As this piece is about the outlook of the year of the Ox in Chinese astrology, I’d better recall what happened in the years of OX passed. To start counting from the day the Hang Seng Index (HSI) was born, the sequence of them should be 1973, 1985, 1997 and 2009. 1973 and 1997 should still be fresh in living memory in Hong Kong; for the rest of the two, HSI rose by 27% in 1985, and 58% in 2009, from Lichun (1st of the 24 solar terms) to Lichun in both years. No pattern shows up yet.

As to GDP growth, they were +12.3%, +0.8%, +5.1% and –0.8% respectively. Again, no particular pattern is found.

From mid-1964 onward when HSI was started, the best performance stuck with the years of the Rat, increase of 57% on average, followed by Monkey, Cock, Rabbit, Boar, between 40% and 29%. Among the twelve animal symbols, there was decrease on average in two of them: a decline of almost 50% in the years of the Snake; almost 5% in the years of the Dog. There were just slight variations in the years of the Ox and Tiger, a fall of 0.01% and 2% respectively. Actually, there was a rise of 10% last year – Rat. There have always been fluctuations in the years of the Rat all through the ages, and it would just head for the opposite direction with variations of smaller margins. In fact, the years of the OX are more or less the same as the years of the Rat

The economy is not much different from HSI. The common experience of various economies is that after shrinking drastically, usually the GDP will go normal the following year. Even if it goes down time and again, giving rise to a double-dip or even multi-dip recession, it will happen once in two years. So, after the plague-driven recession in the year of the Rat, the GDP figure in the year of the OX will not be astonishingly bad. That said, the data showing the strength of an economy such as unemployment rate and deflation rate do not go up and down hand in hand with the periphery, but soar and dive alone. In light of the Hong Kong government blundering through everything and enterprises going bankrupt one after another, the increases in unemployment and deflation are not stoppable yet.

Adversity in the years of the Gengzi happening every sixty years was discussed last year. Sixty years ago, it was also the year of the Ox in 1961 when the regime satisfied its vanity when it could not really afford to by engaging in the Great Leap Forward, the Steel-making campaign, the People’s Commune and big wok of rice (a collective system in which everyone receives the same treatment regardless of their contributions), which gave rise to tens of millions of deaths and a decline of 25% in GDP in a year. The Chinese Communist Party craving for global hegemony and showing that it needs no helping hand with cockiness and rampancy matches pretty well the recent argument put forward by Ohmae Kenichi that Xi is being hitlerized. If 1961 is not going to be repeated, the year ahead will look like the year of the Ox right before World War II in 1937.

Wuhan pneumonia could be just a skirmish. War has always been an opportunity to change the world order, setting and system. Those of good sense can see that the CCP is trying to replace human rights, freedoms, democracy and rule of law with totalitarianism, despotism, dictatorship and rule of man.

America rose to predominate the world after the two world wars. It is impossible for Biden not to be aware of the CCP aspiring to do the same thing as the US did so that it is free to act wilfully. Wars in the realms of technology, finance and virus are coming one after another.

(Law Ka-chung, columnist)

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