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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That gory eye-witness account…

Like this, except not with a goat

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

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

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

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