Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Perhaps the most profound utterance made by Financial Secretary John Tsang in yesterday’s budget speech was on that well-known cornerstone of our economy, the concrete-box industry:

“We don’t know what a ‘healthy’ property market is exactly, but we want one.  We don’t want property prices to go up, and we don’t want them to come down; we want everyone who has an interest in prices either rising or falling to get what they wish.”

Otherwise, to no-one’s great surprise, the Budget Speech was the mind-numbing, insipid same as ever.

• ‘One-off’ (for the fifth or whatever year in a row) handouts of waivers, rebates and subsidies in the form of modest party favours, so every little girl and boy gets something and goes home happy.  Does anyone even remember how to pay property rates?
• Hand-wringing over the poor state of the fiscal reserves, which are down to a mere 20 months’ government expenditure.  (Imagine keeping nearly two years’ salary stuffed under the mattress – and this is less than half of the total reserves.)  Heaven forbid our leaders do something insane like giving this money to its owners, or spending it on something that doesn’t cost HK$3 billion a kilometre.
• Some weird face-giving blather about developing service industries in Shenzhen’s Qinhai district.  (“The present consensus,” apparently, is that Shenzhen can pretend to develop a financial hub on its own, while Hong Kong will mumble about cooperation and partnership from time to time to shut them up and look good in case someone from Beijing passes through.)

The measures to cool the property market draw special attention, not because they are especially intelligent or likely to be very effective, but because the sight of this government even making a vague pretence at preventing housing from becoming less and less affordable is unprecedented.  One of the proposals is to increase stamp duty on property transactions of over HK$20 million from 3.75% to 4.25%.  When this idea was floated a week or two ago, the property cartel started bleating about how this would hurt the middle class (whose well-being, as we all know, is so dear to our tycoons’ hearts).  However, they soon went silent, as if someone had had a word with them and told them to shut up.  Rather than simply victimize vulnerable and hard-pressed members of the bourgeoisie trading up from, say, a HK$30 million to a HK$60 million apartment, the higher tax will also, probably, bite into the developers’ own profit margins – running at 40% or so in the case of a new project in, of all places, Western.

By coincidence, it was also reported yesterday that Sun Hung Kai Properties will probably launch its luxury Larvotto complex in the next few weeks.  This is the place in Ap Lei Chau with the ‘How well do you know ocean’ slogan that some curmudgeons resort to mocking.  The first units to go on sale will start at HK$60 million, or HK$25,000 a square foot.

It is unlikely that the extra few hundred grand in tax now payable on a HK$60 million place will make a difference.  Larvotto is being touted as the new Bel-Air – the lavish place at Cyberport – on account of its sea views and spacious apartments.  What the sales literature doesn’t mention, however, is that the area has a noise problem.  (I am indebted to Mr Webb for calling my attention to this.)

The Environmental Protection Department opposed a residential development on this site because the ‘steel boat repairing activities’ across the road create too much noise (see 348th Town Planning Board meeting from April 2007, Agenda Item 6, p 24).  The Town Planning Board (or at least those members who had not excused themselves because they had business links with Sun Hung Kai) took the developer’s side.  The boat work was unauthorized – which of course always makes the resulting noise more bearable – and no enforcement action seemed possible, owing somehow to fishermen.  Anyway, the developer had tried jolly hard to protect future residents from this nuisance, even building architectural vertical fins and installing non-openable windows.  So the Board let it through, even though the noise levels in Towers 1 to 3 will exceed the HK Planning Standards and Guidelines limits.  (I SAID THE NOISE LEVELS IN TOWERS 1 TO 3 WILL EXCEED THE HK PLANNING STANDARDS AND GUIDELINES LIMITS!!!)

As Mr Webb says, if and when the boatyards close, the waterfront will probably be redeveloped, so when Larvotto’s noise goes, the sea view goes too.

All yours for HK$25,000 a square foot.

A sneak preview, courtesy of a mole in the Post Office, of Hong Kong Post’s special new Year of the Tiger set of postage stamps celebrating ‘Greatest Living Famous Hong Kong Personalities’:

There was a time when to start up a hamburger chain in France was to declare war on the world’s greatest agro-culinary tradition.  Farmers would reverse their tractors into the barely opened restaurants and block off the streets with piles of burning sheep.  Waiters and chefs at three-star brasseries would fire-bomb the trucks delivering the mass-produced, American-inspired slop that threatened their and their children’s and their children’s children’s livelihoods.  On orders from the Elysee, the gendarmerie would pointedly look the other way while the mob wreaked its havoc.

More recently, opening a string of hotdog and sandwich outlets became acceptable, but heaven help you if you called the product le fast-food or named the company something like Quick.  The language guardians of the Academie Francaise would have screamed in horror at this importation and imposition of the hegemonist English tongue.  (In 1990-91, there was talk of compulsory interpretation into la langue de dieu at all international scientific conferences in the Republic – until the local version of Anglo-Saxon pragmatism took effect.)  Today, some 350 branches of Quick dot the nation’s cities and no-one stops to ask whether they should be called Vite.

So has restauration rapide nothing left on offer to offend easily irritated French people?  Luckily, in these modern, enlightened times, it has: Quick’s decision to declare a small number of its eateries to be halal.  This means they substitute turkey for pork and use only meat slaughtered in accordance with Muslim requirements.  (As with the Jewish code, animals are cut at the throat and bled, but the butcher must also invoke the name of God.  This is why halal meat is more acceptable to moderately fussy people who eat kosher than vice-versa, though the more mentally imbalanced believers will rant about this all day.  See below for a gory eye-witness account.)

Quick is not run by Muslims – indeed, even the fiercest Islamophobe would admit that the company’s origins represent an even greater blight on our planet than Mohammedans: it is Belgian.  The halal initiative is commercial; it is a minor change in the menu aimed at increasing business in certain neighbourhoods.  Put bluntly, the management wants to pull in as many customers as possible and maximize profits.

But much Gallic mouth-frothing has erupted, with excitable town mayors planning to sue the chain for discrimination and the country’s Agriculture Minister accusing it of ‘communautarisme’ (don’t ask).

The funny part of all this is that halal food, like kosher, is essentially a way to gouge religious believers.  The dietary strictures, dating back to the impressively wacky Book of Leviticus, are little more than superstition in this day and age (though in all fairness ancient wisdom would have been spot on about turkey being preferable to fatty, salty bacon).  Food marketed as ritually permissible has to be specially prepared, and inspected by money-making licensing authorities, leaving halal/kosher products costing more than the otherwise identical infidel stuff.

Quick would argue, like all merchants of unhealthy and overpriced goods targeting children and the feeble-minded, that it is merely responding to customer demand.  On the other hand, a rigorous Marxist-Foucaultian-materialist-gobbledegook-dilatectic of the sort the French once excelled at would portray the company as evil greedy capitalists and the Muslim diners attracted by the halal sign at the door as exploited victims.  Mais non: the chain is being more or less accused of conspiracy to force an entire nation of gastronomes to eat fowl instead of pig.  It’s funny – though it would probably be funnier still if it weren’t happening in a country that sent some 80,000 Jews to death camps in World War II or whose police led a little-remembered pogrom as recently as the 1960s that left hundreds of Algerians dead in Paris, complete with bodies floating down the Seine.

That gory eye-witness account…

Like this, except not with a goat

It was a hot, sunny afternoon at a Moroccan country market and I was accompanying someone buying a calf for a wedding feast that evening. We chose and paid for a less-scrawny-than-average, reddish-brown specimen with big shiny black eyes and not too much dribble on its chin.  The creature was then led, rather reluctantly, to a small concrete building maybe 100 yards away and through a very wide doorway into a bare room with a few hooks on the walls, drainage channels in the floor, a few flies and a stray dog peering in.

We were greeted by a tall, stocky, bearded man wearing a long, thick leather apron and wielding a dagger with a 8-10-inch double-sided blade.  With one hand he held the calf’s head close to him for a few seconds to calm it, and then moved his body in such a way as to drag the animal to the ground on its side – sort of a slow judo throw.  He probably muttered “bis m’allah” at this point. Within seconds, in maybe three or four strokes, he had cut the throat from the left side of the spinal column round to the right and pulled the head back to expose the windpipe.  The heart pumped blood out of the carotid artery a couple of times before giving up, pink foam bubbled out of the windpipe, the calf’s eyes rolled for a few seconds and its legs kicked a few times, and that was it.

The man and a boy assistant stuck a hook through – if I remember rightly – the area where a rear leg met the groin, and pulled the corpse up against the wall on a rope.  The head was severed and a bag tied round the neck. And this is where it got interesting: the butcher pierced a thigh with the knife and put his mouth to the hole.  He blew until the skin started to bulge like a balloon and separate from the underlying muscle.  He then carefully slit the torso down the belly, and all the lungs, intestines, and other innards flopped out onto the ground (I don’t recall a receptacle) into a big steamy pile.  And then he gently peeled the skin off the carcass.  That was his pay.

We were then invited to choose some cuts for ourselves before the butchering began and everything was wrapped up to take away for the night’s feast back in the village.  I made a rough guess at where I thought steaks should come from and how they should be carved off; they were OK, but the spiced stew later prepared for all the guests in earthenware pots was better – fragrant enough, I have no doubt, to win over the most militant animal rights activist.

Looking at the hulking presence of New World’s Masterpiece on Google Earth brings back memories of the Minden Avenue/Mody Road/Hanoi Road area in days of yore – the mid-late 1980s.  Minden had the vegetarian Indian restaurant Woodlands, known for its decent thali.  I think it still exists somewhere.  A few doors away was a pub called (perhaps) the Black Crow, or the Raven, or something similar.  Dark and dingy.  Across the way was a Filipino restaurant offering chop soy (with a bit too much liver) and kalamansi juice for 20 bucks.  Hanoi Road had some sort of Swiss-German place with a beer garden and waitresses dressed improbably in dirndls.  And then there was… The Ship.

The Ship had another name (the Bell? – and a namesake, or maybe sub-branch, in a basement on Wellington Street, Central, famed for its 1960s jukebox and ceiling graffiti).  After pulling on the nautical steering-wheel door handle and coming in from the street around lunchtime, the occasional unwary tourist would look around for a few seconds as his eyes adjusted to the gloom and hurry back to the Black Crow or the German place, having realized they were not the appalling dives they first seemed.

The décor was dark brown with nicotine trim.  The ambience was cramped, with seating for only a dozen or so, probably.  The furnishings were scratched and chipped black-painted wood with imitation red leather.  The proprietor behind the cramped bar was an aging, overweight Brit who would order customers curries from the neighbouring slop-to-go shop through a hatchway in the wall. An ill-looking woman of indeterminate Asian extraction, well past her prime, helped out.  Presumably his wife.  Up on a shelf near the hatch was a fish tank housing a vile, eel-like creature that spent the whole time sucking the glass.  Along from it were some bottles of port with a picture of a cat on the faded labels. The cute face on such down-market product gave the stuff an almost menacing look.

Then, slumped around at safe distances from one another, were the clientele – probably left over from the night before.  A horribly made-up mama-san, well beyond retirement age, off-duty from one of the older girlie places in the quiet street up from the Mariner’s Club; a chain-smoking, criminal-looking Indian filling in horse-racing slips; a comatose member of Her Majesty’s armed forces.  Cheerless.  But cheap.

What would Peter Lok, demon letter-writer to the South China Morning Post, have been doing in those days?  He started off in air traffic control in the 1950s and over the years worked his way up until he became Director of Civil Aviation in 1990.  So by the time the Ship (I’m now wondering whether it was called the Ship Inn…) was lapsing into terminal sleaze-dementia, he would have been a division head (negotiating air service agreements with other countries, in fact) and then Deputy Director of the whole department.

Having come up through the ranks during colonial times, he must have shined an awful lot of gwailo shoes.  He would have taken a lot of snobbish and racist put-downs, and put up with unequal treatment, like housing allowances for whites.  Even when he became the first local to be appointed to the top, he must have been aware that he had never really been accepted as ‘one of us’ by senior members of the soon-to-depart regime.  Perhaps the consulting work he did with mainland aviation interests after retiring in 1996 made him feel better.

We can reasonably guess that he has a chip on his shoulder from the content of his frequent missives to the paper.  He usually airily dismisses criticism of the political status quo with implicit claims of knowing what Beijing really thinks, and clearly takes delight in taunting pro-democrats.

His letter yesterday goes one step further and addresses the statement that Liu Xiaobo was not allowed to deliver to the court that sentenced him to 11 years in prison for proposing through words that China’s government obey its own constitution.  (Hilariously, the SCMP puts this statement, of all its content, behind its paywall. There is a copy here: “…a must-read, simultaneously evocative of the gospel of Christ, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the poetry of Yeats,” no less.)

Liu’s pointed comments seem to have unnerved Lok.  That’s why he begins by assuring the reader that he approves of their publication.  “Now that is freedom of information.”  Lok’s logic is: China’s leadership is second to none in the world; calling for it to submit to democratic process is no different from physically subverting it; thus the prison sentence is correct and Liu got what he deserved.

It is a mark of Lok’s letters that he uses arrogance and haughtiness rather than hard facts or reason to support his case.  There is something self-indulgent, almost playful, about it; you have to wonder whether he really believes what he is saying or whether it is just a way of irritating people and sorting out some old frustrations.  And thus it is here.  China’s leadership is looking no less desperate than any other government in the world right now.  It is jailing people who fight corruption and injustice.  It is probably (look at property prices) misjudging its response to the world’s financial crisis.  It is looking inexperienced and clumsy as it throws its new weight around on the world stage.  It is petrified of its own people – even the harmless descendents of the Ship’s regulars all those years ago in Kowloon – and we all know that means a government that is not up to the job.  The mainland businessmen buying our luxury apartments with hot money must sense it.  I am pretty sure Peter Lok knows it too, but he is too busy avenging past slights to admit it.

The front page of today’s South China Morning Post juxtaposes two stories.  According to the first, the government could establish an insurance company of its own to compete with private-sector providers of health coverage if and when some sort of incentive system can be devised to convince the middle class to pay more for their (currently heavily subsidized) hospital bills.  Officials believe that, left to their own devices, private-sector insurers will collude to exclude people who tend to get ill and to keep benefits so low that people would just carry on using the public hospitals anyway.

It will be interesting to see how an administration that has just blown the equivalent of over two years’ public health-care expenditure on a 16-mile high speed rail link manages to convince the white-collar workforce to shell out more for its appendectomies, childbirth and other in-patient procedures.  Especially since this is the same administration that keeps housing in artificially short supply in order to force these same families to divert much of their income to the property cartel for a couple of decades in return for a 450-square-foot rabbit hutch to live in.  But still, the basic message is that the government is alert to the possibility that evil, exploitative corporations will bleed poor consumers dry if given the chance.

The problem here is that the general (ie non-life) insurance industry is not, by the standards of Hong Kong’s domestic economy, a rip-off.  It is not exactly a popular business, of course, and thousands of people will whine about the unfairness of the small print they didn’t read.  (The meagerness of many employee health plans is of the employers’ choosing.)  But it is a very low-margin sector.  Many players lose money on basic insurance operations – paying more out in claims than they make from premiums – and rely on investment income for earnings.  As they should.

Skeptics who doubt this can consider the following question.  Which of the following industries is the odd one out: supermarkets, bus services, electricity, property, household gas, insurance, construction materials supplies and ferries?  The answer is the one that offers the least opportunity to corner the market, exercise monopoly power and/or collude with government or fellow cartelizers.  Our property tycoons aren’t in the insurance business because it is a level playing field, and they’re not interested in competing for a living.

For an idea of the property tycoons’ dream deal, we can turn to the second item on the SCMP’s front page, about the 67-storey Masterpiece tower, a Tsimshatsui eyesore developed by New World in conjunction with the Urban Renewal Authority (a government body that somehow mutated into a purely profit-driven real estate juggernaut).

In a nutshell: planning authorities first authorized a massive building on the assumption that it would be used for offices plus public facilities; they then allowed part of it to be a hotel; they then agreed (being old pals of the URA, perhaps) to be flexible about some of it being hotel-like rented serviced apartments; they then changed the rules temporarily to allow serviced apartments to be sold as private residential properties.

The result: a huge luxury apartment block in an area zoned for office use, and (we can guess) astronomic profits for New World, selling something like unit 63E, for example, for HK$30,000 a square foot to a Mainlander with the good fortune to be able to pay in cash.  It makes the Grand Promenade scandal, which yielded Henderson Land HK$3 billion extra profit after a helpful bureaucrat let them double the size of the project, look amateurish.

Obviously, the Independent Commission Against Corruption will soon be kicking civil servants’ and developers’ doors in and carrying away PCs and boxes of papers so they can find out how all these convenient discretionary decisions and loopholes happened to materialize when and where they did.  Except they will be too busy investigating some primary school teacher for claiming a subsidized housing loan when her husband already had one.

Health insurance just doesn’t have this sort of pizzazz.

Can it be true?  Are we going to re-live those heady days of 2005 when the whole world was gripped with the Nancy Kissel milkshake murder case?  The Court of Final Appeal has ordered a retrial, courtesy of one of those technicalities that make law such an enticing and absorbing subject.  Let’s face it, we all enjoyed it the first time round, so why not do it again?  It’ll be like having a repeat of HarbourFest, or a special extra Christmas Day in June, only even more fun.

It could be that in the retrial the prosecution will simply correct the procedural errors they made last time and get her convicted properly.  Her defence, on the other hand, could take advantage of this second chance and do a better job of claiming diminished responsibility, arguing that she had been driven temporarily crazy by her husband, or by the food colouring in milkshake, or the whole SARS/Tung Chee-hwa/Article 23 series of horrors that traumatized the entire city in the months before the killing.  There is no shortage of madness-inducing factors lying around.  I could be an expert witness: hardly anyone was left sane back then.

Then again, it could all be a big let-down.  Kissel’s defence are saying they want to get the whole thing dismissed because she won’t get a fair trial in the gossipy, prurient, grubby-minded, rumour-mongering village that is the Big Lychee.  I am sure all my seven million fellow-residents of our fair city join me in being shocked at these spoilsports’ scurrilous and insulting claim.

Before and after: the 'CSD diet'

There are two strands of thought about Nancy Kissel.  One is that she is a ruthless, sadistic she-monster and embodiment of evil on a par with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Vlad the Impaler.  The other is that she is an abused, exploited, bullied innocent victim who, after being brutalized by her investment banker spouse, was wronged by a cruel travesty of justice.

Actually, there is a third.  To quote a commentator below: “…my fascination with the young [sic] lady stems from the fact that when she’s scrubbed up (or not in the scrubs), I think she looks pretty hot. Sorry, but I can’t help it.”

This is not an unprecedented observation (eg, Tue, 2 Aug, 2005 uses the word ‘coquettish’).  Nancy Kissel does have a certain doe-eyed, slightly girlish, certainly girl-next-door, pouting, kittenish, Jacqueline Taieb/Diana Rigg-like something about her.  Or, at least, she did.  Several years of dining on Correctional Services congee, sleeping on a mat, mopping floors and just plain moping seem to have taken their toll in the hair and skin department.  Still, there is good news: in the four or so years since she was put away, Hong Kong has witnessed an explosion in the number of foot massage, facial, nail, spa treatment and similar outlets.  She will be amazed at the choice these days!