tim's experiment

When I was a student, which was admittedly quite a long time ago, the organisation of picketing, protests and petitions was done by us, entirely off our own bat. True the government paid student union fees for most students, but this wasn’t really intended to encourage political activism. Meanwhile the university administration tried to keep out of the line of fire and not look too embarrassed. This is not the way things are done at the university where I still, intermittently, work. Here the protests, petitions etc are organised by the university administration, encouraged beforehand and thanked afterwards in emails from the Vice Chancellor. Huge banners have appeared whose production values bespeak an origin in the University PR budget. I found a Dean – no less – collecting signatures the other day.

This is all intended to put pressure on the authorities over the rezoning of a piece of land which the university has had its eye on for some time. If the patch is rezoned it will be used for housing. It is quite a small patch of land. The proposed use for housing was part of the new administration’s gesture politics. There may be a shortage of housing in Hong Kong but putting a few up-market flats in Kowloon Tong is not going to solve it.

For geography fans, my university is the Hong Kong Baptist one. Alongside our long stringy campus is the former premises of the Lee Wai Lee Technical Institute, which has moved. At the moment the buildings are being used as overflow accommodation for two universities which, having only had ten years to prepare for the arrival of four-year degrees, have found themselves short of teaching space.  The official proposal is to allocate the northern half of the site to Baptist, and use the southern half for housing.

Of course this is silly. In housing terms it’s a trivial site. And it doesn’t make sense to put housing there because apart from the nearby hordes of students there is also a fire station next door which is quite noisy. The university’s anxiety is understandable, because it is sandwiched between a hill and the vast empty space formerly known as the Prince of Wales barracks and now occupied, or rather unoccupied, by the PLA. The chances of expanding within walking distance of existing buildings are very limited.

Whether the government will take kindly to being pressured in this way remains to be seen. The Institute of Education succeeded in a rather similar campaign to keep its independence. And they are still being punished for it. I also wonder where else this stirring up of popular fervour may lead. Student activism is an uncontrollable force and the genie, once out of its bottle,  may be difficult to put back.

I do think, speaking as one who mis-spent quite a lot of his youth on this sort of thing, that the university made a serious tactical error by announcing that it wanted the new plot for a Chinese Medicine Teaching Hospital. This made a rather simple question – housing or education – more complicated by introducing other questions, such as whether Hong Kong really needs a Chinese Medicine teaching hospital, and if so whether Baptist U would be the best institution to supply it. This part of the campaign seems to have been downplayed lately. It is now a simple choice: flats for mainland money launderers or teaching space for Hong Kong students. So if the petition comes your way, please sign it.