tim's experiment

I have not been a great fan of John Tsang’s budgets: turgid hymns to prodence whose inability to predict the future even a year ahead have become legendary. Still we must recognise merit where merit appears, and Mr Tsang’s announcement that he was a member of the middle classes caused more hilarity chez Hamlett than any previous FS has managed.

The claim is of course absurd. Mr Tsang, if you count his fringe benefits and pension rights, must be wallowing in something over half a million dollars a month, But his explanation was interesting. He thought he was middle class, apparently, because he had the classic symptoms of middle class status: the willingness to watch French films and a taste for coffee. This is interesting but betrays a fundamental flaw in Mr Tsang’s reasoning. There are, after all, two boundaries to the Middle Class. There is the one you cross when you enter it from the bottom and the one you cross when you exit it upwards. Or, in due course, when your fortunes decline, the one you later cross downwards.

A variety of definitions have been offered based simply on money. For example, you can consider the bottom 25 per cent of income recipients as the grassroots, the top 25 per cent as the toffs, and the middle class as the 50 per cent left between these two extremes. None of these statistical interpretations is any help to Mr Tsang, who is certainly, if income is the sole criteria, firmly in the upper ranks.

If you look at it as a matter of culture and habits, the Continental films and Starbucks coffee criteria are probably a pretty good stab at the bottom boundary. No horny-handed worker is going to waste his scarce leisure on films with subtitles, or his hard-earned cash on luxurious lattes. One could offer other tests: pedigree pets, a German car, a private doctor or an overseas education for the kids. This is an entertaining game. But it does not help Mr Tsang because his problem is not that he is a grassroot, but that he is an expensive orchid.

In traditional Hong Kong, according to C Northcote Parkinson, the point at which a businessman became a blossom was clearly marked. As his business grew he would stay for years in the hovel from which he started it – the squatter hut or the cockloft over the shop – until he passed the Hound Barrier. At this point he would move into a detached house in Kowloon Tong with a high wall and a guard dog.  We can bring this observation up to date by adding to the high wall and guard dog a large illegal basement. This progress can be contrasted with the less clear situation in Western countries, where people generally upgrade their lifestyle gradually as they get richer.

For modern circumstances it is difficult to find as crisp an indicator that a person has passed out of the middle classes and gone on to higher things. But not impossible. Clearly when a person starts owning real property in Hong Kong which he has no intention of living in then the person concerned has moved into what the rest of us must regard as the financial stratosphere. Mr Tsang is apparently the proprietor of enough property to furnish a small village. As this seems to be true of everyone else in the ruling circle we must expect that their efforts to rein in property prices will be … well, prudent.

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I owe Hong Kong architects a profound apology. Over the years I have been pretty rude about Hong Kong architecture. Most Hong Kong buildings are carefully dssigned to maximise the owner’s income or profit. The architect is too busy exploring plot ratio loopholes to worry about the eventual appearance of the result. When something more interesting is attempted it is usually either boring or derivative or both. Sites with great potential are squandered: the Convention Centre looks like the Sydney Opera House would have looked if it was designed by a committee; the Art Museum looks like a giant public toilet; the new Government offices … Well you see the point. However, last weekend I went to Macau for the first time since, I think, about 1990. A great deal has happened to Macau since then, most of it bad. The city now offers a chance to recalibrate your assessments of architecture. Architecture does not have to be boring. It can be ostentatiously hideous.

We played at the Venetian (music, not at the tables) which I found quite acceptable as casino resorts go. If you are going to copy an alien and historic style then Venetian republican is not a bad choice. The curious thing was that having been to the Venetian first, walking round the old parts of Macau was disconcerting. The ground floors are occupied by retail outlets from the usual suspects – much the same gang as those found round the Venetian’s fake Grand Canal. The upper floors are in Macau antique and they all look freshly painted. The result is that you could be back in the Venetian, though in Macau proper you do get a real sky.

I noticed that the old Lisboa rotunda had miraculously survived. It used to be a by-word for over-blown ostentation. In its present company it looks a model of dignified restraint. The outstanding eyesore is the new building just behind it, a sort of multi-storey gold eruption. I am not sure what the shape is supposed to be. From the direction of Taipa it looks rather like one of the pawn shop signs of which Macau has so many, gathered in vulture flocks round the casinos. I suppose a reminder that the house always wins in the long run could be considered a public-spirited feature in a town devoted to gambling, but I can’t believe they intended it to be the first thing people would notice.

The other thing which has changed about Macau is that it was full of mainlanders. Well this was quite close to the Golden Week holiday, but still … Outside of the businesses which they staff, Macau people seemed as rare as native Americans on the streets of Detroit. This is what the Tourism Authority is working so hard to bring to  us here in Hong Kong. Oh dear. I have seen the future and it sucks.

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The news that Mr CY Leung has threatened to sue a newspaper columnist raises a number of interesting questions.

The first one is what is all the official nonsense about Mr Leung suing in his private capacity? Senior government officials do not have a private capacity. They are required to seek the permission of the government before taking action of this kind. This restriction may be among those rules which somehow do not apply to the Chief Executive, but if that is the case it would still be a good idea of he behaved as if it did.

The second is why he is making such a fuss. Apparently the burden of the column complained of was that Mr Leung was linked – presumably via the Crazy Bear – with triads. But this is hardly controversial, let alone defamatory. Many senior triads run legitimate businesses as well as their more nefarious ones. Having never been convicted of anything they are free to play the role of public spirited members of the community, including running for election. Everyone knows who they are – Tuen Mun and Wanchai are said to have good representation; Mong Kok, when it was a separate board, was said to enjoy a majority. The Heung Yee Kuk is also said to be well connected. Now psychologists have determined that normal people generally run to about 40 acquaintances whom they keep in touch with more or less continuously. But some professions – journalists, insurance salesmen – run to much larger figures. Politicians are in this category. If we conservatively put the number of contacts per politician at about 100, this means that the contacts of your contacts will number !0,000. Clearly you cannot vet them all. Equally clearly some of them will probably be less than salubrious. This is normal. It is a non-story.

This brings us to the question why Mr Leung bothered. Threatening to sue columnists has costs. Some people, of whom I am one, will see it as a shameless attempt to inhibit comment. Reporters as a group will think less favourably of him, and the general public will not be too impressed either. After all the services of a libel lawyer are like Mr Leung’s palace on the Peak – beyond the means of many of us.

The thing which puzzles me is that Mr Leung was presumably advised that to have any hope of success he must convince the judge that he is a man of unblemished reputation whose good name has been dragged in the mud. But Mr Leung is not such a person. He is routinely described, even in the most sobre newspapers, as a bare-faced liar who got his job by deceiving the electorate. Nobody has been threatened with legal action over these remarks. The defendant could mount the unusual and interesting defence that Mr Leung’s reputation was already so tatty that stories of  him taking tea with triads could make it no worse.

Actually I seem to remember that around 1997 the official line in pro-China circles about organised crime was that many of its leaders were patriots. Presumably they now qualify as persons with the interests of Hong Kong and the motherland at heart, as long as they make no trouble and vote for the Liaison Office’s preferred candidates.  Probably not much consolation when they smash your kneecaps, but politics, as they say, makes strange bedfellows.

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A really surprising and unexpected thing happened the other day. I read a piece about the Lion Rock Institute and thoroughly agreed with it. The Lion Rockers are a bunch of free market fundamentalists usually found defending the rights of employers and landlords to grind the faces of the poor if that is the way the economic forces waft them. However their line on the baby-milk problem seemed to me entirely correct. They pointed out that it was perfectly legal for people who wished to do so to buy baby formula in Hong Kong, take it to Shenzhen and sell it there. This is, indeed, a version of an activity commonly found in Hong Kong business circles. It’s called trade. If this particular trade was causing problems – congestion, local shortages, whatever – the job of the government was to solve the problems, not to ban the activity or try to hamper it with regulations.

As it happened a newspaper letter-writer had made a rather similar point a few days before. It would make more sense, he said, for the government to set up a depot where a copious supply of milk powder in the demanded brands could be collected, and then tell the traders to confine themselves to the first carriage of the train, so that other passengers would not be disturbed by them. This would solve the congestion and supply problems, while allowing the trade to continue.

But this, of course, is not the way our government works. Whether this is a colonial tradition or the result of the new prominence of DAB stalwarts I do not know, but the government’s first instinct on facing a problem is to find someone it can bully. Consider the matter of mainland mothers. There is nothing wrong with mainland mothers coming to Hong Kong to give birth. A territory which seriously wished to become a “hub” for medical services would welcome the development. Instead we banish the customers. This was not inevitable. The government could have rented an empty hotel and turned into a maternity home, to increase the supply of beds. More entertainingly it could have chartered an ocean liner for the same purpose. The ocean liner could work like a casino ship. Every evening it would sail out of Hong Kong waters, thereby ensuring that the babies born in it would not have the right of abode, and the doctors working in it could be recruited without the consent of the local closed medical shop. I do not suggest that these solutions would have been easy or infallible. But I do not believe they were even considered. Much easier to bully some pregnant peasants.

Faced with jams in the Cross-Harbour Tunnel we find a similar lack of enterprise. The government will manipulate the charges and bribe the Eastern tunnel company to behave itself this time. Last time they put the Causeway Bay charge up the Eastern people promptly raised their fess to get us back to stage one. Now I realise this is a tricky problem and not the government’s fault. For a long time I was puzzled by the refusal to try to make the Western tunnel more usable. I understand there is only one lane connecting the tunnel to Central but some people might wish to go the other way, to Aberdeen. But I tried that the other day and it’s even worse than going to Central. You are guided by the signs through an intricate web of Kennedy Town streets with several traffic lights before you emerge blinking on Pokfulam Road. So what it comes to is that the Colonial government built a three-lane tunnel which connects with one-and-a-half lanes of  road on Hong Kong side. Clearly this was a planning cock-up on the grand scale, worthy of comparison with the efforts of the nameless mandarin who decided in the 70s that the KCR did not need a station in Tsimshatsui. Still, the tunnel problem is not insoluble. What we need is for the tunnel companies to copy the system surreptitiously used by the airlines and pool their income. This would mean that whichever tunnel you went through the money would be put in a big pot and divided three ways between the tunnel companies. Charges could then be set in a way which reflected the public interest and ensured that all tunnels made the best contribution they could. The tunnels could then save a lot of money by collecting tolls in one direction only. And drivers could choose their tunnel in the light of the length of the detour involved in an alternative and the likelihood of delays on the shortest route.

The puzzling thing is that some people are bullied while others are cossetted. In most countries the idea of paying the owners of antiquated diesel vehicles to get new ones would be greeted with bewilderment. People are not entitled to pollute. London had diesel taxis for years and they did not contribute to pollution because they had serious annual inspections and a compulsory retirement age, which was five years.  Someone who is driving a 15-year-old truck is killing us. Poisonous antiques should be banned.  There is a place for market forces and there is a place for compulsion. It is not clear that our government knows where those places are.

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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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We are all supposed to respect the law. But this requires some cooperation from the law itself. If the law does stupid things we will laugh at it whether we wish to or not.

This brings us to the case of Mr Ki Chun-kei, who appeared in Eastern Court on Thursday charged with assaulting no less than five policemen simultaneously. A Hong Kong Hulk, you might think.

Not so. Mr Ki was trying to cross the road in Causeway Bay during the annual July 1 protestfest. He found the road closed and followed the crowd in search of a place which was not. Mr Ki was, he told the court, not drunk. However as he was carrying an open can of beer we may suspect that he was not entirely sober either.

At this point stories diverge. Mr Ki told the magistrate that he heard other people whistling and joined in. It seems Mr Ki has mastered the art of whistling with two fingers in your mouth (I have never been able to do this, for some reason) which means he has quite a loud whistle.

According to the prosecution, however, Mr Ki deliberately approached the five cops concerned and whistled “at” them. We may note in passing that in terms of the physics of whistling this is nonsense. Once the whistle emerges from your lips it spreads out indiscriminately in the fashion of ripples on a pond. You cannot project it in any particular direction. We may note also that  some people may have been surprised by Mr Ki’s whistle but we would certainly have heard by now if there was any danger of people being injured by one, if only because whistlers would have deafened themselves.

Now assault is one of those flexible concepts beloved of lawyers. It is not a necessary part of the offence that the perpetrator actually touches, still less harms, the victim. So it would be dangerous for a layman to suggest that the law was in this case being stretched into areas where it was not intended to go. I notice that one of the officers involved claimed, no doubt without any prompting by the prosecution, that he had been temporarily deafened by Mr Ki’s wolf-whistle. Another officer said she was “scared and humiliated”. By a whistle? Are we recruiting such fragile spirits as police persons these days?

But really one wishes that the person considering this prosecution had deployed less of the legal theology and a bit more old-fashioned common sense. Demonstrations are often rowdy affairs. People use a variety of ways of making noises. We do not expect our policemen to put up with abuse but we do not expect them to be shrinking violets either.

If protesters are not allowed to whistle in the vicinity of policemen, whatever next? Will there be prosecutions over shouts, over drums, gongs, bagpipes? Is it now a criminal offence to while away the long walk from Causeway Bay to Central with a few satirical verses from the Policemen’s Chorus in the Pirates of Penzance?

We are not supposed to say the law is an ass, even though it is a quotation from Charles Dickens. But it should beware of behaving like one.

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