An SCMP review of Hong Kong’s recent Art Week…
[I encountered] a taxi driver … ranting about the quality of public art in the city. Last week, he had passengers from Beijing and Shanghai complaining about the “mainlandisation of aesthetics” around Hong Kong.
“They meant the tacky cartoon figures that are popping up everywhere!” he exclaimed.
…Lisa Movius, an arts journalist visiting from Shanghai, questioned the “quality control” for the city’s public art commissions.
“Just pandering to selfie-takers may hit KPIs but makes a city seem culturally unsophisticated. Also, the schlock often edges out quality art in funding and in our attention economy,” she told me.
“Garish graffiti sexy Asian fetish ladies in Sheung Wan have not the cultural draws of, say, small bookshops.”
Several of which have been closing after regulatory/enforcement hassles from the authorities. Something similar is happening with drama: HKFP lists various performances and other events that were recently cancelled for NatSec-related reasons…
In a February internal circular to schools, the Education Bureau asked artistic bodies to sign a declaration that their performances would not endanger national security, as a prerequisite for renting school venues.
How can a play or dance endanger the security of the nation? If it was possible to threaten a country with drama, wars would be far less lethal, cheaper, and probably more enjoyable.
Some weekend reading and viewing…
What is behind Hong Kong officials’ determination to host rich folks’ fund managers, known as ‘family offices’? Such offices create lucrative work for a few lawyers and financial professionals, but are hardly a major GDP driver. Perhaps (as with talent visas for Mainlanders) the idea is to compensate for a net outflow in recent years. Anyway, there was much excitement among officials when a sheik apparently related to a UAE ruling family talked of setting up a US$500 million operation here. Then it transpired that he is also ‘a singer-songwriter with a fan base in the Philippines’. He then scraps the planned office. And now – a snarky editorial in the Standard…
So far, no one seems to have been able to say categorically whether or not the 28-year-old is a Dubai prince.
…It would be too easy to accuse the government of not performing due diligence to check Sheikh Ali’s background before committing to high-level meetings with him as the SAR is desperate to attract capital from the Middle East.
This can also be a challenge for officials because, first, royal wealth in the Middle East is opaque and, second, the government lacks expertise in the Middle East.
Graham Allison was one of the group of business and other figures who gathered around Xi Jinping in Beijing last week for a meeting. Geremie Barme, with a 2017 piece by Arthur Waldron, critiques his ‘Thucydides Trap’ ideas…
[self-described acolyte of Henry Kissinger] Professor Allison might possibly believe that he is the right man in the right place at the right time. But the Harvard academic also has something of a ‘three-body problem’, shape-shifting as he does between his role as an academic, a market-oriented commentator and a new ‘old friend of China’. Like the three bodies of the eponymous novel and its screen adaptations, Allison is enmeshed in the gravitational pull of three personæ.
From YouTube: interesting film footage of Beijing in 1917, and a quick history of Japanese anime’s obsession with an idealized, typically pre-industrial, Europe. (Partly, the buildings are exotic and quaint; partly, it allows depiction of homoeroticism and militarization without upsetting Japanese prudes and nationalists.)
The impossible-to-see ‘red lines’ are vintage Lee Kum Kee (or whatever his name was again) from Singapore. Create lots of grey areas, and the people are scared to operate not even near such undefinable zones.
Ohh, and here is another idea for a mega event, which will attract all the rich guys from the Middle East seeking to set up their family offices in Hong Kong:
Camel Races!
At the Opening of the National Stadium?
A play may not endanger the security of a nation but it can definitely have effects on the prestige of its leader. Hai Rui Submits His Memorial definitely had an effect on Old Mao back in its time
They’re just enacting the same principles of contemporary state surveillance as every authoritarian government (and not a few democratic ones). The idea is for the prisoner/citizen to police themselves. It’s more efficient.
The classic construction of this person from Michel Foucault’s account of the panopticon prison design:
“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”
Re Family Offices: Why tax breaks when these are the fat cat families who should be contributing to society via an equitable tax regime instead of being granted evasion.
19 May 2023 (the Family Office Tax Concessions Ordinance was gazetted. This at a time tax concessions to ordinary HKers are being slashed.
And why are legislators not questionsing the various new well paid positions advertised recently to serve this sector when HK has another significant budget deficit?
2024 Budget:
“Contain Growth of Operating Expenditure
225. We will strictly contain growth of operating expenditure by introducing the following measures:
(a) continuing to maintain zero growth in the civil service establishment, with the aim of containing the establishment at a level not exceeding that as at end‑March 2021; and
(b) implementing the Productivity Enhancement Programme as announced earlier under which recurrent government expenditure will be cut by one per cent for two consecutive years.”
But the already well paid coterie at this branch of the civil service is being added to while many community services face cut backs.
https://www.familyofficehk.gov.hk/
How many people are employed at this operation?
What is the annual budget for salaries and perks?
Office rent and overheads?
Is the expenditure justified for a sector that at best brings limited benefit to our economy?
Vague waffle about the benefits of these offices -are touted, but is the HK tax payer getting bang for all the bucks expended on oiling their wheels?
More positive HK news to encourage the tourist trade:
Hong Kong customs to alert police if visitors caught with seditious materials
Setting aside (fake) sheikhs and their bright pink lippy, most family offices in Hong Kong are there to smooth the transfer wealth from the Mainland to other nations. This doesn’t seem terribly patriotic….
Knowing that the sheikh will return again in May, any chance he will fly in on a magic carpet? Or is all the magic already spent on his credentials, just like my patriotic fervor?