Up early, eager to start five full days of work for the first time in several festivity-infested weeks, I greet the temporary resident emerging from my apartment’s uninvited guest room. He is en-route from Australia to the UK, and it is not his fault, I suppose, that when someone said “Hemlock will put you up for a couple of days in Hong Kong,” he did not interpret it to mean “don’t freeload off others, stay in a hotel.” Pleading a backlog of work and crushing social schedule, I have barely crossed paths with him over the weekend, and he is flying out later today. Since I won’t be seeing him again, he has insisted on buying me breakfast in a wonderful place he has discovered.
We glide down the Mid-Levels Escalator as far as Life, the organic restaurant where most of the food is brown, and stroll down an alleyway leading into Soho’s colonic irrigation and foot massage district, emerging at the New Age Shop, where Gossamer Cooney, spiritual midwife and soul traveler, was recently assisting souls in birthing their higher bodies.
Partly because it will confuse my slightly disorientated companion, and partly because I don’t mind it when visiting the Appalachian Hemlocks and you never see it in Hong Kong, I order grits – American congee – plus a plate of fresh fruit. The uninvited guest drools as he points to the nastiest looking picture on a largely horrifying menu. I must now sit and watch him put this into his mouth.
On the opposite table, a couple with broad but largely comprehensible northern English accents discuss in great detail how Wigan beat Sunderland at something, breaking the scintillating narrative only to cram white toast layered with butter and marmalade into their orifices. Next door, they are getting ready to welcome renowned Cherokee shaman Daniel Darby, who calls crystals ‘stone people’ and performs symbolic acts to change our thinking patterns. An uninvited guest, finding himself lost in this most mentally diseased part of Soho, finishes his grits and flees.
Tue, 8 Jan
Do the two front-page stories in today’s papers have more in common than meets the eye? In one, businesswoman, General Chamber of Commerce chairman, Liberal Party member, member of the Chief Executive Election Committee, and sitter on the usual array of committees and boards Lily Chiang is charged with alleged conspiracy to defraud and making false statements by the Independent Commission Against Corruption. In the other, the Hong Kong Government has signed a new regulatory regime with the city’s two electricity monopolies to cut power bills and reduce the amount of profit they gouge out of their customers.
Similarly, the Hong Kong Government’s dedication to protecting consumer rights and encouraging enterprise and competition by fighting collusion, cartelization, price-fixing and monopoly has for a long time been less than total. From supermarkets to housing to construction materials to transport to fuel to food imports and much else, markets in this bastion of laissez-faire are rigged in such a way as to benefit a small handful of conglomerates run by tycoons whose families got rich through real estate. The bureaucrats who run the city – themselves unaccustomed to competition in their own trade of policymaking – have never shown the slightest inclination to side with the community as a whole when private and public interests clash. So the decision to cut the profits made by Li Ka-shing’s Hong Kong Electric and Michael Kadoorie’s China Light and Power is also something of a wonder.
The judiciary join in Hong Kong’s 2008, exciting, new-look Government For The People, declaring the radio station licensing regime to be an infringement of the Basic Law, Magna Carta, and so on. As with the ICAC charging Lily Chiang with fraud and the regulators paring back the electricity monopolies’ profits, there is something of Dr Sam’s dog on hind legs about it. The court decided that the Chief Executive’s power to withhold permission to broadcast is a possible threat to freedom of speech. However, the ruling came from a humble magistrate, more accustomed to dealing with juvenile triads or peddlers of fake shark’s fin than weighty constitutional issues, and it was suspended after officials claimed it would cause chaos on the air waves before an appeal took place.
Thanks to the Government’s enthusiasm for competition, only one of the two companies licensed to broadcast commercial radio in this city of 7 million is owned by Li Ka-shing’s empire. Officially, there are no available channels for more than the existing range of 13 stations because additional frequencies would cause interference. Most people assume this means the signals would disrupt those of stations in Shenzhen, but in fact, with all these mountains in the way, it would be easy for many parts of Hong Kong, especially the basin around the harbour, to accommodate quite a few low-power FM broadcasters, let alone digital ones. The interference here would be to the duopoly’s profits and to officials’ right to decide who gets on air – and who could say which of these two horrors is worse?
Thurs, 10 Jan
I never realized that the United Nations has its own team of economists. In my naivety, I vaguely imagined that the soothsayers of UNESCO, the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF, the regional development banks, private-sector banks, central banks, finance ministries, public-sector space-wasters like our very own HK Trade Development Council, universities and think-tanks give us all the GDP forecasts we could possibly need. The UN, I absent-mindedly assumed, had its hands full appointing Libya and Cuba to head human rights commissions, debating hairball resolutions that don’t resolve anything and driving around deserts in white, four-wheel drive Toyotas looking macho. But I was wrong. The man with the calculator and sky-blue beret is one Rob Vos, the last remaining member of his exalted profession to pontificate on the chances of a US recession this year. The odds, he reveals with a self-assured boldness bordering on rashness – 50-50. Good to see him so sure about that.
Quote of the day must surely be from ICAC-harassed Lily Chiang, who tells the South China Morning Post, “I think this case will take up a lot of my personal time.” In the estimation of an only-mildly despicable lawyer I met on the Mid-Levels Escalator this morning, she is right – around five years, to be exact.
After Beijing handed down its decree that Hong Kong could have something called universal suffrage in 2017-20 on condition it wasn’t really universal suffrage, exasperated Civic Party boss Ronny Tong more or less called for a general strike or some other form of mass action or civil disobedience. Although it failed to strike the slightest hint of a chord among the population, the idea alarmed our dedicated senior officials, who, beneath their confident, manly exteriors, are nervous and panic-prone wrecks, possibly even suffering a slight crisis of conscience over the role they are playing as collaborators in the Communist suppression of their home town.
This explains the authorities’ hilariously timid response to Citizens’ Radio’s blatantly illegal broadcast from the middle of a crowded street using a transmitter with no licence on 102.8 FM. Following, maybe unwittingly, in the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and the Star Ferry Pier protestors, our pro-democrats might just be developing a way to pressure the Government that actually works. Incessant, ill-attended marches have had their day, petitions are a waste of trees, and judicial reviews are expensive and applicable only in some narrow circumstances. Can anyone imagine the Government jailing yesterday’s broadcasters while sticking by its current restrictive media licensing regime? The headlines in the overseas press don’t bear thinking about, though I suppose we could all use a few weeks’ break from Emily Lau. Employed selectively and skillfully as a form of asymmetric attack, civil disobedience by the opposition could be the Hong Kong leadership’s biggest nightmare. Fortunately for those in power, the words ‘skillfully’ and ‘pro-democrats’ don’t often appear together.
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