tim's experiment

Concern about the number of mainland ladies coming to Hong Kong to have their babies has mysteriously transformed itself into a preoccupation with the fact that the resulting kids have an automatic right to live in Hong Kong. Hence the solution to the problem now being touted on all sides is to come up with some legal way of removing the automatic residency from the off-spring. This seems to me to be rather unrealistic. It is not based on any careful research among mainland mothers-to-be and depends on a rather poor stab at their likely motivations.

No doubt if you are a pregnant mainlander the prospect of your kid having the right to live in Hong Kong is not unwelcome. But it hardly seems a strong enough attraction to offset the considerable cost, inconvenience and even danger involved in having your baby in Hong Kong. After all his or her right to live in Hong Kong is going to be a rather fragile asset. The kid is going to stay with you on the mainland, in the majority of cases, until he or she is old enough to leave home for work or university – say 18 years. In that time a lot of things could happen. The Hong Kong government may change the law so that your kid is no longer a resident. Or the need for permission may disappear: in most places citizens are allowed to travel freely within their own countries. This arrangement has not yet reached China but things are getting looser. Another possibility is that after 18 years no sane mainlander wishes to move to Hong Kong anyway, there being no attractive difference any more. If something really dire happens in China, Hong Kong can no longer expect to be left out. So giving birth in Hong Kong, as a long-term investment in the future of your sprog, doesn’t have a great deal going for it.

Meanwhile there are other more cogent reasons which have nothing to do with the Basic Law of the Hong Kong SAR and relate to parts of China’s current arrangements which local left-wingers would perhaps rather not draw to our attention. The One-child policy, to begin with, is still policy. Mothers embarking on a second pregnancy are still subject to a good deal of discouragement and some post-natal persecution. No doubt having it in Hong Kong is not a complete solution to this problem, but it helps.

There is also the matter of mainland medical services. We are occcasionally assured that some hospitals in China are as good as any hospitals anywhere, but the average standard is quite low, and corruption is a problem. There is also the matter of unscrupulous suppliers of necessities like baby milk. In a country where people are prepared to poison babies to make a fast buck, mothers-to-be may feel that the hazards of having their babies on the threshold of a Tuen Mun casualty department are worth risking, and indeed smaller than the dangers of a conventional delivery nearer home.

Given these attractions you have to wonder whether mainland mothers would be significantly deterred by an announcement that their off-spring would no longer be instant Hong Kongers. Actually if people really believe this is the main consideration the problem could be solved very easily by announcing that all babies born anywhere in China would have the automatic right to live in Hong Kong. This would entirely remove the incentive to give birth in Hong Kong and the babies, when grown, would still have to solve the sort of problems which face would-be migrants anywhere: jobs, housing, culture shock …. And of course if the present arrangements are still in force they will need exit permits from the Chinese authorities.

But this will of course not happen. There is no room in our inn. Perhaps we should offer a stable.

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One of the small fears which haunts newspaper design departments is the possibility of an advert clashing painfully with the story next to it. Airlines do not want their ads next to stories about air crashes, car makers do not with to be neighbours to complaints about the safety of their chariots, oil companies do not wish to wallow in warming stories, and so on. Still, accidents do happen, sometimes just because of coincidence. There was a memorable specimen during the problems in the Congo many years ago. The story was headlined “Two nuns raped in Congo”. The ad underneath was for pipe tobacco. It went “Gentlemen prefer Three Nuns”. In my early page planning days the ads people would try to avoid this sort of thing by putting on the plan they sent you the spaces to be reserved for ads, and some indication of what the ad was. However in these electronic days nobody uses paper plans any more so this habit has subsided. Hence the unfortunate coincidence in Thursday’s Hong Kong Standard.

The ad concerned a “Business Opportunity in the United Kingdom”. This was described as “a large, successful and profitable property business in Birmingham”. Investors could take a half share for about 10 million Sterling or buy the whole thing for twice as much. I have no reason at all to doubt the bona fides of this offer, and if I had a few million pounds to spare I would be happy to consider it. No doubt more details will be forthcoming to serious inquirers. I suspect, however, that there will not be many of them, because the story next door was about a couple who had pocketed HK$22 million of investors’ money by promoting a fraudulent enterprise involving the sale of preserved fruit. Readers who had waded through ten paragraphs of prune fraud were probably not minded to pursue property investments in Birmingham, however prosperous, if the only contact was a yahoo email address.

Moral? Advertise your business opportunities in the business pages, perhaps.

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I have wanted to visit Tai O for a long time. Many years ago, when the Standard was a real newspaper for which you had to pay, it had an investigative reporting team of which I was a member. Somewhere I still have the prize we were awarded for a story about Tai O. But we did not all actually go to Tai O, which was even less accessible then than it is now. One member went on a freebee, ostensibly to look at, and spend the night in, one of the stilt houses, of which more later. My main contribution was to tell her to keep her eyes peeled and ears to the ground, for it is axiomatic that in neglected outlying areas rarely visited by reporters there are stories waiting to be discovered. She duly returned with the expected feature on stilt houses and the makings of a cracking story on the local smuggling scene, with which we did very well.

So, at last, to Tai O. This is much easier than it was, because there is now an MTR line to Tung Chung. From here you can get a ferry, which is rather intermittent, or a water taxi. Or, cheaper, you can take the bus. This is quite a luxurious model by Hong Kong standards (Lantau has its own bus company) and is very frequent. It chugs over a pass through dramatic mountain scenery to the south side of the island. It visits a few seaside villages, and then chugs over another pass through even more dramatic mountain scenery to the north western corner of Lantau, which is where Tai O is. There is a bus station and a car park. From here on you are on foot.

The main tourist attraction is the stilt houses. As most of Tai O is either swamp or mudflat the inhabitants built out from the slim slice of terra firma on thin piles driven into the dirt. The effect looks a bit haphazard and fragile, but it seems they are safe enough. Some eager NGO has been renovating the stilt houses so most of them are now coloured the silver of, I presume, unpainted tin sheet. A few curmudgeons still have the traditional rust and some extroverts have painted their stilt houses in lively colours. Most of the houses look very much like those wood and tin sheet structures which used to carpet Hong Kong hillsides and were called squatter huts. Squatter huts were regarded as a plague and new ones were frequently demolished by a special unit of the Housing Authority. Whether the official hostility was due to the dangers of landslips and fires, the desire to free land for development, or sympathy for hut occupants is hard to say. Anyway most of the urban squatter huts have disappeared, though you can still find a few if you know where to look.

The inhabitants of Tai O managed to persuade the local sprig of the Hong Kong government to try a different approach. The huts have legal water and electricity. Emergency phones and public fire extinguishers dot the hut areas. Tai O people are said to be keen on keeping their traditional arrangements. A few of the huts still have an odd shape, like a small railway carriage or a large loaf. I presume these are modelled on the structures people used to have on live-aboard sampans.

Like most distant villages, Tai O has a large and prosperous primary school and a lot of old folks, but not much in between. It is a noticably hospitable spot. Ancient citizens will happily show you round their homes if you look interested. Other attractions: there are a lot of temples. The streets, which are too small for motor vehicles, make for pleasant walking. A variety of street food is offered and there are some pleasant eating spots on the river side of some stilt houses. I would like to note here the particular kindness of the staff in Solo: when I fell asleep on their sofa they did not throw me out, they put a blanket over me so I did not get cold.

It will be interesting to see how things go for Tai O. It obviously gets more visitors nowadays and is trying for s many as it can attract. There is a small museum. Sino Land is turning the old police station into a boutique hotel.  I understand they do not expect it to make money, which is perhaps just as well. There is a bed and breakfast in the main street with a promising bar but it closes when the owner is tired or busy with other things, so you need to book in advance. There are almost no “village houses” of the usual type, which perhaps goes to show that the demand depends on the ability to abuse the policy by selling to outsiders, which is hardly practical in Tai O because it is so far away. If you are trying to amuse someone in Hong Kong for a few days and you want something completely different, I recommend the trip. If you have time this is also the centre for dolphin watching.

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