Big Lychee, Various Sectors

The rise and fall of Tony Chan seems to be about 80% complete now. It would be tempting to see the saga as a metaphor for something, but it seems to be no more than a simple morality tale: a warning of what happens when someone born to be a bartender gets ideas massively above his station.

How he reinvented himself as a feng-shui master, and how he inveigled his way into eccentric billionaire widow Nina Wang’s affections and chequebook is mercifully a bit murky. What they got up to is more graphic and stomach-churning: geomantic rituals connected with Nina’s kidnapped-presumed-dead husband Teddy; transfers of vast sums of cash; sex (please spare us the details); the naming of his son ‘Wealthee’. Then at last comes the bit we had all been waiting for: the inevitable downfall, starting with court proceedings, which Chan attended accompanied by dim-looking Western bodyguards and a ludicrous grin just begging to be wiped off his face with maximum prejudice.

Nina’s will leaving him her billions was – inevitably – forged. That alone is a serious offence. Then the Inland Revenue came round sniffing after a slice of the billions Nina had paid him for the voodoo sessions. To our understandable glee, the private jet had to go, as did the grin – goodbye Lear, goodbye leer! From what we could see, Chan’s impassive, moon-faced wife slowly started to realize deep down in her perhaps less-than-perceptive mind that this whole thing was not a dream but really happening, whatever it was.

Now we are eagerly awaiting the trials (one begins next month), the sentencing and the slamming of the prison door. In a separate drama, Wang’s family have bickered over the fate of the fortune; it now seems it will end up as some sort of charitable trust overseen by, among others, property tycoon-playboy Cecil Chao and the immortal and omniscient Ronald Arculli – all so predictable it is barely worth mentioning.

In Matthew 16:16-18, Jesus renames Simon the apostle Peter, which of course means ‘rock’, and pronounces him the foundation of the church. As if to wrest a bit of the limelight back at this juncture, Tony Chan renames himself likewise through christening at Crossroad Community Baptist Church in that land of spiritual devotion, Tsing Yi…

Evildoers who find God provoke an obvious question: is it real, or a publicity gimmick? Watergate conspirator Charles Colson spent his whole post-prison life back behind bars spreading the word among convicts. We can’t rule out the possibility that Tony/Peter Chan is genuinely distraught about the terrible things he has done and has sincerely accepted Jesus, who died for these and our other sins, into his heart. His denunciation of feng-shui as (correctly) the work of the devil suggests that he has sensed a whiff of fire and brimstone and is petrified of what awaits him in the hereafter.

But there is a problem – apparent in the picture of Chan in the Tsing Yi baptism pool. The poor bastard was born with the face of a fraud that probably not even plastic surgery could fix. The perfect lighting and composition of the photograph magnify it. Could it be that he fears Correctional Services Department congee for breakfast every day for a few years more than eternal damnation? Will a Hong Kong judge be fooled?

Of all parts of the entertainment industry (in the broadest sense), religion is especially prone to taking itself too seriously. Crossroad Community Baptist, to which the charming christening photo is credited, no doubt has its own agenda here. Rescuing a fallen celebrity villain can’t be bad for business. (Note also that the shot was taken before the dunking into the water, after which the subject would have look disheveled and basically silly, not in keeping with the image of perfection and piety.)

I declare the weekend open with an exclusive look at that baptism pool up close…

What’s underneath it? Does it protrude out of the ceiling in someone’s apartment downstairs?

Click to hear the Byrds’ ‘I am a Pilgrim’!

One of the differences between Mainlanders and Hongkongers is that if someone mentions, say, ‘Guizhou’, a Mainlander will know that it’s a province in the southwest, the capital is Guiyang, the cuisine is distinctive spicy-sour, and the women are exceptionally beautiful and intelligent, while a Hongkonger will vaguely assume that it’s one of those cities near Shanghai or something. So it is with Yu Zhengsheng, well-known north of the border as Politburo member and Party Secretary of Shanghai, but hitherto pretty much unheard-of in the Big Lychee, where most people would be pushed to explain the difference between a Party Secretary and a Mayor.

This morning, everyone in Hong Kong has suddenly heard of Yu, and everyone knows what he does for a living: he drums up business for Shenzhen flag factories. Just as the colonial banner-waving fad seemed to have died down, the guy dredges it up again at a meeting with Hong Kong NPC/CPPCC delegates in Beijing. Voicing displeasure at ‘subversive’ protests and imaginary independence movements is a sure-fire way to encourage them.

Yu’s basic point was that anyone elected to power in Hong Kong under a system of universal suffrage would have to be a patriot. If this sounds familiar, it’s because we went through all this before. It was nine years ago, following Hong Kong’s mini-uprising on July 1 2003 and the subsequent backlash against pro-Beijing parties at that November’s district polls. A Politburo member and Vice-President called Zeng Qinghong suddenly cropped up in charge of a sort of witch-hunt against pro-democrats who were engaged in a foreign-led plot to seize power in the city.

A big, contrived debate took place about what it took to be a patriot, and who wasn’t one. Now-leader of the Democratic Party Emily Lau was out, for example, as she supposedly supported Taiwan independence. To be a patriot, you had to love China and love Hong Kong. Idealists complained that was just a euphemism for loving the Communist Party. But cynics knew it simply meant saying you loved the Communist Party. Kowtow. Shoe-shine. Publicly, and looking like you’re enjoying it. No-one, other than a few dreamers, has warm emotions about something so unlovable.

In early 2004, Beijing seemed to be genuinely panicking that popular demand for democracy would result in the regime losing Hong Kong. (It seems Beijing officials in the city had bureaucratic and political interests in convincing higher-ups that then-DP leader Martin Lee was bent on pulling off some sort of US-backed coup.) Since then, the Chinese leaders have wised up and pretty much promised a form of universal suffrage for 2017. Apart from the pro-dems, still stuck in their late ‘90s time-warp, everyone accepts that the system will be rigged; a one-party system is incompatible with a pluralist one. Instead, Hongkongers are now angry about housing, milk powder, overcrowding, property hegemony, shop closures, schools, the air and a few dozen other things.

Lately, the mood has been one of growing despair. The new CY Leung administration is bogged down in bureaucracy, petty details and pseudo-scandals; the Financial Secretary is clearly suffering from some sort of obsessive-compulsive budget-making disorder; malevolent tourism authorities apparently on a mission to suffocate and bury Hong Kong are dementedly seeking ways to increase the number of visitors. It seems there is nothing anyone can do to get the message across that this is all going wrong.

And then Yu Zhengsheng comes along with the answer.

Click to hear ‘Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again’ by the Books!

Much wailing and indignant gnashing of teeth, as the Hong Kong government appoints York Chow, former Secretary for Health, to run the city’s Equal Opportunities Commission. The real surprise would have been if someone fervent about human rights got the job.

The EOC was set up just before the 1997 handover at least partly as a symbolic assurance that rights would be protected under Chinese sovereignty. Under establishment-friendly liberal chairman Anna Wu, it sued the Tung Chee-hwa administration for gender bias in allocation of school places.

Superficially, giving girls only 50% of desirable school places when they got over 50% of the highest exam results was clear discrimination. If, as some educationalists and bureaucrats claimed, those results were an aberration caused by girls’ earlier development at that stage of life, it would be discriminatory against boys to give them less than 50%. Either way, the government felt humiliated. Wu was replaced by one Michael Wong, which led to a humungous and embarrassing fuss, though we can’t quite remember the details.

Ever since then, the EOC has been one of those tiresomely sensitive issues people get worked up about. It has played a role in expanding Hong Kong’s half-hearted legislation against various forms of bias – though for all we know, the administrations of the day might have passed the same laws anyway. Like so many public bodies, it has become a sinecure for former civil servants seeking to ‘serve the community’ without having to defend the executive branch’s hare-brained policies or get torn to shreds by legislators.

The outgoing chairman, Lam Woon-kwong, left because pro-democrats who felt the EOC’s key mission was to oppose the government objected to his simultaneous membership of Chief Executive CY Leung’s Executive Council. If Lam was at odds with anyone, it was a largely uncaring public who can’t see what’s so special about ethnic minorities, single mothers and gays.

The chattering classes assume that Chow will be a yes-man. They did with ex-civil servant Lam, too, but he proved keener on human rights than they expected. The thing is, it’s a high-profile job, and you will look like an idiot if you don’t take up the noble causes the activists present to you. Obviously, as a glance at the Selection Board’s composition shows, the appointment was the same old stitch-up, complete with officials falling over themselves to cite Chow’s ‘administrative experience’ as the clincher. But provided bureaucratic or business interests or national sovereignty aren’t affected, no-one here or in Beijing has any particular hostility to equality for Nepalese and lesbians. Like so many others, they couldn’t care less.

As well as insisting that some of his best friends are gay, York Chow promises to apply his medical background to protecting the rights of the physically and mentally afflicted. He could start by looking at the glossy little green book inserted into today’s South China Morning Post. To produce this perverted item, the Hermes company has taken a vulnerable young woman who is clearly both educationally sub-normal and suffering from anorexia nervosa, and forced her to pose wearing startlingly ugly clothes. And Dr Chow should know an assault on human dignity when he sees one.

Click to hear ‘Enough About Human Rights’ by Moondog!

In case you missed it yesterday: South China Morning Post business columnist George ‘Mr Shangkong’ Chen has found the solution to Hong Kong’s housing woes. The problem, he says, is not that homes here are too expensive; it’s that people’s incomes are too low. “The Hong Kong government should focus on how to make Hongkongers rich,” he says.

To illustrate his point, he recalls how rising incomes have made luxuries into everyday commodities since he was a youth in Shanghai a decade or so back…

A cup of Starbucks latte cost something like 10 yuan, a luxury for students at that time. Many young Shanghainese would take their boyfriends and girlfriends on dates to Pizza Hut, which was considered a decent restaurant about 10 years ago rather than just another fast-food place.

Today, the same cup of Starbucks latte costs about 30 yuan (HK$37.30) and it is no longer a luxury but a daily necessity for some students.

How much has Starbucks raised the price of its coffee over the past decade? About threefold.

The author sort-of concedes that a cheap, fungible, internationally traded consumer discretionary that grows on trees and residential real estate are ‘two very different things’. But then he returns to the comparison by saying how wrong it would be to blame rising coffee prices in Hong Kong on Mainlanders.

The problems of Hongkongers (and Shanghainese, for that matter) who can’t afford a home, the problems of American families who have to declare bankruptcy to pay chemotherapy bills, the problems of Northeast African farmers dying because of famine – all solved: your incomes are too low. It’s not that the economics is inside-out so much as the fundamental logic. If it’s satire, it’s really bad. If it’s not satire, what on earth is going on?

As luck would have it, columnist Craig Stephens of MarketWatch also takes a look at Starbucks and housing. Like many, he is inspired by Financial Secretary John Tsang’s post-budget claim to be just like all the rest of us coffee-drinking, middle-class French-movie fans. The thesis is essentially that people are treating themselves to little luxuries like almond-and-cream cappuccinos because the traditional aspirations – such as an apartment – are now out of reach. Stephens’ solution is to scrap Hong Kong’s currency peg. Others would say scrap the high land-price policy. Some might say scrap both, if the distortions they produce are creating a largely downwardly mobile society. And scrap the ‘individual visit’ Mainland tourist scheme, while you’re at it. Perhaps this would count as ‘making Hongkongers rich’ as George Chen would put it.

The last thing we really need at this point is for rabidly pro-Beijing commentator Lau Nai-keung to join the debate, but here he comes. After a rather fruitless discussion about whether John Tsang is middle class in either modern academic or Marxist senses, he more or less straddles the George Chen and Craig Stephens approaches. On one hand, the Hong Kong middle class are in fact poor and need subsidies from the government. On the other, the reason for this is the failure of the ‘financial services and real [estate] industries’ to distribute wealth equitably. Delete that phrase in quotes and insert ‘dollar peg’, ‘land policy’ and/or ‘tourist influx’ according to taste.

Lau doesn’t mention coffee once; whatever its social status, the stuff is distinctly unpatriotic.

What everyone is talking about here is the widening economic gap between a small group at the top and most of the rest, with the middle class in the Lester Thurow sense shrinking in size. Not just a Hong Kong phenomenon, though of course we have to have a high-density version of it in the Big Lychee. As for a definition of middle class, for what it’s worth: ‘that part of the population who are either whining now about unaffordable housing, or will be whining later on after the bubble bursts about negative equity’.

On a brighter note: I’ve just spoken to someone in Beijing and asked if they can get Rita Fan out of everyone’s cameras and microphones – give us all a rest down here. They’ll see what they can do. My good deed for the day.

Click to hear ‘A House is not a Motel’ by Love!

Daily Telegraph correspondent Malcom Moore’s tweets from yesterday’s opening of the NPC…

The annual gatherings of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and the National People’s Congress begin in Beijing, and the world is riveted. For Hong Kong, the two-week-long snooze-fest guarantees a steady ooze of meaningless blather and waffle that will clog up radio waves, newsprint, TV channels and bandwidth until well beyond mid-March.

Former Chief Secretary Henry Tang, the nice-but-dim rich-kid who managed to lose a rigged election for Chief Executive of the Big Lychee last year, is a newcomer to the CPPCC. But he is a typical member: probably no longer of any use to the Communist regime, but warranting a pat on the head to save everyone a bit of face. To encourage continued loyalty and, most of all, the illusion, the system will dangle before him the prospect one day of a meaningless-but-prestigious higher position in the so-called ‘advisory body’. And there is always the threat of being dropped if he somehow disgraces himself sufficiently, or – more likely – speak or act out of sync with the United Front line.

This last consideration has a curious effect on Hong Kong’s delegates to the twin meetings in the nation’s capital at this time every year. Often happy enough at home to be garrulous, opinionated or plain frank, they suddenly adopt the otherworldly nonsense-speak of the Mainland official. CPPCC ‘spokesman’ Lu Xinhua apparently has the authority to decide who can or cannot be Hong Kong’s CE and said on Saturday that the job was for people who cared about the country and loved China and Hong Kong. Henry came across as cheerfully clueless about this abstract concept because he’s Henry. 

But when asked for a specific detail, he reverted to United Front zombie-babble…

…Tang said he was pleased that CPPCC chairman Jia Qinglin’s work report, as in the past, had mentioned the 12th five-year plan, which he said could benefit Hong Kong.

…before turning to that reliable old standby, developing Hong Kong’s ‘Yuan business’ – the apple pie everyone can loudly agree is wonderful, however insubstantial or irrelevant it really is.

Other familiar faces in attendance are former CE Tung Chee-hwa, property tycoon Henry Cheng, Hospital Authority chairman and ancien regime stalwart Anthony Wu and property tycoon Li Ka-shing’s son Victor. It is natural for us to resent a system so warped that it plucks people who have exhibited in various ways such malevolence towards Hong Kong to serve on national bodies. If it is any consolation, the next 10 days or so will be a torture for them (apart from Tung, who seems to quite like this sort of thing). Accustomed to the Big Lychee’s speed and efficiency, they will be expected to attend idiotically purposeless meetings, pretend to find content-free speeches interesting, and waste hours while Mainland counterparts have their afternoon naps. Sneaking out for a phone call is OK, but getting back on the plane to Chek Lap Kok is, for most of them, a no-no.

Former senior civil servant Fanny Law, nurtured and mentored by the British colonial regime, is also up there. She probably signed up for the United Front after retirement because it’s the only way to go on ‘serving the community’ in any sort of official capacity. The only alternative way for ex-bureaucrats to satisfy their lust for high-profile interfering and nitpicking – they’re genuinely uninterested in power – is to go into political exile like former-CS Anson Chan.

The Hong Kong media, who presume the right to wander around sticking microphones in delegates’ faces, asked Law whether she felt the Big Lychee’s other political exiles in the pro-democracy camp qualified as patriotic enough to be CE under CPPCC spokesman Lu’s rules. Her response was that they would have to prove it through their deeds – which unfortunately comes across as rather mean-spirited, haughty and smug. Not only did she choose the ideological discipline of the United Front over the raucous Hong Kong values and infighting of the pan-dems, but she stuck her neck out and plumped for CY Leung rather than Henry Tang in the quasi-election for CE last year. The ability to detect when one is in danger of being insufferable was never among Hong Kong civil servants’ strong points. Clueless Henry guessed the majority of Hongkongers met the Lu test.

There’s days and days of this to come.

On the subject of danger, I came across not one, but two, over the weekend… 

Left: a plastic cartoon chick in Mui Wo. I am shocked that such a potential menace to society is left out in the open in a park rather than kept under lock and key somewhere secure. And right: ‘milk tea champagne’, served on ice, at a branch of Tsui Wah restaurants. I was about to order it, but then thought: “Tsui Wah. Yellowish liquid in bottles. Maybe not.”

Press monitors at the Hong Kong Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government will be noting some serious lapses of ideological correctness at the South China Morning Post today. Thuggish parallel traders plundering Sheung Shui’s supplies of infant milk powder roughed up one of the paper’s photographers. To take revenge, the editorial staff at Asia’s finest English-language journal do their bit for the Big Lychee’s nascent independence/autonomy/city-state movement…

First, they use the word ‘border’, in flagrant violation of the unwritten rule that the great wall of Immigration, Customs and barbed wire running from Lok Ma Chau to Sha Tau Kok is a ‘boundary’ and no more. (Yes, we all know you get ‘borders’ between counties, provinces and other sub-national jurisdictions; my late mother even had a border in her garden, and national sovereignty remained intact. But the clumsiness of the rule is the whole point: to jolt us and reinforce the fact that this is ‘One Country’.)

Second – and even more subversively – they refer to the uncouth pillagers of baby formula as ‘Chinese men’. The correct phrase is, of course, ‘Mainlanders’ or, better still, ‘Mainland compatriots’. The clear implication of the word ‘Chinese’ here is that Mainlanders are Chinese, therefore Hongkongers are not, as claimed by some anti-locust protestors, much to the deep distress of patriots and the embarrassment of Hong Kong’s leaders.

Third, the SCMP carries an article on restraining dogs – an obvious reference to a particularly obnoxious insult sometimes hurled by overly irate local citizens against visiting Mainlanders. This, frankly, is uncalled-for.

Ironically, by violently objecting to being photographed, the two milk-looters got their faces in print and on-line. One looks almost but not quite like a neighbour of mine and could be anyone. But the other is a stereotype Mainlander – right down to that hairstyle no-one would be seen dead with on this side of the, er, boundary, and that rather stylish ‘FINGERCROXX BIGFOOTX’ sweat shirt. (I have to Google it, of course. Seems it’s going out of fashion.) In fact, he’s almost more like a Mainlander than a real Mainlander.

Which makes me wonder whether rogue elements in the SCMP didn’t stage the whole incident to spread unpatriotic feeling among the community. This might seem far-fetched, but astute readers will have noticed a cunning plot to bring Mainlanders into disrepute in the form of the occasional ‘Mr Shangkong’ column in the business section. Unless I am seriously missing something very deep, the pieces, ostensibly by a pinyin-named writer, are devoid of substance, information or ideas. SCMP opinion pieces vary in weightiness, but this is off the scale – lighter than air. And there are excellent Mainland journalists out there, so this can only be a slur. There is no other explanation. And to think all this anti-Beijing treason is going on right under loyalist SCMP owner Robert Kuok’s nose.

I declare the weekend open in the hope that the Liaison Office goes easy on them.

About 10 minutes into Hong Kong Financial Secretary John Tsang’s almost unbelievably vapid 2013-14 budget speech, it sank in that – sure enough – it’s Groundhog Day. The man really was just presenting much the same set of spending plans as the year before, and the year before that, and the year before that. If there was a slight difference this time, it was that he seemed slightly more concerned about the imaginary problems that on the one hand can’t be solved and on the other hand prevent us from solving our real problems.

He wrung his hands about our terrible fiscal structure (the one he has presided over for some six or so years now). Well, it’s hardly perfect; revenues are volatile and it imposes a disproportionate part of the burden on middle-class people who didn’t buy property at the right time. But it leaves the majority of people and companies free of paying any direct tax, takes no more than 15% from the rest, and avoids – by a million miles – the public deficits and debt that will be the ruin of future generations in the West. If he had any ‘vision’ or plain nous, he would see this as an opportunity to refine a fiscal structure the world would envy, not wet himself about it as some sort of threat.

He went completely over the top about the aging population. His straight-line extrapolation of the dependency ratio (workers to retirees) showed there will be just two sprightly, enterprising, productive people of working age for every burdensome, senile, crotchety old hunchback with a walking stick by 2041. The truth is that we have no idea what will be what in 2041. We do know that the forecast makes no allowance for migration; ignores foreign domestic helpers; assumes everyone will always retire at 60/65 even as rising health levels leave them living well into or beyond their 80s; and assumes educated and skilled future retirees will have the same low savings as today’s elders – refugees who scraped a living in sweatshops.

(Rather than having too many oldies, it could be that we don’t have enough kids. But then why did the last government help push up housing prices, knowing that this delays young people’s marriages, thus births? Why did they consolidate an education system that reserves opportunities for the better-off, convincing more parents to have just one kid? Why are officials, as we speak, up at the Court of Final Appeal trying desperately to ensure that we keep out thousands of Mainland and Filipino children? Why, in short, are we run by cretins? Best stick with the ‘too many oldies’ approach.)

The ‘aging population’ is a problem in the US or Europe because of huge unfunded pension liabilities. Otherwise it is the result of people living (and being productive) longer because they are healthier. If that’s a problem, making people sicker so they die younger would be a solution. The ‘problem’ is a con on the part of Hong Kong’s bureaucrats to make people believe the government needs to hoard resources (not least for their own pensions). Hong Kong’s opposition politicians’ response? Demand a universal pension that will put us on course for a Western-style system that ultimately goes bust – thus apparently proving the bureaucrats’ case.

And what did Tsang decide to do about these terrifying apocalyptic dangers looming over us? Well, let’s boost sunset industries like logistics and parasite industries like tourism, and everyone gets yet another electricity rebate, and welfare recipients get an extra month’s handouts, and there’ll be no property rates to pay for another year, and there’s a few billion for this small and medium enterprises blah blah fund and a few billion for the caring sharing harmonious community do-gooder fund, and… that’ll sort it all out for another year. Oh, and this… 

A middle-ranking property tycoon would lose face setting up something this trivial.

Safe Hong Kong mourns yet again for its apparently catastrophe-prone tourists overseas.  Financial Secretary John Tsang prepares for what pundits expect to be a weirdly cautious budget starting in a few minutes. The rebates, allowances and other handouts to which we have all grown so accustomed will – the soothsayers say – be tweaked downwards, as if we need to be surreptitiously weaned from them.

While they are waiting, lawmakers accuse the government of negligence while Cheung Kong signed up buyers for its Apex Horizons sort-of-hotel development. At the mercy of commission-driven real-estate agents, the story goes, hapless purchasers thought they were getting residential units; now Lands Director Bernadette Linn makes it clear they weren’t, and threatens to send her valiant Hotel Residency Inspection Gestapo SWAT Team into suites to check that no-one is staying more than 28 days, putting pictures on the walls or getting too comfortable on the couch. Inevitably, the lawmakers liken the case to the Lehman Minibonds Scandal Outrage Saga Massacre.

While the parallels aren’t exact, it is easy to see why the government is going to come under pressure to bail out the investors/buyers/victims/fools. First, obviously, the alleged mis-selling. Then, according to an expert on RTHK3 this morning, the initial paperwork buyers signed committed them to signing the final no-turning-back purchase agreement within an uncommonly short time. On top of that, there’s the government’s ‘negligence’. The South China Morning Post today says:

Linn said her department had reminded the developer in January that the buyers could not keep the units for private residential use.

“We did not take the case public because at that time there was no evidence of abuse or of anyone being misled,” she said.

Of course there wasn’t: the big sales push hadn’t started yet. Bernadette’s officials could have issued a factual statement advising buyers of the non-residential status of individually sold hotel suites. True, it would have been an unusual step. True, it might have pissed off Cheung Kong boss Li Ka-shing – or more to the point, looked as if it were designed to do so. True, the government back in 2011 had reminded the developer it would have to alert buyers as to the project’s status. But these are strange times. The only thing that’s ticking over as usual is Hongkongers’ heightened sense of ‘fairness’. It could have been anyone’s mother or brother buying one of those suites, or sitting in that hot air balloon over Luxor.

If the government buckled, would it bully Cheung Kong into refunding or compensating buyers? Or would it pick on the intermediaries? Presumably, the government will stand firm. With a bubble due to burst at some point, and thousands of idiots at risk of being plunged into negative equity, this would be an insane time to set such a precedent. More likely, we will see disgruntled investors sitting outside Li Ka-shing’s many properties and outlets banging drums in protest for years to come, as per the minibond folk. (Did any minibond victims also buy a unit at Apex Horizons? There would be a movie in that.)

To cheer everyone up, the Standard indulges us with no fewer than four heart-warming stories. Chinese Estates Holdings is (it says) getting HK$80,000-90,000 a square foot for retail property in Causeway Bay. ‘Veteran investor’ Johnny Cheung made HK$2 million by flipping a shop in Western. (Talk about a role model – good old Johnny!) A 900-sq ft apartment in Taikoo Shing has been rented out for an unprecedented HK$41,000 a month. And a Mainlander stumped up HK$1.5 million in stamp duty to buy a shoebox across the road in Kornhill. Four little rays of sunshine to brighten up all our lives.

Perhaps not surprisingly for a city that owes its existence to unequal treaties, Hong Kong barely raises an eyebrow on learning that buyers of individual hotel suites at Cheung Kong’s Apex Horizon project in Kwai Chung are signing some rather lopsided contracts. The Standard emphasizes the disclaimers purchasers sign for lawyers, who want to duck any blame if the government seizes the property, while the South China Morning Post spells out more about the conditions attached by the developer, which (among other things) wants management and other fees but not the responsibility to renew the hotel licence in 2018. These buyers would make an excellent case study for a behavioral psychologist.

Meanwhile, back in civilization… I must have strolled down Sheung Wan’s Wing Lok Street where it turns into Bonham Strand dozens or hundreds of times – most recently a couple of weeks ago. I don’t recall ever seeing a rump of concrete and greenery at the intersection with Morrison Street. But apparently, there is one: a sort of sitting-out area with a very limited number of places to sit, apparently left as an open space as an emergency vehicle access route.

The District Council has decided to spend over HK$4 million on renovations, specifically the installation of a little covered performance stage and a pair of flagpoles. In the grand scheme of Hong Kong money-wasting urban-planning disasters, it is pretty minor. But the Central and Western Concern Group can’t, as their name suggests, resist an opportunity to fret. One of them complains about the blueprint’s ‘ugliness’ and ‘gross nationalism’, as well as the waste of money.

Flicking through the plan by Associated Architects, we find that the improvements are aimed at overcoming three problems: the benches are at an uncomfortable sitting height; the current sculpture, signboard and pillar box obstruct the intended performance stage; and the arrangement of planters is inconsistent. One possible set of solutions would be: buy a few more, bigger, seats (they’re cheap and the place could use them); stop ‘intending’ a performance stage, since nobody has asked for one; and get someone to move the planters to the desired degree of regimentation. But, hey, then we’ve still got HK$4 million lying around.

So here’s a better plan. First, replace the benches with seating with a different uncomfortable sitting height. Then, distract sitters’ attention from the discomfort by giving them flags to watch gently flapping in the balmy breeze, for which we need to install two flagpoles – a tall China one and a short Hong Kong one. Second, ‘intend’ the performance stage after all, move the obstructions, and put in a nice expensive platform, also at an uncomfortable sitting height, with a curved roof like one Zaha Hadid would design if she did bus shelters.  Third, move the disorderly planters around until the anal District Office woman who’s always straightening pictures on walls is happy.

Tragically, even the most expensive 40ft- and 35ft-flagpoles don’t run to HK$1 million, and there’s only so much you can spend on a concrete stage with recycled  plastic wood composite decking and canopy. We need something else, aside from Associated Architects Ltd’s invoice. And voila… 

…a new iconic sculpture is born.

Central and Western Concern Group Guy’s dislike of the plan’s ‘gross nationalism’ is a bit harsh. But ‘ugliness’ seems spot on. The ‘iconic sculpture’ bears all the hallmarks of having been designed by a panel of civil servants. It is a column of tilted cubes; one has ‘Sheung Wan arts platform’ in Chinese, while several others have a Central and Western District Board logo, apparently based on a traditional lattice window. I say ‘a’ logo, as another CWDC symbol, based on the Chinese character for ‘west’, is acid-etched into frosted laminated tempered glass, not once but twice on the new seats.

The most vivid image in Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, is of course the machine designed to acid-etch the name of the crime into the prisoner’s flesh. ‘Crap design’, perhaps. Or ‘Wasting public money’. Just a thought.

And could this plan be a rehearsal for when the District Council’s HK$100 million comes through?

Saturday was a special day for Hong Kong: the South China Morning Post carried veteran business reporter Enoch Yiu’s 1,000th adoring feature on all-purpose establishment worthy Ronald Arculli. And to celebrate, they decided to call him ‘Robert’ in the intro. Perhaps the idea was to make him sound less like ‘cold warrior’ US President Reagan and more like that great friend of China, Zimbabwean President Mugabe. I cannot think of any other explanation.

All this excitement sadly detracted from an even more enticing story in the main news bit of the paper. It was all about the Hong Kong government’s decision to slap extra stamp duty on property transactions in a belated attempt to stop the current bubble from further inflating. The measures will dampen market activity, leading one industry insider to predict that real estate agents will be made destitute and forced to claim welfare in order to avoid starvation. Such a prospect would, presumably, be accompanied by the disappearance of street-front rows of identical property agencies, freeing up space for hair salons, stationers, noodle shops and other retailers who actually do things that benefit the economy and society. Indeed, after encountering the first corpse of an emaciated property intermediary I find, and prodding it with a stick to make doubly sure, I think I will recommend Financial Secretary John Tsang for a special diamond-encrusted Platinum Bauhinia Star.

Whether the additional levies make any economic sense or have any chance of making homes more affordable is a different thing altogether. That we are already well into bubble territory must be clear from the recent parking space mania and the bizarre sale of individual suites at Cheung Kong’s Apex Horizon project. Recent jitters in the stock market at the merest hint of tighter Federal Reserve policy should have warier property investors looking around for the ’emergency exit’ signs. One sign that a crash is on the way is when the forlorn, the naïve, the copycats, the left-behind and the plain pitifully ignorant start to clamber on to the bandwagon. They are the last to turn up, and the least able to afford financial losses. The SCMP today quotes what would appear to be one who has bought a unit at Li Ka-shing’s exotic Kwai Chung hotel-or-something…