fashion beach

Whether or not a country exercises the death penalty is usually a pretty good indicator of how civilised it is - or at least, aspires to be.  When a country shows executions live on TV, you know for sure it's barbaric.  Whether it also violates the country's own law which provides that executions shall not be held in public, is a legal question I am not qualified to judge.

Making It Better
Amnesty International

The discovery by the Consumer Council that Hong Kong's cozy supermarket duopoly is routinely misleading customers with false "special offers" will come as no surprise to those familiar with Hong Kong retail practices. In some cases, the Council found, the "promotion" price was actually higher than the regular price!

What this does is highlight the need for long overdue consumer protection legislation in Hong Kong. This could be modelled on the UK's law which requires a "sale price" item to have been sold at a lower price for a minimum period before it can be advertised as a special offer.

Meanwhile, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority''s head has reported that the controversial Lehman's minibonds, which have also raised concerns about inadequate consumer protection here, were classified as high risk by some of the banks selling them, medium risk by others, and low risk by yet others. If even the banks don't understand these products sufficiently to agree on how risky they are, they are certainly too complex to be palmed off on to unsophisticated investors.

The further so-called derivatives stray from any link to real goods and services, the harder it becomes to determine their real worth. For example, a valuer can tell you the price of a house in California. but if the mortgage on that property is packaged up into bits, bundled with hundreds of others, and sold to hundreds of banks worldwide, what is each of those bits worth? Lose sight of the fact that such products have a link to the real world, and the risk that their price becomes uncoupled from the value of the underlying assets increases dramatically. Which is exactly how the credit crunch arose.

Making It Better: The Consumer Council of Hong Kong

I can't help feeling the unfortunate dog stuck between two buildings in Yuen Long would be rescued much sooner if kind-hearted people would only stop feeding her. Hasn't anyone in Hong Kong read Winnie the Pooh?

P.S. (28 January) Sadly, the poor creature died shortly after being finally pulled out from between the walls.

Making It Better:
Hong Kong Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

Apart from the odd RTHK offering, Hong Kong television seldom serves up any real investigative journalism. So all the more credit to ATV for their Inside Story programme on Tuesday night. I've often poked fun at ATV for their mistakes, but this was worthwhile viewing.

As you may have read, the ever so caring Hong Kong government is planning, without consulting taxpayers (many of whom have already made substantial personal donations), to spend HK$10 billion of our money to aid those made homeless by the recent earthquake in Sichuan. Meanwhile back home, ATV's programme revealed that the same caring government is waging an undeclared war; not on homelessness, which would be creditable, but on Hong Kong's homeless.

Hong Kong has never had a coherent policy towards the homeless. In the past, it has been common for the Social Welfare Department to hand out blankets to them during cold spells, only for another arm of the government to steal their bedding and dispose of it as rubbish the following day in order to tidy up the streets.

Now as if those who have already fallen off the bottom rung of the economic ladder didn't have enough problems already, in recent weeks the government has been making a concerted effort to drive them out of their traditional refuges, even though their presence there is not illegal. A playground in Mongkok that previously accommodated 50 street sleepers is now locked at night and patrolled by security guards. Spaces under flyovers are being fenced off or otherwise made uninhabitable, and their former occupants are being told to, in effect, go away and disappear.

Presumably this is all in the name of improving Hong Kong's image before the expected hordes of Olympic visitors start turning up in a couple of weeks, but a true "World City" would try to solve the problems of these people, not just sweep them out of sight like so much human litter. That would take money - for more social workers, affordable housing for the poor, better mental health care and more effective substance abuse treatment programmes - all of which Hong Kong could afford if it wanted to. That's if the government didn't prefer to spend our money on follies like the Donald Tsang's Ego Memorial Complex on the Tamar site, and the Central Bypass Shopping Mall.

But even before that, it would require seeing street sleepers as individual human beings of value with their own individual difficulties, not as an amorphous mass of garbage to be swept under the carpet. ATV's programme (which will be repeated at 12:30 tomorrow, Saturday 12 July, if you missed it) gave them a voice, but is anyone in government listening?

See Also: Homeless II - Photo Exhibition of Street-sleepers

Making It Better:
Street Sleepers Action Committee Limited

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I received my first fake Burma cyclone relief email yesterday, headed RECOVERY FUND NOTIFICATION, and purporting to be an appeal for the Burma cyclone victims - it doesn't take these leeches and vampires long before they scent blood to suck.

The usual email scams are bad enough, but taking advantage of disasters to divert well-intentioned help away from people who have lost everything already is unspeakably sick. I hope these scammers rot in hell where they belong.

If you want to help in Burma (or China), make sure the help really gets to those who need it. World Vision, for example, has aid workers on the ground in both countries getting help to the needy.

Making It Better:
World Vision Hong Kong

I've been critical of China often enough in this blog - most recently only yesterday - so it's only fair that I should give the Chinese government credit when they get something right. There could hardly be a greater contrast than that between the handling of two natural disasters: the Sichuan earthquake and the Burmese cyclone.

Within hours of Monday's deadly earthquake in Sichuan Province, which has killed at least 12,000 people so far and left possibly hundreds of thousands homeless, the Chinese government had rushed rescue teams into the area, and 50,000 troops are hard at work locating survivors and clearing blocked roads to enable supplies to reach the area. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was quickly on the scene to demonstrate the central government's concern and assess the situation for himself. China has also welcomed offers of assistance from overseas, and journalists are apparently free to visit and report on the earthquake zone.

"We must treasure every second and do our utmost to save survivors," Wen is quoted as saying - not a message that appears to have reached Burma, where the callous clique of bandits in uniform that runs the country is still hindering relief efforts, almost two weeks after Cyclone Nargis swept over coastal communities, killing more than 34,000 people according to the latest official figures (probably grossly understated).

Although as many as 1.5 million people now face homelessmess and the threat of disease and starvation, the Burmese regime continues to deny visas to international aid experts and to confiscate relief supplies arriving in the former capital Rangoon (Yangon) - reportedly either diverting them or relabelling them to appear to be from the Burmese military. The long standing ban on foreign reporters (who might tell the truth about conditions in the country) is also still firmly in place, with the government seemingly committing more resources to enforcing it than to solving the problems reported on.

Some aid is trickling through, but so inadequate and tardy has been the official response to the disaster that even the mormally impeccably doiplomatic United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, rarely directly critical of UN member governments, has described it as "unacceptably slow".

Meanwhile Burma's military rulers, whose greed, corruption and mismanagement have achieved the rare feat - rivalled by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe - of transforming a country rich in natural resources from one of the wealthiest in its continent to among the world's poorest, remain holed up in paranoid seclusion in their isolated slave-labour-built new capital Naypyidaw, at the opposite end of the country from the storm-struck Irrawaddy Delta, showing no signs of any genuine concern for the plight of their people.

So, is this a case of "China good, Burma bad"? Well, not quite - real life is seldom that black and white. The murderous Burmese junta's main trading partner, and strongest overseas backer, is China...

P.S. Immediately after posting this, I turned to Spike's blog to find him saying something very similar, with the added thought that the US Government's response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 more closely resembled Burma's than China's - lest we forget.

Making It Better:
China donations - Oxfam Hong Kong
Burma donations - Hong Kong Red Cross

I received my water bill last night. And my water bill. Both the fresh water and flushing water bills, each mailed in a separate envelope, enclosed two A4 size circulars - one in Chinese (I don't know what it's about, but it didn't look important so I put it out for recycling) and one containing the Water Supplies Department's performance pledges for 2007/2008. On the front of the latter in large letters were the words:

"Save Water for the Future
Every Drop Counts"

I have a suggestion for the Water Supplies Department (a branch of the Hong Kong Government):

"Save Trees
Every Sheet of Paper Counts"

Not to mention:

"Save Taxpayers' Money
Every Cent Counts"

Even electricity company CLP, hardly a model of environmental rectitude (in fact one of Hong Kong's biggest polluters) offers electronic billing as an alternative to paper. The WSD plans to introduce this in stages, but only starting in 2009. Meanwhile it is sending out 7.2 million water bills a year on paper (complete with unwanted and unnecessarily duplicated enclosures).

So, here are some suggested performance pledges for 2008/2009 for the Water Department

1. Send out each year's performance pledges to customers during that year, not almost a year later. In 2008 we should be reading about your 2007 achievements, not those of 2006.
2. Combine fresh and flush water billing to save paper.
3. If this is not possible, at least send the two bills out in the same envelope to save on paper and postage.
4. Speed up the introduction of electronic billing as an alternative to paper billing.

Making It Better:

Water Aid

Amid all the news of war and torture and bombings around the world, every so often civilisation takes a small step forward for a change. In July 2007 Rwanda became the 14th African country to abolish the death penalty, while in Europe only Belarus now retains it. Now New Jersey is becoming the first US state to abolish the death penalty since the Supreme Court reinstated its use in 1976. Good for them!

The number of executions in other US states is also decreasing, as is the number worldwide, although the USA still ranks sixth behind those other great champions of human rights, China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and Sudan, in the use of capital punishment. Between them, these six countries accounted for 91% of all known executions in 2006.

Incidentally, there is something I never understand: why is it that many of those who define themselves as "pro-life" are often strongly in favour of capital punishment? It seems they value unborn lives more highly than born ones. There is an interesting debate on the religious ethics of this here.

Making It Better:
Amnesty International

I'd really like to blog about more nice happy things, but just about everything I read these days is full of more depressing news. Like this story: not content with murdering over a million Iraqis (so far), the US military (with some civilian help) are also killing off the largest creatures we share our tiny planet with.

How much longer will we tolerate having the world run by the idiots who do this sort of thing?

Making It Better:
Save the Whales Again: Stop Deadly Underwater Sounds!

It is an economic truism that "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch". Breakfast, however, may be a different matter...

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine stopped off at a small local restaurant in Mongkok for breakfast on his way to work. After he ordered, four mainland men sat down at the next table and immediately lit up cigarettes, in contravention of Hong Kong's 2005 law banning smoking in restaurants. Not wishing to have his enjoyment of his meal spoiled by their illegal action, my friend asked the waitress to tell them to stop smoking. Perhaps fearing a confrontation, she ignored his request and did nothing.

A little while later, he asked another waitress to tell the men to stop. She also did nothing. My friend hastily finished his food, then walked over to the cash desk (it was one of those little cafes where you pay on the way out), tore up the bill in front of the cashier, informed her he was refusing to pay, and asked her to call the police.

The cashier called the manager over. After an exchange of words in which my friend continued to press his point, the manager got fed up with the whole situation and told my friend to get lost, or words to that effect - which he did.

Obviously he won't be welcome in that restaurant again, which doesn't bother him in the least. He does have one regret, however; in his words:

"If I'd known I was going to get a free meal, I would have ordered something more expensive!"

Making It Better:
Hong Kong Council on Smoking and Health

The continuing tragedy in Burma has been much on my mind for the past week or two. I don't have time now to write all I want to say about the depressing situation there, but I do just want to get the word out to as many people as possible about the global petition to China (Burma's main trading partner and ally) and the United Nations, urging them to put more pressure on Burma's brutal military dictatorship, which is now arresting thousands of peaceful protesters and, according to reliable sources, massacring many of them, particularly monks. Half a million signatures have already been gathered - please add yours now (link below), and tell others.

Making it Better:
Avaaz.org: Stand with the Burmese protesters

When will we have a government that isn't afraid to say "boo" to a property developer?

I first arrived in Hong Kong just days after the old Tsimshatsui railway station closed. Despite widespread calls for its preservation, all that was retained was the clock tower in situ, and a few meaningless bits of its colonnade relocated to a new site in Tsimshatsui East. Three decades later, at a cost of billions of dollars, the KCR was extended back to Tsimshatsui from its new terminus at Hung Hom. Great forward planning, huh?

Soon after that came further heritage battles: the stately old GPO (where Worldwide Plaza now stands); the old Hong Kong Club, a marvellous wedding cake of a building; and over the years since then a whole succession of attractive and/or interesting buildings has vanished, sometimes with a total lack of logic - why, for example, is the Tsimshatsui wet market still in its "temporary" location, twenty years after it was moved out of its perfectly sound building in Peking Road (subsequently demolished after serving other uses for some years)?

Despite occasional victories for preservation (the relocated Murray Building; the Sun Yatsen Museum in the old Kom Tong Hall), in general, the government has almost always put development interests ahead of conservation interests. So whereas other Asian cities have large areas of old buildings tastefully restored (Macau and Singapore are good examples), relics of the past in Hong Kong have become increasingly scarce. Of those which remain, one of the finest is the magnificent King Yin Lei Mansion on Stubbs Road, designed in Chinese style 70 years ago by a Yorkshire architect (no kidding).



The government has known for several years that this lovely building was under threat; the Antiquities Advisory Board proposed that it be declared a monument in 2004. So why is it only when the wreckers moved in to vandalise it, possibly already causing irreversible damage, that they have now listed it as a proposed monument, preventing further alteration or demolition while its case is considered?

The only positive aspect of this case is that the speed with which the listing was done suggests a new-found awareness on the government's part that the community is fed up with the loss of everything that gives Hong Kong its unique character. If this is a sign that they are finally beginning to take conservation seriously, we may yet become a civilised society. I hope.

Making It Better:
The Conservancy Association (I borrowed the picture from their website; I'm sure they won't mind.)