Some, like Levin Zhu, head of investment bank China International Capital Corp and son of former Premier Zhu Rongji, do not hide their family backgrounds.

But for others, while kinship to China’s political elite can guarantee lucrative business offers, it can also create problems in a country where politics has been historically volatile.

From a princeling’s point of view, changing a name, or using several names simultaneously, is often seen as a way to hedge against political risk.

As a result, it is very common for princelings to change their names or use aliases when they go overseas to study or do business, according to Johnny Lau, a veteran China watcher based in Hong Kong.

“There is a long history of this,” he says. “First, they do this to feel safe. They sometimes worry about being kidnapped.

“But they also want to guard their image, to avoid the kind of attention that could invite trouble.”

Li Xueming resigned from the board of a Hong Kong-listed state-owned alternative energy company in late April as the net of scrutiny extended to Bo Xilai’s relatives.

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“I’ve demanded the auction house return the manuscript because it’s an item I couldn’t be more familiar with,” he said. “I’m so happy that we can still see it after more than 40 years, though I’d never expected it to surface this way ….”

The auction house said yesterday that the family had been unable to provide it with “a list of looted items” or a document proving its ownership, both requested by its lawyers. “Based on that, we believe that what they’ve said is not enough for us to withdraw the item from auction,” it said ….

Tsinghua University sociologist Li Dun said it was absurd to ask the family to provide a list and the ownership of the manuscript was obvious, given the Cultural Revolution context. He said the legal battle would involve uncertainty because there were few legal precedents and a lack of legal enforcement on looted items.

Zhou Zuoren was the brother of Zhou Shuren, more commonly known by the pen name Lu Xun.

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Post tags: Cultural Revolution, lu xun, South China Morning Post, Tsinghua University, writers, writers and literature
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The Inauguration of Pinocchio, by Crazy Crab of Hexie Farm for CDT:

Read more about Hexie Farm’s CDT series, including a Q&A with the anonymous cartoonist, and see all cartoons so far in the series.

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Mr. Leung won on the first ballot, receiving 689 votes, after Beijing’s representatives here put heavy pressure on electors in the final week of the race to support him. He is a populist on economic issues, but has a reputation for having a limited tolerance of democracy and public demonstrations. Mr. Leung says, however, that he favors allowing all adults in Hong Kong to vote for the chief executive, but has been vague on whether candidates opposed by Beijing would be allowed on the ballot.

Henry Tang, a longtime politician from a family of Shanghai garment makers, was the early favorite, but then stumbled after acknowledging marital infidelity and the construction of a secret basement under a family villa without government permits or the payment of real estate taxes. He received 285 votes.

Albert Ho, the chairman of the opposition Democratic Party, finished a distant third, with 76 votes.

Roughly one-tenth of the ballots were blank or otherwise voided. The pro-democracy Civic Party, usually a Democratic Party ally, had urged electors to cast blank ballots to protest the lack of broader democracy.

Bloomberg has more on the issues facing Leung as he takes office:

Leung, who will begin his five-year term on July 1, will need to address public anger over rising living cost spawned by an influx of money from mainland China and eight years of rising property prices that have made Hong Kong the world’s most expensive place to buy a home. The former government adviser must also start preparing for the day in 2017 when China, which inherited rule of Hong Kong from Britain 15 years ago, is expected to allow the city’s people to elect their own leaders.

“The next leader will need to address the housing problem, the affordability issues as well as bringing sustainable economic growth to Hong Kong,” William Fung, executive deputy chairman of retailer Li & Fung Ltd. (494), said before the results.

Read more about the election via CDT.

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They say that art imitates life, but so far Hong Kong’s election campaign has most closely resembled one of its seamier low budget movies.

In recent weeks, the two leading candidates have been embroiled in everything from alleged triad links, an illegitimate child, secret mistresses, an illegal luxury basement to government business collusion in a major development tender.

When the mud stopped flying, former financial secretary Henry Tang had taken the most direct hits and was struggling to stay in the race. Leung Chun-ying, a former cabinet member had limped into the lead and is expected to win Sunday’s election.

While both Tang and Leung have received public approval from the mainland, as is the case for all serious contenders for Hong Kong’s top post, The Wall Street Journal reports that Beijing has begun lean towards Leung as its preferred winner:

Beijing’s only official message on the Hong Kong vote has been a comment by Premier Wen Jiabao, who said last week that the city should choose a leader who enjoys the “support of the vast majority of the population.”

But Beijing’s preference has become more apparent in recent days. China Politburo member Liu Yandong, the nation’s highest-ranking female official, flew to Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong, to drum up support for Mr. Leung. Also this week, James Tien, a prominent local politician, said citizens should be prepared for a Leung victory.

While Hong Kong’s two main pro-Beijing papers have long stayed balanced in their coverage of both candidates, they have in recent days begun to tilt toward Mr. Leung. On Tuesday, one paper ran the headline “Leung Conveys Direction for Reconciliation.” On Wednesday, both papers reported how Mr. Leung won 51% of a mock vote among a group of Hong Kong secondary-school students.

In a separate article, The Wall Street Journal warns that unsatisfied electors and a pro-democracy spoiler candidate may push Sunday’s vote to a stalemate:

To win, a candidate needs the votes of a majority of the 1,200 electors—but a number of them have broached the possibility of casting blank votes, which could make reaching that target difficult. If two rounds of voting fail to produce a winner, a new election will be scheduled for May, with freshly nominated candidates.

The pro-democracy camp is backing the third candidate, Democratic Party Chairman Albert Ho, and has said none of its 200 electors will support Messrs. Tang or Leung. If Mr. Tang gets votes from half of the 390 electors who first nominated him, it would take just over 200 blank votes from other electors to hang the election.

For Beijing, already preoccupied with its own once-a-decade power transition later this year, that wouldn’t be its preferred outcome. But given current opinion polls, says Emily Lau, a pro-democracy legislator, a hung vote might be the best result as far as ordinary Hong Kongers are concerned.

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Post tags: Beijing, chief executive, Henry Tang, Hong Kong election, Leung Chun-ying
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Critics of the proposal argue that the new plan would not only exacerbate pollution and congestion in the city, but also prove to be a safety hazard.

Earlier, Secretary for Transport and Housing Eva Cheng cited statistics to show that mainland cars were no safety menace.

Hong Kong-registered right-hand drive cars were five times as likely to be involved in an accident than left-hand drive cars from the mainland, she said, pointing to statistics collected by the transport authority over the last five years.

CNBC contributor Shaun Rein, who founded the China Market Research Group, writes that the anger currently directed towards the mainland may deter wealthy Chinese tourists from visiting Hong Kong and spending their cash:

The damage to Hong Kong’s reputation as a place that welcomes mainland Chinese is serious. Losing mainland money could spell trouble for Hong Kong’s retail and real estate sectors, which over the past five years have become increasingly reliant on it.

Wealthy mainland Chinese, like billionaire Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba [1688-HK 9.25 --- UNCH (0) ], who have bought homes there, propped up Hong Kong luxury home prices during the financial crisis. Retailers like Omega and Cartier have seen sales soar there because of mainlanders seeking to shop without the high value added tax and tariffs on the mainland. My firm estimates that more than 50 percent of luxury products sold in Hong Kong are to mainlanders.

It is highly unlikely that the tide of mainland tourists to Hong Kong will drop greatly – cheaper prices, short flights, and general fun outweigh the nastiness, but it is clear more mainlanders, especially the ultra wealthy, will travel elsewhere instead of Hong Kong.

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Post tags: Hong Kong relations, pollution, protests, retail, tourism, traffic congestion
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Hong Kong’s existential worries flow from a nagging awareness that the city’s destiny doesn’t lie in its own hands, but rather in those of remote mainland politicians. Beijing has never communicated a vision for Hong Kong beyond the starchy “one country, two systems” formula that the people here have never wholly been able to trust. As a result, Hong Kongers are unsure whether China’s rulers are content for the city to retain, and perhaps extend, its qualified freedoms; or whether they would sooner bring Hong Kong’s days as a semi-democratic outlier to the Chinese system to a gradual end, and have it drift into a state of social and political normalcy.

The prickliness of Hong Kongers towards the mainland – which isn’t new, and surfaces sporadically – is an expression of this insecurity. Part of the problem is that Hong Kong is defending an evolving identity. The city’s economic prosperity used to be the defining feature of that identity; but China’s own economic successes have blurred the city’s economic self-image, according to Gordon Mathews, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and author of Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation. “Mainland Chinese were viewed as country bumpkins 20 years ago,” he explains, “whereas now they’re seen as the nouveau riche – and that’s a source of resentment.”

…

These kinks in the relationship could fade as the two branches of the Chinese family adjust to one another’s expectations, and the inequalities between the two societies even themselves out. However, it’s likely that Hong Kong citizens would be much more forgiving of mainland foibles if they felt politically empowered to keep their city the way they like it. Most important to the modern Hong Kong identity, Mathews suggests, is the city’s sense of political individuation from the Chinese mainland. “Hong Kong is an open society; it’s not fully democratic but it’s close to being a democracy, and the mainland isn’t,” he says. It’s that political otherness that Hong Kong treasures, and wants to protect.

Moss mentions several recent events that have fueled tensions between Hong Kong and mainland China. In mid-January, a quarrel errupted on a Hong Kong metro trainwhen locals called out a mainland family for eating dried noodles despite a subway ban on eating and drinking. Then, Beijing academic Kong Qingdong gave a TV interview in which he referred to the people of Hong Kong as “dogs” and “bastards.” Most recently, Hong Kong’s Apple Daily fired back with a full page anti-mainland ad which characterizes mainlanders as “locusts.” The ad was inspired by anxiety over the rising number of mainland women who come to Hong Kong to give birth and guarantee their child Hong Kong citizenship, anxiety which has led to protests by the local Hong Kong community.

See also “One Country, Two Systems? Not Really,” via CDT.

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Post tags: democracy, Hong Kong relations, identity, Kong Qingdao, mainland births, one country two systems
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The Hong Kong administration announced last month it is to limit the number of the so-called birth tourists, setting a quota of 3,400 births for non-local women per year, down from 10,000 last year.

But mainlanders are flouting the rules by arriving at emergency wards in the late stages of labour.

As well as better medical treatment, newborns receive automatic residency and are entitled to 12 years free education.

The unwanted baby boom is putting a strain on resources as well as causing public anger.

Read more about the flaring tensions between mainlanders and Hong Kongers, which reached a boiling point recently with the release of an anti-mainlander Locust Song. See also an Al Jazeera report (via CDT) about the phenomenon of mainland women traveling to Hong Kong to give birth.

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On January 15th a young Mandarin-speaking girl dropped some dried noodles she had been nibbling on a Hong Kong underground train. Perhaps her family, from mainland China, did not know that eating and drinking is banned on the spotless metro. When a local Cantonese speaker objected to the noodle-eating in bad Mandarin, a quarrel erupted. The whole incident, recorded on a mobile phone, was soon viewed online by millions in Hong Kong and in China.

“That’s what mainlanders are like,” was perhaps the nastiest thing said by any Hong Konger in the metro carriage.

In a televised and characteristically nationalistic public admonishment of Hong Kongers, Peking University’s Kong Qingdong added fuel to the fire:

Kong’s comments sent a shock of rage through many Hong Kongers, and led to the commissioning of a full page anti-mainland ad in a Hong Kong publication. The ad, which characterizes mainlanders as ‘locusts,’ is reposted and described in a Wall Street Journal blog post:

The full-page ad, which shows a locust looking at the Hong Kong skyline, was paid for by an online fund-raising campaign on Facebook and local site Hong Kong Golden Forum, which received more than 100,000 Hong Kong dollars (US$12,900) from 800 donors in a week.

A man who identified himself over the phone as “Mr. Poon” and goes by “Yung Jhong” online said he organized the campaign. He said he was inspired to act after seeing news stories about mainland Chinese mothers who crossed the border to bear children in Hong Kong so that their offspring could obtain Hong Kong citizenship and the benefits that come along with it. Local authorities say that some 40,000 mainland Chinese mothers gave birth in Hong Kong hospitals last year, straining the local health-care system.

This tension between Hong Kong and the mainland is analyzed in depth by a table of seasoned China watchers in the most recent episode of Kaiser Kuo’s Sinica podcast. From the episode description:

Ongoing tension between Hong Kongers and mainland citizens erupted into open flames on February 1 when a Hong Kong group raised more than HKD 100,000 to publish a full-page anti-China advertisement in the Apple Daily comparing mainlanders to parasitic locusts and calling for curtailment of benefits enjoyed by Chinese visitors to the Special Administrative Region. The ad was the latest move in an increasingly acrimonious spat that shows no sign of letting up.

Joining Kaiser Kuo this week are Sinica co-host Jeremy Goldkorn, Mary Kay Magistad of Public Radio International, and the ever-stalwart Gady Epstein.

An article in Reuters explains how Hong Kong’s policy relationship with the mainland plays into the hostility:

Some say Hong Kong’s overly China-focused policies have corroded the city’s uniqueness, international character and values and those policies might now need revising. Mainland Chinese counter that Hong Kong for too long looked down on its mainland cousins and should not enjoy favoured status from mainland leaders.

Besides opening the floodgates to millions of free-spending Chinese after tourism went into a tailspin because of the SARS outbreak in 2003, China’s leaders have offered sweeteners to Hong Kong, including a closer economic partnership agreement and backing it as a capital raising centre and offshore yuan settlement hub.

“It’s all an outcome of a set of inclinations toward China policies laid down by the government 15 years ago,” said Chip Tsao, a well-known columnist and writer in Hong Kong, referring to the first post-handover administration of the unpopular, Beijing-backed leader, Tung Chee-hwa, whose policies sparked a mass, half-million strong anti-government demonstration in 2003.

“More Hong Kong Chinese see this in light of a bit of a conspiracy theory. They see it as a kind of colonisation of Hong Kong, or re-colonialisation of Hong Kong[...]

Finally, the folks at the Shanghaiist, who have been closely covering the drama as it unfolds, posted a video (zh) of Hong Kong youth taking to the street in song, along with accounts of mainland tourist’s reactions:

We thought this was a joke but apparently it’s dead serious. An “anti-locust choir” comprising of members of the Hong Kong Golden Forum (now apparently hacked and inaccessible) has been hitting the streets of Hong Kong and serenading tourists from the mainland with “Locust World”, a new anti-mainlander song that has been going viral in the city.

[...]One mainland tourist by the name of Mr Ma, when interviewed by Apple Daily after the “performance”, was clearly unhappy. If Hong Kongers are also Chinese, “then he must be a locust too if I’m a locust,” he fumed.

Said another tourist from the mainland, Ms You, in fluent Cantonese, “I’m from the mainland. Of course I feel uncomfortable when I hear people calling us names like that. People say that mainlanders come to Hong Kong and throw their trash everywhere, but it’s really only a small number of people that are like that.” Calling Hong Kongers dogs is also not the way to go, she added, and that people on both sides of the border need to stop insulting each other.

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The local pastime of “Spot the Mainlander” has long been an amusing diversion in Hong Kong, although it often smacks of arrogance or chauvinism. Everyone seems to have a story — almost certainly apocryphal by now — about a mainland mother holding her naked child by the wrists over a trash can to make toilet. These stories are often set in one of Hong Kong’s marbled, gleaming and obsessively clean shopping malls.

And there are other giveaways, according to Hong Kongers: The mainlanders smoke furiously, talk too loud, ignore traffic lights at crosswalks and roughly elbow their way through Hong Kong’s orderly queues. The women wear too much makeup. And the men sit funny, back on their haunches, like rural peasants. And so the profiling goes.

As China’s economy has soared in recent years, visitors from the north are now arriving with billions of dollars to spend each year. Many Hong Kongers accuse the well-heeled mainlanders of driving up the price of real estate — an odd charge, indeed, given that the speculative flipping of apartments seems to be encoded into everyone’s DNA in the S.A.R. (Meanwhile, it is widely believed here that mainlanders are worried about the social and political stability of China and are using Hong Kong real estate to park their money.)

Locals also complain that Chinese shoppers, scared about food purity and safety back home, have driven up the price of diapers, powdered milk and infant formula, stripping shelves and carting their goods back to the mainland. There’s often a fine line between shopping and smuggling.

After the handover in 1997, opinions about Hong Kong and mainland kinship have fluctuated. More recently, however, more Hong Kong residents seem to have negative feelings for mainlanders, which has Beijing worried about Hong Kong and mainland relations. The Wall Street Journal adds:

A series of incidents in this city have highlighted escalating resentment among Hong Kongers toward the ever-growing presence of mainland Chinese in the city, a shift that has Beijing both incensed and worried.

The deterioration in attitude has expressed itself in protests small and large, with “locusts” the latest insult hurled by Hong Kongers at the millions of mainlanders who come to the city to shop, see the sights and in some cases give birth. The incidents have led to harsh denunciations from Beijing.

In recent weeks the tension has risen following a poll showing that the number of Hong Kong residents identifying themselves as Chinese citizens—as opposed to Hong Kong citizens or a mix of both—fell to 16.6%, a 12-year low. Three years ago, 38.6% of Hong Kong residents considered themselves Chinese citizens.

The dispute feeds the anxieties of China’s leaders who are worried that the first democratic elections in Hong Kong, scheduled for five years from now, could empower forces hostile to Beijing. That helps to explain recent attacks by Chinese officials and Beijing-backed Hong Kong media against U.S. Consul General Stephen Young for comments he made endorsing Hong Kong’s transition to democracy. Beijing deemed his remarks to be interference in local politics.

© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Hong Kong relations, one country two systems
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