Big Lychee, Various Sectors

The Hong Kong government upgrades the travel alert for Thailand to black – the point at which certain insurance and corporate HR policies allow for people to be evacuated – and sends citizens visiting the kingdom panicky SMS messages as the Land of Smiles lurches closer to what looks unmistakably like class war.

One rumour currently doing the rounds among Bangkok’s rulers and their elite and middle class supporters, is that ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is on the verge of death in Dubai from prostate cancer. Establishment types take comfort from the idea because, according to their interpretation of events, the former leader personally bankrolls the red-shirt protestors demanding the restoration of democracy. If Thaksin weren’t paying them, the theory goes, the rabble would return to their farms and get back to happily growing rice for a subsistence income like they did in the old days before the crooked populist got himself elected by bribing them with cheap healthcare and loans. (The chattering classes have even ascertained the amounts being handed out to demonstrators: so many baht per day for those at the back of crowds, and several times more for those facing soldiers on the front line. Another rumour warns that certain major Thai companies are also now financing the mob in anticipation of red shirts coming to power.)

Back in the Big Lychee, the South China Morning Post pulls off what is, by its standards, a major coup of investigative journalism and calculates that directors of the city’s six big property developers now occupy 54 seats on official advisory bodies such as the Airport, Hospital and West Kowloon Authorities, compared with 16 in 1998. Yet more confirmation, as if it were needed, of the growing concentration of political and economic power in the hands of a few family-run conglomerates, presumably with the blessing of the Chinese Communist Party to which our bureaucrat-leaders ultimately report. And a Chinese University poll ruffles feathers by finding that the percentage of people agreeing that the Hong Kong government will respond only to radical action has risen from 21.4% in 2008 to 25.9% today.

That statistic has obviously hit a raw nerve, since pro-establishment voices are clamouring to assure us that it means little or nothing. The Standard’s fictitious Mary Ma dismisses the survey as “a bunch of figures,” while the government’s own pollster, Lau Siu-kai of the pitiful Central Policy Unit, tells us that although the “government and public urgently need to conduct extensive discussions on certain major social issues,” (which he doesn’t specify) the public “will surely censure any ‘riotous’ acts.”

The good news is that 56% (down from 57.1%) do not agree that the only way to get the government to pay attention is to have a riot, while 15.5% (down from 18.2%) say ‘half-half’; 2.7% (down from 3.7%) say they don’t know. At this rate, it will be 33 years before 100% of us believe that violence is the only option, so there’s plenty of time to sort it all out. Anyway, I think the 25.9% were paid by Thaksin.

No black travel alert here!

Just when you think Hong Kong has plumbed the absolute depths of dismal marketing, something comes along to remind you that there is always another nadir of commercial promotion on the way.

The green insert, about 10 inches long, fell out of an apparently inoffensive copy of Hong Kong magazine. It had the word ‘immature’ at the top, a warning that only over-18s should open it at the bottom, and a picture of a baby’s dummy. The ring of the dummy was attached to a perforated strip which, when pulled back, revealed a single Big Boy brand condom in a pack announcing the product as ‘big size’ and ‘L size’ and featuring a horse. Under the pack was the word ‘mature’ and the outline of a ridiculously enlarged prophylactic with the slogan ‘actual size’.

The condom packaging on its own is quite funny – or at least it would be if we didn’t have a nagging feeling that the product developers, far from seeing it as a tongue-in-cheek joke, are serious. And we get that feeling because of the awfulness of the rest of this advertising concept. What is the connection between a baby’s dummy and a condom? Are we supposed to desire the product in order to assure ourselves that we do not have an infant-sized penis? Or is it a reminder that contraception averts pregnancy and thus such dread inconveniences as screaming newborns?

The manufacturer, Okamoto, is Japanese, which raises the vexed question of the variation of manhood-size among different ethnic groups. Is the brand aimed at men who want to assure themselves that they do not have Nipponese-scale genitalia? The consensus appears to be that while the stereotype of black-big, white-medium, Asian-small penises may have a bit of truth in it on average, individual male members’ dimensions vary far more. (Women who are tempted to say they can confirm a definite difference between races should first ask themselves what sample size a scientific survey would need to be statistically credible, and whether they wish to declare themselves to be, in essence, highly seasoned Wanchai hookers. Just to confuse the issue, women’s internal organs come in different sizes too. The terminally bored or curious may poke around here or here for more.)

The idea that a particular ethnic or other group needs a particular condom size is further discredited by the way latex works. An old trick among army sergeant majors is to unroll one of the things over his clenched fist and up to his elbow. They are designed to stretch that much in order to withstand considerable stresses and strains without breaking.

Men in Hong Kong and probably elsewhere will have noticed that rubbers do vary a bit in size; essentially, some but not all Asian brands are a noticeably tighter fit than Western products like Durex and Trojan. It is not unknown for some Western guys to claim to need the bigger ones, even though the sergeant major shows us that this isn’t really true. Perhaps it is conceit, or maybe they find the feeling of the tighter local brands unfamiliar. Given the effect on sensation, it seems odd to prefer either a condom or a vagina that is looser rather than tighter, within the bounds of physical practicality.

So maybe Big Boy is a bit larger than some other offerings in the Okamoto product range or on the Japanese market, and its target is the above-average, or self-perceived above-average, man. (Assuming you don’t care about the shop assistant, the only other person to see the ‘Extra Large’ item will be a woman who, by that stage, will be able to judge for herself how well endowed you are.)

And how big is it, after all that? On unwrapping the Big Boy, we find nothing more or less than a plain, everyday, standard-sized condom – if a rather nasty black colour. Big Boy is average. It takes two hands to do the fist-and-forearm trick, so I test it on a bottle of wine. I am no loss to the world of experimental science, and should have thought this through. Anyway, as the photo shows, the birth control and disease prevention device split in no uncertain manner halfway down.

Maybe the temperature was a factor here (the manufacturer probably doesn’t count on customers slipping these items onto something taken straight from the refrigerator). Maybe it is made of some non-latex synthetic material and doesn’t put up with extreme contortion. Maybe I am doing Okamoto a grave disservice, and their product is in fact fine.

Still, serves them right for such an atrociously, gut-wrenchingly bad marketing campaign.

In December 2008, the National Development and Reform Commission released the Outline of the Plan for the Reform and Development (not Development and Reform, as you would expect) of the Pearl River Delta. It outlined aims to prioritize, accelerate, vigorously develop, renovate and upgrade, actively develop, promote, facilitate (twice), consolidate, build (thrice), deepen (thrice), reinforce, enhance (thrice), establish, exert, optimize, elevate, advance (thrice), inspire, utilize, energetically develop, intensify, prioritize, perfect, complete, improve, innovate, fully exert, elevate (twice), strengthen and – to the alarm of some elderly maiden aunts – stiffen various things. For example, it announced an intention to construct Harmonious Water Conservancy Projects and engage in Closer Cooperation with Hong Kong and Macao. Many of us were unsure whether we should leap up and down wetting ourselves or contain our excitement in the expectation that even greater thrills were to come.

Those who chose the latter have now been proved correct and had their patience rewarded. Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Donald Tsang and Guangdong’s Governor Huang Huahua have signed a Framework Agreement bringing the two jurisdictions’ co-operation to new heights. As with numerous previous cross-border pacts promising cooperation, partnership and mutual da-dee-da integration, the Framework Agreement is long on vague aspirations and short on specific policies other than some reiterated measures on infrastructure and other projects. However, there is something different about this particular piece of highly wrought blather.

It was signed in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing…

As the Hong Kong government’s statement yesterday breathlessly points out, the Agreement has been endorsed by the State Council and the ceremony was witnessed by Vice President Xi Jinping, who is likely to succeed Hu Jintao in 2012. So this is top-level, rather than purely regional, blather. As the press release says when referring to “important iconic effects,” this is about symbolism, but as we all know symbolism can be important. Essentially, this is a sort of peace treaty imposed by Beijing on the leaders of the Big Lychee and their counterparts in Guangdong.

One of the reasons we are knee-deep in cross-border conferences, councils and declarations is that the two sides don’t really like each other. The mainland officials resent our separate status, with its open market, convertible currency, bulging reserves and freedom from obligations to pay tax to Beijing or adopt and subsidize distant towns struck by natural disasters. The Hong Kong bureaucrats, trained by colonial masters, see the Pearl River Delta cadres as covetous central planners and best avoided.

After feeling humiliated by snooty Hongkongers after 1997, Guangdong officials started to badmouth the Big Lychee’s leadership up in Beijing as uncooperative. As Hong Kong went through economic problems in the early 2000s, the mainland provincial authorities grew more cocky, taunting the upstart, foreign-influenced city to the south with plans to restore Guangzhou to its historic position as the region’s top shipping, trade and financial centre. One of my most treasured possessions is a semi-official academic document purporting to outline plans to turn the whole Pearl River Delta into a trendy world-class hi-tech, services, eco-tourism, blah-blah zone, complete with a map showing a barren Hong Kong, isolated and forgotten in the middle of all the colour-coded progress and prosperity. And then there was the bickering over cross-border infrastructure – basically over who would benefit and who should pay.

Whatever his shortcomings as a policymaker, Donald Tsang Kam-yuen has a flair for productive groveling, and since assuming office he has applied this skill with a vengeance across the border. Hong Kong officials have put on a big show of being more sincere, less disdainful and more willing to give their Guangdong counterparts a bit of face. At the same time, the Big Lychee has made visible efforts to be more patriotic – for example, impressing school students to line the streets with flags for the Olympics, or sending cash to Szechuan. We may sneer or shrug, or see a scary trend, but it is what folk across the border expect to see.

So the new-look, positive, constructive, anthem-humming, eagerly integrating Hong Kong can be viewed as a bit of a PR stunt, to win over skeptical mainland leaders hearing bad reports about the ex-colony from their southern provincial bosses. In which case, we need a revisionist treatment of Sir Bow-Tie to portray him as a closet Hong Kong nationalist, appeasing the emperor to win protection for his beloved home town against grasping Guangdong. It would explain how he manages to reconcile devout Catholicism with apparent loyalty to the Communist Party. The upshot: Governor Huang goes to Beijing and publicly signs a fancy bit of State Council-approved Five-Year-Plan blather affirming Hong Kong as the financial centre. If he’s lucky, his sweatshops and duck farms might get a film studio.

Fate over the long weekend led me to a leper colony.

I recall an old colleague some time in the late 1980s enthusing about a trip to Macau. Her party had done a very popular thing at that time and hired a Mini Moke, a little car that looked like a hybrid of a jeep and a golf cart. These were the days when Sleaze City was officially designated as ‘sleepy’ and traffic was light; it was the height of adventurousness to cross the narrow causeway between Taipa and Coloane islands – now surrounded by the reclamation housing the Venetian and other gaudy mega-casinos – to explore. They had a great time, she said, except that at one stage they got lost and accidentally drove into this small, isolated village where people with lumpy faces and missing fingers came out to stare before she and her companions reversed out and fled.

Over 20 years after making a mental note to check it out, I finally visited. It is now abandoned and semi-dilapidated, and screaming out to be renovated as some sort of luxury bohemian free-love pottery-and-beads handicrafts settlement. Set on a wooded hillside on the east coast of Coloane, it is a gently curving strip of five concrete bungalows with verandas. Each has two rooms of around 10-12 feet square, complete with a corner toilet in a waist-high partition. The cells are quite light, with windows on three sides and a front and back door. Ample space for vegetable patches at the rear. If they each housed a single leper, they would have been quite pleasant. At the far end of the village is what was probably an administrative centre and clinic; beyond that is Our Lady of Sorrows, a practical A-frame 1960s church.

The admin building, still partially in use, looks like it dates from the 1930s; the bungalows were probably built a bit later, possibly on the foundations of earlier structures (their stone podiums have filled-in cellar windows). This is guesswork: in keeping with the fear and social stigma surrounding the disease, there are few details about the place. According to its official history, the local Rotary Club helped provide a reservoir in the 1960s. (It also mentions a nearby juvenile reformatory, which seems to live on in a more up-to-date guise in the village of Ka Ho; other undesirable facilities dumped on the neighbourhood include a cement works and scrap metal yards – though Macau seems to have more of the latter than it has casinos.)

Where have the lepers gone? Not far. The modern(ish) old people’s home at the south of the colony (up from the entrance from the road) seems to house them.

Click for location on helpful Google Maps. Click other pictures to hear the Great Society’s ‘Grimly Forming’!

We would all like to say that we have been to one of these mysterious and frightening places. It’s one of those useful things you can drop into the conversation when someone at a dinner party starts to go on a bit about whether Tiger Woods’ family problems will affect his game: “You know I was wondering exactly the same thing the other day when I was over at the leper colony.”

So how do you get to this one? By the standards of compact little Macau, it’s actually quite difficult to access. They put it here for a reason. The key is Ka Ho (九澳) village, which has an occasional bus service and which taxi drivers know. It is within walking distance of the Westin resort, though you probably wouldn’t want to go both ways on foot, and certainly not on a hot day – this is Macau’s alpine district. Or maybe they still have Mini Mokes.

Nice view of the airport runway too.