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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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”.

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.

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.