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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  • The Guardian on China

    This week, The Guardian is running a series of articles about China.  I’m sure this has already been mentioned by other bloggers who are quicker off the mark than I am, but never mind.  I have been a reader of this newspaper for a long time, and although I don’t always agree with their viewpoint, I usually find it a good read (and a useful counterpoint to The Economist).  Anyway, you can find all the reports here.

    The articles I have read from series (so far at least) seem to be pretty good, and better than a lot of the rubbish that is written about China (some of it in this very same newspaper in the past).

    Some of the articles that I have found interesting: Food city (Brit finds some Chinese delicacies a bit hard to stomach), Going for gold (medal factories) A tale of two countries (life as a migrant worker) and Home alone (the problems of the only child).

    Worth a read, I think.

  • Wrongful dismissal

    The Apprentice is back, and after designing toys in the first week the teams were asked to create a new ice cream flavour in week two. Perhaps in week three the challenge will be writing your name using joined up letters. I am not a fan of reality shows, but thankfully The Apprentice has generally managed to avoid many of the irritating aspects of that genre. Sure it’s artificial, but at least success or failure generally seems to be based on competence rather than popularity, and the mechanics of the show have been relatively unobtrustive. Up till now.

    Also, slightly unexpectedly, Donald Trump has helped the show by making sensible choices, and where they have seemed questionable it was more a matter of having so many candidates who richly deserved to be fired that it was merely a matter of who should go first. Up till now. Sadly, all of that seemed to go out of the window in the second show of the second series (shown on Saturday on TVB Pearl). The problem was a bit of meddling by the producers, who decided that if ‘immunity’ was good enough for Survivor it must be good enough for The Apprentice. Last week, Bradford won immunity by being the Project Manager for the winning team, so when he was on the losing team this week he was safe and couldn’t be fired.

    However, Bradford had other ideas, and felt that he could afford to waive his immunity because his good performance meant that he wouldn’t get fired. He rationalised this by saying that it would help him to win the respect of his team-mates, but I am not convinced that he had really thought it through – if he had done he might have remembered that this wasn’t Survivor, and popularity actually counts for nothing. Anyway, I rather doubt that his fellow competitors would have respected him any more for it.

    Perhaps he hoped that Donald Trump would be impressed. Er, no – turns out he actually thought it was a very stupid decision. Even so, I was convinced that he was going to tell Bradford how stupid he had been but sack Ivana (good name, eh?) for being a hopeless Project Manager. In fact he told him how stupid he was, but also that he was the most impressive candidate of the four who were sitting in the boardroom – and then fired him anyway. All the team members were obviously shocked and surprised by this decision, understandably so. Had Donald Trump gone mad?

    (more…)

  • Large colour photograph

    On Sunday, a man jumped to his death in Ap Lei Chau. It goes without saying that this was very sad, all the more so because he took his six year-old son with him. So, as you might expect, Hong Kong’s popular press treated this story with all the respect and dignity they could summon up. Which turned out to be none at all, as they demonstrated by running photographs of the bodies lying on the ground.

    So you’ve decided to run large colour photographs of this family tragedy on the front page of your newspaper. Then, presumably so as not to give offence, you pixellate the photographs. Free advice here – if you don’t want to give offence, write a short factual story and leave out the photographs (like this, for example).

    Also, today’s Standard reports on a study that points out why this type of coverage is unhelpful.

  • BBC Prime

    BBC Prime is finally going to be available in Hong Kong next month.

    The bad news is that it is initially going to air on PCCW’s Now Broadband TV (which I no longer have), and they are threatening to censor the programmes for the Asian market (this was in the Sunday Morning Post, so I can’t link to it).

    I assume the channel will eventually turn up on Cable TV (The Standard says the PCCW deal is non-exclusive), but it’s a little ironic that Now Broadband TV should finally have a channel I want just days after I gave up their service.  I had the box for several months, but never got round to subscribing to any of their channels (though according to Phil there is a special bonus if you do subscribe to one of their packages).

    I’m disappointed if they really do plan to censor the programmes.  We already have to put up with TVB Pearl doing bad things to The Sopranos (and other similar nonsense from all the terrestrial channels), but surely the point of a subscription channel on cable TV is that different rules apply.  However, the problem is that the BBC want the channel to be broadcast in other Asian countries (such as Malaysia and Singapore) and so they have to follow their standards.  The same reason, in fact, that HBO and Cinemax in Asia are very different from the original US cable versions of these channels.  Which is why I’ve never bothered to subscribe! 

  • Egg

    I kept half an eye on the election results during the day, but what could be more boring than every single State voting the same way as 4 years ago?

    There was some excitement this morning when Zogby called the election for John Kerry, but this looked more like wishful thinking than anything else (the page is archived here since they have removed if from their website). They got a few states wrong (which was understandable), but the oddest part was that they showed Bush with a 2% lead in Ohio but called it for Kerry. Anyway, the end result was their prediction of Kerry winning the electoral college by 311-213. Possible, I suppose, but also unlikely – and quite wrong as it turned out. I can only suppose that they hoped that if Kerry had won Ohio and Florida they would look like geniuses. Instead they look like idiots.

    Simon has more on this, pointing out that some of the things that John Zogby said about the election when he was in Hong Kong were not as insightful as they might have seemed at the time:

    Undecideds: turns out they probably did vote, given the rise in turnout, but they didn’t break for Kerry as expected. Zogby said the candidates get 47% each just for showing up. If you take that then the undecideds broke at least 50/50 or even more for Bush. Obviously he could persuade them.

    Turnout: The conventional wisdom was a higher turnout benefits Kerry. Clearly that wasn’t the case. Total votes is 115-120 million, well up on 2000, and far above Zogby’s critical level of 107 million for a Kerry win. Bush is well ahead in the popular vote so clearly these extra voters broke far more for Bush than expected.

    It also turns out that this was the exception to the "rule" that incumbents either win handsomely or get booted out, and that poor approval ratings are an obstacle to winning re-election. Oh, and it really doesn’t matter whether the Washington Redskins win, lose or draw.

    The truth is that John Zogby had no way of knowing how people would vote, any more than similar experts "knew" how the Spanish electorate would vote in their general election earlier this year or how the British people would vote in 1992. The pollsters massage the figures to try and arrive at a reasonable result, but in so doing they guarantee that the numbers they conjure up are subjective rather than objective. Zogby guessed wrong, and ended up with egg on his face as a result.

  • Nice cup of tea

    I think I should make Ordinary Gweilo more like this.

    Some will tell you that it already is.

  • Platinum Visa

    You hold a British passport and you want to go to China for a day or two. How much will it cost you to get a single entry visa from China Travel Service?

    HK$500. Yes, five hundred Hong Kong Dollars (US$65).

    Perhaps I’m daft (or naive), but what benefit does a country derive from making it difficult or expensive for people to cross their borders? Queuing up to enter or leave is just plain frustrating, and I really wonder what it achieves. I remember having to wait around an hour to get through passport control the first few times I came into Kai Tak, and I sometimes see long queues for visitors at Chek Lap Kok (though I think they now have a special scheme for regular visitors, and there is a special queue for holders of the ASEAN Business Pass, whatever that is). My worst recent experience was going to Phuket and queuing for around an hour to get in to the country. That’ll make me think twice about going back there anytime soon.

    (more…)

  • Prices squeezed

    I think I have complained before about the vast array of ersatz fruit juice that litter the shelves of Hong Kong supermarkets. Brand names like ‘juicy’ and ‘fresh’ are used with reckless abandon even though the contents invariably include water, sugar and artificial flavouring and are made from concentrated juice.

    In this rather upside-down world, the most natural packaged juice in Hong Kong is sold under the decidedly puzzling brandname of “Shine & Shine”. Their juice is made from squeezed oranges rather than concentrate, doesn’t contain any additives, and as far as I can tell it is not pasteurised. The only downside is that it only lasts a few days before it goes off. Yes, even if you keep it in the fridge. The ‘sell by’ date on the packaging doesn’t seem to make any difference as far as I can tell.

    Which reminds me that as a child I bought some fresh orange and apple juice a few days before Christmas and didn’t realize that it needed to be kept in the fridge. Well, of course, I realized it when Christmas came and we wanted to drink the juice. For another experiment with keeping orange juice, see here.

    Anyway, Shine & Shine are adopting an interesting marketing strategy (in conjunction with Park’n’Shop). A few months, they increased the official price (for a litre) from HK$25 to HK$30 but reduced the selling price to HK$13. Given that Tropicana sells for HK$26 or thereabouts, this made it very cheap by comparison. A few weeks on, and they seem to be increasing the selling price by HK$1 a week, presumably until they get back to the previous price of HK$25 or thereabouts. I wonder if this strategy will work?

  • Taken for a ride

    It’s a common sight to see couriers waiting by the exit gates at MTR stations with a parcel or some documents. They hand the items over to someone standing the other side of the gates, and go back on to the MTR. Maybe they then pick something else and take that to another station, and if they eventually exit from the MTR back where they started, they pay only HK$3.80 (as long as they don’t stay on the system for more than 90 minutes).

    From Monday there will be a charge of HK$10 for anyone who enters and exits at the same station after spending more than 20 minutes in the MTR system. However, as far as I can see, there is nothing to stop anyone travelling around the system and then exiting at a nearby station (for example entering at Central, travelling to TST, Admiralty, Mong Kok & Sheung Wan and then exiting at Wan Chai). The fare for that journey would still only be HK$3.80, so the loophole hasn’t really been closed.

    Predictably, politicians are whining about this, but I can’t imagine how anyone could contrive to spend more than 20 minutes inside an MTR station by mistake*. However, the MTRC have exempted old people from this surcharge, presumably on the grounds that they walk slowly and easily get confused, or possibly because they would attack the station staff with their zimmer frames if they had to pay. Anyway, if the average age of couriers on the MTR suddenly shoots up, you’ll know why.

    * I managed to spend 22 minutes in a station 13 years later, so yes it can happen

  • Ups and Downs

    Via Phil, news that the Far Eastern Economic Review is to cease publication as a weekly magazine and will try to survive as a monthly.

    I’m not at all surprised. I was a subscriber for a while, but I soon realized that I wasn’t actually reading very much (if any) of the magazine each week, and was getting annoyed by the articles that I did read, so I let my subscription lapse. They kept calling me and writing to me trying to get me to re-subscribe, and I fell it for it once (because the price was so low) but I didn’t renew again. I’m not surprised they were losing money – the subcription price was very low, and they must have been giving away tens of thousands of copies on top of that.

    At the other extreme, I was slightly amazed to read recently that The Economist is poised to break through the 1 million circulation barrier.

    The magazine’s circulation stood at 100,000 in 1970, similar to rivals such as the New Statesman and The Spectator. Today more than four-fifths of its circulation comes from outside Britain.

    I have been reading The Economist for a long time, and have been a subscriber for more than 10 years. I have no hesitation in saying that it’s the best English language magazine in the world, with a breadth and depth of coverage that is unequalled. I can’t say that I always agree with their opinions, but they are usually worth reading. My only regret is that I don’t always manage to find time to read it from cover to cover.

    It’s rather reassuring that The Economist is hugely successful whilst FEER is struggling. I just hope that the management of FEER take the hint and improve the editorial quality rather than focusing on cheap subscriptions and giveways.

    Update: Today’s Standard says many of the same things and also makes comparisons with The Economist. Dow Jones are heavily criticised:

    “They took something that made a lot of money and they trashed it,” Philip Bowring, editor of the Review at the time of the takeover, said. He left after clashes with Dow Jones management. The new owners aligned the magazine editorially with The Wall Street Journal’s arch-conservative, Amer-ican-centric line, he said, turning off many Asian readers.

    Bowring said Dow Jones’ efforts to boost circulation with the student and travel markets it is now jettisoning alienated advertisers by diluting the magazine’s elite readership. Moreover, efforts to widen its appeal by simplifying stories and adding lifestyle articles on restaurants, tech gadgets and the like turned off the Review’s original readership, he said.

    “You don’t notice The Economist dumbing down,” he said. “These people know who their readers are. They are not always trying to find new ones. They are trying to make sure the existing ones get what they need.”

    The new monthly version doesn’t sound very appealing:

    [Dow Jones] will keep the Review name alive by relaunching the title in December as a sober, plain-paper monthly of essays by prominent academics, business leaders and former and current government officials with limited advertising and no editorials.

    I can hardly wait.