Big Lychee, Various Sectors

According to the South China Morning Post, the Hungry Ghosts festival is being driven out of Central by the Urban Renewal Authority’s scheme to eradicate the entire neighbourhood and replace it with high-rise McDonalds and empty luxury apartments for Mainlanders. In Macau on Saturday evening, on the other hand, I found the tradition alive and well – not to say disruptive – with every sidewalk in the grungier districts being taken over by squatting figures burning offerings and leaving food and drink for wandering lost souls. The authorities place metal boxes on street corners for the purpose, but residents know this won’t work: they need to set the money and incense alight right on their doorstep if they are to keep the restless spirits away from their homes.

There wouldn’t be a problem with disgruntled ghouls in the first place if people took better care of their deceased loved ones. The ultimate way to do this is to give them a freehold grave, but such plots are extremely rare in the cramped ex-Portuguese enclave. Casino king Stanley Ho’s first wife apparently has one. And so does the father of the city’s number-two official, Secretary for Administration Florinda da Rosa Silva Chan. Scurrilous gossips and malcontents claim that Florinda acquired this privilege in an underhand manner. She says it was all above board; it was another member of her department who abused power to get such a plot, and anyway he didn’t, or something. So that’s all OK.

Florinda is also in the news because of a proposed law granting officials legal aid if they get involved in court cases arising from their duties. The chatterers see this as another threat to Macau’s ever-tenuous press freedoms: top officials will be able to sue reporters for defamation at public cost. Florinda says ‘no way, we love criticism’. There are two reasons to believe her. First, most of the local papers are subsidized by the government (and report her denials and everything else pretty much without question). Second, the top officials are mostly multi-millionaires anyway and hardly need taxpayers’ funds to hire lawyers.

Meanwhile, casino operators here are complaining about being forced to hire morose, uneducated and unsightly middle-aged local people with no clue about customer service to work in food outlets and other facilities formerly staffed by happy, multilingual young Filipinos and Nepalese (of whom plenty are still around). A quick stroll through one of the vast glitzy gambling palaces confirms that the hire-locals policy is having an effect, and the employers have a point. Through no fault of their own, the older natives – laid-off factory workers, presumably – ruin the ambience. Amid all the glamour-fantasy, their grumpy presence is an intrusion of the reality outside: a city being pimped out to outsiders with dirty money to enrich Stanley, Florinda and half a dozen others.

A quick comparison of two Portuguese eateries: Restaurante Platao and Boa Mesa, a few yards from one another on Travessa de Santo Domingo, just off the historic square. The former is cramped with tiny tables, waitresses squeezing past and elbows, as in Hong Kong’s Soho or Lan Kwai Fong where they have ‘covers’ not people coming in to dine; the latter is spacious and you can stretch your legs out. The former is an old building with courtyard and flashy décor; the latter is a room with some posters on the wall. The former has a philosophy; the latter has a big black plastic pig out front. The former is associated with an ex-chef of colonial governors; the latter is run by an ethnic Chinese from Mozambique. The former is Soho-expensive; the latter is cheaper. The food is excellent in both (so no comparison with Soho in that respect at least). People cram themselves into the former because glossy magazines say it’s famous, and why bother thinking for yourself?

Macau’s nationalists and patriots are fuming over the statue of a boy and girl at the bottom of the steps leading up to Saint Paul’s. I see an ugly bit of Continental European-style contemporary street art, stained with bird droppings. Apparently, in reality it is a Chinese girl offering a Portuguese (don’t ask how they can tell) boy a flower to represent voluntary, if not adoring, submission of the motherland to colonial oppression and exploitation. (Probably some gender stereotyping in there, too.) So now we know. This is what the locals believe. Mainland tourists are too busy being forced to buy things in shops and collapsing with fatigue…

The South China Morning Post declares a conflict between free-market principles and the need for affordable homes. This implies a new definition of a free market: government ownership of all land; an official policy of keeping living space in artificially short supply in order to push prices up; and a rent-seeking cartel in which just two developers currently produce 70% of the supply of new apartments. But it is a mark, not only of the economic illiteracy of headline-writers but of how people in Hong Kong have essentially become brainwashed over the years to consider this tightly rigged property market as normal. It is only now, with a zero-interest-rate bubble forming at a time of an unprecedented wealth gap and disaffection that citizens are tracing problems back to root causes. The Chinese translation of Alice Poon’s Land and the Ruling Class in Hong Kong couldn’t have come out at a better time.

The Post article is a reminder of how the Big Lychee, like Macau, is effectively being prostituted to the crooks and parasites who plunder China and need somewhere to stash their loot.  More than a third of new Hong Kong luxury properties went to Mainland buyers in the first half of the year, as did a smaller but rising share of cheaper homes. And what do they get in return for buying grotesquely overpriced living space from the tycoons? Hong Kong ID cards, courtesy of our government!

Perhaps this all just fell together by accident, but it happens to serve the Chinese Communist Party leadership ideally, giving their cronies and relatives and other elements that prop up the regime a convenient and understanding Monte Carlo. A local clampdown on Mainland buyers would help put such scurrilous thoughts to rest.

One obvious solution to Hong Kong’s housing mismatch is to ignore it until the bubble bursts. But our politicians are under pressure. When Chief Executive Donald Tsang launched a public consultation exercise on subsidized housing, it was fairly clear he had a pre-determined outcome firmly in mind. But it now looks increasingly likely that he will have to do something he hates to do and take some action.

One alternative to direct subsidy is to attach conditions to sites being auctioned to require developers to supply the local market with the housing it needs. This is considered normal in many parts of the world, but the idea will have officials throwing their hands up in horror here. First, they will say with a straight face, it interferes with market forces – as if the whole pile of intervention, collusion and other price and supply distortions is a free and natural state of affairs. Second, also with a straight face, they will say how important it is to maximize government revenues – when there’s half a trillion bucks sitting pointlessly in the reserves.

The readiness of our local leaders to confront the interests of property tycoons and money-laundering Mainlanders could give an indication of who’s really calling the shots. But maybe they’re just cretins.

Down at the bottom of the Mid-Levels Escalator, just a few yards up from Queens Road, lies an interesting little patch of real estate: the site of the Stanley Street dai pai dongs. A few days ago, this alleyway was covered in grimy green canvas awnings, beneath which sat hungry diners slurping cheap noodles al fresco, as they have for decades or more.

A bit of historic heritage passes away. Except the place is being renovated. A real gas line will be installed, and someone will possibly introduce a more hygienic arrangement for washing all the plates (currently done by a lady in wellington boots squatting in a dark sub-sub-sub alleyway). This is the result of government listening to public opinion and not eradicating things local people like and can afford and replacing them with overpriced crap for tourists. At least that’s the theory. We will see in a few months when they re-open the Stanley Street Outdoor Dining Dai Pai Dong Experience Themed Amusement Zone.

The persecution of Lantau International School at the hands of murky ‘rural interests’ and the Environmental Protection Department continues, with the Noise Control Appeal Board confirming the validity of a noise reduction order. When outside during playtime, the kids create a noise level of 62dB, which, in plain English, could be worse.  But it’s 2dB above the limit for the area, known for its graveyard-like silence and its local residents’ extreme aural hypersensitivity. So LIS has to find a way to cut the din.

The South China Morning Post reports the matter as one of a villager called Jenny Tam driven to torment by children laughing and playing music (as, in all frankness, I would be). An alternative story is one of apparent collusion between the EPD and the local village leadership who seem to have it in for the racially mixed institution; another school in the neighbourhood, full of all-Chinese students, can carry on as usual. If the Board’s decision is on the EPD website, they’ve done a good job of hiding it, but Kafka fans may see it here.

Lantau is a hotbed of scholastic strife. On the surface, it is a sleepy and happy land of buffalo droppings, snakes, mosquitoes, extraterrestrial mutant vegetation and people building houses on other people’s driveways. Dig down, however, and you find a battlefield of festering feuds in which everyone hates everyone else’s educational hopes and needs. The only thing that unites the community is the creepy Christian drug treatment centre, which they have nothing against personally but will torch if it moves its premises anywhere near them.

Interfere at your peril. A sizable, empty school sits idle in the heart of bustling Mui Wo. There are (officially) too few high-schoolers to make the facility viable, so, much to everyone’s fury, older kids have to commute to schools somewhere over near Papua-New Guinea. To a layman onlooker pulling tattered protest banners aside and peering through the locked gates of the deserted campus, it would seem perfectly possible that the authorities could justify reopening the place by (say) letting the local high-schoolers and/or LIS and/or the creepy Christian drug-fiend-rehab buffalo-rapists share it. Such a Solomonic utterance will have you scratched off every Christmas card list in town, in seconds.

In Spain, the US and Ireland, vacant homes rot and prices in many areas probably have further to fall. Meanwhile, back on Planet Lychee, the government raises HK$7.6 billion it doesn’t need and won’t spend, by selling two plots of real estate to Asia’s richest man, who will make gigantic profit margins building apartments for sale at sky-high prices to Mainlanders with funny-smelling money. The rest of us look on in wonder. Who, we ask ourselves, are those two guys on either side of the table at the land auction? Especially the one on our right with the World’s-Most-Important-Hong-Kong-Civil-Servant look on his face?

For some of us, there is another question: how am I supposed to afford a place to live in? Some sort of expert from a property company on the radio this morning referred to such citizens as ‘lower-tier people’ and seemed to struggle to understand where they fit in amid all this excitement. All he knew was that if the government went back to supplying affordable homes, the economy would collapse and every male resident’s penis would wither and fall off. The Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong proposes direct government subsidies to less-wealthy buyers of small private-sector homes. There is already a subsidy, through tax breaks on mortgage interest payments. Like any such scheme, all it does is enable developers to hike their prices yet further; they pocket the handout, whatever the buyer thinks.

For others, the issue is what to do with the home we have owned for years.

Less than four weeks ago, I mentioned the over-development of the Mid-Levels as real estate companies surreptitiously buy up units in older low-rises until they have enough to force remaining owners to sell; they then demolish the block and cram another soaring tower into that hillside concrete jungle. After lamenting this sad state of affairs, I did admit that…

I’d be lying if the per-square-foot prices [offered to owners] up at Merry Terrace didn’t leap off the screen and yell “Ker-ching! Ker-ching!” into my face. All morning.

Almost on cue – just a few days later – everyone in my tung lau in exotic Soho received a letter from an obscure property agency expressing an interest in buying each apartment. Despite my dismissal of my neighbours last month as “cantankerous, immovable and apparently immortal oldies who won’t budge, ever,” the turnout at an Owners’ Committee meeting yesterday evening suggested that curiosity has been piqued. We gathered at our friendly local pro-Beijing district councilor’s ward office a few minutes’ walk away to discuss ‘acting in unison’. This is one case where a bulk sale can yield a bonus, not a discount.

I don’t see it happening. It is not a big site, thus limiting its value to a potential developer. The building is well under 50 years old, so a predatory property mogul would need to acquire 90% of the place to force holdouts to sell. Also, unlike the graying tai-tais and retired civil servants up the hill in places like Merry Terrace – the real Mid-Levels – many of my neighbours are of limited means. One used to pass through my swish Central former workplace every afternoon with a baby strapped to her back and a vacuum cleaner (she never recognized me in my suit); another is part of the street garbage detail. The bill for a new communal drainpipe draws mumbles of complaint. The idea of hiring a lawyer or agent to negotiate won’t appeal.

That said, those meek old widows in their pyjama suits know they’re sitting on little gold mines. Gentrification set in some years ago, and many apartments in the neighbourhood are now studios rented out at absurd prices (HK$50 psf pm is normal) to gullible newly arrived yuppie types. The most successful investors in this buy-renovate-let business tend to be Westerners; they are not squeamish about old buildings, and they know what bratty kids just shipped in by investment banks want (no clutter, not much need for a kitchen). Local Chinese investors misread the market and the culture, and install horrible all-glass bathrooms, wacky lighting, the inevitable marble and other gimmicks that they think foreigners will like – with disastrous, impossible-to-let results. Anyway, one Western landlord has approached grannies in my building about buying their flats, only to get a price quoted that is pitched exactly at the tempting-but-too-risky level.

They turned up yesterday evening, of course. Offer enough, and the whole building’s yours. But the consensus is that little will come of all this, at least for now. Talk of concerted negotiations with the intermediaries to extract maximum money from the grasping black hands behind the scenes doesn’t get far. The real estate agents send out letters like this all the time. They will get one back that says “make us all an offer,” and then shrugs. My contribution to the discussion is a reminder that Gough Street Market is being turned into an upscale shopping-hotel complex and the Central Police Station cultural-hub-thing will link the neighbourhood straight to Lan Kwai Fong via new walkways. Wait another five or 10 years and let luxury-sprawl and scarcity value do the rest.

One last thing before the meeting is adjourned: a landlord-owner asks the resident-owners not to mention any of this to the tenants. And we go home.

Basic Law Article 67, declaring that no Hong Kong legislators may have right of abode overseas except up to 20% of them, may be less significant than it once seemed. Article 23, on the other hand, is a troublesome, even dangerous relic – a threat in theory to our rights, in practice to our local leaders. The Standard’s ‘Mary Ma’ editorial yesterday raised the possibility of Beijing once more pushing for the implementation of this part of the constitution, which requires Hong Kong at some unspecified time after the handover to pass a national security law.

The late 1987/early 1988 draft of the Basic Law had an Article 22 requiring laws to protect unity of the state…

There were already local ordinances on creepy-sounding subversive activities, originally aimed at suppressing Communist or Kuomintang plots – the sort of draconian laws we joke about Singapore and Malaysia still having. We still have them, too. For example, if I did anything to “bring into hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection against the person of Her Majesty [Rita Fan?] … or against the Government of Hong Kong,” I could be breaking our age-old law against sedition. The difference with Hong Kong is that it is unthinkable that the authorities would try to charge anyone under this legislation.

After a million Hong Kong people marched (and some collected donations, and organized escape routes) in support of the Tiananmen students in May-June 1989, a panicked Beijing rushed to insert a clause requiring a fuller, tougher national security law – Article 23. (The original Article 23 was on right of abode, which went on to create nightmarish problems of its own.) Ironically, the Hong Kong government’s eventual attempt to push the anti-subversion legislation through in 2003 led to Hong Kong’s second-biggest ever protests.

If they had been more relaxed and willing to work with their critics – the lawyers who later founded the Civic Party – Hong Kong’s officials could have succeeded in passing a national security bill; the final version of it, including such safeguards as warrants and jury trials, probably posed no serious threat to Hong Kong people’s freedoms. But instead, the government was nervous, hyper-sensitive about opposition and determined to ram the bill through using its inbuilt majority in the rigged legislature. And the whole thing blew up in its face with the massive 7-1 demonstration, leading ultimately to the toppling of Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa.

Since then, our officials have always been at pains to assure us that they have no plans to reintroduce national security legislation. Grumpy, sour-faced old patriots occasionally pause en route to their graves to mumble something about how they should – Macau’s did – but it is pretty clear the very thought of Article 23 strikes terror into the leadership. The Hong Kong public gave their unelected government a stomping it has never forgotten.

So the chances of anyone trying to resurrect the national security law seem extremely remote. Yet Article 23 is still there, and it has huge symbolic significance because so long as it sits there unimplemented, it is testimony to successful popular defiance. When pro-Beijing figures mutter about it as ‘unfinished business’ they have a point. Passage of a national security law is necessary to confirm that the Communist Party is in charge.

In this respect, Article 23 has become another example of the compulsory stupidity that happens when ideologues paint themselves into a corner.

The simplification of Chinese characters took on a life of its own after Communist and other leaders back in the mid-20th Century chickened out of Romanization yet felt a need to boost literacy. A whole bureaucracy set to it, and is probably still there today in some dusty office block. And what did the incessant revisions accomplish? A writing system that is barely, if any, easier to learn for either Chinese or foreigners.

The obsession with reclaiming Taiwan as a sacred duty did not come about overnight. When not dabbling in language reform, the pre-Revolution CCP saw Japanese-occupied Taiwan as similar to Korea: not its business. The establishment of an exiled KMT regime in Taipei claiming sovereignty over all China changed that. But as Taiwan has democratized and evolved into a clearly distinct and de facto independent nation-state, Beijing has redoubled its insistence that ‘reunification’ must and will take place at any cost. To the extent the propaganda works, each generation since the 1950s believes it more fiercely than the last. A mere hint of recognition of the truth is now unthinkable.

The South China Sea is another looming example of a big problem that the CCP made for itself out of short-sighted pig-headedness; maybe the recent resolve shown by the US and ASEAN will convince Beijing policymakers to put the paint down and tiptoe out of the corner while they can.

So Article 23: you’d be crazy to revive it, but at some stage you have to. Chances are, it will be used – possibly as a weapon – when CY Leung and Henry Tang and/or whoever start jostling for Chief Executive in earnest. Pro-democrats can’t wait.

Foreign passport holders may comprise no more than 20% of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council members.  This provision appears in the Basic Law, which was written at a time when much of the city’s middle class were scrambling over one another in an attempt to get overseas residency. In barring people with foreign right of abode from the Legislative Council, the article was asserting China’s sovereignty. In then stipulating that they could in fact have up to a fifth of the seats, the Basic Law got pragmatic and recognized that many existing and potential lawmakers would not qualify for Chinese citizenship because of the country’s refusal to recognize dual nationality. Many voices in those pre-handover times, when the handover was viewed with trepidation, thought that 20% was too low. As it happened, exactly a fifth of directly elected legislators in the 1995 Legco were foreign passport holders. The riveting statistical analysis suggested that voters that year did not discriminate between those with or without overseas residency rights.

The idea was not to reserve seats for non-Chinese in view of their magnificent contribution to our World City, etc, etc, so much as to accommodate a number of ethnic Chinese with foreign passports and a handful of non-Chinese who would have been barred from Chinese citizenship even if they wanted it on grounds of ethnicity.

Since then, things have changed. Fear of life under Communist rule has faded. The Hong Kong passports offered to the city’s Chinese citizens, have become widely accepted for travel purposes. More public figures have ditched foreign citizenship in order to serve on the Executive Council or national bodies. Public tolerance of local office holders with foreign passports has declined, as five (of eight) undersecretaries found out in 2008 when they were appointed and pressured into sacrificing their British, Canadian and American documents. South Asian and white Hongkongers have been granted Chinese citizenship. The 20% clause can be seen as an anomaly; Hong Kong officials discussing constitutional reform imply that they view it that way, which means Beijing does too.

The problem of how to limit one class of people to no more than a fifth of seats was solved by naming 12 of the functional constituencies as open to foreign citizens. They are some but not all of the professional and commercial franchises: legal, but not medical; finance, but not agriculture and fisheries. As functional constituencies go, they are probably more likely than average to elect someone holding a foreign passport. The SCMP today shows just four of these members have right of abode overseas – 6.6%. Only Chinese citizens may run for the other 48 seats, including all the directly elected ones.

The 2012 election, with Legco expanded from 60 to 70 seats, provides an opportunity to reduce the 20% level in practice by not creating two more ‘foreign passport-friendly’ seats. This seems likely to happen. This is not a party issue; Legco’s current foreign passport holders come from both pro-Beijing and pro-democracy camps. Voters have increasingly little time for privileged elites in public life. Nationalists (in keeping with the spirit of the Basic Law) see passports as a test of patriotism. Only a few legal and other eccentrics are likely to call for the 20% level to be maintained as some sort of constitutional right to be cherished. It would take a brave debater to argue that Hong Kong (5% non-ethnic Chinese) might benefit from a bit of ethnic diversity in its legislature.

One argument in favour of fans of the full 20% is that opponents of foreigners in Legco are wrong to say – as they sometimes do – that nowhere else in the world allows any non-citizens into its legislature. Indians, Australians, South Africans and other Commonwealth passport holders are constitutionally welcome in the UK Parliament. But this is hardly a convincing precedent for the Big Lychee in 2010.

Fighting their way through crowds of non-imprisoned Black American males fleeing to a better life in North Korea, commuters strolling along the Connaught Road walkway this morning look up at the twin towers of pink stone and bluish reflective glass and shudder in horror. The skyscrapers house the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and numerous hangers-on. And if a proposal by the bourse takes effect, these poor, innocent wretches who have never hurt anyone will be denied their long-cherished right to two-hour lunches.

It is hard to exaggerate the sanctity of the midday meal to many office workers in the Big Lychee’s central business district. No hardship is too unendurable, no distance too great, no standing-and-waiting-time too long, to obtain a seat and hot food. And it must, usually, be sometime between 1-2pm, just when the crowds and other inconveniences are at their most concentrated. Any earlier, and it’s too early. Any later, and it’s too late. Only restaurant staff, for obvious reasons, and lateral-thinking foreigners with their obsession for practicality eat at the wrong time.

There was an era when most service-sector workers would take a numbered ticket for the most crowded restaurant – which they absolutely must go to, regardless of alternatives – wait for half an hour, finally get a table, order their choice from the menu, eat, chat with colleagues, go back to the office and slump over the desk for a 20-minute nap. For most of them, the pressures of international competition over the years have reduced the lunch hour to, as the name suggests, 60 minutes. But while we may envy the brokers and traders’ continued enjoyment of an old-style, leisurely midday break, we sympathize with their determination to keep it.

As is always the case in Hong Kong when someone suggests that something changes, the main problem is not the people with a vested interest in the status quo – it is some third party. Thus the brokers and traders protest loudly that forcing them to take a one-hour lunch would be grossly unfair to… the restaurant industry. You see, the stock market wheelers and dealers don’t stuff their faces full of crab salad, chicken medallions in white wine cream sauce with a medley of fresh garden vegetables, tiramisu and choice of coffee or tea for over 100 minutes every day because they like it. They do it purely to help the catering trade.

Meanwhile, the Tokyo and Singapore stock exchanges are thinking of going from one-hour lunch hours to zero-hour ones! That means a sandwich: cold food, which as we all know, swiftly depletes the body of energy and leads to entire workforces keeling over, many dead, by 3.30pm, faster than you can say, “It won’t increase trading volume!”

The argument that reform would bring us into line with the Mainland might be convincing when it comes to abolishing jury trials, scrapping freedom of the press or jailing women for having a baby without permission. But it’s not going to wash when it comes to fundamental principles and values like lunch. There is only one known force in the world that could compel our stock exchange workers into line, and that’s the three-metre albino python that Italian dope dealers keep hungry and thus aggressive to “roam the apartment to scare addicts into paying for their drugs,” and it’s otherwise occupied right now. Like proposals to reduce bid-offer price spreads, the 60-minute lunch hour is an idea that plainly isn’t going to happen.

This was to be the week of chaos on the buses – the End Time of Hong Kong’s transport network, when striking drivers would leave millions of commuters stranded miles from the office, and the streets would be either totally deserted or jammed solid, according to taste. Instead the industrial action fizzles out, partly because the difference between the labour side’s pay demand and the management’s offer is too tiny to bother with, and partly because “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains” never caught on here, where the existence of rival pro-Beijing and pro-democracy umbrella unions strengthens employers’ hands.

Those of us expecting a great excuse not to go to work for several days are therefore bitterly disappointed. Or at least we would be if we had ever though there was a realistic prospect of labour militancy bringing the Big Lychee to its knees, as envisioned by semi-messianic proletarian spokesmen and an excitable media. The only time within living memory for most of us when daily life seized up in this city was SARS, the 2003 pestilence inflicted on us by official cover-ups on the Mainland, which drove the hordes of tourists away for a couple of months of glorious, peaceful, uncrowded bliss.

Otherwise, it is one disappointment after another. One of the hugest anticlimaxes of recent years officially came to an end just yesterday when we were informed that “The world is no longer in phase six of the pandemic alert.” That was WHO Director-General Margaret Chan, formerly Hong Kong’s Secretary for Health, now Serving the Community on a global scale by ruling over a sprawling bureaucracy that issues dire warnings of swine flu plague that are ignored by most right-thinking governments. Our own leaders, possibly seeing the Chan-led WHO as a sort of extension of Hong Kong’s (or at least the Civil Service’s) ‘soft power’ onto the world stage, took the international organization seriously up to phase four or five or so. But even our own Centre for Health Protection gave up flogging this dead(ish) virus last May. (That said, you can be sure they are still beavering away collecting reams of statistics on the barely noticeable disease, and will be for decades to come. Sorry, no data on the damage caused to people’s lungs by air pollution, because it’s sort of icky, but would you like a non-communicable diseases watch?)

No, that's not GlaxoSmithKline's profits forecast

I may not have been totally awake while brushing my teeth this morning, but I could have sworn that I heard radical medic Dr Lo Wing-lok mischievously suggesting on the radio that the whole swine flu scare was little more than a way to induce authorities around the world into enriching pharmaceutical companies by buying vast quantities of H1N1 vaccine. A scandal? More like a wacky conspiracy theory, surely. The very notion that a former Hong Kong senior civil servant would get herself a post-retirement position in which she could collude with big business at the expense of the public is unthinkably shocking. It was obviously my doziness, or the station’s appalling AM reception. I had to wipe a mouthful of frothy Colgate off the bathroom mirror, so ridiculous was the idea.

In their desperation to be noticed amid all the visual clutter, Hong Kong advertisers have for some years been using bigger and bigger hoardings, some of which are now too massive to see properly except, perhaps, from low earth orbit. Such is the fate of upstart underdog budget carrier Air Asia’s mega-poster hanging on the entire side of a building next to the Mid-Levels Escalator, largely obscured by the trundling commuter system’s roof. This is probably just as well, because anyone taking the trouble to lean over the side of the walkway to see the ad in its towering entirety could, if they are of a sensitive disposition, have a bit of a shock.

“Now taking reservations,” it says, showing the usual Asian airline image of aircraft interior and smiling, uniformed, babe-type cabin attendant with come-to-the-galley eyes. Then it adds, “The seat, not the girl”. Faster than you can say ‘Eewwww’, you see that on the nearest seat is a sign saying “I’m hot”.

Apparently, the ad first appeared in an English-language magazine in Bangkok, unfortunately near an article on child prostitution. It prompted a bit of righteous Facebook fury, to which the airline responded by saying how much they treasured their female crew. “We always use our own flight attendants ahead of models for advertising,” it said, as if a budget airline from Kuala Lumpur would normally hire Claudia Schiffer. Interestingly, the corporate spokesperson thanked the on-line protestors for their feedback and promised to “take it into account for our future advertisements.”

After having done so, they now launch the ad here in Hong Kong, intact. Presumably, in the best tradition of low-cost carriers, the idea is to see if they can provoke some Big Lychee-scale outrage among the local chattering classes and hence free viral publicity for the product in question (the now-common airline practice of charging passengers extra in those parts of the cabin with more legroom). It all depends on how desperate the South China Morning Post is for a story.

Hey – they could have had her thrusting her buttocks into the camera lens with the slogan “Welcome to grab one of our Hot Seats!!!”

A – maybe apocryphal – trendy western 1970s feminist story tells of a billboard advertising a flashy sports vehicle with the tagline “If this car was a woman it would have its bottom pinched”, on which someone had spray-painted “If this woman was a car she would run you over.”

The Air Asia ad could provoke – and I suspect is hoped to provoke – much politically correct mouth-frothing. My inclination, however, is that the forces of wrathful vengeance against the objectivization and degradation of women should back off. Air Asia is an airline that serves the oppressed and disadvantaged. Having flown on it once, I can fairly say that their motto should be ‘We never forget that you’re too poor to have a choice’. It is the nearest Asia has to an airborne shelter for the socio-economic underclass, such as welfare mothers and beaten spouses. A worthy cause, in short.

More to the point is that Air Asia apparently wants to position itself as a fun carrier with a ‘cheeky brand’…

Yet it operates in Southeast Asia, a multicultural environment where everyone from two-bit monarchs to rabid mullahs to racial supremacists to government censors to the Li dynasty has their own view on what ‘cheeky’ is – even before Hong Kong’s burgeoning equal rights industry wades in.

A tortuous flick through the lighter columns of the English-language press in Malaysia and Singapore shows the result: eagerness to amuse waylaid by a constant fear of causing offence, leading to embarrassing gaucheness instead of risque humour. Something like a bowdlerized Nury Vittachi article where the editor has left in only the least radical, edgy, dangerous and satirical wit. In other words, imagine the copy on the Air Asia ad being spoken in a Malaysian accent. All is forgiven.