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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  • Not what I was expecting, but…

    About six months ago I was hoping that the the problems in Thailand would get resolved peacefully.  It now rather looks as if they will be, but only because the military have staged a coup and ousted Thaksin Shinawatra, the democratically elected prime minister.  Which wasn’t really what I had in mind as an ideal outcome.  And yet…

    One of the problems with democracy is that sometimes the voters pick the wrong person.  You have to wonder what possessed the the British Conservative Party to choose first William Hague and then Ian Duncan-Smith as the leader of their party.  That would never have happened in the old days when the party grandees would rouse themselves from their comfortable chairs and choose a “suitable” person to take on the job.  It goes without saying that they wouldn’t have chosen David Cameron (or at least not just yet).

    The Thai people chose Thaksin because he seemed to offer a change from the past.  When he proved to be no different from most of his predecessors, he should have lost the next election and disappeared from public life.  Indeed, if the voters of Bangkok had their way, then that is exactly what would have happened, but Thaksin remained extremely popular with the electorate in the rest of the country.  As far as they were concerned, he had made a promise to help them and he hadn’t let them down, so they were happy to vote for him.  In a democracy, the majority prevail over the minority, and the majority of people in Thailand live in rural areas. 

    Thaksin could probably have remained in power, but he really pushed his luck by ignoring the King’s opinions and also trying to put his own people in to run the military.  He must have know that this was a high-risk strategy, and hardly a wise thing for an unpopular leader to do, especially so soon after the fuss about the way that he had avoided paying tax on the sales of his company.  Winning an election does not mean that you can do whatever you want  

    Nevertheless, I’m sure there are scores (if not hundreds) of leaders in newspapers around the world today expressing grave concerns about the way that democracy has been undermined in Thailand.  Well, yes, but I suspect that history will judge that Thaksin did rather more to damage to democracy in Thailand than Tuesday’s coup.

    So whilst I feel uneasy about Thaksin being deposed by a military coup, and by the King’s role in all of this, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that a new civilian government and a revised constitution could very well be the best outcome.

  • Now That Should Create More Publicity

    An email from George Adams is a rare treat, especially when he manages not to be offensive.

    His reason for contacting me was that his website is apparently not available to anyone who has Netvigator as their ISP, and he felt that I might be outraged by this.

    Well, up to a point, Dr Adams. If you have a long memory, you may recall that a while back there was great celebration over at George’s website because some blogs were being banned in China. This was hailed as a public service since all blogs are trivial, dreary things that serve no useful purpose.

    So unlike George’s website, which has lots of *important stuff*. Like, er, amusing photographs, pictures of George’s girlfriend, tales of how much weight George has lost, whinges about how his part of Hong Kong has been spoiled by this or that development, jokes about Gweilos and their Asian girlfriends (irony alert) and even more amusing photographs.

    George thinks that he has upset Li Ka-Shing, a theory that has been bolstered by news that HGC are also "blocking" his website (Hutchison Global Crossing is part of Li’s empire, whilst Netvigator is owned by his son). I love conspiracy theories (especially when they are set forth on websites that use large fonts and brightly coloured backgrounds) so I do hope that there isn’t a simple explanation for all this.

    Update: I have just noticed that both Sun Gai Gweilo and BWG mentioned this yesterday.  Randall at BWG seems to think that there is a problem somewhere other than in Hong Kong that is preventing access to George’s website. 

  • The same old rubbish?

    The BBC is to replace BBC Sub-Prime with a new channel, BBC Entertainment.  It’s not at all clear what this might mean (after all, BBC Prime is already supposed to an entertainment channel) but I suppose we can hope for fewer old sitcoms starring Geoffey Palmer and something more modern instead. 

    The BBC will also offer three other channels, BBC Knowledge and BBC Lifestyle and CBeebies but it is not clear when (or if) they will be available in Hong Kong: 

    • BBC Knowledge was once a digital television channel in the UK "dedicated to the very best cultural and factual programming", but it was replaced by BBC Four.
    • BBC Lifestyle sounds as if it will be the lighter factual stuff such as cooking, gardening, travel, antiques and the like.
    • CBeebies is a children’s channel (hey – more Teletubbies!!)

    I suppose the decision the BBC have to make is whether to sell programmes to foreign broadcasters or put them out on their own channels.  Currently, TVB Pearl, ATV World (and sometimes even Star World) have BBC programmes scattered randomly across their schedule (ATV are currently showing Dr Who, for example).  Don’t suppose that brings in much money, though.  Do subscriptions to BBC Prime bring in more, though?  Possibly not, which is why BBC Prime usually has old or obscure stuff.

    I don’t watch BBC Prime very much, but I caught some of it on Friday night.  They were showing a strange black comedy called Spine Chillers that was apparently first broadcast on BBC Three 3 years ago (see – old and obscure).  At the start there appeared to be an ‘M’ (mature) certificate, but they still bleeped out all the bad language.  Ridiculous.

  • On a roll

    Sometimes it seems that Jake van der Kamp struggles to find things to write about in his daily SCMP column – you may recall that he was famously caught out by an April Fool joke earlier this year.

    However, he has really got stuck into the debate on GST.  Unfortunately you need a paid subcription to read these articles, but they are worth some of your time if you do:

    Great taskmaster Tang fails to do his homework on needless GST (which I wrote about here)

    Make your own case properly before preaching to us, Mr Tsang

    And how can you be so certain that GST is the right thing for us when most people seem to think it is the wrong thing? If your knowledge is so superior to ours, why bother with a public consultation on GST at all? You should disdain our faulty understanding in that case, as your financial secretary does.

    "Evasion is never a way out."

    Glad you recognise it, Sir. Here are some points not to evade then. 1) GST would not significantly reduce the volatility of government revenues. 2) We have a wide fiscal revenue base that you can call narrow only by ignoring significant sources of revenue. 3) We have plenty of savings to cover deficits in bad years. 4) We now have accruals accounting to show us that our past deficit – we are well into surplus at present – was never that bad anyway.

    Don’t listen to Henry, we’re rolling in reserves and should use them

    "The fiscal reserve totals about HK$300 billion, but the finance chief [Henry Tang Ying-yen] said: `We used HK$190 billion from the reserves to survive the last recession. When the next economic cycle comes, the total deficit we face could be much bigger than HK$190 billion. We do not have much left to keep us afloat’."    SCMP, September 9

    [..]

    What we are left with after taking out amounts owed to others is two items. The first is HK$312 billion in government placements, which, I assume, is the figure Henry refers to.

    Then there is HK$468 billion in accumulated surplus. This is ours. The government is the sole owner of the Exchange Fund.

    Put the two together and you get HK$780 billion in savings. So it is just not true, Henry, that "we do not have much left to keep us afloat". We have plenty.

    I am waiting for the government to respond.

    [Update: all links seem to be broken.  The SCMP appear to be messing around with their site.]

  • You have been warned

    As you may have noticed, I have a strange fascination with Hong Kong’s bewildering array of weather warnings. 

    Yesterday we had a typhoon pass by Hong Kong.  Although it’s initial track was towards Hong Kong, it then turned west and was always heading away from here.  The no.1 (standby) signal was raised on Tuesday afternoon, and that should have been the end of it.  However, the Observatory issued the no.3 (strong wind) signal yesterday morning, followed by all the other warnings they could think of (Torrential rain causes widespread flooding): 

    Between 11.45am and 12.15pm, the landslip, thunderstorm and red rainstorm warnings were all issued alongside the No 3 signal. The Observatory said this had never happened before. The previous record was set in 1999 when a landslip and rainstorm warning was issued alongside a typhoon signal, an Observatory spokesman said.

    The No 3 signal was raised for four hours, from 10.35am to 2.40pm. The only time it was raised for less than that, without a No 8 signal being raised, was on July 1, 1966, when it went up for one hour.

    An Observatory spokesman said that although a tropical cyclone brought heavy rain, the winds were not particularly strong, but a sudden change in wind direction justified the decision to raise the No 1 signal to a No 3 signal.

    "The tropical depression was edging west-northwest, but it changed direction to northwest. That meant that Hong Kong would be affected as winds would be east to south easterly," scientific officer Tam Cheuk-ming said.

    The winds were not particularly strong, but they thought they would raise the "Strong Wind" signal.  Good thinking, that man.

  • More hot air

    Al Gore is in Hong Kong to promote his film An Inconvenient Truth, and to mark this occasion, the SCMP published a sceptical piece on global warming [all SCMP links require a subscription] by Bjorn Lomborg.

    I have Lomberg’s original book The Skeptical Environmentalist and I think he puts forward some interesting ideas.  I have also read countless magazine articles on the subject (The Economist has a survey entitled The heat is on this week, and there is extensive coverage in New Scientist).

    However, we don’t really know whether global warming is going to continue, what (if anything) we can do about it, or what impact it will have. 

    It doesn’t help that there are shrill voices on both sides, arguing either that we need to take drastic action or that we should do nothing.  In the latter camp, you won’t be surprised to hear, is our old friend Simon Patkin, and he’s back in the SCMP letter column: 

    As Al Gore comes to Hong Kong to rewrite reality and morality with his movie An Inconvenient Truth, one of his mantras will be that there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is man-made. Of course, Mr Gore has also declared that he is responsible for the internet, and questioned whether ancient trees should be cut down to produce a life-saving drug for women with ovarian cancer.

    Mr Gore ignores the more than 17,000 scientists who signed a petition declaring that global warming is not caused by man and that the Kyoto Protocol would cause severe economic hardship. These include Robert Carter of Australia’s James Cook University, who has said: “[Mr] Gore’s circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention.”

    This would be the Robert Carter who works in the oil industry?  

    Dr Robert Carter really is a well known oil industry stooge: :::[Global warming denial funded by ExxonMobil]. He is a geologist, paid to find oil and coal, so how can you believe his impartiality?

    In today’s SCMP, Richard Fielding responds to Simon Patkin’s claim that 17,000 scientists had signed the petition:

    Letter writer Simon Patkin accuses former US vice-president Al Gore of ignoring a 1990s petition denying global warming is man-made (“An inconvenient truth – however you look at it”, September 12). The signatories – 17,000 right-wing politicians, businessmen, entertainment stars and a few academics – were hardly scientists, as he claims. The petition is part of a sustained campaign sponsored by the energy industries to deny global warming.

    Big tobacco companies generously funded obscure researchers to question links between cigarettes and disease, and along with economic shroud-waving, delayed tobacco control for decades. The energy industries follow suit, use the same public-relations agencies to mobilise tens of thousands of “citizens” to oppose any threat to their interests, buy political influence and even air TV adverts that wrongly claim carbon dioxide levels are actually falling (read Sharon Beder’s Global Spin).

    I think that it’s entirely possible that at some time in the future people will look back at the arguments about global warming and wonder why it was such a controversial subject.  The question is whether they will wondering why we were worrying about it, or why we failed to do anything about it before it was too late.  Surely common sense dictates that we should take the problem seriously and do something about it, but it doesn’t have to be the scary things that some people seem to fear.  From The Economist’s survey (Where to start  – susbcription required): 

    But there is no silver bullet. If an answer is to be found, it lies in using a combination of economics and a broad range of technologies.

    Robert Socolow, an economist at Princeton University, offers an encouraging way of thinking about this. His “stabilisation wedges”  show how different ways of cutting emissions can be used incrementally to lower the trajectory from a steep and frightening path towards a horizontal one that stabilises emissions at their current level.

    One wedge might be carbon sequestration (storing carbon dioxide underground or below the oceans) to deal with emissions from coal-fired power plants. Sequestering CO2 emissions might raise the price of coal-generated power by 50%, but coal is such a cheap source of power that it might still be attractive. And it may have huge potential: a paper just published by Harvard’s Daniel Schrag and colleagues argues that thousands of years-worth of American emissions could be stored under American coastal waters.

    Another might be renewable energy sources. They supply around 14% of world energy now and the figure is unlikely to increase sharply in the near future. But their share can rise enough to bring the trajectory down a little.

    Now, that wasn’t painful, was it?  I think I’d have to agree with The Economist:

    …although the science remains uncertain, the chances of serious consequences are high enough to make it worth spending the (not exorbitant) sums needed to try to mitigate climate change.

  • Fat man overboard

    It’s fairly obvious that when they choose contestants for The Apprentice it’s more about casting than it is about picking the best candidates.  In the early weeks the "characters" provide some entertainment, cause trouble, and then get fired.

    Hence (as I mentioned before), this time around we had a fat bloke with glasses (Brent) and a Russian (Lenny), who won’t be around very long.  Each thinks that he knows more than anyone else, and is very happy to let you know his opinions (uncomplimentary almost without exception) on his fellow team members.  If only they would listen to me, they cry plantively, blissfully unaware that their colleagues have long ago decided to ignore them. 

    Even Brent’s thick skin and small brain don’t seem to have prevented him from noticing that he was being sidelined by the project managers (in week 4 he was given total responsibility for organizing the clothing to be worn by the team members when they did their presentations).  If he had any common sense he would just have kept quiet and realized that he could hardly get fired if he was never in charge of anything important.  He didn’t, but Sean is obviously a lot brighter because he started worrying that this might enable Brent to survive.

    Or not, as it turned out.  Brent couldn’t keep his mouth shut in the boardroom, and when he launched an over-the-top (and unwarranted) attack on Tammy he opened himself up to a barrage of criticism from the rest of the team.  He responded with largely incoherent attacks on people who had upset him, much in the style of a petulant seven year-old.  As with his misunderstanding of ‘brainstorming’, he appears not to have realized that saying the first thing that comes into your head is not the way to win an argument.

    Even after Trump fired him, he still seemed to believe that he was better than the rest of the team and that Trump had made a big mistake.  I don’t think so.   

    (more…)

  • Foaming at the mouth

    Why does the SCMP publish a letter (Only time will tell – subscription required) from an American (with no obvious connection to Hong Kong) concerning a TV film commissioned by a UK TV network about an American subject? 

    The new film, Death of a President, panders to an underclass which contemporary liberalism shelters but should abhor: the revanchist political left, with its marked intolerance towards opposing viewpoints and its too easy acceptance of the unworthy side of politics ("Bush assassination drama set to spark controversy in Britain, US", September 3) The film’s portrayal of US President George W. Bush being assassinated amid a sea of hateful protesters is offensive and corrosive to democracy. Leftist elements of the self-centred 1960s generation seem to resist the simple truth that mutual respect and compromise are de rigueur in any healthy democratic nation.

    They would also reject out of hand comparison with the detractors of Abraham Lincoln, who began his presidential term being pelted in his railway car but ended it as a murdered icon.

    Yet President Bush’s resolve in confronting terrorism may well come to be seen by history in a similar light and his domestic opponents judged accordingly.

    As they await history’s verdicts the left shouldn’t leave it to time and the Grim Reaper to rescue them from intolerance and vulgarity.

    RON GOODDEN, Atlanta

    Still, it made me laugh whilst I was having Dim Sum, so I shouldn’t complain.

    Channel 4 are getting a lot of free publicity!

    Update: Dave is also on the case.  Apparently this Ron Goodden chap spends a lot of time writing letters to newspapers.

  • Crazy reductions

    Someone in the management of Park’n’Shop has clearly gone mad.  They have decided that what shoppers really want is reductions on all “yellow label” products (please don’t ask me what a “yellow label” product might be, but there are a lot of them).

    The problem is that a large number of these reductions seem to be a nominal 10 cents.  Am I meant to be impressed when something is reduced from $54.70 to $54.60?  Because I’m not.  Worse than that, I noticed one product that was previously sold at $10.00 but is now marked down from $11.70 to $11.60.  Er, hang on…

    As ever, it pays to be alert when shopping in Hong Kong supermarkets.

  • GST and property taxes

    Christine Loh Kung-wai, writing in today’s SCMP (subscription) highlights the curious way that the government says it wants a debate on GST but doesn’t seem to want to give us all the facts:

    What seems unsatisfactory to those who support a GST is that I want more information, and a public debate, about what options Hong Kong has for securing a steady flow of public revenue. Supporters of the proposed new tax appear on the whole to think it’s the best option.

    I have written in this column about revenue from land sales and how it can be used only for capital works under the current arrangements. When I ask GST supporters whether they know that land-related incomes cannot be used for general expenditures, most of them admit they had no idea.

    Some say they did know. So I ask them how government revenues would be affected if land-related incomes could be spent on things like education, environmental cleanups, health care and social welfare. No one has yet given me a decent answer.

    Jake van der Kamp mentioned this yesterday (Great taskmaster Tang fails to do his homework on needless GST):

    The Treasury’s GST paper, however, conveniently ignores this when arguing that we have a narrow revenue base compared with other governments. It looks only at operating revenues.

    It can do this because a previous financial secretary years ago set up something called the capital works reserve fund to hold land sales revenue and then ordained that this revenue could only be used for capital expenditure.  He did it to save face on an embarrassingly inaccurate budget forecast and we are still saving face for him today.

    Pointless as this may now be, it suits the Treasury just fine. It can now say that we have a narrow revenue base. Just make one stroke of the pen to exclude land sales revenue and, hey, presto! we can all sing a dirge about how bad life will be if we don’t have a GST to give us a wider base.

    Christine Loh also (correctly) points out that the current system distorts the property market:

    The way Hong Kong calculates land premiums for lease conversions is opaque, and favours large developers. The premium is negotiated between the developer and the Lands Department, based on the estimated value of the finished development.  The agreed premium – which is a tax – then has to be paid up front, thus favouring those with substantial funds.

    Developers build up land banks, say, for land with agricultural leases. Then they wait for the best time to negotiate the premiums for conversion to, say, residential or commercial uses – so as to keep the tax to a minimum.

    [..]

    Changes [to] the way Hong Kong taxes land development must be a part of any debate on tax reform. Indeed, a responsible government would want to bring up the subject rather than hide behind the fiction of a “one-solution-fits-all” GST. Is anyone interested in discussing this?

    I think they should be.  I wonder if Henry Tang really wants a debate?