Big Lychee, Various Sectors

A couple more pedestrians died yesterday in road accidents.  Although such fatalities are probably no more frequent in Hong Kong than in many other big cities, the reasons are different.  First is the mysterious and in many ways wondrous nature of our vehicles – notably taxis and minibuses – which have a rebellious and malicious will of their own and often ‘go out of control’ for no apparent reason other than spite for their human masters.  The other is that, unlike in other communities, our transport bureaucracy has an official policy of killing (or strictly speaking facilitating the killing of) people who selfishly use up valuable highway space by walking.

A perfect example of this is revealed in the photo in today’s Standard showing the site on Kennedy Road of one of yesterday’s deaths.  The 18-inch wide concrete ridge on which the taxi has come to rest is not merely a base for the fence; it is the sidewalk.  As a resident is quoted as saying: “you fear [cars] will brush against you.”  The narrowest-shouldered, slimmest individuals will be in danger – even when the vehicles are not suffering from violent mood swings – if someone else comes along and they need to pass.

The decision to make the sidewalk so narrow was made by a civil servant implementing a policy, and that policy is to accept pedestrian deaths in order to keep the traffic flowing.  This is an extension of the policy to treat traffic in Hong Kong as a natural phenomenon beyond the control of mankind: though its course can be diverted here and there, its volume – which usually rises year after year – is no more manageable than the lava flows that ooze out of the ground in Hawaii and Iceland.

It is not a coincidence that the Transport and Housing Bureau responsible for this approach is the same part of government that thinks 400 square feet is sufficient for a family to live in and HK$69 billion is a sensible price for a 16-mile stretch of rail track.  It is not the only part of the bureaucracy heavily populated by psychopaths – the planning and lands function of the Development Bureau is stuffed with them – but its malevolence towards citizens has a higher profile.

Interestingly, these two bureaus are involved in a power struggle in Kennedy Road.  Transport officials naturally want to keep pedestrian numbers down through a high mortality rate caused by vehicles traveling at speed.  The planners, however, have a different agenda.  Their priority is to kill off a larger number of people more slowly through increasing air pollution.

To this end, they have authorized the construction of Hopewell Holdings’ famous mega-hotel just down the hill.  As (rather whiny) residents have pointed out, the structure will block airflow and create traffic gridlock; when the tower is built, people walking in the neighbourhood will be squeezing their way through almost-stationary vehicles crawling along at the speed of molten rock.  Thus the planners will come out on top and rot people’s lungs with suspended particulates over many years, while the transport officials will have no choice but to lose face and abandon their favoured ‘instant death’ solution.  Just another of those interdepartmental squabbles that make government so interesting.

In the first Member’s Motion (IV, 1) in Wednesday’s Legislative Council meeting, the Civic Party’s fragrant Audrey Eu Yuet-mee proposes that the assembly urge…

“…all electors in Hong Kong to actively participate in the forthcoming by-elections in the five geographical constituencies to peacefully quantify public opinion through voting, so as to achieve the social effect of a de facto referendum, and strive for the expeditious implementation of genuine universal suffrage and abolition of functional constituencies.”

The tautology “effect of a de facto” is presumably an attempt to make the characterization of the polls as a referendum as palatable as possible to folk who, loyally following the ill-advised example set by Beijing’s local officials, publicly declare the idea to be somehow a constitutional abomination or even act of treachery, albeit perfectly legal.  The use of the word ‘expeditious’ is an enormous, though totally expected, disappointment to those of us who have been waiting for the day when a Legco motion doesn’t feature the word (it appears twice, as a verb, in the following motion put forward by the Democratic Alliance of the Blah Blah of Hong Kong’s more-aromatic-than-fragrant Starry Lee).

The motion is a call for the people of the Big Lychee to register their discontent – and a desperate one.  From property developers to pollution to schools to poverty to traffic congestion to consumer rip-offs to overspending on infrastructure to underspending on health, there is so much to be angry about that it should be easy to rouse, say, 40% of electors to turn up in May and vote overwhelmingly for the pro-democrats.  The way things are looking, they will be lucky to get half that turnout, allowing pro-establishment figures to portray them, not unreasonably, as humiliated.

Much of the problem must be the pro-dems’ compulsive and self-indulgent focus on the abstraction that is political reform.  Maybe functional constituencies are a cause, or a symptom, or a symbol of what is wrong with Hong Kong, but after a quarter of a century, people are numbed to them and to wrangling over them. Much to the relief, no doubt, of the bureau-plutocracy that runs this city, the government’s opponents mostly chant structures and concepts rather than food, housing and hospitals.  The nearest to an uprising the motion might lead to is a walkout from Legco by the pro-government lawmakers.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, and indeed planet, we have the US Tea Party movement, the latest in a long line of grassroots backlashes against the federal government.  Like its predecessors (eg the Ross Perot fad), it is less representative than it thinks and will fizzle out.  It probably is, as House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggests, being hijacked by the Republicans (and partly engineered by vested interests, and partly aligned with the Democrats’ aims).  Most of all, some of its followers have mental health rather than political complaints.  It would be interesting to know what percentage of them believe:

• the US government was behind the 9-11 attacks;
• President Barack Obama was not born a US citizen and/or is a Muslim;
• the US government has plans to round up domestic opponents and put them in concentration camps and/or confiscate all private legally held firearms;
• the Bible is the literal truth and scientific explanations for the origins of the universe, the planet’s geology and different life forms are wrong; or
• the European Union is the Kingdom of the Antichrist foretold in the Books of Revelations and Daniel.

Click on Audrey to hear the Sensational Alex Harvey Band

Even given all this, there is a large group of decent, sane people out there who are genuinely furious about bank bailouts and bonuses, unemployment and evictions of homeowners, and scared by the apparent calamity and uncertainty around them.  Tea Partiers’ votes could affect the outcome of some elections later this year.

In Hong Kong, maybe it would be called the Yum Cha movement.  Or maybe it would be more historically resonant to see the local equivalent of the Boston Tea Party as Commissioner Lin Zexu’s defiance of colonial power in throwing British merchants’ opium into the sea at Humen in 1839.  (The comparison is faulty, but for the more Anglophile pro-dems he would be the ideal patriot-hero figurehead.)

It won’t happen, even if we caught a glimpse of it over the high-speed express rail project.  Partly, perhaps, because Hong Kong people are too docile, cynical, busy, splintered or self-centred, but mainly because the words needed to spark a fire aren’t there – just more endless droning on about universal suffrage.

Maybe we should call it the Dinner Party, in honour of Mao’s definition of what a revolution is not.

Not The South China Morning Post, the famously rude and crude satirical Hong Kong website and media franchise founded by Dr George Adams in 1995, is reborn yet again in the next stage of the great karmic cycle of consciousness.

This latest version is not to be confused with a blog, because blogs, whatever their easiness on the eye, are common and mostly stink.  Also, you wouldn’t find anything as vulgar as a blog on the website of Oxford Tutors, an up-and-coming educational service offering to teach the Big Lychee’s children all their favourite important academic subjects.  Blogs are stupid, but what ambitious parents can possibly look at NTSCMP, with features like Dog Pram of the Month, and not feel inspired to entrust their slightly slow kid’s supplementary schooling to its creator?

Catch it before it goes the way of its noble predecessors (see the first) in its long journey to cosmic enlightenment.