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.

Would forcing CY to step down be a victory for the people of HK? Only in the same way that CY winning the CE "election" over Henry Tang was a victory for public opinion and the people of HK. Ya know, it's amazing to me that some people can actually believe that part about CY beating Tang with a straight face and not admit it was just one faction using the people to beat another faction and that the people's best interests had zero consideration and zero impact on the outcome.

There is no doubt that this mess isn't just negligence on CY's part. CY is a man whose address represents the pinnacle of colonial privilege with a guard house for a public security detail. He is a professional and been the ExCo convenor for a decade and a half. He was the Chair of the Basic Law Drafting Committee. Yet we are to believe that he was satisfied with providing an ignorant answer in ExCo to the Chief Executive and to the people of HK during a televised CE debate? Maybe if I get dragged in to court I can claim ignorance to the judge and jury and get let off with a few crocodile tears.

CY had no problems hiring men to come in and remove his illegal structures, but he was unwilling to hire someone to come in and cure his ignorance of whether he had any illegal structures. And when asked by Bowtie whether he had illegal structures at home, he did not give the answer of ignorance: "I don't know. Let me check." CY affirmed the negative: "I know I don't have any. I know the facts."

So why risk it all by stating that you know when you don't? I'd guess almost all HKers with illegal structures know they are illegal. The Kuk isn't fighting tooth-and-nail on illegal structure removal because they aren't sure if the law might negatively impact them. Even CY's biggest defenders like the Big Lychee know if their dwelling has illegal structures. Why doesn't he do something to have it removed? For the same reason CY didn't bother to say anything about his guardhouse and trellis. "The structures are there in plain sight and no one has ever said anything about them, so no one will ever say anything about them and if someone does say something, I'll deal with it then. Until then I've got more important things to deal with." And given Henry's refusal to deal with his illegal structure, it meant that even if the story escaped the spike during the campaign, CY could show he was more responsible by dealing with his problems.

But the sad truth is that it doesn't matter. Hong Kong is a colony and the Governor General sits in Sheung Wan. Even if the uproar over CY grows too loud, the Governor General will just appoint another puppet and the game will go on until 2047, when the colonial power can drop the whole charade and assume their preferred direct and absolute control.

The story features sub-divided flats and hawker stalls in a part of the city that wasn't featured in the CE's Chinese New Year's portrait of Hong Kong.

A remarkably well-done story by HK Magazine on the reaction of the HK SAR Government towards the hawkers. One thing it doesn't mention is the rationale for the long-term antagonism towards hawkers. Hawkers pay less rent and create competition in the retail space. This creates less profits for commercial landlords and retail outlets. Thankfully in HK the dominant commercial landlords ofter are also the owners of the dominant retail outlets. They also run the government. So much like the hostile takeover that resulted in The Link REIT, the attack on the hawkers is an attack on HK's lower-end residents displaying the Lion Rock spirit in favour of the rich, who are desperate to get richer.

On the other end of the problem are the sub-divided flats across Kowloon. These provide shelter for folks who are too cash poor to afford the larger up-front rents of the typical flat in a neighborhood with jobs for these folks.

This situation is the result of a couple of long-standing HK Government policies. First is a development policy which focuses almost exclusively on that zone displayed in the official CNY portrait of the territory: north-central HK island and the TST waterfront. This means that jobs in those areas of the territory with more affordable rents don't exist. And as the SCMP expose on Tin Shui Wai showed, this lack of development was not an accident but the official undisclosed policy deal made with the tycoons.

The next goes to the development of affordable housing in those areas that do provide jobs. This issue goes all of the way back to the creation of public housing in Hong Kong. Fine books on the time period that provide a great history and an antidote to the cotton candy historical narrative the HK Government likes to sell to its residents.

Three things to remember about the 50s squatter clearances: squatters paid higher rents per square foot than standard residents, the squatters land was of huge prospective value to developers, and the squatters were to be relocated to places far away from their jobs. All three of these are being repeated 60 years later very close to where those squatter fires broke out.

Today, the residents of sub-divided flats pay a smaller total rent per month, but they pay a higher rent per square foot than most in HK do. This higher rent per square foot though means that the price required by the major developers to buy out these flats is way beyond what they will pay once the flats have been cleared by the government. Thus the statement by the HK SAR government that partitioned flats hamper redevelopment.

Of course once these buildings have been redeveloped for the private profit of the tycoons, the current residents won't be able to afford to live in the neighborhood. And all current plans to move any qualifying members of the current residents to public housing will see them move far, far away from their current social situation, like jobs, friends, neighborhood hangouts, etc.

UPDATE: Forgot to combine two stories that have lingered in a blog editor on another computer.

In case you thought I was exaggerating the government's intentions, read the following SCMP article. HK SAR government says partitioned flats hamper renewal

The problem of subdivided flats is slowing down the redevelopment of urban Hong Kong, according to the organisation in charge of revamping the city.

...

When dealing with tenants of partition flats, the authority offers them either cash compensation or places in public housing estates. But there was a shortage of public housing in urban areas, Law said. "Tenants prefer to stay in the urban districts where they live. However, the supply of public housing in areas like Sham Shui Po is very limited. Thus it takes us much more time to settle with displaced tenants," he said.

The release of a LegCo report on the Lehman Brothers "minibond" debacle has drawn criticism from the usual "anything goes" business leaders.

The responses have ranged from "we would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddlesome kids" of former HKMA head Joseph Yam to the "you bought them, so it's your fault you believed us" of Philip "one-finger" Wong.

Joseph Yam said it was the financial disaster that was to blame not him. What caused the financial meltdown? A misrepresentation of risky investments (CDOs aka minibonds in HK) backed by farcical unregulated "insurance" with insufficient financial backing (credit default swaps). So what was Joseph Yam's job? To insure the financial market in HK was providing risk information to investors. What's the circular argument provided by Joseph Yam? If the financial disaster hadn't happened due to improper representations of risk to investors, people wouldn't be unhappy with me for not ensuring proper representations of risk to investors. Idiot!

As for folks like David Li and Philip Wong, criminals never want the police to arrest them for their crimes. The only difference is when little people try to rob David Li's bank, they will go jail. But when David Li's bank is robbing little people via deception, they will never see jail and get to keep 30% of the loot for being the right sort of people. Institutionalised corruption is the norm and those that want to root out corruption are "vaguely liberal" and are the "idealist faction". This is the true meaning of the "anti-regulation" crowd. Don't read their lips, watch their hands as they steal your money and your health with impunity.

A question from outgoing LegCo member David Li concerning mainlanders buying property in Hong Kong produced the answer you'd expect from the HK SAR government's Eva Cheng.

Since it has all along been the Government's policy to safeguard the free flow of capital within, into and out of Hong Kong, the Administration has no plan to require buyers of residential property to declare information about their origin. The Administration has also not conducted any study and forecast on the impact on or the outlook of the property market arising from Mainland people purchasing properties in Hong Kong.

As I've said elsewhere the true third rail of Hong Kong politics is laundering mainland money. There must be some heavy hitters in the mainland government to ensure that no one in the HK government snoops too closely in to the money transiting HK.

That said, the Government has always been mindful of the ramifications that wild fluctuations in property prices would have on overall macroeconomic and financial stability.
...{blah blah blah policies}...
with a view to ensuring the healthy and stable development of the property market.

In other words, the HK SAR government wants to ensure that betting on HK property is a win-only proposition, a safe investment with government blah blah blah policies in place to ensure your investment doesn't go underwater. Investors love government guaranteed winning.

And finally the HK SAR government throws up the usual obfuscation to avoid blaming their political masters in Beijing.

Nonetheless, as the major advanced economies are likely to maintain an ultra-loose monetary policy for a prolonged period, the resultant low interest rates and abundant liquidity could easily drive the property market to an exuberant state again when the external environment shows even a slight improvement.

As this analysis at Also Sprach Analyst of what drives HK property prices shows, it's the growth in money supply. Classic Milton Friedman monetarism. Excess liquidity chasing after too few investment assets produces asset inflation and bubbles. Of course the zombie conventional wisdom is always ultra-loose monetary policy in major advanced economies. But check out the actual data as provided again by Also Sprach Analyst and we can see that the announcement of the US' QE2 produced a huge spike in the growth in HK's monetary supply, while the actual implementation of QE2 several months later produced a slowing decline. While it would be impossible to ascertain the actual origin of the money growth due to recalcitrance on the part of the HK government and HK Monetary Authority, it's pretty clear that the driver of HK's property market has been a mind-boggling growth of the money supply on the mainland. Up until the last few months, the mainland's M2 would leave Ben Bernanke's jaw on the floor and has left a pile of unpayable loans that will require a clean-up that will make TARP look like a drop in the bucket.

So given the obvious data that shows the current and future HK government's policies on housing to be addressing sideshows of land supply rather than the actual economic drivers of money flows and policies designed to make housing a sure investment bet, 5 years from now HK will still be fucked.

While Hong Kong was watching the Sevens and the Wolf and Pig, AFP ran this story out of Australia on a pan-asian triad syndicate.

It said intelligence was uncovered that the syndicate had infiltrated a high level of government "in both law enforcement agencies and political circles" in Asia, including China, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Macau.

"There are a number of other countries where this is suspected but not apparent to date," the briefing, which has been supplied to overseas agencies, reportedly said.

And yes, if China and Macau are mentioned, you can be sure that Hong Kong doesn't get left out.

It pours billions of dollars into "high-profile Internet gambling facilities, Asian hotel chains and resorts, commercial construction companies, property companies in Hong Kong and Vietnam (and) casinos".

To move money, the syndicate uses "highly-placed government officials, banking staff ... (to) undercut any other overt or covert money transfer facility", the Herald cited the briefing as saying.

Who loves their money laundering?

What is it about this CE Selection that has Western media writing such crap about Hong Kong? This time I'm referring to an article in Time Magazine on Hong Kong's Non-election. At least they got the headline correct

The article does come complete with the now all-too-frequent "critics call it" aside. In this case, it's a reference to the election being a small-circle affair. After spending a paragraph noting the election is limited to a small circle of 1200 people, mostly chosen for their obedience to Communist Party dictates, why bother with the "critics call it" aside?

The story also fails to mention Albert Ho, Chairman of the Democratic Party, except as an aside in the last paragraph. "(the third is a democracy activist)" I don't really think of Ho as an activist. In this case he's more like the willing crash-test dummy, who survived a much worse beat down years ago, that gets to be the comic relief egging on the two CCP-approved candidates to continue providing HK with endless laughs.

And HK has to take the laughs it can get with this government, though you wouldn't know it from reading this article.

Other hot-button issues include pollution, and more and better schools and hospitals, areas where the government has shown little leadership even though it has plenty of money to throw at the problems.

The HK SAR government has spent almost every minute since the handover displaying leadership on schools, hospitals and pollution. It's fired loads of teachers and actively closed schools instead of pushing smaller class sizes. It's adjusted "school nets" to decrease the competition against their children getting the prized seats at the best secondary schools. They've been pushing privatising health care and granting cheap land for private hospitals, while fighting tooth-and-nail against funding local doctors and nurses at public hospitals. And it has spent more effort going after Lonely Planet for publishing a guide book with a grey skyline cover photo and pushing a garbage landfill in to HK's equivalent of a National Park, than it has on pushing forward new air pollution indices.

The biggest problem though with Western reporting on the CE selection this year has been the wrap-up of Henry Tang's problems. Invariably the Western media, and this Time article, write out a laundry list of the scandals plaguing Tang. The scandals themselves are really an afterthought for most HKers at this point. Even before the scandals hit mass publication and semi-confirmation, people thought of Henry Tang as the affable inherited wealth with a wine glass. Tang is the nice official you invite for a ribbon-cutting, but you bring dull scissors and a pre-cut ribbon to ensure the event goes as planned.

This was amplified by Tang's handling of the basement scandal. It was spectacularly bad crisis management. There was already disdain for the government's hypocrisy over illegal structure demolition due to several ministers' properties having illegal works and Henry Tang had pledged his properties were all legal. So when the information about Tang's basement came to light, he first denied that it existed and if it did exist, it was just a small storage space. He used his domestic servants to block access to government inspectors, until the media forced the issue. When the size of the basement became apparent, he said it was his wife's property and therefore she was to blame. Also there was no connection between that property next door and where he stayed and that because he was busy with his marital affairs, he was oblivious to his wife's wrong-doing. The local TV crews filmed Tang's dog walking freely between the two properties, so not even the most plausible of his excuses stood up to a few seconds of scrutiny. But placing the blame entirely on his wife would be like Bill Clinton doing his infamous 60 Minutes interview with Hillary and blaming her for Ken Starr and not properly cleaning that blue dress.

Leung's handling of the triad issue was poorly handled as well. I think if Leung's supporters had been more forthcoming about their part in that dinner, people might have stayed focused on the key issue, which is what dirt do the triads have on Henry Tang's business dealings. Of course the pro-HenryT press would try to deflect attention away from this issue and try to point fingers at Leung for "black-hand politics" and against the triads being able to influence the selection of the CE. There is a sacred cow media narrative, which dates back more than 60 years, about Hong Kong's economy being free and vibrant. Dirty laundry that exposes the institutional corruption that this narrative is designed to conceal is a violation of the Prime Directive.

And when I say institutionalised corruption, I'm talking about Henry Tang and his wife being in front of the TV cameras and press microphone while simultaneously eluding the government inspectors investigating whether Tang broke the law with his illegal structure.

UPDATE: Day of the CE non-election 25 March 2012 9 am:
I've gotten quite bad about posting completed long-form blog posts. I have a lot of half-written posts waiting for neater endings or for me to fill in names of books or hunt down urls of articles I've read. Of course the twitter stream has been in full throat the last few days as the Liaison Office cranks up its insular authoritarian intereference on behalf of CY, including bullying a paper run by Richard Li Tzar-kai of PCCW and Li Ka-shing's son and the spiking of a regular Friday column by the Liberal Party's Miriam Lau that tried to advocate for casting blank ballots, which runs counter to the Party Line that patriots must vote for their candidate.

So I snuck out yesterday to get a haircut. Sitting in front of me was the pile of magazines with JessicaC on top staring at me. The Hong Kong press is driven by scandal and shame. Hong Kong loves nothing better than one of their disliked big shots going down in glorious infamy.

Everyone knew that Henry Tang was neither a genius nor particularly well-regarded in Hong Kong. It puts him on par with HK's first CE, Tung Chee-hwa. Rumours had long swirled about Tang having skeletons in the closet. *cue up Diana Ross and The Supremes "Love Child"* But as Stephen Vines rightly pointed out, Hong Kong's elite don't live subject to the same rules that you and I are.

And this simple disregard for the rules that govern the groundlings is why the storm blows fiercely around Henry Tang's teacup.

Another caller said Tang and his supporters were shameless. "They ignored Hongkongers' views for their own advantages. I hope Beijing will do something," the caller said.

When has Beijing not ignored Hongkonger's views for their own advantage? And I'm sure Beijing will do something: they'll stick their fingers in HK's eyes and laugh. What are Hongkongers going to do? Are you going to stop them from doing it? As if.

What? You're going to throw your public support to CY Leung? When did he do anything for you as convenor of ExCo? I know he's pandering to public opinion now with policy proposals like a US 24 hour news network pushing "missing white woman" coverage, but did Beijing give him the nod against Tung Chee-hwa? Did he get the nod to replace Tung? Why is Beijing going to change the gameplan now?

So my predictions for the CE farce are: HenryT at 95-99%. If photos of HenryT on his office couch with removal sale items from Fetish Fashion appear on the net, it'll bump Regina Ip up to 1-5% odds. No one else has odds listed. Ip is the safety valve candidate that isn't the first choice of either the Cultural Revolution holdovers in the DAB or the plutocrats and their sycophants, but she's the compromise candidate if Henry can no longer get in front of the camera and shamelessly put forth the Party Line. (And telling the cameras yesterday that he still had broad support without breaking out laughing shows he's still passing that threshold.)

In either case, it'll be a colorful July 1st and Tsang Yok-sing will be busy tossing LegCo members out of the chambers for daring to question the Imperially-anointed Executive-led government.

UPDATE 26 March 2012:
And I'll be the first to eat crow. The Party's Liaison Office took advantage of the negative winds that HenryT faced and swept in Leung Chun-ying. Between the original post and now though CY's popularity has dropped spectacularly as he went from the darling of the anyone but Henry coalition to folks actually looking at his track record and actual beliefs. We'll see what happens with the opening bell of the HKEx this morning and we'll see the response of the HK people over the next 4 months and the next year.

So has anyone thought about why the DAB asked the government to relocate government offices to Kai Tak and pushed so hard for redevelopment of property in East Kowloon?

Let me run through some thoughts of mine. First, there was a time when the DAB was just the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong. Now it's the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong. Where'd the Progress come from? It comes from when the DAB subsumed the Progressive Alliance in February 2005. What was the Progressive Alliance? It was a pro-Beijing pro-business political party. This merger I believe is one reason the DAB has strayed from the positions of the pro-Beijing Federation of Trade Unions, though being pro-CCP trumps all other thoughts, beliefs and actions.

The only time I ever saw a Progressive Alliance street-side banner was in the Ngau Tau Kok-Kwun Tong industrial area. There's big money to be made by redevelopment of Kowloon East for businesses that might be eligible for buy outs and for commercial property owners in the area that would have formed the core of support for the ex-Progressive Party.

So when Donald Tsang starts tossing around the "triad" epithet, make sure to follow his own actions and see who profits from his policies. If the beneficiaries are his political/financial cronies, we can see who's really running a triad-style fiefdom.

So how do you know when the effects of social media are providing an equalising effect to the CCP's money being funneled in to the pro-Beijing political parties? When the pro-Beijing puppets in the HK government outlaw social media in politics.

So when the HK/DAB government's economic policy leave greater than 15% of the population in Kowloon/NT in poverty, Beijing's money can ensure the DAB's gift bags and services to old people will win votes. When the pan-Dems successfully find equalizers to Beijing's money funding DAB electioneering, the DAB doesn't have to worry. The HK government will do whatever it takes to ensure that free and fair elections with universal suffrage will never be seen in Hong Kong, because that might leave the rich subject to the rule of people that are supposed to be grateful for a gift bag of rice and crackers after being denied an economy that provides meaningful gainful employment for the vast majority of the territory.