Keeping up the good news stories: prosecuting bookshops

Another day, another embarrassing story about Hong Kong. Our city has become a dangerous place for independent bookshops. Secretary for Security Chris Tang says his forces are not targeting any particular sector. Indeed. Only three boookshops have been raided so far this year.

So independent bookshops have just been unlucky. Well we have to believe officials when they say these things. They are honourable men. So are they all, all honourable men…

One does rather cringe, though, at the idea of newspaper readers all over the world seeing the picture of a bookshop worker (t-shirt: I am a bookshop staffer) being led in cuffs out of her workplace. Quite apart from the distressing thought of a young woman being led off for trial on dubious charges, why do our national security police look so scruffy?

Photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP.

I suppose there may be some reason why raids on delinquent bookshops cannot be done by cops in full uniform, but if there are to be plainclothes could you boys at least tuck in your shirts, and maybe iron your trousers? I also have some misgivings about the Adidas product placement.

Mr Tang, meanwhile, continues to spout nonsense. Booksellers must be responsible for the books they sell, he says, “just like merchants selling food have to make sure their food won’t make people sick. That they are not selling poison and not breaking the law.”

This is a totally false analogy. Someone selling food has complete control over the situation. The cafe owner or chef chooses the ingredients and the preparation method. It is entirely right that he or she should be held responsible for not poisoning people.

Someone who runs a bookshop does not write the books. I find it hard to believe I had to write that. Unless the bookshop is vanishingly small the person running it does not even read the books. This is simply not possible. Some books are very hard work. Is “War and Peace” subversive? Don’t ask me; I have never managed to finish it. It is not the philosophy that loses me, but the fact that in Russian novels every character has at least three names.

It is interesting to compare Mr Tang’s hardline approach with the law on obscene publications, passed in gentler times, which provides a defence for people who “had no reasonable opportunity to inspect the article the subject of the charge; and had reasonable grounds for believing that article was not obscene.”

After all there is no reason to suppose that people who work in bookshops are bent on breaking the law. I imagine a polite notification that a particular book was, in the official view, subversive would result in the swift disappearance of the denounced volume. This would be sad, but not as sad as losing the whole bookshop, which seems to be the government’s objective.

Mr Tang rejected suggestions that it would be useful to supply booksellers with a list of banned works, saying that this would only “help criminals”. This seems an odd thing to say. After all it is generally considered a good idea that people should know in as much detail as possible what is the law which applies to them.

We do not see signs on our streets saying “Speed limit: guess!” or “Possibly no parking”. Providing a list need not imply that anything not on the list is legal. It would simply provide guidance to book vendors trying to work out what is allowed and what is not.

Mr Tang’s other objection to a local Index Librorum Prohibitorum (the name of the Papal version, abandoned in 1966) is that people producing banned books could simply change the title of the book. This is so far off the mark as to suggest that Mr Tang’s encounters with literature have been quite limited. The title of the book is its name, the label by which the eager reader identifies it.

If we change the title to hide the book from Mr Tang’s minions, we also hide it from potential readers.

What is really worrying national security enthusiasts may be the thought that a list of forbidden books would provide good publicity for some otherwise obscure works, and people with a taste for subversive literature could order copies from overseas booksellers. Books you cannot buy from shops in Hong Kong might soar up the Amazon bestseller lists.

This is not a totally implausible fear; “The one they tried to ban” has sold a lot of books. But what does that tell us about the relationship between Hong Kong’s government and people?

Source: Tim Hamlett

https://timhamlett.com/2026/07/19/keeping-up-the-good-news-stories-prosecuting-bookshops/

HKFP Member Preview 20260724

A brief history of anonymously scattered leaflets

History, it is said, does not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. This may explain the sense of déjà vu that crept over me when I read about the case of Mr Raymond Wong – a 55-year-old construction worker, not the former newsman of the same name – who appeared at the West Kowloon Magistrates Court a couple of weeks ago.

File photo: Canva.

The charge against Mr Wong was that he had on two occasions thrown home-produced leaflets, or in legal language “paper sheets written with statements,” from the vicinity of his 12th-floor public housing flat into the public area of the estate.

The first time, many of them were picked up by an irate district councillor, on the second by a staff member of the estate’s management. Quite how this led to Mr Wong was not explained in court but police eventually discovered his fingerprints on two of the offending items.

Mr Wong was then charged with violating the local national security law, on the grounds that the words on the leaflets were seditious. The first batch called for action against corrupt police people, which I suppose is automatically seditious because it implies that there are corrupt police people, which – of course – is not true.

The second batch of leaflets included the phrase “liberate Hong Kong; do not vote.” Curiously Mr Wong was not charged with discouraging voters, though that is an offence. Worse, we may suppose, was the fatal phrase “liberate Hong Kong,” when – as we all know – the law presumes that Hong Kong is already as liberated as it wishes to be.

Mr Wong sensibly pleaded guilty and will be sentenced later next week.

West Kowloon Law Courts Building. File Photo: GovHK.

Meanwhile, I was haunted by the thought that scattering subversive leaflets into public places had come up somewhere before. And after some searching I found it in Geert Mak’s book, “In Europe.” Mr Mak was assigned by the Dutch newspaper he worked for to spend a year touring Europe while also touring the continent’s 20th century history. The resulting pieces were published as they were written in the newspaper, and assembled into the book, which is excellent though now a bit dated, afterwards.

So, in due course, Mr Mak reached Munich, a city with a complete set of capital city kit because it used to be the home of the Kings of Bavaria. One of them lent his name to the local university, the Ludwig-Maximilian Universität. Apparently this is a rather bombastic piece of architecture.

Let me now hand the microphone to Mr Mak:

“Here at the university is where it all converges: the pompous stairways, the pseudo-Roman statues beside them (in reality, two Bavarian kings in costume), the stupendous dome covering the hall, but also the wispy innocent desperate little pamphlets that the students Hans and Sophie Scholl let flutter down from the galleries here on 18 February 1943 ‘In the name of Germany’s young people we demand restitution by Adolf Hitler’s state of our personal freedom …’. They had spread tracts and left behind graffiti on earlier occasions as well: ‘Freedom’, ‘Down with Hitler.’ That was all the White Rose did. This time, though, they were caught by the caretaker and turned over to the Gestapo. Four days later they were beheaded.”

Now, nothing like that could happen here. We do not conclude national security cases in four days. We take four years, which may or may not be an improvement but is certainly different. We do not do capital punishment.

We do not have to worry about our personal freedom, at least as long as we refrain from daring stuff like appearing in the vicinity of Victoria Park with a piece of red string or an inflated question mark.

Still, it should not be a matter of rejoicing that we have joined the club of countries where the channels of public communication have been so choked by fear and restrictions that citizens who wish to express their views are reduced to scattering anonymous leaflets.

Our government seems to have inherited the thin skin of our notoriously sensitive police force. Now even legislators – carefully vetted patriots to a man or woman – are complaining that any comment on government policy which falls short of a rousing endorsement is branded as dishonesty or worse by official spokespersons.

LegCo president Starry Lee at the 8th Legislative Council’s first meeting on January 14, 2025. Photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP.

No doubt government policies are usually well chosen and efficiently implemented. Still, our leaders should perhaps take a word of advice from Oliver Cromwell, who famously wrote to one set of obstinate opponents: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”

Source: Tim Hamlett

https://hongkongfp.com/2026/06/07/a-brief-history-of-anonymously-scattered-leaflets/

Breaking out the binoculars for another lamppost adornment of public interest

One of the changes I have noticed since our last (shall we say “popular?”) District Council was replaced by a more salubrious patriots-only gathering is that we now get decorations on Sha Tin lampposts.

Sha Tin. File Photo: King Ho/Pexels.

This adds to public gaiety, no doubt, but has limited effectiveness as a communication medium because the banners have to be quite small and the lampposts are quite tall. So you can’t really get any words in.

Early attempts in this area avoided the legibility problem because they were put up in celebration of anniversaries. All you could really see was a big number, but as you were seeing the same number in all sorts of other places, it was quite obvious what we were supposed to be celebrating.

The latest effort did not involve a number. Looking up at it while waiting for the traffic lights to change, I could not make out anything at all. My research assistant deployed her mobile phone, took a picture with the telephoto feature working flat out and announced that we were celebrating China’s 15th five-year plan.

Happily, I was able to catch up with this important matter when I came across a much bigger offering on the same theme outside an MTR station. It seems we are urged to “Pro-actively align with the 15th five-year plan” and “Follow a holistic approach to development and security”.

The text seen on lamppost promotions across Hong Kong. Photo: GovHK.

I hesitate to criticise the work of other writers, but I cannot resist the thought that the author of this offering needs to give some thought to finding the sort of language which means something concrete and sensible to the man in the street, who is rarely told to proactively align with anything, or indeed to follow a holistic approach to it.

Most English people of my generation are not bowled over by the idea of five-year plans. This is partly because rigid adherence to erroneous five-year plans caused two of the 20th century’s most catastrophic famines: in Ukraine in 1932-33 and in China in 1958-62.

It is also no doubt partly because UK governments have rarely attempted economic planning of this kind and the rare experiment (in the early years of the 1964 Wilson government) was not a success. The Treasury (which is what they call the Finance Ministry in the UK) has never developed a wish to run plans itself, but certainly does not want anyone else doing it.

Besides the history, there is the philosophical objection, usually attributed to Friedrich Hayek, to government direction of the economy. This maintains that official intervention is an infringement of freedom and also obscures the useful information provided by prices set in the marketplace.

Whatever you think of five-year plans, though, one does have to wonder if they really call for the sort of mass public participation that the campaign on lampposts and MTR stations appears to be seeking. Even if we replaced proactive alignment and holistic approaches with something more democratic in tone, it is far from clear what the average Hong Kong person can do to further the doubtless laudable aims of the national plan.

Apparently, we are going to have our own five-year plan in due course, sometime later this year. No doubt this will be a very valuable indication of what Hong Kong should be doing to further national objectives. Perhaps it would make more sense to wait for it.

Advertisement to promote the National Security Education Day in Admiralty on April 11, 2024. Photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP.

A separate question is whether the compulsive adornment of lampposts with announcements of public interest is a welcome innovation. Perhaps it is a dulce et decorum thing that citizens should be reminded of historic landmarks and invited to join in democratic festivals.

But there is a cost to hanging things on lampposts, and District Council members need to consider whether the message they are trying to get across really suits this particular mass medium. If the only thing you can get in at a legible size is two digits, then the merits of proactive alignment and holistic approaches should be advertised elsewhere. There is no point in hanging a message on a lamppost if people need a pair of binoculars to read it.

Source: Tim Hamlett

https://hongkongfp.com/2026/05/12/breaking-out-the-binoculars-for-another-lamppost-adornment-of-public-interest/

Education and ChatGPT: Time to return to bad old days?

Happily, I retired from the university teaching scene before ChatGPT and its mates came along, because it has apparently made life rather difficult.

Generally, the most subtle assessment method, at least in the humanities, is the essay. You set the topic, send the student away, and assess the resulting masterpiece a week later.

ChatGPT app on a mobile phone. Photo: Sanket Mishra, via Pexels.

People in other necks of the woods have other choices, of course. Mathematicians can be asked to tackle a problem on the spot.

Subjects which consist primarily of absorbing a lot of memorable material can be tested with multiple-choice questions, which have the additional advantage that they can be graded by a computer.

The most picturesque assessment method was applied to trainee aircraft engineers. The class assembled at 9am, and each member was presented with a small engine.

At 1pm the examiner returned, by which time the engine had to be dismantled entirely into its component parts. The class then had lunch, and then reassembled to reassemble their engines.

At 5pm, the examiner returned and tried to start each engine. If it started first time you had passed, and if not…

But I digress. The problem with setting essays now is that you do not know if the result was partly, or indeed wholly, written by artificial intelligence (AI).

This has, in turn, produced a lot of interest in detection, which is sometimes possible. The person who told me about this problem recalled a case in which the essay included the word “albeit.”

Chinese startup DeepSeek’s AI assistant. File photo: Kelly Ho/HKFP.

This is not the sort of word that comes up often in sociable chat, so the writer was asked what it meant… and could not answer.

Clearly, though, there is going to be an ongoing arms race here between AI users and programmers, trying to produce ever more convincing forgeries, and teachers and other detectives looking for ways to spot traces of computer composition.

The answer, I fear, is going to be a return to the primitive practices of the past.

When I took my first degree, half a century ago, there was no continuous assessment, multiple choice was regarded as simplistic, and computers were monstrous machines which had to be fed punched cards.

We wrote essays at least once a week, and these had to be submitted and discussed, but they were not part of the assessment. There was also a small examination each term intended to reassure your personal academic adviser that you were still alive and working, but this was not part of the assessment either.

After three years of this regime, you encountered an ordeal more like the old Chinese civil service exam – in which candidates were locked up for a week and, according to legend, invited to write down everything they knew – than modern gentle testing methods.

Starting on Wednesday, we had three-hour exams each morning and afternoon until Sunday, when you had a day off, a relic of the days when universities were mainly intended to train clergymen.

The ordeal resumed on Monday and ended at lunchtime on Tuesday, at which point there was an understandable tendency for the survivors to get resoundingly drunk.

Desks with pens and test papers. Photo: Andy Barbour, via Pexels.

The actual examination was quite Spartan. You were allowed (times had changed) to use a Biro. The paper was white and completely blank. People were agitating for lined paper to help authors whose writing tended to diverge gradually from the horizontal as they got down the page.

This came eventually, but too late to help me.

There was a list of about a dozen questions, of which in your three hours you were expected to attempt four. As the marks available were divided equally between your four answers, it was an elementary point of exam technique to get to four somehow.

There were no “open books”, bringing in notes of any kind was cheating, and the examiners were not – with rare exceptions – the people who had taught you.

We were not asked our opinions of the teachers, but because the examiners were applying consistent standards, the outcomes of individuals and groups could be compared.

This was a stressful system, and I would not recommend copying it in all its details. It favoured glib bullshitters and people who could write quickly. It was a great preparation for journalism, which is perhaps not a recommendation.

But as AI tramples its way across the academic landscape, it may be time to rediscover the merits of putting the students in a room with paper, pen, questions and a time limit. At least you know who has written what.

Source: Tim Hamlett

https://hongkongfp.com/2025/10/29/education-and-chatgpt-time-to-return-to-bad-old-days/

Tim's Take on New Education Guidelines

There was news last week of a new edition of the School Administration Guide, a regular publication from the Education Bureau. This handy document runs to no less than 313 pages, ensuring that few people will read it and fewer still will remember the contents.

Still, awareness is a good idea. These days things labelled “guidelines” have a way of being laws in effect and intention.

The guide mentions national security about 50 times. Clearly the Education Bureau is not at all discouraged by the suspicion that the most popular motive for emigration is to move kids out of range of its propaganda preoccupations.

Well, we live in interesting times. I cantered happily through the new rules on external events, speakers and reading exercises, which must not endanger national security. I take it, from a recent last-minute cancellation, that this includes not allowing your pupils to participate in debates if the judges are going to be retired democratic politicians.

This is a shame. Former democratic politicians have a lot of time on their hands these days. And I can say, as a very experienced debate judge, that one really does not consider the merits of the motion as an idea, because that is not chosen by the contestants. If the luck of the draw puts you in defence of Adolf Hitler you defend him as best you can and should be judged on the quality of your efforts, not on the judge's opinions of Adolf.

Anyway, onward and upward, as we used to say, until we get to the innovations in the primary area, where I found something a bit shocking.

Pupils will, apparently, be expected to acquire a basic knowledge of national defence, the national security law, and the Hong Kong People's Liberation Army (PLA) garrison.

Of course, there can be no objection to an introduction to the law, to national defence, or the PLA, at least from me. I chose military history as my undergraduate special subject, did a Master's degree in War Studies and then by way of penance spent three years in a Peace Research programme, which is just war studies from the other direction. National defence is a worthwhile subject of study, though perhaps an ambitious one for primary schools.

I object, though, to the classification of this kind of thing as “humanities.” This label is sometimes abused as a catch-all term just meaning Not Science and Not Social Science. This is an error.

Humanities properly applies to the study of philosophy, religion, history (if like most historians you think it is not a social science) and the arts: performing, visual, and dramatic. This is not the way the word is used by the Education Bureau, which offers humanities for primary pupils in six flavours: Health and Living, Environment and Living, Financial Education and Economics, Community and Citizenship, Our Country and I, and The World and I.

Some curiosities here. Who decided, I wonder, that every item should include the word “and”? One might also consider the merits of replacing My Country and I with My Country and Me. Just a suggestion.

More seriously, most of these items – at least health, environment and economics – are not humanities at all. What seems to have happened is that the old general studies subject was divided. One part became Science and the other part became Not Science. Calling it “humanities” is lazy.

It is also likely to lead to disappointment. One of the attractions of studying the humanities is supposed to be the encouragement of critical and creative thinking. But we're not really looking for that any more, are we?

Source: Tim Hamlett

Hong Kong Free Press Members Newsletter 

The Metropol is to Close

So the Metropol, the huge dim sum restaurant in the United Centre, is to close. Well it's so long since I've been there that I was surprised it was still open. It is decades since I ate there. It was a big impersonal enterprise and the food, in my unqualified opinion, was nothing special.

Still, I had one unforgettable moment there. It was my first large-scale engagement as a public player of the bagpipes.

The band occasionally supplied small groups to do voluntary appearances at district events on weekday afternoons. These were organised by local councillors to amuse their elderly constituents and - as I was often free in the afternoons - I had done several.

But the United Centre do was a serious matter, staged in the evening so we could all turn up, before an audience of hundreds, and attracting a small fee. As far as I remember, the playing part went fine, but I did make one mistake later.

We were to enter the room from a corridor at the opposite end from the stage, where the food came out. We would march through the tables, which consequently had to be done in single file. As the least experienced member I was at the back of the line.

This meant that when we climbed onto the stage I was the last one up and stood on the left-hand end of the row. The plan, which I must admit had been carefully explained in advance, was that as we played our farewell number I would climb down from the stage, turn sharply left, and we would all disappear into the shadows on that side of the stage.

The entrance of the Metropol Restaurant. Photo: Heichinrou.

Unfortunately, in the excitement of the moment I forgot about this arrangement. I stepped down from the stage and set off through the tables, back the way we had come. The band loyally followed and the audience seemed quite happy with this.

As I entered the kitchen corridor, though. I almost collided with a waitress coming the other way. Presented with the wall of Scottish sound, culminating in the spectacle of a large man in a skirt, this woman was terrified; she dropped her tray and fled. Fortunately there was nothing on the tray.

This may seem a rather ungrateful way to mark the demise of an institution which has met the lunchtime needs of generations of office workers, but restaurants are closing all over the place at the moment, amid bitter complaints from the industry that local diners, a flighty and ungrateful lot, are abandoning Hong Kong eateries for cheaper outlets in Shenzhen.

Well, food outlets have always been a hazardous business. The line between success and failure is narrow and easily crossed. One celebrity endorsement or one online complaint can make all the difference.

I note that a legislative member suggested Hong Kong's next rail project could be undertaken at less expense if the builder were allowed to adopt mainland safety standards and wage levels, both of which are lower than local ones.

Perhaps something similar could be attempted in the food business. After all, what are a few food poisonings between friends? What doesn't kill us makes us stronger!

Source: Tim Hamlett

HKFP Members' Exclusive