Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Will the Diaoyutai/Senkaku islands be the spark that sets off China’s first external military confrontation since the country’s rise as a global power? The PRC’s last serious conflict – the less-than-successful invasion of Vietnam in 1979 – showed the country to be a paper tiger. A burst of islet-snatching in 1988 looked a bit more professional. Now, in 2010, China is assertive, far wealthier, increasingly well-armed and the consequences of even a minor shooting match with the Japanese Coastguard off Diaoyutai on, say, our stock portfolios doesn’t bear thinking about.

Common sense suggests that cooler and wiser heads will prevail in the existing squabble over the detained fishing boat captain. Fine him and send him back, and both sides agree behind closed doors to keep a distance. But there is a hint of irresistible force-versus-immovable object here. Both governments face vocal, not to say potentially mouth-frothing and disturbed, domestic constituencies that will not accept any perceived concession to the other side.  And there are some 40,000 sq km of continental shelf at stake, supposedly bursting with oil and gas.

Who really owns the uninhabited little dots on the map a third of the way from the tip of Taiwan to Okinawa?

Japan claimed them as undiscovered in 1895 and stresses that this was a separate act from the invasion and subsequent cession of Taiwan that year. After World War II the US treated the islands as part of Okinawa, which was under American administration until 1972, when authority was returned to Tokyo. Japan’s official line is there is no dispute – end of story.

China claims that its fishermen have been using the islands for centuries and the Japanese took them under the same unequal Treaty of Shimonoseki that gave them Taiwan. Neither the PRC nor ROC were represented in the talks leading up to the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty under which Japan officially gave up Taiwan and associated islands and the US occupied Okinawa and its associated islands (including the Senkakus, though they are not mentioned by name). Lots of fun details here.

With continuous jurisdiction – postwar occupation notwithstanding – since 1895, apparently confirmed by the 1951 treaty, Japan might have the better claim to legal title. Neither the PRC nor the ROC protested the fine print in the 1951 treaty.

However, China can be forgiven a sense of injustice. Japan took Diaoyutai in much the same manner as it was grabbing Korea and Taiwan at the time (and had taken Ryukyu, or Okinawa). The place is shown on old Chinese maps and don’t you forget it. There are Ming Dynasty references to the islands as being on the Chinese side of a maritime border with Ryukyu. Chinese harvested herbal medicines on the island.

In a perfect world, free of Japanese imperialism and Chinese expansion, the islets would probably belong to the indigenous people of Okinawa or Taiwan, with the latter maybe having a better claim simply due to proximity. Allow for the Sinicization of Taiwan and disregard the island-province’s peculiar status, and China’s historic claim perhaps seems fairer.

One problem for China is that it makes some ludicrous territorial claims in the South China Sea, so even if it has a case over Diaoyutai, international opinion might be biased against it – either on the assumption that Beijing’s cases for owning remote islands are always absurd, or for fear of emboldening Chinese nationalists in their demands to own everything up to the beaches of Vietnam, the Philippines and Borneo. That said, at heart, the China/Taiwan claims to both the Diaoyu and Spratly groups are similar: we found them first, way back. The case would be stronger if China could prove continued past administration of these places, but they are tiny, good-for-nothing rocks and atolls. A Solomon-like judge would declare that no-one owns them. International arbitration is unacceptable to both sides.

One difference is that bullying Vietnam or the Philippines is relatively easy; Japan is much more economically important to China and more capable of defending its interests (even without the US, which, despite all its involvement in treaties and occupations, essentially claims neutrality on the Senkakus). But the military gap between the PRC and Japan is closing, possibly faster than China is making the transition from humiliated, maybe trigger-happy would-be aggressor to mature, relaxed and self-confident pillar of international security. The obvious way out is joint economic development, but that implies concessions. Meanwhile, the nationalists on both sides are frothing at the mouth, and the competition for oil and gas reserves gets more urgent.

One of those uncertainties that make life that little bit more interesting.

You can’t really complain about something that’s free, especially when women – as cheerful as they are no doubt financially desperate – jostle every morning to thrust it into your hands. I refer, of course, to The Standard, Hong Kong’s number-two English-language newspaper, which after years of commercial failure in one guise or another suddenly found a new lease of life as a giveaway.

As a low-budget tabloid aimed at middle-brow commuters must, it offers bite-size world news reports from AFP along with condensed, translated and rehashed local coverage from its owner, the unashamedly pro-establishment Sing Tao group. Much of this leans towards tawdry and prurient stories about celebrities, scandals and suicides, though the best they can manage today is the rather lame ‘Elderly man sleeps in bed with dead wife’, which we must have read a hundred times over the years. Not being behind a paywall, The Standard enjoys a far higher Google News and Internet profile than the ‘real-newspaper’ South China Morning Post, so this is English-speaking overseas surfers’ main insight into life in the Big Lychee.

Where The Standard gets truly distasteful is in its slobbering, pandering shoe-shining of (presumably – how else would they decide?) whoever Sing Tao owner and Hong Kong Tobacco heir Charles Ho sees fit. Thus in today’s gossip column we get a fawning account of how HK$150,000-a-month political assistant Jeremy Young’s actress wife has had a baby. Because the photocopy boy works hard, we are told, “Young’s boss, Secretary for Education Michael Suen Ming-yeung, must … be happy to have an employee like him.” It is unlikely that Ho specifically wants Young to be buttered up (he is the son of Howard, the Liberal ex-tourism representative in the Legislative Council). The idea here is to talk up the unpopular political appointee system, flatter the officials who introduced it and, ultimately, display loyalty to the government in China that appointed them.

The Standard’s redeeming feature, in the total absence of analysis or serious editorials, is its advertorials and space-filling columns, which can be downright funny if you’re in the right mood. Today, readers are blessed with the offerings of three quasi-investment gurus, of the sort that Hong Kong’s middle class appreciate.

Frank Wong of Barclays is pushing a CNOOC call warrant (brought to the market by, surprise, Barclays). The oil company’s stock has risen some 8% in the last week, so this derivative has naturally done well. Therefore it might again. Or it might not. In most places, warrants are used as hedging devices by institutions; in Hong Kong, they are a popular alternative to horse-racing among the retail-level of what Frank Wong euphemistically calls ‘investors’. There are tight restrictions on gambling in Hong Kong. And then you have warrants.

Then we have Dr Check. This anonymous stock tipster exemplifies the Big Lychee investment philosophy for people who find derivatives too scary. You aim for short-term gains, probably have a stop-loss order to automatically sell if your tipped stock dips, cash in quickly if it rises and stay on the sidelines when the technical analysis suggests the market might do this or then again might not. Dr Check’s genius is to dredge up the most obscure, rat-infested Mainland companies to recommend to people who just can’t stop trading. Today’s alternative to being prudent and doing nothing is to buy COFCO Packaging. Which I look up and find was listed in Hong Kong less than a year ago, basically churns out drinks cans, is part of a big food giant and has a P/E of 26 and a dividend yield of 1%. This is possibly not as dismal as some of Dr Check’s other tips, but you still have to wonder what is so special about it.

Finally we have my favourite: Welly Wu, Currency Strategist. (As in ‘Tex Wade, Frontier Accountant’.) Everyone can understand forex. It’s like the ‘big-small’ game in the Macau casinos: if it goes up, you win; if it goes down, you lose – but not much, courtesy of our friend the stop-loss order. To make it interesting, and meaningful, Hong Kong people like to trade currencies on margin, which is how the company Welly works for makes its money: they lend the housewives and taxi drivers the bulk of their stake. (The default leverage at his company is 50:1, which they consider dull, unadventurous and safe.) Welly Wu, Currency Strategist bears a certain resemblance to the brochure-wielding real estate agents who mob innocent bystanders when the latest half-built luxury apartment complex goes on sale. It’s the hair. I think Welly has done well. Thousands of secretaries must recognize him in the street.

All this, and it doesn’t cost you a penny!

Something tells me the Quran-burning scheduled for Saturday at the delightfully named Dove World Outreach fundamentalist Christian church in Florida isn’t going to happen. What with 100 armed citizens’ militia, the world’s media, pro- and anti- demonstrators and probably fire permit enforcement officials all planning to attend, the whole thing would end up being a crowd-control circus. And even if they have little time for the Vatican, Hilary Clinton or Germany’s Angela Merkel, the cretinous Evangelicals led by Pastor Terry Jones may at least pause for thought before defying US General Petraeus, Sarah Palin and other patriotic and God-fearing opponents of the event.

This will be a good thing because book-burning is creepy, and because such a specific and extreme insult to Islam is almost designed to boost recruitment rates at suicide-bomber training camps across the world. The Dove World Outreach folk are Western civilization’s equivalent of strict Muslims. To them, the New Testament is the word of God and the literal truth. We are currently in the End Time, the chaotic era preceding the second coming of Christ, following which Jesus Himself will cast all sinners – including all heathens and non-Evangelicals and non-believers in Noah’s Ark and the rest of the Book of Genesis – into the eternal fiery torment of Hell, after hacking them up a bit with a sword. It would be great to tie these people and their Muslim counterparts into a sack and leave them to it.

But a little bit of me secretly wouldn’t mind seeing the book go up in flames. On a radio interview yesterday, Pastor Jones outlined his thinking to a (presumably BBC) reporter wringing his hands about grievously offending a billion Muslims. The preacher’s main concern was that Muslims needed to be saved for Jesus lest they end up in perpetual suffering being roasted on a spit by demons. But at one stage he briefly mentioned something that should resonate with all of us: the growing de-facto status of Islam as a special faith that is protected from criticism and overrides freedom of expression.

For years in most Western societies, a well-intentioned spirit of multiculturalism has yielded to Muslims claiming to be offended by something – it could be as ridiculous as a cartoon of a pig in a kids’ book, or the portrayal of Mohamed in contradiction of Islamic (but no-one else’s) teachings. (There is probably also a feeling of ‘anything for a quiet life’. When the Shelley Street Mosque was built in the 19th Century, the colonial Hong Kong authorities passed a law banning the transportation of swine past the site. For all I know, anyone clutching a pack of Park N Shop bacon on the Mid-Levels Escalator today is committing an offence – though the worshipers don’t seem to care.)

Perhaps encouraged by this reluctance to defend basic principles of free speech, somewhere between 0.1% and 99.9% of Muslims have come to assume an entitlement to demand this privileged protection for their faith more rigorously. To offer help – albeit no doubt as a stunt – for people wishing to leave Islam and thus in physical danger is inflammatory or polarizing. Indeed, they assume a right to enforce it. When the vast majority of Western newspapers and TV stations failed to reproduce the Danish cartoons satirizing Mohamed, it wasn’t out of some kindly respect for Muslims’ sensitivities but because they were afraid of their offices being firebombed.

The FBI is now warning that the Quran-burning, an act fully within constitutional rights, may provoke violence, with the clear underlying message that it should therefore please not happen. Implication (stripping all the idiocy and obnoxiousness out of the picture): individuals or groups threatening violence may now veto others’ exercise of their constitutional rights. Another example is some British commentators’ views and protests that the UK’s presence in Iraq/Afghanistan brought the 7/7 London suicide bomb attacks upon the country. Implication: the foreign policy of the UK’s democratically elected government should now be subject to a veto by a little group of disaffected Pakistani youths.

An attempt to be tolerant has encouraged muddled thinking and irrationality. A recent Washington Post opinion column featured confused Muslim academic Muqtedar Khan who says of the planned Quran-burning: “The Constitution does not permit this. The Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment. For Muslims this is worse than torture.” (The bar on cruel and unusual punishment, lifted from England’s 1689 Bill of Rights, is of course designed to constrain government.)

As for irrationality, he also says:

…the Quran is the thing that Muslims hold the dearest. My children have been listening to it since even before they were born. I use to recite it to them while they were still in the womb. Their children will be reciting it to them when they will be lowered in to their tomb. Believe me, there is nothing more precious to Muslims than the Quran, and watching people toss it into fire, will be horrifying. I would rather burn in fire myself, than watch a Quran burn.

Rather immolate yourself than see some paper and ink go up in smoke? This is verging on a mental health issue. If your religion is that sensitive, vulnerable and fragile, you need to get a new one – one that has the confidence to let the almighty penalize such slurs as he sees fit in the next life.

What I think we are seeing here and with the Ground Zero Mosque fuss is a backlash against this creeping Islam-is-special mentality. (Khan, to his credit, says: “I think Muslims may have invited this through their own hateful zealotry.”) Since moderate defenders of free speech haven’t had the guts to stand up and insist that all faiths have equal non-protection against insults or being offended, the lunatics of Dove World Outreach will happily do it for us in their own unhelpful way.

My humble suggestion for Saturday: The Great Holy Scripture Cook-Off. Get all the people who believe their scriptures are the literal truth and unbelievers are damned, and let them burn each other’s sacred texts for as long as it takes until inventories are exhausted. Beer and soft drinks available. Maybe when they’ve burned every last Bible and every last Quran on the planet we’ll have some sanity and peace.

Not this one. We'll keep a few historic editions tucked away in museums

Before the handover in 1997, Chinese government officials worried that the dastardly British colonial devils would leave ‘time bombs’ behind. They never specified what form these booby-traps would take, but they seemed to assume the existence of deliberately inbuilt faults within Hong Kong’s physical, institutional or even social structure. They never explained why they thought the UK would want to do such a thing; the implication was that China, still feeling its way in the world of international relations, assumed that all countries behaved like spiteful children.

After the handover, the new rulers did (allegedly, etc) find eavesdropping devices planted within walls at the Tamar military HQ and Government House.* There were dark hints from some mainland officials that outside forces were helping to foster public discontent, and patriotic loyalists occasionally saw puppets of London or Washington among alien elements in the city’s legal system, schools and media. But no time-bombs went off.

*Supposedly the true reason Tung claimed to dislike the feng-shui. There was even a rumour that the Legislative Council was bugged, though it is hard to believe anyone could be so desperate to hear what people were saying there.

However, our first post-reunification leader, Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, bequeathed certain recurring nuisances that never seem to go away. For reasons that probably made sense in his poor, addled mind during his tragic decline in the late 90s and early 2000s, the crop-haired one determined that he should “put Hong Kong on the map.”

“We checked the map sir,” his assistants assured him, “and it seems we’re already on it.” But he wouldn’t take no for an answer. The result was that the Big Lychee became a minefield of munitions destined to be ticking away long after Tofu-for-Brains himself would otherwise have faded from memory.

Thus we had the World Trade Organization Mutant Korean Farmers Rampage of 2007, followed by the wretchedly tiresome East Asian Games – a sub-sub-sub-Olympics attended by various past, present and future tributary states and special administrative regions of China – in 2009. Meanwhile, there is a constant procession into and out of town of anesthesiologists, women’s rights activists, HOFEX, Infocomm Asia and a thousand other conventions and congresses to gum up our transport infrastructure and plod around Wanchai wearing brightly coloured name tags.

And now, to quote yesterday’s South China Morning Post: “Hong Kong has taken another step forward in its quest for sporting glory.” The Asian Games Provisional Bid Committee is born, tasked to advise an eager government that has no doubt already made its mind up about venue availability, accommodation and potential economic costs and (it says) benefits. Oh, and “engage community support.”

What have we done to deserve it? Why do they hate us so much?

The list of people dragged in to sit on this body is the usual caricature, including Anthony Wu of Bauhinia Foundation fame, bosses of the Jockey Club and Cathay Pacific, second-generation scions of various family-owned companies, a few token squash players and wheelchair fencers, plus former Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference delegate Hu Fa-kuang CBE, JP, GBS and his son, Herman Hu Shao-ming.

Hu Senior is 86 and possibly hopes to be selected for the Hong Kong 4 x 400m relay squad – which brings me to the glimmer of good news. This event will take place in 2023. Plenty of time to emigrate, die or something.

Not one but two items on the op-ed page in today’s South China Morning Post urge action on property prices.

As an Executive Council member, vaguely pro-democratic academic Anthony Cheung cannot publicly oppose existing policy, but suggests that the government could ease the problem by increasing land sales for non-luxury developments and barring mainlanders from buying up precious space and leaving it unused. He also raises the possibility of reviving the old Home Ownership Scheme, which provided affordable, semi-nice apartments for the non-poor non-rich by cutting developers out of the loop.

Ex-civil servant Mike Rowse puts the issue in the context of Chief Executive Donald Tsang’s last-but-one policy address in October: will Sir Bow-Tie fizzle out as a lame duck or do something bold, in which case what better target than the property mess? Rowse doubts the feasibility of keeping mainlanders out of the market and essentially recommends more land sales. But, he adds, in such a fine-tuned way as to avoid reducing existing property owners’ unrealized gains – a surely impossible condition if the idea is to make homes more affordable.

The problem is that policymakers (many of them owners of investment real estate) cannot bring themselves to announce that prices are too high and young couples and other end-users should wait. (Donald, as Financial Secretary, did say as much around early 1997, prompting roars of outrage when prices continued climbing for several months before he was proved right.)

Rowse opposes resurrecting the HOS on the grounds that: “…direct intervention by the government in any market is really an admission of policy failure.” Even assuming that ultimate government ownership of all the land is not direct intervention in the first place, this is absurd. To the serving or former bureaucrat’s mind, it seems, avoiding a face-losing admission that policy has failed – which it clearly has – is more important than fixing the resulting problem.

With the Philippine bus massacre slipping off the front pages, property is resuming its rightful place as the all-consuming Default Big Issue of mid-2010. The never-ending debate on the subject at AsiaXpat has become the on-line equivalent of that ant colony in Europe that now covers much of Spain, France and Italy. The SCMP articles are part of the much broader discussion ahead of the policy address.

This is the time of year when politicians and interest groups clamour to provide input, preferably to Donald in person, ahead of the big annual speech. Yet this is a face-giving, symbolic ritual about as nonsensical as Hong Kong’s supposed inclusion in China’s latest Five-Year Plan. Donald doesn’t do listening. (Actually, faced with stuff like the British Chamber’s dense, single-spaced, committee-drafted, turgid blathering about Four Pillar Industries and RMB business, who can blame him?)

We do know, however, that the Chief Executive might listen, in a roundabout way, to the tycoon-funded think-tank the Bauhinia Foundation, not least because the people running it are good buddies, and can be relied upon to tell him what he is thinking anyway – and bear in mind that there might be times when he could use a helpful reminder. And with unfortunate timing, just before Rolando Mendoza opened fire with his M-16, the Foundation announced a proposal for what might be called an HOS with quasi-Singaporean characteristics.

They put forward several ideas to give middle-class, first-time buyers a leg up: minimal down-payments, straight HOS-style supply of cheap units, release of cash from buyers’ Mandatory Provident Fund accounts and/or the buying of a 50% stake in a property while paying a government agency rent for the rest. Will Donald go for all or some of it? Possibly, in limited amounts; ideally over such a timescale that the cycle turns, a crash takes place and the whole thing can be shelved before it even gets off the ground. It is bred into his bureaucratic body and mind to want to go down as the hero who never let the Civil Service down by admitting policy failure. A lame duck, in this culture, is a success.

By the standards of usual Bauhinia Foundation policy documents (think BritCham on Powerpoint) this is thought-provoking, lateral-thinking stuff. Of course it is just a Band-Aid designed to maintain the high-land-price system and the flow of wealth it guarantees the property giants who finance the Bauhinia Foundation. But it’s good to see our local vested interests devising thought-provoking and lateral-thinking ways to carry on screwing us. It makes a change.

Which city is the 10th best in the world for a vacation? Here’s a clue: it’s so pristine that it rates a magnificent 88.89 for cleanliness, which as we all know is about as near as you can get to godliness itself. The answer is Hong Kong, according to readers of British lifestyle magazine Conde Nast Traveller.

Some may snigger at the idea of the Big Lychee as pristine. Birds of prey swoop down onto bits of McDonald’s hamburger buns floating in the fragrant harbour. The aroma of raw pig meat permeates the street markets. Prime tourist attraction Lan Kwai Fong hosts a constant procession of rancid garbage trucks and has a bombed-out road surface that would be considered a disgrace in Manila.

From my own experience as a tour guide, British visitors do spend much of their time wandering around this city raving in amazement about “how clean everything is.” Maybe they were expecting even more trash in the sea, even more pork odour, and even more carrion and peelings being transported through the famous bar district. But what seems to strike them most is the shining, sparkling appearance of much of the public space within and around buildings.

I lead them through the shopping centres, office lobbies and connecting overhead walkways, and watch them stare in wonder at the absence of dust or specks, let alone grime or disrepair. I sit them in a mall coffee shop near the window and wait for the inevitable kid to drop his ice-cream on the gleaming marble floor; then I enjoy my guests’ admiration and amazement as the emergency response team of estate managers, security staff and cleaners descend on the scene with safety barriers, warning signs and mops, barking orders into walkie-talkies and expertly maintaining crowd control until the crisis is over.

But to hell with being the 10th best city. The same survey puts Shanghai – a dull mélange of tacky skyscrapers and vanity projects with a scattering of art deco – in 15th place, presumably giving it 87.63 for fried dumplings. No, Conde Nast Traveller also names Hong Kong as the absolute best top number-one island on the planet. In other words, the finest piece of sub-continental territory surrounded by water anywhere.

Is the survey trustworthy? Manhattan doesn’t rate as one of the top 20 islands, though New York comes second in the list of best cities, which seems a bit odd. But can we seriously doubt the integrity of any system that gives percentage scores for friendliness accurate to two decimal points? And let’s not forget that the magazine fails to rate Singapore as either a city or an island – which surely confirms the reliability of the methodology.

Indeed, it is easy to see why Hong Kong is superior to the other 19 islands. Whoever heard of the Zanzibar or Crete stock exchanges? The Sardinia or Galapagos mass transit systems? Where can you get 20 different styles of Hello Kitty lip gloss in Cuba? They don’t even have gold toilets in Cuba. How many minutes away is the nearest 7-Eleven when you’re on the Great Barrier Reef? Do they make movies like Devil Fetus in the Maldives? Do they have the world’s highest number of luxury Mercedes cars per mile of road in Antigua? These other so-called islands never stood a chance.

When Deng Xiao Ping promised to let ‘Harbour people rule the harbour’, he wasn’t kidding. As if the citizens of Hong Kong were not already busy enough choosing which of two external designs of waterfront tunnel ventilation buildings they want, they are also being consulted on the exciting West Kowloon Cultural District’s three Conceptual Plan Options. In plain English: the proposals by famous architects to turn the patch of wasteland on the northwest of Victoria River into a glistening hub of parkland, museums, concert halls and only limited amounts of luxury apartments and offices.

The story of the West Kowloon reclamation serves as a mini-history of Hong Kong since the mid-1990s. Originally, Governor Chris Patten’s government decided that the new land (arising from the construction of cross-harbour tunnels) would be a decent downtown park for the Hong Kong people – something the city noticeably lacks. After 1997, when older, colonial-style ‘pro-business’ attitudes resurged under Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, the government decided that frittering land away on residents would be a waste, and the site should be used to benefit the tourism industry by hosting such facilities as a concert venue. This turned into the idea of a bigger cultural ‘hub’ to generate tourist dollars for the usual beneficiaries, namely landlords.

According to the Big Lychee’s traditional, near-autistic bureaucratic principles, such a project had to be self-financing through funds somehow conjured into being as part of the physical project itself. As with Cyberport, this essentially meant Big Ugly High-Rises of Luxury Apartments, and the property developers were soon salivating at the thought of having all that land to play with. Fatally, the government decided that one bidder, promising to chuck some museums and theatres in for free, would get pretty much the whole site. It came under a guise of a cultural project courtesy of a giant canopy, but people weren’t fooled. By the mid-2000s, such blatant handouts of public wealth to the same little group of families were becoming decidedly unpopular, and the new regime of Donald Tsang wisely dropped the idea. After much deliberation, officials finally took the plunge and abandoned cherished principles: at least a bit of the site would be something nice for local people, and the government – sitting on vast unused reserves – would simply pay for it.

The roving exhibition was distinctly under-visited when I dropped by, but it was during working hours and in Wanchai. In coming months it will rove its way through unsophisticated places like Tuen Mun and Shatin, where displays of architects’ models are a huge novelty and the very idea of free admission will draw millions. Much the same content appears on-line, buried deeply and almost secretly away in the West Kowloon Cultural District website. After 10 minutes’ searching through speeches by Henry Tang and self-congratulatory press releases about a biennale in Venice, you might manage to find the three proposals, offered by: the UK’s Foster and Partners, who did HSBC and the airport; Hong Kong’s Rocco, who did IFC; and the Dutch ‘urbanist’ Koolhas, who designed the ridiculous ‘big underpants’ CCTV HQ in Beijing.

Each plan is supposed to be distinctive, but given the awkward shape of the site and the government-sanctioned percentages of gross floor area and number of facilities for each use, there is an unmistakable sameness about the three. How many different ways are there to link Kowloon Park with WKCD across Canton Road? The two proposed designs for the tunnel ventilation building are a study in stark contrast by comparison. A Developing HK mailing gives a summary of each. Essentially, if we focus on where they vary: the Foster concept comes closest to being the park the common rabble wanted all along, the Rocco one is good in parts but let down by some bad bits, while Koolhas is dumb/weird/crap.

When the rival proposals were unveiled, Chief Secretary and WKCD supremo Henry Tang made a throwaway remark about how we could throw together various features from all three. This resulted in a hail of criticism from several hundred thousand architectural, design and similar experts, shocked at the philistinism of this attack on the integrity of the individual visions. Then a smaller but perhaps classier group of cognescenti came forward to say that, even though Henry Tang said it, and no-one had ever heard Henry say anything that made sense before, really smart and sensitive types like themselves could, in fact, blend certain features of the three designs successfully (though of course you couldn’t mix and match the way Henry probably thought).

What would have happened if, in 1998, the Tung administration had conducted a poll and asked the public to vote for one of: a) give it to Li Ka-shing to cover with luxury towers for absentee Mainlanders; b) build a vacuous vanity monument to bureaucratic onanism; c) have an open green space where kids can ride bikes and have picnics? As with the ventilation buildings, the whole WKCD public consultation exercise is a cover for decisions already made in secret by bureaucrats. There will be three theatres of a particular size; there will be a Cantonese opera joint; there will be some arty educational place; there will be an iconic museum. Do you want them over here in the corner, or down there at the end? Wavy lines on the walls, or grass on the roof? Up to you entirely.