tim's experiment

Walk down any street in Tsimshatsui and a man will offer you either a copy watch or a suit.

Well we all understand what a copy watch is. Probably we all understand what a suit is as well. This is an unremarked landmark in the success of cultural imperialism.

The other day I was looking at one of the numerous pictures of the latest festivities in Beijing. Every member of the new leadership – there are reportedly some women there but they had eluded the cameraman – was wearing a black or dark grey suit: jacket, three buttons. Trousers, down to top of feet. With a white shirt and a tie, colour of tie the only thing according to individual taste.

Look at a picture of President Trump on the campaign trail, or in a cabinet meeting, and you see the same thing on every man present: suit, tie, white shirt… The only difference is that the Americans have more variety in hair colour, led by Mr Trump’s notorious yellow follicles.

In Beijing hair is worn black, despite the rather high average age. There is a curious symmetry here. On porn sites there are an implausible number of blondes, in bulletins from the Politburo an implausible number of ravens.

The depressing thing about this is that you actually see more variety in a British Army infantry school passing out parade. They have the same guns, the same uniforms, but at least the graduates wear the hats of the unit they are going to join, which produces an interesting variety of caps, berets, and strange Scottish headgear.

It is difficult to believe that a society, whether Chinese or American, can be a hotbed of originality and innovation if its leading members, as a matter of course, all wear the same uniform.

The lounge suit, as it is officially called, is one of the few inventions which has not been claimed by Chinese historians. People who take an interest in this backwater trace its origins to Charles II, the Merry Monarch or the Harvey Weinstein of the 17th century, according to taste.

In 1666 Charles, following the example of Louis XIV, instituted a dress code for gentlemen at court (that is the Royal court, not the tennis court or the legal one) which comprised knee breeches, a coat, and a waistcoat. Gents were also required to wear a cravat (a now extinct variation on the tie) and a hat.

It seems sober gentlemen got in the habit of having the three pieces in the same colour though this was certainly not compulsory.

The other person who shares the blame for the modern suit is Beau Brummel, the dissolute but very fashion-conscious side-kick of the Prince Regent, later George IV. I must say that pictures of Mr Brummel do not look much like modern suit wearers but apparently he more or less invented trousers which came down to the ankle, as opposed to the previously customary knee breeches.

Something we would recognize as a suit appeared towards the end of the 19^th century, initially as sporting wear. By sporting we mean aristocratic sports: shooting and fishing, nothing too athletic.

By the end of World War 1 the “lounge suit” had become the standard wear for men of all classes except the very rich, who persisted in such interesting oddities as the tail and frock coats.

In the second half of the 20^th century there was a general movement on the part of people previously considered toffs to stress their sympathy with the general public by wearing the same clothes. So a high level of uniformity was achieved and if you look at pictures of crowd scenes, whether at sporting events or factory gates, weddings or funerals, most people are wearing the suit.

For me this came a bit unglued in the 60s. Like most people who went to boarding schools I had been required to wear a uniform which was clearly intended to prepare us for life in a suit – trousers with crease, blazer, white shirt, school tie…

When I went to university I supposed that people would wear a civilian version of this, involving maybe what was called a sports jacket (a tweedy thing you wore with non-matching trousers) and perhaps a cravat, which survived in those days as a comfortable alternative to the knotted tie. To my surprise a lot of people managed quite well in jeans and a sweater so after my first term I joined them.

We now have a paradox: lots of people wear suits to work. Nobody would dream of wearing one at the weekend unless they were going to church, and perhaps not even then.

One of my lady friends observed on this topic that “anyone who is wearing a suit is in sales.” The rest of us are free.

And what do we do with our freedom? We develop another uniform. I have every sympathy for Mr Howard Lam, the politician who may or may not have been abducted by mysterious assailants who stuck staples in his legs. Clearly Mr Lam either had a very nasty experience or needs some heavyweight head help.

I could not help thinking, though, observing still pictures of the video which allegedly showed him walking through Mong Kok unkidnapped, that there must be a great many similarly dressed men in Hong Kong.

He was wearing long shorts in dark blue or black, a dark tee-shirt, black peaked cap with logo, trainers and a black rucksack. I have every one of these. The thought occurred to me (bad taste warning) that if I was short of a Halloween costume I could assemble my shorts, tee-shirt, cap, rucksack and trainers, draw a few crosses on my legs and go as Mr Lam.

In one of C.S.Forester’s Hornblower books (well OK it’s The Commodore; I know the Hornblower saga backwards) the hero muses on the burden presented by civilian life, where he has to choose his clothes, and take the blame if they do not suit him. Wearing the King’s uniform was less stressful, because whether it suited him or not there was no choice involved.

It seems that ladies cannot avoid this problem. You are judged by what you choose to wear. In my trade union official days aspiring lady officials wore men’s shirts and jeans, flat shoes and no make-up (the Rosa Luxemburg look?) but this clearly suited some people much better than others.

Men on the other hand can avoid this problem by tacitly agreeing that they will all wear the same thing. Which is what we do whenever we can. Whether this is mere laziness or reflects some inherited tribal instinct I leave to the scientists.

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An autocratic police state run by a centralized dictatorship. A multi-ethnic empire imposing its chosen language on administration and education, trampling local dialects.

A variety of different administrative arrangements, rights and privileges in different regions, with defence and foreign affairs strictly reserved for the central authorities. Functional constituencies…

Before you jump to conclusions, I have been reading “The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918”, by A.J.P. Taylor, a history of what became the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The book is almost as old as I am – it was first published in 1948 – but Mr Taylor was a noted stylist whose prose still gives pleasure. I wonder if the same will be said of the contemporary historians who, now that he is safely dead, are rather rude about him.

The story told here is a depressing one. It starts with defeat by Napoleon, and ends with Austria starting the First World War and disintegrating under the strain of defeat in it.

Beijing officials will not perhaps welcome the suggestion that, having rejected Stalin’s empire as a model, they should turn to Franz Josef’s. It isn’t exactly a shining example. Switzerland is erroneously accused (in The Third Man) of producing nothing but the cuckoo clock. What can we attribute to Vienna but a lot of classical music and some lovely pastries?

Well try this, in the account of the achievements of the “German liberals”, who briefly enjoyed a period of political prominence before normal aristocratic service resumed in 1871: “They thought it was the duty of liberalism to protect the individual from the state and could not imagine a state under popular control, least of all under their own.”

And yet “These constitutional laws … created a system of individual freedom… There was equality before the law, civil marriage, freedom of expression, freedom of movement…

“The police state still existed … but it was a police state exposed to public criticism and confined to civilized behaviour.”

“Political affairs were discussed without restraint, and the German Austrian, at any rate, felt himself free.”

Now there are no exact parallels in history, and there is clearly one topical item missing here. The German liberals, because they spoke the imperial language as their mother tongue, had nothing to say about the language question, which was a live issue in most of the Austrian empire, where people spoke a wide variety of mother tongues.

Also you could say that the Hong Kong liberals approached this from the other direction. Our pioneers hoped that democracy in Hong Kong would lead to democracy in China. Contemporary localists do not imagine a state under popular control and see democracy only as a way to protect the individual in Hong Kong from the state in Beijing.

Clearly though there is an outline here of a sort of grand bargain which might, as it did in Austria, deliver several decades of comparative peace and freedom, though it will probably have to wait until the regime in Beijing, which is very full of itself at the moment, has suffered a painful collision with economics.

A lot of Hong Kong people would be prepared to settle for the rule of law, freedom of expression, freedom of movement and a “police state exposed to public criticism and confined to civilized behaviour.” Nobody really wants to dabble in defence and foreign affairs, or for that matter in the numerous and difficult problems presented by the internal affairs of the rest of the Chinese empire. They want to feel free here.

If this was consistent with absolute monarchy in Vienna there is no reason why it should be inconsistent with “China’s absolute sovereignty” over Hong Kong. It just needs people to get their heads round it. Is there anyone in Beijing who can even spell “self-restraint”?

Observant readers will have noticed that I missed out one of the achievements of the German Liberals, the arrival of “civil marriage”. This was one aspect of the resumption of secular control over the Roman Catholic church. This is generally regarded as an exotic European problem of no relevance to Hong Kong, but I am not so sure. Hong Kong, as one observer put it long ago, enjoys freedom of religion but not freedom from religion.

This brings me to the matter of the Gay Games and the government’s tepid response to the news that this festival is coming to Hong Kong. Every columnist in Hong Kong has lambasted the government’s approach to this matter already, so I shall be brief.

If Carrie Lam feels that presiding over a festival of pink power is inconsistent with her religious beliefs nobody could complain if she sent someone else to do the opening ceremony. Not C.Y. Leung, please.

The question of how the government should handle the games, however, is not a matter of personal conscience, it is a matter of public policy. And the relevant public policy is that hosting mega events is good for the economy and the territory’s reputation so they should be supported with encouragement, money and help with booking venues.

This policy should not be abandoned in deference to the views of a minority of Godbotherers, even if the Chief Executive happens to be one of them.

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Usually when an international story about human behaviour appears we are treated, sooner or later, to a local version. So far though, the current fashion for complaining about the sins of Harvey Weinstein and other male pigs has not prompted any Hong Kong victims of harassment or worse to come out and tell their stories.

We can safely exclude the possibility that this is because there is nothing to tell.

Hong Kong had a world-class film industry, and it had a world-class casting couch habit as well. If anything, it seems, the situation was and is worse here, because standards of behaviour are lower.

Mr Weinsten may be a man with whom no woman is safe, but at least he is not a gangster. The Hong Kong film business has long been a popular money-laundering machine for people with what newspapers in countries with English-style libel laws call a colourful background.

As a result female actors are expected to be athletic and sociable not only with the producer but with his sundry friends and financiers as well. This toxic culture only occasionally surfaces in public. It is occasionally alluded to in print in a rather indirect way if a young actor commits suicide.

Otherwise we get the occasional accident. There was the case of the well-known TV personality whose method of expanding his social circle was to promise potential bed partners an audition. This only came to light because one of these partners, possibly suspecting that the glittering career did not beckon as advertised, had an accomplice emerge from the wardrobe with a camera in the middle of the proceedings.

The upshot of this was that she and the camera person were charged with blackmail. The star of the show was allowed complete anonymity by the court..

Then there was a case which involved dangerous driving. The driver, who was running a TV station at the time, had been celebrating an agreement to buy advertising. The buyer appeared in court with an implausible tale of how much they had not been drinking and explained the deal, which included the interesting provision that the casting of all the female parts in the show to be sponsored should be done by him. Why a young millionaire with no relevant experience was given this job was not explained.

Then there was the time Mark Thatcher, son of the famous Margaret, came to Hong Kong as the guest of some of the less puritanical parts of the financial industry. They were looking for a reputable international face and he was looking, I suppose, for some money.

However this story, which was mainly about business, took an interesting turn. One of the less puritanical parts had a showbiz connection and Mr T spent an evening with a quite beautiful young actress who was, I suppose, on their books. We tracked them through dinner and disco. What happened after that remained unknown. Clearly the situation was rife with possible misunderstandings.

Readers who have been around for a while may also recall the case of a magazine which printed on its front cover a picture, heavily pixillated, which was allegedly of an actress who had been kidnapped and beaten up a few years before. This led to noisy protests from showbiz people at the publication of the picture. The prevalence of kidnappings and beatings in their industry, on the other hand, apparently did not call for comment.

We must not, I suppose, suggest that the entertainment business is the only one with this problem. Factories and other work establishments employing large numbers of women present obvious opportunities for abuse of power.

So, I fear, do educational establishments. There are two schools of thought in local universities. One holds that students are adults and if they want to socialize or sleep with profs that is their decision. The other holds that this is a dangerously asymmetrical situation full of dire possibilities and should be avoided.

Personally I prefer the second view. But that is easy for me, because by the time I got into the business I was a happily married man old enough to be the average student’s father. Those who take a more conventional approach to academic work face a long period in which they are neither purely a student nor completely a professor. This is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons, of which the danger of romantic misunderstandings is only one.

Well we shall see. I suspect it will only take one example to unleash a flood of stories. But Hong Kong is not as kind to whistleblowers of all kinds as … say, the US. I am not sure, if I had a daughter who was considering being that one example, whether I would encourage this, or not.

Let us hope, at least, that we shall not see much of that weasel word “inappropriate”. Good behaviour and bad behavior we all understand. “Inappropriate” sounds like an etiquette problem, like using the wrong fork for your fish or wearing a hat in church.

Most of the behaviour which people are complaining about is not impolite; it’s criminal. Forcing people to have sex with you is rape. Grabbing their private parts is indecent assault. Grabbing other parts is assault.

I realize that there are marginal cases where two people may have different views of the situation. Indeed the import of an action depends on its context. I had a lady colleague of considerable beauty on a Hong Kong newspaper who was often patted by the editor. There was nothing explicitly erotic about it. He patted her shoulder. She didn’t like it, didn’t complain, and eventually left. Clearly this would now be regarded as objectionable

On the other hand I had a colleague in a local university who occasionally patted me. This was also on the shoulder and I did not take it as an erotic invitation. I was a bit disconcerted the first time – do I look like a dog? Apparently this lady regarded me as a large and potentially fierce animal.

But then some writers maintain that this is the world women live in; they permanently share their space with larger, stronger and potentially fierce animals called men. Soothing massage is a survival skill.

This brings us to another delicate area, which is the question of consent. The Economist opened its discussion of Mr Weinstein’s alleged crimes with this quote: “I spent a great deal of time on my knees,” Marilyn Monroe once said of how she became a film star. “If you didn’t go along, there were 25 girls who would.”

You have to wonder what was going through the minds of all these young things who turned up for an evening “interview” in Mr Weinstein’s hotel room. After all this is not a promising venue. Generations of Hong Kong reporters have been told, by me, never to agree to an interview in a hotel room. Temptation lurks if you are alone in a small room with a bed and a person of the opposite sex, or in these liberated days with a person of the same sex if that is your preference.

There was an amusing piece in the Guardian the other day by a lady who accepted the Weinstein invitation but turned up with a chaperone. The “interviewer” was angry and the “interview” extremely short.

Mr Weinstein’s proclivities were in fact well known. I have a friend in Hong Kong who, in his prime, was notorious for his, shall we say, hearty sexual appetite. I once asked him if this bothered him. On the contrary, he said, he treasured it because it meant that if a lady accepted an invitation to his flat she knew what was likely to happen later. She might refuse his advances but she would not be shocked by the approach.

I do not suggest that we should blame the victims in any way. But I do wonder if some of the people who now claim to have been shocked by Mr Weinstein’s actions were, at the time, willing to pay an unsavoury price to further their careers. They shouldn’t have been asked for it, of course, but Ms Monroe was surely not the first, or the last, to feel that this was the way the business worked.

The times are now a-changing in Hollywood. Are they changing here?

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