In Hong Kong, Who’s the Bigger Story? C.Y. Leung or Jimmy Lai?

Maybe the answer is Both.

Nobody expects Xi Jinping to do something about C.Y. Leung just because Hong Kong student groups wrote him a letter.

Key point, in my opinion, is to put it on record that C.Y. Leong is the deserving target of the movement’s righteous wrath.

As to why the movement wants Leung out [bold prediction here]:

I don’t believe it’s just because Leung is considered a barrier to electoral reforms and a valuable scalp to collect for pro-democracy activists.

The goal may be more strategic, to systematically discredit and delegitimize C.Y. Leung, and with him the process that put “Mr. 689” (referring to the number of electors who voted for him in the final iteration of the constituency-based winnowing process) in office.

Leung’s fall, in other words, could be spun as proof of the hopeless flaws of the old system and its method of leadership selection, and a vindication of demands for full public participation and supervision in every stage of the electoral process i.e. universal suffrage in the selection of candidates as well as election.

In other words, No More Leungs.  We Need Democracy. * 

Then throwing C.Y. Leung under the bus is not a temporizing measure that will win Beijing any buddies in the democracy crowd (typing that phrase makes me realize how ludicrous that idea is); it will be presented as a profound repudiation of the PRC’s formula for rule in Hong Kong and a signal for redoubled efforts to bring the electoral system in line with the newly understood realities.

If this is the way the CCP sees it, maybe C.Y. Leung isn’t going anywhere soon.

And if he doesn’t resign, the democracy movement will make sure that his days in office are not happy ones.

Discrediting Leung and thereby delegitimizing the political system he represents has, of course, already begun, assisted by the fortuitous leak of some tycoon worthy tittle-tattle to John Garnaut.  We’ll see if Jimmy Lai’s paid-up pols in Legco step up to shoulder more of the political burden.  They’ve already called for Leung’s impeachment and promised legislative gridlock.  Expect many healthy servings of indignation and acrimony to show that the current political order is terminally dysfunctional.  

It’s always possible that more fuel for the bonfire may be needed, of course.  John Garnaut, watch your inbox.

I suppose we also owe the media a debt of gratitude for keeping sunshine in our lives through its coverage of the Umbrella Movement, sustaining the joyful, idealistic image of the student demonstrations…and not killing the buzz by putting the focus on Jimmy Lai, the problematic eminence grise of the democratic movement.

Lai is an important paymaster for the movement and motivator for democracy.  As to what “important” means, here’s an excerpt from the Hong Kong Standard story from this summer about Jimmy Lai’s largesse:

[L]eaked documents showed Lai has donated more than HK$40 million to the pan- democratic camp and legislators since 2012, of which HK$9.5 million was made to four political parties in April 2012.


Lai also gave the Democratic Party HK$10 million in two payments - HK$5 million in October 2013 and HK$5 million in June 2014. 

The Civic Party also got an additional of HK$6 million during the period. 

Alliance for True Democracy convener Joseph Cheng Yue-shek and Occupy Central organizer Reverend Chu Yiu-ming received HK$300,000 in June 2013 and HK$400,000 in April 2013 and April 2014, respectively.

Former chief secretary Anson Chan Fang On-sang got HK$3.5 million - more than twice the HK$1.3 million she received from Lai between 2007 and 2009.

Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun received HK$6 million and Democratic Party founder Martin Lee Chu-ming got HK$300,000.

League of Social Democrats lawmaker "Long Hair" Leung Kwok-hung received HK$1 million. 


Former Civic Party lawmaker Tanya Chan Suk-chong and five incumbent pan-democratic lawmakers - Democratic Party's James To Kun-sun, Labour Party's Lee Cheuk-yan, Civic Party leader Alan Leong Kah-kit and the party's lawmaker Claudia Mo Man- ching and Leung - received donations between April 2012 and April 2014.

Noto bene, as they say, the bolded passage and compare and contrast with Jimmy Lai’s statement  to the South China Morning Post three days ago:

Lai said that while he had donated large sums of money to politicians in the pro-democracy camp, he had not given a cent to the co-founders of Occupy Central.

The SCMP declined to call Jimmy Lai on this particular statement, despite the fact that Reverend Chu Yiu-ming is listed as one of the three Occupy co-founders in the very same SCMP article.  Wonder how the merry-go-round spins on that one.

More importantly, Jimmy Lai casts a distinctly unstudently, unidealistic shadow over the democracy movement.  With democracy activists howling for C.Y. Leung’s head on ethics charges, now would not be the time for Jimmy Lai to appear on the scene as C.Y.’s oligarchical doppelganger and explain how his devotion to democracy squares with paying $75,000 to arch neo-con Paul Wolfowitz to get into the good graces of Burma’s markedly democracy-averse military rulers and get his business done over there.

In short, the spectacle of Jimmy Lai’s non-stop application of financial, media, and political grease in pursuit of his interests, democratic and otherwise, would undercut the dominant narrative of the democracy movement struggling against the non-stop application of financial, media, and political grease by Beijing and its bespoke oligarchs in the affairs of Hong Kong.

Until C.Y. Leung has been disposed of, I imagine Jimmy Lai will not emerge to distract from the movement’s optics and serve as a propaganda piñata for pro-Beijing forces by acknowledging any active role in the formulation, strategizing, or advancement of the Hong Kong democracy agenda.

And maybe not even then.  Maybe, as they say, truth is the daughter of time and we’ll only get a rounded idea of what went down after, well, after it all goes down.

Perhaps journos are hoarding their Jimmy Lai stories for their retrospective tomes on the democracy movement, which could be subtitled, “Now it can be told…because nobody cares.”

To be generous about it, I will say that today the media is giving relatively short shrift to the unethically acquired audio file of Jimmy Lai’s table talk with Shih Ming-the because Jimmy Lai’s machinations, although integral to the furtherance of the pro-democratic political movement in Hong Kong, are peripheral to the Big Story that Big Media believes is worth telling: the erosion of PRC legitimacy and control in Hong Kong and possibly throughout China.

Well, for those who enjoy the little stories, the awkward facts on the ground that have received less play, below the fold is my previous piece on the leaked Jimmy Lai/Shih Mingteh audio file and C.Y. Leung’s current round of difficulties.

Dirty War for Hong Kong Democracy Heats Up

Things got  hotter for C.Y. Leung, with Australian journalist John Garnaut revealing that Leung has 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 Chief Executive.

Though the sin seems to be of a venial nature as RFA 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.  IMO 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 C.Y. Leung’s resignation and putting the accommodation-minded Carrie Lam 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 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 C.Y. Leung to be more reasonable in upcoming talks.”

What I do have a problem with is bullshit.  In this case, the bullshit is the meme, put out by the democracy movement and apparently adopted by sympathetic members of the press, that Beijing leaked the Leung story to John Garnaut, a journalist resolutely antagonistic to the CCP regime, in order to push the Chief Executive out of office.

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--CH] 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 Alan Leung, who has emerged as perhaps the democracy movement’s most brazen flak, was claiming the Legislative Council had recessed because:

Civic Party's Alan Leong suspects Legco session suspended bc pro-Beijing lawmakers got messages that Beijing wants to fire CYL over payments

Double-stacked bullshit.  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 right now 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 DPP 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 KMT-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 Mr. Shih’s taste; and either Mr. Lai believed that Mr. 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 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 a couple days ago.

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 Mingteh 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 Liming, a political commentator who also helped put the wood to Chen Shuibian 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 has to flow”, he declares.

A year before Hong Kong Occupy kicked off (but a full six months after he had rained millions of $HK 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 14^th” 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.

For the sake of posterity and interested readers and journos, I have roughed out a translation of the transcript below the break.