tim's experiment

Here is a lttle puzzle. Some time ago, readers will recall, there was a big row over the road which runs through Fairview Park. Residents complained that large lorries used this residential boulevard as a short-cut to nefarious non-agricultural doings in nearby villages, even though the government had provided a new, slightly longer, road expressly for their use. The intrusion of large trucks in what was basically a low-rise housing estate posed obvious dangers, a point driven home when a boy cyclist was killed by one of them. The management of the estate, after carefully considering its legal position, decided to ban articulated trucks from the road. This was an entirely sensible suggestion but it was bitterly opposed by residents of said nearby villages. At no point during the ensuing fracas did any official voice make the fundamental point that this was a private road whose owners had a perfect right to bar from it any vehicle of which they disapproved, whether the result was inconvenient to third parties or not.

Now come to the more recent past and the problems of the residents of Tsoi Yuen Tsuen.  The village, the SCMPost told us yesterday, “must make way for the $66.9 billion Hong Kong-Shenzhen-Guangzhou rail link” . Actually this is not entirely true. The link will not run either through or under the village site, which is actually needed for a large siding. This in turn is only needed because of the idiotic and extremely expensive decision to put the whole line underground. I also do not think much of that $66.9 billion price tag. That figure was itself the result of vigorous massaging – previously the governemnt had admitted to something in the upper 80s. And since the project was approved there have been spectacular rises in the predicted costs of other MTR projects. Face it, folks, this white elephant is eventually going to leave us no change from $100 billion. I suppose the government has to get rid of the surplus somehow.

Anyway, be that as it may, the villagers have to move, and many of them settled on a vacant plot in Yuen Kong, another village. Their move has been delayed because the only access to the new site is a road through the existing village, and the road is private. The owners refused to allow the newcomers to use it unless they paid sums initially reported at several hundred thousand and rising to $5 million later. The names of the extortionists were never divulged. Officials might have been expected at some point in this fracas to intervene, as they did in Fairview Park, to ensure that the owners did not use their legal powers to inconvenience other people, even if those other people wished to kill their children. Not a bit of it. The offiicial line was that this was an entirely private matter involving potential users of the road and its owners. Officials would not touch it with a barge pole. In the end the would-be migrants were rescued by Mr Lau Wong-fat, who recruited a mystery donor to pay the mystery extortionist or extortionists. Clearly Mr Lau is wasted on Exco – he should be negotiating with Somali pirates, to whom some residents of Yuen Kong display a remarkable resemblance.

This is a depressing spectacle. If the government really wishes to discourage unreasonable behaviour in New Territories villages it has planty of means at its disposal. Relying on Mr Lau is pathetic. It is also wrong in principle. Mr Lau is the chairman of the Heung Yee Kuk, which represents indigenous villagers. They are only a small minority in the New Territories population and it is unfair to say the least that the affairs of the region should be run entirely in their interest.  Also Mr Lau has a famously poor memory. I felt a twinge of sympathy for the Tsoi Yuen villager who wanted the agreement in writing, though it will be interesting to see who, if anyone, will sign it.