In answer to a perverse need for an almost-unique, or at least strange, experience to start the day, I run the intimidating gauntlet that leads to the Mid-Levels East Constituency ballot box. Although they are banned from a zone within a hundred metres (or something) of the polling station, campaign workers for the Democratic Alliance for the Blah Blah of Hong Kong are occupying every possible approach to it. A voter taking the Mid-Levels Escalator from Soho would pass groups of them on Elgin Street, Caine Road, Mosque Junction and on the final stretch on Robinson Road, all with flags, banners and – in some cases – loud recorded messages. How much does this cost?
All this time, I have been the only voter among a good two dozen junior civil servants getting overtime for running the District Council election process in this constituency. No sooner do I leave than a second turns up, with Marxist legislator Long Hair Leung Kwok-hung in hot, protest-prone pursuit. It is Chief Executive Donald Tsang. Since it is quite possible our votes cancel each other’s out, we could have arranged by phone to both stay in bed. Next time, perhaps. Half an hour later, I find myself having breakfast with Hong Kong’s favourite ‘maverick’ lawmaker in his Che Guevara T-shirt, who has let Sir Bow-Tie go in peace. It’s amazing that by mid-afternoon, six hours later, a whole 20 percent of the electorate has actually battled their way through all this weirdness to perform their civic duty.
Despite apparently having millions of communist dollars and hundreds of conscripted campaign worker-slaves shipped in from across the harbour to help him conceal his true pro-Beijing affiliation, the oozy Jackie Cheung still only scraped through by 1,370 to 1,097 votes in the Mid-Levels East Constituency in yesterday’s election. Astoundingly, after a full week of groveling to passers-by in the neighbourhood, he is standing next to the Mid-Levels Escalator again this morning, marking his victory by bowing to commuters on their way to work. It is quite possible that by the time I write this some exasperated citizen will have beaten him to death, thus opening the way for the candidate for truth, justice, liberty and botanical facial masks, Morticia Helena Yuen Chan, to take her rightful place on Central and Western District Council.
Down the hill in Chung Wan, the pro-democracy candidate Yuen Bun-keung slaughtered Simon Lee 1,107 to 689, despite the extensive financial and labour resources his opponent received from Beijing’s hidden, black hands. Lee, who has ‘DAB candidate’ written all over his bespectacled face, obviously saw no point in trying to hide his loyalties and succumbed to the wrath of voters accordingly.
It would be nice to think that we have seen the last of this psephological mania for a while, but no. The Hong Kong Island Legislative Council by-election is just two weeks away – an epic clash of titans, or at least pushy, ex-colonial civil servants determined to find ways to Serve The Community whether the latter likes it or not. It is unlikely that Regina Ip and Anson Chan will personally be pestering innocent Mid-Levels residents on a daily basis as this is an island-wide race, but there will be no shortage of activity, be it embarrassing, tiresome or puerile. Looking at the disproportionate amount of resources pro-Beijing elements committed to their District Council hopefuls, it is clear that someone up there in the Mainland is taking silly little Hong Kong elections Way Too Seriously
For low tax, consultants Mercer advise in a new report, head for the United Arab Emirates, Russia or Hong Kong. It is a tantalizing choice to have to make. The sun, sand and sea of plucky little Dubai, where dusky temptresses’ doe eyes peer seductively from the slits of their niqab. Crisp, vodka-fuelled winter evenings spent ice-skating in Moscow in the brawny arms of a blonde, buxom, big-boned Olga or Tanya. Or the struggle on the crowded, polluted streets of the Big Lychee, dodging the flailing arms of scrawny, sour-faced, off-duty cosmetics salesgirls as they slap their dandruff-racked boyfriends to their knees as punishment for insufficient funds.
Should someone have told Mercer that in one of these three fiscal paradises there resides a gentleman with the name of Li Ka-shing, who, with a small group of acquaintances, the full complicity of the local Government and the apparent wholehearted approval of the national leadership, corners the market in most essential goods and services and depletes the people’s disposable income almost as effectively as Denmark’s Internal Revenue Department?
Still, to put things in perspective, we can point out that the UAE, beneath the air-conditioned veneer and overseas workforce, is still at heart a society of goat herdsmen and pomegranate traders. And Russia’s rulers, building on centuries of feudalism and despotism, even now run their land with a subtlety and care that owe much to Peter the Great’s methods of household management.
As if we need further reminders of Hong Kong’s superiority, the South China Morning Post is currently publishing a succession of letters piling unrestrained praise upon our fair city in a style that verges on Singaporean. The writers’ identities all sound oddly normal – ‘Peter Thompson’ today – which suggests the authors are in Government, too timid or unimaginative to think up more believable names. But what do you expect for such low tax?
I start the day overwhelmed by a flood of emails from helpful – at least, well-intentioned – folk who insist that South China Morning Post letter writer ‘Peter Thompson’ is a real, live person. He is, according to source…
# a former magazine publisher
# a former senior partner at a leading law firm (plus Hong Kong/Fanling Golf Club bigwig)
# a former oboe player with the Hong Kong Phil
# owner of a laser hair removal centre for men, or
# a struggling new age veterinarian chiropodist.
The fact that there are probably dozens of Peter Thompsons in circulation lends weight, in my nasty, shallow and suspicious little mind, to the theory that the toadying missive to the editor is the concoction of a Civil Service propaganda officer with a deficient imagination. Still... perhaps one of the above-listed individuals – or one of the millions of other people blessed with the same name – did indeed scribble the fawning note in a moment of weakness. If so, we can safely say that if he didn’t exist, the Government would have to invent him. And how many among us can put our hands on our hearts and say that about ourselves?
The idea, presumably, is to outrage the good electors of Hong Kong Island so much that they get out of their beds on Sunday, 2 December and vote for Dame Conscience’s opponent Regina Ip in the Legislative Council by-election. Are Sing Tao serious? How can the Big Lychee claim to be Asia’s World City when one of its leading press groups can’t even organize a simple, plain, everyday character-assassination that does the job?
One of life’s minor mysteries is finally solved, thanks to the Government’s reply to an inquiry from a Legislative Council member. Why, I have (very) occasionally wondered, is the name and address on my water bill in English but the bill itself in Chinese?
I know why I get a Chinese-language bill. Some years ago bilingual demands for payment were replaced with monolingual ones, to free up space on the document for official instructions on beating SARS, advice on cleaning behind one’s ears, and orders to jump up and down in delirious joy over the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The default option was Chinese, and I have more important things to do than exercising my right to insist on a quarterly invoice in the Roman alphabet. In the long run, they will switch to the latter anyway, when the Middle Kingdom finally accepts the need to abandon its exotic but impractical hieroglyphs in favour of the efficient, stripped-down set of phonetic characters used by sensible global citizens elsewhere. In the meantime, it makes little difference. The Filipino elves see to it that the bill is paid – or perhaps it goes through Autopay. I do know that at times, despite my assiduously hygienic washing and showering habits, my apartment at Perpetual Opulence Mansions has consumed too little water to warrant any charge.
He is also raising the issue of the much-vaunted ‘through-train’, on which a wall of Mainland money would trundle into Hong Kong’s market, push up share prices, make the semi-nationalized stock exchange even richer, and generally recreate the awe-inspiring splendour and self-confidence that mysteriously vanished from Hong Kong after the handover in 1997. After whipping up much excitement about this prospect, our visionary leaders went into reverse as it dawned on the more alert among them that the Mainland has capital controls, while their counterparts in Beijing descended into territorial squabbling over the issue. Our genius officials engineered a bubble. Then they burst it. Visiting the tributary state of Uzbekistan, Premier Wen Jiabao explained that this was to ensure the stability of the Hong Kong stock market. What would they have done if they had wanted to destabilize it? At least the spotty IT guys at the Water Supplies Department know their limitations.
Hell hath no fury like a Hongkonger who gets a small windfall from The System while someone else receives a bigger one. The injustice burns within them, generating enough heated indignation to attract our city’s highly professional and economically literate politicians, eager to fan the flames and bring the seething masses to boiling point.
When the Mid-Levels Escalator first opened, parents of children who climbed up the hill to school in the morning protested that the new conveyance operated only downhill at that time of the day. It was unfair, they wailed, as if the benefit to commuters descending towards Central placed some sort of additional burden on their precious offspring, who had been merrily overcoming the forces of gravity unaided en route to their classes on Caine and Robinson Roads for years. It is our local version of Singapore’s infamous Kiasu ethos, an infantile resentment of others’ fortune or success – to which the Fujianese are rumoured to have a genetic predisposition – thinly disguised as a relatively respectable ambition to outdo the next man.
Thus the Mass Transit Railway’s announcement that it will lower fares following its merger with the Kowloon Canton Steam Traction Corporation prompts moans of intense anguish, as the beneficiaries discover that some users will receive greater price reductions than others. Over half the passengers will pay five percent less, but – owing to the MTR’s monumental and wanton iniquity – a lucky 130,000 will enjoy double that level of savings. Legislator Fernando Cheung recoils at the savagery of it all, bitterly lamenting dashed hopes of an above-10 percent discount across the board. Fellow lawmaker Leung Yiu-chung, after conducting a thorough cost-benefit analysis, righteously demands an 8 to 12 percent fare cut for all. The Hemlock Party, if it existed, would choose this moment to trump them all – rail travel to be free, and the MTR to provide all passengers with foot massages, dental coverage and eternal life.
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