Ordinary Gweilo

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

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  • Pierce Lam (again)

    I know I’m very late on this, and in fact I can no longer find this letter on the splendid SCMP website so I have resorted to copying it from Spike’s blog (Breaking News: Pierce Lam Still Hates White People)

    The American Chamber of Commerce claims that Hong Kong’s status as a “world class” city depends on its meeting the demand from expatriates for international school places (“AmCham warns of schools ‘crisis’”, December 5).

    This assertion is misleading, tendentious and absurd. It misleads with the weasel words “world class”, which refer to various qualities of questionable desirability.  If international school places were a measure of a city’s world-class status, Hong Kong is undoubtedly No1 among world-class cities.

    There are much more public resources for a much greater variety of foreign schools with a much larger number of international school places in Hong Kong than the combined offers of New York City and Geneva, where the United Nations’ headquarters are located. But New York and Geneva are world-class cities in their own right, with local institutions that command foreigners’ respect.

    In Hong Kong, our universities are world-class, and our pre-college pupils are famous for their outstanding performance in international scholastic assessments. But the city’s expatriates shun local education for their children and show no respect for local institutions.

    As has been pointed out many times, it’s actually the case that local schools shun expatriates.  Even if parents would like their children to attend local schools they find that they are not welcome.  There is no incentive for local schools to welcome families who don’t speak Chinese and they find it much easier to deal with local families. 

    They have no qualms making what is absurd sound serious, alleging that the city’s international standing depends on their presence so it had better invest more public resources to satisfy their children’s need for privileged education in effectively segregated “international” schools.

    Again, this is nonsense.  Local schools are far more segregated than ESF schools, several of which have large majorities of local Cantonese-speaking students.  Other international schools are also very popular with local parents, who feel that they offer a better education than local schools. 

    Ironically, the demand of this community of privileged minorities for unfair advantages is blindly and forcefully promoted by the city’s self-styled democrats, who supposedly should represent the majority’s interest and fight for equality.

    As Alex Lo observes, there is neither economic nor moral justification for granting public resources to expat children’s international schools (“No place for apartheid in our schools”, December 3). That’s why the city’s foreign residents have to resort to the silly idea of world-class status, which they claim is what Hong Kong should pursue.

    Expatriates who have come for economic reasons should thank the city for the opportunities available here and learn to engage in fair competition with the indigenous majority. They must learn to respect local institutions and not to expect the unrealistic privileges of the bygone colonial era.

    Pierce Lam, Central

    The last paragraph strikes me as the most absurd.  Not all expats are here “for economic reasons”, and all that the American Chamber of Commerce is asking  is for the government to allocate land for international schools – which will then (almost certainly) be overwhelmed with applications from local parents. 

    Alex Lo was arguing that the government should focus its efforts on local schools to make them a more attractive option both for local parents (who currently choose ESF & International schools) and non-Chinese speakers.  But Pierce Lam is reluctant to admit that there is anything wrong with local schools, and therefore tries to argue that it’s those pesky foreigners who are being difficult.

  • British passports – slower and less convenient

    Having finally caught up with the story about changes to the way British passports are being issued, the SCMP are not letting go.

    Local jobs to go as Britain closes passport operation

    Keith Wallis
    Dec 07, 2011

    Up to 24 staff working at the British consulate in Hong Kong will be made redundant when all passport operations move back to Britain in a revamp of how passports are handled.  They are among 166 people working in the seven regional passport processing centres around the world, who are likely to lose their jobs when the centres close.

    No date for the redundancies has been announced, but Britain’s Identity & Passport Service is aiming to have all applications handled in Britain by 2014.

    Jo McPhail, head of the overseas passport management unit at Britain’s Foreign Office, said: "The centres will close and most will lose their jobs. Almost all are locally employed staff." During a visit to Hong Kong last week, she said people were fully aware they would face the sack. "We have been honest with them," McPhail said, adding people would be "treated fairly" and helped with future employment.

    Those affected are involved in checking and verifying applications for new and replacement passports and sending documents to Britain.

    Since August, new British passports have been issued in Britain and sent to Hong Kong by courier, although applications can still be made in person at the consulate. Because passports are cancelled as soon as the new application is made, and new passports can take up to four weeks to arrive, the change – highlighted by the Sunday Morning Post – is leaving British citizens marooned in Hong Kong.

    Well, yes, but this change was introduced early last year.  The dozy journalists appear to have become aware of the story by reading a letter in their own paper last Monday:

    Renewing UK passport a costly chore

    Beware the new and improved efficient passport renewal process at the British consulate.

    Expect to spend about two hours waiting to be told that your photographs are rejected (two teeth showing in my case), renewal will take four weeks (it used to be one week), and the cost, at GBP200 (HK$2,420), is more than double the previous price.

    The good news is that if you have to travel during the processing period, you can obtain an emergency travel document valid for one trip only and costing GBP100 each time. Of course, you are again required to queue up for this privilege and not earlier than one day before you need to travel.

    This system is inefficient and not user-friendly.

    Bryan Carter, Pok Fu Lam

    On Sunday came this:

    Danger of hold-ups on British passports

    Thousands may be left in limbo after rule changes on renewals mean applicants are waiting up to four weeks, prompting calls for ‘express service’ in HK

    Keith Wallis
    Dec 04, 2011

    Thousands of British passport holders in Hong Kong and on the mainland face being marooned because of little-known changes in renewal procedures.  Regulations introduced last August mean that the applications are dealt with in Hong Kong but the passports are issued from Britain.

    Little known?  Maybe to SCMP newshounds.  And some of the change came in long before August.

    Previous passports are cancelled as soon as the person applies for renewal, and the new passports are taking up to four weeks to arrive.

    That means business people across Asia can be stranded and unable to travel while they wait.

    One Hong Kong businessman was forced to spend HK$15,000 travelling to London to renew his passport or risk losing key deals in China and India because the Hong Kong processing centre could not guarantee the new passport would arrive before he travelled.

    The regulations are also severely affecting British passport holders who commute between Hong Kong and the mainland on an almost daily basis. They have to renew their 10-year passports as often as every 10 months because they are full.

    Officials in London say the move was prompted by security concerns and the need to save money.

    Maybe more of the latter than the former.

  • A colonial legacy?

    In today’s ESF, Alex Lo provides a reasonable summary of the issues but seems to have missed the point.

    No easy options for the ESF dilemma

    MY TAKE
    Alex Lo
    Nov 26, 2011

    Negotiations between the government and the English Schools Foundation are going nowhere. The government wants to let go of the ESF, if not now then eventually. The ESF, however, wants to stay with increased public funding.

    Either outcome is acceptable. In the first case, ESF institutions would become fully-fledged independent international schools. In the second, they would come under the government's direct subsidy scheme, much like many elite local schools, which enjoy a good deal of autonomy but not full independence.

    The ESF will prosper one way or another. Of course, as at international schools, families who cannot afford non-subsidised fees will be forced out, but these places will be filled given the demand for such school places.

    What is not tenable, however, is the status quo. ESF schools currently receive public funding well below what is given, on average, to schools under the direct subsidy scheme. This means the ESF has had to raise fees regularly, antagonising parents in the process. Despite the current subsidy, ESF fees are approaching those of some international schools. Without adequate funding, the foundation cannot properly budget for future expansion and development.

    But it is difficult for the government to justify increased funding for the ESF – widely regarded as a colonial legacy – if the foundation continues giving admission priority to non-Chinese speaking families. Unfortunately, few local schools have the facilities to accept non-Chinese speaking students, so schools such as the ESF's are essential for the expatriate community.

    A rational and humane solution is for more local schools to develop the capability to take foreign students. The ESF could then drop preferential admissions in exchange for higher funding. But this calls for long-term commitment, and the government may instead be tempted to take the easier way out and let the ESF go.

    Well, yes, but what is the chance of the government adopting this “rational and humane solution”?  The reason that the ESF was established was because the government wanted another body to run its English schools.   For the next 30 years the ESF received the same funding as government schools, but since the handover this has been steadily reduced and now stands at about half of what it used to be (in real terms).  So any new solution will cost the government more than they spend today on the ESF subvention.

    I don’t see why it is “difficult for the government to justify increased funding for the ESF .. if the foundation continues giving admission priority to non-Chinese speaking families”.  Isn’t what it was set up to do?  Ah, but it’s “widely regarded as a colonial legacy”.  There’s the problem. 

  • Online madness

    Interesting article in the Guardian about the high prices for downloading movies. 

    Movie fans turn to piracy when the online cupboard is bare

    Downloaded movie prices are about 30% to 50% higher than buying an actual DVD. That's if you can find the film online

    Ask anyone who's studied copyright policy – scholars of music and literature, economists, sociologists, law professors – and they'll tell you that the No 1 problem with copyright is that it is enacted without recourse to evidence.

    Professor Ian Hargreaves, the latest eminent scholar commissioned by government to review Britain's copyright policy, lamented that his advice echoed many of his predecessors', none of which had been heeded.

    Policymakers are unabashed about the lack of evidence in copyright policy — the EC's 2011 Single Market for Intellectual Property Rights report declares "The case does not need to be made anymore: IPR in their different forms and shapes are key assets of the EU economy." Of course, "the case does not need to be made" is another way of saying, "the case has not been made".

    [..]

    The UK Open Rights Group (disclosure: I co-founded this group and serve as a volunteer on its advisory board) recently contributed some more evidence to the debate – and its very timely indeed.

    ORG and partner Consumer Focus undertook some empirical research on the state of the lawful market for downloadable movies in the UK. This is important because whenever our government or courts undertake to increase penalties for copyright violations – measures such as our nascent national censorship regime for sites that offend the entertainment industry – it is always with a kind of sad head-shake and the lament that despite the healthy, burgeoning lawful market for downloadable material, stubborn pirates continue to take copyrighted works without permission.

    ORG's study Can't look now: finding film online investigated the lawful availability of downloads for "recent bestsellers and catalogues of critically acclaimed films, including the top 50 British films" and what they found was that the claims of the lawful market for movies are as evidence-free as the piracy claims they accompany.

    Here's what ORG found: though close to 100% of their sample were available as DVDs, more than half of the top 50 UK films of all time were not available as downloads. The numbers are only slightly better for Bafta winners: just 58% of Bafta best film winners since 1960 can be bought or rented as digital downloads (the bulk of these are through iTunes – take away the iTunes marketplace, which isn't available unless you use Mac or Windows, and only 27% of the Bafta winners can be had legally).

    And while recent blockbusters fare better, it's still a patchwork, requiring the public to open accounts with several services to access the whole catalogue (which still has many important omissions).

    But even in those marketplaces, movies are a bad deal – movie prices are about 30% to 50% higher when downloaded over the internet versus buying the same movies on DVDs. Some entertainment industry insiders argue that DVDs, boxes and so forth add negligible expense to their bottom line, but it's hard to see how movie could cost less on physical DVDs than as ethereal bits, unless the explanation is price-gouging. To add insult to injury, the high-priced online versions are often sold at lower resolutions than the same movies on cheap DVDs.

    I have previously complained about the absurd prices of many books on the Kindle and the price of music downloads, but apparently it costs Apple a lot of money to store the file online and deliver it to me.  Perhaps the same explanation applies here – though I am still not totally convinced…

  • ESF vs EDB round 27

    The negotiations over the future of the ESF continue, but there seems to be some progress: 

    Deadlock over future ESF subsidies

    Rather than losing government funds, foundation wants amounts matching Direct Subsidy Scheme

    Dennis Chong
    Nov 23, 2011

    Negotiations between the English Schools Foundation and the government over whether ESF schools should continue to receive government funding are deadlocked, with the clock ticking on an earlier goal of finalising reform details by the end of this year.

    The government is considering whether funding should cease in the long term, while the ESF wants an increase to a level equal to the subsidies received by Direct Subsidy Scheme schools in the government system. The government has yet to set out conditions for the funding to stay and the two sides have yet to reach agreement on how schools should be better regulated if it does remain, ESF officials say. The uncertainty may hamper drafting of a plan for development of the foundation's schools for the next three years.

    "We will continue our discussions with [the Education Bureau] and negotiate for a sustainable and recurrent subvention," ESF chief executive Heather Du Quesnay, who has strongly objected to removal of the subsidies, said yesterday.  Du Quesnay said that instead of accepting the loss of the government money, the school operator was demanding an increase to a level on a par with schools under the Direct Subsidy Scheme – now about double the amount received by the ESF.

    She said the foundation was willing to accept more monitoring and supervision if its own control over curriculum and the pay, recruitment and professional development of staff could be maintained. In this academic year, DSS schools receive HK$35,200 for each primary pupil and HK$43,890 for each secondary pupil. The ESF got HK$17,757 and HK$23,659 respectively, an ESF spokeswoman said.

    In a letter received by parents this week, Du Quesnay wrote that the board had been at pains to put forward its case to retain and increase the subsidy.

    Earlier this year, the government proposed reviewing the future of ESF schools, raising the possibility that the foundation should ultimately become self-financing. This poses questions on how the city will be able to maintain adequate opportunities for non-Chinese-speaking pupils, who now go to ESF schools, to receive a quality education.

    The authorities also proposed in July that under planned reform, ESF schools would have to sign time-definite service agreements with the government in order to improve accountability. The government said this should take place in the next academic year.

    Du Quesnay said yesterday that the ESF was willing to sign service agreements setting out programmes of activities and financial monitoring arrangements. The Education Bureau declined to comment.

    I have never fully understood why the ESF couldn’t be part of the DSS scheme.  It seems like the obvious answer to the problem, but it would require some changes to the DSS scheme given that the ESF gives priority to students who are not Cantonese speakers.  Given that the whole point of the ESF is to fill that gap in the local school system, you’d think that the government would be able to do that.

  • Letter of the week

    They must be desperate at the SCMP to publish letters like this. 

    Serious implications for schools

    Alex Lo demonstrates an inability to handle the intrusion into management of religious schools ("God-awful fears freeze school reform", November 8).

    Without a firm foundation, he assumes the high ground in the conflict between religious schools and their forced compliance with a dramatic shift in the structure of their governing bodies.

    Lo proposes that religious schools would despair of teaching Darwin as if Darwin’s theories have no flaws. Lo suggests that Mao Zedong is not taught in these schools, a dictator who was responsible for millions of deaths.

    I think we’re starting to get an idea where you’re coming from…

    At the very least, there will be more conflict on religious school governing boards, with clashes over values and principles.

    Will we see some non-Christian members wanting to see a very liberal view of sex education put on the curriculum? Other new board members might wish to have abortion taught as a value. Some could debate that the Ten Commandments or similar basic texts are a waste of time.

    Abortion taught as a value?  Really?  Is that common in non-faith schools?

    I am sorry that people want to water down religious schools and say this is fair, for this introduces a skewed value system.

    A what?

    Everyone chooses some god or belief, but forcing people who have adopted one standard to bow down to any system at all is discriminatory. Evidently this has been lost on many people.

    Rosa Chan, Lai Chi Kok

    (more…)

  • Don’t drink the water

    Dilbert – 27 October 2011

    Dilbert.com

    Today’s news

    Japan MP Yasuhiro Sonoda drinks Fukushima water

    A Japanese official has drunk water collected from the quake-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, after reporters challenged him to prove it was safe.

    Yasuhiro Sonoda appeared nervous and his hands shook as he downed a glass during a televised news conference.

    The water he drank was taken from puddles under two reactor buildings. It is decontaminated before being used for tasks such as watering plants.

    Journalists have repeatedly queried the safety of the procedure.

    Mr Sonoda, who serves as the cabinet office’s parliamentary spokesman, told the news conference: "Just drinking [decontaminated water] doesn’t mean safety has been confirmed. Presenting data to the public is the best way."

  • Long overdue

    I finally got round to cleaning up the links in Hong Kong and Asia blogs. I've removed all broken links and any blogs with no recent postings. It's possible that I may have missed one or two that have moved to new places, so feel free to let me know if that is the case.

    I'm happy to add new links.

    Next question is whether anyone actually visits this website or whether RSS readers have completely taken over.

  • Banyan

    Tropical storm Banyan is heading for Hong Kong….it’s heading to Vietnam…oh no, it isn’t…and now it’s a low pressure area.

    imageimageimage

  • Amazon wants to buy The Book Depository

    The Book Depository is a UK-based website that offers a decent alternative to Amazon for international customers.  Anyone who has ordered books from Amazon will know that international delivery charges are prohibitive, with the possible exception of expensive books that are reduced by 50% (or more).  The Book Depository don’t charge extra for delivery, and although they do charge customers outside the UK more, their prices are still normally quite reasonable (typically a discount of around 10% on cover prices), especially compared to the 20% markup that usually applies in Hong Kong.

    The question is whether that will change if Amazon are allowed to acquire The Book Depository.  They made an offer, which has been accepted by the company, but it has been referred to the Office of Fair Trading.

    From The Bookseller:

    The Office of Fair Trading has said it now expects to announce its decision on the Amazon takeover of The Book Depository by late October.

    On a notice posted on its website this morning (19th September), the OFT said the expected decision date on the merger is 24th October. The decision was originally due on 2nd September. An OFT spokesman gave no specific reason for the delay but added: "In general it can be because some cases are more complex than others, some require more information from the parties or the OFT needs time to analyse the data . . . No inference should be made about the likely outcome of the case."

    Amazon announced the deal with The Book Depository in July. The Booksellers and Publishers Associations, the Independent Publishers Guild and the Bookseller Group all oppose the merger.

    Given that company appears to be doing well (Book Depository's sales rise 20%) and Amazon is already so dominant, one might think that there would be grounds for blocking the deal on competition grounds.

    If it does go through, will Book Depository continue to operate independently and offer a better deal to overseas customers than Amazon?  I guess we just have to wait to find out.

    UPDATE: OFT clears Amazon acquisition of the Book Depository

    UPDATE 2: Amazon closes down Book Depository