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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  • Off the hook

    [I know this has got absolutely nothing to do with the purported subject matter of this blog, but I think I can permit myself this indulgence.]

    Last night I watched Lord Hutton presenting the conclusions of his inquiry, shown on BBC World (and CNN). I was expecting a fairly brief summary, but he actually read large chunks of his text, and it lasted very nearly 90 minutes. It can’t have been much fun for the BBC, given that it was severely criticised by Lord Hutton, and I can’t have been the only viewer willing him to get on to the conclusions rather than summarizing the facts and the evidence.

    On balance I think his conclusions were correct. The BBC deserved the criticism it got, and needs to re-think the way it deals with controversial stories, and should not blindly defend its journalists without knowing the full background. Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter involved, behaved very badly throughout, and it’s hard to see how he can carry on working for the BBC.

    What surprised me was that government got off so lightly. Geoff Hoon in particularly adopted a very high-handed attitude, seemingly arguing that most of the decisions were made by civil servants without his knowledge, and Alastair Campbell took the whole thing very personally (at least in part because of previous run-ins with Gilligan). I guess that Lord Hutton paid much closer attention to the evidence than I did, and drew some different conclusions. I don’t believe that anyone in the government can be held responsible for David Kelly’s death, but if they had done things differently he might still be alive today.

    (more…)

  • Chinese New Year – still going strong

    This should be positively the last mention of Chinese New Year here (until next year). Promise.

    This week I have managed to attend two company post-CNY lunches and witnessed the giving and receiving of Lai See packets on a fairly large scale. The amount of enjoyment that people get out of this ritual is quite something, even though the sums of money are really quite small. If you compare this with the amount of hassle (and frequent disappointments) that are involved in giving presents, this system does have a lot going for it.

    People genuinely enjoy both giving and receiving Lai See, and it makes starting work after CNY a real pleasure! I previously worked in a small office with a mixture of different nationalities, but in a larger office where everyone (apart from me) is Chinese, there are a lot more people to give and receive Lai See. It’s also amusing to hear the arguments about whether people are single or not, and the pretend reluctance of some people to give Lai See to people who they believe may not really be single.

    Incidentally, I get the impression that a lot of people are still on holiday. I know they say that it’s unlucky to go back to work on the 4th or 5th day, but today is the 7th day. What’s up with people?

  • Sweatshops

    Simon notes an interesting blog that I have seen before but don’t read regularly, Asian Labour News.  It’s put together by Stephen Frost, who is a Research Fellow at the Southeast Asia Research Centre, part of the City University of Hong Kong, and it is described as “an online database of news about workers in Southeast Asia and China and the issues that affect them.”

    He has noticed an article in Reason magazine about sweatshops:

    “Want to improve the lives of poor workers in developing countries? Then rush out and buy a pair of Nikes or Levi Strauss jeans”

    They are suggesting that it is actually helpful to workers in Asia to buy products from well-known brands and large retailers that are sourced from Asia.  The logic being that these companies pay higher wages and enforce better working conditions, and that foreign investment “is positively correlated with the right to establish free unions, the right to strike, the right to collective bargaining, and the protection of union members.”

    When I first visited a factory in China several years ago, I was fairly horrified by what I saw.  Then, after discussing it with various people, I realized that it was not as simple as it first appeared.  For one thing, most of the workers only stay for a few years, and the amount they can earn in that time is more than they could hope to earn in their home villages.  For another, it isn’t really appropriate to judge living or working conditions in a factory in China by the standards of Hong Kong or the UK.  Yet, nevertheless, most companies could afford to provide decent accomodation for their workers and ought to pay them a decent wage.

    So is it true that the large well-known companies pay better and provide better conditions for their workers? 

    Well, in fact these well-known companies don’t normally own factories, but instead sub-contract the work to other specialist manufacturers, many of which are headquartered in Hong Kong.  These companies are expected to meet the minimum standards set by their customers and also have to compete (on cost and quality) to win the business.  If the big names aren’t proactive in checking that these standards are actually followed, the factory owners are always going to be tempted to cut corners.  I have seen production lines in China that are dedicated to producing products for one well-known company (that does carry out checks) which obviously do meet the expected standard, but I don’t believe every company is as vigilant as that.

    One of the obvious contradictions here is that large retailers such as Wal-Mart and Tesco are now extremely powerful and can drive a very hard bargain with their suppliers.  This in turn forces those suppliers to cut costs, and often prompts them to source goods from Asia to take advantage of low labour costs.  Can you simultaneously be negotiating hard on how much you pay and enforcing high standards in the factories?  

    In relation to the current problems with Avian Flu in Thailand, I was somewhat surprised to find that the UK imports large quantities of chicken from that country, mainly for use in processed food.  I have already linked to this article from The Guardian:

    “Waitrose and Marks & Spencer do not buy any chicken from outside the EU for their processed foods, but the decision not to use cheap Thai or Brazilian meat is believed to have added £10m a year to M&S’s costs. Most other retailers have sourced the cheaper products.”

    In case you were wondering, Waitrose is a posh supermarket owned by the John Lewis Partnership.  If you buy food from M&S or Waitrose you will pay higher prices, but for higher quality and closer supervision of the supply chain.  However, the low prices offered by Tesco and Wal-Mart seem to be a more successful proposition, with both companies highly profitable and gaining market share.  When given the choice, most consumers seem to prefer low prices.

    So how can you tell which companies really care about the working conditions and salaries of factory workers in Asia and which ones are mainly concerned with cutting costs?  Search me!    

  • Plasma, LCD or smoke and mirrors

    I am always happy when my view of the world is confirmed. So I heartily recommend Stephen Wildstrom’s column in the current issue of Business Week magazine, wherein he considers the relative merits of plasma, LCD, CRT, and projection systems when choosing a TV. He says:

    The picture quality of LCD is rapidly approaching that of plasma

    I have never understood the argument that LCD was better than plasma, especially not when people were saying this 2-3 years ago. Today, the best LCD screens are quite good, and for smaller sizes I’d agree they are the best option.

    Coming up on the rails are the new rear-projection sets, which apparently contain a million or more tiny mirrors (but no smoke), and which are priced lower than plasma.

  • Is it too green?

    Sorry, I’ve been playing around with the design. I’ve also re-instated the left column for the search, site meter and the Flippery Fish nonsense, plus the list of recent posts. It’s hard to know what’s best – but it looks fine on my monitor (which is set at 1280 x 1024) and I’ll check it later on a lower resolution. Some blogs look quite strange on my monitor, with large spaces on both sides and a comparatively thin stream of text in the middle, whereas this design should adjust according to your display setup.

    I’ve been having big problems with my email over the last few days, and no-one seemed to be willing to admit responsibility (it’s either the company that hosts my domain or Netvigator). After much complaining to everyone it now seems to be OK, but no-one has claimed any credit for fixing it.

    Netvigator sent me an email a few months back saying that they would now be offering me 24×7 support, but so far all that seems to mean is that I can speak to someone who can’t solve the problem, and fixing it still takes a few days. Or when they have a serious problem I can’t even get through to their support line because everyone else is calling, and my so-called priority service counts for nothing.

    UPDATE: They have now admitted to blocking my email, but don’t know why. They just starting blocking it and then stopped blocking it. So that’s OK, then.

    If there’s too much green, please let me know and I’ll see what I can do. Just call the usual number, enter ‘2’, ‘1’, ‘3’, enter your 10 digit account number, and our customer service representative will be right with you.

  • The Office

    The surprising news from the Golden Globes is that “The Office” has won two major awards.  Ricky Gervais (creator, co-writer and star) won the TV comedy actor award, while the programme won best TV comedy series.

    It’s surprising not because it doesn’t deserve the prize, but because in the States the show is only on cable TV (through BBC Americas) and certainly won’t appeal to everyone.  It seems that people either love it or just totally don’t get it and wonder why anyone should want to watch a show about such awful people.

    I shall have to revise my opinions of Americans, because whoever votes for these awards obviously has the intelligence to realize that The Office really is the funniest thing on TV.

    If you don’t own the DVDs of the two series, buy them now, and when the Christmas specials are available, buy them as well.

  • Shouting

    When I first came here, one of the things I found quite strange was the way that people would start shouting in meetings. Not understanding any Cantonese, I assumed that they were getting upset, but I was assured that this wasn’t the case. So why do it?

    Subsequently I discovered that it was a normal feature of life in Hong Kong. Middle-aged women seem to be the worst culprits, but all sort of people do it when talking on their mobile phone, which is particularly irritating on public transport. I’m afraid I can’t help looking at people who do this, in the (vain) hope that they will turn down the volume. Sometimes it even works, and no-one has hit me (yet).

    It appears that local television is partially to blame, given the tendency of presenters to shout continuously in an attempt to make things appear more exciting. There is a particularly irritating man who appears on most of TVB’s appalling variety shows, and makes up for his dimunitive stature by dyeing his hair and shouting at the top of his voice in an effort to get noticed. However, most of them seem to do it, and ordinary people in Hong Kong unfortunately seem to be copying them.

    Please! Turn down the volume before we all go deaf! Now! Doh jeh hahp jok.

  • Geekery

    I blame the Geeky Kaiser.  He mentioned BlogJet, and so I thought I would try it out.  It’s a useful little program for composing posts, and lets you do more clever formatting than Typepad allows.  Like colors and bullet points.  Unfortunately it seems to be incompatible with the Typepad editor, so if you start with one you really have to carry on with it rather than switching over half-way through writing a post (as I did with the post below about salmon, which explains why it was such a mess earlier on). 

    The main advantage I can see (apart from colors and bullet points) is that you can compose off-line and save your work as you go along.  I was using WordPad, which is fine except that you can’t create hyperlinks.  Yes, I know Word could do that, but I avoid it because it uses characters that don’t always display properly through a browser.  For example, Hemlock was obviously using MS Word (or something similar) during his stint on The Gweilo Diaries having complained about the unfriendly MT interface. 

    Talking of Hemlock, I notice that he has updated The World’s Most Authoritative Guide to Hong Kong Blogs and included this blog, along with Fumier and other fellow upstarts.  He gives me "full marks for admitting [I am] not especially exciting" and says that I write about my "apparently staid and not overly eventful day-to-day life".  Actually, I thought the one thing I was not writing about was my day-to-day life.  What I have tried to do is provide some observations on everyday life in Hong Kong, and these inevitably tend to be fairly mundane.  However, clearly I am not competing with Conrad or Shaky, and if anyone wants to read about that type of lifestyle then this is not the place to come.  The title of the blog is meant to emphasis that I’m just an ordinary guy living in the New Territories, not a typical "expat" on a generous package living in Mid-Levels and enjoying the Wan Chai nightlife. 

    Actually, one problem about doing a blog is that it’s difficult to know what other people think about it.  Other bloggers tend to be very polite, and in truth we rely a bit too much upon links and commenting on each other’s blogs for it to be any other way.  Sometimes there are differences of opinion, such as Glutter’s recent attack on bloggers who "like to put photos of girls half their age semi-nude up on the net", and her consequent removal of links to certain un-named blogs, but these seem very rare.  I kept out of that controversy, though it seems that in Glutter’s opinion my silence constitutes support for Conrad et al. 

    So I do find it interesting to read opinions on this and other blogs (as long as they are vaguely intelligent, which rules out the idiotic Blogwatch), even if I don’t agree.  Any other comments would be very welcome.

  • Is it safe?

    I recently mentioned one of the latest health scares, over farmed salmon. These type of stories appear regularly, and they intrigue me for a couple of reasons – firstly because you sometimes need to check who is behind the scare stories, and secondly because you can almost guarantee that another study will appear later that will contradict or at least cast doubt on the scare.  Sometimes the counter-argument appears almost immediately, sometimes it takes months or years, probably depending upon whether there is any company or other organization that has a strong interest in the subject, and whether it has an effect on sales of the product(s).

    A couple of the recent scare stories that come to mind:

    • All fried food is carconogenic – no-one quite believed it, and further research established that it was apparently not true.
    • Excessive amounts of vitamin C can be bad for you – the UK government is introducing legislation to stop the sale of large doses.

    Interestingly, the salmon story does not seem to have had any significant effect on sales (in the UK), which suggests either that people are cynical about these scares or that they were already convinced by the research about eating oily fish being good for the heart – or possibly that salmon is cheap these days and people enjoy eating it!

    The Scotsman has followed-up on the salmon story comprehensively, as you would expect given the importance of salmon fishing in Scotland, and is, unsurprisingly, defending the industry. This is not a new story, and Private Eye has been running it for several years.  There was also a BBC documentary on the subject a while back, and the reporter on that programme felt vindicated by the latest study and wrote about it, again in The Scotsman, arguing that he has been vindicated. The ordinary reader is, unfortunately, left confused by the conflicting claims.

    As is often the case. there appears to be a genuine dilemma.  If salmon (and other oily fish) is good for you, how much difference does it make if there is an increased risk of cancer?  By the same token, if Vitamin C is good for you, can you have too much of it?

    Fortunately, The Economist managed to analyze the evidence on salmon and explain why different conclusions are being drawn (mainly because there are several potentially dangerous organochlorines in salmon and some scientists believe all of them cause liver cancer through the same mechanism, whereas others believe they work in different ways). They also point out that wild salmon probably eat the same smaller fish, so ought to be equally contaminated, but the recent study didn’t investigate that issue.

    One benefit of controversies such as this one is that it can have beneficial effects in the longer term, because it should be possible to reduce the levels of organochlorides if it is established that they do present a danger to health. However, as with intensively-reared chickens there will probably always be doubts about farmed fish, which brings us to another interesting question – is cheap food worth the risks that are involved?

  • My Crow Soft

    Strange story from The Guardian about a guy called Mike Rowe who thought the obvious name for his website was Mike Rowe Soft. A very large software company thought that perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea and asked him to hand over the domain name for $10.