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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  • A little clearer

    Just to end the week on a positive note (and at the risk of being accused of being “Pooterish” by the man with the big yellow blog).

    The last few days have been fairly horrible in Hong Kong, with an all too obvious blanket of smog almost everywhere. I was starting to wish for a storm to clear it away, though having seen the impact of Hurricanes Ivan, Jeanne, Charley and Frances over the last few weeks, perhaps that’s not such a good idea.

    However, we seem to had some stronger winds overnight, and this morning the air looked much clearer. I hope this is not an illusion, and that it’s not tempting fate to point it out.

    It’s ironic that Reuters should write about the problem just when it is improving, though obviously the smog will be back before too long – given the concentration of factories in Guangdong, this is not going to be an easy problem to solve. I remember reading a few months ago that the air pollution should be reduced because they had closed some power stations across the border, but unfortunately it seems that was wishful thinking. However, according to Reuters there are official targets for reducing sulphur dioxide, so perhaps things really will get better before too long.

  • Spike – what went wrong?

    Wednesday’s Standard had a more detailed piece about the closure of Spike magazine:

    Spike’s demise had been predicted among the territory’s small expatriate journalist community ever since it opened. Spike was launched last November and was supported by nine investors – individuals and companies – among them staff and contributors.

    The magazine set out to use satire to explain the workings of the government, “at a time of heightened interest in politics, deepening cynicism about the government’s ability to meet the aspirations of Hong Kong people”. The July 1 anti-government demonstrations and pro-democracy wins in the District Council elections last year were the catalysts for its launch.

    The magazine offered translations of Apple Daily and Next magazine stories, and an `Expat TV’ section whose fictional programmes poked fun at foreigners. The plan was to refinance it after six months, Vines said, having proved to potential investors its creators had “something to show”. While other investors were secured, the major investor did not deliver the amount they had agreed on before the company’s deadline.

    “We were left high and dry, I’m afraid,” Vines said, declining to disclose financial figures. Political columnist and Spike investor Andy Ho said he thought the magazine put up a “good fight”. “People liked to read it, especially the expatriate community,” he said.

    “The problem is obviously people tended to share the magazine, rather than subscribe to it.”

    Well, that’s a good excuse! I don’t know what evidence they have to say this – clearly they could have had a higher circulation if every reader had bought a copy, but that was never going to happen. Many magazines boast to advertisers about readership rather than circulation, and it is to be expected that more than one person will read each copy!

    A reader is obviously not impressed:

    Reading the reports of Spike’s demise was sad, but Mr Vines comments about investors having to keep pumping in money, what a load of bullshit. A magazine is a buisness, Spike failed because it had no advertising and couldn’t attract enough people to buy copies to cover its costs. Ergo either the magazine was bad, the people running it weren’t doing a good job or both.

    Well, obviously. It seems to me that the business plan must have been wrong. Getting initial investment from staff and contributors is fine, but if this was meant to last only six months then they always faced an uphill struggle. Establishing a magazine like Spike was always going to take a long time, and the lack of advertising was an obvious sign of this. If someone had asked me to invest in Spike after six months I think I would have had considerable reservations. So, although it is understandable that Steve Vines was upset that an investor let him down, I don’t think it is at all surprising.

    I’m sure it took years before Private Eye became profitable, and I’m fairly sure they had the advantage of supportive investors (Peter Cook being the best-known) who were putting in money because they liked the magazine, not to make money out of it.

    The market for English language media is not very strong in Hong Kong. I don’t think The Standard publishes circulation figures, and there is a good reason for that, whilst TVB Pearl and ATV World are subsidised from the profits made by the Chinese channels. It was always going to be a challenge to establish a new title, and they needed more time. If their business plan didn’t allow for that, then clearly they got it wrong.

    What I find disappointing is that so many people seem to have been willing Spike to fail. I can only assume that Steve Vines has made a lot of enemies in Hong Kong.

  • Long Hair and Hemlock

    Via Simon, an interesting piece in Slate about ‘Long Hair’ Leung Gwok Hung, by a journalist who also interviewed Hemlock. “Long Hair” feels that the election results were not as bad as they were portrayed:

    “The results aren’t a setback for democrats; we won something like 60 percent of the vote. But it was a setback for the democratic party politicians. My argument is, and always was, that democracy needs a platform, an agenda.”

    His criticism of the democratic parties’ leadership boils down to two points. First, they didn’t work hard enough to expand their platform and their appeal beyond the abstract issues of suffrage and democratic rule. “If you want to get people to the polls, you have to bloody well give them a good reason why they should cast their vote for you. The democrats sat on top of the political capital they built with the two successful July 1 democracy marches. “

    But his biggest criticism of the democratic parties is that they were wimps, doomed to lose against a determined and disciplined group of Beijing-backed adversaries. “The Democrats wanted to avoid confrontation. I told them to attack! They told me they didn’t want to fight. So I have to do the dog-fighting.”

  • Making sense of it all

    Some interesting analysis of the opinion polls from ESWN (via Simon). I wasn’t aware of this, but it seems that the DAB’s share of the vote is consistently under-estimated in opinion polls.

    This is not a new phenomenon, and interestingly, there’s a piece in this week’s Economist about the differing results from opinion polls on the US election. They mention…

    a problem that pollsters have long recognised: people who feel the winds of public opinion shifting in their direction are more confident about telling pollsters what they think than those who don’t.

    Perhaps Americans like to back winners, but in the UK it was more a matter of apparent embarassment about supporting the party in power. This caused opinion pollsters major problems in the UK when the Conservatives were in power (notably in the 1992 election, which was widely expected to result in a Labour victory). When asked, people were most reluctant to admit that they were intending to vote (or even had actually voted) for the Conservatives. At first, opinion pollsters (reasonably enough) took the answers they were given at face value and found that their predictions were hopelessly wrong. Then they started adjusting the raw data to take account of this discrepancy (and I believe they also had some cunning scheme to allow people to express their preference ‘secretly’ when data was collected face-to-face rather than over the phone). Whatever they did seemed to fix the problem, and I guess the HK pollsters have no choice but to do something similar.

    ESWN also notes that the results have been subject to vastly different interpretations in various media around the world. We aren’t electing a government and so there are no winners or losers in absolute terms, and in addition to that, comparing these results with 2000 is difficult because there are now more seats in the geographical constituencies. So, as ESWN notes, it largely comes down to how the parties did against expectations. That means that there’s ample scope for almost any interpretation you wish to make!

    One area where I think EWSN is being a trifle unfair is in saying (even with the benefit of hindsight) that it was a mistake to field two separate lists of pro-democracy candidates on HK Island. The reason for having two lists is because some voters might support Audrey Eu (or Cyd Ho) but not be so keen on Yeung Sum or Martin Lee (or vice versa), so a single list might be off-putting for some people. As seems to have been the case in NT East, according to Christine Loh in today’s SCMP. She feels that it was a mistake to field a single list because the candidates were so diverse, and it certainly didn’t work as well as they had hoped. I don’t think there is any guarantee that it would have worked any better for the HK Island consitituency.

    There is no simple answer to this conundrum, and unless we have a change in the voting system the democrats will always have this problem. The big error, obviously, was in encouraging voters to switch to Martin Lee’s ticket because opinion suggested he might lose. Which is where we came in, I think.

  • Spiked

    Spike has apparently ceased publication. Good news for George, but disappointing for the rest of us.

    UPDATE: Here is the story from Wednesday’s SCMP

    An errant investor has forced satirical magazine Spike to be, well, spiked. Publisher Stephen Vines confirmed yesterday that, following a key investor’s failure to deliver promised capital, the publication was finished.

    “We are having to close the magazine down and the issue that was published last Friday will be its last,” Mr Vines said. “We have been in negotiations for the last two to three months with investors, and in the end we did manage to secure two new backers, one of which did what they said they would do.”

    The other, he said, did not honour two signed agreements.

    “It would have been irresponsible to have carried on trading in that condition,” Mr Vines said. “The idea was not to just continue putting the magazine out, but to do a proper marketing campaign that would have allowed it to become bigger and better.”

    Spike quickly gained a loyal fan base after its launch last November, but while its mix of comedy and current events was well received, its financial health had been under a cloud in recent months.

    Staff were told last Friday that the funding deal had collapsed.

  • LegCo elections

    I was mildly encouraged by the results of the LegCo elections (as already covered by Phil, Simon and others). The turnout was up, and considering that this was election to select an opposition rather than a government it was amazing that so many people bothered to turn out. If you compare the turnout on Sunday with that in the elections for the European Parliament, a figure in excess of 50% is actually remarkably high, all things considered.

    Overall, the results make sense to me – they reflect the diversity of opinions held by Hong Kong people in a way that a landslide for the pro-democracy parties wouldn’t have done. It doesn’t mean that Hong Kong people don’t want democracy, but it does demonstrate that the Democratic Party can’t take votes for granted. There’s something of an irony here in that a landslide for the democrats would have alarmed Beijing and probably made it less likely that the system would be made more democratic anytime soon.

    Instead, the Liberal Party succesfully make the leap from Functional Constituencies to Geographical Constituencies (winning a seat each in NT East & West), and Rita Fan comfortably won a seat on HK Island. With the democrats making some gains in the Functional Constituencies, we seem to be moving away from the old setup whereby the democrats dominated in the popular vote and the pro-Beijing parties dominated in the rotten boroughs.

    Conrad was horrified by the result in NT East:

    Irresponsible provocateur "Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung, of the April 5th Action Group, and the reptilian James Tien, of the Liberal Party, both won seats in the New Territories East constituency, demonstrating that at least one part of Hong Kong really isn’t ready for democracy.

    Conrad seems not to understand that one of the joys of a democratic system is that produces results that may not make any sense to intelligent people like him. He couldn’t understand how the Spanish people could tip out a centre-right government that had ignored overwhelming public opinion on Iraq and then lied about who had planted the Madrid bombs. People, eh! What’s the matter with them? Clearly we need a panel of sensible people to arbitrate on this and anyone who refuses to vote sensibly will lose the right to vote. Same idea as the Election Committee to choose the Chief Executive, I guess.

    Or to put it another way – Conrad, get a grip, man!

    The democrats really should have capitalised on the frustration felt by many people about the refusal of Beijing to allow more democracy, but for a variety of reasons they failed to do so. Personally, I don’t think it was smart of Martin Lee to go to the US and say what he did, or for Emily Lau to go to Taiwan and shout her mouth off. The scandals that affected the Democrats during the campaign didn’t help, and then we had the fiasco of Martin Lee appealing for extra votes and inadvertently causing Cyd Ho to lose her seat. There are some harsh lessons to be learned over the next four years.

    A lot of fuss has been made about the problems in a few polling stations, mainly caused by voters folding their ballots incorrectly (which must rank alongside the ‘wrong kind of snow’ as an excuse). I can understand people feeling upset if they had to wait to vote (or, in a few cases, left without having done so), but it only affected a handful of polling stations and only briefly. It’s unfortunate, but there’s no conspiracy involved!

    I have to agree with Phil on this (I read this comment yesterday, but overlooked it today, and Ron has reminded me of it).

    It is always unfortunate that any doubt could be thrown on to the results of the election, although I highly doubt there was any tampering going on. In fact I don’t believe it for a minute. I would suggest it was just a logistical cock-up. The Democrats are talking about reserving the right to take legal action. I think they should can that. They will just end up looking like fools and cry babies.

  • Poetic justice

    Marvellous – the ‘junk mail’ filter in Hotmail places an email from Microsoft into the junk mail folder. It’s obviously cleverer than I had thought!!

  • A difficult choice

    Anyone living in Hong Kong will be aware that the elections for the Legislative Council take place tomorrow (Sunday). I don’t have a vote this time, so I have four more years to make up my mind who to support in the next elections. In truth, I’m not sure I’ll have much more of a clue then than I do now. Which is distinctly odd for someone who always took a keen interest in British politics and wasn’t in much doubt who to vote for.

    So what’s the problem (for me) in Hong Kong? Firstly, I suppose, that politics is dominated by one issue, and secondly that we are electing an opposition, not a government. Voting “for democracy” sends a signal to Beijing, but it’s not as if they are unaware of what most people in Hong Kong want, and the behaviour of many of the pro-democracy politicians hardly inspires confidence (if we assume for a moment that we are choosing people to run the place). Voting for the “Beijing” parties (such as the DAB) is even less attractive. The Liberals are the obvious alternative, but their leader seems a bit clueless and I am puzzled by the concept that what’s best for Hong Kong business is always to do what Beijing wants, and that CEPA is the solution to all HK’s problems.

    The very fact that we are not choosing the government is probably the reason why we have politicans who go in for posturing and grand gestures rather than trying to formulate logical policies. The optimists say that the political parties have made good progress in a relatively short time, and expect that real democracy will bring with it a change in local politics. One has to hope so.

    (more…)

  • More Weasels

    Warning: even by my low standards, this is fairly boring stuff.

    Like most people, I guess, I get annoyed when telemarketing people call me. Not so much because they are trying to sell me something, but rather because what they say is entirely scripted. I hate having to listen to their pathetic attempts both to be polite and to avoid telling me why they are calling. Yet the fact is that I might be interested in what they are trying to sell, in which case I am willing to spend some time on the phone, or I might not, in which case it’s a waste of everyone’s time. There’s no point trying to persuade me to buy something I don’t want, because it won’t work.

    Anyway, good sales people spend a lot more time listening than they do talking. They want to understand your needs and therefore what they might be able to sell you. Clearly you can’t do that in a scripted telemarketing call.

    So when someone calls me and starts reading a script, I am seconds away from putting down the phone. Hence, when a telemarketing person from my ISP called me last week I got rather upset. However, it turned out that they wanted to offer me a new lower rate for my existing broadband service.

    (more…)

  • Wet

    Yes, I know this is a bit of a taboo subject, so if you are easily offended please don’t read any further.

    Look, here’s the thing – a little bit of rain never did anyone any harm. The human body is cunningly designed to be water-resistant (otherwise taking a bath or a shower would be very hazardous). So it really isn’t necessary to use an umbrella when we are experiencing what the Irish charmingly call “soft rain” and everyone else calls “light drizzle”.

    Honestly, it won’t do you any harm to get a little wet. This is Hong Kong in September, not Moscow in February, so your clothes and your hair will quickly get dry. Put away the umbrella, please!

    The one benefit of today’s rather pathetic excuse for rain is that the swimming pool was completely empty (of people, I mean, not water). Well, obviously one doesn’t want to get wet when one goes swimming.