Big Lychee, Various Sectors

When Deng Xiao Ping promised to let ‘Harbour people rule the harbour’, he wasn’t kidding. As if the citizens of Hong Kong were not already busy enough choosing which of two external designs of waterfront tunnel ventilation buildings they want, they are also being consulted on the exciting West Kowloon Cultural District’s three Conceptual Plan Options. In plain English: the proposals by famous architects to turn the patch of wasteland on the northwest of Victoria River into a glistening hub of parkland, museums, concert halls and only limited amounts of luxury apartments and offices.

The story of the West Kowloon reclamation serves as a mini-history of Hong Kong since the mid-1990s. Originally, Governor Chris Patten’s government decided that the new land (arising from the construction of cross-harbour tunnels) would be a decent downtown park for the Hong Kong people – something the city noticeably lacks. After 1997, when older, colonial-style ‘pro-business’ attitudes resurged under Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, the government decided that frittering land away on residents would be a waste, and the site should be used to benefit the tourism industry by hosting such facilities as a concert venue. This turned into the idea of a bigger cultural ‘hub’ to generate tourist dollars for the usual beneficiaries, namely landlords.

According to the Big Lychee’s traditional, near-autistic bureaucratic principles, such a project had to be self-financing through funds somehow conjured into being as part of the physical project itself. As with Cyberport, this essentially meant Big Ugly High-Rises of Luxury Apartments, and the property developers were soon salivating at the thought of having all that land to play with. Fatally, the government decided that one bidder, promising to chuck some museums and theatres in for free, would get pretty much the whole site. It came under a guise of a cultural project courtesy of a giant canopy, but people weren’t fooled. By the mid-2000s, such blatant handouts of public wealth to the same little group of families were becoming decidedly unpopular, and the new regime of Donald Tsang wisely dropped the idea. After much deliberation, officials finally took the plunge and abandoned cherished principles: at least a bit of the site would be something nice for local people, and the government – sitting on vast unused reserves – would simply pay for it.

The roving exhibition was distinctly under-visited when I dropped by, but it was during working hours and in Wanchai. In coming months it will rove its way through unsophisticated places like Tuen Mun and Shatin, where displays of architects’ models are a huge novelty and the very idea of free admission will draw millions. Much the same content appears on-line, buried deeply and almost secretly away in the West Kowloon Cultural District website. After 10 minutes’ searching through speeches by Henry Tang and self-congratulatory press releases about a biennale in Venice, you might manage to find the three proposals, offered by: the UK’s Foster and Partners, who did HSBC and the airport; Hong Kong’s Rocco, who did IFC; and the Dutch ‘urbanist’ Koolhas, who designed the ridiculous ‘big underpants’ CCTV HQ in Beijing.

Each plan is supposed to be distinctive, but given the awkward shape of the site and the government-sanctioned percentages of gross floor area and number of facilities for each use, there is an unmistakable sameness about the three. How many different ways are there to link Kowloon Park with WKCD across Canton Road? The two proposed designs for the tunnel ventilation building are a study in stark contrast by comparison. A Developing HK mailing gives a summary of each. Essentially, if we focus on where they vary: the Foster concept comes closest to being the park the common rabble wanted all along, the Rocco one is good in parts but let down by some bad bits, while Koolhas is dumb/weird/crap.

When the rival proposals were unveiled, Chief Secretary and WKCD supremo Henry Tang made a throwaway remark about how we could throw together various features from all three. This resulted in a hail of criticism from several hundred thousand architectural, design and similar experts, shocked at the philistinism of this attack on the integrity of the individual visions. Then a smaller but perhaps classier group of cognescenti came forward to say that, even though Henry Tang said it, and no-one had ever heard Henry say anything that made sense before, really smart and sensitive types like themselves could, in fact, blend certain features of the three designs successfully (though of course you couldn’t mix and match the way Henry probably thought).

What would have happened if, in 1998, the Tung administration had conducted a poll and asked the public to vote for one of: a) give it to Li Ka-shing to cover with luxury towers for absentee Mainlanders; b) build a vacuous vanity monument to bureaucratic onanism; c) have an open green space where kids can ride bikes and have picnics? As with the ventilation buildings, the whole WKCD public consultation exercise is a cover for decisions already made in secret by bureaucrats. There will be three theatres of a particular size; there will be a Cantonese opera joint; there will be some arty educational place; there will be an iconic museum. Do you want them over here in the corner, or down there at the end? Wavy lines on the walls, or grass on the roof? Up to you entirely.

It is difficult enough for even the faster-moving breeds of Hong Kong civil servant to keep up with public opinion. For the flowchart-driven project-management plodders who for decades have been robotically covering land and water with highways, bridges and podiums, it is well-nigh impossible. They are not helped by the time-span of their missions. The time when you could keep life simple by filling in a chunk of harbour and putting ugly public facilities right on the waterfront was not that long ago.  The public mood on planning has changed so swiftly that it is perfectly possible for a big infrastructure project to have started back when no-one gave a damn about aesthetics and be only half-completed by the time the Big Lychee is teeming with eager new conservationists, preservationists, sustainability freaks, oxygen-breathers and other troublemakers.

Thus it is with the Central-Wanchai Bypass, an underground, six-lane freeway designed to speed up the drive from North Point to Central by [correction: to] a grand five minutes at a cost of… It says HK$28 billion here.  When I first read that, I thought, “Wow – that must be a typo.” Then I thought, “Get real.” So 28 billion it obviously is. You get a road above ground thrown in with it.

At some stage between conceptualization, drawing board, reclamation and commencement of tunnel-digging, outraged opponents sprouted apparently out of thin air. Save the harbour and billions of bucks, they said, and just introduce road charging to reduce traffic. This set off alarm bells. Word went out to ram all the legal and other paperwork through as quickly as possible. Transport bureaucrats insisted as if their lives depended on it that road charging alone wouldn’t do because people ‘must have a choice’. By this they meant a choice between roads with a charge and ones without – not between, say, driving and taking the MTR. Perhaps because they don’t take the MTR, the new highway capacity seemed unusually important for senior officials, and no doubt for their friends at Aecom.

The rise of an uppity civil society mid-way through this gargantuan infrastructure project left the officials struggling not only to justify the mess but to put on a hapless show of pretending to let the public have some input. Hence the not merely intelligence-insulting but tragic Public Consultation on Exterior Design of Ventilation Buildings, the subject of a roving exhibition, with glossy brochures, currently underway in the old Central Market.

For the convenience and comfort of the civil servants whizzing their families between Central and North Point in their SUVs five minutes faster, the underground freeway needs huge ventilation outlets occupying lots of space and spewing out lots of fumes above ground. One is planned to go right in front of IFC Mall, on a bit of reclamation barely 100 yards deep that already manages to accommodate, by my count, five roads running east-west (the bypass will emerge from under the ground on the one remaining strip – currently grass – not covered by road).

Folks are not impressed. In fact, the location threatens the view, and therefore the rental yields, from property owned by Sun Hung Kai, which gives me a deep, instinctive feeling that the valiant engineers will find a way to shove the eyesores a bit to one side. But the main point is that someone somewhere seems to seriously imagine that consulting those of us who are not property tycoons on which inane design we prefer for a huge ugly polluting block of concrete makes everything fine.

Here’s your choice, complete with dazzling poetic descriptions…

“…adding tenderness to the mass of the building.”  Your tax dollars at work.

Unbridled excitement sweeps through the corridors of power as the Hong Kong government is able to announce that a consensus on something has formed. This is akin to discovering the Holy Grail wrapped in a blueprint for a perpetual motion machine, and lifting the lid to find that it contains the elixir of life, complete with a hen’s tooth floating around in it. The people behind this amazing breakthrough are the Provisional Minimum Wage Commission, which has decided on a suitable statutory pay floor. The actual figure is a closely guarded secret, namely HK$28 an hour according to most newspapers, but HK$29 if you read the Standard/Sing Tao.

The Commission is an improbable little collection of property billionaires, academics and labour activists formed in February 2009; civil servants with ample experience of herding cats have been at their side throughout, steering the group deftly towards the outcome pre-determined by Chief Executive Donald Tsang – say HK$25 or so. But somewhere along the way, between late 2009 and mid-2010, Hong Kong public opinion took an unexpected turn. After years of viewing property tycoons and many other businessmen as heroic creators of wealth, providers of jobs and protectors of babies and puppy dogs, people suddenly started to see them as rotten, dirty, cheating, thieving scumbag-leech-bastards.

The likely origins of this enlightenment include exasperation among the younger ‘post-80s’ generation; the Lehman minibonds affair, accumulated evidence of a growing wealth gap and, not least, the breath-taking (and maybe ultimately self-defeating) increases in naked greed displayed by property developers. At the height of this shift in popular feeling, Liberal Party legislator Tommy Cheung proposed that the minimum wage be HK$20. He later apologized to the community and recommended HK$24, but he should save the groveling for his voters in the catering industry, and other employers of cheap menial staff. With the proletariat growing restless, Cheung’s comments alone must have added a couple of bucks to whatever Donald’s original figure was.

With prospects of a lower-range number fading, the pro-labour lobby on the Commission presumably felt emboldened to make a bit of a concession from their original high-end demand of HK$33. They know that once it is introduced, the minimum wage is going to be a hot potato impaled on a lightning rod, and it will be a question every year of how much, not whether, it will be ratcheted up.

The employers’ lobby argued for a minimum wage equivalent to 40-45% of third-quarter 2009 median monthly salary, which was HK$11,000 (excluding foreign domestic helpers). That would work out at HK$4,400-4,950; the higher sum works out at a bit over 51 hours of work a week at HK$24 an hour. The bosses’ idea was to “only guarantee workers a minimum remuneration for their work but not a living wage to cover family expenses.” This choice of words implies that employers assume the taxpayer at large will effectively subvent their businesses’ profit margins via subsidized homes and hospitals for the low-paid, and should therefore alienate the middle class as well as the working poor.

Rough calculation based on GDP per capita of HK$233,000, a workforce of 3.6 million and a 50-hour week: GDP per hour per worker = HK$190

It wasn’t that long ago that the Big Lychee’s officials boasted of the city’s lack of a minimum wage; it was as much a matter of pride as low taxes and the rule of law. And now it has come to this.

Globalisation, modern technology, the immigration of unskilled mainlanders and colonial under-investment in education have all played a part. But the extra tilting of the Hong Kong playing field in favour of established, largely property-connected, business interests since the new order took over in 1997 must take much of the responsibility. As ye sow…

As the last injured victim is flown back to civilization (Tuen Mun Hospital, to be precise), Hong Kong’s Manila bus hijacking drama enters its third act. After ‘Shock and Horror’ and ‘Righteous Outrage’, we now watch the curtain rise on ‘Squeezing it for all it’s worth’, where the plot goes unashamedly down-market and commercial.

The administration of Donald Tsang has had a good crisis. For a while on Tuesday and Wednesday it was visibly displaying leadership, making decisions without pausing to worry about stakeholders, win-wins or consensus. Now it is returning to form, arguably overdoing the public mourning for fear of appearing uncaring, and taking the opportunity to push the tired and deluded message of harmony/pulling together/strength in adversity that for a dozen years has failed to divert attention from the city’s real problems.

In Beijing – where the shooting of tourists, poisoning of babies or deaths of miners are seen in terms of maintaining Communist Party control – the government has balanced the desire to appear concerned and assertive with the need to keep nationalistic sentiment at reasonable levels. China’s emissaries in the Big Lychee have maintained a high, grief-stricken profile at all the right times, even if the performance is as cold and wooden as always.

Jostling with them for limelight are our political parties (even the unloved and unlovable Liberals with their black protest signs), always eager to score populist points and never more amateurish than when dealing with international affairs. The League of Social Democrats, scourge of national and local administrations, is in its element with a third evil government to denounce.

Of all the people making full use of the tragedy in Manila, none wants to prolong the grief and tears as much as the media. The SARS outbreak, the nearest recent trauma to this, offered plenty of opportunities to exploit nearly every emotional angle: fear, self-pity, heroism and – with nearly 300 deaths – anguish. But not blame. The fault in 2003 lay squarely with Mainland officials who covered up the disease, and it wasn’t polite to point this out. This time, they can point the finger loudly and angrily at a tin-pot police force in a country full of brown people, on behalf of Hong Kong victims in dangerous foreign parts, and you can be sure they will. They must be starting to worry about what they’ll have to print next week.

One of the Big Lychee’s more embarrassing icons, has-been actor Jackie Chan, declares in a Twitter message that “HK is a nation.” Maybe this is an attempt to atone for his widely reported comments that Chinese people need to be controlled and Hong Kong has too much freedom. More likely, it is a well-intentioned gesture to fulfill his role as Hong Kong tourism ambassador, goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, Chengdu panda ambassador or one of his other quasi-diplomatic positions by helping to avert what many see as an imminent catastrophe: a massacre of innocent Filipinos in the streets of Hong Kong as a backlash after the deaths of the eight tourists in Manila.

Others think such an outburst is highly unlikely, though admit it would be interesting. As the reaction to the bus killings shows, Hongkongers these days are mostly a soft bunch, unaccustomed to real violence. Filipinos, on the other hand, are a hardier breed and especially good with knives. Maybe actually being a nation helps, too. Time says we are a semi-autonomous sliver, which sounds like something surgeons cut off one of your internal organs even though it’s benign, just to be sure.

A far more appropriate way to avenge the fallen tourists – and possibly do the Philippines a favour as well – is for Hong Kong to conduct a full investigation into what happened, as mentioned by Secretary Security Ambrose Lee. With the benefit of hindsight, plenty of ‘How The Manila Cops Screwed Up’ articles to cut and paste from, and their smart, well-pressed uniforms, the Hong Kong Police could issue an authoritative, withering and humiliating indictment of Philippine law enforcement, national leadership, community ethos and Malayo-Polynesian culture in general. Such a public slapping for the Republic’s venal and amateurish leaders at the hands of a mere semi-autonomous sliver might wake up Filipinos, who are as sensitive to criticism from outsiders as they are oblivious to bad governance.

That’s assuming that the semi-autonomous sliver’s sovereign power would let it do such a thing. Beijing is eager to be friendly and cuddly in the eyes of Southeast Asia, and may not want Hong Kong to go around baiting the neighbours. In which case, unable to be Jackie Chan’s nation that does not hate, we will just have to be Hong Kong Silent And Restrained.

The Chinese government, accustomed to ignoring, fearing or barracking the Hong Kong people, gets a rare opportunity to come to their loyal compatriots’ defence by angrily demanding that the Philippines investigate how eight Hong Kong tourists ended up dead after Monday’s bus hijacking. On-line nationalists join in the criticism of the authorities in Manila. Hong Kong people themselves flock to websites and the Philippine consulate to make their disgust known.

There is a subtext here that goes something like this…

The Philippine National Police and other law enforcement agencies in Manila in fact have a highly trained, superbly equipped, fearless, state-of-the-art special-operations squad. They can leap from helicopters, abseil down skyscrapers and burst through windows. They can insert hidden cameras and microphones anywhere. They have guns that shoot round corners, laser rifle sights, night vision equipment, robots, armed dogs, body armour, stun grenades and the latest, most sophisticated radio networks.

But these elite forces are called out to rescue only hostages who are Filipino, African, Eskimo, Western, Japanese, Korean, Arab, Turk or Pacific Islander. If they are Chinese, the senior commander says: “Nyaaa, don’t bother with the hi-tech SWAT Team, just send in a bunch of petrified idiots with ill-fitting helmets and a hammer, because the hostages are only Chinese, so what the hell hahahahahah!”

Just wait until we sort out the South China Sea issue and they find Rizal Park is PRC territory at high tide.

The rumour is that the Big Lychee’s overworked, double-income, middle-class families are firing their Filipino maids in protest at the tragedy in Manila. So in theory we should soon be seeing truckloads of tearful, dusky young women tied together by their thumbs trundling to the airport for deportation. Followed by the sight of certain people wiping their own baby’s backside, mopping their own floor, washing their own car at 5am, picking up their own Airedale’s excrement with newspaper, and telling their overweight teen to carry his own school bag. Or maybe not.

OK, it’s been over 36 hours now – time to get down to the really important details we are all bursting with curiosity to know about.

“In panic and indecisive” is one verdict on the performance of the Manila police during the bus hostage drama. It is a phrase Hongkongers usually associate with their own government, but at least – we assume – our cops would handle such a situation professionally. They would probably make sure the whole proceedings weren’t broadcast live on TV and radio. They wouldn’t have allowed the hijacker’s armed brother, plus other bystanders, to stroll right up to the scene out of nowhere. They would have succeeded in pulling the bus door off first time. They would probably have a real negotiator present. Little things like that.

The Philippines is a joke country. But yesterday’s freakish outbreak of deadly mayhem leaving eight Hong Kong tourists dead does not make it more dangerous than it was last week. The Big Lychee already views abroad – or Southeast Asia, more accurately – as a risky place, thanks to Thailand’s civil strife and Indonesia’s bombings and pogroms, let alone the incessant ferry sinkings, volcano eruptions, typhoon strikes and journalist massacres of the region’s former Spanish colony.

What, therefore, is the point of the Hong Kong government’s decision to issue a Black Outbound Travel Alert for the Philippines? This means the recall of all Hong Kong package tours already down there, cancellation of all planned/booked/paid-for/bags-packed group trips until further notice, plus an official warning to everyone else to steer clear of the place (despite a constant stream of migrant workers and others between here and there).

One possible answer to the question is that, in a state of panic and indecision about appearing to be panicking and indecisive, our leaders proclaimed the costly and troublesome order to at least tackle the ‘indecision’ part of their self-perceived shortcomings. Ever since the Mainland and Macau mounted operations to rescue their delicate tourists stranded in Bangkok’s shut-down airport in 2008, our officials have been especially petrified about appearing uncaring towards Hongkongers who venture out into deepest darkest foreign parts and encounter problems. Screw up thousands of planned trips, and save face!

Another explanation is that the Hong Kong government, a non-sovereign entity with no independent foreign policy, is using the travel alert system as a diplomatic or political weapon: a way of hitting back at Philippine incompetence out of spite. If this is the case – whether the target audience is Manila’s bumbling officialdom or (more likely) our own local public opinion – it is a stupid thing to do. It’s costing money, even if you don’t care about the advisory system’s integrity. Coming from a government that routinely misuses public consultation exercises, off-the-record media briefings and other functions of its publicity machine, it is all too believable. One consolation: there are probably some very good ex-HKG Manila deals on offer all of a sudden.

What to make of Gannon Walter Sutter Jow, an American charged with a murder in Tsim Sha Tsui on Wednesday?

Worn ten gnu jaws, Loretta?

Nouns: grater, town, jet, law;
__entrust Anne to growl “jaw.”
Ten anal jug torrents – wow!
__Art just won’t enlarge now.

Jon tugs rental townwear;
__Ron won’t strangulate Jew.
New jog rot – ‘twas unlearnt!
__Joust! Or we twang lantern!

Orangutan jolts wet wren:
__lent two jaguars worn net.
Glutton Jane rants: “We row!
__Tug ten trawlers now, Joan!”

Gannets wrote “Nut jar low –
__arrogant owl wets jet nun.”
Town egret wants journal,
__jots: “Got wren war annulet.”

We own Tung’s tolerant raj.