Beating the Bush

A man with a little political power and a moustache halfway between Josef Stalin and Clark Gable is bound to be in an awkward position, deeply distrusted by common Chinese and suspected by Beijing. No wonder financial secretary John Tsang, nicknamed “Tsang the Moustache,” has struggled to bluster his way out of his much badly-booed budget by agreeing to distribute HK$6,000 to each adult Hong Kong citizen, only to end up opening a whole new can of worms.

The Council of Equal Opportunities has received complaints from mainland immigrants who have been living in Tin Shui Wai for six years and 11 months while working as toilet cleaners and restaurant waitresses on minimum hourly wages of HK$28—as non-permanent residents, they can’t get a cent. It doesn’t add up to the equation of patriotic education that a gweilo hobo living on Lamma Island for seven years and one day will celebrate his extra income with a few rounds of beer in Lan Kwai Fong with his girlfriends.

Many 18-year-olds, at the legitimate age to receive their HK$6,000 reward, are going to spend the money on the iPad 2, meaning Tsang will enrich the American IT imperialist giant Steve Jobs even further and contribute to a higher suicide rate at Foxconn, the Taiwanese-owned assembly factory in Shenzhen. Travel agents are busy taking the trophy by launching HK$5,999 packages, ranging from a shoestring weekend trip to Tokyo to even six-day-and-five-night luxury hotel tours in the Philippines.

To avoid stimulating local inflation—as previously warned just last week by a reluctant Tsang—you may spend your windfall tentatively on your luck at the roulette table plus a night’s stay at the Wynn or the Venetian in Macau, thus shifting the burden of inflation to the former Portuguese colony. Or if you prefer to relieve our beloved and miserable-faced Premier Wen Jiabao from the worry of rising national unemployment, with HK$6,000 you can enjoy at least 20 foot massage trips to Dongguan.

Why tens of thousands of Hongkongers-turned-Canadians are allowed to rush back from Hongcouver to reap that money is also a highly sensitive issue, given the fact that they have deserted Hong Kong out of fear of Chinese communism and voted off the HK$6,000 with their feet a long time ago. If they can come back to grab the big special lai see, why can’t someone like Lord David Wilson, former governor, with his family? Lord Wilson would be eligible with his wife Natasha and their three sons to receive a total of HK$30,000. As an old friend of the Chinese people, he is of course free to announce contribution of his lot to the Democratic Party or Falun Gong if he so wishes.

I advised John Tsang privately some time ago to shave off his western-style moustache because it looks too culturally suspicious. Obviously my words fell on deaf ears. The police arrested a total of 113 protesters as though gleaning out 113 fleas from the bushiness above his upper lip. Despite his beating around the bush for the next Chief Executive job as rumored, it panned out to be nothing but bad feng shui.