Big Lychee, Various Sectors

As the Festival City mania dies down – though there’s a five-day weekend ahead to reignite it – Cheung Kong chairman Li Ka-shing announces a 53% jump in profit for 2009 (from a low base in 2008). This doesn’t include any of the billions currently rolling in from Celestial Heights phase 2, La Mer, Le Prestige, Le Prime or La Tai Wai Panoramic Route 8 Vista, so the company has more to look forward to.

Although he doesn’t exactly put it this way, Li seems to doubt whether his own customers are doing the right thing in buying property right now. All he knows, we can surmise, is that it is a good time to sell.

For a further idea of how much Festival City represents value for money, I am grateful to Mr Webb for pointing out that the development rests on an enormous podium directly above the MTR’s maintenance facility, using the air rights on the public-sector rail operator’s land. The title deeds to my Soho slum say I am the proud owner of one 24th of Inland Lot No 123ABC; my own little patch – on an 1870s, 999-year lease – of God’s good earth. The buyers lining up at Tai Wai will have title to the cube of sky encased in their concrete box, and nothing else.

So is Cheung Kong Holdings, stock code 1, a good investment? Li himself is buying, so it could well be. However, readers of Alice Poon’s Land and the Ruling Class in Hong Kong will recall that among the array of tricks developers employ to extract maximum wealth out of the Hong Kong economy is the awarding of construction and materials contracts to their own privately held companies, whose earnings don’t have to be shared with riffraff investing in their publicly listed vehicles. Profit can therefore leak into family pockets before having a chance to appear on the bottom line at a press conference. Still, for investors into medium-term range trading, Hong Kong property stocks are reliable yo-yos.

Li doesn’t want to discuss rebellious number-two son Richard’s trouble in Beijing. The boy seems to have been punished for overly enthusiastic land speculation, though Daddy suggests it might be something else altogether. (And if they took action against everybody doing it, would there be anyone left?) Richard has run into problems with the Mainland authorities before, when trying to sell PCCW’s fixed-line network to evil foreigners planning to eavesdrop on China’s most precious state secrets. Possibly as a reaction, he started palling around with Hong Kong’s pro-democracy Civic Party, even advertising in/subsidizing their government-critical newspaper – a blatant breach of the patriotic united front’s ban on trading with the enemy. The Civic Party, along with the radical League of Social Democrats, are behind the unconstitutional by-elections currently being organized by the government and which won’t count as a referendum. Maybe that’s what Daddy was getting at. But then again, probably not.

Past Leader of the Year Awards. Top: Ronald Arculli presents Allan Zeman with Outstanding Public Service Award. Below: Allan Zeman presents Ronald Arculli with Outstanding Public Service Award.

The Civic Party came in for a roasting last night at the 2009 Leader of the Year Awards Ceremony – the Hong Kong tycoon-bureaucrat oligarchy’s Woodstock, if that isn’t too mind-boggling an image. Speaking to the assembled establishment ranks, tobacco tycoon and event sponsor Charles Ho saw fit to joke that the unlikely alliance of CP ladies and LSD “wolves” was due to lust. Not content with that, he then had his Sing Tao Group newspapers publish his wit for all to enjoy. It is the done thing on these occasions never to mention the dissidents and malcontents baying at the gates outside. They are too inconsequential (actually, baleful) to be worthy of a moment’s thought or breath. So if this was an attempt by Ho to score brownie points it was a failure, not to say something of an embarrassment to his audience.

The CP-LSD contribution to the fight against the parasites that run this city – the by-election/referendum publicity stunt – is pitiful and lame. But what about their moderate pro-democratic colleagues’ efforts? They have become so bogged down in the political reform public consultation charade that they are now, in effect, calling for the functional constituencies that bolster tycoons’ political influence to continue for another 10 years. With opponents like that, the Hong Kong government must think, who needs a broad support base?

One thing puzzles me: How does Li Ka-shing, sitting before the media and surveying the gargantuan profits yielded by the horrid apartments courtesy of a supportive government and acquiescent opposition, stop himself from laughing out loud? I would say he deserves a medal, but of course he’s got one.

The ‘it’s-not-a-bubble’, otherwise known as ‘our healthy property market’, roars ahead courtesy of almost nonexistent real interest rates, a government that thinks creating an artificial shortage of homes is a shrewd policy, and the uncontainable, grasping cunning of real estate developers’ marketing tactics.

Behold Festival City, a half-built strip of high-rises in Tai Wai, the first bit of Shatin you enter after coming out of the tunnel from civilization under Lion Rock. The site is squeezed between two spurs of Route 8, the HK$18 billion-plus-plus freeway linking Shatin to Tsing Yi that not many people use. The other main feature of the neighbourhood is the Mass Transit Railway maintenance yard.

There was a time when this would have been considered a run-of-the-mill residential project aimed at the reasonably humble middle class. Under the surface, the accommodation is really little different from that at City One, the 1980s development closer to beautiful downtown Shatin. But since then floor areas have come down, and prices gone up, so developers can add a tacky foyer with marble and chandeliers and a pool and clubhouse (generating ongoing fee income for themselves), and call it luxury living.

The website, complete with videos of blond Westerners to show you how high-class everything is, adopts a mildly deranged theme based on brand labels, namely: Landmark (“Be the centre of eminence”); Homme (“Conquer with free rein” – about how convenient it is to drive to Kowloon, Central and the border in your Porsche with empty, traffic light-free Route 8); Lady (“Walk tall in life” – non-specific glamour); Junior (“Festival City inspires children’s intelligence and artistic taste via X-games principle”); and Florist (“Be embraced in green oasis hub”). Then there is “European aesthetics at its finest … Versace, Fendi, Swarovski and Armani … all tastefully set … for all to admire,” for which read, “others to envy.”

Even allowing for the fact that mainlanders, with their supposedly unsophisticated and superficial preferences, are a target market here, this is trashy second-rate advertising. And the reason is simple: the developer doesn’t care. It is going to sell anyway. The challenge is to extract maximum prices by messing with buyers’ minds far more directly than any glossy photos and inane slogans can manage.

Cheung Kong is offering apparently cheap financing; it is not a bank, so Monetary Authority efforts to calm down home lending don’t apply to it. It creates a buzz as sales start with the help of newspapers eager to shoeshine Hong Kong’s richest tycoon and attract advertising from his vast retail, property and utilities empire. Thus 20,000 rush to Tai Wai, and “$13,000 a sq ft is a reasonable target price,” though they’re asking less to start with. Rumours fly around that mystery investors from Wenzhou are buying in bulk; the selfless developer, concerned as ever for the public well-being, nobly announces a cap of two properties per buyer. Alarmed purchasers turn up desperate to grab a unit before prices skyrocket. A Mr Leung tells the South China Morning Post how he and his wife wanted a cheaper apartment, but ended up buying a pricier one because the developer unexpectedly started to sell them first, and he was afraid of losing out – at 10pm, amid a frenzy during which Cheung Kong pulled in HK$3 billion from the sale of some 300 units in 4.5 hours.

What do you get? The 1,373 sq ft unit contains 1,040 sq ft of space (the rest is in the stairwell, the clubhouse, etc) and cost HK$12-14 million. The floor plan does not have a scale, so I have cut and pasted a few toilets from the bathrooms (in pink) to give an idea of the size. The standing-up area in the kitchen (bottom right) is one toilet (lengthwise – around 2ft 6in) across; the kids’ rooms are a bit over two toilets wide, and even the master bedroom (top) would barely accommodate a row of four. In other words, the master bedroom is maybe 10ft x 10ft, plus a window ledge (the yellow hatching is either a ledge or external – I missed some halfway up the left). For US$1.7 million.

It is easy to blame the herd-like behaviour of Hong Kong property buyers, but it is a vestigial survival instinct in this formerly refugee society that when a shortage of anything essential or at least desirable is looming, you leap in and get what you can. Developers are past masters at exploiting buyers’ fears of a coming famine. Some make Cheung Kong look decorous in their sales tactics.

You would have thought people would make a fuss, but the middle class at the sharp end of this scam have no friends. Radical politicians like the League for Social Democracy are more concerned with the grassroots in the public housing estates. The Civic Party and Democrats are up to their ears in lawyers, many of whom probably can’t avoid working at least indirectly for the property cartel and its various tentacles and ancillaries. The bureaucrats in government make sympathetic noises about affordability, but are, at best, resigned to a bubble as something beyond their control or, at worst, think it’s a great idea and grin at how clever they are.

There are, of course, winners:

Eric Yuen Chi-fung, the head of research at Guoco Capital, said the total investment cost of the [Festival City] project was HK$5,000 per sq ft.

Based on the first batch being sold for HK$8,692 per sq ft, this represents a profit margin of at least 74 per cent.

Nice!

Take some clueless bureaucrats, a very large pile of taxpayers’ money and a handful of trendy 50-something guys with receding ponytails, and what do you get? With an embarrassing lack of embarrassment, the Hong Kong government unveils its latest BrandHK logo.

The Big Lychee’s first logo, introduced in the 1840s, served the city reasonably well for a century and a half. It was painstakingly designed by bohemian Victorians sporting green-rimmed monocles and inspired by laudanum. The brand strategy and positioning was ‘East meets West and does what it’s told’ – represented by the dragon and a lion, plus a little extra lion on top in case you didn’t get the whole message. Fee: 72 guineas.

Hong Kong’s long-awaited re-branding in the late 20th Century dispatched with the outdated colonial look to fully reflect its emergence as a dynamic, modern, multi-dimensional and always changing hub. (The lengthy list of adjectives associated with the city-turned-product took up entire double-decker buses at one time. The most memorable, perhaps, was the word ‘progressive’, which was in some ways fitting for one of the few places in Asia with no death penalty, no jailing of dissidents or gays, no censorship, etc, but nonetheless seemed a bit jarring. It was possibly intended to irritate Singapore.) Fee: HK$52 million, which was justified by the very nifty adaptation of the characters heung and kong into a dragon’s head – plus, at no extra charge, the letters H and K if you look really carefully.

This design has now been overhauled following an extensive course of public engagement, opinion surveys, consultation with opinion leaders and discussion groups. According to the guys in pony tails: “The dragon image and the brandline [that’s the slogan] have built up equity over the years. Both are now well recognised in connection with Hong Kong while the city is, if anything, [this is where the civil servants decide to accept the pitch and the price] even more ‘Asia’s world city’ than it was at the start of the millennium.”

The relaunched logo now incorporates what are, we are told, coloured ribbons. Anyone looking at it and immediately imagining male gametes wriggling their way up a fallopian tube in search of an ovum is sick and probably needs some sort of treatment, possibly including beatings with large volumes of Rorschach ink-blot tests.

Chief Secretary John Tsang, introducing the vivid new look, explains that the blue and green ribbons extending from the dragon symbolize “blue sky and a sustainable environment.” The wrinkle in the red ribbon, which represents pigs flying to a land where it’s Christmas every day, is the outline of Lion Rock. (Admit it – you had to be told.) My own quick look through the latest Annual Digest of Statistics suggests that these curvy psychedelic trails could have more down-to-earth meanings.

There are now 10 official adjectives or buzz words to reflect core values, Tsang says. Acutely aware of the tendency for negative-thinking cynics to mock, he stresses that two phrases, namely ‘innovative’ and ‘quality living’, “have been classified as ‘aspirational’ values.” I’d have done the same, I must say. Thank God for ad-men – how else would we get core values?

Fee: HK$69.9 billion, mostly owing to the Lion Rock allusion.

We don’t hear much about localization these days in Hong Kong. The active replacement of overseas personnel with natives in the public sector as part of decolonization has pretty much run its course. Although some older Westerners are still plodding their way towards retirement in the ranks of government service, written-language requirements now effectively bar new non-Chinese – even if Cantonese-speakers – from joining the bureaucracy in anything other than a specialist or technical capacity.

In some cases, unwritten rules seem to require a Chinese face. It is unthinkable that any of our universities will ever again have a European, Indian or other non-yellow person as a vice-chancellor, though an American- or Canadian-Chinese is apparently acceptable. It is hard to imagine the authorities deliberately recruiting locally born minorities like Pakistanis or Nepalese as front-line cops to smooth relations with those communities – a standard measure in the US and UK for decades.

Some public-sector positions are still open to foreigners. The judiciary is full of white and even brown faces. This is partly because Rule of Law, along with a maximum 15% tax rate, is sacred – and seen to be more so with every sandstorm or disease scare. But it is also because local legal talent can make much, much more money in the corporate and financial world. Similarly, there appears to be no particular rush among local members of the Hong Kong Police to ease one Mr Brittain out of his job as Senior Bomb Disposal Officer.

A few, but not many, eyebrows were raised when Australian health administrator Shane Solomon was appointed head of the Hospital Authority four years ago. There may well have been some local officials bickering behind the scenes wanting the high-profile job, but there were probably many more who wouldn’t have gone near it. The public healthcare system is underfunded and bureaucratic, while patients are increasingly fussy and the media constantly poised to turn every misdosage and misdiagnosis into the crime of the century. Give the job to an outsider – there’s nothing to lose.

Click to see Pete n Dud at the art gallery!

Another poisoned chalice now goes to one Graham Sheffield, artistic director of London’s Barbican complex, who has been appointed first Chief Executive of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority. Does he realize what a pit of vipers he has agreed to jump into?

It was inevitable that this job would not go to a local. The West Kowloon reclamation was jinxed from the start, presumably because of the impact of the new finger of land on the harbour’s feng shui. Departing colonial governor Chris Patten saw the area, reclaimed as part of the airport express rail project, as a badly needed park. His successor, Tung Chee-hwa, succumbed to the more traditional idea that letting Hong Kong people enjoy some open space would be a waste, so decreed it should be some sort of tourism-related hub, complete with sports stadium. This rather predictably transmuted into an opportunity for the property tycoons to cover the area with luxury high-rises, under the guise of an arts hub to be funded by a slice of the profits. A plan to give the whole project to a single developer (or consortium) caused public outcry and had to be abandoned.

Tung’s successor Donald Tsang swallowed his pride and reluctantly agreed to fund the whole arts hub idea out of the government’s bulging coffers, consoling himself with the thought that at least all the money would go on concrete. ‘Arts’, it goes without saying, has never meant any more than narcissistic, vanity-project, white-elephant theatres and galleries, preferably big, ugly ones designed by apparently famous European architects. The idea that you need something to put in these edifices was an afterthought, entrusted to a big bureaucracy full of civil servants called the WKCDA.

Mr Sheffield will now try to run this thing, even though the bureaucrats have already made themselves very comfortable with as many committees and boards as they can set up, and are enjoying all the attention from an array of cultural groups – many publicly funded to start with – demanding a piece of the museum/concert hall/theatre action for themselves.

Assuming he can wrest control from civil servants determined to serve the community come what may, he will find that orchestras, ballets, portrait collections and statuary will be the least of his problems. There will be volatile, trendy young creative types demanding time and space for the latest Canto-avant-garde out of Shatin. He’ll have Chinese opera activists with connections in Beijing and a zero-tolerance attitude to uppity barbarians. There will be Christian fundamentalists crawling all over the place ready to screech in outrage at the slightest hint of nudity. There will be friction, rivalry, backstabbing and disharmony everywhere, except among the 7 million people of Hong Kong, who will stubbornly refuse to show the slightest shred of enthusiasm for any of it, unless maybe a bit of nudity sneaks in – Salome, say.

Mr Sheffield has undeniably started by asserting himself with in-your-face defiance. Can anyone in the Big Lychee remember the last time they saw a black jacket with a brown shirt and a blatantly un-matching tie? Good luck to him.  Personally, I’d feel safer running the bomb squad.

I still get only a choice of English or traditional Chinese on google.com.hk – a page I visit dozens upon dozens of times a day – but apparently a simplified character version appears on the other side of the border, where mainland web users now have no other choice if they want to use what is by a million miles the best search engine going. (One of modern life’s most irritating frustrations: wanting to check something quickly on a public PC and finding some benighted wretch has set Yahoo or Bing as the default.) Unlike us in Hong Kong, of course, people on the mainland using ‘our’ Google have the PRC firewall filtering out prohibited sites.

The South China Morning Post, controlled by the patriotic Robert Kuok’s Kerry Group, asserts its editorial independence today with a bold defence of Google’s decision to more or less tell China’s communist rulers to do their own dirty work rather than self-censor:

The correct party line, which the SCMP pretty much ignores, is that Google is utterly wrong and incorrect and abandoning its cheese (don’t ask) and indulging in a civilizational conflict at the behest of information-imperialists, not to mention in a publicity stunt that will only benefit rival Baidu, essentially a children’s search engine that Forbes has promptly told investors is a sell. (For the youthful among us who need to rummage around for hard-to-find files of, shall we say, a terpsichorean nature – of the sort Google does not highlight – I recommend Sogou.)

Essentially, Google has moved to humiliate Beijing in the eyes of China’s more sophisticated net-using citizens. The company hasn’t gone the whole way by pulling the plug on Google Earth and other features these people would sorely miss, but it has implicitly threatened to provoke resentment against the authorities by doing so. The leaders in Beijing have never come across a company or government that essentially says “We’re not that fussed about the money,” and they are outraged. To them, an entity that isn’t mesmerized by the lure of profit in China is a thing to be feared.

If the SCMP editors find this inspiring, they are quick to pull themselves together and redress the balance with an op-ed article by Professor the Hon Anthony Cheung Bing-leung GBS JP, Executive Council member, President of the Hong Kong Institute of Education and founder of low-key sort-of-think-tank-thing SynergyNet. He presents the Big Lychee government’s official line – which is to say, the CCP’s directive translated into local bureaucrat-speak – on political reform.

This is a line rooted in a deception and fantasy that much of Hong Kong seems close to swallowing. According to this pretence, the People’s Republic of China – a one-party state – will allow the people of Hong Kong to choose their own executive and legislative branches of government, through free and fair elections, within the next 10 years or so. Conditions, such as the need for the process to be gradual and orderly, are attached but vague and generally downplayed. The key, we are now being told by people like Professor Cheung, is forging a compromise between conflicting local forces, essentially the minority who currently hold power and everyone else.

A simple look at the electoral reform package offered for 2007-08 (vetoed by pro-democratic lawmakers) and essentially repeated this time round for 2012 shows that something very different is really happening. There is no intention whatsoever to reform; Hong Kong is currently run by a small group of tycoon-influenced bureaucrats answerable to the Chinese government, and the cosmetic changes being proposed will not alter that one iota.

So, for example, Cheung must know that asking the pro-democrats to work on building the two-thirds legislative majority necessary to abolish functional constituencies is a snare – an invitation to get absorbed into a time-wasting dead-end.

The FCs exist to ensure that Beijing can control the legislature. The decision to abolish them can come only from Beijing. They will dissolve themselves if Beijing tells them to, otherwise they won’t. Pro-democrats don’t come into it (any more than the FCs themselves do, or the Hong Kong administration).

Cheung half admits this when he says that the Chinese government insists on “balanced participation by various sectors”.  This is code for “being allowed to rig the election”. A Communist Party will always, always rig any election. It must. It has no choice. The country ceases to be a one-party state otherwise. Our best hope, if we are sick of Hong Kong being run on behalf of half a dozen property tycoons’ families, is that Beijing chooses a different and less malignant way of rigging things. Since it doesn’t address this, the political reform debate is a farce.

Why Cheung should lend himself to all this disingenuousness is anyone’s guess. His fellow token moderate democrat on Exco, Anna Wu, manages to mostly steer clear of it (though her columnist husband Frank Ching partly compensates in his SCMP articles). He is a public-sector guy through and through, so it’s not as if he’s having multibillion-dollar construction projects dangled before him. Perhaps someone has an embarrassing photo of him in a Shenzhen hotel room? Or has he fallen under the spell of an upgrade from Gold Bauhinia Star to Grand Bauhinia Medal?

Thank God he doesn’t run a search engine.

Ocean Park feels a need to deny rumours that mainland women are trying to abduct western toddlers at the famous tourist attraction. Despite their image as inactive, over-eating wastrels who spend all their time lazing in nail spas and rescuing distressed pangolins, Hong Kong’s expatriate housewives emerge from this scare as caring and protective mothers. Or at least those currently on-line do; who knows about the ones who are, as we speak, scouring Chinese orphanages in search of a new accessory-baby?

As anyone who has had to escort a young blond child in Hong Kong will know, some Chinese people are besotted by little European-looking brats. Mainlanders – who have only ever seen the golden curls, round blue eyes and supposedly doll-like pale-pink skin in pictures – are especially prone to stare in wonder and even ask to take a photo. Indeed, this is probably the reason why Ocean Park is so popular among mainlanders: the panda bears are obviously no big deal, but where there are pandas, there will be cute, fair foreign infants to stare at and stroke.

Ideally, the next development would be widespread alarm that the blond infants are being kidnapped to order to have their eyes harvested for desperate Shanghai tycoons with glaucoma, or maybe to be kept as exotic pets by a Beijing equivalent of the late musical performer and eccentric Michael Jackson. But since, to all right-thinking people’s intense disappointment, common sense is rearing its head and the story is dying down, we instead need some rumours about who started the panic.

There must be a distinct possibility that the flap was started by Disney, possibly in the hope that an anti-mainlander backlash at Ocean Park – possibly a lynching or two by outraged western parents – will help attract the tourist yuan back to The Mouse. Or it could be a Google-CIA plot to damage China’s reputation ahead of the forthcoming clash-of-cultures trade war. Or is it the dastardly Swedes, inundated with swarthy immigrants, looking to replenish the national gene pool with more Nordic stock?

Aha! None of these. A Hong Kong government spokesman has just announced that the authorities have discovered the source of all the terror: sandstorms in North China.

Mainland kidnappers spiriting their little fair-haired victims away from Ocean Park into the swirling suspended particulates yesterday.

The Hon Sophie Leung GBS JP, the 64-year-old but exquisitely airbrushed representative of the textiles industry in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, generously shares her thoughts on the issue of social mobility:

I am saying all this today to the youngsters of Hong Kong … to move upward, they should take the first step on their own and cannot wait forever for someone else to lift them upwards … It’s up to whether you are willing to work hard on your own … learn to be enthusiastic and optimistic, follow your hearts, fill your hearts with positive thinking. Learn to hold on to opportunity, and live happily and in harmony with the society!

As a result of filling her own heart with positive thinking at an early age, Leung found herself with a father who owned a clothing factory. This sector was, shall we say, stitched up by a group of mainly Shanghainese industrialists who arrived in Hong Kong after the communist revolution in China.

Partly as a reward for not being Cantonese (a rather undependable bunch, old chap), the British colonial authorities awarded these people the Big Lychee’s textiles quotas. These entitled their holders to a given amount of low- or non-tariff access to American and European markets under agreements negotiated to cap imports of cheap apparel into rich countries. These immensely valuable licences were handed out free of charge to the existing main players, rather than auctioned. It was estimated that in the mid-1970s some 15-25% of the value of textiles exports was pure windfall profits for these lucky firms.

The families of Chief Secretary Henry Tang and tycoon-politicians James and Michael Tien made their fortunes this way (all are connected with the Liberal Party, though Sophie left to co-found the crypto-reactionary Economic Synergy group). Like the heirs to today’s property giants, these people never encountered any business success other than the sort handed over on a plate. Competition, level playing fields and the creation of value through innovation are as alien to them as the fact that non-middle-class people who grow up in public housing (even if they gain degree-level qualifications) and/or were born from 1976-1989 are statistically less likely than average to become middle class.

Although it has been declining since the days when leaving a Tang or Tien knitwear sweatshop to sell noodles on the street was a step up, social mobility is no worse in Hong Kong than in many other societies. The real problem is inequality.

As Executive Council member CY Leung never tires of pointing out in his hunger for the post of Chief Executive, real per-capita GDP in Hong Kong grew by 34% from 1997-2006, yet pay for workers on HK$5,000-7,200 went up by less than 4%.* Social mobility and inequality are not strictly the same thing, so it is hard to say whether Sophie’s remedies are applicable. But in her Legco motion last week (Item 17: Adding impetus for promoting upward social mobility) she seems to take a fairly holistic approach to addressing social ills in general. “Promote in … various sectors,” she urges, “the development of a ‘from the heart’ attitude of doing things.” Policymakers around the world kick themselves for not thinking of that first. So maybe those people on HK$5,000 a month should try it. Learn to hold on to opportunity, and live happily and in harmony with the society – or be poor. It’s up to them.

* Or actually declined 12% if they worked in… textiles!

No fewer than five scarcely credible events leave the world stunned, not to stay shocked, maybe even traumatized, as some of our most deep-rooted assumptions and certainties are suddenly turned upside down and left in tatters.

1. We reel in horror at the suggestion that Macau casino mogul Dr Stanley Ho GBS OBE might be associated in some way with triads. This follows New Jersey’s decision to bar his daughter Pansy from running a gaming business in the state on account of the family connection. “You would have to be living under a rock not to know about Stanley Ho,” said former MGM Mirage chairman Terry Lanni, “and what the perception of Stanley Ho is.” What on earth can this disgraceful man be thinking?

Perhaps now the Hong Kong government will finally come to its senses and give the ailing Dr Ho the Grand Bauhinia Medal that every high net worth patriot in the Big Lychee receives as of right. The administration’s decision to leave him languishing with a mere Gold Bauhinia Star – which they give to anybody, along with all the riffraff Bronze and petit bourgeois arriviste Silver ones – has always struck me as a glaring insult, indeed a calculated humiliation, though fortunately not many people seem to have picked up on it.

2. We are appalled at the sight of Financial Secretary John Tsang wasting his time and our money in Kuala Lumpur uttering inane blather about how Hong Kong is to somehow guide its banks into making the city a major platform for Islamic finance – a cynical fad aimed at exploiting gullible religious believers, of which Malaysia has become the regional hub. Whatever next? Chief Secretary Henry Tang going to Shenzhen and signing vacuous agreements on partnership and cooperation with a bunch of corrupt thug-cadres who hate us?

3. We are struck dumb on hearing that Hong Kong officials have made a decision that will benefit the property tycoons at the expense of the rest of the population. The idea that they would even consider allowing the last few gaps in the hillside and on the roads of the Mid Levels to be filled in with monstrous high-rises and more traffic beggars belief.

4. We freak out at the news that among Hong Kong’s world-class, knowledge-economy, service-sector, high value-added exports is a movie called Womb Ghosts featuring the spirits of aborted fetuses and a scene – even in the trailer on YouTube – in which an egg cracked into a frying pan contains a small, bloody human embryo-baby of some sort. The idea that our local film industry would stoop to such depths of depravity, bad taste and crap scriptwriting to make a few bucks out of excitable and unsavoury American teenagers is little short of sickening. Have these production houses and cinematic arts professionals no shame?

5. We are struck dumb on hearing that Hong Kong officials have made a decision that will benefit the property tycoons at the expense of the rest of the population. Again. The idea that they would even consider tilting the playing field even more steeply in the developers’ favour by enabling compulsory sales of old buildings with 80% of owners’ approval leaves us flabbergasted. As for the sight of the corporate functional constituency representatives – and the Democratic Alliance for the Blah Blah of Hong Kong – combining to ram the measure through in the Legislative Council… What can I say? Who would have thought they would ever live to see the day when such a thing happened?

Such weirdness… I think I have to go and lie down. Thank God this lunatic string of aberrations is over and next week everything will be back to normal.

Pressure is rising on the Obama administration to somehow make China revalue the Renminbi. History offers two contrasting attempts to tackle the middle kingdom’s mercantilist, protectionist ways.

First, the Tiberius approach. The Roman emperor tried to ban silk in the AD30s because its importation was depleting the empire’s reserves of wealth; the Han Dynasty in China required payment in the form of gold – which it hoarded – and refused to accept other goods in exchange.

Tiberius didn’t know anything about the Seres, or silk people; he didn’t even know where China was. Indeed, Romans thought silk was the wool of a sea-dwelling sheep. And it is unlikely that the Chinese noticed the Romans’ limp attempt at economic sanctions.  Result: nothing happened, and the Chinese carried on, oblivious to foreigners’ concerns.

Second, there is what we might call the Palmerston approach. In the early 19th Century, Indian-based British merchants buying silk, tea and chinaware for export to the UK faced a similar problem. The Chinese authorities banned importation of most foreign goods and demanded that barbarian traders pay for Chinese products in silver. Again, the metal was simply hoarded. It started to grow scarce, so the merchants found another commodity that was as valuable and easy to transport: opium. The Chinese government objected, and tried to stamp the traffic out by confiscating the merchants’ supplies.

Britain’s response to this infringement of her subjects’ property rights was unambiguous: declare war; win; demand reparations, land and free trade; repeat as necessary.

One difference is that China today is far more integrated into the world economy. The whole country depends on imports of raw materials, energy, technology and plain everyday food, mostly from places other than the US. They pay for it not by selling pleasant, smooth, highly desirable silk, but by exporting cheap, indeed often worthless and unnecessary, manufactured junk, notably to the US. To help the process, they force their low-paid factory staff to subsidize fat Western consumers – the net effect of a weak, pegged currency reducing a population’s purchasing power. Now the Americans are basically demanding a competitive devaluation of the dollar, to make their own people poorer. A stronger Renminbi equals higher demand for imports among Chinese consumers, equals US$5-a-gallon gas in the US.

The Renminbi will rise in its own good time; it seems such a safe bet that many of us in Hong Kong take advantage of our privileged access to 20,000 Yuan a day to accumulate RMB savings as a sort of fingers-crossed, probably-high-yield time deposit. But in the short term, Obama will follow a route closer to Tiberius than Palmerston, whatever labour unions, xenophobes, Nobel prize-winning economists and congressmen might want. A big trade fight might teach [insert name of whoever you don’t like] a lesson, but the world simply isn’t that exciting. Look at Greece – I’ve given up waiting for that country to drop out of the Eurozone, let alone for the common currency to blow apart. They’re going to find a disappointingly dull way to muddle through. I just know it. Euro-Armageddon would be great, but life’s just not that interesting.

Except maybe this, in today’s South China Morning Post:

How is this supposed to influence a consumer’s behaviour?  The small print says: “Jamie Bochert photographed by Juergen Teller.” Never heard of either of them. The ad is for a certain Marc Jacobs. Never heard of him/it. I have no clue what this is an ad for. All I can be sure of is that I don’t want one.

Oh, and that it’s made in China.