tim's experiment

One of the thing which hjas often amazed me since moving to the education field is the number of people who reach very senior positions in this area while being really dumb.

Consider our, or rather the PRC’s, Minister for Education, Yuan Guiren. I suppose this person cannot have reached such an education eminence without some knowledge of the field, not to mention the animal cunning required to survive and prosper in the upper ranks of the Beijing leadership. But yesterday he, as Pravda put it, broke his silence on the national education issue. He said that “all nationals should receive national education”. This settled at least one part of the argument. One of the strongest arguments against national education, and the hardest to refute (because it is always hard to prove a negative), was that the whole thing was just being done to please Beijing. What was hard has now become impossible. It is being done at Beijing’s wish and Mr Yuan has no scruples about issuing instructions to that effect in public.  He went on to say, reportedly, that there was “room for discussion” on the matter. Too late.

Actually there was no reason for Mr Yuan to “break his silence” and a good reason for sticking with it. Under “one country two systems”  education is clearly a matter for Hong Kong, not for Beijing. It has nothing to do with defence or foreign affairs. Hong Kong schools are no more the business of the PRC Education Ministry than Hong Kong railways are that of (perish the thought) the Railways Ministry, or Hong Kong hospitals of the Health Ministry. Those people who periodically assure us that China has scrupulously observed the terms of the Basic Law now look a bit optimistic. After all if ministers are prepared to issue instructions in public who knows what they say in private? Sometimes silence really is golden.

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It seems the business pages are awash with people who wish to assure us that there is no housing bubble. Prices are perfectly reasonable in historical terms and there is no need for the government to do anything. Well it would perhaps be too easy to ascribe this to either a position in the market or a desire to please friends in the business, but it does seem a bit suspicious. Some of the evidence cited in support of this view is very technical. Some of it is a bit tacky. It seems that real estate agents can always come up with convincing reasons why this is a good time to buy. I wonder why that is…

A particularly eye-catching part of the statistical scenery is the figure for empty flats in Hong Kong, of which there are apparently 120,000. If you are determined to look on the sunny side of things you interpret this as indicating that there is no shortage of flats in Hong Kong. Current high prices are purely a result of our dollar being tethered to Mr Obama’s apron strings. So mortgages are cheap. And there is no bubble. And the government should not increase supply, and if it does then it will get the blame when prices come down.

I have a problem with this interpretation. I do not see the owners of these 120,000 flats making frantic efforts to let or sell them. After all if they wished to do so, they could manage it by lowering their asking price. Every economist since Marchall has maintained that a free market which is functioning properly will “clear”. In other words, if there are 100,000 empty flats for sale, then the price will come down until 100,000 willing buyers appear. Why is this not happening?

I turn at this point to J.K. Galbraith’s old but still very readable book on the Great Crash of 1929/30. Galbraith does not go in for any of the exotic statistical stuff now on offer. He looks at interest rates as a possible problem and rejects the theory. His bubble indicator is rather qualitative. A bubble forms when people aquire things for which they have no use or need, with a view solely to benefiting from an expected rise in the asset’s value. If you bought a tulip bulb because you wanted to grow tulips that was OK. When people started buying tulip bulbs because they thought the bulbs would double in value just sitting on a shelf, they were blowing bubbles. If you bought shares in the South Sea Company because you thought it was a good company with excellent long-term prospects then you were an investor. If you just bought them because you were fairly confident that someone would pay you three times as much for them next week then you were blowing. If you bought a flat recently, to live in, fine. Whatever happens to property prices you will still have somewhere to live. If you bought it because the rent income would more than cover the mortgage payments that is also OK. I hope you didn’t subdivide it. If you bought it because propsrty prices always rise so it will be worth more next year than this year .. well good luck. You’re probably getting better odds than you would get in Macau but it’s still a gamble. And the government is not obliged – though it may be talked into it – to ensure that you win.

The question we now have to ask ourselves is why these 120,000 flats are sitting unsold on their owners’ metaphorical shelves. They are not being let. They are not being sold. They are not being lived in. They are, as one bubble non-spotter put it, a “popular investment for middle class Hong Kongers.” Not to mention mainland money-launderers. But investments come in two categories. Investments which produce an income flow you hold for the long term. Investments which are intended to rise in value are dropped like hot bricks if the relevant prices seem to be going down.

Well we shall see. The proof of the bubble is in the bursting. Bubbles do not deflate gently. They pop. If the fall in property prices is slow and smooth then the apostles of complacency were right. If the fall is sudden and precipitate it will be because there was a bubble after all. It will not be the government’s fault. But some blame will attach to the people who told us there was nothing to worry about, and prices would go onwards and upwards …. for ever … to infinity and beyond…

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Interesting reversal of roles this weekend. Usually I pipe and my wife takes the pictures or the video. This time she was performing in a concert in the Shatin Town Hall foyer and I was behind the camera – a rather alarming arrangement because I know very little about cameras. The concert was for groups of zheng (it rhymes with bung) players, in numbers ranging from one to about 12.  The zheng works rather well as an ensemble instrument. Oddly enough they have one problem which they share with bagpipers. One does not have a conductor. The leading player gives the signal for things to happen. But the instrument requires the attention of both hands. In pagipe bands everyone is standing up and the leader of the proceedings developes a very expressive foot. You play the zheng sitting down so the leading lady (I have never seen a male zheng player) gestures with her head. This will never catch on with pipers. We have to wear hats.

Actually this sort of musical event is going on all the time. People who think Hong Kong is a cultural desert do not get out enough. We are short of those mammoth artisitic enterprises like grand opera which used to be court entertainments and consequently are too expensive to live without massive subsidies to replace their lost royal patronage.  But smaller scale events are happening all the time. Hang around your local town hall and you will see a great deal of coming and going. In fact the recurring complaint in local music and dancing circles is of the difficulty of finding places to do it. Our beloved government provides a certain number of small rooms in town halls and sports centres where such things can be done. No doubt the number of rooms conforms to some ingenious formula which tells the urban planner how many such rooms will be required per million of population. If you ask me this formula needs to be tweaked a bit.

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Splendid piece of investigative journalism in the last Sunday Pravda. The reporter, Ms Joanna Chiu, had a simple but fruitful idea. She rented a segment of a subdivided flat for a month. Actually she only lasted a week but in the conditions that is nothing to be ashamed of.

I had better insert here that, as far as I know, Ms Chiu has never been one of my students. If she had been she would have got my standard line on investigative journalism (a field in which, long ago, I could claim some eminence) which is that there are a lot of good stories which do not require a great deal of money, connections or Deep Throats. You just have to think of them. This was an excellent example. Anyone could have done it. The secret of success is to be the person who thinks of doing it first.

The details of life in a subdivided flat were fairly harrowing. Let us say that it did not come as a great surprise when Ms Chiu, fleeing her hell hole to spend the night in the nearest all-night Big Mac Parlour, found a lot of other people doing the same thing.  Clearly Hong Kong has a large number of sleazebag landlords who are happy to rent out cubicles which are unsafe, unsanitary, barely habitable and grotesquely over-priced.

The question which now arises, of course, is whether it is acceptable to have one of these sleazebag landlords as the political appointee in charge of buildings matters.  The answer is obvious, and is unlikely to come out any different if you accept what seems to be the usual excuse these days and say that actually he is only the sleazebag’s husband.  I am beginning to think I would rather have kept the guy who had done interesting things with his rent allowance. Come to that I am beginning to wish I had cast my non-existent vote for Henry. But it’s too late for all that.

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An interesting moment in the patriotic voyage to the Diaoyu Archipelago came when the police boarded the patriotic protest trawler. Previous protest odyssies had ended at this point in a burst of law-enforcement based on the notion that trawlers are meant for fishing, and so are not designed, or more importantly licensed, to carry passengers. On this occasion, we were told, the Forces of Order boarded the trawler. The inhabitants of the boat, it transpired, had locked themselves in the wheelhouse and refused to admit the floating plods. Fearing that they would be carried into international waters, where they have no jurisdiction, Hong Kong’s finest unboarded the trawler, returned to their own boat and watched the protest pirates sail away. This was either a politically-directed charade or the most humiliating moment in the history of our police force since …  the last time a Commissioner of Police apologised.

Happily the Force’s reputation was to some extent restored on Monday. A member of the public called the police to  report that a dog had been left in its owner’s car with the windows closed, and that the dog seemed distressed. Police found that the car was locked. Like the island protesters, the dog did not unlock the door. The police in Yuen Long, however, are made of sterner stuff than their Marine counterparts. They broke a window, and rescued the dog. The dog was taken to a nearby dog hospital, where it was declared dead. The owner was arrested when she returned to the car, and will be charged with cruelty.

Clearly there is a need for some exchanges of expertise here. Perhaps the person in Yuen Long who knows how to break windows can be seconded to the Marine Police, where he can spread the word that trawlers have windows. Meanwhile the Marine moron who doesn’t know how to break windows could be transferred to Yuen Long, where his limitations may cause the odd dead dog but will not lead to international incidents.

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I do not claim that the Joint Declaration on Hong Kong’s Future and the ensuing Basic Law of the Hong Kong SAR are my daily reading. Still I assert with some confidence that the division of labour in the running of Hong Kong affairs was very clear on one point: foreign policy is a matrter for the Central People’s Government. So what on earth did C.Y. Leung think he was up to when he summoned the Japanese Consul to his office for an earful about Those Islands?  If Hong Kong’s Chief Executive wishes to express concern about the plight of Hong Kong citizens detained in other countries, fine. The Japanese Consul has a telephone. It might be more to the point to call his head office anyway. Summoning a diplomat personally to your office is technologically obsolete. It is preserved as a signal-sending gesture in international diplomacy. But Hong Kong has no role in international diplomacy. So there is no excuse for Mr Leung masquerading as Metternich or Castlereagh and a good reason for not doing it: it looks pompous and ridiculous.

I have some sympathy for the people who say we should give Mr Leung a little while to show what he can do before we all start throwing fruit. But the fact is that he has already shown what he can do. The new administration seems to have two themes. One is a strong pong caused by the reluctance of so many members of the new team — led regrettably by Mr Leung himself — to be forthcoming about their financial interests, and the discovery that some of them did indeed have something to hide. The resulting whiff of sleeze is, no doubt, partly a result of score-settling by people who wanted a Chief Executive with a large basement. Still, standards do not seem to be high. Anyone who cannot remember what was going on in his property because he left such matters up to his wife should be out on his ear.

The other theme of the new bunch is lurid nationalism. The trip to the Daoyius was a spectacular piece of self-dramatisation. I particularly enjoyed the report that the intrepid voyagers might starve because half of their food had been swept overboard. People have been fishing from Hong Kong for decades with no reports of food being washed overboard. Floating kitchens are much like land-based ones: indoors with food cupboards. Only on political voyages do monster waves catch the food sunbathing on deck.  This trip was a prime example of the classic agitation techniques: propaganda by deed and provocations. Propaganda by deed involves performing a conspicuous and preferably illegal action which dramatizes the political situation to which you object. Provocation meens trying to trigger an act of repression which will put your antagonist in the wrong. Having dabbled in this sort of thing myself I do not like to see it wasted. Anyone who thinks the ownership of a few uninhabited rocks is an important political issue needs to get a sense of proportion.

But it seems Mr Leung and several well-known fellow-travellers actually helped to finance the expedition. I do not buy the line that the whole thing was a surrogate job on behalf of the People’s Government. The PRC does not need to go to such elaborate lengths to start a shoving match with the Japanese Coast Guard. It  has plenty of fishing boats. I am afraid this is just another instalment in the attempt to play the nationalism card by a team which sees no other plausible route to popularity. Personally I do not like nationalism. This is a widespread sentiment in Europe where we have seen the movie and know how it ends.

Island activists who want to start a war should first take a trip to the north of France, where there are still more than 2,000 British war cemeteries. There is a similar number of French war cemeteries, among which I particularly recommend the Ossuary at Verdun. This large building contains the battlefield debris left by soldiers who were not only no longer identifiable by name but had been so dismembered that they could no longer be assembled into complete sets of parts. Obviously a certain amount of guesswork is involved in working out how many people may have contributed to the collection but the figure usually given is 130,000. Taking provocative trips to disputed islands is not conducive to a peaceful solution to the problem. It is conducive to a violent solution. We may have had criticisms of the first two Chief Executives but at least they did not try to start a war on our behalf.

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Two fallacies have been widely propagated about the new Diploma of Secondary Education. The first one is easily disposed of. This is the claim that the new Liberal Studies subject can be considered a success because most students managed to pass it. Now it is true that the whole enterprise would have been a disaster if students had failed the exam in large quantities. After all, many universities require it. But avoiding disaster hardly counts as success. Saying that most people pass the exam is like saying a boat floats. It’s a good start, and better than the alternative, but more is needed before we start congratulating ourselves. Among the possible explanations for the encouraging pass rate is that the exam was rather easy or was graded with a generous eye. The purpose of a new subject is not to provide another exam which students can pass. I am not sure exactly what the purpose of Liberal Studies is, but it will be a year or two before we even have an inkling of whether it has made any difference. Will next year’s university students perhaps be more liberally studious than their predecessors? What do you think?

The other error was more grandiose. This was committed by those reporters who totted up the number of people who had achieved the minimum number of passes required for university admission, and noted that the number of university places available was considerably smaller. This was written up on the basis that large numbers of people had “qualified for” university but would be deprived of the benefit for which they had qualified because of the shortage of places. This is placing far too much faith in universities’ ability to encapsulate their various requirements into a set of examination grades. The minimum requirements for admission are just a bureaucratic convenience, a way of reducing the potential pool of candidates to manageable proportions. Many programmes will actually have higher requirements, or more detailed ones, than the minimum. Popular programmes will use exam results to shrink their own pool of applicants, so that the practical minimum for the course you want may be much higher than the minimum standard agreed for all universities. The minimum is set so that even the least fashionable institutions will have a pool of eager applicants. It tells us nothing about the people who reach it, or don’t reach it.

Nobody who has thought seriously about the matter supposes that every student without exception who reaches the minimum standard would enjoy, benefit from, or even successfully complete, a university education. The converse is also true. Some students who fail to reach the minimum standard are in fact perfectly capable of university studies and now the system is a bit more flexible many of them get the chance to prove it. One of my most outstanding students had failed all her A Levels but gained entry to a HND course with her AS language scores. She transferred to HKBU on the strength of her excellent performance in the Higher Diploma and did very well.  Examinations are a very rough and ready way of measuring people.

Personally I wonder if it might be better if fewer people went to university. I notice they are now getting complaints in America – where more than half the population goes to university – that there is a serious shortage of people with technical and engineering qualifications. Mass higher education means lots of people having general education degrees which do not prepare them for demanding jobs. In the light of this it could be considered rather ominous that the arrival of 3-3-4 education in Hong Kong has been accompanied by a wave of enthusiasm in local universities for … general education. Ever since the government decided to go from having three universities to eight the newly elevated institutions have been shedding practical professional subjects in favour of more theoretical and academic ones. My university has decided to drop Physics. Too difficult to get good students. We’re still doing Sociology…

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There was a gloriously confusing piece on the op-ed page of Pravda last week, on the topic du jour, national education. Really this is not a very interesting topic. The government paid oodles of money to a bunch of left-wingers to produce a set of teaching notes which are propagandistic garbage. Ap0logists trying to wriggle round this obdurate core of fact often get themselves into undignified positions.

So to last week., The writer was a lady whose only claim to our attention, according to the little note at the end, was that she graduated from the London School of Economics. She trotted out the usual line that many countries have national education. Oddly enough we are never actually given any names in this connection, which leaves the reader with the suspicion that either there are not that many countries which have national education, or the countries which go in for this are places we might not wish to imitate, like North Korea. There is a dangerous area of ambiguity here, actually. In most countries children do pick up a lot of material which might, if you were anxious to make sure they didn’t miss any of it, be categorised as national education. It is a common complaint about history lessons that they concentrate on the home country and its immediate vicinity. Geography is a bit more cosmopolitan, but not much. Local field trips are easier. Literature classes tend naturally to focus on the national language and its authors. And so it goes on. I was not subjected to national education. We did, though, in the normal course of events, pick up a reasonable amount of Brit history, geography, etc, as well as such patriotic trappings as the origins of the national flag and the words of the national anthem. It doesn’t have to be a separate subject.

Actually, if I may digress for a moment, primary schools are not supposed to do separate subjects any more. The modern way is to have what is called a topic tree. Say the topic for this term is trees, so we have a trees tree. We will do the biology of trees, the economics of trees, literary references to trees, King Charles’s oak, the giant Sequoia and whatever else the teacher can think up. Perhaps each child will bring in a twig and make a model dug-out canoe. While this is going on the basics of reading, writing and counting will be painlessly absorbed as a fringe benefit. Or so the theory goes. One of my son’s teachers once told me that in her experience there were only two “topics” which worked: dinosaurs and ancient Egypt. They were always a great success. Others did not spark much interest. She had not tried trees. Anyway into this happy scene we are now going to insert a period devoted to a government-ordained syllabus. There will be no exam. Do I hear snoring?

Enough detours. The nub of last week’s article was that the nation was not the same thing as the state. This is a typical piece of sociological slight of hand, in which a well-known word is given an arbitrary new meaning, whose implications can then propel a small fleet of research outputs. Most of us know what a nation is. It is a political entity with a flag, a UN seat, a president (or monarch in old-fashioned examples), an army (Costa Rica excepted), a passport and a football team which appears at least in the preliminary stages of the World Cup. There is a school of sociological thought, however, which uses “nation” for smaller groupings distinguished by the possession of a distinctive language and culture. This enabled our writer to point out, rather unhelpfully, that Britain consisted of three “nations”: Scotland, England and Wales. Hong Kong was at present, she observed, a separate “nation” which did not regard itself as part of the Chinese “nation” and the purpose of national education was to remedy this.

This is the sort of thing which happens when you mess about with the language. The Chinese “nation” is a nation in the traditional sense, posessing flag, passport, president, UN seat etc. It is not a “nation” in the other sense, in which Hong Kong might well be a “nation”, having a distinctive culture and language. China the nation state also incorporates numerous “nations” in the trendy sociological sense with their own language and culture. Actually the people who use “nation” in the way we are invited to use it here generally do not believe that the “nations” they discover should be pressured or propagandized into submerging themselves in other “nations”, or in larger political entities. On the contrary they generally infer that the culture and language of the “nations” they identify should be preserved and protected, as variations on Gaelic are, with varying degrees of success, in the British Isles.

So I suspect the people at LSE would be rather surprised to find their ideas pressed into service to support the imposition of national education on Hong Kong schools. But if you’re desperate…

If there is a moral to be drawn from all this it is that the local left-wing fraternity should not be allowed to dabble in the education of those children fortunate enough to have escaped their school system. In order to achieve eminence in left-wing circles it is necessary to amputate the political balls and check them in at the Liaison Office in a jar. This leaves the victim in no condition to contribute to civic education for people who are still intact.

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