tim's experiment

The news that one of our senior officials has to be hooked up to a gadget every night to make up for the deficiencies of his kidneys unleashed a wave of heartrending stories about the hard life led by ministers. Recent casualties were enumerated, and touching quotes provided about the difficulty of being constantly answerable to the public. Some officials were reported to be working 14-hour days, some to be wilting from overwork.

Well hold your tears. This is predominantly a government of mature to elderly men. Such men generally have the odd medical problem. There is no evidence that being a minister in the Hong Kong SARG is more dangerous or wearing than other jobs commonly taken by men in their 50 and 60s. There is no evidence that appointees are sicker as a group than others of a similar demographic make-up. Nor is there any evidence that being answerable to “the public” is any more difficult and stressful than being answerable to some individual boss who may have his or her own prejudices and caprices.

I also doubt that they actually have that much to do. The big decisions are made in Beijing. I presume people would not have accepted appointment to our puppet regime if they were not happy with that. The small decisions can be left to one’s ever more numerous underlings and assistants. Anyone who is finding himself bowed by an excess of real work needs to sort out his priorities.

But on closer inquiry one finds that they are not bowed by an excess of real work. When you ask how the Secretary for Sewage can possibly justify working 14 hours a day you are told that he has very time-consuming social obligations. So the secretarial day goes something like this. The clock starts at 8 am, when he is collected by the office car and driver. By 8.30 he is in the totally unnecessary daily meeting known as “morning prayers” with all the  other bigwigs. At 9.30 he gets back to his own office and spends a couple of hours with the correspndence, emails, files, etc. Then it’s off to an official luncheon of the Sewage Conractors Association, at which he is the guest of honour. The afternoon is spent on an official visit to the North Kowloon office of the Department of Sewerage Services. Here the staff have spent the last two months making sure he will have a good time. Half an hour before he arrives a lift has been reserved for his exclusive use. The toilet seat has been warmed and the champagne has been cooled.

In the evening we are off to another formal dinner or two. Leading to our hero arriving home about 10 and feeling that he has clocked 14 hours on the job, after a strenuous day of meeting, eating, inspecting and adding to his collection of souvenir plaques. Now of course I realise that this is not as much fun as it sounds. Going to parties as a job sounds wonderful. It soon palls, even on reporters with a well-developed taste for free beer.  On the other hand, and considering the remuneration and the perks involved, the secretary’s routine  certainly beats a great many other jobs you can think of.

So one can offer two suggestions for ministers who feel the job is killing them. One is “get organised”. Send your deputy to morning prayers, limit your engagements, delegate. You are part of a municipal government, not a global empire. Rule one is don’t sweat the small stuff.  Rule two is: it’s all small stuff.

 The other possible course of action is to resign. You can then relax, take a lucrative job with the company which builds Hong Kong’s sewers, and explore the world’s golf courses. Do not be dissuaded by the argument that the government will have trouble finding a talented, enterprising and effective replacement for you. Why should they? How many of your present colleagues are talented, enterprising and effective? Conformist mediocrity is what they really want, and of that there is no shortage.

While driving home the other day I found myself leading – or at least preceding – a white Ferrari. I had some difficulty in identifying it at first, because you rarely see a white Ferrari. Many Hong Kong drivers will not consider white for a car because it is the colour used for the government fleet.  I suppose if the car you are painting is a Ferrari then that question does not arise. Anyway, the traffic was heavy and neither of us was racing. He did not seem to be in a hurry and I am too old for that sort of thing. So we remained more or less in formation from the traffic lights in Waterloo Road to the traffic lights before the bridge over the Shing Mun river in Shatin, though by that stage he was in front of me. When the lights changed we both advanced, and I was treated to the music of his four exhaust pipes. I noted that he had to change gear twice before we reached the speed at which my Prius, with no prompting from me, abandoned the pretence that it was an electric car and started the petrol engine.

Now clearly a Ferrari — supposing I could afford one — would be an impractical choice for me. I often want to carry more than one passenger. Even if that were not the case I could not consider a car which could not accommodate a bass drum in the boot. The Ferrari drinks petrol, it is far more polluting than my Prius, and it would not fit in my garage. There is no road in Hong Kong where you can legally approach its maximum speed. And yet… I felt that little irrational burst of suppressed emotion. It’s impractical; it’s expensive; it’s polluting, but what red-blooded male – or for that matter female – would not like, at least for a while …?  This makes no sense, but then many instinctive feelings about cars make no sense.

Consider Jeremy Clarkson, whose work – both broadcast and print – I enjoy and admire. He nurtures a violent hostility for the Prius. On one programme he took great delight in destroying one with a heavy machine gun. And I understand the hostility. When you drive a Prius you finally lose contact with the old world in which “motoring” (so called to distinguish it from “driving”, which meant steering horses) was fun. The Prius does not pretend to be a sports car. It does not make those lovely noises. It does not make the nice smells. It is as far as you can get from the old days when the roar of the exhaust drowned out the non-existent radio, the wind ruffled your hair and the characteristic odour of Castrol R tickled your nostrils. The Prius admits that modern travcl is functional. It is a good car to drive in a tunnel queue. It doesn’t have a rev counter but it does tell you how much petrol you are using. It is a sort of metrosecxual motor – practical but in touch with its feminine side.

No wonder Mr Clarkson hates it. It is the wave of the unwelcome future. Mr Clarkson’s affection for a world in which drivers changed their own gears, rode with the roof down and frequently let the tail hang out round a corner is charming, eminently shareable and totally anachronistic. It is on a par with the nostalgic yearning for sailing ships, aeroplanes with four wings and steam locomotives. The world is changing and future cars will increasingly take over the work now done by the driver. This is a pity if you happen to enjoy the work, but on crowded roads enjoyment is anyway in short supply. Where in Hong Kong can you really drive a Ferrari as it ought to be driven?

Interesting column by Albert Cheng on Saturday urging us all to “unite against violence”. This started with the observation that vulgar language and radical action were OK if within the law, and went on to say that civil disobedience had a moral basis, whether the public agreed with it or not. So far, I thought, rather radical for the SCMPost. Mr Cheng went on to strongly condemn violence in terms which few people would quarrel with, citing as unacceptable the attack on him some years ago, and also the suggestions by people who thought his opposition to the link Reit was costing them money that the attack should be repeated. He also said the media had been remiss in not condemning this suggestion more forthrightly, which may be true; frankly I don’t remember. Mr Cheng went on to say that the media had not improved since, and it became apparent that some long-overdue reference to a current event which had sparked this line of thought was now going to forthcome, as it were.

Here it was. During a protest outside the Legco building one group had staged a “street drama” in which an actor representing Mr Li Ka-shing and other actors representing his bodyguards were attacked by another group of actors representing an angry mob. Mr Cheng’s objection to this performance was that it was “encouraging the public to use violence”.

To which the only possible answer is “Oh no it wasn’t.” Protest is protest, real life is real life, and drama is drama. People do not imitate what they see in dramas. Teenage couples do not emerge from Romeo and Juliet feeling suicidal. Ladies do not go home from performances of Antony and Cleopatra to clasp an asp to their bosoms. The “Rape of Lucrece ” is not generally considered Shakespeare’s best effort but it has never been accused of encouraging sex crimes. Violence is used in drama as a metaphor. Viewers have no difficulty in distinguishing it from real life. I do not suppose the simulated overthrow of Mr Li Ka-shing was very good drama, but it was drama, not violence. If Mr Cheng wants a peg in which to hang a condemnation of violence it should be a specimen of real violence, not a piece of artistic expression, however low in quality.

I was left wondering, actually, if he was really up to something else, and perhaps the objection to the street theatrics was not so much to the violence as to the fact that it was rude about Mr Li. No doubt there is a perfectly good column to be written about how Mr Li is a nice man who is kind to children, dogs and needy universities,  though readers will not find it here.  Probably there is also a good column to be written to the effect that local media are not appropriately vociferous in their condemnation of violence. But that needs better evidence than the fact that street theatrics are reported without comment.

A strange change has taken place in the meaning of a previously well-understood phrase, “light pollution”. Light is not a pollutant in the normal sense because it is, in most circumstances, entirely harmless. Astronomers, though, complained that the quantities of light leaking into the sky from modern cities made it impossible for them to pick out small, distant features of the night skyscape. Nobody has ever suggested that a practical sollution to this would involve curbing the use of artificial light to restore the opportunities for city-centre astronomy. Serious astronomers now site their telescopes on mountain-tops as far from built-up areas as possible. Astronomy continues, though no doubt with less contributed than before from eager amateurs with telescopes in their suburban back gardens.

However that is not the kind of light pollution which has been making headlines in Hong Kong. This started, at least in the English-language press, with a lady who had bought as investments some flats in the Masterpiece, a new and hideous high-rise in Kowloon. She complained that these flats were illuminated in the evenings by the bright lights on a nearby shopping centre. She might, as a result, have to lower the rent she was demanding from tenants. I confess that I am a landlord in a small way myself. All the same I found it difficult to sympathise. The Masterpiece is in a commercial area. It was always likely to be surrounded by shopping malls. Also the tenants can console themselves with a compensating feature of their view: from inside the building they enjoy views unblemished by the Masterpiece itself. One must also reflect that this form of pollution is not only harmless in its effects – I mean flashing lights on your ceiling may be irritating but hardly a health threat on the scale of noise or dirty air – but also an eminently solvable problem. If the air is polluted we all have no choice but to breathe it. If your neighbour is remodelling his bathroom you can try earplugs or hi-tech earphones, but basically you are defenceless against the thundering of his jackhammers. However if some nearby retailer is shining nocturnal lights on your window there is a well established low-tech solution. It is called the curtain.

Actually I thought the complaining landlady had a nerve. A fact of life in Hong Kong that we all have to live with is that your rights as a property owner end abruptly at the edge of your property. The owner of the adjacent plot may obstruct you seaview, or indeed access to daylight, with whatever monstrous edifice he chooses to erect. The government may run fly-overs within feet of your windows. Faced with ventilation shafts, rubbish collection points or incinerators you may solicit the help of your disctrict board but your own legal rights are non-existent. Among the beneficiaries of this system, or lack of one, are the owners of the Masterpiece itself, which would never have been built in its present form in a city where land use was controlled properly in the public interest.

I concede the point that very bright lights are probably wasting electricity, but somehow I do not think this was the thought which had landlords and landladies up in arms. And shops are businesses after all. Presumably they know what works for them and if bright lights attract customers they are a legitimate ploy. I feel less confident about the light show which the government puts on every evening in the harbour for the amusement of mainland tourists. Several eager environmentalists complained about this as another form of light pollution. But we have to consider Hong Kong’s credibility as a mainland city. One of the nice things about the mainland is that every city offers an evening boat ride with some sort of light show on the riverbank buildings. Hong Kong was lacking in this important piece of civic infrastructure before the Handover but I noticed it appeared soon after. Just as all serious English cities have a cathedral (and some have two) so all serious mainland cities must have a boat ride and a light show. I suppose the light shows are a bit of a waste. So are the cathedrals.

I must apologise for neglecting this little blog for a while, as I have been away at a Scottish dancing event in Budapest. Yes I know Budapest is not in Scotland; it’s a long story. This happy event was held in a hotel built in an historic building, of roughly the same vintage as our own beloved 1881, alias the former Marine Police HQ. The New York Hotel in Budapest (yes I know New York is not in Hungary either; explanation coming) was originally built as an office block for an insurance company. It takes its name from a cafe built into the ground floor, which has some claim to historic fame as a hang-out for artists, literati and such people. It seems an early proprietor was art-loving and indulgent; he accepted small sketches in lieu of payment of bills, which naturally attracted the Bohemian crowd. So the cafe is still one of the city’s attractions. The hotel has been lovingly restored in its original style by the owners, an Italian hotel chain. Oddly enough they somehow missed out the three floors of expensive shopping which would no doubt have appeared in a Hong Kong version, though there is a modern annex tucked away at the back with meeting rooms, some bedrooms, and a ballroom fit for jigs and reels.

The interesting thing about this is that the hotel is not, like our 1881, an isolated specimen surrounded by shining examples of the 20th century developer Phillistine style.  The city is full of 19th century buildings, an increasing number of which are being carefully restored to their original outside appearance. This probably has something to do with the fact that the whole city centre has a height limit, which seems to click in about the sixth floor. Viewed from a convenient hill the city centre (and the word centre is interpreted expansively) still presents the spectacle of a patchwork of rooftops punctuated by the high points of church towers and other aspiring ornaments. This means that if you are the owner of a five-story building in Budapest you may, if you wish, demolish it and replace it with a modern one. But the modern one will be the same size as the one you had before. So sprucing up your antique is an attractive option. Hungarian owners seem quite happy with the idea that the ownership of a fivc-story building entitles you to the five-story building of your choice. Only in Hong Kong, it seems, does ownership of an old building confer on the proprietor the sacred right to replace it with four floors of underground carpark, three floors of shops selling expensive handbags to dumb tourists, and 30 floors of luxury boltholes for mainland money-launderers.

Personally I have never understood the logic of this. It is not the system followed elsewhere. Many European cities have limits on what you can do with old buildings. Height limits are also common.  The result of all this is that Budapest is beautiful and Hong Kong, generally, is not. Upon my return the newspapers were full of complaints from Mr Li Ka-shing about the hostility directed at real estate developers. Apparently he finds this surprising. Personally I think they’re lucky if they can walk the streets without being spat at.

What sort of people are becoming journalists these days, I wonder? I say this because last weekend the Hong Kong Journalists Association called for all local journalists to be recalled from Japan, apparently because it was too dangerous. Even more surprisingly, later in the week it was reported that most of the local reporters had in fact returned to Hong Kong. This seems to me to be a shameful episode. The events in Japan are a tragedy. They are also, as tragedies often are, a tremendous story and journalists should be eager to cover it. Hong Kong people are entitled to know what is going on, and that knowledge is best provided by Hong Kong reporters who speak the local language and share its culture and interests. Reporting natural disasters is demanding and occasionally dangerous. It is also an important and necessary service which journalists perform for the rest of the community.
The Hong Kong Journalists Association has a legitimate role in this area, in urging employers to ensure that journalists who are sent on potentially hazardous assignments are properly prepared, equipped and insured. It is not the Associaton’s job to chicken out on behalf of its members.   I am afraid the leadereship of the association is in danger of appearing a bunch of pretentious pussies pontificating about points of ethics, while forgetting some basic reporting rules, like “get to where the action is.”  I am not suggesting that reporters should be encouraged to be rash and foolish. But ruling a whole country off the map because of a potential nuclear problem is going beyond caution to cowardice. For reporters who think this was a good idea I can only recommend PR.

The disorders at a demonstration in Central on March 6 provoked interesting responses. Let me say at the outset that like everyone who was not there – and probably a good many who were – I have very little idea of what happened. So I proceed on the basis that everyone was doing more or less what they were supposed to do. The interesting thing is not the game, but the post-match comments.

First up was the Secretary for Security, Ambrose Lee. Mr Lee was asked about reports, which seem to have been accurate, that an 8-year-old boy was sprayed with pepper foam during the festivities. Now this report did not present any huge difficulties for an official spokesman. Clearly no sane officer would deliberately target a child with pepper spray. One would expect that with the spray, as with any other police weapon, the officer concerned would recognise his responsibility to be sure where it was pointing and who was going to get the good news before he pulled the trigger. Maybe in the excitement of the moment someone was a bit generous in his spraying. Or maybe someone jogged his elbow. No harm was done to the child and no harm would have been done by a polite expression of regret that someone had intercepted something which was not intended for him.

Instead, however, Mr Lee uncorked some verbal pepper spray of his own. It was, he said, inappropriate to be using children as a weapon to defend amid confrontation”, and it was “bad for children to bring them to those violent scenes”.  The problem with the first part of this is that no evidence has emerged, from Mr Lee or anyone else, that children were being used as any sort of shield or defensive weapon. No doubt Mr Lee would say that his remarks were entirely hypothetical and were not intended to apply to any particular individual in particular. Let me say in a similarly hypothetical way with no resemblance intended to any real person living or dead, that a minister whose response to a minor PR problem was a resort to venomous lies would not be fit to be a minister.  The problem with the second part of Mr Lee’s observation is that it is his job to preserve public order, not to issue retrospective travel advisories if the result of his efforts is a public brawl. Demonstrations in Hong Kong are generally peaceful. It is his job to keep them that way. His account of the proceedings was that protestors “were not willing to leave in a peaceful way, which led to a police decision on using a minimum level of force”.  If the result was unfit for children perhaps the level of force was not as minimal as it could have been.  I have seen something of police anti-riot rehearsals. Clearly our boys are well prepared to deal with a screaming mob bent on the destruction of all that we hold dear. Whether training for this eventuality is the best possible preparation for dealing with protesting members of the Hong Kong middle classes is another matter.

Mr Lee’s performance, though, was a model of soothing sanity compared with the performance later in the week from the Commissioner of Police. Asked if he would care to apologise to the pepper-sprayed kid, Mr Tsang Wai-hung flatly refused. “I don’t think we have done anything wrong,” he said, reassuring those timid citizens who supposed that the use of chemical weapons on primary school children was an essential part of law enforcement. “It is really an Arabian Nights if maintaining law and discipline needs to apologise.”  Now someone, and I fear Mr Ambrose Lee is not suitable for this task, needs to take Mr Tsang aside and point out one or two things. The first one is that it is not the job of his Force to maintain “discipline”. The police are the servants of the public, not its masters. Enforcing the law is quite enough.  The second is that there is nothing in the law of either Hong Kong or common courtesy which suggests that if you have a good purpose you are absolved from the obligation to apologise for your mistakes. All policemen seek to uphold the law. Nevertheless in the course of this laudable pursuit, accidents happen. Officers kick down the wrong door because they got the address mixed up. Innocent bystanders are hit by bullets intended for criminals. Detective constables with over-active hormones rape women in police stations. Innocent railway passengers have their heads blown off by anti-terrorism squads. Sooner or later Mr Tsang is going to have to say “sorry” for something. Last week would have been a good time to get some practice.

I was in the Bank the other day – the luxurious part where you get a seat, a cup of coffee and a paper to read while you wait – and they had a television on to one of those irritating news channels which runs a tickertape across the bottom of the screen. This was not distracting because the tickertape was in Chinese, as was the sound. So I looked at the pictures. 

This was one of those bulletins often found on Hong Kong television, which consisted entirely of the recent doings of senior officials. First up was the Financial Secretary, looking like a freshly whipped cur and surrounded by dubious men in black who looked like they might be something important in organised crime. I later found that these men were actually the government’s loyal legislative supporters, who had just been revising the FS’s budget for him.  Then we came to Donald, who was still complaining about his sub judice encounter with a protester. Those of us who have watched the Bokhary clip on one of its news outings will realise that the correct form in these matters is for the victim of the alleged assault to take a few seconds to ponder his next move, before giving a yelp, clutching the offended spot, and collapsing onto the pavement. Mr Tsang seems to have taken this polite convention to extremes by taking a ten minute rest, giving a speech and having dinner before he decided he needed to collapse into the nearest hospital.  After Mr Tsang we had the constitutional team, who had just been put through the wringer by legislators who had discovered that – as predicted on this blog many moons ago – the detailed arrangements for the five new constituencies had been designed deliberately to be as undemocratic as possible.  I don’t know why anyone finds this surprising. Next time the democrats decide to take the 30 pieces of silver and put the rat in democrat they will get better value for their betrayal if they insist on a few important details – like single member constituencies.

Leaving these details aside the whole spectacle, in purely visual terms,. was depressing. All the officials concerned looked tired. Our Chief Executive’s hair line is retreating rapidly towards his collar under the strains of office. Nobody looked happy in his work, nobody looked inspired or inspiring. We are led, in short, by a government which has passed its “best before” date and is fast approaching the one where it would be dangerous to feed it to your dog. The great merit of those crude democratic systems which almost force the politicians to sort themselves into two contending parties is that this situation is handled very well. Old tired governments are painlessly euthanised by the electorate and replaced by eager new faces. In time, of course, the eager new faces grow tired and stale in their turn. Meanwhile, though,  the fielding team  has refreshed itself, thought new thoughts,  purged the stupid and the senile, and is ready for another go.  What a contrast with our own dear government, which is condemned to eternal life, staggering zombie-like towards a forgotten destination while a large audience hoots and throws fruit.  If they weren’t so grotesquely over-paid you might feel sorry for them.

As I write this I have no idea what is in the budget. At least, not officially. A lot of stuff has been leaked, as now seems to be the habit. Still, I do not know, as of now, whether the FS has decided to raise the tax on cigarettes or not. Nor is that relevant to my complaint, which is that the question has become rather hysterical.

After all this is a prettystraightforward policy issue. Arguments for: raises money, discourages young smokers. Arguments against: government doesn’t need money, tax applies to all smokers regardless of age, if difference between prices in HK and prices in Shenzhen gets too big, lots of cigs will be smuggled. Both sets of arguments can be supported with statistics. In theory, a job for the technocrats. In practice this is a topic which attracts fanatics.

So we were treated to screeches of horror because the Financial Secretary had done something terrible. He had not kicked his dog, beaten his wife or, heaven forbid, actually been seen smoking one of the poisonous things himself. He had, in the course of the usual charade of public consultation which precedes the budget, met representatives of the tobacco business. Nobody suggested that he had made any decision as a result. The mere holding of the meeting was enough to arouse a horde of  health harridans of both sexes. It was, apparently, not enough that the government already taxes the business. It should also ostracise it. True believers know that the dreadful industry is populated by people of matchless cunning and supernatural persuasive powers. Merely being in a room with a tobacco baron is enough to reduce a government official to a state of helpless puppetry, putty in the nicotine-stained hands of the fag pushers. Or so they affect to believe. Personally I think this is nonsense. The FS meets all sorts of people. Some of them I rather disapprove of. No doubt he considers all the points put to him, and does not overlook the possiblity that interests are mixed up with the logic. So the Jockey Club sees merit in more gambling, the construction industry sees merit in more building, the booze people urge the advantages of cheaper booze and real estate salesmen want lower stamp duty. So it goes. Arguments should be considered on their merits, not on their origins.

But this is not the way fanatics work. Also up for the firing squad was the Lion Rock Institute, which had criticised the idea that taxation should be used to manipulate people’s behaviour as incompatible with complete personal freedom, which it is. The Institute, we were told, had accepted money from organisations which, in turn, had accepted money from the tobacco industry. Its opinions were therefore tainted with nicotine and should be disregarded. This is not fair. I usually disagree with the Lion Rock Institute. They are in my view a bunch of free market nutcases. However they seem to be a sincere and consistent set of free market nutcases. Opposition to tobacco taxes is entirely consistent with their views on a wide variety of other subjects. People are entitled to have their arguments considered as arguments, not dismissed by association. Actually having tried in vain for many years to get any of the tobacco puritans to address the question of freedom I do not expect the institute to have any luck either. But still. Argument ad hominem is fallacious and misleading. If the tax is an infringement of freedom it remains an infringement whether the person pointing this out is a pawn of the tobacco industry, a member of the Falun Gong or the last survivor of the Armenian Massacres. Some health experts need to meet a logic expert.

Actually this is a knife that cuts both ways. The public health business has become a substantial academic industry, populated by people who have made a career out of attending each other’s conferences and citing each other’s papers. Nobody actually reads most of that stuff. The industry has its own consensus. The researcher who fails to substantiate the expectation that in all and any circumstances tobacco is a threat to your health will be drummed out of the magic circle. There was a good illustration of the results of this approach the other week. A Canadian researcher had established that you can detect small particles in the air even if you are a few yards from an outdoor smoker. I presume this requires a gentle breeze or no breeze at all, but it is very unsurprising. We have all caught an outdoor whiff occasionally. Was this dangerous? The researcher announced that the concentration of particulates exceeded someone’s safety limit. He then added that the safety limit was for 24-hour exposure. Honesty might have suggested admitting, at this point, that the odd whiff of particulates that you might pick up as a passer-by was no hazard at all. But this is not the way these things are done. The smoke, we were warned, might be a hazard to people with lung conditions or breathing problems. No evidence was provided for this. But then “might” is a very flexible word. Science also has its dogmas.

Meanwhile the persecution of local smokers (of whom I am not one) continues. The latest wheeze is the ban on smoking in “public transport interchanges”, even if they are in the open air. This means effectively that you may not smoke at bus stops, because the railway stations banned smoking years ago. This has been interpreted in a sweeping way to include places which have very little to do with public transport. In Shatin, for example, it applies to the pedestrian ramp which goes from the ground floor up to the podium on which the station, and other things, sit. It is true that some people use this ramp to get from minibus stops downstairs to the station upstairs. But it is not part of the bus station, nor of the station. And many people use it who are not users of buses or trains, because it is the only way of crossing the railway for a few hundred yards in each direction. So it allows pedestrian connections between, on the mountain side of the tracks, important landmarks like the LCSD headquarters, the Shatin Government offices and Ikea, with on the river side of the tracks, New Town Plaza, the Tiown Hall, Law Courts, Town Park etc. Even more contentiously, according to the new signs, the Public Transport Interchange includes a stretch of pavement in what I think is Pai Tau Street which has no connection with buses or trains at all.  No doubt officials will say that the new signs conform to the plans of Public Transport Interchanges which were provided for public information. Well there were 130 of them, and curious would-be inspectors had to go to the Lands Registry, wherever that is. Clearly officials have used this as a pretext for surreptitiously extending no smoking rules over large numbers of open spaces which have no connection with public transport and where the odd whiff is a minor inconvenience if you notice it at all. What a bunch of weasels.

Lately I have been casting an editorial eye over a great deal of written material produced by my colleagues. The accumulated documents will shortly be exposed to the visiting eyes of a team who will assess our activities. So one wishes it to look good, or at least correct. One of the recurrent problems is the spelling of a few words, like programme, centre and colour, which have different spellings in the US from those used elsewhere. Now there is a school of thought which maintains that there is no such thing as correctness in these matters. As long as the reader knows what you mean the language works. I think this is lazy. The reader is entitled to expect that he or she will be spared gratuitous surprises. At least there should be consistency.

On the whole I think in academic contexts we should probably aim a bit higher. There is no such thing as a good spelling system or a bad spelling system. All of them are merely sets of arbitrary rules. What we expect of an educated writer is that he should use one recognisable set consistently. As a matter of courtesy this should be the set of rules with which most of his readers are familiar. Now the Hong Kong education system, for obvious historical reasons, has always used the non-US system, which for reasons of brevity is usually referred to as the British system, though it is used in plenty of other places, and indeed would hardly be worth taking seriously if it were not. I repeat that this is not because the Brit system is in any way better. There are no value judgments to be made between spelling systems. It is simply a useful convenience if we all use the same one.

As far as the local universities are concerned, on the whole we do. Taking the two easiest words to check up on, The University of Hong Kong offers programmes and supports centres. So do the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the former Polys, Baptist U and Ling Nan. Shue Yan University has programmes but does not yet seem to have sprouted centres. To this general consensus there is one spectacular exception: the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The HKUST does not have Programmes, and neither does it have Centres. Instead it has Programs and Centers.

As it happens I remember when this rot started. About ten years ago the then Vice Chancellor took exception to the fact that the university had both centres and centers, and decreed that in future all centers should be so spelled. Or as the Americans would say, spelt. I recall writing a piece at the time for one of the local newspapers pointing out firstly that the Hong Kong education system taught our students to write centre, and secondly that the university would look dangerously illiterate if it mixed up two different spelling systems. The university seems to have recognised this problem, and solved it in a perverse way. They have changed all the spellings to the American system. I expect there are some Britishisms lurking somewhere but all the things you can easily check on the university website have been Americanised, right down to the unnecessary full stops after abbreviations like Prof. They have even adopted “meter” (which has only been the legally endorsed  US version since 2008) instead of the internationally agreed “metre”. This seems a rather controversial choice for a scientific establishment.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Was this a huge anguished effort to save the Vice Chancellor’s face by pretending that the “Center” order was merely the first step on a long march to a different spellling system? Or is the place just full of scientists and technologists who do not care? Having spent a certain amount of time with the website I conclude that if there is anyone in the university who can write good plain English free from jargon and academic fad words then he or she is kept well away from the internet spout. My bull shit detector was already muttering to itself when I found ” Transforming the UG Experience”, which starts with “The undergraduate academic program structure will be re-engineered to encourage students to become autonomous and life-long learners”. The detector was ringing merrily long before I got to the end, where we meet the aspiration to “develop an internationalised campus community that is fully integrated into the undergraduate learning experience”.

The losers in all this are the students. No doubt the ” undergraduate learning experience” includes some effort to introduce these scientific types to the consumption and production of good plain English. But it starts with a tacit announcement of the university’s contempt for their English studies so far, which did not take into account the university’s aspiration to have an international campus community with a foreign spelling system.  Maybe in 50 years time the world will have adopted the US system throughout. In the meantime the UST sits on its hilltop like a sort of orthographic Alamo defying the surrounding hordes who like U in their humor.  I do not say this is wrong. I do say that it’s rude. Using the same spelling system as everyone else is a useful courtesy, like driving on the right side of the road. Which is of course the left.