But wait! I have discovered a source of solace. On a recent inspection tour of Shenzhen, I saw some little packs of yeast used to make glutinous rice wine soup – a slightly alcoholic sweet rice pudding especially popular in winter. Think of congee you can get (faintly) drunk on.

The method: cook rice, let it cool a bit, add yeast, leave mixture at room temperature in a container for two days, eat.

Or you can do it the interesting way, and leave it for weeks. Over time, the rice starts to shrink and the amount of liquid starts to increase. After (say) a month, you remove the icky mouldy cap that forms on the top of the stuff (it comes away easily with chopsticks), and you squeeze the liquid out through a cheesecloth.

And behold – you have real rice wine. It is thick and gummy, and surprisingly sweet and tasty. Water it down a bit, and you essentially have fresh home-made makgeolli, the cloudy Korean rice beer you can get in 759 stores. Judging by the detectable buzz from a small glass of it on an otherwise booze-free day, I would guess it’s roughly 5% or 6% in strength.

Not sure what Hong Kong law says about home brewing, but it would be even more gratifying to think, as we declare the weekend open, that this hooch is illegal.

The post Homemade Rice Wine: Please Do Try This At Home appeared first on The Nanfang.

As a polite and understated academic quoted in the South China Morning Post puts it, the government did not plan this properly.

Indeed, it looks as if the idea was planned and implemented badly on purpose. Even bureaucrats get pissed off. Since CY Leung took office four years ago, Beijing’s local Liaison Office has assumed control over the fight against Hong Kong’s subversives and counter-revolutionaries. The smearing of pro-democracy activists, the police tear-gas frenzy at the beginning of the Occupy/Umbrella protests, the selective prosecutions, the interference in university governing bodies – all suggest Chinese officials losing patience with this foreign, rule-of-law ‘impartial public service’ BS, and showing the locals how it’s done. All backfired, but the ‘loyalty test’ particularly overstepped the mark.

The loss of two top people from the Independent Commission Against Corruption takes this Mainlandization of governance to its most disturbing level yet. Today’s SCMP carries a reassuring op-ed from a former ICAC boss. He says he has no insider knowledge of the agency today, but nonetheless denies that political interference had any role in the recent departure of Rebecca Li. The job she had taken over was massively challenging, he says – having struggled to do it himself back in the day – and Li should not walk away. It would be persuasive if this were not happening in the midst of the Liaison Office undermining so many other institutions (let alone the unfortunate context of an investigation against Chief Executive CY Leung).

Even if it’s true, people won’t believe it – this is what happens when you tarnish a hard-won reputation. The pro-establishment Standard saw fit to report that the New York Times had run a story about the perceived weakening of the ICAC and other Hong Kong institutions…

Hong Kong’s leaders constantly remind us that the city relies on its reputation for the integrity of its institutions – an independent judiciary, clean bureaucracy, free press and so on. But these local officials must also serve the Chinese Communist Party, and the CCP despises this ‘integrity’.

As Beijing’s response to the South China Sea ruling shows, China’s leaders do not believe that a court is ever impartial, only controlled by one side or the other.China’s leaders do not believe that a court is ever impartial, only controlled by one side or the other. When they look at the West and see a democratic election result, jury decision, media revelation, regulatory ruling, business dispute resolution, or a market-based outcome like a currency or stock-market shift, they see only manipulation and a struggle in which someone stronger has won and someone weaker has lost. To them, separation of powers, checks and balances or market forces are fabrication and lies.

The apparent failure of the ‘loyalty test’ will no doubt make the Liaison Office more determined to stamp out the pro-independence forces as CIA-backed threats to national security. Meanwhile, it is hugely tempting to vote young localists into the Legislative Council.

The post Beijing’s “Loyalty Test” Not Working in Hong Kong appeared first on The Nanfang.

Many observers – the New York Times being one of the latest – wonder whether Li’s departure is linked to an ICAC investigation into Chief Executive CY Leung’s UGL payment hoo-hah. In the grand scheme of things, the real issue is the contradiction between the ICAC’s independence and the Chinese Communist Party’s need to have total control. Beijing officials can’t sleep at night knowing that a Hong Kong law enforcement agency with British-trained (and indeed some actual British) staff can undermine state power. It’s the principle: if Beijing appoints a high official in Hong Kong, it can’t have some other body come along and prosecute the guy. Who’s in charge here? This is China. This has to be rectified.

Of course, this is the road to unintended consequences. An ICAC subject to Beijing’s ultimate influence will cease to be impartial and lose credibility. Growing cross-border and other corruption could damage Hong Kong’s business environment. As the SCMP points out, hasty government interference in ICAC personnel matters is already creating chaos…

Suddenly, everyone is called ‘Ricky’. What a tangled web we weave…

And the unintended consequences keep on coming. The government’s ‘loyalty test’ for election candidates is making household names out of formerly obscure pro-independence or otherwise localist figures like Edward Leung. An attempt to deny them a platform has become the best platform they could ever hope for.

To compound the idiocy, along comes Rita ‘heavyweight’ Fan. She seems confident that the courts can and will resolve everything neatly. Let’s put it this way: they will have to rule whether officials can bar someone from running for election on account of his opinions. Furthermore, if a lawmaker who signed the declaration subsequently voices support for Hong Kong independence, the government should in theory prosecute him for having lied at the time – or maybe for subsequently changing his mind. A rumour says Chief Secretary Carrie Lam thought up the ‘loyalty test’ idea; if so – since she is not dense – it is a parting time-bomb.

The post Hong Kong’s ICAC Slowly Comes Under Beijing’s Influence appeared first on The Nanfang.

Down the hill above Queen’s Road, a couple of young women in pale-blue quasi-nurses uniforms are trying to drum up business for a nail salon/foot-massage emporium. I successfully avoid eye contact. Then I look back. Whoops – no, that’s Starry Lee of the pro-Beijing DAB. Sorry.

Team Regina is officially the New People’s Party, but they seem to downplay the name – perhaps because of its eerie Singaporean feel. The rose-coloured jackets are a similar attempt to wrap a soft, warm and feminine aura around the cold-hearted, iron-fisted monster within (or something).

Even the individuals featured in the leaflet seem to have been carefully selected by some sort of image-management specialists. They are young wholesome types, Judy and Gigi in pastel peach blouses, and Joey, Larry and Marcus in light blue shirts. Marcus, through no fault of his own, bears an unfortunate resemblance to Li Ka-shing’s number-two son Richard.

They are portrayed in a row, all gazing meaningfully in the same direction, as if transfixed by a glowing vision of future glory. It’s a pose and composition I’ve seen somewhere before, though I can’t quite put my finger on it…

The key phrase is ‘Win Back Hong Kong’ though she doesn’t say who from. As for the substance, Regina summarizes Hong Kong’s problems neatly…

But she says nothing about how the city ended up in its current state. More to the point, she offers no ideas about how to even start fixing any of it, which we would expect someone with an intense, burning, planet-size ambition to be Chief Executive to do. Then again, her chances are zilch, so it probably doesn’t matter. In fairness, she spares us the usual faux-patriotic, faux-enthusiastic blather about ‘One Belt One Road’ – another sign, perhaps, that the image consultants paid a visit.

However, makeovers and spin can only do so much to disguise or hide reality. The photo of her with arms crossed, attempting to relax and smile, is genuinely nightmarish…

The post Hong Kong’s Invasion Of The Pink Zombie-Ghouls With Mad Staring Eyes appeared first on The Nanfang.

Pro-democracy opposition candidates will have some powerful ammunition to use in the forthcoming campaign. CY’s much-vaunted focus on welfare issues has yet to make much noticeable difference to people. The pan-dems can attack the government’s supporters on a whole range of issues like housing, poverty and inequality, and neighbourhood anger over lead in water or management of public-housing estates’ shopping malls.

But that’s just the start. While at least some loyalists can claim to be fighting for the people on such livelihood issues, they are more exposed to accusations that they are associated with CY’s clumsy policy of Mainlandizing Hong Kong. If you dig around you’ll find that most pro-Beijing politicians have some record of supporting something unpopular, idiotic or scary. Examples could include links with patriotic-style National Education, the bizarre HK Army Cadets Association, or local ‘Belt and Road’ propagandizing.

Then there are Beijing’s most serious and shocking attacks on Hong Kong’s autonomy and values in the last few years. The heavy-handed White Paper/Standing Committee edicts of 2014 declaring Hong Kong to have no entitlement to self-rule or democracy. The abduction and forced confessions of the book-sellers. And now the apparent defenestration of the Independent Commission Against Corruption’s top graft buster, the resignation of a senior investigator, and – Hong Kong’s version of a counter-revolutionary uprising – a staff banquet boycott.

Not all pro-Beijing politicians have publicly aligned themselves with all these events. And some parts of the electorate will be more outraged than others by particular examples of encroachment of the Communist one-party system in Hong Kong’s pluralist, rules-based society. But the potential for some real negative campaigning and flinging of mud that sticks effectively on all the right villains is mouth-watering.

Meanwhile, further proof that Beijing’s henchmen at the Liaison Office are giving the orders comes with news that candidates for the Legislative Council must sign what looks like a statement waiving their right to express a particular opinion. Anonymous Spokesman 1 says it is to ‘avoid confusion to voters’, while Anonymous Spokesman 2 claims that signing it and subsequently being found to have lied will result in ‘criminal sanction’. This I would love to see.

The post Beijing Loyalists in for a Rough Ride in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council Elections appeared first on The Nanfang.

The last refuge of a defender of the Motherland is the insistence that the evil USA did the same thing, or did worse. For example: cops in Louisiana and Minnesota shoot black guys for no reason – therefore, China’s arrest and persecution of human-rights lawyers and their families is perfectly OK and understandable. Totally logical and clear. So there.

In this case, we’re talking about rejecting international court judgements, and the best we can do (at the risk of seriously showing our age) is dredge up some long-forgotten episode from a different era of weirdness, and attach the label ‘relevant’ in the hope no-one looks too closely…

Memories come flooding back of the ‘Oliver North for President’ T-shirt a mischievous aunt sent me. (Details here and here for anyone who wants them.)

It was the late Cold War, and the Americans were fighting Communism, as represented by the Sandinistas, who were led by Daniel Ortega, then-youthful and trendy Che Guevara-type heart-throb. Looking back it was all a bit stupid (the US never worked out that maintaining corrupt far-right dictatorships in Nicaragua, Vietnam, Philippines, etc, etc was actually encouraging Communism.)

Anyway, the ‘relevant’ thing here is that in his twilight years, President-apparently-for-Life Ortega has been working very closely with a creepy and presumably state-linked Chinese entity planning to build an economically and environmentally ruinous canal across Nicaragua to create, it would seem, a Beijing-friendly version of Panama’s. The purpose of this project is unclear, but perhaps the theory that China wants to turn the South China Sea into its own Caribbean is the wrong way round – maybe the Nicaragua waterway will allow the Nine-Dash Line to extend so far as to absorb the Caribbean into the South China Sea.

But I digress… The US laid mines outside Managua’s port in the mid-1980s – therefore it is perfectly OK and understandable for China to grab Southeast Asian countries’ waters and resources today. Totally logical and clear. So there.

The post China’s Logical Contortions to Lay Claim to the South China Sea appeared first on The Nanfang.

The former Police Married Quarters on Hollywood Road could have been sold to a developer, demolished and used to build a luxury high-rise for sale to money-laundering Mainlanders. Or it could have been handed over to a tycoon to mutilate beyond recognition as a luxury retail concept heritage theme historic zone hub. Instead, in a stunning fit of vaguely decent taste, the Hong Kong government decided it should be preserved and adaptively re-used as a local creative concept start-up design incubator hub heritage zone. In keeping with the bureaucracy’s obsession with not spending money on things that might make life nicer, the project would have to be self-financing, in that free-multi-billion-dollar-patch-of-real-estate-thrown-in sort of way.

Bids were invited. Callow, naïve, Kowloon-dwelling, financially illiterate, not-to-the-manor-born applicants who would be out of their depth were politely turned away, leaving a group of pro-establishment philanthropic businessmen called the Musketeers Foundation and design-school partners as the winners.

The ground-level premises at the complex are occupied with biggish brands that nonetheless fit in with the ‘local design’ ethos and remit of the place – Vivienne Tam and Goods Of Desire, for example.

The upper floors house various creative and arty start-ups and obscure/minor brands. A few overtly commercial-type operations sneak through; on a visit last weekend, I spotted a nail salon and a photographic studio – though both of a heavily bohemian/artisanal/hipster sort. Also, an art-jamming joint. Most of the units accommodate mildly weird and offbeat arty-crafty clothing, stationery, household-ware and the inevitable jewellery (those who can, do; those who can’t create home-made bangles). The one thing they all have in common is that they offer stuff you either don’t want or wouldn’t pay such prices for.

On the top floors are some mysterious top-secret ‘skunk works’ of the Hong Kong creative start-up world.

Outlets come and go, and you never know what will be there. This weekend I saw these eyes in leather, which were interesting although their purpose was unclear…

Indeed, it is hard to determine exactly what many of these operations are producing. That wasn’t the case with the cardboard furniture place, which even offered a charming child’s coffin…

…and to hell with the feng shui.

One thing that has changed since my last visit is that the northern block now has a gleaming glass-clad new rooftop floor, which would put the most audacious New Territories illegal structure to shame…

This is Isono, home of 100% Bellota acorn-fed tapas, in which property tycoon Raymond Kwok’s son reportedly has an interest. I am guessing that the place has far more space than most pretentious and overpriced Soho restaurants could ever dream of, and at less rent per square foot. How open and fair was the bidding for the lease? A juicy scandal would be great, but no-one seems to be running with this. Governance comes under the usual great and good with a dash of creative-industry (amazingly, no Allen Zeman).

Essentially, the big chains on the ground floor and the fancy restaurants are subsidizing the small start-up tenants, whose cardboard hand-crafted kids’ caskets and bizarro organic leather accessories would never otherwise have a physical retail presence, leaving Hong Kong a drabber and more humdrum town.

Obviously, the space could have been used for something better – the mostly unused open atrium area between the two blocks could still be a great park/play area/street-food court if the managers were to exercise a little of the creativity they are supposed to promote.

As an oasis of semi-uncommercial, avant-garde anarchic zaniness and fun, PMQ is crap – but in Hong Kong it’s surprising that it’s there at all.

The post What To Do With Hong Kong’s Former Police Married Quarters appeared first on The Nanfang.

Rather than ignore the low-budget dystopian anthology, Chinese official propaganda organs had a foot-stomping, mouth-frothing hissy fit about the portrayal of Hong Kong being crushed by Mainland/Communist despotism. Pro-Beijing shoe-shiners in Hong Kong’s entertainment industry followed suit when the movie won the Hong Kong Film Awards, whining bitterly that the top prize should go only to big-budget productions with special effects, gorgeous pouting starlets and no message.

The public and media (let alone taxpayers) can only conclude that Hong Kong government press releases cannot be treated as accurate and authoritative. So when an official notice reports that the water quality at Turtle Cove Beach is ‘fair’ today, we must assume that the bay may in fact be strewn with piles of E.coli, dead rats and used syringes. When it says the Museum of Coastal Defence Fun Day will include a ‘Fun and Joy Balloon Twisting activity’, parents must consider the very real possibility that the civil servants have knowingly organized an event that will be miserable and abounding in choking hazards. When the bureaucrats advise that the stool of a kid at a Shatin kindergarten tested positive for Coxsackievirus A6, we owe it to ourselves to wonder whether – or why – they are not telling us about 50 others fading fast as a result of bubonic plague, zika virus and necrotizing fasciitis.

The air-brushing of a movie title out of existence undermines whatever remains of the government’s credibility three-fold. First, of course, it is pathetic, ridiculous and laughably infantile. Second, it draws yet more attention to the offending work (no-one would have noticed if they had just listed it). But third – it makes it seem as if the film is coming true.

The post Hong Kong Cinema Featured At New York Asian Film Festival But One Film Is Missing appeared first on The Nanfang.

Apart from that, he featured in one of my old art-drawing-things – which after some rummaging around in a dusty corner, I have located.

I would date it at 1987-ish. This is before Windows Paint, the Internet, PhotoShop, colour monitors, or indeed any ‘devices’ other than toasters and (used in the creation of this work) photocopiers.

It was exhibited at the Fringe Club, which in those days took its role as a home for the dispossessed, marginal and genuinely sub-culture seriously (now it’s all fancy and trendy and sponsored by champagne brands). Bonus marks for anyone who can name the well-connected anti-democracy Teutonic dignitary behind Xu.

Needless to say, it is all very deep and meaningful…

…and bursting with allegory and symbolism.

Or not.

I guess the Xu eulogizing is partly a nostalgia thing. In a similar vein, I declare the three-day Reunification With the Motherland Weekend open with something strictly for the outdated and tasteless – the whole of Oz online.

The post The Death Of Xu Jiatun, Beijing’s Top Official To Hong Kong In The 1980s appeared first on The Nanfang.

But apparently, it won’t. I can’t remember when so many usually-sensible people (George Magnus, say) were getting so worked up. It seems people are confusing leaving the EU with leaving Planet Earth. There’s an important difference: if you leave Planet Earth, trade, investment, immigration, regulations, taxes and death will come to an end; if you leave the EU – whether you love these things or hate them – they will all carry on, maybe with slightly different paperwork.

Commerce will continue because everyone benefits from it (it doesn’t happen otherwise). Migration will continue partly because at least a lot of people benefit, and partly because it’s a force of nature. Regulations/taxes/death go without saying. No-one gets ‘isolated’ or ‘liberated’ if Brexit happens. Brits in Spain will not be expelled. The UK’s Poles, Bangladeshis, Somalis won’t disappear. Everyone needs to get a grip. (The political fallout in Westminster is another thing.)

This is even more the case with the UK than other EU countries, because of something few people acknowledge: the UK is only half in the EU in the first place. It has nothing to do with the catastrophic Euro single-currency. It has a separate visa system and passport controls. From Euro-visionaries’ point of view, the Brits have already wrecked the EU. It was supposed to be a tight-knit, protectionist-leaning group destined to flower as a federal nation-state. The UK joined, put its weight behind free-market principles and insisted on letting a dozen or more backward and/or ex-Communist countries into the organization, rendering it unmanageable. Thanks to the Brits, the original dream is in shatters anyway, with only a flag, ‘parliament’ and pretentiously titled ‘president’ as reminders of what should have been.

Bottom line in the UK: Brexit would give emotional satisfaction to a certain segment (older, uncouth, supposedly dim, supposedly racist, probably angry), while Remain means another segment (young, sophisticated, ‘international’, probably doing quite well) feel righteous and victorious. Remain also spares officials some bureaucratic and administrative headaches – which tips the balance for the rational among us. If Brexit does win, the elites and bores and smug trendies have only themselves to blame for indulging in such a ridiculous scaremongering campaign.

Bottom line for everyone else: keep calm and carry on. It’s just the UK and the EU.

The post Brexit? Everything Will Be Fine, Especially in Hong Kong appeared first on The Nanfang.