Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Today’s news on the heritage front is terrible in the South China Morning Post, where Ho Tung Gardens mansion on the Peak is to be demolished, but wonderful in the Standard, where the West Wing of the old Central Government Offices is to be preserved. However, the fates of the two architecturally unlovable buildings go beyond heritage.

Privately owned Ho Tung Gardens is supposedly valuable because of its ‘Chinese Renaissance’ architecture – common in 1920s and 30s rail stations, colleges and other structures in the Mainland. Essentially it is early 20th Century utilitarian Western style with some cheesy Oriental ornamentation added, often by the first generation of technically qualified Chinese architects.

The real reason it is valuable is of course its redevelopment potential. The government won’t buy it from the owner because she demands that it pay her the billions and billions she could make from building luxury villas on the site. Yes, we’re back to Hong Kong’s real-estate fixation, and the assumption that property rights must include untrammeled redevelopment rights for the owner regardless of any non-financial costs to the rest of the community.

What we need in practice (without getting bogged down in the legal or administrative aspects) is a planning regime that forbids redevelopment unless specific environmental, air flow, traffic, overdevelopment, heritage, etc, etc considerations are satisfied. In other words, the opposite of how the current system seems to work. This would slash the notional redevelopment-linked values of older sites and introduce some common sense into the Big Lychee’s Great National Fetish. A true heritage site would not be worth too much money for the government to save. Remember, there’s always Fanling golf course and Disneyland if we need more space.

(If you suggest something like this idea to an official she will look at you like you’re a Martian who’s just killed her grandmother with a gamma-ray gun and eaten the corpse. Such a planning regime would infringe owners’ rights. In effect, it is ‘unfair’ to owners to protect everyone else’s views, air flow, traffic flow, heritage, etc.)

The government’s decision to keep the West Wing is a victory for a determined group of admirable busybodies. While mainstream pro-democracy parties in Hong Kong shrivel into insignificance, civil society is learning how to adapt to or even use the existing political structure, and bend bureaucrats and policymakers to the will of the people. OK, mainly educated and articulate people – but this is how these things start (for Whigs; the Trotskyists like Long Hair Leung Kwok-hung who think it begins at the bottom don’t do heritage much).

The preservation of the West Wing is a defeat for ‘development’-obsessed officials. They originally wanted high-rise shopping malls and car parks with which to smother Central in yet more air pollution and Mainland tourists. They don’t back down. But tenacious activists forced the bureaucrats to make a strategic withdrawal or two, and eventually broke them, though the ending of Donald Tsang’s term as Chief Executive must have helped. In its own way, this one can be filed in the same drawer as Article 23 and National Education.

One of the winning tactics of the coalition of activists was to create a previously non-existent brand in the form of ‘Government Hill’, which we could all envisage as a distinct place that we have ownership of, compared with the old label of ‘CGO’. So what will happen to the shady leafy courtyard, and the flying buttresses, Corinthian columns and magnificent marble spiral staircases of the building itself?

Mindful of the need for magnanimity, the conservationists seem to have graciously allowed our Beijing-appointed government to choose a mind-numbingly unimaginative role for the saved site, to save a bit of official face. Thus the place will become a sort of legal themed zone, with Department of Justice offices and facilities for international legal organizations (whatever they are). It will also house international arbitration and mediation services – one of those snore-inducing trendy ‘hub’ concepts that ranks down there with Yuan bonds, eco-tourism and Kate Middleton on the World’s Least Exciting Things list. Boring. But that shouldn’t diminish the importance of the West Wing episode in helping us answer the big question of our times: (maybe it’s just me) but why are we constantly being told how the undoubtedly otherwise charming and talented Kate Middleton is a great beauty when she is, to put it perhaps a bit brusquely, about as visually attractive as a late 1950s government office block? who really runs Hong Kong?

China, as everyone knows, has 56 officially recognized nationalities, or ethnic groups. The number was originally bigger, but central planners amalgamated some tribes and clans in neighbouring districts, perhaps to simplify the job of assigning them their official costumes and folk songs. Judging by the happy, smiling Miao, Xibe and Yao people we see sporting dazzling headgear at National People’s Congress gatherings, they are all, as we are told, delighted to be part of the Chinese family.

How will Mainland officials classify Dutch-born Chinese citizen and Hong Kong Southern District Council member Paul Zimmerman when he takes his seat between the grinning Manchu lady and the sleeping PLA general in the Great Hall of the People at the next NPC meeting? Will they make him an honorary Han or create a 57th happy, smiling minority just for him?

Sadly, we will not find out. Getting onto the ballot for the election of Hong Kong’s NPC delegates turns out to be surprisingly easy. You need a handful of nominations, and since a handful of pro-democrats form a small portion of the loyalist-stacked election committee, it’s no problem. It’s certainly more open than the race for the five ‘Super Seats’ at last September’s Legislative Council elections. But that was a real poll, in which the pan-dems could and did enjoy success. The vote for delegates to China’s rubber-stamp parliament is about as rigged as it gets. China’s local Liaison Office is not above circulating a shortlist of 36 recommended candidates, which the obedient majority of voters will endorse.

Mr Z says the campaign will give him an opportunity to air his views. The snag is that – for obvious reasons – not much of a campaign takes place. Hopefuls will earnestly lobby potential voters by phone (it’s amazing how many people angle for support on the off-chance that China’s local officials will notice them and pick them for the list). Conversely, Liaison Office officials may have tapped people on the shoulder and urged them to get nominated, which is no doubt how a few fresh faces from business and even the civil service have ended up on the NPC in recent years alongside the traditional scowling old guys few recognize. Pro-Beijing organizations represented on the election committee may invite selected candidates to closed-door meetings and Q&A sessions, but don’t expect public debates or TV coverage, or a groovy website in six languages. Unlike the equally rigged but in-your-face Chief Executive election, this process could take place without most of the population even noticing. It’s sometime in January, if I recall.

(That said, a guerilla/street-theatre campaign would be great. Put the silk sash on, print some glossy leaflets, gather some volunteers, and hit the streets collecting 100,000 signatures from Hongkongers demanding Paul Z as their delegate to the nation’s ‘highest organ of state power’.)

If it’s any consolation, Southern District Council has more genuine decision-making power than the 3,000-strong NPC, which can’t even relocate a bus stop. And being a Hong Kong NPC delegate is a well-known pain in the backside: you have to spend 10 days a year stuck in Beijing hotels waiting for Mainland counterparts to finish their after-lunch naps, so everyone can go into the Great Hall to dutifully vote to approve the next lengthy work report. At least the District Council gets to push a literary trail and visit Ocean Park.

During 2009-2011, Hong Kong endured a debate on a proposed minimum wage. In an attempt to deflect pressure for a legal pay floor, officials had encouraged an embarrassing voluntary ‘wage protection movement’, which to no-one’s surprise low-margin employers of menial labour ignored. As unions and activists demanded action, lawmakers representing corporate interests predicted mass-firings of unskilled workers, then demanded that the minimum be set at sub-starvation levels that would retain the status quo in practice. Pious free-market types decried the sacrilege of state intervention in the libertarian paradise that was the Big Lychee. The government sought to contrive obscure categories of local workers who would be exempt from the new law, to make it look as if foreign domestic helpers – who were never going to be included – weren’t being singled out.

After much bickering, a minimum wage took effect at a level arrived at through lots of consultation, consensus and harmony. At HK$28 an hour, it is a fraction of its counterparts in many countries with comparable per-capita GDPs and an admission that a chunk of Hong Kong’s work force are living in a Third World economy, albeit often with near-free housing and medical care. Rather than reduce demand for labour, as basic economics would expect, the compulsory higher wages actually attracted underemployed and voluntarily idle people back into work, increasing employment levels. Employers seem to have adapted, almost certainly by passing on at least some extra costs to customers and extracting better deals from suppliers.

Apart from the prospect of regular adjustments to reflect inflation (or maybe one day deflation), the excitement is all over. But anyone nostalgic for the debate, for the struggle for oppressed workers’ rights and for the amusement of seeing some fairly repellent politicians and lobbies not getting their way can now look forward to the next big controversy: official standard working hours.

In theory, Hong Kong’s downtrodden proletariat has little chance of success. Their excuse for a movement is divided into two rival blocs. One is susceptible to persuasion and manipulation by pro-Beijing United Front forces that value the loyalty of capitalists more than that of the masses. The other is itself split between moderates and radicals who don’t always get on. However, the workers can always rely on representatives of employers’ interests to inadvertently come to their help. The bosses spokesmen could make measured and valid points about the potential administrative problems with working-hours laws. Instead, predictably, they start the process off by issuing dire warnings that are clearly exaggerated, if not stupid.

Stanley Lau Chin-ho of the Federation of Hong Kong Industries forecasts Greece-style riots and unrest if statutory hours are introduced. It is a strange argument, because half-failed European economies like Greece are trying to change the law to allow employers to make staff work longer hours – the opposite of what Hong Kong is set to do. It sounds as if he thinks the very mention of the subject will provoke civil disorder. But presumably his logic is the slippery-slope one; go down the regulated-hours road, and one day we will be like the European countries with so much protection for workers that business ceases.

Even that argument is pretty unconvincing in Hong Kong. The introduction of a 35-hour week in France was intended to reduce unemployment, which had at least partly resulted from laws making it so hard to lay off employees that companies would stop expanding in order to avoid hiring more help. The idea was that by limiting working hours, work would be shared out among a larger number of people – an economically illiterate concept surprisingly popular in some quarters.

None of this has much relevance in Hong Kong. Proposals to give employees iron-plated job security as in France and other parts of Europe would be a danger – but most people only have to look at our very low unemployment rates to see the benefits of labour market flexibility. The problem in Hong Kong is that employers in low-value industries, struggling to pay rents and naturally desiring a decent profit, compete purely by squeezing and sweating their unskilled workers. The business sector itself, going back a while, helped create the conditions for this by lobbying for plentiful immigration from the Mainland.

The experience of the minimum wage suggests that when minimum standards are imposed to prevent rank exploitation, wealth is redistributed downwards as business owners, customers and suppliers all chip in to cover the extra costs. There might be some unintentional cross-subsidy among the low-paid, but it seems the benefits have outweighed any ill-effects.

If the labour unions wanted to speed up working-hours legislation, they would talk about the unevenness of the whole playing field rather than just bleating about how bad conditions are. They should say that bosses who are too backward to upgrade equipment or train staff to boost productivity and landlords who ramp up rents at every opportunity are getting too big a slice of the pie. Standard working hours – like the minimum wage – would force them and the better-off rest of the community to share out the goodies more fairly. (Then you come out with the tear-jerking stories about Mr Chan’s 70-hour weeks with no overtime.) But the labour activists probably won’t play it that way. Then again, it won’t matter: the employers’ lobby will shoot themselves in the foot just fine.

OK. That’s it. This has gone too far. I came home last night to find that a 7-Eleven has opened in my living room.

To put it another way: for the second day in a row I have… work to do. This is a terrible shock to the system. A half-day’s toil from time to time I can handle; some would even say it is morally and spiritually beneficial to include occasional moments of discipline and duty in a life of continuous and leisurely self-indulgence. Mercifully, I have a weekend in which to recover, which is, despite everything, declared open with a few time-wasters for those fortunate enough not to be compelled to labour.

Those with over 1 hour 40 minutes to spare might like S.W.A.L.K. – released outside the UK as Melody, which shouldn’t be on YouTube and probably won’t be there forever. A twee love story between 11-year-olds set in an early-70s London high school might not sound like a must-see, and the fact that it became hugely popular in Japan suggests something to be avoided. But it is interesting, not only to the nostalgic of a certain age or to cinema fans curious to see Alan Parker’s first screenplay.

To me, it’s a British version of The Graduate, and the timing suggests that director Waris Hussein may indeed have been inspired. One parallel is obvious: it is a romance between two young people, opposed by their elders, with the last few minutes (if you must spoil it) almost a homage to the 1967 classic. Second, it has a lot of the zeitgeist, humour and satire of the Mike Nichols film, albeit transposed to a different place and subjects. Not least, many scenes have mood-creating music in place of dialogue. Instead of Simon and Garfunkel, this soundtrack is largely by the (Beatles-esque, pre-disco) Bee Gees. Unlike The Graduate, the British movie has a class angle, with the three main characters coming from distinct socio-economic backgrounds.

A shorter, and starkly different, audio-visual delight comes in the form of Epizootics!. You need to sit and watch and listen – it’s not for people with attention deficit disorder or the otherwise hard-to-mesmerize. The twist is that the music is by Scott Walker, who did schmaltzy classics like You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling in the 60s but is now popular among trendy avant-garde types like Eno – as will become clear.

With China clearly installing itself in the territorial waters of Southeast Asian countries that equally clearly are simply going to have to get used to being doormats, light-hearted, quick and accessible relief comes courtesy of the Song of Patriotic Prejudice by Flanders and Swann.

For the hard of hearing who just want something to look at… 

Roll on, 5.00pm or so.

Hemlock’s Diary

Wed, 29 Nov
The Big Boss drags me into a meeting with a fellow tycoon – ‘Dr’ Tai.  The proud owner of an honorary doctorate from a little heard-of university in a distant land, Tai straddles the generations of the current and former Chairman of S-Meg Holdings.  “My father always told me to be nice to him,” mutters our illustrious leader, “but they’re nothing now.”  The Tai family made its fortune trading durians back in the 1950s, then lost much of it by going into property at the peak of the market in the ‘70s.  The fading company is ripe for asset stripping, but face overrides commercial sense in these circles.  “This is a bit embarrassing,” the Big Boss whispers before we enter the reception room where the gentleman is waiting.  “Hopefully, when he sees you he’ll go away.”

Unfortunately, Dr Tai is unfazed by the appearance of S-Meg Holdings’ most exotic staff member and eagerly gets down to business.  He wants his son to be made a Justice of the Peace.  Many of his friends’ sons sport a ‘JP’ tag after their name, and he thinks it’s unfair that his own boy – now in his 40s – should be left out.  He reminds us that he was one of the first members of the business community to start saying rude things about Chris Patten in the early 1990s, and the family donated generous sums for Mainland flood victims a few years ago.   We sit and nod politely.  The Big Boss says he will “speak to Donald about it.”  You can tell you’ve been in Hong Kong too long when you find nothing remotely strange about a man feeling that his loyalty to the Communist Party and the Chinese motherland should be rewarded by the symbolic appointment of his first-born to an English public office dating back to 1361.

TO ATONE for their spelling mistake in a headline last Saturday, the South China Morning Post today comes up with Most Deadpan Photo Caption of the Week…

Thurs, 30 Nov
So joyous is the mood on the Mid-Levels Escalator this morning that everyone bursts into song.  “Here in Hong Kong we are one big family,” we chant.  “And we’re proud of this place we all call home.”  It was the unofficial Big Lychee national anthem back in the days when the city was confident, happy and prosperous, before it became self-doubting, miserable and prosperous.  It was a rousing tune – an anti-littering ditty that stirred the heart of free men and women of all colours and creeds, rejoicing in their good fortune to live in a land of liberty, where the Government’s idea of intrusion into people’s lives was to urge them to place their Hello Kitty ice cream wrappers in the garbage bins provided at 10-foot intervals the length and breadth of our colonial paradise.  Like the people, the bins were rugged and sturdy – crafted of steel and painted a bold and defiant orange.  Today, we put our used tissues and half-eaten quarter-pounders into effete, cheap, plastic purple receptacles – a reflection of the pitiful, childlike weakness and meek subjection to authority to which we have been reduced.

In the old days, you could hire anyone you wanted and be open about it.  You could announce, “I want a clerk who is young, able-bodied, female and Chinese,” and fire her the second she got married.  You could say, “I want to rent my property out, but not to an Indian because they will cook curry,” and get a blond-haired, blue-eyed British tenant who cooked curry.  There was an unwritten rule.  No-one started up hate or supremacist groups.  No-one got lynched, beaten up or spat on.  In return, we were all free to loathe each other in peace and harmony.  It was too good to last.  The great libertarian experiment succumbed to lawyers, activists, do-gooders and bureaucrats.

Being civilized and progressive, we will now be able to sue each other for race discrimination, except under circumstances carefully chosen to avoid any serious inconvenience to decent people with perfectly understandable reasons for favouring or rejecting persons of one particular hue or another.  Indeed, I already feel that a trip to the Equal Opportunities Commission might be in order.  Under the proposed law (Urdu version, Nepali version, Bahasa Indonesia version and Thai version coming soon), racial harassment and vilification will be an offence.  Is this not what I face in my own workplace?  Barely a day goes by when I do not hear some snide remark about the Company Gwailo – an island of Anglo-Saxon DNA in an ocean of the seed of the dragon – and the way he is allowed to turn up late, go home early, skip the excruciating annual dinner, not wear the puce and lime-green company tie on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and enjoy all sorts of other privileges and immunities.  Just because he is white, reports directly to the Big Boss, and the Human Resources Manager is petrified of him.  The next expression of hostility or intolerance about this situation – Ms Fang the Hunter Killer Secretary is a frequent complainant – and I will see to it that my persecutors are struck with the full might of justice.

You would have thought that most people have heard all they want to hear about Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung’s infamous illegal structures and his nefarious plot to hide them and subsequently pretend he didn’t know he had them. But someone rather badly wants you to hear more, and again more.

Much to the delight of headline writers, the spotlight turns from the dastardly trellis and the criminal carport roof to a wall. The wall was not in the right place, so on June 27 the Buildings Department sent CY a letter demanding to know why. With three full days to go before becoming Chief Executive of Hong Kong he should have had ample time to write back with full details. A further three letters followed. CY (or more probably his secretary or lawyer – or maybe wife!) ‘ignored’ them (if you’re the South China Morning Post) or ‘refused to reply’ (according to the Standard).

The world naturally reels in horror at this outrage. Or at least at the impressive output of correspondence from the clearly mega-productive government bureaucracy concerned. But wait! There’s more!

CY said a few days ago that he had no previous experience of hiding/lying about/fixing illegal structures, and this obviously made dealing with the current situation all the more difficult. But… After much rummaging around by someone, a December 2000 Buildings Department press release appears, showing that he removed an unauthorized glass corridor from his former house.

We would naturally like to ask the obvious question: what the hell is a glass corridor exactly? But not before we get to the bottom of CY’s glaring untruth, for which there can only be two explanations:

1.  He vividly recalled the glass corridor event 12 years ago, but deliberately lied about it – calculating that no-one would check the old newspaper clippings, and betting that the public would naturally feel more sympathy for an illegal-structures virgin than for a seasoned UBW repeat offender.

2.  He forgot.

The Standard’s ‘Mary Ma’ column mentions a rumour that CY’s decision to issue that 14-page explanatory statement on the unauthorized building works saga without holding a press conference followed advice from Beijing’s local Liaison Office. With PR advisors like that, who needs the Standard? But the column also hints that Rita Fan and Paul Tse, mentioned here yesterday, are backing off from their anti-CY stance. Which suggests that the Liaison Office people, after trying their hand at press-relations consultancy, are getting back to what they do best: making slightly menacing phone calls to bring strays into line. From which we can conclude that the cascade of mind-numbing CY Leung illegal-structure outrages may soon run its course, at least so far as the pro-Beijing establishment is concerned.

We will look back at this one day and laugh about it. Especially at the lengthy list of CY’s home’s construction misdemeanours released for our reading pleasure by the Buildings Department yesterday. For example…

The storage cabinet originally placed in the parking space was thus exposed in open air and became an outdoor structure. After taking the measurements of the storage cabinet, it was confirmed that the storage cabinet was an actionable item…

Would you reply to letters from these people?

Note under House 4, second item: “a metal gate erected at the access road near the house”.

Oh my – Metalgate-gate!

In most places, if a public figure wants to put a glass canopy on his patio, he puts a glass canopy on his patio, and the world carries on as if nothing had happened. In Hong Kong, the glass canopy is a major news story, and opponents and detractors act as if the backyard feature were a collection of child pornography. Perpetrator du jour is Duncan Prescod, the top civil servant at the Transport and Housing Bureau. In his defence, he can claim that it’s the tenants’ doing, and that he is barely a public figure anyway. Luckily for him, the media SWAT teams will move on; they have their eyes on Chief Executive CY Leung’s own illegal-structure woes, which seem to be reaching some sort of crescendo.

CY’s masterstroke during his fight with Henry Tang for the CE job was to pounce on the dim rich-kid’s conveniently exposed, unauthorized, vast basement-palace. It was the tipping point that lost Henry and his tycoon backers the battle, but the war never ended. Aided by pan-democrats who hate communist loyalists, the old establishment has successfully established in the public’s mind that CY, in the midst of campaigning, maliciously conspired to cover up such diabolical unauthorized building works as a garden trellis, and thus brings his integrity into grave doubt. By forcing him onto the defensive and demanding public accounts of the most stunning trivia, they are taking exquisite revenge.

And how will the trellis do what trellises nowhere else on the planet can do, namely come to the aforementioned crescendo? Through a vote of no confidence in the Legislative Council; even the word ‘impeachment’ is being muttered. Like the quasi-election that had to be re-rigged at the last minute in March, this will force people to show their hands.

Outside Legco, former council president and all-purpose busybody Rita Fan has been loudly flinging mud at CY. She has acknowledged that she could lose her National People’s Congress seat as a result, which suggests she knows she is probably choosing the wrong side.

Within the council, Paul ‘maverick lawyer’ Tse is at the fore, likening the trellis, carport, etc to a corpse and CY to a murderer. He is one of several ‘independents’ who are actually in the pro-Beijing camp and won seats with behind-the-scenes help from China’s local Liaison Office officials. Those officials were probably driven more by an obsession with denying pan-dems seats than anything else. To what extent Tse is following orders – not his strong point – we can’t tell. It is hard to imagine him as a lynchpin in a local coup being engineered as part of upheavals resulting from the leadership transition in Beijing.

Maybe the installation of former President Jiang Zemin’s favourites in the Politburo requires the restoration of tycoon-bureaucrat rule in Hong Kong. Assuming they have more important things to worry about up in Zhongnanhai, however, we can assume that the no confidence motion will fizzle out, despite all sorts of ne’er-do-wells’ attempts to be out of town on the day of the vote.

Meanwhile we have to suffer the weirdness that is the de facto alliance of radicals, moderate pro-democrats and the tycoon-bureaucrat ‘elite’. Sing Tao editor Siu Sai-wo BBS pens a more-than-averagely nauseating little column called Fame and Fortune. It exists solely to shoe-shine its daily subject, usually a tycoon’s kid who has pulled off his first great property deal, or an aging plutocrat who has bought an honorary doctorate. It looks very much as if Henry-supporting newspaper-owner Charles Ho decrees which lucky luminaries are featured. And today’s upstanding establishment icon: Long Hair Leung Kwok-hung.

I have a copy of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. (Get yours for free here.) It came out in 1841, the same year the UK took Hong Kong Island, but if he were around today, author Charles Mackay would surely mention the Big Lychee’s latter-day tulip manias. To quote from Amazon’s review of the book: “Why do otherwise intelligent individuals form seething masses of idiocy when they engage in collective action? Why do financially sensible people jump lemming-like into hare-brained speculative frenzies…?” To which we can add: who seriously thinks a car parking space in the little patch of paradise that is Tai Wai can be worth HK$1.3 million?

The Standard’s story leaves us in little doubt that the bubble du jour is car spaces. But you have to wonder: is the tycoon-owned and tycoon-friendly paper reporting a bubble, or simply urging one on? The report is about one (allegedly Nazi-managed) development by Li Ka-shing’s Cheung Kong group. It looks rather as if, deprived of money-laundering Mainland customers by Hong Kong’s property market cooling measures, the company is applying its apartment-selling tactics to humble parking spaces – which developers have traditionally seen as a source of rental income. Drip-feed units onto the market, while a cooperative media quote real-estate agents’ tales not only of instant profits, but of rental yields that still look enticing. (The project is atop an MTR depot, so there may be fewer parking slots than in sites farther from the railway. The developer says only residents can buy these car parking spaces, though that doesn’t seem to be affecting this mini-mania.)

The other developers will, as always, imitate the master. And, if a real bubble is to take place, speculators obsessed with quick, easy returns will take the bait. Some of them will not be lemmings at all, but seasoned lemming psychologists, calculating that if you get in soon enough and the developers, agencies and media do their hype thing, idiots afraid of ‘losing out’ will join in the rush. (Seriously: how much hot Mainland money is really flooding into parking spaces?)

The extra taxes recently imposed to cool the market apply only to residential units. With mortgages available for parking slots, this craze will be open to all, or at least anyone who can scrape a few hundred thousand Hong Kong bucks together; if past bubbles are any guide, families will pool their savings. The Hong Kong Monetary Policy sees no need to worry because the parking-space market is not big enough to affect the banking system, and the assets being traded are not a necessity or politically sensitive.

If a bubble really takes place and thousands of HK$1 million dollar-plus parking slots start changing hands, some people will end up holding what had been some horribly overpriced little oblongs of concrete.

Mackay’s book did not address only financial bubbles, but other forms of collective insanity, such as the rush of Medieval peasants to join the crusades and outbreaks of witch-burning. Maybe because he was Scottish, he neglected one of the worst forms of communal mental disease: golf. There is something tragic about using up hours walking around a field in funny pink or yellow clothes hitting a little ball with a stick. When a whole segment of society is addicted to it, it gets scary.

Environmental activists Green Sense have a refreshingly bold suggestion (not their first): develop the Fanling golf course into housing for 100,000 people. Amusingly, they promise that a team of young architects are working on a blueprint. The Hong Kong Golf Club’s boss is alarmed enough to say “Hong Kong must have its own course as an international city to attract investors to visit,” which tells us something about how golf damages its victims’ sense of reality.*

Critics could point out that if Hong Kong actually has a surplus of housing, thanks to all the empty apartments out there, it would not make ‘green sense’ to build more. But the activists still have a point. This is a government-owned, 170-hectare space that could be used for all sorts of useful purposes: for example, you could get 50,000 7-Elevens in that area, and still have room for the world’s biggest columbarium.

Golfers are 30 times more likely than the rest of us to be struck by lightning. It is the only interesting thing about them. Everything else you need to know about their illness is here. What they need is not help so much as drastic, cold-turkey-style intervention, and Green Sense surely point the way to a humanitarian solution to this affliction.

* Hong Kong is a net outbound investor and does not need to seek inward investment; any investor who will not look at a possible location unless it has a golf course will probably not allocate capital efficiently; if these investors are only ‘visitors’, we have enough already, thanks.

Just when I thought I wouldn’t be switching on the air-conditioning again for four months… The streets have a ‘hot, wet, summer day after the typhoon’ feel about them this morning. Maybe winter will start next week.

To cheer us all up, the South China Morning Post treats us to a delightful error right on the front page.

The background: just as Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung’s administration is under fire from all sides over just about everything, Beijing official Zhang Xiaoming chooses to make things even worse by spouting scare stories about foreign interference in the Big Lychee and stressing the need for national-security laws, as mandated by Article 23 of the Basic Law. He also echoes Secretary for Justice Elsie Leung’s recent comments that Beijing rules local courts, which led pro-democrats to demand her appearance in the Legislative Council, and her refusing to bow to ‘McCarthyism’.

Pan-dems are up in arms about Zhang. But, according to the SCMP, ultra-patriot Elsie has suddenly joined them, describing his comments as ‘not only unconstitutional but also immoral’ – even though he was agreeing with her previous remarks.

What happened is that the ‘immoral’ quote comes from Civic Party’s Alan Leong. Perhaps the copy editor (are they still using Sri Lankans based in Bangkok or something?) accidentally inserted Elsie’s name in the wrong place (Leung/Leong – so easy to confuse), leading a designer to innocently put a picture of the old girl next to the outraged anti-Beijing quote. They have fixed it in the on-line edition.

Except… do things this horribly wrong happen by accident? Or could it be deliberate editorial vandalism? Maybe the SCMP needs an Article 23 of its own to root out subversives in the news room.

I look forward to the groveling apology on tomorrow’s front page. Will they have the nerve to blame it on that old stand-by, a technical glitch, or will they be man enough to admit human fault, perhaps with an assurance that the perpetrators have been rounded up and locked in a dungeon full of snakes.

Of course, it could be that Elsie really has turned against Zhang. He has, after all, committed an act of sabotage of his own. The chances of Article 23 being implemented looked small enough, especially after the people’s revolt over National Education. Now, it has never looked more dead.

Paranoia about foreign interference in Hong Kong seems to be triggered by the waving of colonial flags at protests and vague mutterings about autonomy or even independence. It would be unthinkable among Beijing officials to shrug this adolescent silliness off and ignore it. Whether they really mean it when they describe a serious threat to the nation, we have no idea. Conspiracy theorists believe that Chinese leaders want to provoke trouble in Hong Kong to justify a serious clampdown (that is, use anti-Article 23 unrest to justify Article 23). One witty comment below the on-line SCMP article suggests that Zhang wants to buy a home in Hong Kong and is trying to bring property prices down.

Apparently, it is beyond anyone in the government or pro-communist community in Hong Kong to go to Zhang or some other official and say: “Listen, cut the number of Mainland visitors by 80% and give everyone back their streets and shops, and the ‘foreign interference’ will magically disappear.” Why use a simple solution when massively complex, trouble-provoking ones are available?

I declare the weekend open with one of the best things most people have never heard: Erika Stucky singing ‘Why’ from Carla Bley’s opera ‘Escalator Over the Hill’, featuring such lines as ‘So many ingredients in the soup, no room for a spoon’…

The South China Morning Post reports that one in three (the story actually starts ‘More than a third of…’) women has been a victim of what it terms ‘sex crimes’ on Hong Kong’s MTR system. The Standard determines that the figure is one in four (‘A quarter…’). At least the SCMP gives its singular subject the appropriate verb form. Well done.

The papers appear to be reporting two different-but-maybe-not surveys – sort of a parallel-universe thing, maybe. In the SCMP, the Rape Crisis Centre polled 533 people, and found only 10% of victims sought help, and three screamed loudly; in the Standard, the Association Concerning Sexual Violence Against Women surveyed 537 people and found that no victims went to police or MTR staff, but 2% yelled.

The ‘sex crimes’ are mostly undefined indecent assault or taking photos up skirts, with a dash of indecent exposure. Given the crowding on our mass transit system, every passenger has probably been accidentally brushed up against or rubbed or (what really freaks me out) breathed upon. You have to wonder how many of the perceived assaults were conscious and deliberate. But who am I to say? Just because feminist groups accidentally happen to distribute their questionnaires among the more neurotic and histrionic segment of local womanhood, it doesn’t mean the MTR isn’t crawling with weird guys who get off on grabbing passing buttocks.

The Standard refers to the up-skirt photographs as ‘secret snapshots’ – which raises the obvious question about how, if it’s a secret, victims would know. The SCMP refers to it as ‘invasive photography’, for which the Crisis Rape people’s proposed remedy is, obviously, more surveillance cameras.

The surreptitious taking of photos up women’s skirts is so bizarre you have to wonder who the victim really is. We are talking about some sort of mental disease here, probably originally from Japan; maybe in time the tragic cameramen metamorphose into hikikomori. (Why don’t they do some serious creepy subway snapshots like these?)

The SCMP adds that the Rape Crisis Centre is also worried about areas beneath glass elevators becoming ‘black spots for perverts’ and doesn’t like the idea of women-only train carriages because women should not be perceived as weak [so jab the pervs’ eyes out!] and men and transsexuals are also victims. I’m sure they do some fine work, but maybe they should rename themselves the Rape and Anything Else We Can Think About Crisis Centre?

The biggest mystery to me, even more than the guys with cameras on sticks, is the appearance of two identical-but-different surveys,  by two very similar-sounding organizations, one in each newspaper, at the same time. They do say that if you understand quantum physics, you haven’t studied it properly. And could there be a parallel universe where women who have a big hang-up about men seeing their legs don’t wear very short skirts?