Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Unbridled excitement sweeps through the corridors of power as the Hong Kong government is able to announce that a consensus on something has formed. This is akin to discovering the Holy Grail wrapped in a blueprint for a perpetual motion machine, and lifting the lid to find that it contains the elixir of life, complete with a hen’s tooth floating around in it. The people behind this amazing breakthrough are the Provisional Minimum Wage Commission, which has decided on a suitable statutory pay floor. The actual figure is a closely guarded secret, namely HK$28 an hour according to most newspapers, but HK$29 if you read the Standard/Sing Tao.

The Commission is an improbable little collection of property billionaires, academics and labour activists formed in February 2009; civil servants with ample experience of herding cats have been at their side throughout, steering the group deftly towards the outcome pre-determined by Chief Executive Donald Tsang – say HK$25 or so. But somewhere along the way, between late 2009 and mid-2010, Hong Kong public opinion took an unexpected turn. After years of viewing property tycoons and many other businessmen as heroic creators of wealth, providers of jobs and protectors of babies and puppy dogs, people suddenly started to see them as rotten, dirty, cheating, thieving scumbag-leech-bastards.

The likely origins of this enlightenment include exasperation among the younger ‘post-80s’ generation; the Lehman minibonds affair, accumulated evidence of a growing wealth gap and, not least, the breath-taking (and maybe ultimately self-defeating) increases in naked greed displayed by property developers. At the height of this shift in popular feeling, Liberal Party legislator Tommy Cheung proposed that the minimum wage be HK$20. He later apologized to the community and recommended HK$24, but he should save the groveling for his voters in the catering industry, and other employers of cheap menial staff. With the proletariat growing restless, Cheung’s comments alone must have added a couple of bucks to whatever Donald’s original figure was.

With prospects of a lower-range number fading, the pro-labour lobby on the Commission presumably felt emboldened to make a bit of a concession from their original high-end demand of HK$33. They know that once it is introduced, the minimum wage is going to be a hot potato impaled on a lightning rod, and it will be a question every year of how much, not whether, it will be ratcheted up.

The employers’ lobby argued for a minimum wage equivalent to 40-45% of third-quarter 2009 median monthly salary, which was HK$11,000 (excluding foreign domestic helpers). That would work out at HK$4,400-4,950; the higher sum works out at a bit over 51 hours of work a week at HK$24 an hour. The bosses’ idea was to “only guarantee workers a minimum remuneration for their work but not a living wage to cover family expenses.” This choice of words implies that employers assume the taxpayer at large will effectively subvent their businesses’ profit margins via subsidized homes and hospitals for the low-paid, and should therefore alienate the middle class as well as the working poor.

Rough calculation based on GDP per capita of HK$233,000, a workforce of 3.6 million and a 50-hour week: GDP per hour per worker = HK$190

It wasn’t that long ago that the Big Lychee’s officials boasted of the city’s lack of a minimum wage; it was as much a matter of pride as low taxes and the rule of law. And now it has come to this.

Globalisation, modern technology, the immigration of unskilled mainlanders and colonial under-investment in education have all played a part. But the extra tilting of the Hong Kong playing field in favour of established, largely property-connected, business interests since the new order took over in 1997 must take much of the responsibility. As ye sow…

As the last injured victim is flown back to civilization (Tuen Mun Hospital, to be precise), Hong Kong’s Manila bus hijacking drama enters its third act. After ‘Shock and Horror’ and ‘Righteous Outrage’, we now watch the curtain rise on ‘Squeezing it for all it’s worth’, where the plot goes unashamedly down-market and commercial.

The administration of Donald Tsang has had a good crisis. For a while on Tuesday and Wednesday it was visibly displaying leadership, making decisions without pausing to worry about stakeholders, win-wins or consensus. Now it is returning to form, arguably overdoing the public mourning for fear of appearing uncaring, and taking the opportunity to push the tired and deluded message of harmony/pulling together/strength in adversity that for a dozen years has failed to divert attention from the city’s real problems.

In Beijing – where the shooting of tourists, poisoning of babies or deaths of miners are seen in terms of maintaining Communist Party control – the government has balanced the desire to appear concerned and assertive with the need to keep nationalistic sentiment at reasonable levels. China’s emissaries in the Big Lychee have maintained a high, grief-stricken profile at all the right times, even if the performance is as cold and wooden as always.

Jostling with them for limelight are our political parties (even the unloved and unlovable Liberals with their black protest signs), always eager to score populist points and never more amateurish than when dealing with international affairs. The League of Social Democrats, scourge of national and local administrations, is in its element with a third evil government to denounce.

Of all the people making full use of the tragedy in Manila, none wants to prolong the grief and tears as much as the media. The SARS outbreak, the nearest recent trauma to this, offered plenty of opportunities to exploit nearly every emotional angle: fear, self-pity, heroism and – with nearly 300 deaths – anguish. But not blame. The fault in 2003 lay squarely with Mainland officials who covered up the disease, and it wasn’t polite to point this out. This time, they can point the finger loudly and angrily at a tin-pot police force in a country full of brown people, on behalf of Hong Kong victims in dangerous foreign parts, and you can be sure they will. They must be starting to worry about what they’ll have to print next week.

One of the Big Lychee’s more embarrassing icons, has-been actor Jackie Chan, declares in a Twitter message that “HK is a nation.” Maybe this is an attempt to atone for his widely reported comments that Chinese people need to be controlled and Hong Kong has too much freedom. More likely, it is a well-intentioned gesture to fulfill his role as Hong Kong tourism ambassador, goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, Chengdu panda ambassador or one of his other quasi-diplomatic positions by helping to avert what many see as an imminent catastrophe: a massacre of innocent Filipinos in the streets of Hong Kong as a backlash after the deaths of the eight tourists in Manila.

Others think such an outburst is highly unlikely, though admit it would be interesting. As the reaction to the bus killings shows, Hongkongers these days are mostly a soft bunch, unaccustomed to real violence. Filipinos, on the other hand, are a hardier breed and especially good with knives. Maybe actually being a nation helps, too. Time says we are a semi-autonomous sliver, which sounds like something surgeons cut off one of your internal organs even though it’s benign, just to be sure.

A far more appropriate way to avenge the fallen tourists – and possibly do the Philippines a favour as well – is for Hong Kong to conduct a full investigation into what happened, as mentioned by Secretary Security Ambrose Lee. With the benefit of hindsight, plenty of ‘How The Manila Cops Screwed Up’ articles to cut and paste from, and their smart, well-pressed uniforms, the Hong Kong Police could issue an authoritative, withering and humiliating indictment of Philippine law enforcement, national leadership, community ethos and Malayo-Polynesian culture in general. Such a public slapping for the Republic’s venal and amateurish leaders at the hands of a mere semi-autonomous sliver might wake up Filipinos, who are as sensitive to criticism from outsiders as they are oblivious to bad governance.

That’s assuming that the semi-autonomous sliver’s sovereign power would let it do such a thing. Beijing is eager to be friendly and cuddly in the eyes of Southeast Asia, and may not want Hong Kong to go around baiting the neighbours. In which case, unable to be Jackie Chan’s nation that does not hate, we will just have to be Hong Kong Silent And Restrained.

The Chinese government, accustomed to ignoring, fearing or barracking the Hong Kong people, gets a rare opportunity to come to their loyal compatriots’ defence by angrily demanding that the Philippines investigate how eight Hong Kong tourists ended up dead after Monday’s bus hijacking. On-line nationalists join in the criticism of the authorities in Manila. Hong Kong people themselves flock to websites and the Philippine consulate to make their disgust known.

There is a subtext here that goes something like this…

The Philippine National Police and other law enforcement agencies in Manila in fact have a highly trained, superbly equipped, fearless, state-of-the-art special-operations squad. They can leap from helicopters, abseil down skyscrapers and burst through windows. They can insert hidden cameras and microphones anywhere. They have guns that shoot round corners, laser rifle sights, night vision equipment, robots, armed dogs, body armour, stun grenades and the latest, most sophisticated radio networks.

But these elite forces are called out to rescue only hostages who are Filipino, African, Eskimo, Western, Japanese, Korean, Arab, Turk or Pacific Islander. If they are Chinese, the senior commander says: “Nyaaa, don’t bother with the hi-tech SWAT Team, just send in a bunch of petrified idiots with ill-fitting helmets and a hammer, because the hostages are only Chinese, so what the hell hahahahahah!”

Just wait until we sort out the South China Sea issue and they find Rizal Park is PRC territory at high tide.

The rumour is that the Big Lychee’s overworked, double-income, middle-class families are firing their Filipino maids in protest at the tragedy in Manila. So in theory we should soon be seeing truckloads of tearful, dusky young women tied together by their thumbs trundling to the airport for deportation. Followed by the sight of certain people wiping their own baby’s backside, mopping their own floor, washing their own car at 5am, picking up their own Airedale’s excrement with newspaper, and telling their overweight teen to carry his own school bag. Or maybe not.

OK, it’s been over 36 hours now – time to get down to the really important details we are all bursting with curiosity to know about.

“In panic and indecisive” is one verdict on the performance of the Manila police during the bus hostage drama. It is a phrase Hongkongers usually associate with their own government, but at least – we assume – our cops would handle such a situation professionally. They would probably make sure the whole proceedings weren’t broadcast live on TV and radio. They wouldn’t have allowed the hijacker’s armed brother, plus other bystanders, to stroll right up to the scene out of nowhere. They would have succeeded in pulling the bus door off first time. They would probably have a real negotiator present. Little things like that.

The Philippines is a joke country. But yesterday’s freakish outbreak of deadly mayhem leaving eight Hong Kong tourists dead does not make it more dangerous than it was last week. The Big Lychee already views abroad – or Southeast Asia, more accurately – as a risky place, thanks to Thailand’s civil strife and Indonesia’s bombings and pogroms, let alone the incessant ferry sinkings, volcano eruptions, typhoon strikes and journalist massacres of the region’s former Spanish colony.

What, therefore, is the point of the Hong Kong government’s decision to issue a Black Outbound Travel Alert for the Philippines? This means the recall of all Hong Kong package tours already down there, cancellation of all planned/booked/paid-for/bags-packed group trips until further notice, plus an official warning to everyone else to steer clear of the place (despite a constant stream of migrant workers and others between here and there).

One possible answer to the question is that, in a state of panic and indecision about appearing to be panicking and indecisive, our leaders proclaimed the costly and troublesome order to at least tackle the ‘indecision’ part of their self-perceived shortcomings. Ever since the Mainland and Macau mounted operations to rescue their delicate tourists stranded in Bangkok’s shut-down airport in 2008, our officials have been especially petrified about appearing uncaring towards Hongkongers who venture out into deepest darkest foreign parts and encounter problems. Screw up thousands of planned trips, and save face!

Another explanation is that the Hong Kong government, a non-sovereign entity with no independent foreign policy, is using the travel alert system as a diplomatic or political weapon: a way of hitting back at Philippine incompetence out of spite. If this is the case – whether the target audience is Manila’s bumbling officialdom or (more likely) our own local public opinion – it is a stupid thing to do. It’s costing money, even if you don’t care about the advisory system’s integrity. Coming from a government that routinely misuses public consultation exercises, off-the-record media briefings and other functions of its publicity machine, it is all too believable. One consolation: there are probably some very good ex-HKG Manila deals on offer all of a sudden.

What to make of Gannon Walter Sutter Jow, an American charged with a murder in Tsim Sha Tsui on Wednesday?

Worn ten gnu jaws, Loretta?

Nouns: grater, town, jet, law;
__entrust Anne to growl “jaw.”
Ten anal jug torrents – wow!
__Art just won’t enlarge now.

Jon tugs rental townwear;
__Ron won’t strangulate Jew.
New jog rot – ‘twas unlearnt!
__Joust! Or we twang lantern!

Orangutan jolts wet wren:
__lent two jaguars worn net.
Glutton Jane rants: “We row!
__Tug ten trawlers now, Joan!”

Gannets wrote “Nut jar low –
__arrogant owl wets jet nun.”
Town egret wants journal,
__jots: “Got wren war annulet.”

We own Tung’s tolerant raj.

According to the South China Morning Post, the Hungry Ghosts festival is being driven out of Central by the Urban Renewal Authority’s scheme to eradicate the entire neighbourhood and replace it with high-rise McDonalds and empty luxury apartments for Mainlanders. In Macau on Saturday evening, on the other hand, I found the tradition alive and well – not to say disruptive – with every sidewalk in the grungier districts being taken over by squatting figures burning offerings and leaving food and drink for wandering lost souls. The authorities place metal boxes on street corners for the purpose, but residents know this won’t work: they need to set the money and incense alight right on their doorstep if they are to keep the restless spirits away from their homes.

There wouldn’t be a problem with disgruntled ghouls in the first place if people took better care of their deceased loved ones. The ultimate way to do this is to give them a freehold grave, but such plots are extremely rare in the cramped ex-Portuguese enclave. Casino king Stanley Ho’s first wife apparently has one. And so does the father of the city’s number-two official, Secretary for Administration Florinda da Rosa Silva Chan. Scurrilous gossips and malcontents claim that Florinda acquired this privilege in an underhand manner. She says it was all above board; it was another member of her department who abused power to get such a plot, and anyway he didn’t, or something. So that’s all OK.

Florinda is also in the news because of a proposed law granting officials legal aid if they get involved in court cases arising from their duties. The chatterers see this as another threat to Macau’s ever-tenuous press freedoms: top officials will be able to sue reporters for defamation at public cost. Florinda says ‘no way, we love criticism’. There are two reasons to believe her. First, most of the local papers are subsidized by the government (and report her denials and everything else pretty much without question). Second, the top officials are mostly multi-millionaires anyway and hardly need taxpayers’ funds to hire lawyers.

Meanwhile, casino operators here are complaining about being forced to hire morose, uneducated and unsightly middle-aged local people with no clue about customer service to work in food outlets and other facilities formerly staffed by happy, multilingual young Filipinos and Nepalese (of whom plenty are still around). A quick stroll through one of the vast glitzy gambling palaces confirms that the hire-locals policy is having an effect, and the employers have a point. Through no fault of their own, the older natives – laid-off factory workers, presumably – ruin the ambience. Amid all the glamour-fantasy, their grumpy presence is an intrusion of the reality outside: a city being pimped out to outsiders with dirty money to enrich Stanley, Florinda and half a dozen others.

A quick comparison of two Portuguese eateries: Restaurante Platao and Boa Mesa, a few yards from one another on Travessa de Santo Domingo, just off the historic square. The former is cramped with tiny tables, waitresses squeezing past and elbows, as in Hong Kong’s Soho or Lan Kwai Fong where they have ‘covers’ not people coming in to dine; the latter is spacious and you can stretch your legs out. The former is an old building with courtyard and flashy décor; the latter is a room with some posters on the wall. The former has a philosophy; the latter has a big black plastic pig out front. The former is associated with an ex-chef of colonial governors; the latter is run by an ethnic Chinese from Mozambique. The former is Soho-expensive; the latter is cheaper. The food is excellent in both (so no comparison with Soho in that respect at least). People cram themselves into the former because glossy magazines say it’s famous, and why bother thinking for yourself?

Macau’s nationalists and patriots are fuming over the statue of a boy and girl at the bottom of the steps leading up to Saint Paul’s. I see an ugly bit of Continental European-style contemporary street art, stained with bird droppings. Apparently, in reality it is a Chinese girl offering a Portuguese (don’t ask how they can tell) boy a flower to represent voluntary, if not adoring, submission of the motherland to colonial oppression and exploitation. (Probably some gender stereotyping in there, too.) So now we know. This is what the locals believe. Mainland tourists are too busy being forced to buy things in shops and collapsing with fatigue…

The South China Morning Post declares a conflict between free-market principles and the need for affordable homes. This implies a new definition of a free market: government ownership of all land; an official policy of keeping living space in artificially short supply in order to push prices up; and a rent-seeking cartel in which just two developers currently produce 70% of the supply of new apartments. But it is a mark, not only of the economic illiteracy of headline-writers but of how people in Hong Kong have essentially become brainwashed over the years to consider this tightly rigged property market as normal. It is only now, with a zero-interest-rate bubble forming at a time of an unprecedented wealth gap and disaffection that citizens are tracing problems back to root causes. The Chinese translation of Alice Poon’s Land and the Ruling Class in Hong Kong couldn’t have come out at a better time.

The Post article is a reminder of how the Big Lychee, like Macau, is effectively being prostituted to the crooks and parasites who plunder China and need somewhere to stash their loot.  More than a third of new Hong Kong luxury properties went to Mainland buyers in the first half of the year, as did a smaller but rising share of cheaper homes. And what do they get in return for buying grotesquely overpriced living space from the tycoons? Hong Kong ID cards, courtesy of our government!

Perhaps this all just fell together by accident, but it happens to serve the Chinese Communist Party leadership ideally, giving their cronies and relatives and other elements that prop up the regime a convenient and understanding Monte Carlo. A local clampdown on Mainland buyers would help put such scurrilous thoughts to rest.

One obvious solution to Hong Kong’s housing mismatch is to ignore it until the bubble bursts. But our politicians are under pressure. When Chief Executive Donald Tsang launched a public consultation exercise on subsidized housing, it was fairly clear he had a pre-determined outcome firmly in mind. But it now looks increasingly likely that he will have to do something he hates to do and take some action.

One alternative to direct subsidy is to attach conditions to sites being auctioned to require developers to supply the local market with the housing it needs. This is considered normal in many parts of the world, but the idea will have officials throwing their hands up in horror here. First, they will say with a straight face, it interferes with market forces – as if the whole pile of intervention, collusion and other price and supply distortions is a free and natural state of affairs. Second, also with a straight face, they will say how important it is to maximize government revenues – when there’s half a trillion bucks sitting pointlessly in the reserves.

The readiness of our local leaders to confront the interests of property tycoons and money-laundering Mainlanders could give an indication of who’s really calling the shots. But maybe they’re just cretins.

Down at the bottom of the Mid-Levels Escalator, just a few yards up from Queens Road, lies an interesting little patch of real estate: the site of the Stanley Street dai pai dongs. A few days ago, this alleyway was covered in grimy green canvas awnings, beneath which sat hungry diners slurping cheap noodles al fresco, as they have for decades or more.

A bit of historic heritage passes away. Except the place is being renovated. A real gas line will be installed, and someone will possibly introduce a more hygienic arrangement for washing all the plates (currently done by a lady in wellington boots squatting in a dark sub-sub-sub alleyway). This is the result of government listening to public opinion and not eradicating things local people like and can afford and replacing them with overpriced crap for tourists. At least that’s the theory. We will see in a few months when they re-open the Stanley Street Outdoor Dining Dai Pai Dong Experience Themed Amusement Zone.

The persecution of Lantau International School at the hands of murky ‘rural interests’ and the Environmental Protection Department continues, with the Noise Control Appeal Board confirming the validity of a noise reduction order. When outside during playtime, the kids create a noise level of 62dB, which, in plain English, could be worse.  But it’s 2dB above the limit for the area, known for its graveyard-like silence and its local residents’ extreme aural hypersensitivity. So LIS has to find a way to cut the din.

The South China Morning Post reports the matter as one of a villager called Jenny Tam driven to torment by children laughing and playing music (as, in all frankness, I would be). An alternative story is one of apparent collusion between the EPD and the local village leadership who seem to have it in for the racially mixed institution; another school in the neighbourhood, full of all-Chinese students, can carry on as usual. If the Board’s decision is on the EPD website, they’ve done a good job of hiding it, but Kafka fans may see it here.

Lantau is a hotbed of scholastic strife. On the surface, it is a sleepy and happy land of buffalo droppings, snakes, mosquitoes, extraterrestrial mutant vegetation and people building houses on other people’s driveways. Dig down, however, and you find a battlefield of festering feuds in which everyone hates everyone else’s educational hopes and needs. The only thing that unites the community is the creepy Christian drug treatment centre, which they have nothing against personally but will torch if it moves its premises anywhere near them.

Interfere at your peril. A sizable, empty school sits idle in the heart of bustling Mui Wo. There are (officially) too few high-schoolers to make the facility viable, so, much to everyone’s fury, older kids have to commute to schools somewhere over near Papua-New Guinea. To a layman onlooker pulling tattered protest banners aside and peering through the locked gates of the deserted campus, it would seem perfectly possible that the authorities could justify reopening the place by (say) letting the local high-schoolers and/or LIS and/or the creepy Christian drug-fiend-rehab buffalo-rapists share it. Such a Solomonic utterance will have you scratched off every Christmas card list in town, in seconds.