tim's experiment

One of my more easily shareable birthday presents was a translation of a poem:

At the foot of Shade Mountain

The sky, a woolly tent over the wilderness

Blue is the sky; boundless is the wild.

Grass bends in the wind, cattle and sheep showing

Since I first heard of it 30 years ago I have found something strangely haunting about the vision of tall grass bending in the wind, revealing previously hidden cattle and sheep. I would love to see it. One suspects a certain amount of poetic licence here. Grass tall enough to hide a sheep I can accept, but a cow?  On the other hand experience has taught me not to jump to conclusions about these things. I used to think that the odd-shaped mountains in so many Chinese paintings were purely conventional, perhaps partly motivated by the desire to fill a very vertical canvas. Upon coming to Hong Kong, where photographs of Chinese mountains are everywhere, I discovered that the paintings were no more than faithful renditions of some unusual but perfectly authentic pieces of landscape. So I am keeping an open mind on the cow-high pasture. Still the place sounds beautiful, and reading things like this brings on a vigorous urge to get up there and see it.

This urge is then attenuated by reading the daily news, in which the picture of China, while still doing justice to the scenery, also includes currupt officials, violent policemen and a pervasive absence of anything recognisable as the rule of law. It is one of life’s little mysteries that a government which cannot protect the constitutional rights of citizens in the suburbs of its own capital should be so eager to extend its rule to distant islands and provinces. This poroduces a dilemma, particularly for foreigners who have studied Chinese history and culture before making the aquaintance of its modern manifestation. There used to be occasional complaints in Hong Kong that Foreign Office mandarins who had studied up on China developed a romantic attachment to the Tang Dynasty version of the country which was a severe handicap when dealing with the Deng Dynasty. One of my friends who, after growing up in Hong Kong, studied Chinese in the UK, lamented the number of his classmates who were distressed by the discovery that the country they had come to admire in its literary manifestations was in real life a nasty police state.

Of course the situation is in a way much worse for Hong Kong people, who would like to take their place in the great historical epic which is the heritage of China but are all too well aware that the epic has had some nasty moments in the last 50 years and not all of them have finished yet. In this morning”s papers was a story — not at all unusual — about a security firm in Beijing which had been caught rounding up petitioners, robbing and beating them before sending them back to their home provinces, under a business arraangement with the local governments concerned. What, I wonder, goes through the mind of a faithful local left-winger when he reads a story like that? It cannot be dismissed as capitalist propaganda. Like most such stories it comes from a mainland newspaper. One can say that China is better than it was, but when you start from a condition in which politically motivated persecution, violence, murder and even cannibalism are not just tolerated but encouraged as a matter of state policy, then a lot of improvement can still leave much to be desired. I suppose the solultion to the problem is to say that the government represents the country and “my country right or wrong”. G.K. Chesterton observed that this was like saying “my mother drunk or sober”.

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It is nice to see it almost universally recognised that the cost of housing in Hong Kong is becoming outrageous. Last week saw the passage of another grim landmark – a former public housing unit sold for more than a million dollars. I hope this made the idiot ideologies who insisted that public housing flats should be available for purchase by their occupants feel better. It made me feel that a flat which mighrt once have housed the desperate was now available to house millionaires. No doubt there will be limits to the gentrification of former public housing estates, if only for reasons of prestige, or lack of it. Still, we are left with a situation in which buying a small flat for a newly wed couple is beyond the reach of even two of the sort of salaries which most young Hong Kong people can command. Buying a flat in which one might wish to raise a few kids is simply beyond the reach period.

I do not seek your sympathy for me. Actually the Hamlett family benefited greatly from Mr Tung Chee-hwa’s demonstration that a government which controls the market in land can make house prices go down as well as up. While everyone was complaining about negative equity we bought a house which we could never have afforded before and we have not been able to afford since. What this experience illustrates, of course, is that price movements in any direction are not good or bad in themselves. They benefit some people and cost other people money. This explains why there is a certain infirmity of purpose in the government’s present attempts to reduce the rate at which the cost of housing is increasing. I put it in this rather elaborate way because I think to say that the government is trying to lower housing costs is to give them credit they do not deserve. There are two reasons for this.

One is that actually our legislators and their sycophants and small horses have their own interests at stake. If you look at the register of members interests, or take the trouble (thank you, SCMPost) to look up the interests of the political appointees who, at enormous expense, carry their briefcases, you will find very people who own no flats, quite a lot who own one, and a clear majority who own two or more. No doubt in a few cases the extra flat is for a relative, the domestic servants or the book collection. But in the majority of cases our leaders are investors in the very racket which they are now pretending to deplore. They have bought flats in the hope of making money by selling them at higher prices. I do not suggest that we shall see anything as shameless as people seeking to boost housing prices as a way of increasing the value of their own investments. I do believe that people in this position are likely to find arguments which tend to complacency more persuasive than those which tend to urgent action.

The second reason is the “negative equity” con. Look, if you buy a house its value as a resale object is a matter of pure fiction. You own a house or flat. You can live in it. If the price goes down you can still live in it. It is just as warm and waterproof as it was before. Now there is a catch in some places, and that is that you may need to move. If you live in a mining town and the mine closes then you will probably not be able to find a job locally. As large numbers of people are in the same position it is quite likely that the value of your home will fall, and you may well find it is worth less than the amount you still owe the bank. This presents an agonising dilemma and explains much of the pain caused in places like America and Spain by the bursting of local property bubbles. The choices lie between bankruptcy and unemployment, with a strong possibility of both. But this will never happen in Hong Kong, because ours is a small city with decent public transport. One would not, if given the choice, choose to commute between, say, Chai Wan and Tin Shui Wai. But it is possible, in the sort of times commonplace in sprawling commuter cities in other countries. So a Hong Kong person whose flat is having a downmarket moment can sit it out.

Negative equity is not a threat to home-owners. It is, of course, a threat to real estate investors. If the flat is worth less than you borrowed to buy it then your prospects of a profit are dim. It is also a threat to banks. Owners whose homes are worth less than the outstanding loan may be tempted to throw in the towel, send the bank the keys and leave it with a house or flat worth less than the loan for which it was supposed to be security. So any time there is negative equity we will here a concerted moan of dismay and sympathy for the victims, which is actually a hymn to hypocrisy. It will, though, be heard by Hong Kong officials, whose ears are particularly sensitive to any communication from the real estate business or the banks which support and batten off it.

So do not expect too much. It has been interesting, in recent months, to see how many people now recognise that Hong Kong enjoys government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. It has been even more interesting to see many commentators suggesting that unless this is changed there will be some kind of violent explosion. This is all rather theoretical, though. And anyway, in a competition between greed and fear, greed usually comes out on top.

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It is beyond dispute that the tragedy in Manila was a tragedy. Grief is fully justified. Frustration with the local police is equally understandable, but perhaps less justified.

Should such an unhappy event take place in Hong Kong we will have to consider ourselves very lucky. Because it seems that everyone and his dog in this town, from Donald Tsang downwards via various pundits, columnists etc. to the man in the street. is an expert on the way in which such problems should be handled. The consensus among local talking heads is that the attempts to rescue the hostages were bungled, the police were bumbling, and this is why the whole thing ended in tears. Comparisons with the Keystone Cops were commonplace. The Phillipines, we were told, was a hotbed of corruption and incompetence, and that was why it should be punished with a government-organised travel boycott for not having a well-organised police force like ours, in which deranged cops only shoot themselves or – occasionally – each other.

The one thing which all these commentators have in common is, if you will excuse a blunt expression, ignorance. How many of us have watched live coverage of a hostage situation lasting several hours, after all? Answer, probably, none. We know that as hostage rescues go, having half the hostages killed doesn’t count in anyone’s training manual as a success. On the other hand having half of them rescued more or less unharmed is a distinct improvement on the worst possible outcome. Nobody learns anything about hostage rescues from news programmes, because on news programmes time moves very quickly. If the drama lasts an hour, or a week, you will only see 30 seconds of it: the SAS man swoops through the window, stun grenades pop distantly, the triumphant prime minister says a few words and it is on to the next sensation.

Consequently, I fear, most of us get our idea of what a hostage situation should look like from on-screen dramas of one kind or another. The problem with this is that they follow the rules for drama, which go roughly like this: the situation has to be sorted out in 90 minutes; the hostages, unless extremely obnoxious, must survive; the hostage taker, unless extraordinarily sympathetic, must die; the hero, who is usually a policeman, will unerringly make the right decisions. This is not because scriptwriters are dishonest, it is because time is money, viewers are easily bored, and they have to meet the standards set on other programmes. When do you ever see the hero go round the block in search of a parking place? He doesn’t, because there isn’t time for that sort of thing. What comes next has to come next.

The consequence of this long period of media training is that most people have no idea what a real hostage taking should look like. I have no idea either, but knowing your limitations is important. Some things – like construction sites and slaughter houses (or, to use the American euphemism, meat packing plants) – look a mess even when they are working properly. Others, like the annual meetings of listed companies, look smooth and well-organised even if the underlying reality is chaotic.  You have to wonder what the people who are complaining about the performance of the Manila police are comparing it with. Would they rather have German efficiency? At the Munich Olympics all the hostages died. Would they rather have the Brits running things, and have innocent foreigners blown away in the underground? Or should we call in the Yanks, and hope we don’t get the people who were in charge at Waco? I get the distinct impression that what most commentators really want is not the SAS or the Navy SEALS or the Los Angeles SWAT team or the Russian Spetznaz. What they want is Keanu Reeves.

Some of the complaints were clearly of cosmetic matters. One columnist complained that some of the Manila policemen were overweight. Another thought the hammer used on the coach windows disappointingly domestic. Oddly enough the only person I met who did not complain about the Manila police was a Hong Kong police person who might find himself in charge of a similar event here, if we are so unfortunate. His only comment was “There but for the grace of God go I.”  It is about time people recognised that hostage situations are unpredictable, difficult and do not always have happy endings. The Manila police may not be the bees’ knees of law enforcement. But they could be seen approaching a bus containing a homicidal lunatic armed with an M-16. Those of us who are not up for such dangerous activities would do well to shut up.

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