combination of proto-Victorian morality re-dressed-up as Asian values, and the biggest CIA station in the region, that saw American lickspittle win comfortably.

Pragmatism is I think what defined Harry more than anything. He was a fantastic leader for Singapore. But he didn’t really give a toss about south-east Asia so long as Singapore was ok. In this sense he was a modernisation of British governors of the Crown Colony of Singapore. Smarter, more savvy, more efficient than any colonial goon, but at the end of the day nothing very different. He provided phenomenal leadership, and he led by example. But the notion he had ‘vision’ at the level of south-east Asian politics and development does not stand up for me.

So goodbye Harry. I think of you as the full-on Chinese student at Cambridge, with your motorbike and your cigarettes, determined to prove you were better than the gweilos, even if what mattered most to you all too often was their approbation. I wonder: did you used to flick your cigarette butts away on the street, such that you would have been fined in Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore? We may never know.

Later:

Here is an essay about Lee Kuan Yew by Orville Schell in The Wall Street Journal. It is not the way I would tell Harry’s story, and is something of a eulogy, but worth reading.

Another academic, Minxin Pei, has a different but still very positive take on Project Syndicate.

Much later: 

The quality outs when the dust has settled. Jerry Cohen relates encounters with Harry across the decades in this article. Note Harry’s instructions, after he gave up smoking, that no one should smoke when he attended a social gathering. Including in the United States…

This recent documentary about Singapore’s political exiles is much praised. If you can find some way to see it. I have not.

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Posted in Singapore, South-east Asia | 2 Comments »

Black-eye Fridays all round

December 19, 2014


cam gowns formalcam jumping in river examscam spies

Of all the great Cambridge traditions — wearing silly capes to dinner, jumping in the river, spying for the Soviets — Black-Eye Friday is surely the finest spectacle. On the last Friday before Christmas (today!) the good townspeople of the city remind us of their presence by getting as drunk as possible and fighting in St Andrew’s street, between Downing and Emmanuel colleges.

cam street booze 5 cam street booze 4 cam street booze 3 cam street booze 2 cam street booze 1

So seriously is this tradition observed that a special medical team from the 254 Medical Regiment Army Reserves is called in to attend to the wounded. A legion of Black-Eye Friday ‘street pastors’ roams the city through the night, sweeping up broken glass, offering flip-flops to inebriated women in high heels, and ‘reasoning’ with those who just want to get on with a good fight. Police gobble up precious overtime and get to tell people to ‘spread ’em’ against the railings of Emmanuel college (through which those detained can conveniently vomit while awaiting their fate).

cam emmanuel

So far the build-up to the most violent day of the year has been auspicious. Sub-editors at the Cambridge News were gifted the most prized headline in journalism before dawn on Monday when a man involved in a violent altercation allegedly bit a dog before dying of a heart attack.

In mid-week, the News sent its crime reporter to test the waters of St. Andrew’s street and he was pleased to report on a large-scale drunken brawl between a group of men dressed in Christmas jumpers. In a separate incident, a pastor offered a blanket to a young, insensible woman whose lower half was clad only in a pair of black lace knickers; she told him to go away, explaining that she had ‘come out like this’. Sadly, the News declined to publish photos of these interesting incidents.

Global link with Chinese food reference

thomas kwok

But it is not only in Cambridge that people are getting black eyes today. Over in Hong Kong, spooky-looking mega-billionaire Thomas Kwok, of Sun Hung Kai fame, has been found guilty of bribing the man who was about to become the second-most powerful politician in the territory (FT sub needed). Tommy might well be sent for a bit of prison congee when sentencing happens next week.

It is all rather shocking. The judge apparently failed to understand the Asian culture of gift giving, in which a consultancy retainer while holding public office, a couple of rent-free flats and an interest-free loan are simply ways of saying: ‘Hello, how are you?’ The sort of treatment that has been meted out to church-going born-again Christian Tommy suggests that almost any act of friendship can be called into question — as, for instance, when uber-billionaire Li Ka-shing gave retiring HSBC chief executive Michael Sandberg a metre-high, solid gold statue of the HSBC headquarters building. Thank god that black-eye Friday is only one day a year.

More from Hong Kong

Bloomberg details testimony from the trial about money, mistresses and paranoia. The ransom paid to Big Spender, who kidnapped elder brother Walter, was also stated in the trial, as HK$600 million. (Big Spender later kidnapped Li Ka-shing’s eldest son, Victor. It is all in Asian Godfathers…)

 

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Tits and bums

November 24, 2014

Oh, so now you’re paying attention.

In the past couple of weeks I have posted blogs that seemed to me important. About the Xi Jinping-Obama understanding on emissions that paves the way for a global deal to arrest climate change in Paris next year. And about Adair Turner’s argument that governments may have to print money to pay for fiscal expenditure and monetise part of their debts if we are to head off another asset bubble by raising interest rates while at the same time avoiding global economic depression.

Well, these momentous developments have garnered little more than the usual rate of traffic on this blog. So, looking at email addresses of the several hundred people who now subscribe to every single post (dear oh dear), I note that most of you are academics, researchers, money managers, NGO-types and ‘activists’. So it occurs that what you really want is a bit of gratuitous demi-porn to take the edge off your lives of monotonous intellectual mind-wrestling.

Fortunately I am in a position to indulge you. The peg is the recent APEC summit in Beijing, which was important not just for an apparent meeting of minds between the Chinese and US presidents, but also for an alleged pass made by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, at Xi Jinping’s wife.

Personally, I don’t think there is much to it, although Putin is now officially a single man, which puts him (even more) firmly in the frame in terms of motive. However the extraordinary reaction of Chinese censors, who moved immediately to expunge any trace of Vlad’s let-me-get-your-coat-darling moment from the Chinese Interweb, reminds us that in Chinese Communist Party cultural terms Vlad was indeed on quite thin ice. Here, side by side, are the photo (similar to the one below) briefly posted by Chinese state news agency Xinhua and, to the right, the notice you got shortly after/still get at the same URL saying in Chinese that the page has been deleted.

Obama to Xi: 'Looks like Ukraine is not the only thing Vladimir wants to get into.'

Obama to Xi: ‘Looks like Ukraine is not the only thing Vladimir wants to get into.’

And here is a brief story from Foreign Policy about the whole incident, including a link to video if you really want more.

The Putin-Peng Liyuan (yes, she has a name) frisson got me thinking, as I am sure it has you, about the broader subject of global leaders hitting on other leaders, their wives and partners. So here, in no particular order, are some memorable moments I have been able to come up with:

 

1. Henry Kissinger’s ever-penetrating analysis. These must surely be among the most famous images of the genre, as Henry first enjoys a full frontal review of Lady Diana’s strategic assets, and then follows up from behind with a sly ass-check.

kissinger Di 1 kissinger Di 2

 

 

 

2. The Brezhnev. But did you know that back in 1973 Kissinger’s own date, former Bond girl Jill St. John, was subjected a famous occular eye-over by the leader of the Unfree World, Leonid Brezhnev? In the photo below you can almost see Brezhnev calculating out the potential upside of detente with the Americans. Coincidentally, it was in 1973 that Kissinger was quoted in the New York Times saying that: ‘Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.’

Brezhnev Jill St John 1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is a shot that shows Kissinger (back to camera) and Jill as another guy (described in Walter Isaacson’s Kissinger biography as a ‘naval aide’) gives Jill’s ass a caressing gaze too.

Brezhnev and Jill St. John at Nixon Pool Party

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. Size doesn’t matter. Deng Xiaoping. There is no killer photo here, just various official ones like that below. However, when Ronald and Nancy Reagan visited China in 1984 and were received in the Great Hall of the People, Deng said to Nancy (in range of the foreign press corps): ‘I hope you’ ll come the next time and leave the president home.’ After translation, the ever-cool Ron batted the remark away.

Deng XP Nancy R and Ron R

 

 

 

 

 


 

4. Obama-Gucci Helle. These images are so recently famous they hardly bear posting. Except to tee up the less well-known 5., below. Here Obama flirts with Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, known to her countrymen as Gucci Helle for her rather un-Danish love of branded designer clothing.

obama helle 1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here is the US president after a bollocking from his wife, who was sitting on the other side of him all along. (There is another image of Brave Dave Cameron forcing his way into Helle and Obama’s selfie, but it is just too depressing to post.)

obama no-helle michelle

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5. Obabma and Lil sis’ Yingluck. Now here is the collector’s item. It is Obama and Thaksin’s little sister Yingluck, who was running Thailand after Thaksin was thrown out in a coup, at least until Yingluck was also thrown out in a coup. What was that song about ‘One night in Bangkok’?

Obama Yingluck

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To be fair to Obama, however, I think the story may have been that it was young Yingluck who was providing the come-on.

Obama Yingluck 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Posted in China, South-east Asia, United States | 1 Comment »

Singaporean takeaway

October 27, 2014

I failed to write anything the week ending 18 October despite an interesting trip to participate in the 10th anniversary of the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. (They invited you, you’re thinking. Yes, they did. As Saul Bellow once wrote: ‘There is nothing too rum to be true.’)

I also had a wonderful side-visit that week across the causeway to Johor Bahru, about which I will say nothing more than that if you have never read Han Suyin’s classic novel And The Rain My Drink, you should get on and do so. The book is particularly recommended for Chinese, Indians, Malays, Japanese and assorted gweilos, all of whom feature amid the chaos of the Emergency in Malaya/Singapore. What is more, there is a new edition, published by Monsoon Books that contains two, new short forewords; one is by Han’s former ‘liberal’ Special Branch husband; and one is by a well-known Malaysian human rights lawyer. The forewords unlock a few secrets about the writing of and background to the book. The copy I picked up in Singapore has the cover contained in the previous link; the copy available on Amazon has a different cover but an online review indicates it has (at least) the additional foreword by Han Suyin’s second husband. The book is not a bad gift.

Aside from the trip to JB (the treatment of hundreds of thousands of Malaysians who cross the border for work each day is pretty shocking on both sides; waiting time is frequently hours), the week in Singapore gave me a chance to speak with a bunch of policy people and a couple of ministers, and so here are a few thoughts about a place I don’t often talk about:

 

Singapore menu du jour:

1. The Great Unwashed are becoming the Great Ungrateful. In the 2011 election, Harry Lee’s People’s Action Party (PAP) got, by Singapore standards, a kicking, hit by a negative vote swing of almost 7 percentage points which took it down to 60 percent of votes cast. More and more people have had enough of the PAP’s arrogance, its brutal elitism and its lack of the common touch. On top of this there is Singapore’s hideous inequality (Gini of income inequality at a record 0.54), the out-of-control immigration (including horrific numbers of dumb, fat gweilos), and the apparently congenital inability of PAP politicians to think in terms of the population’s interests as a whole. Back in the UK, the PAP makes me think of David Cameron and George Osborne on a really bad day.

2. Never underestimate Harry, or indeed Little Harry. The PAP remains a formidable machine when it comes to co-opting Singapore’s best and brightest. A reasonable example is chipper Minister for Culture, Community and Youth, Lawrence Wong, whom I had the pleasure to chat to. He is a big supporter of new PAP measures to curb real estate speculation and increase welfare transfers to the poor. It is not fundamental change, however it is change at the margin. The PAP’s logo may have been inspired by that of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, but the PAP has enjoyed considerably more success and longevity.

Oswald

Oswald

 

 

 

Harry

Harry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. So the big PAP trope just now is that the party is becoming much more touchy-feely and getting down with the labouring masses. At a public forum, many-times minister — most recently Foreign Minister — George Yeo, who became the most senior PAP figure since the 1960s to lose his seat in 2011 (‘arrogance’, said one of my taxi drivers), summed up the required shift in elegant philosophical terms. He said that Singapore must move on from ‘utilitarianism’ and seek policies that work for as many people as possible. In other words, the crude majority (assuming there even is one in the next election, in 2015) should no longer ride rough shod over the interests of minority groups, be they the very poor, Malays, whomever. He didn’t use the second philosophical designation, but what he meant is that Singapore needs to shift from utilitarianism to something more Pareto efficient, where policy gains for the majority do not come at the expense of other people.

4. Unfortunately I am a sceptic and I don’t believe the PAP will change its stripes – at least not fast enough to prevent even more trouble at the next election. At the same forum I commended George Yeo for calling for a move to a more mature, thoughtful policy framework. Then I asked him when he thinks Singapore will stop hanging people. (Singapore releases poor and patchy data, but in some years has had the highest per capita state execution rate in the world.) The response was interesting: no more new George/new PAP. He simply said that killing people has a deterrent effect and that most Singaporeans are in favour of it. This is the old PAP we know and love: not letting facts or logic get in the way of what it wants to do. First, there is no statistically robust evidence – and there are many studies – that capital punishment has a deterrent effect, so the claim to the contrary is disingenuous. Second, the logical case against capital punishment doesn’t hinge on the debate about deterrence anyway. Instead — at least for me — the sledgehammer argument against capital punishment is that you cannot guarantee in any legal system not to make mistakes; and when you do make a mistake, you cannot bring wrongly-hanged people back from the dead. I have looked in detail at miscarriage of justice cases in both the UK and the US, each of which has a better, more transparent legal system than Singapore. So when George offered the sop that he is open to looking for better ways to kill people, I wasn’t overly impressed. In reality of course, the PAP is sufficiently embarrassed at some level about its barbarism that the number of killings has fallen sharply as its political support has waned in the 2000s and 2010s; in 2012, the number of convictions subject to mandatory capital punishment was reduced.

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Posted in Singapore, South-east Asia | 1 Comment »

Targeted consumer boycotts

October 8, 2014

Here is a very interesting article from Foreign Policy about possible future strategies in the Hong Kong protests. It is written by academic researchers of successful non-violent protest movements around the world.

Following my FT oped, the idea of targeted consumer boycotts is what jumps out…

In addition… there were lots of comments on the FT article. As with this blog, I don’t think that comments which do not add substance, or challenge substance, in what is being said are useful. But several people did say things on the FT site that seem to me interesting enough to re-post. I was struck by the comparison with Singapore. Is it possible the Harry and the PAP are more responsive on the question of social equity and competition than the Hong Kong government? I think the full answer would be more nuanced than the commenter suggests, but it is an interesting idea.

…

Great article.  So true.  We Chinese generally don’t take to the streets unless our bellies are empty.  Usually too busy working and making money!

Singapore has a supermarket chain run by the National Trade Union Congress, which was put in place to keep prices competitive.  Its produce is often superior to the so-called upmarket chains.  I remember as a child the beginning of this chain and how it put the lid on the supermarket chains left behind by the British.  In fact, one of those chains, Fitzpatrick ended up going out of business!

As for food, there are many hawker centres where hawker stalls are rented out at ridiculously low rents to stallholders who “inherited” these stalls from their parents or other relatives.  As a result, you get delicious food (from secret recipes passed down generation to generation) at super-low prices.  I just had a “home-cooked” type meal of rice and dishes (1 veg, 1 meat and 1 toufu) for a total of S$3, in the Central Business District.  And it gets cheaper in the “heartlands”.

At the last General Elections, the PAP lost seven seats to the opposition.  It is now implementing even more social transfers in response to popular sentiment.

I think that’s what ordinary Hongkongers want.  Someone to listen to their woes and take action.

…

I came across the following stats at Bloomberg to quantify the hurt inflicted on so many living in HK as a result of money and power being in the hands of so few.

Hong Kong’s Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, rose to 0.537 in 2011 from 0.525 in 2001, the government said last June. The score, a high for the city since records began in 1971, is above the 0.4 level used by analysts as a gauge of the potential for social unrest.

The average gross household income of the poorest 10 percent of the population fell 16 percent to HK$2,170 a month in 2011, from 10 years earlier, according to a government report. The comparable income for the richest 10 percent jumped to HK$137,480 a month, a 12 percent increase.

Not good for creating social harmony.

…

Studwell’s refocus on economic questions is correct, and would be very good for Hong Kong, but it would never receive the kind of universal support that the Western press has given the democracy movement. In fact, the West is proposing the opposite of Studwell’s economic fairness: to break the current Chinese social structure and open the gates for multinational business, a kind of Yeltsin years for China. Every Western journalist knows that democracy without campaign finance will lead to the election of money – i.e., the election of a tycoon or someone backed by one (CY Leung was an anti-tycoon candidate compared to Henry Tang, and look where he is now).  Studwell seems concerned with actually improving Hong Kong, but that is not what the press coverage of the democracy movement is about, otherwise they would have used real facts rather than cinderella stories. Nevertheless, the FT should be commended for printing this piece, as well as for keeping comment board open.

…

There is no questions that HK is run by monopolies, duopoly and oligopolies and things are more expensive than it could have been.

However, the author who learn much by looking in the back yards, especially the VAT inclusive prices here..  For example, one can run a price comparision between watsons.com.hk and boots.com, Johnson baby shampoo 500ml cost £3.35/£0.67 per 100ml at boots and cost HKD56.9/£4.60 for the 800ml version -> £0.575 per 100ml.

Toyrus HK : Nerf CS18 : HKD399.9 / £32.07,  ToysrUS UK : £39.99
HK Electricty prices : Max HKD186.4 or £0.1495 per kwh
http://www.hkelectric.com/web/DomesticServices/BillingPaymentAndElectricityTariff/TariffTable/Index_en.htm

UK Electricity prices: British gas £0.1535 per kwh.

Looks like we all have our own ‘monopolies’ problem to deal with (for us, including the one at Brussels).

…

It is encouraging to read an FT an article which says it like it is regarding Hong Kong and much of Asia, perhaps best summarised as ‘Winner takes all, loser hard luck’. Consider the Gini coefficients of wealth inequality and you’ll find Hong Kong and Singapore, two of the ‘wealthiest’ places on the planet with the worst ‘developed nation’ Gini coefficients, these being on a par with some of the poorest African nations. It’s long been apparent that the propertly developers, Government, ‘managed land releases and sales’ operate in a manner beneficial to the few and disenfranchising the majority. Arguments that this is a hang over from the past don’t quite stack up, as the present leaders have all the powers they need to do something about it. One has to ask why not, with the answer perhaps reducing to such tolerance of vast inequalities being an inherent part of the region’s social fabric and culture. Surprising that the majority have tolerated this for so long but then this too, fortitude in the face of injustice, even from within, is a regional trait. Perhaps, with modern dissemination of information, so that it is clearer to all as to what is going on, the majority will start to exercise their influence. Without this, nothing is likely to change.

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How to make enemies and alienate people…

October 6, 2014

Here is the FT op-ed I wrote over the weekend. It just went live on their online edition.

Can’t say it is likely to get me many tycoon dinner invites, but I do think it is true:

 

 

October 6, 2014 5:14 pm

Hong Kong should focus its fight on the tycoon economy

By Joe Studwell

The real target is the anti-competitive, anti-consumer economy, writes Joe Studwell
A woman holds a placard at a large pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong on October 1, 2014. Hong Kong has been plunged into the worst political crisis since its 1997 handover as pro-democracy activists take over the streets following China's refusal to grant citizens full universal suffrage. AFP PHOTO / ALEX OGLE (Photo credit should read Alex Ogle/AFP/Getty Images)©AFP

Hong Kong stepped back from the brink on Friday night, when chief executive CY Leung belatedly authorised a senior official to “hold talks” with protesters and those same protesters decided, for now, not to enter government buildings. It was a fortunate outcome. Beijing would characterise the occupation of official property as an attack on the Chinese state.

What Hong Kong needs is not a strategy that backs Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, into a corner, but one that resonates with his own mindset. This is why the protesters should refocus on Hong Kong’s tycoon economy, and the anti-competitive, anti-consumer arrangements that define it. You may think,like the Heritage Foundation, that Hong Kong is a free market. However, except for external trade, it is not. Instead it is what one of the richest men in the city once described to me as “a nice bowl of fish soup”. That soup is fed to the few, making ordinary people poorer, stoking resentment, and indirectly contributing to acute pollution.

Cartels are everywhere in Hong Kong. Supermarkets are a duopoly, one whose pricing power allows the chains to charge higher prices for the same products in some of Hong Kong’s most deprived areas. Drug stores are a duopoly. Buses are a cartel: high-priced, mostly cash-only, running shoddy, dirty diesel vehicles with drivers who earn a pittance. Electricity is provided by two, expensive monopolies that handle everything from generation to distribution, one on Hong Kong island and the other in Kowloon. The container ports are an oligopoly, with the world’s highest handling charges. Yet they will not supply onshore electricity to vessels, which must instead run diesel generators that pollute the city air.

The biggest stitch-up remains the lousy construction standards and sky-high costs in a residential property market dominated by the “Four Families”, which in the 1990s were estimated to be selling property for between two and four times what it cost to develop.

You may think of the territory as a free market but, except for external trade, it is not

Add in the jiggery-pokery of a Boys’ Own stock market with 1970s-style governance, and a taxation system that tycoons circumvent by taking out their money through tax-free dividends, and you begin to get the picture.

Hong Kong has had a Competition Ordinance and a Competition Commission since 2012. But so far nothing has changed. In a striking contrast with mainland China, where the Communist party after 1989 first increased transfer payments to the urban poor, and then increased transfers and cut taxes for the rural poor in the 2000s, the Hong Kong government lets a colonial rentier economy carry merrily on.

Mr Xi launched his new administration with not only a brutal anti-corruption campaign, but also an anti-monopoly drive. Unfortunately he seems unaware that Hong Kong is at least as rigged as the mainland.

So here is a plan. Speak to Mr Xi in terms he understands. Refocus the protests on the cartels. I am no protester, but it is not hard to think of peaceful tactics that would be difficult for the tycoons to ignore as they sweep into their basement car parks and ascend in private elevators to their penthouse offices. Where possible, boycott the cartels.

Would this be the end for the tycoons? Not at all. In my experience they are people of extraordinary entrepreneurial acumen. Like all of us, they enjoy a capacious free lunch. But if that is taken away they will adjust and add more value to the economy by doing so.

It is time for Hong Kong to work for the majority. If the protesters make Mr Xi understand the economic problem, it becomes easier to compromise on the politics – probably with a more open nomination process in 2022. I hold, perhaps wrongly, that Beijing’s intransigence is born of ignorance, not malice.


The writer is author of ‘How Asia Works: success and failure in the world’s most dynamic region’

 

More:

This just went up from Han Donfang. Very much worth a read. The lead explains who he is if you do not know.

And here is a nice piece from The Age about CY Leung trousering US$7m during the sale of his insolvent firm. Now that is leadership.

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10 seconds of unprovoked HK police brutality

October 3, 2014

See here. HK policeman swings around a middle-aged, passive protester so he can spray pepper spray directly into his face and eyes.

Anti-protest thugs have been attacking the Occupy movement in Causeway Bay (HK island) and Mong Kok (Kowloon) today. Police not responding to/unable to cope with this. Looks like Beijing United Front / state security people up to no good. Old-fashioned Italian-style ‘Strategy of Tension’ that allows government to sell itself as the good guys riding to the rescue amid civil chaos. Except that in Italy the protesters included terrorists who were killing people. In Hong Kong it is just kids who clean up after themselves. People on the ground in Hong Kong say students so far not reacting, moving away. Student leaders have called on those in Mong Kok to leave and come to the government offices area in Admiralty where international press is concentrated and numbers are larger.

Key link:

Here is the livestream feed from HK. Not looking good UK 1330/HK 2030.

More:

This video purports to show Hong Kong police handing out blue, anti-protest ribbons to anti-protesters in a police station. Pretty appalling if true.

Hemlock is singing a similar tune to me re. the tycoons. The point he quotes from Nicholas Bequelin is brilliantly incisive.

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Rubber bullets can and do kill

October 2, 2014

rubber bullets arrive

This is a picture of rubber bullets being prepared on Hong Kong island today, 2 October 2014.

It looks like protesters are ready to attempt to break into government buildings to occupy them and that police, after first using tear gas (not yet done so, but will), may be ready to shoot.

I maintain that the protesters would be better to refocus on a strategy of blockading the Tycoons’ Towers, most obviously the car parks, thereby forcing them to use the main door like everybody else when Hong Kong goes back to work. At such a point there might be an opportunity to confront KS Li, Lee Shau-kee, Robert Kuok and the rest. CY Leung won’t meet the people, so what about the tycoons? They are the ‘prefects’ of this system.

The other good target would be to stake out these guys’ homes, including on Deepwater Bay Road, the tycoon alley where many of them live. Then there is the golf club, where they play in the early morning.  But the most obvious target is the Towers.

The point is to refocus the protest on Hong Kong, the backward nature of government, the monopolies and oligopolies that lead to far higher real estate, utility, supermarket, bus fare and other costs than should be the case. This is why Hong Kong needs genuine universal suffrage.

A move on government offices will be deemed in Beijing to be an attack on the state. This may be very hard to reverse back from to a position where an accommodation can be reached, something I believe is entirely possible. Plus people are quite possibly going to get maimed or killed.

A move on the tycoons, by contrast, is something that everyone can live with. They’ll be absolutely livid, but they are big boys and can deal with it. Start with K.S. and Cheung Kong Tower. He’s the smartest of the gang. Greedy but affable and, let’s remember, the son of a teacher.

CY Leung will hold a press conference at 11.30pm tonight, Hong Kong time (very soon). More in a bit.

 

Update (midnight in Hong Kong):

CY Leung said at the presser that he has asked a senior civil servant to ‘hold talks’ with protesters.

Here is livestream that collates 4 different live TV sources in HK and contains some English notes for those of us who can’t do Cantonese. You’ll get a couple of ads before it runs.

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China and the culture thing…

October 2, 2014

A major intellectual breakthrough I made in the last 10 years (one of very few) is to recognise and begin to incorporate in my thinking the dynamic nature of culture — in other words how culture both changes for reasons internal to societies and can be changed via policy intervention. I started to understand this working on Asian Godfathers, partly by spending time with ethnic Chinese, Arab, Tamil and Indian tycoons in south-east Asia, and partly because I tripped over, and then read, the extraordinary anthropological work of G. William Skinner from the 1950s*. Then I just started reading more anthropology (also known as ‘journalistic reportage for grown-ups’).

Anyhow, if you want to understand what is going on in Hong Kong and Taiwan just now, you need to fit the cultural piece of the jigsaw. As luck would have it, here is a new paper dealing with just this issue, across the three societies of mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. It is free, easy to read and enlightening.

 

* The core Skinner opus:

G. William Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History (Cornell University Press, 1957)

G. William Skinner, Leadership and Power in the Chinese Community of Thailand (Cornell University Press, 1958)

G. William Skinner, ‘Creolized Chinese Societies in South-east Asia’, in Anthony Reid, ed., Sojourners and Settlers: Histories of South-east Asia and the Chinese (Allen & Unwin, 1996)

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Posted in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan | Comments Off on China and the culture thing…

Happy holiday?

September 30, 2014

Tuesday 30 September 2014 in Hong Kong. Tomorrow is China’s National Day, symbol of ‘Liberation’, symbol of the Party. What will it bring?

Central has not yet been occupied, so that is one thing.

But if I was these students and workers and housewives and children, I would occupy the space around the main tycoons’ towers. Each of the big boys works out of a penthouse in their HQ tower. Imagine if they couldn’t get in! Start with Cheung Kong Tower in Central and carry peacefully on from there.

I should say, of course, that as a gweilo I ought not to be recommending such things. But it is important to remember that this protest, at least a decade in the making, is about far more than just the electoral arrangements for 2017. It is about justice for the ordinary man and woman, about fair trade, about an end to rip-offs and the economics of the few. I have always said that I love my tycoon acquaintances, but they know as well as anyone that life moves forward and that the real tycoon is able to adjust.

 

Hong Kong, the day before 1 October

Hong Kong, the day before 1 October

Link:

Latest from Keith Bradsher in the NYT here, of interest mainly because of CY Leung’s drivel half way down the story. He really is not a good advertisement for Bristol Polytechnic. Perhaps that is why they changed their name to the University of the West of England.

Video:

From Dominic Meagher, 8.30-9pm Hong Kong time, Tuesday 30 September, wandering through the crowds in Admiralty. This is his Facebook page. This should be the specific video. Huge numbers of people, few police, no tear gas, party atmosphere (thus far)…

Cripes:

Forgot about Hemlock, whose blog is here. Just now he is writing about snowy-haired nutcase Robert Chow. But what we really want to hear is dear, politically-rather-well-connected Hemlock explain his erstwhile deep affection for CY ‘He’s going to change things’ Leung. Think I’ll send him an email…

Chinese:

Here is what Xi Jinping says about Hong Kong and Taiwan in his National Day speech. It seems accommodating inasmuch as he reasserts commitment to the Basic Law and does not (if I am reading this right) say anything about ‘Basic Law as we decide to interpret it’. But of course they have already said that, so who knows?

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Update, 1 October:

All is well on 1 October. No violence around the China flag-raising ceremony by the Convention Centre in the morning, just well-earned heckling for CY Leung.

This is a very useful piece linking HK, Taiwan and Xinjiang by Michael Cole in The Diplomat. Good context for anyone who needs it, which is pretty much everyone. This is not bad by the BBC’s Carrie Gracie trying to figure what might be going through Xi Jinping’s head at this point; of course it is speculative, but Carrie has a lot of experience. In Chinese, this is today’s People’s Daily (the CPC mouthpiece) editorial on Hong Kong. It is tough-ish, but as various well-informed people have pointed out, not as tough as the infamous 26 April 1989 People’s Daily editorial that presaged the troops going in. As I said yesterday re. Xi Jingping’s national day speech (above, in Chinese), Beijing appears to be leaving a little wriggle room. But will it be a deal that wriggles through, or people with guns?

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Posted in China, Hong Kong | 2 Comments »

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