THE intriguing thing about the attack on Hong Kong 'welfarism' by Mr Chen Zuo'er, head of the budget team under the Joint Liaison Group, was his choice of metaphor.
The suggestion that Hong Kong's welfare system was a 'Formula One car which is going to crash and kill all six million people in Hong Kong' produced the predictable response: 'What does he know about it?' This is understandable, if a bit rude. Another interesting question is this: what put the connection with Formula One into his head? The general run of official metaphors in Beijing can be roughly divided into two categories. There is the picturesque - monks, mountains, dragons and emperors - and there is the homely - river water and well water, the second stove and so on.
Motor sport has not previously featured. As metaphors go this is not a very good one. One of the basic things we know about Formula One cars is that they do not carry passengers. Less obviously, they do not actually crash that often.
Of course, Mr Chen could hardly be expected to choose a more plausible example which would give offence to his colleagues, like 'this is a China domestic flight which is going to crash'. But we can all think of alternatives.
The reference to Formula One is intriguingly technical. It can hardly have been intended for home consumption. China has never had Formula One racing. Neither for that matter has Hong Kong. Does Mr Chen know the difference between Formula One and Formula Three? Does he know what happened to Formula Two? The real Formula One circus goes to Japan once a year, and apart from that sticks pretty close to the benighted territories of bourgeois liberal capitalism. Amazing, really, that these countries ruined by welfarism can still afford such expensive hobbies.
We must, I suppose, entertain the possibility that Mr Chen is a closet Formula One freak. While colleagues on the budget team are winding down with a World Bank publication on the fine points of the money supply, he relaxes with samizdat editions of Muscle Car.