This blog has been neglected lately because I have been away so much. One trip to Jakarta. Indonesia is a friendly and fascinating place, but Jakarta provides a chilling glimpse of where we might be heading. Basically there are two cities. One is inhabited by the rich, including the corporate expat set. This consists of large hotels, shopping malls, large houses with numerous servants and upmarket clubs, ditto. These places have elaborate security of the sort found in Hong Kong only at the more controversial consulates. Bags are examined, metal detected, car boots opened for inspection. Travel between these secure enclaves is usually by car. Visitors will take a cab, but residents tend to have something large and solid with a paid driver and smoked glass windows.
Leave your cocoon and go round the corner, and you enter another world. The wardrobe is by Les Miserables and the environment is clearly not disturbed by considerations of Food and Environmental Hygiene. Small children ask you for money and “ladies” of uncertain gender offer services which Bill Clinton dows not count as sex. Elderly folk can be seen settling down for the night in other people’s doorways. Life is precarious and basic. Intruders from the other world will feel uncomfortable – perhaps they should – if not unsafe. And this is all, I suppose, the standard arrangement where many people are very poor and a few people are very rich.
This is not where we are but it may be where we are heading. Statistical measures of Hong Kong’s wealth distribution have been moving in an ominous direction for years. Under a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich the upper end of the income distribution is bound to prosper. The only question is what happens to the rest of us. At the moment there are no places in Hong Kong where a rich person need feel unsafe, and — apart from clubs — few places from which a poor person is barred if he can handle the dress code. Some senior civil servants and top business bods appear to live in a different world; that is by choice, not necessity. But how long will this last?
tim's experiment 
There has also been a gradual drift of the attributes of the rich people in Hong Kong. More and more Mainlanders populate the local rich community.