Hong Kong: nothing has changed except for everything

Other recent revelations included the discovery that many of the councilors unseated in 2019 had been recruited to "care teams" in which they handed out government largesse to the deserving poor. Would-be candidates have now dropped this exciting activity.

It also transpired that no less than three quarters of the approved candidates were members of those local committees from which hopefuls were expected to solicit nominations.

There have been some signs of anxiety in government circles that the turnout to pick the government supporter of your choice – and theirs – may be a bit low. Civil servants have been told that it is their duty to vote. It is a sign of the way things are now that this sparked speculation that the government would find some way of discovering who had followed orders.

Well, no government can avoid having court cases and elections. But then there are the gratuitous little mysteries.

For example, the Democratic Party put in the winning bid for a stall at the annual Chinese New Year Fair in Victoria Park. Then their bid was canceled. The department in charge said it was not obliged to give a reason and did not do so.

A senior UK barrister, Timothy Owen, was after much legal heaving and straining barred from representing Jimmy Lai, a former newspaper tycoon and top government target who really needs a good lawyer. Owen was invited to give talks on general legal topics at the University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Club. The talks were then canceled without explanation.

Then there is the case of Lie Jexin, a 69-year-old man who was jailed for 30 days for busking without a license. Nobody else has been charged with busking in living memory.

Actually, when a pedestrianized street in Mongkok became so popular with buskers that shopkeepers complained bitterly about the noise, nobody suggested that they should be asked if they had licenses. In the end, the shopkeepers got the pedestrianization reversed. Lie's crime was playing a tune that the government disapproves of. The magistrate said this was an example of "soft resistance," currently a worry for officials who feel obeyed, but unloved.

The long-range approach to this is to adopt the traditional Jesuit approach and catch people young. Pupils as young as eight will next year be treated to a "humanities" subject which will include "a basic knowledge of the Beijing-enacted security legislation, the Hong Kong People's Liberation Army garrison and national defense."

The Education Bureau said the aim was to "systematically cultivate students' sense of belonging to our country, national sentiments and sense of national identity from an early age…" Or as Orwell might have put it, they will learn to love Big Brother.

Orwell's language comes up often in discussions of developments in Hong Kong. It would be interesting to know if he is among the hundreds of authors whose works have been removed from local libraries as unsuitable for patriotic readers. But the list of banned works is itself a secret.

Would there be room, one wonders, for Housman? "What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content…"

The trouble with denial, of course, is that what is not happening is not remedied. So besides global warming and mounting trade barriers, which are perhaps above Hong Kong leaders' pay grade, there is rising emigration, resignations from the civil service and student suicides, with falling school enrolments, fertility, and house prices. Writers about these problems will occasionally allude tactfully to the fact that young people are not too pleased with the way things have gone since 2019. But the government has other fish to fry. In the next legislative session, Hong Kongers are promised a new law to increase the maximum penalty for feeding a feral pigeon from a small fine to a year in prison.