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A man, a plan, Panama!

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on March 27, 2025| 2 Comments »

I generally hesitate to say anything about what appears in the Chinese-language press, because it reaches me only second-hand, and in translation. But recent commentaries in Ta Kung Pao have me puzzled.

I do not participate in controversies about China, for or against. Such matters are not very interesting and in any case, as a marooned Brit, none of my business. But I thought I understood how the game was played.

Take the row about Huawei and its exclusion from the business of providing telecom networks in Western countries. What we might call the Trumpeters’ tune is that there is no such thing in China as a private company. Whether or not Huawei wished to tweak its software to facilitate spying, it would have no choice.

But this is a smear peddled only by China haters and stirrers-up of trouble who wish to start a new Cold War. Actually Huawei is free to make its own decisions and would not dream of tricking its customers in this way.

A similar division of views hovers over the Belt and Road scheme. Critics say this is a cunning ruse through which China can extend its ownership and control over vital links in the world trade network.

Not at all, explain the scheme’s defenders. Belt and Road projects are win-win affairs which benefit everyone concerned: both the trading countries at each end of the road and the country which actually contains the port, railway, canal, or whatever. They are a benevolent donation to the common good by the PRC, and the eventual ownership of the items constructed will normally be vested in the country in which they sit.

Then there is the matter of the national security law. When this first appeared many critics (I rather think I may have been one of them) complained that there was a shortage of precise definitions of the new offences created. Not at all, we were assured. The descriptions of the offences were perfectly adequate and nobody who had read them carefully would be in any doubt as to what was intended.

All three of these comfortable thoughts have been thrown into doubt by the Ta Kung Pao leader-writers, who are generally assumed to be privy to the truth as senior Hong Kong government people see it.

The news which stirred all this up was that Hutchisons, generally regarded as a Hong Kong firm though most of its business is elsewhere and its registration is in the Cayman Islands, was selling 40 ports to an American consortium led by BlackRock. Among the ports in question are two next to the Panama Canal, about which President Trump has been complaining bitterly.

Hutchison’s explanation was that this was a purely business decision, basically to get out of the overseas ports business; the group will still own ports in Hong Kong and mainland China. In view of the danger of tariff wars shredding the international trading network this is not an ostentatiously surprising decision.

It did not, though, go down well with Ta Kung Pao. Hutchisons’ move was denounced as a “betrayal of all Chinese people”, an act of “spineless grovelling”. Former Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying asked “Do merchants have no motherland?”

Well no doubt the whole thing would have looked more attractive if President Trump had not so rudely called for changes in the Panama Canal Zone in the first place. On the other hand if Hong Kong companies (we’ll leave the Cayman Islands out of it) are expected to tailor their activities to PRC foreign policy objectives, how can we be expected to believe that mainland firms do not?

As the row rumbled on the deal was stigmatised as sabotaging the Belt and Road initiative. This is not what we used to be told about the Belt and Road at all. Is Ta Kung Pao now of the view that the purpose of the Belt and Road scheme was to ensure that no container could be unloaded anywhere in the world without China’s approval and participation?

And as the writers warmed to their task we came to the inevitable ingredient in any political storm these days, national security. Was the sale of the ports a national security crime?

Well one rather hopes not. The crimes created by the national security law are secession, subversion, terrorist activities and collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security. Clearly the first three are not relevant, and it is difficult to see how the fourth could be applied to selling a business asset for a realistic price to a foreign buyer. It may be a source of pride and pleasure for Chinese people to know that one of their number is a global presence, but it can hardly be a national security necessity for someone with a Chinese name to own a port on the other side of the Pacific.

A couple of thoughts might soothe. The first is that ownership of two Panama ports does not confer any power at all over the canal, which remains the property of Panama and under the control of the Panama government. The ports are actually outside the canal proper and their main function is to deal with Panama’s own imports and exports. President Trump does not seem to know this, among many things.

The second is that the new American owners will not be under the same pressure or expectations which local patriots would like to exert on Hutchisons. Much has been made of the fact that the chief executive of the buyers, BlackRock, is an old friend of Donald Trump.

Well all these plutocrats go to the same parties, no doubt. But American business is not inhibited by concerns about the national interests of the USA, or indeed anywhere else. Ethical standards have gone down the tubes over the last 50 years. Money trumps morals every time. Ports controlled by American companies will be ruled by pure greed, unsullied by politics. Doesn’t that feel better?

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Commenting on, or criticising, court cases is both legal and helpful

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 10, 2025| 1 Comment »

It is nice to know that the Secretary for Security reads Ming Pao. Think of the alternatives. Sadly however the secretary, Chris Tang, often does not appear to enjoy his reading.

The last item to arouse Mr Tang’s ire was an op ed on the latest legal instalment of the Yuen Long incident, by law professor Johannes Chan. “The author, who is a law professor, has once again published a biased article,” Mr Tang complained, “deliberately ignoring the fact that some white-clad people have already been brought to justice, misleading readers with a warped perspective that the court has made an unfair judgment regarding either party, shaking the public’s confidence in the court system, and undermining the rule of law in Hong Kong, which must be condemned.”

Mr Tang went on to say that the afterword, commonly added to opinion pieces these days, saying there was no intention to incite hatred of the government, did not discharge the obligation on the editor to ensure that his publication was “fair, objective and unbiased.”

He concluded “It is hoped that Ming Pao will not continue to be exploited by people with ulterior motives to use this platform to spread confusing remarks, to poison the community, and to create conflicts.”

Now I propose to ignore some of this. Opinion pieces are not supposed to be fair, objective and unbiased. They are expressions of opinion. Moreover if Mr Tang wishes to campaign with any credibility for unbiased media he needs to avoid the impression that he has some unique problem with Ming Pao.

I shall also pass by the bit about white-clad people being brought to justice, which strictly speaking is entirely irrelevant. Injustice to one defendant cannot be balanced by justice to another.

More interesting is Mr Tang’s claim that the offending piece misled readers into the “warped perspective” that the court had made an unfair judgment, and that this had “shaken the public’s confidence in the court system”, thereby undermining the rule of law.

This is, alas, nonsense. The rule of law has never required the public to believe that judges are infallible. In 1793 the then Chief Justice, Lord Kenyon, said that “In the hurry of business, the most able Judges are liable to err.”

More recently we can consider the view of Lord Denning:”We do not fear criticism, nor do we resent it. For there is something far more important at stake. It is no less than freedom of speech itself…Those who comment can deal faithfully with all that is done in a court of justice. They can say that we are mistaken, and our decisions erroneous, whether they are subject to appeal or not.”

Or there is the rather more literary, oft-quoted, opinion of Lord Atkin (more famous as an innovator in business law), which goes in part “The path of criticism is a public way. The wrong-headed are permitted to err therein… Justice is not a cloistered virtue; she must be allowed to suffer the scrutiny and respectful, even if outspoken, comments of ordinary men.”

I infer that Mr Tang is offering the courts a protection which they have never sought and do not need. If a judge makes a statement about the law it is open to criticism and comment. Similarly if the judge is sitting alone and has to make findings of fact, they may also be scrutinised. The rule of law is fortified, not weakened, if the activities of the courts can be discussed and debated.

He may also care to consider that freedom of the press is not furthered by threatening words from officials in the law and order industry, and if the government wishes to offer a running commentary on media output this might be better left to the information specialists.

Mr Tang’s repeated insistence that appending “this piece is not intended to inspire hatred of the government,” or words to that effect, is not an effective bar to prosecution, is unnecessary. We all know that. It’s like starting a novel with the usual stuff about “no resemblance to real persons, living or dead”. This will not keep you out of the libel courts if your lead villain is an erratic politician called Ronald Frump.

Mr Tang may be a happier reader if he bears in mind the wise words of the American judge Robert Jackson: “The price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish.”

And if tempted to rush to the defence of some official masterpiece he might also bear in mind another observation from the same judge: “Who does not prefer good to ill report of his work? And if fame — a good public name — is, as Milton said, the “last infirmity of a noble mind”, it is frequently the first infirmity of a mediocre one.”

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The rule of law and the rule of lies

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on March 3, 2025| 3 Comments »

People who have been complaining about how slowly the legal system works in Hong Kong can draw some comfort from its latest success: an outstandingly swift performance in the gentle art of rewriting history.

This goes on all the time, of course. Mediaeval baronial brawls are recycled as wars of national liberation starring Mel Gibson. Revered founding fathers turn out to have had a sideline impregnating their own slaves because mixed race babies were more valuable. Historians reluctantly admit that much-admired monarchs were secretly gay.

But this usually takes centuries. Not, however, in the courtroom of national security specialist District Court Judge Stanley Chan – a generous provider of material for critical judge-watchers over the years – who was passing sentence last week on seven men accused of rioting during the Yuen Long incident on July 21, 2019.

That was six years ago, a long time for a criminal process but a mere blink in the evolution of history.

Those of us who were here at the time will remember the Yuen Long incident. It was extensively videoed by mobile phone owners. One reporter live-streamed an attack on her. The BBC reported:

Dozens of masked men armed with batons stormed a train station in the Hong Kong district of Yuen Long on Sunday. Footage posted on social media showed the masked men, all in white T-shirts, violently attacking people on platforms and inside train carriages. Forty-five people were injured, with one person in a critical condition.

The Guardian’s correspondent had:

Men dressed in white T-shirts, some armed with sticks, entered the Yuen Long MTR station and stormed a train, attacking passengers, according to footage taken by commuters, journalists and Democratic Party politician Lam Cheuk-ting. Witnesses said the attackers appeared to target black-shirted passengers who had been at an anti-government march earlier in the day.

And it was not just the capitalist press. A few days later the China Daily referred to:

…savage indiscriminate attacks on protesters and passengers in the train cars and the platform at Yuen Long station last Sunday. The attack, causing injury to 45 people, was widely denounced …

Oddly enough the government at the time refused to classify the incident as a riot. And indeed it was not what the lay person usually means by a riot – vandalism, protest, confrontation with the forces of order – and more an exercise in assault and battery on an industrial scale by an armed and uniformed mob.

A curious feature was the absence of police people. Men in white tee-shirts armed with sticks had been marauding in the streets of Yuen Long all day, threatening anyone who looked as if they might be a protester. When they appeared inside the station the MTR staff promptly called the police, who did not show up for half an hour. As the station is only a short walk from the local police station this was embarrassing.

A few days later the then Chief Secretary apologised to the public for the fact that the police response had not met expectations. The apology was bitterly denounced by both the police staff unions.

When Chris Tang became police commissioner (yes, that one: now the Secretary for Security) he unveiled the new police line, initially suggested by Junius Ho, which was that the conflict was due to Lam Cheuk-ting, who had intensified the tense atmosphere and so provoked the fight.

On the day of Lam’s arrest this had developed further, and the whole incident was described as a clash between “two evenly matched rivals”. The video and photographic evidence was “one-sided” and the reporting was “biased”. It could be considered a bit strange that the police have developed a narrative which they offer with such confidence, because the one fact about the incident that everyone agrees with is that no police people were present.

It appears as a result that Judge Chan was heavily reliant on video evidence, a worrying thought because – as police spokesmen used to remind us whenever footage surfaced of their colleagues kicking the crap out of someone – such films are subject to a variety of interpretations.

Anyway in Judge Chan’s reasons for passing sentence the police story finally achieved escape velocity and freed itself from the gravitational pull of reality. There were, in Judge Chan’s view, not one but two riots, one for each side. The men in tee-shirts would have engaged in nothing more than Ghandian non-violence if they had not been provoked by the first riot.

The provocation seems to have consisted in calling them gangsters. Judge Chan did not believe Mr Lam, whose “chief provocateur” status earned him a three-year sentence, was there to “monitor police actions”. Well that was just as well. The police actions came later. We do not enjoy the rule of law. We enjoy the rule of lies.

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Mystery ailment causes nervous breakdowns in catering infrastructure?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on February 19, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Are Hong Kong hotels becoming less reliable, I wonder. Or have we developed a new variation on “cancel culture”?

Forgive a detour. Readers who have been following these diatribes will probably have noticed occasional references to the Scottish bagpipe, an awkward and troublesome instrument which I took up as a post-retirement hobby. In due course I joined a band, as one does, and we were often booked to provide loud music (opinions differ about the melodiousness of the bagpipe, but nobody disputes that the volume is tremendous) for festivities of various kinds, many of which were held in Hong Kong hotels.

Until the whole sequence was interrupted by COVID we must have averaged one gig a month for years. We shook the chandeliers in most of Hong Kong’s bigger hotels, usually for weddings but sometimes for formal dinners. None of these events was cancelled at the last minute due to a technical hitch.

I think the only mechanical problem we ever encountered was a faulty escalator. I expect we could have climbed with it stopped but the bride was not dressed for that sort of thing, so we stood and warbled for a few minutes while hotel staff coaxed the thing back into action.

Another passtime I drifted into was the secretaryship of a club which runs social events for people interested in Scottish culture. I thought this would just involve note-taking and minutes, but it turned out the secretary was also expected to organise two or three events a year. These were generally held in hotels or clubs and involved eating and dancing. Again I can recall no example of an event which had to be cancelled due to a last-minute problem in the host building.

Last year a kind friend invited me to the Hong Kong Journalists’ Association’s annual dinner. Upon my arrival I said, in jest, that I had checked my emails before setting out in case there had been an airconditioner problem. This was soon after the Democratic Party’s annual foodfest and fund-raiser had been cancelled at the last minute for this reason.

This year I was again invited. But two days before the event it was postponed because, we were told, the hotel concerned – the Regal in Causeway Bay – had a problem with water on its busbars. This sounds painful, and apparently led to fluctuations in the power supply.

There are two interesting things about this ailment. One is that it apparently precluded such remedies as changing the date, the menu or the venue. The other is that when a reporter visited the hotel (Were we not expecting this? It’s a journalists’ association for goodness sake) the power supply appeared to be in rude health, the staff assured him that normal service was being provided, and indeed the room where the journalists were supposed to be doing their browsing and sluicing later in the day was full of happy visitors.

This gives rise to a certain scepticism about whether the problem with the Regal’s busbars was entirely and purely a technical matter. Looking at the history of last-minute cancellations there seems to be a common theme. The mention of “fund-raising” turns sane and happy pieces of catering infrastructure into nervous wrecks.

But I fear this just conceals the underlying reality which is political. After all organisations which zealously support the government do not need to fund-raise. They get money thrown at them.

Those which adopt a more – shall we say – impartial approach have a problem. Money from overseas is an obvious no-no. Crowd-funding can be prosecuted as money-laundering unless you get the names and addresses of everyone in the crowd, and who wants to do that? So you think perhaps a dinner, lucky draw, auction …

And at this point the mysterious gremlin strikes, usually at the last minute. One suspects that somewhere behind the scenes people are being treated to small tea gatherings in North Point which conclude with a warning that even revealing that this event has taken place would be a national security offence. They not only have to do what they are told but to make up a cock and bull story to explain it.

This is an undignified way of dealing with the problem. If the government or the police force wish to make it impossible for certain organisations to book a venue they should circulate a list. Then we shall all know where we stand. I do not know why they would wish for this but no doubt the motives involved are impeccably respectable so there is no reason why the whole procedure should not be public.

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On music, memory and history

Posted in Uncategorized on February 17, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Now for something completely different. We start with a bit of distant history. In 1971 the student union (remember those?) at the University of Lancaster decided to change the system under which entertainments were organised by student volunteers.

Instead the union appointed the most promising of the recent volunteers, Barry Lucas, as a professional manager. Over the ensuing 15 years this produced a remarkable flourishing of pop culture in the university’s largest hall. Almost everyone who was anyone performed there, despite its backwater geographical location and modest size

This has now been decribed in a book, “When rock went to college”, co-authored by Mr Lucas. You have to be at least 50 years old to have any personal memories of all this, but the book has sold well in North Lancashire and is now in its third edition.

Most of it consists of an annotated list of the people who performed. This is so long it is easier to count the omissions. Everyone you have heard of from that era is there except Mack Jagger (desired date conflicted with exams) Elton John (mysterious last-minute no-show) and ABBA (Mr Lucas admits a mistake).

It all looks a bit magical. True, Lancaster is geographically convenient for a group doing a national tour, next to the motorway connecting Manchester and Glasgow. The hall (now rather misleadingly called the Great Hall) fits 1,600 people, not a lot by pop standards. Its acoustics are excellent and the audience was enthusiastic. The management was professional, experienced and understood musicians’ needs. Financially Mr Lucas did not have to pay for the hall or show a profit, though he was expected to make enough to pay his own salary, initially very small.

Readers who supposed that the popular music industry was entirely ruled by greed and ambition will be interested to hear that singers who could fill a football stadium urged other similarly popular performers to do an underpaid gig in Lancaster because it would be an enjoyable evening which they would remember for the rest of their lives.

In its day the Lancaster shows seem to have become widely known. A survey of students conducted by the Business School discovered that conventional reasons for choosing the university (course, department, proximity to home or the Lake District) were heavily outpolled. No less than 60 percent of respondents said they had chosen Lancaster because it had top-class concerts.

I imagine the university was not overjoyed by this discovery. Perhaps it should have been. New institutions need to be known for something. I am sure Baptist U benefitted in its early days from the widespread but erroneous belief that most of Hong Kong’s reporters came from the old Department of Communication.

Anyway, memory is a funny thing. Chugging through the book about the Lancaster pop scene I got to page 332, where it names the student union president who started all this, who was … me.

I wouldn’t say I had completely forgotten the whole thing, but the reminder came as a big surprise. Well it was 50 years ago. And I left the country before it really took off. But like, I suspect, most people my age I sometimes find myself in that half-asleep stage before getting up in the morning, going through long-ago events which I would like to repeat because they were fun, or would like to repeat to have a chance to do something differently.

My presidential memories tend to run to clashes with that small minority of students who wished not only to see the Revolution – a popular ambition in student circles – but wished to start it right now by burning down the university.

Like the less thoughtful historians I remember the flashy public bits and have quite overlooked important administrative changes. Most of these would have been made sooner or later as the university grew in size and the student union grew with it. But still… Improving the concerts remained a one-off, imitated half-heartedly only by the student union in Leeds.

Enoch Powell famously said that all political careers end in failure. Well mine seemed to. Within weeks of the end my successor – a would-be revolutionary – announced the consignment of the Hamlett regime to “the dustbin of history”.

You only get a year in student politics. So the fact that something lasted 14 years is interesting. Which of our current leaders will be able to look back at something more heart-warming than keeping the show on the road and obeying orders?

History is full of ironies about who or what gets remembered. Consider Leslie Hore Belisha, a reforming war minister in the Appeasement era, later scandalously sacked at the behest of senior generals, probably because he was a Jew. In an earlier posting as Transport Minister he introduced the zebra crossing. The orange ball on top of a striped pole which marks such a crossing is still known as a belisha beacon.

Updated version in Kwai Chung

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Pandas are pretty, but do not expect them to solve our financial problems

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on February 7, 2025| Leave a Comment »

It appears, though the numbers published vary a bit, that our government is bleeding money on such a scale that the reserves will be run down in five or six years, placing us in the same boat as all those debt-addicted governments we have been looking down on.

Of course this will not happen. Economies will be made, new sources of income discovered, the real estate racket revived. Or something.

A quick perusal of the pro-government papers suggests that thinking among supporters runs along some ominous lines: tinkering with the $2 travel concession, selling parts of public housing, the MTR and the airport, a new sales tax, automatic car parking penalties administered by artificial intelligence…

Some odd omissions: nobody wants to increase salaries or company tax; few takers for blanket reductions in civil service salaries.

No interest in my two favourites: first abolish the whole “Political appointment” nonsense. There is nothing policy secretaries have to do these days which could not be done by the permanent secretaries of their bureaus, and in most cases done better. Second, put up parking penalties to the same level as those for such trivial offences as spitting on the pavement or travelling in First Class without beeping your Octopus. This would involve multiplying the present parking fine by a factor of three, or six, depending on which current Mickey Mouse offence you were catching up with.

Well these are hard times for a Financial Secretary. Obviously the public coffers would benefit if the economy was prospering, but this is difficult to arrange.

Let me, though, help in the discussions now taking place behind the scenes by eliminating one alleged possibility: the “panda economy”. Some people are putting an awful lot of hope in our rising panda population. One writer said that Hong Kong was enjoying “pandamania”. This sounds suspiciously like pandemonium.

I have nothing against animal tourism. Indeed when travelling I am a sucker for animal experiences of all kinds. I have petted dolphins in San Diego, fed deer in Nara, cuddled koalas and fed kangaroos in Brisbane, charmed a pigeon in Perth and enjoyed a whole flock of sociable doves in Dalian. My most memorable experience in Canada was when I was selected, as the guest who had come furthest, to feed a bear as big as me. This was safer than it sounds: you do it by poking a hose through a chain link fence.

This enthusiasm for animal experiences is probably a result of being brought up in an age when attitudes to such things were different. When I was a kid feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square was a regular treat and vendors had stalls selling split peas for the purpose. This is no longer allowed so Admiral Nelson is no longer up to his knees in pigeon poop.

In those days London zoo offered rides on camels and elephants. Nowadays they only offer donkeys. Other zoos were quite happy to have visitors getting up close to harmless herbivores, which only happened if you had something to offer. Dried pasta was a popular choice. So I fed giraffes, elephants and a variety of variations on the antelope. This sort of thing is no longer allowed.

Certainly you will not be allowed any meaningful interaction with the panda population. Corporate Hong Kong seems to be doing its best to make up for this. My petrol station has provided panda tissues and a panda camping light (?). The local supermarket is offering panda buns – white with black spots. But these efforts are likely to wilt when the public discovers that pandas do not really perform. They sit and chew a bit of bamboo. If you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky they just sit.

So I fear having pandas is not going to inspire any great improvement in local productivity. Judging by their notorious lack of interest in sex it is not going to do much for our distressing reproduction rate either. And the idea that people will come to Hong Kong from miles away to look at a pretty but rather boring bear seems a bit of a stretch.

Also our leaders should be careful what they wish for. The panda may not do much for tourism but it is a potential gift to political satirists. Fat, lethargic and confused about sex: could that be the Hong Kong government?

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Coffee should be more than a warm drink

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on January 30, 2025| Leave a Comment »

How, I wonder, did Hong Kong catch the coffee bug? The other day I was in the Wai, the MTR’s downmarket mall for Tai Wai inhabitants (no international brands, no wheeled suitcases) and pondered this mystery: while there are no brands or suitcases there are outlets of Starbucks and Pacific Coffee, together with two serious coffee shops, and one of them offers a menu of exotic beans which you can watch being transformed into nectar at considerable expense.

My favourite cafe in Shatin – five floors up, and so well away from the brands and suitcases – claims that its coffee chef has some international qualification in the matter. Certainly he does a very fine flat white.

Yet Hong Kong is supposed to be a tea place, like the UK of my youth. I really didn’t encounter coffee of any kind until I reached university. Students in those days were not offered any cooking equipment more advanced than a kettle – we did make toast by hanging slices of bread on the bars of the electric fire – and no refrigerator. So the only hot drink was coffee made with instant powder and dried milk. And a lot of sugar.

By the time I reached the world of work there were, I believe, proper coffee shops in London with Italian machinery, but in the North we drank tea.

As Hong Kong people did when I arrived here. Western-style hotels had “coffee shops” but there was nothing particularly sophisticated about the coffee offered there, which traditionally was made by the filter method on an industrial scale, and then sat about on a hotplate slowly becoming undrinkable.

Whether your cup was nice depended on the luck of the draw. If it was recent it might be good, and if not… A local magazine decided to do a comparative review of hotel coffee. The unhappy recipient of the brickbat for the worst local hotel brew responded in an interesting way: they fired their PR person.

On a study visit to Australia in the early 90s my students, and I, were impressed to discover that quite humble street sandwich bars offered a menu of coffee styles – cappucino, latte and so on – which had not really arrived in Hong Kong yet.

Well it duely arrived with multiple openings of the usual suspects: Starbucks and Pac Coffee. But although the menu arrived, generally the lifestyle did not.

Coffee shops, in the Viennese or 18th century London model, were supposed to be sociable establishments. Newspapers and magazines were provided. They were places for long leisurely chats or reading, catering to a population of regulars. It was a place where “everybody knows your name”.

This did briefly appear when the Baptist University, rightly concluding that academics – as many learned establishments have discovered – have no talent for running catering, invited Pacific Coffee to take over a small space at the south end of our long thin campus which had clearly been designed as some sort of snack bar.

This featured a rather easy-going financial arrangement which did not require either rapid turnover or packing lots of people in, so the space was furnished in a comfortable domestic style featuring soft furniture and even some plump armchairs. It swiftly became the hang-out for occupants of the nearby fine art and communication building. Small meetings could be held there. Early pioneers of remote working used laptops. Antiquated preservers of print read newspapers or books. Random encounters sparked interesting cross-disciplinary conversations.

This did not last. Alerted to the possibility that profits might be appearing the university introduced some form or tendering, and Pacific Coffee were replaced by the other lot. I have nothing against Starbucks, but this was a disaster. Pursuing the theory of profitable coffee shop management Starbucks filled the place with uncomfortable wooden furniture clearly designed to move people on and milk the space.

The complaints which ensued were so loud and bitter that the university eventually offered PC another space on the campus. But this illustrates a problem. Opening a coffee shop is supposed to be about much more than offering a particular kind of hot drink. A coffee shop should aspire to the status of an important social space, a community asset like the English pub or the French estaminet.

But this in turn requires a willingness to forgo that process known in business circles as “sweating the assets.” A traditional coffee shop meets needs outside the simple matter of warm fluid which are difficult to monetise. Efforts to impose or encourage a “minimum spend” or a “maximum stay” are not compatible with the desired ambience.

The situation is not hopeless. Perhaps the present turbulence in the commercial property market will lead to more tolerance for experiments. Perhaps corporate greed will wilt in the face of alert and discriminating consumers. Or perhaps not.

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There are too many Trump supporters on my desktop

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 21, 2025| 1 Comment »

Having sworn off Hong Kong politics I am certainly not going to start writing about American ones.

Besides, what American electors get up to is really none of our business. If citizens of the Land of the Free wish to be represented on the international stage by a convicted criminal, serial sex pest and compulsive liar, that is their choice.

I am, though, concerned about reports that the titans of US tech have been lining up not only to make the usual polite noises about a new president, but to throw money at his inauguration and express admiration and allegiance to the Orange Catastrophe.

Press people are not much better, I admit. Six months ago Mr Trump was being written about in the sort of condescending tones usually reserved for unsuccessful stand-up comics. Now we are treated to thoughtful analysis of Mr Trump’s possible policies.

In their innermost thoughts most of these writers are well aware that Mr Trump does not have policies. To have a policy you must first read and think about the issues involved. Mr Trump notoriously does neither. Where other people have policies he has prejudices and impulses.

The prejudices are unchanging and unchangeable. The impulses come and go from day to day, under the unhelpful influence of Fox News. Neither the prejudices nor the impulses are hampered by any close examination of the real world.

Still, none of the press people has been adopted as courtiers. Whereas at the Inauguration on Monday the tech tycoons were lined up for the cameras. The nobodies in the background are members of the new Cabinet, who are apparently going to get the same respectful attention as Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet got from her.

The problem this poses is nicely exemplified by the flourishing market in bumper stickers for embarrassed Tesla owners to put on their cars. These run to variations on “I bought this car before we knew that Elon was mad”. An entertaining option: “I bought this car before Elon became First Lady.”

Fortunately I had not got round to buying a Tesla of any kind. Also, having never been a Twitterer I have effortlessly avoided X. As I have no ambitions to move to Mars I suppose I am pretty Muskproof. Which is just as well, because I know what a Nazi salute looks like and I am looking at one now.

However my computer is an iMac. It is a very fine computer and it is a recent purchase. I can hardly give it up. But I understand the big Apple man has made his bow although he doesn’t seem to have attended the inauguration.

Definitely in the picture, though, are the billionaires responsible for my two favourite pieces of time-wasting software, Youtube and Facebook, as well as the modern journalist’s essential tool, Google.

This integration of digital imperialism with the political kind must be a worry in a good many places. There is mounting evidence that indulging in extensive internet use is toxic for children and young people. And if there is no attempt to stem the torrent of lies it can be pretty disturbing for adults, too.

It will be a source of much justified resentment if attempts to deal with these problems in Europe or South America are opposed by the US in the name of “free speech”.

We all like free speech and we all recognise, as our local government occasionally reminds us, that it has limits. Steven Pinker asserts (in “The better angels of our nature”) that humanity was elevated to a new level of sympathy and gentleness by the invention of the novel, and the resulting invitation to put yourself in other people’s place and imagine what they must be thinking and feeling.

According to Mr Pinker this was a slow but dramatic change, leading to a great reduction in violence generally. This raises the question: what is five hours a day of web browsing doing to people? I am not sure what the answer to this question might be but it seems increasingly likely that the answer is “nothing good”.

So the titans of tech are poisoning our minds. And if we use their stuff I suppose we are in danger of complicity. They invite you in, but only so that they can sell you to advertisers. It seems under the circumstances the least you can do is install a good ad blocker. This also has the important benefit of making Youtube much more enjoyable.

I cannot unfortunately recommend the further step of urging our government to restrict nasty internet content. This is because our leaders have a track record of using laws intended for other purposes to harass or punish activities they disapprove of, like fund-raising for unliked causes, playing unliked tunes in public, running independent bookshops or dubiously loyal restaurants, and so on. They’re doing quite enough censorship already.

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Dear policy secretaries: People with luxurious jobs shouldn’t be complaining about the workload

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on January 9, 2025| Leave a Comment »

A word of advice for policy secretaries: do not, in your laudable efforts to communicate with the general public over social media, tell us all how tough your job is.

This thought was first prompted by an end-of-the-year Facebook contribution from Chris Tang, the Secretary for Security, in which he recalled a year full of challenges, loss of sleep and “inflammation in my eyes and shoulders, and my gout came back.”

Mr Tang is in a sense in a class of his own. As the Secretary for Security he is in charge of the prison-filling machinery. Numerous people who have friends enjoying the unwanted hospitality of the correctional industry will have been tempted to rather uncharitable responses to reports of his medical problems. Like “Gout? Pity it wasn’t ebola.”

Let us, though, avoid personal specifics and concentrate on the situation of policy secretaries generally. There are plenty of things which they all have in common, which make them rather unlikely recipients for public sympathy.

We know from the budget that you all enjoy salaries exceeding those enjoyed in other countries by prime ministers, presidents and even in some modest cases kings. We know from the reported details of the Political Appointments scheme that you have the services of a secretary, a deputy, a personal assistant and a driver.

Where there is a driver we must also suppose there is a free car.

We know from a little glitch in the sewage system of the freshly-opened Central Government complex that your office also has a private toilet, a dream for many Hong Kong people living in subdivided flats or bedspaces.

We know from the difficulties Ms Carrie Lam experienced when thrust out into the real world that these generous provisions lead to helplessness when forced to use public transport, and complete lack of familiarity with the concept of buying your own toilet paper.

Your work may feel challenging and strenuous but it is also clean, safe and prestigeous. Hong Kong’s working population is (latest census figure) 3.83 million. At least 3.8 million of those people would happily swap jobs with you. Many of them are completely unqualified for the work, but would tell themselves that even if they were fired after a month they would still have earned more than they usually get in a year.

But being unable to do anything useful has not historically been a bar to a lengthy period in office as a policy secretary. The rice bowl is not iron but it is not exactly fragile either.

Under the circumstances complaining about your work makes you look like, to coin a phrase, a bit of a wuss. Getting landmark legislation through Legco may be a source of pride. But how hard can it be to get a law passed in a legislature containing 89 government supporters and one independent?

I would also recommend not going on about possibly work-related medical problems. You are all about 60 years old, give or take a few years. You are reaching a stage in life when the biological machinery which you have taken for granted for half a century starts to throw up the odd problem and needs some care and maintenance.

Sooner or later all of you will encounter one or more of arthritis, tinnitis, varicose veins, deteriorating eyesight, cataracts, mysterious muscular twinges, and occasional inability to remember where you put something down five minutes ago. Your doctor will develop a desire to push cameras into places where you do not normally welcome foreign bodies – happily this is done while you are asleep – and subject you to mysterious but expensive scans.

After a few years of this you will find that conversations with other people in your age group often involve comparisons of medical histories. This is all part of life’s rich pageant and nothing to worry about. But people who are already enjoying it will not be impressed by complaints about the first small symptoms.

A final word for fellow gout victims. This problem is not caused by hard work; it is caused by high uric acid levels in your blood. The solution is a cheap pill called allopurinol. I have been taking it for 40 years.

Looking on the bright side, this used to be known as “the disease of kings” because it was erroneously associated with rich food. Famous victims have included Isaac Newton, Christopher Columbus, Benjamin Franklin, Beethoven and George W. Bush’s vice president Dick Cheney. Doesn’t that feel better?

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Substandard flats are ‘targeted for eradication’ … and their occupants?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on January 8, 2025| Leave a Comment »

The government has put out some details about its plan to eliminate substandard miniflats. But a question remains.

According to a newspaper contribution by the relevant minister there are believed to be 110,000 sub-divided flats – where an already miniature flat is further split up for multiple occupation – in Hong Kong.

It is estimated that 220,000 people live in them. This is a suspiciously round number. It appears that it is the consequence of a finding (wild guess?) that the number of people living in each tiny flatlet is on average two.

No doubt this is a difficult area and two seems a plausible number for a very small space. On the other hand before the public housing system really got under way there were similar estimates for the number of people per squatter hut. And they turned out to be much too low.

Never mind. Let us go along with the official numbers. There are 110,000 miniflats accommodating 220,000 people. It is further supposed that about 80,000 of these little homes will be able, with some work, to conform to official standards in the matter of space, windows, plumbing and such like.

The other 30,000 or so will, in the Housing Secretary’s rather chilling phrase, be “targeted for eradication.” She supposes that this will leave 77,000 units still on the market after mandated improvements.

This also seems a bit optimistic. If you are the owner of a sub-divided flat facing a large bill to bring your sub-units up to official standards, there are alternatives. One obvious one is to dismantle the subdivisions and sell or rent the flat in its original intended form. Or you can unload the whole arrangement to some hardened criminal who will regard the remote possibility of a large fine with equanimity.

Still, again, let us go along with the official figures. We now come to the unanswered question. There are 30,000 flats to be “eradicated”. They will be home to 60,000 people. Where are all these people supposed to go?

We have already been told that they will not be going to public housing, unless they arrive at the front of the queue just in time. Officials are apparently worried that there may be a rush to occupy really squalid spaces in the hope that inhabitants will be wafted swiftly into public housing.

Well whatever the merits of that theory, only 40 percent of miniflat dwellers have even applied for public housing. So we have 36,000 people for whom the government apparently has no plans at all.

There is an ironic history here. During the 1980s and 90s the government took a great pride in the number of overseas housing people who came to Hong Kong to look at local public housing efforts and learn from them.

But the big attraction was not the multi-story tower blocks which were then growing like mushrooms all over the New Territories. Lots of places had experimented with public housing in tower blocks, with mixed results.

The big attraction was an innovation called a Temporary Housing Area. The idea behind these places (pic here) was that the government provided a floor and roof for a single-story structure and the occupants put in the walls. Water, showers and toilets were provided centrally and residents cooked on bottled gas.

This was an outstandingly cheap solution and had obvious attractions for places which had more space than we do. Hong Kong being Hong Kong there were recurring reports of local bandits monopolising the wall-building, but apart from that the only drawback was that the area was always only temporarily available. The government had other plans for it, usually but not always for housing.

This was nobody’s idea of paradise but it met a need. The nearest thing to it now seems to be what officials call “transitional housing”. Web site here. It is usually run by NGOs apparently. However only 3,000 units are currently under construction so those 36,000 people will have to wait.

I am sure the government’s intentions in sorting out the sub-divided flat situation are good. It would be nice, though, if the people running housing policy tried harder to look as if they recognised that the occupants are people, whose happiness is the objective of the exercise.

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