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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  • NTSCMP

    The NTSCMP website is getting larger and more confusing every day. Apart from attacks on the SCMP, we have a selection of other columnists (not all of whom can be George Adams) laying into almost anyone and everyone in Hong Kong. It’s good knockabout stuff, though one can’t help wondering whether an ignorance of the libel laws will prove to be an adequate defence if it ever comes to that.

    The content is very variable – some of it is worth reading, but the sneering attitude that runs through everything quickly becomes tiresome. Hemlock, who I assume to be a contributor, does this kind of stuff quite well, but understands that the key is to limit himself to small doses. He can also be quite funny…

    Having got a moderate amount of publicity from Hong Kong bloggers (as a result of Hemlock’s mention of the website resurfacing), George has now (inevitably) decided to go on the attack. He is promising “Blogwatch”, but gets in a pre-emptive strike that gives us a clue about what we can expect:

    Back in 1995, when we staretd up this venture of ours to give the punters some cheap and innocent relief from the SCMP, people wrote things called e-zines. Some of them were sharp and funny. Most have gone the way of all cyberspace. Then, on a fateful day whilst I was off-air, the blog was invented. I quickly caught on with a certain type of Hong Kong coterie who were proud to be gwailo or derivatives of it. Hence some of the web addresses. To say that their material – and there is I think only one exception – sounds inward-looking, puerile and self-conscious is to beggar these terms indeed. What also amazes one is the use of the dynamic, liberating Internet medium to focus on drab words, drab layout and monochrome, non-moving, non-speaking slabs of narcotic blogorrhoea. Then the mediocrity is commented on and dissected as if it were a piece of Voltaire. Readers may have noticed that we do things eactly the other way round to the blog. Words have to be looked for on our opening pages, colours and pictures are up front. As ever, we are streets ahead. Even our enemies have to titter occasionally when they see our photo montage. Long live the Internet. Let’s hope the Mr Pooters of Hong Kong get back to Surbiton or Pittsburgh or wherever they have come from. Push-button publishing? Push off.

    You can certainly say that most blogs have “Drab layout”, but personally I prefer that to the garish mess that is NTSCMP. Words and pictures are apparently arranged randomly on bright yellow pages, and it is not an easy to matter to find what is new. I reckon that if you don’t have much idea of page layout, it’s best to keep it simple and straightforward.

    It’s hardly shock news that blogs are boring – what do you expect when someone decides to write about whatever interests them and stick it on the Internet? Of all people, George ought to understand that!

  • ESF pay cuts

    This is one issue that doesn’t look as if it is going away. According to today’s SCMP:

    English Schools Foundation teachers have voted to withdraw goodwill, including extra-curricular activities, in their fight against a proposed pay cut of up to 10 per cent. Teachers’ representatives held six hours of talks with management this week but failed to agree a compromise, according to David Reeves, chairman of its staff association.

    Results from ballots held in all ESF schools prior to last week’s annual foundation meeting have now been counted. “The ballot was for the withdrawal of good will and not doing lunchtime, after-school activities and all the other sorts of things done in teachers’ own time,” Mr Reeves said.”In some schools it was almost 100 per cent in favour of action, in others fairly near.”

    The teachers are not convinced by the arguments for the pay cut, and are concerned that there will not be an equivalent reduction in the school fees charged to parents. They are also upset that the ESF won’t let them put their case to the parents – who, so far, don’t seem to be supporting the teachers:

    Parents reacted with dismay to teachers’ decision to boycott their children’s extra-curricular activities. Nury Vittachi, chairman of Kennedy School’s Parent Teacher Association, said: “It is the families who will get hurt rather than the paymasters.”

    Nick Bilcliffe, another Kennedy parent, said: “This is ludicrous. It is premature, it is petty, it is not thought through. They are going to lose parental support. Parents will be less tolerant of what they perceive to be a well-paid group of teachers who do not understand the wider economic realities.”

    The problem for the ESF is that they are under pressure from the government to cut costs, and there is a risk that if they are not seen to be taking action then the “subvention” paid by the government could be reduced. In Monday’s SCMP, Jake van der Kamp commented on the results of the study by the Pay Review Body that looked into ESF teachers salaries and which concluded that:

    When considering the comparative data, which included such indicators as contact hours, teacher/student ratios, extra curricular commitments, it became very apparent that the base salaries of ESF teaching staff were at the top of the top quartile, not only when compared to teachers in Hong Kong schools, but worldwide. Furthermore, the margin of differences between the pay levels of ESF teachers and those of other teaching staff within the top quartile was such that the basic pay could be reduced by up to 10 per cent whilst still preserving the ESF’s top position.

    Somewhat provocatively, Jake suggested that if the teachers did not accept the pay cut, then the Secretary for Education and Manpower should reduce the subvention paid by the government to the ESF (which accounts for about 28% of the ESF’s income). In response to this, there’s an interesting letter in today’s SCMP, from Tim Hoffman, Chairman of Island School (an ESF school):

    Three years ago I led a task force to reduce the cost of staff benefits. Following extensive and very useful consultations with the teachers, we implemented a significantly reduced package that saved parents and taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year. The staff welcomed this as equitable, and good for parents, the government and the future of the ESF.

    The current situation is the result of a breakdown in communication and trust between the executive committee and the staff. The data justifying the pay cut has not been adequately explained to the staff, and because that data contains, inevitably, some errors and omissions, it has thrown the validity of the whole process into question.

    This seems to suggest that the problem lies with the ESF management. Perhaps the anger of the teachers is not directly related to the pay cut, but is more to do with their dissatisfaction with the way that the organization is run. A new chief executive is due to be appointed early next year, and it has been suggested that no decisions should be made until that happens. That seems like the best option at this stage.

  • I hate PCs

    There are times when I really wonder about PCs. I am not an expert by any means, but I understand the basics and I’ve even added a few bits and pieces (DVD drive, extra memory and disk, an Ethernet card), yet I still sometimes find myself totally baffled by things that don’t work how they should. Surely the point of the home PC (and consumer software) is that it ought to work with minimum hassle, and not require much technical expertise.

    I have had two recent problems that completely baffled me, but which eventually turned out to be caused by upgrades. The first prevented me from accessing any secure site (https://www…) and stopped my wife from accessing her email through Outlook Express. The second problem caused some content not to be displayed on a few websites, which in a few cases made them useless – for example, bulletin boards where the messages were not visible!

    To be honest, I feel slightly stupid that I didn’t figure out the problems earlier, but then there are people with much less technical knowledge than me who purchase PCs and expect them to work properly. I thought I was doing the right thing – installing the endless fixes from Microsoft and keeping my software up to date – but now it seems that this may have made things worse!

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  • Sat feevee exTV to hit Hong Kong

    The headline is from Variety. exTV is the name of the new Pay-TV venture from Galaxy Satellite Broadcasting, owned by TVB and Intelsat (the government insisted that TVB couldn’t control the venture and had to have a partner, and I think the original partner pulled out). This is from the Hong Kong Standard:

    The service will carry 30 channels at its debut, of which five will be from shareholder TVB. The five will include the 24-hour news channel TVBN, drama channel TVBE and children and family channel TVBQ in addition to two TVB Mandarin language drama and entertainment channels, TVB8 and TVB Xing He.

    Apart from the five TVB channels, exTV will also carry BBC World, CNBC Hong Kong, Hallmark Channel, HBO, E! Entertainment Television, Eurosportnews, Cinemax, Nickelodeon Asia, Blue House and Turner Classic Movies.

    Very imaginative channel names from TVB, I thought. Most of the non-TVB channels are already available in Hong Kong, always assuming that the service is available in your building. I know people who can’t get Cable TV at all, and we still only have their analogue service. No sign of Now Broadband TV here either, in spite of the letter they had published in the SCMP Technology section claiming virtually all residential buildings now have the service. Perhaps the New Territories doesn’t count? There are other players (YesTV etc.) but I am not sure they can be taken seriously.

    However, more competition has to be a good thing, and, assuming that the exclusive deal between CableTV and ESPN/Star is re-negotiated, it should be possible to get any of the channels you want from multiple providers, which must mean it will be cheaper.

    What I really want is something like the SkyPlus box (currently available in the UK), which allows you to record programs from any of the satellite channels on to a hard disk and watch them whenever you want.

  • SARS – panic now whilst stocks last

    The news that a Taiwanese military researcher managed to infect himself with SARS has caused alarm in Hong Kong, and I am sure that sales of masks will have been given a boost. The SCMP was calm and rational, devoting most of page one and all of page three to the story. They had a typically pointless picture (“passengers at Chek Lap Kok fill out health declarations yesterday”) and a panel about “Hong Kong’s contingency plan”. You will be very re-assured to hear that if we reach ‘Level 2’, the Chief Executive will take charge. That should do the trick.

    On Wednesday, Hong Kong issued a SARS alert at the lowest-level (as you do, when a Taiwanese researcher who has not been anywhere near Hong Kong falls ill). So what headlines do we find in newspapers around the world? Well, there was “SARS case alert in Hong Kong” in the New Zealand Herald, which might give the casual reader the impression that there was a case in Hong Kong.

    The rearcher in Taiwan has obviously been very stupid, not only by failing to take properly precautions, but then travelling to Singapore, and when he knew he was infected he delayed going to hospital because he “didn’t want to bring shame on Taiwan”. Unbelievable! During the SARS outbreak earlier this year, one thing that particularly annoyed me was the ban that Taiwan placed on Hong Kong people travelling there. Not because I had any wish to go there, but because this type of hysterical reaction made things so much worse.

    We had a brief holiday in Australia during the SARS outbreak, and it was quite frightening to see how empty Chep Lap Kok was, and how few passengers were on the plane. Then when we got there, the customs official checking our bags for illicit food products got scared because my son sneezed twice, and we had to wait nearly an hour for someone to take his temperature. In the local newspaper there was a story about a woman who had gone to Paris on Cathay Pacific, and was expecting them to get her back to Australia without a stopover in Hong Kong! The problem was less SARS itself than the paranoia and over-reaction that followed. If SARS does come back, I hope that we see a bit more common sense being employed.

  • Hong Kong IPOs

    The China Life IPO has been quite entertaining. First we had the spectacle of grannies and taxi drivers queuing up to invest their life savings (or HK$1m borrowed from their broker), obviously unaware of the fact that they were very unlikely to get more than HK$10,000 worth of shares allocated to them. Then we had the fiasco of the allocations being listed incorrectly in the official announcement, forcing the company to issue a correction (more advertising revenue for the SCMP) and making some people look a bit foolish.

    However, there is a more serious side to this, as Jake van der Kamp pointed out on Wednesday. People in Hong Kong have lots of money stashed away and don’t know what to do with it. When the property market finally stabilises, I believe that a lot of that cash will head in that direction and we will see a definite bounce in prices. In the meantime, one obvious destination for this cash is the IPOs of large China companies. Which would be fine if these companies had good long-term prospects, but in fact they are usually large (previously state-run) enterprises who are likely to face stiff competition from smaller, more nimble, businesses with lower cost bases. It’s perhaps understandable that Americans should fall for this trick, but Hong Kong people really ought to know better!

  • A fool and his money

    Hong Kong has a few supermarkets that are aimed squarely at the expat community – Citysuper (in Times Square, Harbour City and IFC 2), Great (in Pacific Place), and Olivers (in the Princes building).

    The majority of the customers are gweilos (Brits, Australians, Americans, Canadians, Europeans) and Japanese, and the shops tend to have different ranges for the two groups – my comments are mainly about “gweilo food”. I have very mixed feelings about them – on the one hand it’s great to be able to buy things that are otherwise unavailable, but on the other hand the prices are very scary.

    I don’t visit these shops very often, mainly because, when I do, I end up walking around picking things up, and then putting them down when I see the price. Then I tell myself that I am being stupid and I should just pay the money and not worry about it.

    The first time I went in to citysuper I remember seeing some yoghurts and thinking that the price looked quite reasonable, until I discovered that they charged that price (HK$14 or thereabouts) for each single pot, not for the pack of four!! This is for an ordinary yoghurt that is available in supermarkets in France for a fraction of that price.

    I don’t mind paying a modest premium for imported products, but I do object to paying a high price for run-of-the-mill products. Assuming that it is the cost of shipping that makes these products expensive, but that is a fixed cost regardless of whether it is a cheap or an expensive product, so why not import the good stuff? If you go to Harvey Nichols food hall you pay high prices, but the quality is also very high. Here it sometimes seems that we are paying Harvey Nichols prices for Tesco products!

    For example, the cheese counter has some fairly ordinary cheeses at extraordinary prices. I wouldn’t mind paying for really good cheese, but this is mainly mass-produced stuff! I did find some decent Cheddar in Great, but typically they didn’t label it with the name of the producer – it just said “cloth bound Cheddar”. On the other hand, I bought some Stilton a while back that was very poor

    The selection of meat in most ‘ordinary’ supermarkets in Hong Kong is not very impressive (though my local Wellcome does sell fresh New Zealand lamb). Unfortunately the prices in the expat supermarkets are quite high, and a lot of the meat has previously been frozen.

    Fruit and vegetables in the expat supermarkets are also expensive, but again the quality is variable. I sometimes look in total disbelief at the prices they are charging for very ordinary produce!

    Sometimes they do get it right – Great sell a range of fresh sausages from Waitrose (an upmarket supermarket in the UK) for just under HK$50 per pack. I’m guessing that they sell for £3 or thereabouts in the UK, which is HK40 at today’s exchange rate (and so I think they’ll increasing the prices if the rate stays the same for much longer).

    Going off at a tangent, I noticed a poster advertising Beaujolais Nouveau when I was in Great this week. This really is a triumph of marketing, and whoever it was who thought of promoting the stuff all over the world deserves to be very rich. Beaujolais Nouveau is very immature wine that is fermented rapidly, and so does not develop the characteristic depth of flavour and tannins that are normally found in red wines. In a good year it is clean and fruity, but in a bad year it tastes of almost nothing!

    Around 1985, some of the wine producers started promoting it by organizing a race to get the first bottles to London. It was a huge success, and for a few weeks in late November and early December it became the perfect excuse for going to a wine bar. A few years later I worked for a company that had drinking as a very strong part of the culture, and we didn’t need much of an excuse anyway, but we had a few Beaujolais Nouveau nights!

  • Asia Weblog Awards

    Phil is now starting to remove dodgy votes. The effect on some of the runners has been dramatic, and I can’t say I’m totally surprised. I have been very suspicious about some of the vote counts (I’m not going to name anyone here) and the figures now look a bit more reasonable.

    Phil has created a small piece of code that will allow any blog to tell its readers how many votes are required to win a particular category. I looked at mine (120 votes to win the Best Hong Kong blog) and decided that I could quite easily resist the temptation to add that to my site, but amusingly someone else with an equally pathetic number of votes did post it on their own site. If I knew what post-ironic meant, I might suggest that was an example of it.

    There was another brief mention of the awards in the Technology section of the SCMP, picking up on the somewhat bizarre controversy about the difference between blogs in and about Asia and blogs written by Asians. I suppose it’s all good publicity, but I really do wonder about the people who pick arguments on these things rather than being constructive. Phil has put a lot of effort into running these awards, and no-one else had taken the initiative to do it, so basically he gets to set the rules. I am sure he is open to suggestions for improving it next time, but let’s be sensible about this.

  • TVB public service blurring

    I was watching the first part of the documentary series about Soong Mei-Ling (Madame Chiang Kai-Shek) on TVB Pearl. One of the talking heads was Hao Po-tsun, and the caption informed us that he was Premier of ##### 1990-93. Someone from TVB had diligently blocked out this politically incorrect description. Marvellous.

    The program also described Soong Mei-Ling as being legendary in three centuries. This is stretching things somewhat – she was on a toddler at the start of the 20th Century, so she couldn’t really have been legendary!

    In Monday’s Guardian (in an article about a proposed tunnel between Spain and Morocco), I found this rather surprising piece of information:

    There are also proposals for a tunnel to link China and Taiwan, which would stretch at least 78 miles.

    Considering the reluctance of the Taiwan government to allow direct air links, how likely is it that they would build a road tunnel to the mainland? Wouldn’t it be rather an ambitious project?

  • Christmas past and present

    It’s funny how Christmas means different things at different stages in your life. My son is now old enough to understand Christmas, and at the weekend we bought him a Christmas tree (in response to frequent requests over the last few days) and he had great fun decorating it. I realized that this is the first time that I have had a Christmas tree at home for a very long time!

    For many years, as far as I was concerned, Christmas was not much more than an excuse for more drinking and less work, and the day itself was quite boring (though at least I did spend it with my family rather than on my own). Then when my brothers and my sister started having children it took on a new meaning, as I was able to enjoy the day with my nieces and nephews and share their excitement. Rather than feeling disappointed that my relatives had given me a book I didn’t really want, I could see how happy the children were with what they had been given.

    Then I moved to Hong Kong, away from my family and discovered that life carried on very much as normal over the Christmas period. I was amazed to find that shops were open as normal. One year we even moved apartments on Boxing Day, something that would be impossible in the UK. No Christmas presents, and basically just another public holiday. Now, for me, things have changed again as my son is old enough to get excited about Christmas.

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