Hong Kong's war for democracy gets dirtier
By Peter Lee
[Hong Kong opposition lawmakers have asked the territory's anti-corruption agency to investigate CY Leung, the chief executive, following revelations that he received 4m pounds [US$7 million] in undisclosed payments from an Australian company.
The Democratic party on Thursday asked the Independent Commission Against Corruption to open a probe, while members of the umbrella pan-democrat camp said the opposition would also consider launching impeachment proceedings. - Financial Times, October 9.]
Things have become hotter for Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung, with Australian journalist John Garnaut revealing that Leung signed a non-compete agreement when he parted ways with an Australian company, UGL, that also included a multi-million dollar consulting clause that might have exposed him to
some conflict of interest ethics problems when he became Hong Kong's chief executive.
Though the sin seems to be of a venial nature as Radio Free Asia reported it:
While there was nothing apparently illegal about the contract itself, Leung didn't disclose it during his election campaign, the paper said.
That's not good enough for the pro-democracy movement:
Pan-democratic lawmakers in Hong Kong said they would impeach Leung over the allegations.
Fair enough. In my opinion, this is a not unpredictable escalation of the crisis, an effort to get the pro-Beijing government on the defensive when dealing with the negotiations with the students, intimidate the government with the pro-democracy movement's clout and capabilities and, perhaps, decapitate the HK government by forcing CY Leung's resignation and putting the accommodation-minded Carrie Lam - Hong Kong's chief secretary, ie the city's top civil servant - in the driver's seat.
So Leung has his work cut out for him. No problem with that. We're clearly in the hardball phase of the struggle.
I predicted there will be a continual escalation of pressure against the Hong Kong government in order to reform and co-opt it and present the pro-democracy case to Beijing, maybe not out of conviction but because of the desire to dodge the intense political pressure that the democracy movement will continue to bring to bear, inside and outside the governments, from elites and key constituencies, and backed up by the ability to put students on the streets to protest.
Educators now in open support of the movement, as I also predicted. A student told RFA that only half the students were in class:
"[The rest] are all in Admiralty and Central," Chin said. "The college still supports us, and the teachers are e-mailing stuff to us, to help the students."
And indeed, Garnaut's audio segment (illustrated with a quite timely Next Media animation), editorialized about the "travesty" of the nine-day delay in the Hong Kong government's beginning talks with the students and opined that revelations about the deal "add to the pressure on CY Leung to be more reasonable in upcoming talks".
Here's Quartz:
It's not clear where Fairfax Media obtained the contract. When asked about the publicly-floated theory [David Pilling of the Financial Times obligingly started the attribution ball rolling - PL] that Beijing may have leaked the information to Fairfax, Nick McKenzie, one of article's authors, told Quartz: "I'm afraid we never comment on the identity of sources, I can only say they were people with deep concerns about the probity of CY and UGL's dealings and that we only got the story very recently."
The fact that John Garnaut co-wrote the story is notable. Now back in Australia, Garnaut was for many years a highly accomplished foreign correspondent in Beijing, thanks to his many sources connected with the Chinese government.
For Pete's sake. John Garnaut is Xi Jinping's go to guy for radioactive tittle-tattle? I smell ... bullshit.
As I smelled in a tweet by another journo, who passed on the tidbit that Legislative Council member and Civic Party leader Alan Leong, who has emerged as perhaps the democracy movement's most brazen flak, was claiming the council had recessed because:
... pro-Beijing lawmakers got messages that Beijing wants to fire CYL over payments
My fingers would curl up in embarrassment if I tried to type something like that (fortunately I was able to cut-and-paste).
If the journalistic community is unable to recognize, as I put it on Twitter, plain vanilla psyops meant to sow FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) between Beijing and Hong Kong at a level befitting an IQ test in a petting zoo, while dodging the fact that the pro-democracy movement is engaged in a calculated and rather inelegant exercise in dirty tricks ?
? but who am I kidding?
My general feeling is this. The Western media wants a big story to come out of this. Heck, there's a certain prestige media outlet that's laying off journos by the fistful while maintaining an expensive, top-heavy presence of exiled reporters in Hong Kong; it needs a big story.
And it's hoping that story is democratic revolution in Hong Kong and maybe, just maybe, in mainland China.
Unfortunately, that's just one story. And right now it's not the main story.
The main story is that the pro-democracy movement is coordinated and financed by a group of clever, determined, and ruthless bigwigs who are using the student demonstrations as part of a sophisticated political campaign against the Hong Kong government to achieve some electoral reforms.
Maybe not the story the pro-democracy media wants to tell.
But it's the true story. And I don't think there's any shame in telling it. The democracy movement has a solid agenda and support, and the facts, if they hurt, aren't going to hurt too much. And it's easier on the discriminating reader than flogging the dishonest and increasingly tedious line that what we see playing out in the streets and in the media is just a spontaneously evolving outburst of impassioned students, or pretending that a carefully prepared and timed hatchet job against Leung is some kind of circular firing squad gambit by Beijing.
Speaking of facts - actually, facts, leaks, and oppo research dumps from the other side of the fence - pro-Beijing operators unearthed another interesting nugget from the computers of Jimmy Lai, the Next Media tycoon who is bankrolling and overseeing much of the democracy action in Hong Kong.
The Lai camp has not challenged the authenticity of an audio recording purporting to be Lai's own record of his discussions with Taiwan democracy icon Shih Ming-teh in October 2013.
Shih did 25 years - yes, 25 years, including 13 years of solitary and four years of hunger strike - of hard time in Taiwan's prisons during a struggle for reform of the Republic of China's political system (under Chiang Kai-shek, and until his son Chiang Ching-kuo yielded, the ROC operated under a martial law regime inherited from the mainland that gave Taiwaners only a minority voice as one of the two dozen or so Chinese provinces in the parliament). As a result, he is called by some "Taiwan's Mandela".
As befits the factionalized character of Taiwanese politics, Shih broke with the Democratic Progressive Party and is now on the outside looking in. His most relevant experience to Lai apparently was his organization of the "Million Voices against Corruption, President Chen Must Go" "Red Shirts" action in 2006, an orchestrated multi-stage, multi-week street action that contributed to independence-minded Chen Shui-bian's removal from office, much to the delight of Beijing; in fact, Shih was accused of acting as the PRC's cat's paw.
Today, Shih Ming-teh pursues a relatively idiosyncratic but rather Kuomintang-friendly agenda of "Greater One China", which splits the baby between independence and reunification with a call for overlapping sovereignty.
So it would seem that democratizing the Hong Kong arrangement within the PRC context would be somewhat to Shih's taste, and either Lai believed that Shih would not blab his plans to Beijing, or didn't care if he did.
In any event, they met.
The tape - in nice, clear Mandarin, by the way - has Lai blustering in the trademark da kuan fashion, while Shih goes Zhuge Liang [the third-century Chinese strategist] in advising on how to win at high-stakes democratic brinksmanship.
The accompanying news story says Lai made an offering of 200,000 yuan (currency not specified) to arrange the meeting (which was puckishly described as Lai "going to pick up the scriptures" as Tripitika did in Journey to the West) and Lai collected everybody's phones so they couldn't be used as listening devices (Lai apparently knew about the ability of government surveillance authorities to secretly turn on cellphones and turn them into microphones).
Shih supposedly gave Lai advice on putting students, young girls, and mothers with children in the vanguard of the street protests, in order to attract the support of the international community and press, and to sustain the movement with continual activities to keep it dynamic and fresh.
We've certainly seen that, though these particular elements are not addressed in the audio and transcript that made their way into the world earlier this week.
For some reason, Lai openly recorded the conversations himself (he refers to shutting the recorder off at presumably sensitive moments) and then the audio file got hacked off his computers. Go figure.
The meeting was apparently meant to be a super secret summit between Lai, some Hong Kongers, and Shih Ming-teh and some other Taiwan figures who had experience in the use of mass street politics. One of the other attendees at the meeting, a local media nawab associated with protest politics named Fan Keqian, revealed on Taiwan TV that he was furious at Lai - who had demanded complete, "silent as the grave" secrecy - for letting the audio get out, calling him "a son of a dog". Neither Fan nor another attendee, Yao Li-ming, a political commentator who also helped put the wood to Chen Shui-bian in the 2006 mass action, can be heard on this excerpt.
The audio is an interesting look at the nuts and bolts of high-stakes activism by two serious players, one well-heeled and determined, the other bringing a lifetime of experience to the table. Shih talks about the importance of a commitment to go to jail for the cause (he says he's willing to go to Hong Kong and get arrested) and the inevitable dangers of provocateurs.
Interestingly, Shih does not share the "Tiananmen Redux" anxieties voiced by so many journos and pundits during the Hong Kong street demonstrations. "No blood will flow," he declares.
A year before Hong Kong Occupy kicked off (but a full six months after he had rained millions of Hong Kong dollars on democracy-inclined politicians) Jimmy Lai already seemed to be "in it to win it", as we say in US politics ("It's decided!" he trumpets, his enthusiasm perhaps a function of Shih's confidence that jail time for Hong Kong protesters won't be anything like what he went through on Taiwan).
Lai offers to send some journalistic cheddar Shih's way, and indeed Shih contributed a hopefully well-compensated opinion piece to Apple Daily on October 1 on Tear Gas and the Freedom that Wants to Fly.
Maybe further releases will fill in some interesting gaps, like the reference to "the meeting on the 14th" and scheduling a visit by Shih "after the round table conference"; and the "Ma" action on Taiwan; and what seems to be Shih's interest in using the Hong Kong action to jumpstart his new political alignment in Taiwan with some supporting street demonstrations.
Rely on it, there's plenty more out there, and plenty more worth reporting.
Note:
For the sake of posterity and interested readers and journos, see here for a translation of the transcript of the discussion between Jimmy Lai and Shih Ming-teh.
