Brainwashing? Propaganda? Almost assuredly. At least we can be sure from the National Education implementation that nothing has dramatically changed from the two previous HK CE's. The CE will implement his pet programmes over divided public opinion while claiming public support. The CE will block programmes he dislikes with the rationale that public opinion is divided and the public supports his blocking these programmes. The behaviour shows utter contempt for the people of HK and an unwillingness to treat them as adults. (Insert some ideas of modern neo-Confucianism as a rationalisation for authoritarians to treat the people they rule over as non-adult lesser beings.)

As the HK SAR government rams through their National Education programme, let's keep a few questions in mind when determining if it is brainwashing. First, will the HK SAR government fund alternative curriculum development? Second, will the HK SAR government delay implementation of the program until alternative curriculums are available? And third, will the government require alternative curriculums be approved as satisfactory by the Department of Education?

Could I develop a National Education curriculum that taught the Chinese Communist Party's insurgency from the 20s crippled China economically, militarily, and politically to the point it was an easy target for Japanese invasion? Could I teach that the US-brokered truce between the Communists and Chiang Kai-shek was the only thing that allowed the CCP to survive the 40s? Could I teach that the Communists ran the country in to the ground from 1949 to 1979 economically, thus producing an incredibly depressed baseline from which to judge current economic progress? Could I teach that during those 30 years that Chiang Kai-shek, Lee Kuan-yew, and even the British in HK, demonstrated the same economic growth that the CCP now claim to be superior to all others? Could I teach that the major driving force of the PRC's economic miracle of the last 30 years was a willingness to sacrifice Chinese labour as cheap serfs for HK and Taiwanese capital, which then produced knock-on unemployment in HK and Taiwan? Teach that the one true miracle of the CCP economically is a willingness to force unequal economic treaties on foreign companies who are blindly tempted by the ever unrealized notion of a billion person market? Could I excerpt a travel guide on Taiwan and state that Taipei's beauty was unrealised until democracy forced the KMT to pursue policies to make the Taiwanese people happy?

I'm sure my educational curriculum would be labeled as brainwashing by those who developed the government's curriculum. But given what I've seen of the HK Secondary School Geography curriculum, I'm not surprised at the brainwashing in education here. When I say Geography, don't think geography. The curriculum is closer to some sort of property tycoon urban planning nirvana. Living in over-priced under-sized mislabeled high-rise rabbit hutches is the natural order of things, so don't worry and be happy.

As for appeals to being Chinese and the importance of learning Chinese culture? It's as if the students aren't learning Putonghua. It's as if the students for generations haven't been brainwashed in to believing that written Cantonese is invalid and unworthy of study in favour of written Putonghua. It's as if the students don't already study Chinese history and Chinese literature. And if you want to teach a Chinese government class, do we need more than the Basic Law of HK and the Constitution of the PRC? Do we need the misinterpretations of the Basic Law by the Election Committee and the National People's Congress? Do we need to do more than hand our students rubber stamps for them to understand the CCP and HK's Executive-led governments?

So two days in to his new term as CE of Hong Kong and CY is heading in the wrong direction. He may be rapidly uniting Hong Kong, but he's not uniting them behind his leadership. CY's continued to promise that he's bringing fresh air to the job, even though he was a major player since the Handover in one of the major problems, ExCo. Is CY's new listening tour an admission that he wasn't listening as ExCo convenor for the last 15 years?

First there is the cause celebre of the July 1st March: Hello Kitty. Why Hello Kitty? Because CY used Hello Kitty stickers as an excuse for not living up to his Mr. Clean billing. The use of excuses is a way of dismissing the concerns of others, which is the opposite of listening. Hong Kong's long suffering masses are used to excuses from their administration, like lots of people come out for marches because they want to take a nice holiday stroll in the sunshine. And if crisis management doesn't teach that people don't want to hear excuses, it surely teaches that apologies should NEVER contain the word "but". Yet CY (and his proxies Tsang Yok-sing and Bernard Cheung) used the word in his apology. "I was negligent, BUT I do not have integrity problems." It's like waving a red flag in front of a bull. Excuses and BUTs just piss people off because it shows you aren't willing to unequivocally take responsibility. This doesn't bode well for CY, since during the CE "campaign" his major positive was not being Henry Tang and his major negative was a slick ability to answer questions while avoiding answering the questions.

Then there's the police response to the protest march. It was the same old games with the numbers trying to downplay opposition. The FT BeyondBrics blog on the march and discontent coined a phrase: "one country, two realities". This is in response to official media not reflecting the reality that everyone else can see with their own eyes. Officials on both sides of the border are guilty of disappearing data, "massaging" data or fabricating data (like HK's CPU use of push polls). And after the police's unreal numbers, came the excuses. The clusterfuck of crowd control was everybody's fault but the police. This is Lau Nai-keung listening. Every one not supporting the government is a dissident and should shut up, so we can listen to the people willing to feed our vision of reality.

Next there's Carrie Lam in TKO with the Education Secretary in tow. As anyone who's followed the news in the last 5 years, the big issue in TKO is the landfill. She didn't bring the Environment Secretary, she brought the Education Secretary, like a job-seeker who couldn't be bothered to do even the most basic of research. Was she not listening at her last position in government? And again, when faced with the true concerns of the people, the government official goes on the defensive and pushes out excuses. The government can't do anything quickly, because it's a big problem. Again with the Lau Nai-keung listening. The problem here isn't the Civil Service getting stuck on their preferred solution, but the political appointee getting stuck on their preferred solution and refusing to listen and work with the grassroots.

Then there was CY himself. The confrontation with members of People Power may make the news due to being the big splash, but the real problem for CY was his answers on housing. The problem posed to him was housing not being affordable. The official response to the problem? That he wouldn't make housing affordable and then a deflection towards CY's programme to enrich his cronies.

Allow me digress here a bit in response to a Time magazine article on the march. The issue with mainlanders and property isn't a matter of them buying our expensive property. It isn't a matter of, "they're marrying our white women and moving in to our neighborhoods." Rather mirroring the US, where fraudulently easy credit in the mid-2000s skewed property production towards McMansions that became asset deadweight after the bubble burst, the fraudulently easy credit on the mainland since 2008 (see AlsoSprachAnalysts' graph on China's M2 growth) skewed property development in HK towards luxury estates to the point the government had to place restrictions on a few less prime land sales to provide non-luxury flats. And the excess cash in Hong Kong that was floating in from across the border was dragging the prices in the rest of the property market up from the top. And this was true, not just in residential property, but also in commercial real estate, where rents skyrocketed and shops were being skewed to provide luxury bling for the status-seeking nouveau riche of the mainland.

The real problem here comes back to the issue of one country, two realities. How do we know mainland money is skewing these markets? Look at the luxury jewelry stores popping up like 7-11s in tourist districts that have killed off mom and pop shops in nearby streets in a domino effect of gentrification. As for residential housing, all we have is a survey by one property agency of records that used putonghua for the anglicized names instead of their cantonese names. e.g. Lin vs Lam. When I wondered if there was official data on how much HK property investment came from mainland Trusts and investment vehicles that promised big returns, I was told there isn't any. If mainland officials told CY that many struggling mainland Trusts and investment vehicles couldn't survive bursting HK's property bubble and it would cause very bad problems for the Party on the mainland, what do you think CY's policy action would be? Take care of HKers and make housing affordable or take care of the Party?

We can't know why, but making housing in HK more affordable is off the table. Instead we are offered a resumption of the Home Ownership Scheme, a lecture on how his family bought a house with a few years' hard work with plastic flowers and so should you and a lecture on a need to come up with a plan for the future of land formation, which sounds a lot like the government's laughable Hong Kong 2020 consultation on Morlocks and reclamation. Previous governments, that CY was part of, told us they were listening and then Lau Nai-keunged the consultation results to create the reality the government wanted, which puts CY's listening tour in a deep hole to start. But after one weekend of CY in charge, it's pretty much the same story. And if CY doesn't start to learn truth from facts, he's truly in danger of becoming the next Tung Chee-hwa and not making it to the end of his term despite being the Party's Golden Boy.

So I promised a blogpost on today and I've actually got two running intertwined in my head. Both deal with today's event and the HK Police and crowd control.

The first starts with exiting the Causeway Bay MTR station around 2:30p. The first sign that things were out of the ordinary was that the escalators for the Victoria Park/Great George Street exit were stopped. Manual climbing to slow traffic headed to Victoria Park.

Upon exiting it was pandemonium. The police had allowed political groups to set up in the middle of Great George Street but seemed to have made zero accomodations to ensure bi-directional pedestrian flow. Great George Street is crowded and busy on a normal Sunday, but add the political theater and it made the sidewalks in to rolling rugby rucks. When there was a need for crowd control, there was none. This limited the access in to Victoria Park from the Causeway Bay side.

Somewhere along the way to Victoria Park, I stopped to have a chat with Leung Yiu-chung. A bit of politicking for the fall and a bit of constituent reminding rep of active issues with CY's stated plans.

Finally made it in to Victoria Park. It was roughly 2:45p and only the two pitches on the Tin Hau side were filled. The crowds were flowing in, but I knew how the game was played. If the number of people in Victoria Park on the pitches was low at 3pm sharp, the HK Police would use that number. 55,000 is a decent rough estimate for the number in the pitches at 3pm. But 3pm wasn't the time where the march started, but when the singing and festivities started. People kept flowing in and it seemed like the Causway Bay side pitches filled completely by 3:30-3:45.

As bad as getting in to the park was, getting out was far worse. Police have been issuing loads of excuses for why they kept people penned up in the park under the sun, but all of the excuses put people at risk. Saw lots of kids suffering due to crowd control that was infinitely inferior to marches in 2004, 2005, etc. under the previous Police Commissioner, which itself had major room to improve.

By 4:45pm the crowds had abandoned the idea that the Police would allow them out from the usual Victoria Park exit and marched to leave from exits further back towards Tin Hau Station.

I left the park somewhere around 5pm. At this point the police had surrendered the main road but were still blocking the tram lines by the Regal, a route which would have shortened the walk by more than 45 minutes. Instead the standard route takes the Police favourite strangle point on to Irving St and then right on Pennington St. up to the circular walkway and turn left on to Yee Wo St. I made that turn on to Yee Wo St. at 6pm. As the crow flies, I'd walked less than 200 yards in 2 hours, because the HK Police want to make it as inconvenient as possible.

All lanes of Yee Wo St had been opened to the march at this point, but the march wasn't flowing. It took 25 minutes to walk the two blocks from Commercial Press to Sogo, which is two blocks. It was hot. It was packed like the MTR at rush hour and people were pissed and becoming more pissed as time went by. With another 25 minutes of walking I made it to the Canal Rd flyover. During this time I witnessed a young man rip open his calf climbing one of the tram's fences trying to escape the crowds. He impaled it on 3/4 inch of rusty bolt that holds two pieces of the fence together and then pulled it off. Bolts produce ugly wounds. This was uglier than words can describe, but surely this sort of thing will ensure Andy Tsang is awarded a Gold Bauhinia medal by C.Y.

After the Canal Rd. flyover it seemed that the Police had stood down for the most part. This is at 6:48pm So apparently a steady stream of people had moved from the park to this point for roughly 3 hours or more and the tail wouldn't make it here for another hour and a half, yet the number of close packed people on 4 lanes of road during this time is only 63 to 120 thousand? Incredulous. Even if it was only two lanes for the first few hours, the numbers being floated by various groups are risible.

Once the police stood aside, the march proceeded without much incident. The decency of the HK people shone despite the heat and the obstruction and disrespect of the police. People swarmed the 7-11s and Circle Ks in Wan Chai, but they weren't overcrowded and folks queued and paid like you'd expect from HK.

Having attended marches previously that ended at the new Tamar Government HQ, the surveyors and planners may not have gotten the moat they wanted, but the road surrounding the HQ make pedestrian access miserable. Even a march of a couple of hundred people protesting the HK 2020 plans for reclamation was logistically painful due to the stairs and escalators and general barriers to access. I saw the pain and frustration of the crowds as they made the turn at Pacific Place, so I bailed on the march to head to the Central Ferry Piers and hopefully make my way home.

And this leads to the second blog post, but I'm tired and sleepy and writing that will have to wait until tomorrow.