Ordinary Gweilo

It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writing (mainly) about Hong Kong

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Month: Dec 2003

  • Please don’t call it “cargate”

    The so-called “Cargate affair” has apparently come to an end, with the decision not to prosecute Anthony Leug because “a reasonable prospect of securing a conviction in this case simply [does] not exist”. Most people seem to have accepted this decision as reasonable, though Martin Lee is making a bit of a fuss about it.…

  • The three satirists go to war

    Last Friday morning, RTHK devoted about half an hour to a discussion on the state of satire in Hong Kong, and the three guests spent most of the time attacking each other! Steve Vines was promoting Spike, George Adams was promoting his NTSCMP website, and Nury Vittachi was promoting, well mainly Nury Vittachi (though I…

  • The best response to pirate DVDs

    Interesting story in the SCMP this morning, about the approach taken by film distributors on the mainland to pirate DVDs. Infernal Affairs III was released last week, and pirate DVDs were available a few days later. So rather than whingeing about it in the SCMP they did something positive: Just three days after cinemas began…

  • Funny signs

    Batgung has some amusing signs from Hong Kong. Most are examples of poor or mangled English, and one is confusing jargon. It’s always tempting to do this, but it seems a bit too much like shooting fish in a barrel and I also feel it’s unfair to criticize other people’s English when my Chinese is…

  • Spike

    Spike has now reached issue 4, and on the positive side they seem to have attracted advertising from Vokswagen and copies still seem to be widely available even in the “Gweilo lite” parts of Hong Kong where I spend most of my time. The serious stuff is still first-rate, and I think it’s a very…

  • Democracy in Hong Kong

    Today’s SCMP leads on Beijing’s rebuke to the US for meddling in Hong Kong affairs. This arises from the comments made by James Keith, the US Consul General for Hong Kong. His comments seemed relatively uncontroversial – you’d expect the US to be advocating greater democracy for Hong Kong: It is the US belief that…

  • Pet food

    An interesting piece in The Guardian about what people in China will eat. Note that in Hong Kong it is illegal to eat cats, dogs and most wild animals, and there are still restrictions in force in the PRC from the SARS outbreak. I find it quite interesting what is deemed acceptable to eat in…

  • From the Washington Post

    This is a good article about Hong Kong in today’s Washington Post.

  • We can’t hear you

    It’s always amusing to read prospectuses with the warnings that they are obliged to include these days (“all our senior management might leave the company, and all our customers might suddenly die from a mysterious disease”) but this one seems to be self-inflicted. The New York Times reports that a Chinese company called Ctrip.com has…

  • Windows 2000

    Another assortment of stuff I noticed over the last few days… According to the SCMP’s property supplement, there is a housing estate called “Windows 2000” in Shanghai. Apparently it was constructed before Microsoft started using the name, but it does seem to be tempting fate! Bill Gates once famously tried to compare computers to motor…