A Sky Burial

By Chip Tsao | published Jan 13, 2011

It was like a Tibetan sky burial. In these rituals, the dead body is placed on a mountaintop and ripped open, exposing the heart and organs to circling birds of prey. A swarm of hungry vultures then flutters down to share the banquet. The body is soon reduced to a pile of broken bones. It’s the most ecologically friendly form of funerary.

There is a remote resemblance between the death of veteran democrat Szeto Wah and this Tibetan ritual. Almost unanimously glowing eulogies have suddenly been pouring forth on the former chairman of the anti-China alliance, who died of lung cancer last week, and was just about the lone, brave voice calling persistently for an end to communist dictatorship and an open trial of the June 4 massacre butchers.

Szeto Wah, a former primary school headmaster, had been branded a traitor for more than 20 years. He had been taunted with accusations of treachery from his political enemies, and has been the target of abusive name-calling by the pro-China press at a scale similar to what a black slave would have heard from the whites around him in Mississippi during the 19th century.

Why Szeto was lauded officially as a “stern patriot” and a “life-long lover of China and Hong Kong” immediately after his death by chief executive Donald Tsang remains a mystery. Rumors have it that Tsang is privately indebted to the old man for his support for the 2010 political reform bill, without whose influence Tsang would have been left looking fatally bad in the eyes of Beijing. Some suggested that they had been clandestine political allies, since Szeto was a devout Christian and Tsang is Catholic. And thus the conductor changed the emotional tone of the orchestra he leads. The pro-China musicians looked confused at first, then started playing a new toadying requiem to the man they deeply hated while he was alive. It’s not quite the same thing as Clement Atlee saying a few nice things about Winston Churchill at his funeral. For those who remember, that scene would have been as grotesque as Adolf Hitler transforming into Mahatma Gandhi overnight.

Because the beloved founder and former chairman of the Democratic Party once again rallied Hong Kong people with his death as he always had during the yearly June 4 memorial vigil, any politician will win some dividends by simply following the mourning mainstream, taking advantage of the forgetful Hong Kong masses. Since the veteran democratic leader never revealed a long list of his former political predators’ names, whose mourning he would dismiss and firmly decline as a tasteless show of hypocrisy, he instead offered his name as a buffet open to everybody for political gain, like a body exposed to the vultures of Tibet.

And the birds came flapping down for their food, as natural as an Oriental shopping crowd noisily grabbing at a limited number of LV handbags in Paris. For China-watchers, it’s just too familiar a scene.

Say No to National Identity

By Chip Tsao | published Jan 06, 2011

Since the 1997 handover, Hong Kong people have been regularly harassed by survey polls about their consciousness of “national identity.” Do you feel more like a “Hongkonger” or more “Chinese”?

My answers to the inquisitor vary from time to time depending on mood. I tend to say “Chinese,” but add a personal statement explaining why. I am proud of being Chinese for the time being, and I promise I’ll be three times prouder if General Secretary Hu Jintao declares war on India tomorrow and wins it, because I had a hot and heavy Indian meal at a Tandoori restaurant in Wan Chai last weekend, and I was given a hostile look by the Indian waiter upon receiving the bill when I queried why he had charged me for the ice-cream I hadn’t ordered.

Sometimes I choose “Hongkonger” just for the hell of it, like after a hot-springs vacation trip to Hokkaido. The reason: the Japanese immigration officer let me enter the country without hindrance after peeping briefly at my SAR passport with a respectful smile, but the Chinese man in the neighboring queue was stopped and given a hard time. The man made a scene, blustering in inscrutable and broken English, mentioning words like “the Rape of Nanjing” or “Diaoyu island,” or something.

Surveys like this are more or less a waste of time, because fence-sitting answers that depend on circumstances are not always reliable. Don’t tell me someone like Sir Donald Tsang is not proud of being British when he reveals his proper title on a name-tag on his chest at a Chatham House cocktail party in London. But when he’s the leader of the flock gathering in Golden Bauhinia Square on October 1, when he’s seen fighting back his tears while quivering his lips to the tune of China’s national anthem as the red flag rises—well, when you’re thinking of which side your bread is buttered on at that moment, it is only human to feel proud of being Chinese.

Surveys of this kind are more complicated than a Quebecois being asked whether he feels more Canadian or French. As dim sum eaters, most Hongkongers always consider themselves Cantonese first. If one has migrated to the Chinatown in Vancouver for ten years, he considers himself Canadian. A Hong Kong Canadian Cantonese friend of mine once told me he felt like being a Tibetan when he talked to the Dalai Lama in a state of meditation as a Buddhist. Ethnographically, I am Mongolian and I occasionally identify myself with Genghis Khan, and Ulan Bator as my capital rather than Beijing, or even “Victoria”—as they printed in 1940s British geography textbooks. To borrow a quote from Woody Allen: “I can’t understand why more people aren’t bisexual. It would double your chances for a date on Saturday night.”

A Snow-Snubbing Snog

By Chip Tsao | published Dec 30, 2010

Should the SAR government have been dispatching extra flights with taxpayers’ money to rescue those few hundred Hong Kong overseas academic wretches stranded at Heathrow Airport as London was paralyzed by the most severe snowstorm in a hundred years?

Still traumatized by the Manila massacre, Hong Kong people had every reason to be appalled as the Heathrow airport lounge was reduced to something like a Vietnamese
boat people camp.

Frustrated flight-awaiting passengers wriggled on the floor in their sleeping bags, with some Asians cooking their instant noodles or, in the case of the Chinese, even helplessly cutting their toenails on the benches in the airport lounge. It is unfair to let one’s kid—for whom a Hong Kong parent pays an average of HK$400,000 in annual tuition fees to get him into Winchester College to be trained to look like Prince William—wander among starving and half-frozen refugees, going nowhere, witnessing yet another living episode in the decline of Western civilization since 9/11, as one of the greatest crossroads on earth grounds to a halt.

But to find a silver lining in the blackest cloud, wouldn’t it be the best time (if a Hong Kong Chinese kid is bright enough), to hand out some ketamine to the young Russian teenage girl snuggling next to him, also stuck at Heathrow waiting for her Moscow home-bound flight? He would be able, if his boarding school enlightenment has worked on him so far, to say a seductive “hello” to her in an Etonian accent. He would further engage the young blonde in an interesting conversation with his knowledge of Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” or recite a few lines of Pushkin in broken Russian with an enchanting, Tony Leung sort of smile. It’s what English aristocratic education is all about—an ability to endure accidental hardships in life, while maintaining an outstanding ability to improvise with a gentlemanly wit and humor.

It would prove value for money if your Hong Kong kid texts you a long-distance mobile message which reads something like this: “Hey dad, I got stuck in this snowbound third-world airport named Heathrow. It’s anarchy, just like David Cameron’s coalition government. But don’t be taken in by the CNN news scenes relayed by TVB Pearl to your bedroom in Repulse Bay. No, it’s not the end of the world. I’m surviving better than those buried in the Sichuan earthquake and having a good time. Guess what, I’ve just got hooked on this young daughter of a Siberian natural gas tycoon. She’s just invited me to her Black Sea villa after New Year’s. Give me another 48 hours here, and I’ll propose to her. I wish to thank the inefficient Heathrow airport authorities. Don’t wait for me for dinner this weekend.”

Liu’s Little Limbo

By Chip Tsao | published Dec 23, 2010

Apart from the big global crowd who went ape over this year’s Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to the leading Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, there were a few worldly wise men who managed to keep a cool head about the news, yet hardly qualify as sympathizers of Beijing.

An intellectual friend of mine told me he had been invited to add his signature to support the widely-circulated Charter 08 drafted by Liu before his arrest. After going through the manifesto, he bluntly refused. The reason: Liu had raised a more interesting point during an interview with Open Monthly, a Hong Kong-based China-watch magazine in the 1990s, when he said he believed China should become a Western colony for 300 years, before its people learn the basic laws of freedom and democracy. That interesting thought is missing in the now widely-acclaimed Chinese human rights charter.

It is difficult to imagine, without the elementary episode of Western colonialism, how we Chinese could handle democracy where fair-play is the core value, starting from the very primitive lesson of all vehicles getting used to stopping at traffic lights turning red, the existence of an independent ICAC, and producing melamine-free milk powder, all consolidated in Hong Kong under British colonial rule.

The Taiwanese have been lucky to embrace democracy of a cruder type. Gunshots were fired in election campaigns and TV coverage of election news is ludicrously emotionally biased, because Taiwan was ruled by the Japanese, not the British, for a pitifully short period of 50 years. Their former president was almost shot by a magic bullet while campaigning, then locked up on corruption charges: a cheap version of Dallas 1963, copied from their US mentor, and a replica of South Korea in the 1990s. These second-rate dramas are enough to make the Taiwanese go hog wild, thinking that they are a more dignified breed of Chinese living on the other side of the Strait of Taiwan.

Calling for China to make up this missing lesson is a better idea, although Liu did not specify. First among all, Western colonialism is now a matter of the past. Few EU countries, including Portugal, Belgium and Holland, would have the appetite to come back to the Far East with the Bible and rule a 1.3 billion population who live in a post-Chairman Mao total moral anarchy, like they did to Macau, the Congo and Indonesia some two hundred years ago. The UK has been castrated of the thought of imperialism by liberals. Some in the United States, like Sarah Palin, would be tempted by Liu’s offer, but they lack the skill given what Iraq looks like now. Liu’s “I-have-a-dream” manifesto should have a more realistic and imaginative opening chapter, telling us how he thinks China should be packaged and auctioned. He would have won my friend’s, or I am tempted to say my, signature as well, had he elaborated his point a bit further.

Confucius Confusion

By Chip Tsao | published Dec 16, 2010

It is time to brush up on our long forgotten Confucian wisdom, as some desperately patriotic Chinese staged an impromptu ceremony in Beijing last week to award a “Confucius Prize of Peace,” cynically designed to eclipse this year’s much-hated Nobel Peace Prize. The Chinese equivalent went to Lien Chan, the eye-boggling, poker-faced “honorary president” of the pro-Beijing Kuomintang, a man selected to dwarf imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo.

Lien, a Taiwanese billionaire and politician who favors “reunification,” has been fingered by Beijing after a few obsequious “ice-breaking” trips to the mainland in recent years. He has thus been branded as China’s fifth column in Taiwan. The Confucius Prize of Peace, with the word “peace” defined by the Ministry of Truth, sounds like something of an Orwellian Newspeak. No wonder Lien was bewildered and wouldn’t dare to travel to Beijing to grab his trophy and the eight-inch-thick bundle of RMB$100,000 cash, which were both squeezed into the arms of a mysterious and visibly puzzled five-year-old girl instead (although some suspect that she may be Lien’s illegitimate daughter) in front of the TV news cameras.

The former vice president of Taiwan has reasons to be embarrassed. His luck has been bad. His son was shot in the face by a triad gangster while campaigning for the mayoral elections in Taipei last month. An honor in the mainland, a humiliation in the “free world.” If Stalin praised Winston Churchill as a good guy, the British people would have much to worry about.

Imprisoned for his “Charter 08,” a human rights manifesto inspired by Vaclav Havel, Liu Xiaobo’s aura of international holiness was brought to him by his Beijing jailer. Eleven years is a long enough sentence for the Nobel Committee to be resolute and unanimous in deciding who this year’s peace prize should go to. If only the US$1.5 million cash prize were handed to some trusted Hong Kong friends, like Emily Lau, to invest in a flat on Robinson Road. The longer the Beijing communist regime exists, the more likely Liu will serve his sentence in full, and the more profit he’ll gain. Confucius had foreseen this more than 2,400 years ago: “If you want pretty nurse, you got to be patient.”

As for China, it has struggled hard to rebuild its image as a civilized nation by hosting the Beijing Olympics and opening hundreds of “Confucius Institutes” in the United States and E.U. countries. While Confucius was derided by Mao during the Cultural Revolution, it’s a pity that Beijing’s budding global propaganda campaign had just started to work on the simple-minded West, until its hysteria over the prize shocked the world. Confucius say, “Virginity like bubble. One prick, all gone.”

The War of Vacant Chairs

By Chip Tsao | published Dec 09, 2010

Enraged by Norway’s audacity when it interfered with China’s internal affairs by awarding our public enemy No.1, Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize, an official newspaper in Beijing has called for the establishment of a Confucian Peace Prize to counteract the white man’s supremacy in dictating who is the good guy and who is the thug.

Not a bad idea. Should the Oscar-bestowing American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hegemonize the definition of good-quality movies? The French have long answered them with their Cannes Film Festival. Since we already have Zhang Yimou—a peasant-born filmmaker with genius rivaling Steven Spielberg and known as China’s Akira Kurosawa or sometimes hailed as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Orient—it is high time we presented Confucius as a check and balance to Oslo, the White House, 10 Downing Street and even Jehovah of the Old Testament, to tell the world eloquently and afresh what is morally right and morally wrong.

In that context, the field for the Confucian Peace Prize would be as highly competitive as the Nobel. Should the first year’s award go to our Dear Leader Kim Jong-il of North Korea or Senior General Than Shwe of Myanmar? Or, for example, should we give the inaugural honor to President Mugabe of Zimbabwe due to his age? The choice is already shaping up to be a headache for our selection committee, on which the Chief Executive of Hong Kong would be a permanent ceremonial non-executive member with the right to raise his hand to signal a “yes” concurrence to any decision.

To boost Hong Kong’s status as an international city and a cradle of culture, the award presentation ceremony for the first year could be held at City Hall in Central with some singers and primary school children performing “We Are the World” with a happy welcoming orchestra. Invitations will be sent to ambassadors or even foreign ministers of the United States and European Union, which means plenty of empty seats in the first couple rows of the hall. A perfect retaliation for their provocation.

Hostile western media ranging from Oslo TV and Reuters to Fox News and NHK will unleash a cynical smear campaign attacking the prize as a hilarious farce. A few Sinologists and anthropologists from the University of London’s School of African and Oriental studies will sink to the level of claiming that the man named Confucius never even existed. To that we as Chinese will have the courage to answer back in a voice 10 times louder: Yes, Confucius was a historical figure 2,400 years ago, more real than Jesus Christ—and our ancient Great Master of All Wisdoms stands on a moral ground definitely higher than a bunch of bear-skin-wearing, whale-killing Vikings.

Call it arrogance, but with a foreign reserve of more than US$1.8 trillion, it is time for us to act as Confucius once said: “A man with a hole in his pocket always feels cocky.”

Stockim Syndrome

By Chip Tsao | published Dec 02, 2010

I was attending a cocktail function in Kowloon on the day I was told by a few people I bumped into that North Korea had fired artillery at an island in South Korea, pushing the peninsula to the brink of a major war.

“The stock market is going to crash,” I was alerted by everybody. I found myself a bit unpopular when I innocently asked, “did anyone get killed?” only to be met with a few poker faces. I soon realized it was the wrong question. I should have checked my iPhone to find HSBC shares had dropped a little and told people the Hang Seng Index had reacted to the killings rationally, so we had not lost much money.

The Dear Leader’s aggressive acts, be it sinking a South Korean naval corvette to commemorate his late father’s birthday or the firing of a few bombshells to announce the succession of a crown prince, have been described as irrational and unpredictable by western governments and media. But there is nothing mind-boggling in his saber-rattling games as long as one understands the interdependent sadistic-masochistic psychic relationship between our Dear Leader and his foes.

Four South Korean cabinet ministers were killed in Rangoon during a state visit led by former president Chun Doo-hwan in 1984, who narrowly escaped death. This would ordinarily have amounted to a declaration of war, but was instead met with a round of routine “condemnation”—there was no other response.

Then came the bombing of a Korean airliner in 1987, when North Korea recruited a young and pretty female agent, Kim Hyon-hui, to plant a bomb on the ill-fated KA858 flight. Kim was arrested but her movie-star-like beauty melted the hearts of the South Koreans. She was pardoned by then-president Roh Tae-woo, who described the 25-year-old mass murderer as a “child” who is “as much a victim of an evil empire as the passengers aboard.”

This was soon followed by the “Sunshine Policy,” when the “evil empire” described by South Korea was awarded with rice, buffalos and cash, a policy endorsed by the United States.

It was the first time feminism played a decisive role in human judiciary. Kim was made a VIP as she toured around the country, making confessions in tears, blaming her communist motherland for her brainwashing. Had she been old, wrinkled and ugly, she would undoubtedly have been executed. Is Kim’s case a triumph of feminism or some kind of positive discrimination against women? I leave that mystery to the liberal academics to argue in their air-conditioned university lecture halls.

Male criminals will remain prejudiced against Timothy McVeigh, a terrorist of the American militia movement who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 civilians, was young and handsome with charismatic qualities resembling a combination of Steve McQueen and Tom Cruise. The 27-year-old indoctrinated terrorist was also a “kid” and a victim of some evil ideology, yet he was given a lethal injection.

So well done, our Dear Leader Kim.

The Grand Illusion

By Chip Tsao | published Nov 25, 2010

The SAR government has been left stranded in its insistence on hawking a plan to host the 2023 Asian Games with the fabulous cost of more than HK$6 billion.

It’s no easy task to convince Hong Kong people that the global status of the last former British colony in Asia would be boosted by one Norman Foster-designed white elephant in West Kowloon followed by an extravagant Soviet-style opening ceremony to a sporting event. It’s as challenging as coaxing a struggling baby to drink a bowl of Chinese herbal tea by pretending it’s actually a tasty chocolate milkshake. The irritated mother can maybe force the baby to drink the tea by slapping aside his Buzz Lightyear toy, but the bowl of black bitter liquid will still spill upon the bed sheets and there’ll be squeals that will wake up a few of the neighbors.

The government simply needs to tell better lies to a people who care little about sports apart from the traditional tile-shuffling of mahjong. The tag “Asian,” above all, is the least attractive element of the pitch. Who wants to be labeled an “Asian” in the global village and identify with Burma and Laos as a community? The trendier term is “Asia-Pacific,” which includes countries such as Australia, Canada and the United States. Even Mexico and Chile join the party.

Hong Kong’s TV stations engage in fierce civil wars, squandering billions to bid for broadcasting rights to the FA Cup or UEFA Cup because these brands refer to the Englishman’s or the European’s tournaments. Names like Chelsea and Manchester United raise the blood pressure and cause a commotion among emotional crowds in a Wan Chai pub more than any badminton match between Hong Kong and Chinese Taipei, or a volleyball game between Bangladesh and Mongolia. For years even the annual rugby tournament scores more international press coverage for Hong Kong, with its rowdy half-drunk striped-T-shirt-wearing white men roaring around on the MTR heading for Wan Chai, harassing a few Suzie Wongs on their way. “Asia” is somehow an enviable term at the Financial Times, thanks to the connotations of high GDP growth, but ask any Chinese shopper if the term carries a market value—chances are they’ll see it more in terms of silk ties in Stanley Market rather than the Vacheron Constantin diamond watches sold on Canton Road.

It’s all about perception. The image of “Asia” is unfortunately still associated with the word “jungle” and is rife with notions of “Asian values,” such as nepotism and corruption. People tend to believe the winner of the gold medal in diving might be a result of a secret deal between his government and the referee to cover the latter’s daughter’s tuition fees at an English boarding school. Hosting the Commonwealth Games could have boosted Hong Kong’s status as an international city—not because of the participation of Nigerian athletes but because, I hate to say this, of Prince Charles’s attendance at the opening ceremony. But it’s too late.

From Man to Pig

By Chip Tsao | published Nov 18, 2010

Fewer eyebrows than usual were raised last week when British Prime Minister David Cameron shied away from remonstrating his Chinese hosts on China’s human rights abuse record during his strictly business promotion trip to Beijing.

The West finds fewer cards in their hands as China climbs up to its place as the second richest nation in the world. Beijing starts lecturing the United States and Europe about the successes of the “Beijing Model”—combining Leninist dictatorship with nepotistic capitalism, letting corruption flourish along with the GDP, with no place for judiciary independence, free media or ICAC-like institutions. Refusing to appreciate the Renminbi, Beijing sees little reason to swallow the medicine for the economic sickness of the United States, let alone ingest a prescription from the West about how to treat its people less like pigs and more like human beings.

Among the contracts that were to be hawked by the British Prime Minister and signed with China was, bizarrely enough, one about pig-breeding technology. Britain, particularly the Tory party, takes trade as the priority in its diplomacy with China while holding a historical insouciance about China’s democracy. British missionaries and adventurers traveled to China in the 19th century, witnessing atrocities under the Taiping and Boxer uprisings with an eye of exotic curiosity. While human rights philosophers like John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham were preaching equality, there was a budding consciousness regarding China already forming in Europe, seen in its acquiescence to public executions of deaths by a thousand cuts at a market in old Peking—this was seen as a part of the ancient Chinese civilization, through an early lens of multiculturalism.

Neither are Chinese intellectuals particularly sentimental about British values. Chinese historical textbooks have long accused the British of exporting opium to China in the 19th century as a conspiracy to destroy the health of Chinese people. Any British government should be more discreet and neutral on issues like the recent imprisonment of Zhao Lianhai, the father campaigning for his sick baby who fell victim to the made-in-China melamine-contaminated milk.

With the West demoralized and divided, Cameron came to Beijing as a humble student to learn more about Confucian doctrines where slavery has long been sanctioned. It is time for the West to correct its perspective to the East. Closing the door firmly to ungrateful, anti-Christian and benefit-claiming immigrants from Shanghai or Islamabad, for example, is one way to escape the slow death by a thousand cuts of Western civilization. Let the Chinese solve their own problems, while exporting British pig-breeding technology to help a hungry world feed itself. Who is more superior in this global chaos? We all need a bit of humility. George Orwell famously puts it in the end of “Animal Farm”: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to tell which was which.”

China's Cinematic Takeover

By Chip Tsao | published Nov 11, 2010

Some Chinese funds are talking about buying up Metro-Goldwyn-China (MGM), which rumor has it is about to file for bankruptcy.

The Hollywood film studio behind Oscar-winning blockbusters such as “Rocky” and “West Side Story” agreed to a plan last week with its creditors on the restructuring of debt, which totals more than US$4 billion. Peanuts compared with China’s colossal financial strength! It’s time that the roaring King Kong did something to save the screaming blonde clinging to the window of a shaking Empire State Building.

That would mean, if we own MGM, the next James Bond would be played by our heartthrob Donnie Yen, who would leap into bed with Bond girl Keira Knightley in the first five minutes. It’s always been Sean Connery with Tsai Chin or Peirce Brosnan with Michelle Yeo—an indisputable surplus of white Anglo-Saxon males reaping sexual advantages over Oriental women on the Hollywood screen. Now it’s time for some political correctness. Not used to seeing a Chinaman hero unclipping the bra of a western woman for some hanky-panky? Give us some time. Some 20 years ago, no American would dream of having a black president.

Then Blofield, the cat-stroking arch-nemesis of a global criminal gang, will be played by a bald-headed Tom Hanks wearing a tie and jacket instead of a Maoist suit, or even a kimono, depending on how long the Japanese are occupying our sacred Diaoyutai islands. Our Chinese Bond will thus crush the White House, the headquarters of the Evil Empire, at the last minute before Beijing is nuked, saving the world from the nuclear doom.

But a Chinese-owned MGM could be a strategically sensitive matter for the U.S., which knows all too well how global cinematic indoctrination works. It’s rumored that even if the Chinese are allowed to buy it, we will only own the land and a pile of bricks, like the studio buildings in Los Angeles. That means we’d have to stay away from approving film scripts and deciding the skin color of heroes like Indiana Jones or Rocky. There’ll be an actors’ strike if a Chinese boss insists that Jackie Chan be given his long-overdue sex scene with Nicole Kidman.

It’s what you call the Beverly Hills’ Four Seasons Hotel model. The prestigious five-star hotel was sold to some Hong Kong property tycoons about 20 years ago. But strict clauses were stipulated in the contract, restricting the Chinese consortium to owning the premises only, without the right to change a single toilet roll used in the restroom as mandated under the auspices of heritage preservation. When I visited the world-famous hotel in 1996, I was delighted to learn that it had changed hands, with Hong Kong’s Cheng Yu-tung now being the main shareholder, but was disappointed to find there was no Yeung-chow Fried Rice on the dinner menu. The manager and chef were still Italian, not some familiar faces transferred in from Yung Kee. I walked out in rage.

The Missing Chicken

By Chip Tsao | published Nov 04, 2010

A mysterious fetus-carrier in America recruited by the crown prince of one of the wealthiest property tycoons in town has given birth to triplets. Pictures of the three little angels with their grinning father and happy granddad have occupied front pages of most of the local Chinese newspapers in an imperial public euphoria unseen since Nigeria’s national newspapers celebrated the birth of Prince William in 1983.

The difference is the absence of our Princess Diana, or mother Cinderella, whom the father preferred the public not to know about and soon forget. This raised the eyebrows of some ethicists, who question the motherless triplets’ parenting, and whether only the upper class of wealth can enjoy the privilege of selecting offspring of a more superior genetic quality.

From an ethnographical point of view, it is only common sense that Hong Kong’s rich have a better chance of producing superior offspring. They can afford to send their children to Eton or Winchester to receive a more civilized education. These kids come back to Lan Kwai Fong for a cheerful drink in the summer and order their babycham or gin-tonic in English tinged with a mock-aristocratic accent. Their children are unlikely to be addicted to spitting openly and squatting on Canton Road while waiting for their tourist coaches after a loot of LV and Prada shops. Each is looked after by at least three Filipino maids and escorted by two Gurkha guards to their kindergartens, and probably stay in a castle, playing hide-and-seek with their butlers in England, on boarding school term breaks.

A combination of that majestic breed of sperm paired with an egg carefully screened under the advice of the most expensive gynecological experts at the best facilities in the US may help, in the long run, boost the global image of the Chinese people. The rest of the world is getting fed up anyway with the typical stereotypes ranging from the noisy gambling crowds in Chinatown to the juggling Jackie Chan, consolidated unfortunately by Beijing’s persistent refusal to allow the value of the Renminbi to rise. It is time that an “Aryan” breed of Chinese emerged on this planet, with the help of a bit of money.

Well-known for their feminine beauty and seductive charm, the only group to stand disadvantaged is our young fellow countrywomen. Had this medical innovation come about 150 years earlier, China would have had no Empress Dowager. Our empire would have been saved, as well as our family-controlled entrepreneurial legacies, many worth tens of billions of dollars, all preserved without the fear of being equally shared with the soon-to-be-divorced wife, who could hold the children as some kind of hostages thanks to some malicious clauses in common law.

If the omelet is tasty enough, you may want to meet the chef, not the chicken. In our case, just announce the name of the clinic in the United States.

The Long March

By Chip Tsao | published Oct 28, 2010

Hong Kong TV news audiences have been fed a fresh wave of anti-Japanese demonstrations unleashed in several Chinese cities in what appears to be a calculated stunt to divert public attention away from Liu Xiaobo and his recently awarded Nobel Peace Prize.

In the global village, you can be both a disaster or farce tourist, sitting on a sofa in an air-conditioned room with a can of Coke in your hand. It’s Manila on Tuesdays and Chile on Wednesdays, but China and Japan are always back on Thursdays. For ghouls with their noses pressed against the Samsung and Panasonic widescreen plasma TVs, the demonstration scenes were obviously more visually entertaining than the constant drumbeat of boring still pictures of the imprisoned, bespectacled dissident.

In second-rate cities like Chengdu and Wuhan, big protesting crowds toddled boisterously in the streets between walls of armed policemen lined up ready for a crackdown in case things went wrong. A slogan on a banner read “Marry a Japanese wife and beat her to death,” as a patriotic outcry for revenge against Japan’s occupation of the Senkaku Islands. There were so many miswritten Chinese characters on the placards that if I penalized each of them by 1RMB per mistake like a schoolteacher, I would be one-tenth as rich as the grandson of Li Ka-shing.

A young Chinese girl on the street dressed up in gaudy greens, yellows and reds, a “classical Han costume”—the kind of loose gowns commonly seen in some third-rate violent Chinese sword fighting movies set in the Ming dynasty—was soon spotted by the angry crowd and verbally assaulted as “traitor,” because demonstrators thought she was wearing a Japanese kimono. Frightened, she hurried into a nearby public toilet to change, dumping her classical costume for a t-shirt and American jeans to avoid a possible attack.

There were reports of the occasional emergence of banners displaying irrelevant slogans such as “We want a multi-party political system,” but to no one’s surprise, local Hong Kong channels never broadcasted them. Demonstrations were limited to only minor cities, because many people in Beijing and Shanghai, I guess, are rich enough and still eager to apply for their tourist or student visas at the Japanese consulate. They may fear once their faces are recognized and recorded by Japanese diplomatic officials, their chances of a pre-Christmas shopping trip to Tokyo or taking up illegal employment as waitresses in Kyoto would be greatly undermined. Putting myself in their shoes, I’d love to taste a bowl of shark’s fin soup off the Senkaku Islands, but for the time being, I’d probably do the same.

And for those who marched on the streets in Chengdu and Wuhan, they still have a long way to go—both in terms of their upward social mobility if they want to rival Beijing and Shanghai as well as in their quest for the adoption of a multi-party system. Let’s wish them good luck with their long march.

The Thunder and the Bird

By Chip Tsao | published Oct 21, 2010

Would hosting the Asian Games at the fabulous cost to the taxpayer of HK$45 billion make Hong Kong people more “health-conscious”? This is the theory the SAR government wants us to believe. By building a few replicas of water-cubes or bird-nests in the vein of the glamorous Beijing Olympics, in a highly dense city where land is too scarce even for garbage dumping, the government opens itself up to accusations of pissing away public money. Taxpayers should not bean-count the biblical budget but instead look at the project’s “intrinsic values,” or so argues the SAR government, admitting that investment in the Games would bring about little return.

That means another face-buying trade—the construction of grandiose projects as a panacea for some psychological inadequacy, a pattern common among numerous newly independent African colonies back in the 1960s. Most notable was the late president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, who embarked on a spending spree of white elephants ranging from American-style motorways that rarely had any traffic (his subjects were largely using ox-carts), to huge football stadiums for no footballers (his people were used to the simpler daily exercise of running rather than the sophisticated 11-member team game, a lesson the British had maliciously refused to include in their enlightening colonial rule, unlike horse-racing here in Hong Kong), to a luxurious Ford Thunderbird convertible for one of his mistresses. Such extravagance was designed to show the world “African unity,” but it was also supposed to make his people feel proud for having been freed from Western rule.

It would be a bit far-fetched to assume that the SAR government suffers from the Nkrumahian syndrome, but the new HK$2 billion government palace being erected at Admiralty and the HK$6 billion West Kowloon Cultural Centre both echo the nationalistic vanity of the former African tribal leader. Like Ghanians, we Hongkongers have little interest in sports apart from mahjong and foot massages. Even the few made-in-Hong Kong global brand names, like Bruce Lee and Donny Yen, have hardly unleashed a harbor-wide passion among Mongkok taxi drivers and Kwun Tong housewives for the art of kung fu. Sports, art and music are widely seen as “junk disciplines” by parents, who prefer their children to excel in math, economics or physics because only those can pave the way for lucrative careers as CEOs at Citigroup.

Licenses to broadcast the Games live won’t sell well even in China, as the word “Asian” carries little monetary value, unlike the Euro Cup and FA Cup, which are in the same league as LV and Prada. No wonder the government is making sounds of total financial defeatism.

The convertible Nkrumah bought for his mistress was nicknamed “the thunder without the bird.” It’s time to learn the post-colonial lesson—­though we are the Chinks, and they the “Hak Gwei,” and we are an ocean apart. Calling SAR government officials and Nkrumah birds of a feather does sound a bit provocative, so get ready for some thunder.

A Piece of Iceland Cake

By Chip Tsao | published Oct 16, 2008

Iceland turned to Russia last week for financial rescue. But it is China, not Russia, which should have been asked to bail the North Atlantic island-state out from the financial failure caused by the global credit crisis.

Iceland needed some HK$470 billion to save the country from its national debt. That figure is a piece of cake for China, and Guangdong alone with its foreign reserve could well afford it. Iceland could have thus been turned into an overseas Chinese province or—God forbid, what a sensitive term—a Chinese colony. We could make a conditional offer—China is so rich that the rescue package could even be doubled, so that each Icelander could get an additional HK$150,000 in cash (divided by a population of 3.2 million)—but only if they agree to surrender their sovereignty.

Then Iceland, an island inhabited by westerners, would be reunited with the Motherland. It sounds so surrealistically incredible. In the past 150 years, such annexation had been the other way around—bits and pieces of China were carved away, we all know, and taken by the colonialists of Britain, Japan, France, and most effectively by the Soviet Union, who hung portraits of Lenin and Stalin at Tiananmen Square. What a retribution it would be to send a governor to Iceland. But instead of distributing copies of the Little Red Book as missionaries did with The Bible in Africa, the Oriental colonial masters would be leading a flock of benevolent Chinese businessmen to modernize the country’s backward economy by opening foot massage parlors, karaoke bars, saunas and nightclubs in Reykjavik, providing new job opportunities with priority training for the ladies.

We could civilize the Icelanders by improving their boring cuisine, introducing sophisticated dishes such as steamed plaice, deep-fried shark meat with abalone, and for those locals who wish to be further enlightened through Chinese culture, a bowl of whale penis soup—we could take it from the world-famous Museum of Penis already in Iceland, which boasts a collection of more than 260 penises from various animals including horses, bulls and whales. The Icelanders are descendants of the Vikings, so let us take up the yellow man’s burden...

Some right-wing Europeans would furiously protest that this would be the beginning of a global Chinese takeover conspiracy. But no, we could pitch it so it’s not a cynical act of neo-colonialism, but simply a recovery of long-overdue sovereignty. Some American anthropologists made redundant by universities in recession could publish a few books—sponsored by patriotic Chinese billionaires—with new evidence that Cheng Ho, the Chinese navigator who came well before Columbus, made a side-trip northward after discovering America. A few antique bowls and chopsticks could conveniently be found in some new digs. But we must be careful not to go over the top. When someone suddenly hails the discovery of one of the exhibits in the Museum of Penis belonging to that of the great Chinese navigator, people will know it’s a fabrication, for Cheng Ho was in fact a eunuch.

What A Bad Week

By Chip Tsao | published Oct 14, 2010

It was a bad week for the Chinese government, and also a bad week for me. I lost HK$100 to a friend at the pub betting that Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Chinese dissident, would not be awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. I was wrong.

My judgment was based on the economic fact that Norway has sold over 10 million salmon to China in the last 22 years. The Norwegians cannot afford, as the cliché has it, to offend China because of its trade interests. China is the formidable economic and military monster that has to be engaged with, not confronted, according to former U.S. president Bill Clinton.

Also, after the grim warning delivered to the Nobel Prize Committee at the Chinese embassy in Oslo by Madam Fu Ying, China’s visiting deputy foreign minister, I figured the Chinese diplomatic kung fu would work with yin-and-yang finesse as Madam Fu, a former ambassador to Britain, had charmed many British government officials and the British press with her Oriental finery and elegance. Her apparent “open-mindedness’ and tastes in wine and French cuisine had even bewitched a Financial Times editor into devoting a full sycophantic page to an interview with the charismatic and “liberal” Lady Dragon last year. Seldom has an Oriental feminine creature churned out such romanticism in Europe since Maria Callas took the stage as Madame Butterfly in Puccini’s classic.

That’s why I laid my bet with confidence. But the Norwegians are not the same as the British. As direct descendents of Vikings, they seem to show ungentlemanly but equal cruelty toward both genders with some rigid precision, as the Norwegian ambassador pointed out flatly to his Chinese host that the Nobel Committee is not under the thumb of the national government—typical of Scandinavia.

All hell broke loose after the announcement. The Norwegian ambassador in Beijing was summoned by the Chinese to be warned that Norwegian-Chinese relations would be damaged. I first thought of the coming closure of most Japanese restaurants in Hong Kong thanks to the Senkaku issue, and then the possible boycott of Ericsson and Nokia mobile phones (which have been replaced by iPhones anyway). Perhaps Hong Kong children should also spit and swear at Santa Claus in TST and Central this coming Christmas as well. I know that these are brands of Finland and Sweden, but it’s very much the same, as most Midwestern Americans, including Sarah Palin perhaps, think that Hong Kong is the capital of Thailand or a remote fishing port of Japan.

After the fall of the Senkaku Islands, we’ve spotted a new target. The Japanese should feel lucky that our hatred towards them has been short-lived as usual. Until the Dalai Lama visits Antarctica and we emigrate our people to eat all the penguins there, the Norwegians have good reason to tremble. And so they should.

Hong Kong In The Shit

By Chip Tsao | published Oct 07, 2010

Some children of mainland Chinese tourists have been literally taking shits in corridors at shopping malls around Hong Kong. Several short clips have been flooded with abusive slogans such as “Go back to your own country and crap there,” echoing the Japanese fury over the Senkaku Islands.

As a liberal and a global citizen, I’d rather assess the matter sympathetically from a multicultural perspective. We are now one family since the 1997 handover. Should we be tolerant and refrain from condemning our fellow countrymen for being selfish, disgusting and barbaric? At least in one of the cases, the mother of the defecating child was seen caring enough to wrap up the offending product with a few tissues afterwards instead of leaving it to a security guard. A huge step forward.

Open defecation is a daily norm in rural, agricultural China. Smiling peasants easily take care of their business in paddy fields. Scenes of a three-year-old girl squatting for a pee aided by her mother in a waiting room of a crowded train station are as common as a dog raising its hind-limb by a tree on a Paris street. The Chinese consider human excrement as fertilizer, a recycling product from Mother Nature. We Hongkongers as former colonial subjects have long been indoctrinated with the Western hegemonic concept of a flushing toilet—invented in the Victorian era—assuming that doing your business in a closed cubicle in your own privacy and flushing it after use is the supreme form of civilization. How prejudiced we are. With China’s economic might proudly climbing up to the global scale and now overtaking even Germany and Japan, let alone Britain—it is time that we redefined words like “decency” and “civilization” in the Chinese way.

Even from the Marxist point of view, open defecation as a Chinese custom could help Hong Kong build into a more classless and what Beijing calls a “harmonious society.” Our Southeast Asian domestic helpers could at least enjoy a brief and proud moment by offering some instructions for hygienic precautions by slipping a newspaper between the floor and the child’s bottom in time. It would be a rare break from the it’s-always-what-your-Chinese-master-tells-you-what-to-do racist rule.

Winston Churchill once called Gandhi “nauseating” when he caught sight of the Indian national hero wearing a fakir “striding half-naked up the steps of the vice-regal palace.” Gandhi never changed his attire when invited for peace talks in London. Leaving a few stinking turds on the floor of the Paris LV department store would make us all proud as long as someone has paid for dozens of luxury handbags. The West needs our cash to save its economy. It would serve as a refutation to the US government’s constant accusations that we Chinese are a big nation but never gives a shit about the world.

Born Free-loading

By Chip Tsao | published Sep 30, 2010

Calling the few rocks between Okinawa and Taiwan the “Senkaku Islands” instead of “Diaoyutai” does not automatically make you guilty of treason; you are simply following the translation globally propagated by the suspenders-wearing editor of Reuters from his smoky newsroom.

Nor should one feel ashamed for wishing Zhan Qixiong, the heroic fisherman detained by the Japanese over his intrusion into the waters of the islands, a nice stay in custody because Japanese jails are torture-free, fully air-conditioned and enviably serve fresh sushi meals.

If on hearing Beijing’s threat of a potential boycott of Chinese tourism to Japan last week, a move calculated to make Japan’s economy feel the pain, and you rushed to call your travel agent to book your winter hot-spring holiday to Sapporo because you know now the hot springs there will be free of spit and buzz—you are simply smart. As a Hongkonger, you are reacting to big news stories as calmly, pragmatically and scientifically as always—and there is nothing wrong about that. The last time I recall reacting similarly was when I urged my mother to buy up HSBC shares at its record low in the early morning of June 5, 1989. My mother made a small fortune before the blood on Tiananmen Square had hardly dried. She thanked me for my filial piety. It was ages ago. How time flies.

All I know about how to behave as a good moneymaking Hong Kong citizen during moments like these, is a strict observance of article 14 of the Basic Law, which stipulates that the defense of the sovereignty of the country is the responsibility of the Central Government. As I watched the TV news, I raised a glass of fresh Hokkaido milk just purchased from the nearby Park-N-Shop in salute to the Hong Kong SAR government marine police, which stopped a trawler from sailing to the Senkaku Islands to confront Japanese gunboats.

When the Chinese go nuclear at the Japanese and start throwing bottles at Japanese international schools, we show our good will to our neighbor up in the northwest and vote more often with our feet to some 1,000 local Japanese restaurants, nearly all of which are owned by Hongkongers. Should we afford to be emotional, it would mean the local waitresses shouting, “Yilashai-masei” (roughly: “welcome”) there with their heavy Cantonese accents may lose their jobs. We snatch up tickets to Hiroshima to admire the autumn maple leaves there for a casual autumn weekend, while our fellow countrymen have to endure long queues and some hostility from junior Chinese staff at Japanese consulates in Beijing and Shanghai. At moments like this, I doubly miss the late Uncle Deng Xiaoping, the man who, under the “one country, two systems” formula, had secured our tourist visa-free travel to Japan, as well as the glass of melamine-free milk I happily sipped jet-fresh from Hokkaido.

Long Since the Clock Struck Twelve

By Chip Tsao | published Sep 23, 2010

Tung Chee-hwa failed. Donald Tsang doesn’t seem to have much luck either. Air pollution is incurable. The most expensive railway in the world is going to be built here. There is no universal franchise as promised in the Basic Law, and people are pissed off with an amateurish administration. The harmony once longed for by both Beijing and Hong Kong people under British rule when nobody used to question the legitimacy of the total of 28 unelected colonial governments has evaporated like Cinderella’s dream. The implementation of “one country, two systems,” together with the fanciful notion of “Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong,” has gone pear-shaped.

Hong Kong is, following other examples such as Zimbabwe, Ghana and Nigera, becoming regrettable anthropological testimony to the grim social reality that after Robinson Crusoe departs, Friday is not sophisticated enough to cope. China couldn’t quite figure out why the little former colony, once so uniquely prosperous and successful, operating in a system tailor-made for the Chinese, consisting of a free market economy with minimal social welfare and virtually no democracy, stretched to the most extreme—miraculously worked. It’s too much of a mystery to explain why Hong Kong people were once so tamed and hypnotized by the British only to wake up rebellious and discontented under the Motherland’s sovereign rule. Most enigmatically, Hong Kong’s local civil servants, once branded the “world’s top-class administrative team” by the last governor as he handed them over to the Chinese, have turned into a bunch of dunderheads as quickly as the wife of Lot in the Book of Exodus petrifying into a pillar of salt in the blowing wind.

Venice has been frequently quoted as an example of past glory as a prosperous trading port. For those of us lucky enough to witness the decline of Hong Kong over the past 12 years, it’s been one of the most spectacular magic shows on a biblical scale in modern history. It’s a new academic research topic to study how the perfidious Fox of Albion duped the Chinese into believing that even without the Union Jack flying, Hong Kong would be a never-ending banquet after the clock struck 12 at midnight. It’s a very English feat to remain stoically patient and quiet when faced with the abuses of an arrogant enemy, keeping a stiff upper lip and reserving oneself the last laugh. A sweet revenge, perhaps, against China who was not even bothered to utter a “thank you” during the handover ceremony. After all the contributions of the colonial power to a land where everything reminiscent and nostalgic of it is now being dismantled, including even the colors of the police uniforms and the post office, except—so far—the rule of law.

How We Could Help

By Chip Tsao | published Sep 16, 2010

Michael Chugani, the leading local liberal political commentator and columnist, agrees with me on almost everything, from the right taste for a bowl of wonton soup to the art of wooing Chinese women—everything, except politics. Whenever he’s yelling over an issue of political correctness, he always calls me and sparks off a fierce debate on the mobile phone. Our latest crossfire has been on the uproar over plans to build a Muslim cultural center and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero in New York City.

As someone often labeled a socialist, Beijing’s stooge, and occasionally—to my horror—a Bin-Laden sympathizer by some American republicans living in Hong Kong, Mr. Chugani’s position on the issue hardly needs my support.

I reminded him that the emotional consensus held by the families of some 3,000 victims of September 11, who together form a marginalized minority, compared to the dominating Islamic population of the world—much like gays and lesbians when compared with the sheer number of heterosexuals—should be tolerated and respected. From this view, and from the same perspective of political correctness as is used to look at the other side, Park51, as the project is called, should be dropped. If you have never lost a loved one on that day, you’d never know how much it hurts to see a mosque erected near the historic spot. Having not been born black, as the famous anti-racist argument goes, a European will never know how it truly feels to be black and be discriminated against.

This view is not anti-Islam, but anti-location. There are already enough mosques in North America and Europe to illustrate the point of multiculturalism. It is now the turn of the Islamic world to illustrate the same by, say, allowing the building of a few Christian churches in cities like Tehran and Riyadh.

There was a pause at the other end of the line. A former journalist in Seattle and an American citizen, Michael is a strong orator, but I’m glad that sometimes I can manage to shut him up with some fundamental logic.

How should the crisis be resolved? Easy, I said. The mayor of New York could recruit a feng shui master from the nearby Chinatown. Hopefully with a lai-see pack of a few hundred US dollars squeezed into his hands, the master would bravely meet the Park51 developer and remind him that according to Chinese culture, a haunted Ground Zero provides very bad feng shui. The mosque should be built opposite to the statue of Confucius on Canal Street to truly mark the spirit of multiculturalism. Good feng shui and harmony would bring in a lot of money. The Chinese community in Manila wasn’t very helpful during the Hong Kong hostage crisis. It’s time for overseas Chinese to square it up and contribute to world peace.

On this point, Michael and I both agreed.

Those Were the Days

By Chip Tsao | published Sep 09, 2010

Eight Hong Kong hostages perished tragically in the fiasco on August 23, where Filipino armed police performed a blind-leading-the-blind rescue stunt that flabbergasted the seven million people in Hong Kong. After many days have passed, it’s still not cliché to talk about what should have been done during the wasted eleven hours of “negotiations,” and raise a few questions about why the gun-wielding armed policemen behaved like a vaudevillian troupe.

Money is the ultimate solution to all riddles, enigmas and mysteries in business, social life and politics in Asia, and any colonial British Hong Kong government of days long past would have had the best understanding of this core Asian value.

Ask perhaps Sir David Aker-Jones, a former acting governor of Hong Kong, how the Brits would have tackled the situation. It might go something like the following hypothetical thought experiment:

First the Governor, appalled by what he sees on the television, would have grabbed the phone on his desk to call the colonial secretary in London. He would then be told that a 23-year-old Oxford graduate cadet in charge of Far Eastern affairs had just called the Filipino foreign minister and reminded the FM that those held on the bus were Her Majesty the Queen’s subjects, and that it would be too regrettable a matter if they were harmed by the Rambo-like savage with the M-16.

Then the Governor would ask the Chief Secretary to summon his Executive Council for an emergency meeting. With the absence of Dame Lydia Dunn, who was reportedly on a Harrod’s shopping trip in London, someone like Allen Lee would have been given the job of calling the travel agency boss to convey an important message.

“Hey Chow,” Lee says with relaxed confidence, “Now listen. Get three million pesos out of your own pocket ready to be wired to a Chinaman called Mr. Wilfredo Antonio Lim, who is the leader of the Amoy Grocery Shop Owners Association of Manila. Here’s his account number. Mr. Lim will sort things out there. Do it now. The government will then foot the Cathay Pacific bill for shipping our people back home.”

Mr. Chow, a member of the Royal Jockey Club, hesitates because three million pesos is a huge sum of money, even though his horse had just won handsomely on the previous weekend.

“Come on, there’s no room for negotiation.”

Mr. Lee gets the message straight away: “Wire the fucking money now you stingy bastard! Delay no more. This is an order. Any delay, the big boss behind me will hold you solely responsible.” All 15 hostages would have landed at Kai Tak safely by midnight on the same day. Not a single life would have been lost. Those were the days when there was little “transparency.” After three years, Mr. Chow would have been awarded an OBE.