tim's experiment

The 360 cable car from Tung Chung to the Big Buddha has now been out of action for a couple of months. No doubt the shopkeepers have been feeling the pain and many visitors have been disappointed. Yet, this time, nobody has been complaining about the management.

This is not what happened when the cable car endured a little spate of opening glitches. There is a habit in Hong Kong, of which locals appear completely unaware, and indeed which appears so natural and inevitable that it seems almost churlish to complain. If something goes wrong there is a tendency to find a foreigner to take the blame. This satisfies everyone except the foreigner conerned, who with luck will leave the territory and be in no position to complain. The habit surfaces in all sorts of places. Education is no bar to it: it is often the outcome of problems in universities (and institutes which would like to be universities). Sometimes, as in the Harbourfest debacle, the foreign scapegoat bites back. More often, as in the airport launch complaints, he has already left us and perhaps does not mind too much what is said about him.

When the cable care had a few initial teething troubles, as new pieces of machinery tend to, a number of people who had shown no previous signs of knowledge pertaining to cable cars opined that the management company, which was Australian, were not up to snuff. The management company was duely fired, and the MTR took over. Everyone was happy. Readers will note that the standard of management appears actually to be no better. Maybe cable cars are harder to run than appears on the surface. Maybe the MTR’s formidable engineering skills are not of the type required. Whatever the reason it appears that the cable car is still accident prone. As there is no longer a foreigner to blame I suppose we just have to put it down to bad luck.