tim's experiment

I have occasionally wondered if Hong Kong might be best described as ruled by the rich and for the rich. The truth is perhaps worse. The latest proposed change to the law governing limited companies suggests we are ruled by criminals for criminals.

The idea that company directors should be able to conceal their names from inquirers stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of limited companies. That purpose is to allow people to do business without the risk of having their entire property seized by creditors if a deal goes awry. In other words the purpose of a limited company is to allow people to run up debts which they may not be able to repay. It is not only unnecessary but unconscionable that people enjoying this privilege should also be able to conceal their identities. I notice that there has been no talk of allowing people to remain anonymous if they trade under other names without forming companies. The Register of Business Names will presumably remain public. It would serve no useful purpose if it was not. The registers of doctors and lawyers will remain public. People can also consult the Societies Register to fund out who is behind harmless recreational clubs. It is entirely right and proper that anyone who is interested in the affairs of Dubious Enterprises Ltd should be able to find out who its directors really are. Nobody is forced to become a company director. Shy people can trade on their own account.

Whatever the merits of this argument, though, the scandal pales by the revelation (thank you Ming Pao) that the 16-member committee which approved the innovation included no less than 12 people who were company directors, every one of whom had in defiance of the law registered a bogus address as his home. The form they fill in requires a home address. It seems local businessmen, at least in Legco circles, prefer to put the address of an office or factory. This is a disgraceful episode. Come on you legislators! Does the phrase “conflict of interest” ring a bell somewhere? You were not put in that chamber to legalise your own crimes. Will we now hear from all those people who were pushing for Long Hair to be drummed out of Legco after his conviction for disrupting a bogus consultation meeting? Can we rename the committee concerned the Nameless and Shameless Committee?

All this has given rise to some interesting discussion of the status of that Hong Kong basic item, the ID card number. Of course when ID cards were introduced we were told that only the police would have the right to demand a look at one. Naturally, as was predicted at the time, once it was known that everyone had an ID card, all sorts of people arrogated to themselves the right to look at it. And they frequently make a note of the number. It is a good point, though, that the number as such tells people nothing, or almost nothing, about you. It does not incorporate your nationality, religion, appearance or sexual preferences. All it does is to give you a unique identity in a town with a shortage of different personal names. Connoisseurs may be able to tease a few fragments of Immigration information from the numbers and letters, but for most of us it is just like a human number plate. It is not, and is not supposed to be, like a PIN. So here we go: mine is XD680118(3). Although personally I think bloggers should be allowed to remain anonymous, if they desire it.

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The neew 3-3-4 arreangement is now running into rough water, as was to be expected. The problem (I claim no credit for predicting this: it was obvious) is the way students are now admitted and shunted into particular programmes. Actually the whole problem is unnecessary. Universities could have kept the old system under which students applied for a programme and knew when admitted what they would be doing. This was not incompatible with a four-year programme, or with a common first year devoted to General Education. But the heads of universities decided that admission should be on a Faculty or School basis. A few cherished – or influential – programmes were exempted from this toxic innovation. For the rest, the students have now discovered that many of them will not be able to pursue the programme of their choice. And they are not happy.

There are two reasons for this. One is that if a particular programme is more popular than others the university concerned will simply set a quota. Students who are not admitted to this programme will have to choose something else. This is annoying. It is made more annoying because the choice is effectively constrained by the entirely arbitrary administrative boundaries between Faculties or Schools. A student who is refused for Accountancy, for example, will not be able to switch to Computer Science because it is not in the Business School. Some restrictions will depend on decisions made long ago by accident: is History an Art? Is Geography a Science?

Even more annoying, the selection will be on Grade Point Average, or in other words on performance in First Year subjects which, by definition, have nothing to do with your hoped for Major. In other words, back to Examination Hell, boys and girls. The old A Level tensions have not been slackened; they have merely been moved from school to university.

This brings us to another looming problem. The educational advantages and disadvantages of students spending the years between 17 and 18  in school or in a university are something that can be argued over endlessly. But there are other issues. Students under the stress of important examinations and difficult decisions under uncertainty will have problems. Some of them will encounter illness, mental or otherwise; some of them will have relationship problems, some of them may just need a friendly ear. In school this sort of thing is catered for as a matter of course. Teachers accept that they have pastoral duties as well as educational ones. Students who have been in the school for years will know who they feel comfortable confiding in and can advise more recent arrivals. There is a structure of houses and classes which provides a social environment.

The first year in university, as we have now reconstructed it, lacks many of these features. The student is in a strange environment. He or she is one of several hundred admitted to a particular Faculty or School. Classes will be large. The student will be, or will easily become, an alienated and isolated individual, lost in a lonely crowd. The more alert universities are trying to construct some kind of advisory or tutorial mechanism, but under these circumstances progress is not likely to be impressive. The student does not belong to anybody yet, so nobody feels responsible for him or her. University teachers have had no training or preparation for the role of advisor or counsellor. Of course they have had no training for the role of teacher either but they do not believe this to be necessary. Many of them are reluctant to engage in an advisory role and some of them are acutely afraid of the blame, or guilt, which may settle on them if a case ends in tragedy.

This may seem a shamefully timid attitude but as a prediction about the future it is spot on. Tragedies there will be. This is an entirely avoidable consequence of universities setting up a system which requires in them qualities which they do not possess. That is, of course, not what you will read in the press releases. In universities, I have discovered, you do not get a higher standard of administration. You get more elaborate and sophisticated excuses.

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Excuse the four-letter word, but on my last trip back to the ancestral village in the UK I made an interesting discovery. The f-word has come out. Of course in my youth we used it, on occasion. And we all knew what it meant. But there was an unstated rule, even among the most foul-mouthed of us, that it was not to be used in mixed company.

This was not just some bourgeois convention found in “polite society”. Almost everyone who was older than me had been conscripted into the forces for two years. They had there learned a vast repertoire of really obscene songs which were commonly sung in the communal bath after rugby or football matches. We were not prudish in our speech, at least in men-only occasions. But The Word was not used in public speeches, or in the media. A whole generation of publishers had wrestled with the problem of how to handle That Word in books devoted to the War, then of recent vintage. Some used asterisks, some used substitutes which fooled nobody like “frig” or  ” “flick”. Few dared simply to censor the offending word. After all the Other Ranks had won the war as well.

In the 60s the polite convention, like so many others, came under attack. With the abolition of stage censorship it became possible to use the word in plays and this was, at the expense of some controversy, done. The Word briefly appeared on television – I was watching at the time – when it fell from the lips of Kenneth Tynan. Speaking in defence of a show called “Oh Calcutta” which plumbed new depths of indelicacy he maintained that the word, which he uttered, was now no longer controversial. This was not true, at least in my family, where the arrival of the first broadcast f*** caused much discussion, some of it critical. Mr Tynan was not punished for his trailblazing, but it was not – at the time – copied or repeated.

My first inkling that times were finally a-changing in this matter came some ten years ago when I went with my son – then about 14 – to Glasgow for a week. During the day we both attended classes and in the evenings we watched television for an hour or two before going out to eat. We stumbled across a cooking programme which turned out to be Gordon Ramsey exploring restaurant disasters. Mr Ramsey’s reputation as a man with an eff constantly at the tip of his tongue had not yet reached Hong Kong. So we were taken completely by surprise when someone asked the kitchen guru how he could tell if a piece of meat was done. “Remember the old saying,” said Gordon, “if it’s brown it’s cooked, if it black it’s fooked.”  Clearly cooking programmes are not what they were. I was a bit offended at the time. After all this was an hour when kids might well be viewing. But I later discovered that Mr Ramsay uses the same language in front of his wife and children, so no doubt he cannot be expected to refrain in front of other people’s.

On my last visit to the UK there had been further progress – or if you like further degeneration. Reality television is bleep-free but not fuck-free. During one perfectly respectable programme there was a loud conversation going on in the background, from which the word “motherfucker” floated audibly into the soundtrack. Nobody turned a hair. This development has not yet arrived in Hong Kong, where Mr Ramsey’s programmes unleash a veritable blizzard of bleeps. But it is probably on its way, so we may well consider whether it is a Good Thing.

Some people will no doubt say it is. Liberated ladies may dismiss the convention that certain words should not be used in their presence as an old-fashioned symbol of their inferior status, like men opening doors for them or walking on the road side of the pavement. Sociologists – or at least some of them – believe that in the phase of history when self-control and restraint were desirable and badly needed social goals it was useful to have a large range of polite inhibitions, even if some of them were unjustifiable. Now that we feel secure in our ability to refrain from genuinely anti-social behaviour we can take the skirts off our piano legs, as it were.

Arguments against? Well this has gone beyond the stage where people were using the word to discuss sex in public, no doubt a useful liberation. It has now become an all-purpose adjective, often used in insulting contexts. Frequent use will devalue it, so that now we find footballers reduced to assailing each other with racist epithets because “fucking cunt” has become so familiar as to be almost a term of endearment. I suppose in the end it’s a matter of taste, and this epidemic of public effing and blinding is not to mine. Perhaps I’m getting old.

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It is sadly rather common for writers about business and economics to forget that many of their most common concepts started as metaphors. This leads to abuse of common phrases like “bottom line”, which does not mean the point in your negotiation at which you will not give way, or “soft landing”, which does not mean an arrival on a runway at all. A more entertaining possibility is that writers whose sensitivity to this point has dulled will produce mixed metaphors, in which incompatible  specimens are paired.

Monday’s Business Post delighted discerning readers with a heroic example: NEW HUBS TO CUSHION EXODUS FROM DELTA. How, one might wonder, does one cushion an exodus? Would you want to cushion an exodus? And supposing you did, would a supply of new hubs come in handy? The entertaining possibility might also occurr to the suspicious reader that the headline would make just as much, or maybe more, sense if you threw it all up in the air and took whatever landed: New cushions to exodus hubs,  exodus to new hub cushions, new cushion to delta exodus from hubs…

The usual solution to problems of this kind is to read the story. But the story started with an intimidating intro (first paragraph) running to 53 words. This is usually regarded as too many and this was a good example of why. It announced a statement and then said it was wrong. What was wanted, and need not take up too much space, (I used to do this sort of thing for a living) was “China will remain a manufacturing centre despite some factories moving abroad, because most of those leaving the Pearl River Delta are only going to cheaper provinces further West, analysts say.” Still a fairly boring story, as most business stories are. I wouldn’t change the headline, which is very entertaining.

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