After spinning the Liaison Office's Scrooge McCY as a man of the people and someone to shake up HK's tycoons prior to taking office last July, the United Front is back with a vengeance on the day after his inaugural Policy Address.

Of course the actual Policy Address was a potpourri of goodies and subsidies for HK's tycoons with no asset checks, while the few benefits for the poor and middle-class individual were attached with massive strings and major asset checks.

Since housing is the major complaint of locals it's only natural to find Scrooge McCY addressing the problem. Of course his bosses at the Liaison Office and friends use Hong Kong property as a stable depository of questionable wealth, so this limits Scrooge McCY's options, but rest assured Scrooge McCY has maintained the belief system of property flipping as Hong Kong's primary personal economic ladder, which ensures HK's wealth will properly be diverted in to the pockets of the few HK and mainland developers that monopolise the market.

When faced with a problem of too much money (due to the CCP's binge spending on non-productive assets flooding Hong Kong with cheap cash) chasing a limited amount of assets, you either have to limit the cash or increase the amount of assets that can chased. Scrooge McCY diverted the cash from residential property at least temporarily in to parking spaces, commercial property, milk formula and the rest of Hong Kong life, while experts were figuring a way to work around the special stamp tax on mainland money. The real Hong Kong government way though is to create more opportunities for big profits for Hong Kong's tycoons. And Scrooge McCY's Policy Address delivered land, land, and more land for property development. Underground land to survey and turn into concrete. Sea to survey and turn into concrete. Greenspace to survey and turn into concrete. Must have MORE CONCRETE to sustain property developer's profits and provide places for the Liaison Office's friends to park their assets without creating an excessively bubblicious HK property market.

When faced with opposition from communities that would be destroyed by all of the concrete pouring, Scrooge McCY was resolute in his vow that divisions of opinion would not stop him screwing the communities. Of course Scrooge McCY was just as resolute in vowing to let community divisions stop him from considering whether to allow communities be treated equally based upon whom they screw. Never say Scrooge McCY isn't resolute in doing what his puppetmasters want him to do.

The most interesting part of the Policy Address reflected the financial backing of Civic Exchange. The bus companies have been lobbying hard the last few years to reduce their labour costs, since the primary driver of Hong Kong's corporate wealth is labour exploitation via pathetic wages and excessive hours. The easiest way to reduce labour costs would be to cut the salaries of C-level staff by two-thirds, but that would run counter to every MBA course and tycoon's dreams, which demand firing front-line staff instead. Time to make bus drivers redundant with a government directive. Thanks, Ms Loh. And if you have a pile of rusting depreciated assets on hand that need to be replaced, you can be sure Scrooge McCY will have a big handout for you under the principle of The Polluter Gets Paid with no asset checks. Of course Scrooge McCY and Christine Loh may get reduced API levels at the paltry few roadside pollution stations the government runs, but please remember Bow-tie trying to hype the air pollution benefits of LPG taxis as the sun sets in to another smog-filled sky. Also be sure to note there are no new tarriffs on CLP or HK Electric for generating power and particulates and SO2 and CO here to ship the power north of the border for big profits, while overpaying for clean nuclear power from a company in which they are a major shareholder.

But remember it is only pragmatic that Hong Kong's Chief Executive hand out wealth and assets to the richest while feeding the scraps to the wretched and poor. This is because CY Leung truly has his heart in the right place and helps those that are most deserving, which God and The Party have shown by making them the wealthiest (or at least wealthy enough they have an address on The Peak instead of in Kowloon Tong or God forbid the public housing that Long Hair was living in when he was elected to LegCo).

Even HK's most annoying shoe-shiner is heaping praise upon the PR maneuvers this holiday season of Scrooge McCY. The band has squawked loudly about him breaking the monopoly of the monopolists and Scrooge McCY being a true populist, but that's all bah and humbug.

What has Scrooge McCy done? Why today HK finds that Scrooge McCY won't open the beef market.

He {Secretary for Food and Health, Ko Wing-man} said the government will study whether Hong Kong's beef supply is being monopolized by Ng Fung Hong {Hong Kong's sole beef supplier and a mainland firm}.

Have to study if a monopoly supplier is monopolising the market. *lolololololol* Only hiding behind years of a flood of "Big Market, Little Government" propaganda could you make such a dumb ass remark.

What other presents has Scrooge McCY brought this year? How about Law Reform Commission proposal for changes to adverse possession. In order to more fully utilize property in Hong Kong, the government maked it easier for developers to force poor owners out of their property by lowering the ownership percentage requirements for redevelopment but makes it harder for squatters to actually utilise property unused by inattentive absentee owners. Can you figure out who Scrooge McCY favours this Christmas?

The only affordable housing Scrooge McCY has created for the middle class has come by reallocating it from the poor. True expression of benevolence and cause for celebration.

But what about the Old Age Living Allowance? Doesn't that prove Scrooge McCY cares? Exactly in the same way that Darth Bowtie's Travel Subsidy and Medical Vouchers did. *lmao* Programs designed primarily as a PR stunt to prove that "the proper class" cares about the less fortunate, while ensuring that minimal expenditures are actually made from the public purse due to the stinginess of the government restrictions imposed on the program.

The only thing that the Old Age Living Allowance debacle demonstrates is the real problem with having Hong Kong run by the Liaison Office. They're still happy to squeeze every free dollar out of Bob Cratchit while remaining smug since they've made action on the CCP's big problems in little Hong Kong without ever compromising with any of those dirty old dissidents.

The pro-CCP Federation of Trade Unions thought that Scrooge McCY's restrictions on the OALA were stingy. Even the CCP's local lip-synchers, the DAB thought the restrictions were stingy, but they should only be relaxed after the program's passage or it might provide some credit to those dirty dissidents fighting for HK's grassroots, which by shoe-shiners' rights was their claim to glory.

How bad is this hatred of dirty dissidents? Scrooge McCY brought in Christine Loh to help with his environmental credibility and by only listening to the pro-government district councillors in Tai Po has forced her to defend a ludicrous Environmental Impact Assessment and endangered animal resettlement plan that has left Ms Loh with zero credibility and a post-government career path as a turd polisher for BP/Exxon-Mobil.

Scrooge McCY gets to relive his Shenzhen surveying glory days with the northeast New Territories new town development plan. Ignore the dirty dissidents actually using the land and only listen to pro-government absentee land owners. Only ignore the pro-government absentee land owners when they are assaulting the dirty dissidents, especially the Hong Kong Police ignore the tomahawk chops of dissidents with the megaphone played repeatedly on the news channels.

Yes, Hong Kong, Santa Claus may be a lie, but so is everything that comes out of Scrooge McCY's mouth. And unfortunately it's infectious as lies become the standard operating procedure for Scrooge McCY's ministers, from the environment to education to immigration to arrests and prosecution. And even worse than the lies is that Scrooge McCY and his friends are starting to believe their own lies and as the late, great Izzy Stone said that's the government that's really dangerous.

I know a lot of journalists want to believe that the CCP and their Think Tanks are serious about handling the situation on the Korean Peninsula. Like this story in this morning's SCMP titled "Change tack on Korea, experts urge Beijing". But you read through it and realise quickly that the experts either don't possess much expertise or are being wholly unserious.

Liu Ming , a Korea affairs expert and deputy director of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of Asia and Pacific Studies, said Beijing wanted to maintain a role as neutral mediator on the peninsula, but that would not please either side.

Liu said: "If Beijing joins the US-led alliance in condemning North Korea, it will lose its limited leverage over Pyongyang."

After decades where the CCP has dangled some future prospect of economic access to the PRC's markets in exchange for technology transfer now and an autumn where the CCP bludgeoned Japan and Australia and the rest of the world with economic attacks in response to diplomatic disagreements, it's clear that the CCP has no interest in altering the DPRK's behaviour, because they've singularly refused to take any such action with the government in Pyongyang. In fact quite the opposite has occurred, which makes it clear to me that the CCP enjoys the DPRK repeatedly creating tensions and trying to extract economic and diplomatic victories from the ROK, Japan and the US.

Unfortunately the skill of strategically making mountains out of molehills is something that US Democrats have failed to learn from their Republican/Tea Party compatriots. And neither party has used it in the foreign diplomacy field like the folks in the CCP's Foreign Ministry.

Overnight here in HK paint was splattered on the US Consulate in Admiralty. My guess is that this is a result of the inflammatory anti-US rhetoric coming from the CCP's Foreign Ministry in regards to US-ROK joint military exercises.

This would be a perfect opportunity for the US State Dept to push the CCP to tone down the rhetoric. If this had been a Chinese consulate, the US ambassador would have been called in at 3AM, just like what the CCP did with the Japanese Ambassador to the PRC. And if the Hong Kong authorities say it's a matter of law enforcement, like the Japanese did with the PRC fishing boat captain, Hillary should call in the Ambassador again and say she expects some major figure like the Police Commissioner to resign over the failure to protect US interests in Hong Kong. I'm sure the CCP and their local shoeshiners will put up a fall guy to take the blame and try to sweep the whole matter under the rug, like they did with the attack on Albert Ho and the assassination plot on pro-democracy lawmaker Martin Lee and the owner of Next Media, Jimmy Lai. It would be a sign of diplomatic weakness to just accept the matter being swept under the rug without someone in authority having to accept responsibility and suffer consequences like losing their cushy government/Party job.

But the US won't and will continue to be pushed around by CCP client states like North Korea and Iran and Burma and will continue to lose diplomatic prestige as the rest of the world sees how easily the US is played by third-rate poker players.

Given the harping over the last several years by CCP leadership that the path to rebalancing trade is by selling high-end dual-use technology to Beijing, that Western leaders and journalists would have figured out who's really running the show in Zhongnanhai.

Of course these are the same Western leaders and journalists who still think that the People's Republic of China constititutes a valid market for finished goods after years and years and years of promises by the CCP to open the mainland market to foreign sellers. (How long do you think the CCP would buy the high-end dual-use tech from the West before it just cloned it via domestic producers?)

Another of the big online topics for the insular English language China blogs in the last month and a half has been the CCP's proejction of "soft power". One of the peculiar items about the discussion is the absence of commentary on the CCP's online efforts to project soft power. It goes so far as niubi's commentary on the situation at sinocism.

China’s efforts to build its “soft power” have been in the news over the last few months. So far none of the coverage of the media strategy for soft power has discussed what may be the fatal flaw in the government’s strategy-the media efforts are almost entirely focused on declining media like television, radio and print.

Not only has there been limited emphasis by the Chinese government on using the Internet to further soft power, but there are also major structural and cultural issues that make it extremely difficult for China to push its soft power agenda over the Internet. China has planned the soft power effort as a multi-decade effort, but the lack of effective products for the medium of future generations may doom the government’s efforts.

He analyses the situation from the point of view that Google, Facebook and Twitter are projections of US soft power and that China's lack of such a company hampers their soft power online.

There are no domestic Chinese Internet firms that have a shot at developing the global impact of a Facebook, Google or even Twitter. First, the language barrier is a real issue; maybe the Confucius Institutes will eventually teach decent Chinese to millions, but that will take decades and even then there will still be vastly more people outside of China more capable of reading English than Chinese.

Second, none of the top Chinese Internet firms-Baidu, Tencent, Sina, Sohu, Shanda, Netease-have either the DNA or the credibility to succeed materially in major overseas markets. In most markets they will face the same kinds of difficulties that Western Internet firms face in China. They may gain share, especially in gaming, in parts of the developing world, but not in any significant way that would have a meaningful impact on the overall soft power goals.

Personally I'd say this is rather upside down. The US-based companies aren't a projection of US soft power. Rather they provide a network relatively unencumbered for individuals to project a soft power that can be easily labeled as American or Western liberalism. Twitter didn't use a green-overlay on users' avatars. Google doesn't write the blogs that have long had the Blogger service blocked (on and off) by the Great FireWall.

The focus on print is important online. Google doesn't write news stories. Yahoo doesn't write news stories. The wire services write stories and Ron Fournier at AP provides a clue how important it is to have your guy's story being aggregated in order to drive the conversation.

Beyond the actual news, it's about having a network of people driving the story. Here's ESWN's Roland Soong from two years ago (scroll through to 012).

Of course, they exist. As noted in the post by Rebecca MacKinnon, they exist in China as well as elsewhere in the world [DTL note: the rmack story actually links back to a Paul Denlinger story @ ChinaVortex which makes the assertion of East-West astroturf equality :endnote] (including the 'democratic' countries which enjoy 'freedom of speech' and 'freedom of press'). In the Internet age, any government ('democratic' or otherwise) would do the same thing with their resources. But I believe that their effectiveness in China won't be felt in another two years or so. Why? Because they still have no idea how to harness the power of 280,000 Internet commentators at this time in China. I see no need to have 280,000 Internet commentators to 'guide' public opinion. 'Big' in not necessarily 'better.' The main job can be done more effectively by just a few hundred purposeful Internet commentators.

Does anyone really think a government that's been savvy enough to have previously hired firms like Burson-Marsteller and currently have hired Patton Boggs and DDB Worldwide as US-registered Foreign Agents to burnish their image, would give up on their network of individuals online or the scheme of using astroturfing individuals online that they had two years ago?

The keys to astroturfing are "to not get caught" and "present a coherent marketing message". You obviously want to downplay or obfuscate the connection to the CCP. In fact you'd want your opinion leaders to put distance between themselves and the official online outlets like People's Daily in order to increase the astroturfer's credibility and deniability. So perhaps in English they might push cadre corruption stories that fall in line with official guidance on corruption (but with a pro-CCP slant) which have been banned for online discussion inside the PRC, while assiduously avoiding stories that might reflect badly on single party rule or stories that might question the conventional story arc about the effective leadership of the Party (except for a few uncontrollable bad apples in the Provinces).

Then the question of the CCP projecting soft power online becomes who are the Online Opinion Leaders in the China blogosphere, who consistently push story lines about how Western media always gets China wrong and that China isn't protectionist and that the Party is serious about corruption and that China's internet is a spot for lively unfettered discussions that provide a check on CCP power and that if the Party does anything bad, well all the other kids are doing it too, so don't point any fingers at my Party.

So the big twitter fest this morning was over news reporting on Google being blocked in the mainland. Google runs an automated network monitoring app that posts results here. Apparently the page has been updated in the last 16 hours or so to include some clarification on the monitoring schedule:

This dashboard receives updates at least once a day, generally in the evening Pacific Time.

Still no clarification on the exact methodology or ASNs being tested. Why is this important? Well network admins have jobs precisely because automated network monitoring apps at best can provide notifications of events which need further investigation. They report on what they're programmed for, in this case whether a service is available or not at the time of monitoring and nothing more.

Let's do a thought experiment. I set up two network monitoring apps: one in the PRC and one in Hong Kong. They are to monitor http service connections to twitter homepage and a designated twitter API url. If only PRC box says twitter is unavailable, does that tell us that twitter is blocked by the Great Firewall? No. It says that for some reason the packets from the PRC failed and that further investigation is required. It could be you've got intermittent failwhales at twitter and the packets from PRC just coincidentally failed. It could be that twitter is blocked by GFW. If the service appears unavailable on both, again it doesn't say that GFW isn't blocking twitter in the PRC. It could be that GFW is blocking twitter and HK faces a failwhale or a trans-Pacific cable cut or other possibilities. Again the network monitoring apps only provide a notice that further investigation in to why is needed and that almost anything is possible.

So even if you assumed that Google's PRC availability page was real time, it would be a huge leap of faith/ignorance to rush off and print a news report that says the PRC is blocking Google again. And looking at the various reports, I'm going to single out Reuters' report for praise, though the headline with "Google says China Web Search fully blocked" is poor due to the fact Google didn't say any such thing.

It was unclear whether access had been blocked by the Chinese government or if it was a temporary service disruption. A Google spokesman said he did not have any immediate information on change in service availability.

The NY Times has a Google spokesperson clarifying that the page isn't real time. This means there is no way to verify the network monitoring app's report of complete blockage since network monitoring is temporal. Google probably was unavailable from the checking IPs for unexplained reasons for the short time that day's monitoring was being conducted. Being available in the morning doesn't make the data from the network monitoring app any less true (even if Google walks back from reporting a full blockage).

The only ones that seemed intent on hyping the event were English-language China bloggers who were quick to claim Western media got the China story wrong again because Google was available when they woke up Beijing time and the AP who wrote "It's the latest twist in a high-profile showdown over Internet censorship pitting Google against China's communist government" and that they saw the event as "what initially looked like a dramatic development" as if news stories need to be pumped up like an episode of Desperate Housewives or some Wrestlemania jawing.

So as the debate raged in Taiwan over the signing of ECFA with the mainland, the DPP pointed to the bust that is HK's CEPA. Even Hong Kong's Oriental Daily went forward with an article describing the HK SAR government's negotiations with the mainland as a failure for 10 years. But Donald Tsang Yam-kuen responded that CEPA was a success, because it allowed for the Individual Visit Scheme from the mainland. The need to link the two scheme is a fairly clear example of how large a failure the negotiations have been by Donald Tsang and his predecessor.

But the HK SAR government in general trumpets frequently and loudly the benefits of mainland tourists coming to HK. They always talk about how much money they pump in to the local economy via tourist spending. This sets the primary goal of the program from the VERY TOP of the HK SAR government.

Early this morning (LegCo was still debating when I went to sleep around 2am), LegCo passed HK's first minimum wage law. The vote was 45-1. The one vote against the minimum wage was from the Tourism Functional Constituency representative. Currently many Hong Kong tour guides are not paid a wage by their employers, but make money solely from kickbacks (the industry calls them "commissions") from retailers where the tour guide herds her group. I've been proclaiming this as a sore spot of HK's tourism industry for well over 3 years on this blog (do a search for "kickback"). The lack of a set wage combined with the kickbacks places all incentives squarely on getting mainland tourists to spend, spend, spend. This dovetails precisely with the goals stated for the program as noted above by the Chief Executive himself.

The policy of getting mainland tourists to spend, spend, spend also dovetails nicely with a unique feature of HK, which is retail leases paying a commission of retail sales to the property owner beyond the base rent. This helps the cash flows of the primary commercial property owners, who also happen to be HK's tycoon property developers, during those periods when property sales are slow.

So as the video of Ah Zhen blazes across mainland television screens, I can only ask that mainlanders point at the National People's Congress for intruding in HK politics and propping up HK's functional consituency seats. The stranglehold on HK power by those that take supreme pride in being greedy ensures that common people will only be treated as ATMs to pump out even more money in to the greedy pockets of both HK tycoons and the CCP. Until that stranglehold is broken there will be no change and despite the complaints spanning more than 3 years, you'll hear that Ah Zhen was an isolated incident and then it'll be back to business as usual. Care for a little melamine in your milk tea while we wait?

As an American, here I'm referring to the 17th Amendment to the US Constitution. This isn't one of the big ones on US history or government syllabi. It is the implementation of universal suffrage for US Senators. Originally US Senators were to serve as the representatives of state governments and were elected by the legislatures of the individual states rather than by direct ballot from the people.

In the late 1800s the US went through the Gilded Age, which was gilded for the robber barons and filled with massive economic boom/busts that impoverished pretty much everybody else. At the forefront of protecting the institutional corruption that resulted in massively unequal economic distribution were the Senators elected by indirect popular votes. So as the Progressives pushed for an end to the institutionalised corruption in the US, one of the items on the checklist was the election of US Senators by the State legislatures.

Now why would I be posting on this obscure bit of information now? Because one of the key men at Beijing's Liaison Office opened his mouth on Universal Suffrage.

A senior official from the Beijing Liaison Office has attacked the Democratic Party's political reform proposals, calling them unnecessary, overdone, and legally groundless. Hao Tiechuan, the Director-General of the Liaison Office's Publicity, Culture and Sports Department, also insisted that indirect elections are 'a form of universal suffrage.'

Sadly, No!

Of course we forgive the Liaison Office for their ignorance of universal suffrage, since they've never bothered to implement it or live under it. And thankfully history from the US shows exactly why these Functional Constituencies exist: to protect the institutionalised corruption that maintains the massive inequality in society.

So the question becomes, did the HK SAR want their Constitutional Reform proposals to fail or are the folks in the HK SAR government and the local CCP Liaison Office dumber than stumps and more deluded than ravers on ketamine?

Secretary for Constitutional Failure and Mainland Shoeshining Stephen Lam told RTHK that every effort has been made to move democracy forward in HK.

The government announced on Monday that it will put its 2012 political reform package to a vote on June 23. There will be two resolutions - and the contents will be the same as the original proposals put forward in April.

The government knew the original proposals were doomed to failure, but decided that failure was more acceptable than actually allowing the HK people to choose their own leadership.

The overall sentiments of the people of HK are that the government proposals don't go far enough, even among the people who say they'll accept a half-assed package as better than nothing.

As HK's students sit for exams, the HK SAR government provides a fine example for them. If something is really urgent and important, it's best to neglect it for your full term and then try to cram all of your effort and studies in to the last minute. And when faced with a study plan certain to fail, you may not deviate from that study plan or take advice from others. After all if your parents won't forgive you getting an F on your exams, you can always say that you made every effort to pass your exams and the Party will be sure to forgive you and protect your job. As long as you shoeshine, the measure of what constitutes success is not on an A to F scale.