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Archive for February, 2024

On the Wais and wherefores of tourism

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on February 28, 2024| 1 Comment »

The MTR has opened a new shopping mall in Tai Wai, naturally next to the station, called the Wai. This has now displaced Festival Walk as my destination for the weekly Big Shopping Spasm. Oddly, the attraction is not what is there, but what is not there.

In many ways the Wai is much like other malls. It was designed in the modern shopping mall style, which seems intended to maximise the chances of visitors getting lost. All the floors are different shapes; there are few straight lines; escalators are distributed randomly.

The entrance to the car park is also discouraging. You drive four stories down a long and winding spiral road featuring narrow spaces and tight turns. Within days of the mall opening the walls of this road were generously decorated with scrape marks and paint deposits by errant drivers.

The supermarket is, even by Hong Kong standards, a weird shape. Few of our supermarkets follow the boring Western style of floor plan, a large rectangle. The Wai’s supermarket (a Marketplace, Wellcome’s version of Taste; usual local stuff but cosmopolitan decadence also catered for with sushi, choice of cheeses, large wine department etc) is shaped like a deformed dumbell.

What is not there? The tourist traps. There are no international vendors of make-up, perfume, or brand-name handbags, no offerings of watches with real clockwork for the price of a small car, no gold shops. In at least six visits I have only seen one wheeled suitcase.

I have no prejudice, racial or otherwise, against mainlanders. But tourism is an industry which brings benefits to some people and costs to others, a point which seems lost on our government. There is such a thing as enough. Places with Pinterest-worthy attractions have discovered this and acted accordingly. Venice, for example, restricts cruise liners. Barcelona is discouraging Airbnb. Yosemite rations access.

I do not suggest anything like that for Hong Kong. But official dreamers need to recognise that outside the developer hegemony, which has a vested interest in astronomical shop rents, most local people regard visitors to the city like visitors to their home: welcome in limited quantities and at limited times… as long as they behave themselves.

Tourists who congregate at particular spots, as they tend to do, can quickly become an unwelcome part of the scenery. Hong Kong U students have been complaining of tourists gate-crashing their lecturers and photographing the proceedings. I know where this is going. Oxford and Cambridge colleges routinely refuse to admit visitors at all.

Photogenic spots generally may lose their allure if they become a perpetual crowd scene.

This may be a problem which is on the way to solving itself. My early journalism career was spent mostly in fading resorts on the coast of North Lancashire. Morecambe was at the time the butt of cruel jokes. Sample: if you die in Morecambe they prop you up in a bus shelter to make the place look more busy. Blackpool was part-way down the slope which has left it, according to current reports, in many ways the most deprived town in England.

One of the symptoms of decay was a chorus of complaints from local hosts of various kinds that people were no longer coming from a long way away, and as a result visitors did not stay overnight. Most visitors were from nearby towns; they ate their fish and chips, had a few beers and went home the same day.

Another symptom was the increasingly frantic efforts of the local authorities concerned to find some interesting new attraction which would renew the flow of overnight visitors. These rarely seemed to make much difference. Is any of this beginning to sound familiar?

Of course tourist towns can go up as well as down. Historians of the European spa enthusiasm noted the way in which particular spots would suddenly become top destinations after a visit from the Tsar, or the invention of a new bogus water cure. Tourism is like the restaurant business: you are at the mercy of fickle consumers, wafted by the winds of fashion. However good the food, next year’s hot item may steal your customers.

So the search for the secret sauce goes on. Unfortunately it is difficult to be confident that a magical new ingredient will come from an establishment run by mainland officials and recycled policemen. Holiday destinations, like Homeric heroes, are judged by what they are, not by what they do. Hong Kong used to be regarded as a fun place. Now it is not. A shortage of firework displays is not the problem.

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Time for the Director of Audit to stick to his knitting?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 19, 2024| 1 Comment »

Regular readers will recall that a couple of months ago I complained that the Director of Audit had devoted the resources of his department to some nit-picking criticisms of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

I thought there was a danger that this might look like a contribution to the general barrage of abuse from government-friendly quarters which had led to the departure of the university’s vice chancellor.

However it appears from the director’s annual report that this is not what is going on at all. What is going on is a violation not of the separation of powers but of an even older principle: the division of labour.

The Director of Audit, Nelson Lam Chi-yuen, is not a career civil servant. Before he was appointed to his present post by Carrie Lam in 2022 he was an accountant, his political experience limited to membership of the usual sort of consultative bodies and six months on the Legislative Council.

This may explain why he apparently supposes that senior civil servants are free to devote themselves to whatever work they think might be important and interesting, regardless of whether this is their appointed function, or whether it may in fact be someone else’s.

Mr Lam devoted a quarter of his annual report to his efforts to improve the protection of national security, including his farcical foray into the Chinese University. He is reported as complaining, in a newspaper interview, that “government departments and other public organisations either failed to prioritise the national security law or did not fully comply with the government’s requirements.”

“These departments and organisations are at risk of violating the law,” he said.

It seems I am not the only scribe who thought that Mr Lam’s self-appointment as a sort of national security Witchfinder General was straying a bit off-piste, as it were. Why, he was asked at the inevitable press conference, was his department no longer keeping its traditional focus on an audited body’s proper and effective use of money?

His reply deserved quoting in full: “Efficiency and effectiveness refers to whether the audited body abided by the law or not. If they have failed to do so that means they are doing a poor job. If they have broken the law, that would also involve money,” Lam said.

Which of course is rubbish. It is perfectly possible to impair national security without involving money. Effective spending of money is not the same thing as abiding by the law. And ineffective spending may be perfectly legal. Contrariwise there are many things which will eventually involve money if left unchecked, which we do not expect auditors to explore. If the drains in the Central Government Offices are blocked it will eventually cost money; we do not on that account expect the Director of Audit to explore the official sewers.

There are already elaborate mechanisms in place to ensure that government departments and public bodies accord appropriate attention to national security and obey the relevant laws. We have national security police, our shy guardians from over the boundary, the Secretaries for Security and Justice, and so on.

Mr Lam’s formulation that departments and organisations are “at risk” of breaking the law tells us, and should tell him, that he should be leaving law enforcement to police people and lawyers who will have a better idea of whether the risk is real or imagined.

The flip side of the Director of Audit developing a new national security hobby is that it will reduce the resources devoted to his proper function, which is ensuring that government spending is honest and effective.

Nobody else has the knowledge, experience and powers to do this job properly. Amateur observers have no right to extract answers from recalcitrant departments, and potential whistleblowers in the civil service may well be restrained by the thought that whistleblowing is rarely a good career move.

Mr Lam’s innovation in this area is the idea that “not everything has to be audited at once”, so any new policy will be given a few years before it is audited. By which time, surely, it will be too late to do anything about it?

An unintended light on the new approach was shone by Mr Lam’s concluding remark that “the Audit Commission is not trying to pick on the government’s mistake, but trying to step up the government’s accountability and service quality.”

Well perhaps it would be a good idea if someone in the government was trying to “pick on the government’s mistake”, because critics from outside it are “at risk” of breaking the law, as Mr Lam might put it.

And some errors become evident long before a few years have passed. The West Kowloon Cultural District, for example, is tottering towards bankruptcy because its two big museums operate at a loss, as museums generally do, and no arrangement has been made yet to fill in the resulting financial gap.

There is talk of an MTR-like solution, in which the cultural district will go into the business of developing expensive flats. This raises an interesting question. Allowing rail companies to develop the land over and around their stations is justified as allowing the rail operator to share in the extra wealth that it generates when it opens a station. Whether this is an acceptable way of financing a cultural district is perhaps a different matter.

Then if Mr Lam is not too busy he might look at the Express Rail link. It seems most of the travellers on this wonderful innovation are only going to and from stations in nearby Shenzhen, for which purpose a high-speed rail link is inappropriate and ludicrously expensive.

No doubt readers will be able to think of other items which are more worthy of Mr Lam’s sleuthing skills than the Chinese University bookshop. Directors of Audit have traditionally had a high degree of freedom to pursue whatever issue attracts their attention. But freedom, as we are so often reminded these days, has limits.

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The Messi mess: fun, but a distraction from more important things

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on February 7, 2024| Leave a Comment »

A rare moment of public preoccupation has hit Hong Kong as a result of the incident which would in due course probably be called Messigate by the popular tabloids, if we had any left.

The hero of this debacle is Mr Lionel Messi, a footballer of sublime gifts who is now getting a bit long in the tooth. As footballers sometimes do at this stage of their careers he has moved from the highly competitive European scene to the US of A, where the football is worse but the money is better. Not so much a swan song as a goose with golden eggs song.

So Mr Messi now twinkles his agile toes for a new club called Inter Miami. The name is a straight lift from a legendary Italian club, Inter Milan. Inter Miami is not yet legendary.

But Mr Messi is, so when a local lifestyle magazine, backed by a government grant and official approval for the staging of “mega events”, arranged for Inter Miami to come and perform in Hong Kong there was great excitement among soccer fans.

Many of them had the opportunity to watch a training session or to see Mr Messi from a distance. Less publicly, for a six figure sum people could get close enough for a selfie and a few words, although as Mr Messi is from Spanish-speaking Argentina the communication may have been a bit disappointing for everyone concerned.

The high point of the whole exercise was a friendly match against a Hong Kong team assembled from the local performers. More than 30,000 spectators turned up for this, paying between $800 and $4,000 for the privilege.

I was not one of them. Inoculated by five years as a professional watcher of football matches I am rarely tempted and “friendly” games in my experience usually disappoint. One of the reasons for this is that professional athletes are surprisingly fragile and reluctant to risk their livelihood in encounters which are merely entertainment. So there is a tendency for people to drop out at the last minute if they get a twinge somewhere.

And so, alas, it turned out on this occasion. Inter Miami did their stuff, and saw off the Hong Kong team handily, but they did so without the assistance of Mr Messi, who was down as a substitute but was not used.

Many of the spectators were extremely offended, and a speech at the end of the match from Mr David Beckham (who used to be a footballer but nowadays is famous for being famous) was booed.

Cue outrage on all channels that fans bad been scammed. The internet frothed with bitter complaints. Some irate fans resorted to the Consumer Council. Column inches were devoted to Mr Messi’s medical symptoms and history. Academics were interviewed.

After the organising magazine announced that under the circumstances it would not collect the government subsidy our leaders could wade in. Secure, for a change, from charges that they had misplanned an event or wasted the taxpayers’ money, they were free to express warm solidarity with disgruntled fans and call for money to be returned to them.

Which is all very well, and has provided a great deal of harmless media fodder. It has also, rather regrettably, consumed a large chunk of the rather small period allowed for people to comment on the up-coming national security legislation.

This is a pity. I was surprised by a recent offering in China Daily’s English version from Prof Lau Siu-kai. Prof Lau is an emeritus professor of sociology (a polite academic way of saying retired) and a consultant to the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies, a think tank where democratic ideas are drowned.

Those of us who were here at the time will remember as the high point of Prof Lau’s career his prediction in 2003 that the July 1 march would only attract 30,000 or so people, which turned out to be about 500,000 people light.

However if you want to know what the government is plotting then Prof Lau is your man, so I waded through his thoughts on “colour revolutions”. This involved a very elaborate string of definitions, understandable in a way because Prof Lau could hardly be expected to use the common-sense definition, which would be something like “a popular movement aiming at the overthrow of a despotic regime”. For Prof Lau a colour revolution is a Bad Thing.

He then proceeded to explain how the national security law would prevent colour revolutions in Hong Kong. Which included some interesting observations. For example:

…It will no longer be possible for political groups to freely participate in the leadership, planning, organization and mobilization of a “color revolution”. The Ordinance will stipulate: “If the Secretary for Security reasonably believes that prohibiting the operation or continued operation of any local organization in the HKSAR is necessary for safeguarding national security, the Secretary for Security may by order published in the Gazette prohibit the operation or continued operation of the organization in the HKSAR,” and “If a local organization is a political body and has a connection with an external political organization, the Security for Security may by order published in the Gazette prohibit the operation or continued operation of the local organization in the HKSAR.

This seems a little stark. No obligation to tell the society first, or give it a chance to explain itself; no avenue for appeal? It also seems a bit unnecessary. In 2018 the police withdrew registration as a society from the Hong Kong National Party on national security grounds. We are plugging a non-existent loophole.

Then there is this:

…It will be difficult for hostile forces to spread false information to slander the central government and the HKSAR government, to instigate hatred, division and opposition in society, and to instigate, lead and organize unrest.  That is because they would be committing the offense of espionage under the Ordinance, which includes “colluding with an external force to publish a statement of fact that is false or misleading to the public, and the person, with intent to endanger national security or being reckless as to whether national security would be endangered, so publishes the statement; and knows that the statement is false or misleading.

I quite see why one might wish to have a law against false statements, although this already seems to be covered by the sedition offence which we already have. But, at least in English, I do not see how this can be classed as espionage. This is a concern because espionage is generally treated as a very serious matter, whereas publishing a statement might in some circumstances be a fairly minor offence, if for example the publication was seen by very few people.

It used to be said that the British Army was always preparing to fight the last war, not the next one. Something rather similar seems to be afflicting our government. The HKJA is “not recognised” because of two disagreements in 2019, a play is cancelled because the founder of the drama group tweeted something in 2019, a legislator making reasonable points about tourism and police work is accused of speaking “dangerously” and sounding like some of the things that were said in … 2019.

Now we have national security legislation which appears to be an attempt to criminalise anything and everything people did in 2019 which didn’t please the government. The fear of an encore is unwarranted. The people who wanted the five demands have got the message. They are going or gone. Relax.

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