Readers of the South China Morning Postonline are greeted with a big top story today: an Exclusive interview with Alibaba boss Jack Ma. Presumably they tried to get a one-on-one with a major tycoon who did not own the paper, but had to make do with their friendly proprietor this time. (Well, and next – it’s a two-part series.)
The Mainland’s leading and well-connected Amazon/PayPal/eBay emulator believesChina has another 15-20 years of serious growth ahead once the current ‘difficult three to five years’ are over. He might be right. Maybe the Communist Party can and will enable a more innovative economy by sharing power over allocation of capital, over markets, over regulatory enforcement, over the judicial system, over information, etc. Being so confident, Ma is no doubt willing to buck the Chinese elite’s current financial behaviour patterns, and sell his alpine kingdom in upstate New York to invest back home in all these lovely opportunities. Wait for Part 2 to find out…
Ma is at least prepared to state a position on the record. Flicking through the rest of the paper, we are reminded of the challenges Hong Kong reporters seem to face when seeking quotes for their stories. The MTR has just raised its fares, leading to the inevitable outrage and wailing from commuters now facing starvation. The SCMP asks Lingnan University president Leonard Cheng what he thinks. We are not told why Cheng’s views might be especially relevant, though he does indulge in some fancy micro-economics jargon. But he starts off by declaring that the fare mechanism should ‘strike a balance’ and ‘not pit the interests of the public against the investors’…
This is the sort of Hong Kong establishment waffle that gets you appointed to boards, awarded Bauhinia Medals – and quoted in media keen to encourage ‘positive energy’.
The simple fact is that any ‘balance’ will by definition pit the interests of the public against the investors. A better quote would be: ‘This is what you get when you try to semi-privatize a publicly subsidized utility.” The commentator could follow through by stating what an idiot former Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa was for bringing this about, and perhaps suggesting splitting the property developer from the railway and accepting the subsidized (and actually cheap) transport system as the social good it is. But such forthrightness might alarm the frail and the thin-skinned, and disrupt harmony.
Following yesterday’s HK Free Press hilarity on government-funded ‘Belt and Road’ youth exchange trips to Syria, the SCMP reports that the Home Affairs Bureau is really into kids’ safety.
The experts quoted in the piece are all very reasonable about the (admittedly notional) possibility of sending Hong Kong children to a humanitarian disaster zone in which Salafi, Assad/Alawite and a dozen other psychotic and desperate camps are slaughtering one another over blood-drenched uninhabitable rubble. Perhaps the sacred status of the ‘Belt and Road’ concept requires such sensitivity and understatement. Lawmaker and pro-Beijing businessman Lam Tai-fai thinks such tours ‘should not be encouraged’ and boldly suggests that if any group is planning a fun trip down Damascus way, ‘the government should advise it to adjust its itinerary’…
You would have thought the paper might have found someone honest (or rash) enough to deliver an expletive-filled rant about the idiocy, absurdity or sheer insanity of a government that unthinkingly produces such a policy – but apparently they did not respond to our requests for comment.
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