Big Lychee, Various Sectors

In his occasional English column, Chris Yeung mentions: the Chinese translation of Alice Poon’s Land and the Ruling Class in Hong Kong; the “alleged malpractices” of Henderson Land and other developers; the property and related retail and utilities cartels; tycoon Simon Lo Lin-shin’s attempt to build a luxury compound at a Sai Wan beauty spot; the Great Octopus Card Personal Data Sale Massacre; and the Chinese Manufacturers Association’s lobbying of Beijing for the maintenance of functional constituencies.

This is a list that could go on and on, from minimum wage, to Lehman minibonds to supermarket rip-offs. The Hong Kong business community is facing a new surge in skepticism and hostility from what a decade or so ago was a far more acquiescent, even admiring, public. Rising political awareness has much to do with it, but even in boardrooms there is now unease over the unbridled greed being exhibited by certain quarters of the plutocracy. Bauhinia Foundation/General Chamber boss Anthony Wu, one of Chief Executive Donald Tsang’s most remorseless cheerleaders, hinted at some frustration when he recently suggested that all this anti-business sentiment is, at heart, anti-developer.

Yeung says “the business sector is waking up to the winds of change,” and points to a recent interest in charitableness and social responsibility (or at least public image) among companies and business groups, notably developers. He cites the best example of the futility of this approach: tycoon-politician James Tien’s plans for a Victorian-sounding business fund for the deprived elderly and young. This idea is not so much cynical as – inevitably from Tien – simple-minded and slimy. After cheating and overcharging consumers, the cartels will now hand a little rebate back in the form of a donation to the poor, and that will stop us from coming and stringing them up from lamp-posts someday. It’s as desperate as the boss of New World buying a has-been newspaper ‘to protect the rights of developers’.

As Yeung essentially concludes, the tycoons simply don’t get it so long as they are unable to “embrace society’s emerging core values such as environmental protection (the Sai Wan case) and fair and equal voting rights (functional constituency election).”

Why don’t some members of the business community – the majority who are as much victims of price-gouging property tycoons as everyone else – identify themselves with the rest of the population/economy? Why don’t some local or overseas-born entrepreneurs, investors and managers stand up and say: “Hong Kong’s businesses and middle class are forced to buy over-priced accommodation, goods and services from the property tycoons. The cartels get rich, the rest of us are all the poorer. How does this help Hong Kong?”

Eventually, some business figures – notably with political ambitions – will come forward and speak out along these lines (as Chief Executive hopeful CY Leung more or less has). But they still have a lot to be nervous about.

First, would Beijing approve? Since the 1980s, the Communist Party has worked on the misapprehension that Hong Kong’s wealthiest families create the city’s wealth. Clearer signals that Beijing is questioning this assumption would encourage pro-establishment people to say what they really think of the property sector. Until then, the shoeshining instinct, united front and peer pressure will keep them silent.

Second, what would the property giants do to them? Even if they lacked clout in Beijing, the big tycoons have assumed commanding positions as suppliers and buyers of goods and services in much of Hong Kong’s domestic economy. In theory, they could make life difficult for a small or medium-sized business in many sectors. They have also accumulated multiple votes in many (probably nearly all) of the small-circle functional constituencies where many politically ambitious businessmen get their first taste of public affairs. Not least, they have acquired an entitlement mentality as powerful as that of public housing tenants or civil servants: these rigged markets are theirs by right. You’d be better off kicking a mama bear’s cubs. It is no secret that they intimidate (typically via an intermediary).

Still, if public opinion continues to mount against the corporate world in general, business figures who want to be loved will have no choice but to distance themselves from the true scoundrels and common enemy. Unlike the split among the pan-democrats, such a division could represent major shifts in the local political and economic scenes. Needless to say, the big tycoons have a massive interest in making sure it doesn’t happen.

On the subject of Anthony Wu…

In today’s Standard, the Bauhinia Foundation/General Chamber boss laments the departure of Shane Solomon, chief executive of the Hospital Authority, of which Wu finds time to be Chairman. He says:

“As a foreigner, he performed perfectly during his term.”

Which the barbarian (an Australian) will no doubt rush to put in his resume. The quote comes from an interview with Sing Tao, a Chinese-language milieu, in which superfluous allusions to ethnicity are perhaps not considered gauche.

What else could Wu say about Solomon? How about…

“As a foreigner, he wasn’t at all fat-looking.”

Like the millions of barrels of oil recently spurting from BP’s hole in the Gulf of Mexico, plumes of foam gush through Hong Kong as citizens, politicians and media collectively froth at the mouth over the Great Octopus Card Private Personal Details Scandal Outrage of 2010.

In the last few years, hundreds of thousands of innocent residents of the Big Lychee filled in an application form for what must be, even by the standards of loyalty marketing schemes, the lamest ever Exciting Bonus Points system yet devised. While completing the details to entitle themselves to the 0.5% ‘Octopus Reward$’ that would bring them eternal wealth and happiness, they neglected to think critically about why the company wanted to know their age, gender, education level, address, occupation and income. Perhaps they thought the boxes and questions were there just to fill space on a large sheet of paper. Maybe they fantasized that some Octopus Reward$ administrative assistant would go through the database and hand out extra special free gifts for being, say, a professional male between 30 and 40 living in Taikoo Shing. Presumably, despite what they promised on signing the document, they did not read the small print making it pretty clear that scumbag firms employing starving wretches on commission would be all over you in minutes.

So Prudence Chan, the boss of Hong Kong’s space-age and indispensable Octopus stored value cards, enters the Legislative Council to be publicly stripped, skewered, flayed, disemboweled and burned at the stake by a frenzied pack of dedicated, hard-working politicians who smell a bit of corporate, and partly state-owned, blood. She did not help herself (though I confess to being mightily impressed, personally) by initially denying everything, point-blank before grudgingly admitting that her company did pass large amounts of personal data to third parties in exchange for some HK$44 million, and you could – depending on how semantically fastidious or inflexible you are – sort of call this process ‘selling’, in a way, if you really must.

Just as many other mammals have a strong mating instinct, so Hongkongers have an almost overpowering urge to take advantage of apparently generous commercial offers made by openly profit-making companies. Even if they are too savvy to seriously believe they will get something for nothing, they understand that where loyalty schemes are concerned, you are already paying for the freebies through the vendors’ margins, and you will be missing out – losing money – by not taking part and claiming your rebate/reward. And how can you sleep at night knowing you let that happen? Apparently, this materialistic frailty is all the fault of Octopus.

Meanwhile, to show all of us how it should be done, we have the rehabilitation of child-eating tourist-murderer Li hau-chun. Last seen on YouTube and TV single-handedly wrecking the Big Lychee’s tourism industry by bullying Mainland visitors into buying overpriced junk, guide Li has escaped a date with the firing squad and is now an object of pity – a single mother, struggling to get by without a wage, left by her cruel employer to survive solely on a loyalty bonus points scheme from hell in the form of kickbacks from shops. Tears of sympathy, bouquets of forgiveness and offers of marriage flood in, while Prudence is led off for another round at the whipping post.

“The United States has a national interest in freedom of navigation, open access to Asia’s maritime commons and respect for international law in the South China Sea…” US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Not before time, Washington points out – without using these actual words – that the PRC’s apparent claims to the South China Sea are illegitimate. The longer this was left unsaid, the more confident Beijing would become that the world’s last remaining empire could assume sovereignty not only over Tibet and Xinjiang, but over stretches of open ocean too.

Since 1947, Mainland (and Taiwanese) maps of China have featured the famous ‘nine-dotted line’ that appears to show the country’s boundaries extending virtually all the way down to North Borneo. Under the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea, all nations with a coastline have territorial sovereignty up to 12 nautical miles offshore. However, even this is open for foreign ships to pass through en route elsewhere (including military vessels subject to certain conditions – eg, submarines must surface). This is why Hong Kong’s gambling cruises sail 12 miles south before opening the casinos: they leave the Big Lychee’s jurisdiction. Countries have an economic zone extending up to 200 miles, bestowing fishing and mineral rights. Countries also have some economic rights over up to a further 150 miles of continental shelf, if any.

This leaves plenty of room for disagreements. The blue dotted lines on the map below indicate what a fair-minded arbiter might decide, but most of the countries adjoining the South China Sea bicker about the exact extents, angles and curves of the boundaries. The empty bit with a green ‘X’ in the middle is beyond anyone’s 200-mile limit.

The red line is China’s ambitious-looking claim. Beijing officials have never specified exactly what it means, but they are adamant that the country has sovereignty over the Paracel (Xisha) and Spratley (Nansha) islet groups. All of them. The Republic of China made such a claim in 1932. Many of these reefs, atolls and rocky outcrops are not even above the sea surface at high tide, suggesting that they do not count as territory at all. Other countries in the region, especially Vietnam, also declare sovereignty over many of these tiny specks on the map, some of which host desolate military posts and other facilities from the different nations designed to bolster their respective cases.

China insists that history is on its side and points to ancient literature, maps and archaeological evidence like coins and pottery attesting to a vibrant Sinic culture on the specks dating back 2,000 years to the Han Dynasty, no less.

US policy up to now has been not to acknowledge that China has made any claim, and Clinton’s comments do not contradict this. But she does declare the issue to be a multilateral one, of international interest. China has always demanded that discussions on the issue be bilateral so it can intimidate places like Vietnam and the Philippines one by one. For example, Chinese authorities have arrested Filipino and other fishermen in disputed waters, and Beijing threatens US and other foreign oil companies considering joint-venture exploration agreements with the region’s smaller powers.

The territorial disputes among the South China Sea’s countries, several of which are investing in submarines to show they’re serious, are essentially about oil and gas, and to some extent potential control of strategic sea lanes. But from the US and international point of view the issue is also about registering displeasure with China’s weak handling of North Korea – hence the current US-South Korean naval exercises – and a long-overdue assertion that an increasingly uppity PRC is not going to make the South China Sea (‘maritime commons’) into its own lake. Beijing, and especially the military, will huff and puff about American hegemonists seeking to contain the motherland. Everyone else in Asia is breathing a sigh of relief.

What could and should be a relaxing end to another working week is rudely disrupted by one of those highly unwelcome shocks to personal routine, communal convenience and plain everyday harmony under heaven. Sometimes it’s an unexpected public holiday that creeps up on you at just the time you don’t need one; other times it’s the relocation or closure of a once-reliable facility like an ATM. Today, the South China Morning Post annoys neurotics throughout the Big Lychee by putting a huge ad for itself on its front page.

They obviously think they are being clever. But for those of us who like to peruse the headlines on the hoof before opening the publication indoors away from jostling crowds and killer rainstorms, this is a nuisance. In a way, they could argue, they have reproduced their normal front page – which appears overleaf – on this special one, but as seen on the famous iPad plastic box gizmo that goes on sale in Hong Kong as of today. (Is it, by chance, life-size on the page? These sorts of things designed to impress us often escape me.)

We are all delighted that enthusiasts/victims of the HK$5,000 plastic box gizmo can see a stripped-down version of the SCMP on what, up to now, seems to have been a device mainly used by cats to make music on YouTube. All I know of iPods, iPads and iEverything else is that they are stuffed full of proprietary systems that make users slaves to Apple and its friends. And, from what I have seen, they are no easier to handle and read while on the move than an old-fashioned broadsheet newspaper.

I recall a previous occasion when the SCMP was too clever by half with its front page, and that was 1 July, 1997. It was a public holiday – one for which there had been plenty of advance notice – and people looking vaguely at the newsstands for the English-language paper that morning were disappointed (ish) to find it wasn’t there. Maybe all copies had been snapped up as souvenirs to mark the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China (sounds unlikely), or maybe it wasn’t being published that historic but non-working day (also hard to believe). “Whatever,” people shrugged, and got on with their day.

It later turned out that the SCMP had been there all along, but wrapped in the same sort of gaudy Chinese calligraphy celebrating reunion as all the other newspapers. So no-one had bought it. The company was reduced to trying to sell leftover copies in a special commemorative box for weeks afterwards, for which, presumably, there were few takers – readers had just wanted the TV listings.

The paper today does feature Alice Poon and her subversive book Land and the Ruling Class in Hong Kong, which has just been translated into Chinese. In a nutshell, it is the only book you need to read to understand what is wrong with this city. So far as I know, this is the first time the SCMP has paid the book any attention since it was published five years ago.

The weekend begins.

Being made of equigranular medium-grained biotite ‘Kowloon’ granite, the Mid-Levels area is unlikely to collapse in on itself. Instead, the developers will continue to turn it from a dense forest of high-rises into something more like one humungous block crisscrossed by foul, gloomy canyons, at the bottom of which lie permanently gridlocked vehicles.

Apartments at Merry Terrace, a 47-year-old building in Castle Road, Mid-Levels are being snapped up like the latest pink Hello Kitty iPad. The reason is that, after it hits the grand old age of 50, its successor will probably be added to this (MS Excel) database of giant new buildings that have been squeezed into spaces previously occupied by small old ones. Thanks to the Hong Kong government’s latest favour to the property tycoons, a developer that can buy 80% of the units in a block can force the remaining owners to sell theirs. The government claimed that this would help solve the problem of crumbling ancient structures in unfashionable districts collapsing and killing people. In fact, it is simply permission to evict people from well-built, safe properties in desirable neighbourhoods, so property giants can redevelop and make a vast profit. Henderson seems to be the busy buyer at Merry Terrace.

Designing Hong Kong want to hear about similar cases; the pressure group thinks some owners and developers, fearful that tougher planning regulations may be in the pipeline, are in a rush to take advantage of the lower compulsory sales level. Another (perhaps less naïve) reason not to delay redevelopment is explained by Designing HK’s Mr Zimmerman:

Even in our distorted property market, who will want to buy a ‘luxury’ apartment in such an unlivable neighborhood? Perhaps the mysterious buyers from 39 Conduit Road knew what they were doing when they walked away from their sales agreements. Tseung Kwan O with great harbour views and transport services and infrastructure which are well planned in line with the permitted density starts to look like paradise. Sell Mid-Levels, buy TKO.

The first time I went to Tseung Kwan O, I came out of a tunnel and thought, “Oh my God, I’ve died and gone to Alphaville.” Even the government’s most psychopathic planners felt bad about the density of the place after they stood back and saw what they had done. But it does look distinctly attractive compared with the even more cluttered hillside above Central.

Going further back, the first time I strolled along Robinson Road, I thought, “It would be nice to live here.” Within a year or so, I was sharing a huge old apartment in a row of two-storey blocks – number 31/33, if I recall – up a driveway, with some trees around, opposite what was then a Park N Shop (now, of course, a strip of real estate agents). Knife-sharpeners strolled the streets calling for customers, a stinky tofu vendor with a bubbling wok waited for passing schoolkids, and the main noise at night was mahjong. One day, crossing the road from the supermarket, I wondered where all the extra cars were coming from. High-rises soon started to replace many of the older buildings, and by the time developers jammed a particular monstrosity right on top of the Ohel Leah Synagogue, I had fled down the hill for the grottier neighbourhood’s rustic, old-world charm.

Looking at Designing Hong Kong’s database, I note that Swire and Henderson happen to be among the companies most involved in cramming mega-towers with car parks and club houses into the once-idyllic district. By coincidence, these happen to be the two developers in my modest stock portfolio. So if they despoil the environment, at least I get a slice of the profit, and if I lose out financially, the place doesn’t get too wrecked. This is the nearest thing the solid-concrete Mid-Levels has to a hedge.

My own humble abode, built in the early 1970s, won’t be eligible for the 80% scam for a while; it would take 90% to trigger compulsory sales, which you wouldn’t get because we still have a quorum of extremely cantankerous, immovable and apparently immortal oldies who won’t budge, ever. As for me… I’d be lying if the per-square-foot prices up at Merry Terrace didn’t leap off the screen and yell “Ker-ching! Ker-ching!” into my face. All morning.

Tips of properties being picked off in advance of an ‘80% kill’ can be emailed to paul “at” designinghongkong.com

The Standard reports that its slightly more up-market British weekly counterpart The Economist has declared the death of laissez-faire in Hong Kong now the city has passed a minimum wage law.

How market-led was Free Hong Kong, really? Milton Friedman idolized the city’s 1950s-1980s triumph. Who can blame him for getting a kick out of 1960s Financial Secretary John Cowperthwaite’s eschewal of statistics as a way of warding off the temptation to plan? However, it was Cowperthwaite who also saw no point in education spending; free, compulsory elementary schooling was introduced only in 1971, leaving us with the semi-literate older-generation work force that can’t adapt to today’s services-based economy.

Fans of free-market Hong Kong also ignored the major role played by the government in housing, its support for textiles, the port and other sectors, and its transfer of land in lieu of funds to finance projects like the MTR – a lame cheat that makes spending look smaller than it really is (just as the hidden levies raised via artificially high land prices give an illusion of low taxes). They also failed to pick up the possibility raised by Leo Goodstadt that laissez-faire in the old days was a way for a small government with no popular mandate to keep a rapacious business sector from plundering the place. Officials could deflect businessmen’s requests for favours by pointing to the lack of government help for the refugees pouring over the border.

Still, Hong Kong has undeniably drifted towards statism. A rise in social expenditure was inevitable following the 1960s, when communist protestors tried to topple the colonial authorities (as they essentially succeeded in doing in Macau). Growing public expectations of government were inevitable after the educated, post-refugee generation became middle class. To some, last colonial governor Chris Patten drove a big nail into the coffin of laissez-faire when he boosted welfare and introduced a compulsory retirement savings system.

What happened after the handover, however, was far more important in hurrying Hong Kong along the corporatist road to Singapore-style economic planning – which is the real complaint of the Economist feature. The collapse in asset prices and (at least nominal) economic growth following the Asian financial crisis swiftly showed the first post-1997 Hong Kong government to be panicky, incompetent and out-of-its-depth. The people needed a leader but got Tung Chee-hwa. There was nothing to do but despair; almost overnight, Hong Kong seemed to shed optimism and self-reliance, and a sense of helplessness and an entitlement mentality set in. The public also turned on the hapless Crop-Haired One and started to torment him mercilessly.

The major increase in government intervention began here: from propping up the property and stock markets, to handing out land to Disney and Cyberport, to picking ‘pillars’ and other sectors to broaden the economic base, to seeking economic favours from Beijing.

The process came in several intertwining strands. One was sheer panic, flinging money and resources at things like technology start-ups in the hope of stimulating economic activity or at least a flicker of public appreciation. A second was a sincere conviction among many of the post-handover elite that the hands-off colonial policy had been negligent, and ‘we [Chinese] can do better’. Hence the obsession with R&D, endless hubs, and the rise of state-sector empires like the Mortgage Corporation and a semi-nationalized stock exchange. A third, where self-interest got into the action, was rank hand-outs to the tycoons; Goodstadt’s balance of non-favouritism went out the window, and the developers in particular have been gorging themselves stupid at everyone else’s expense ever since.

A fourth was contrived benevolence from the Central People’s Government to its helpless compatriots newly returned to the loving fold of the motherland. With combined solemnity and joy, Hong Kong officials announced shipments of medical gowns during SARS, a symbolic free-trade agreement called CEPA and a flood of Mainland tourists. These ‘gifts’ came with carefully orchestrated campaigns to warn the restive folk of Hong Kong that their city was in danger of being ‘marginalized’ and ‘left behind’. In other words, undermining the community’s old confidence had become a way of bringing it to heel; growing popular acceptance of intervention was at least partly just a side-effect.

Hong Kong’s march to serfdom, or at least to rule by meddling, self-satisfied sub-technocrats, is far from complete. As the Economist says, the place is still vibrant, just not as much as it was. Between them, property tycoons’ cartels and bureaucrats have cornered or restricted economic opportunities while ignoring a growing gap between rich and poor. This has raised the prospect of instability, and so pressure mounts on the genius bureaucrats to plan new industries (creative, health care, wine hub, blah blah) and resort to such band-aids as a minimum wage. The alternative is serious reform, notably of the land system, to end the cartels’ parasitical behaviour and level the playing field to give everyone else a chance – and no-one in power can even start to conceive of such an idea.

Reasons for at least a few shreds of optimism, because it should take more than a decade or two of bad governance to crush the Big Lychee’s old can-do spirit: mounting disgust even among officials and certainly in some business quarters at the sheer putrid greed of the property developers; Beijing’s recent decision to make a concession on political reform to the Democratic Party and thus the non-tycoon/non-patriot/non-bureaucrat majority in Hong Kong whose interests have hitherto been disregarded; and signs of a growing body of tentative, still-deniable support among some business and political figures for slightly scary but at least non-brain-dead CY Leung as next Chief Executive. That’s as optimistic as it gets. Oh, and under the glitter Shanghai and Singapore are laughable dumps – there’s always that to fall back on.

Back to the usual routine, and I need to catch up with the big wide world out there. First, I find myself joining in the agonizing over the election system for the Legislative Council’s expanded District Council functional constituency. Some say the five new representatives should each come from one of the existing geographical constituencies; some say first-past-the-post; some – especially the government and its friends – have a hankering for a city-wide, at-large proportional representation system. On the radio this morning, an academic intoned that the latter model would allow smaller parties to participate. This is not true: smaller parties could participate under any other system; they would just have a lower chance of success. Our officials’ agenda is simply to discreetly minimize the number of pan-democrats winning seats – as if the opposition aren’t perfectly capable of doing that for themselves.

The other big issue is the minimum wage. Should it be HK$23 an hour or HK$33? To put this in perspective, let’s remind ourselves that no self-respecting Filipino elf will pick up a bachelor’s iron for less than HK$40 an hour, assuming she can help herself to refrigerator contents and use the washing machine for her own commercial purposes – otherwise it’s HK$50. Labour Secretary Matthew Cheung offers a clue when he says that the statutory pay floor is not intended to be a living wage. A social worker writing in the South China Morning Post recently calculated a living wage to be HK$32.6 an hour. So 27 bucks it is, presumably. Picky types wondering how people are supposed to survive on pay that is below a living wage should bear in mind that the beneficiaries here will be fast food, cleansing and security staff currently on HK$22 or so. Clearly, they manage somehow. Cheung’s point, if I read it correctly, is that rates of such evils as scurvy will drop as (to paraphrase him) we strike a balance between a righteous society and… whatever.

The Economist, like many rigorous and crunchy thinkers among us, mourns the end of laissez-faire a la Big Lychee. A few lost souls gripped by libertarian mental straitjackets rage against the minimum wage as if it were the perpetrator of this terrible crime – the killing of Milton Friedman’s great experiment. But the more level-headed see it as an effect rather than a cause; somewhere along the way, government action or inaction led our economic system to become so lopsided, so rigged in favour of landed and bureaucratic interests and against everyone else, that further intervention, planning and micro-management is now the only alternative to riots. The question is: who is to blame? We had a confident, self-reliant city in the 1990s; now it’s self-pitying and afraid of Third World losers like Shanghai. That didn’t happen by accident. Who do we string up?

Mulling over all this excitement as I stroll down the Mid-Levels Escalator, I am suddenly stopped in my tracks by an intriguing billboard advertising Bella Scat-Q Skin Rejuvenation Technology.

What catches my eye, obviously, is the lamb. Assuming the adorable little bundle of woolly cuteness is not a fairly realistic stuffed toy (it is always hard to tell with lambs) or added to the bikini-clad model by PhotoShop… What was the creature thinking? Where did the ad agency get it? Did they (as I think they did) drug it to keep it smiling and thus sending out a positive subliminal message about the product? What did they do with it afterwards? So many questions.

Then, as I step back, I notice the usual row of government banners tied to the railings along the overhead walkway. This is an educated, well-heeled and sophisticated part of town, so the powers that be usually spare us the more distasteful propaganda urging passers-by to wash behind their ears, ‘Be Smart, Be Free – Say No to Drugs’, and not to touch live poultry. We get warnings not to drink and drive, notices of European pianists’ forthcoming City Hall performances and blurb about the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Biennale or East Asian Games. We also get Tourism Board posters imploring us, or someone, to visit Hong Kong or pushing some fake tradition (as the current one for the HK Dragon Boat Carnival in Tsimshatsui).

But there is something odd about one of these banners. It is publicizing the Lan Kwai Fong Beer Festival, a disagreeable annual event in which amateur imbibers stroll around with phony (plastic, foot-long) yards of ale sold at high prices from flimsy looking stalls at the side of the bar district’s streets. It is organized by the Lan Kwai Fong Association, whose Chairman is Allan Zeman, billionaire landlord of much of the LKF neighbourhood. While the LKFA is non-profit, the Beer Festival is as commercially-driven as anything Bella Scat-Q Skin Rejuvenation does. The money raised from selling overpriced beer flows, via corporate-owned, plastic-themed ‘concept’ bars, into landlords’ pockets. Yet by pretending to be a fab fun tourist attraction it gets a (presumably free) spot in the resolutely public-sector banner-hanging location that is the Mid-Levels Escalator.

Perhaps the government department in charge of allocating display space on public walkways knew that some cruel jester recently super-glued Zeman by the lips to legislator Regina Ip’s face, took pity and decided to send a few more tourist dollars in the entrepreneur’s direction to help cheer him up. Which surely it did.