What are you smiling at? Oh, nothing…

29 Jan

Hong Kong panoramaHere’s a question. Why are so many Hong Kongers so bloody miserable? I hadn’t really thought about it until a Gallup poll of 150,000 people worldwide last month revealed that those living in the SAR and their counterparts in Singapore are among the most miserable anywhere on the planet.

Singapore came bottom in the poll of 148 countries, with just under half expressing happiness, while Hong Kong came in 73rd, with 69 per cent of respondents all smiles. As pointed out by SCMP, these two city-states rank third (HK) and seventh (Sing) on the World Bank’s per capita GDP table – in Hong Kong’s case the figure is ten times higher than that of the happiness joint leader, Panama.

So what can we deduce from this? Money can’t buy you happiness? Asians are intrinsically less likely to tell a stranger they’re happy than Central Americans? Such polls are a spurious waste of time? Well, a mixture of all three probably. The problem with this kind of research is that no matter what the results, you can drag some kind of expert out of the woodwork to validate it with their insightful social commentary.

So here’s mine. I can’t speak for Singapore but there’s a huge wealth gap in Hong Kong. Around one in six Hong Kongers live in poverty, according to a ten year study released last November by Oxfam. Bearing in mind the median salary of Hong Kong’s top 10 per cent is HK$88,800 (£7,300) per month this is pretty shameful. It would be difficult to imagine even Margaret Thatcher in her prime ignoring that kind of societal imbalance.

So that might explain why around a sixth of Hong Kong isn’t very happy. What about the rest? To put it bluntly, the acquisition of wealth seems to be one of the few things which binds the people of this former colony together. It’s why they run two or three jobs, working all hours; why they school their kids until all the joy is sucked out of them, wait until they’ve been to uni and then nag them to get hitched before they hit 30. Incidentally it’s also why you see men who’ve been beaten furiously with the ugly stick married to stunning brides. Money. Money. Money. It’s fucking relentless and, I imagine, it doesn’t make for super happy smiley people.

I’m not sure whether the survey was confined to indigenous locals, but I’d also posit the notion that there’s probably a difference between the happiness rankings of Cantonese and gweilos living in Hong Kong. I say that through no rigorous research of my own other than I’m having a cracking time here.

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As the snakey New Year approaches – China’s rent-boy-friends come out to play

22 Jan

snakeSince China’s gradual opening up to the world post-Mao, a whole generation of youngsters have grown up free from the life or death choices that faced their forebears. These Little Emperors – the result of China’s controversial one-child policy – have had it pretty bloody good when you consider their parents’ and grandparents’ generations faced the horrors of the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution and flared trousers. They may be blinged up with iPhones, Gucci handbags and Burberry scarves but one thing the girls at least still can’t get their hands on these days is a fella.

Now, it’s not quite clear why this might be, given that the one-child policy and a cultural predilection for a son and heir has led to a gender imbalance in China which could mean 40 million more men than women by 2020. Maybe the women need to try a bit harder, put some make-up on from time to time, stop playing so hard to get and just put the chopsticks down once in a while. Either way, the problem has reached crisis proportions in China, where familial pressure for girls to settle down and marry before they’ve even hit 30 is huge.

With the impending New Year’s holiday break upcoming, that generation of late 20-something girls we’ve just been talking about are starting to get nervous – pretty soon they’ll have to travel back home to their folks and explain why they’ve still not managed to bag an eligible batchelor.

Well, in 21st century China, that’s not a problem. E-commerce site Taobao – a kind of eBay-like platform for small merchants – has recently been flooded with hundreds of enterprising young gents keen to make a quick buck out of the misfortune of others. These rental boyfriends apparently charge around 20 yuan (£2) an hour and will even travel home to meet their clients’ parents.

Afters are extra.

Even in modern, international city-state Hong Kong where parents often have the luxury of more than one child, the cut off for girls is around 26. The only winners in all this, apart from a few entrepreneurial rent-boy-friends, are the online dating firms. Charging as much as HK$3,000 a month, these companies feast on human loneliness and parental expectations like a bunch of bastard mosquitos. Some even offer date nights with foreigners. Can you imagine?

The government has clearly let down these poor girls. I suggest mandatory marriage for all who reach 30 without getting hitched.

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Southern Weekly saga: porridge, censorship and hacked off hacks in Xi’s China

10 Jan

chinaflagIt’s been a rather depressing, or optimistic, week in China depending on how you view the Party’s latest not-so-subtle attempts to strangle free speech and the unusually vocal reaction to it.

It all began when propaganda chief of the southern Guandong province, Tuo Zhen, decided he didn’t like an already edited-for-his-pleasure New Year’s message in the liberal-leaning Southern Weekly and decided to re-write it, removing the bits calling for reform and adding his own anodyne intro.

Considering China’s hacks already conform to imposing censorship requirements, the editorial team got rather peeved at this blatant hatchet job and went on strike.

Messages of support from scholars, students – and maybe more importantly, bloggers and celebs with tens of millions of followers on weibo – followed as the stand-off between the hacks and the Party-influenced paper management continued.

An editorial in state-run rag Global Times playing down the dispute was ordered by the Party to be published in papers across the country, forcing the principled Dai Zigeng, editor-in-chief of the Beijing News, to resign after he refused to do so.

Undeterred, the BJ Daily, as it’s called by no-one, ran a fascinating article about porridge in defiance of the Party. Yes. Porridge. Read CMP here for the reason why porridge is now politically dissident (hint: It involves homophones and metaphors).

All of this can be set against the backdrop of incoming Party and national leader Xi Jinping’s crusade for reform and transparency. Xi has made it his mission to root out corruption in the Party and sent some pretty strong signals so far that this isn’t just an attempt to cement his popularity and power base.

So is this a particularly sad day for freedom of speech in China’s admittedly pretty sad history? It depends what you believe is going on here.

To take the pessimistic view one could see the message coming loud and clear from the new administration that no relaxing of the country’s tough censorship laws will be allowed, despite initial hope that the country’s new leaders would be a tad more liberal.

A leaked directive sent to all editors from the Propaganda Department would seem to confirm this depressing take on things, blaming as it did the usual mythical “external hostile forces” for the development of the Southern Weekly situation and stating unequivocally: “Party control of the media is an unwavering basic principle”.

Coming from another angle, however, there are signs of encouragement.

One couldn’t expect Xi to stamp his personal mark too quickly on the presidency and the Party, in fact, he’s not even sworn in as pres until March and Party-wise the incoming leader is usually hidebound for many months and even years before they can really take control.

This whole affair could rather be seen, as Beijing-based scholar Russell Leigh Moses argues, as the result of heavy-handed actions – perhaps even designed to deliberately disrupt Xi’s reformist push – of the old guard of the Party.

In addition, pro-democracy protesters were allowed to gather freely outside the Southern Weeklybuildings – although police took pictures of many in that rather sinister “we’ll be in touch later” way police sometimes do – for several days.

And in defiance of the Party, hugely popular internet portals such as that run by Sina published theGlobal Times editorial with the crucial caveat that it did not represent their views. Acrostics in unrelated headlines were also used ingeniously to spell out messages of support for Southern Weekly.

In short, I’ve absolutely no idea what’s going on in China, as usual, but there are signs, albeit hugely caveated ones, that some things may be changing across the border.

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Ladyboys in Boots – NYE in Phuket

4 Jan

IMG_1064The world’s population can be divided very neatly into two mutually exclusive camps: those who enjoy New Year’s Eve and those who’d rather stay in with a box of wine and the box set of the Wire. Unfortunately for me, I’m firmly in the might-as-well-have-a-fucking-party category and have been searching for that perfect night ever since a roller-coaster ride through the suburbs of Newcastle in ’95 left me temporarily blind in one eye.

What this meant a few days ago was decamping to Phuket in search of fun, sun and lots of Chang (beer). Only now do I feel my blood is purified and my head clear enough to recount what went down. You may even find the following useful if you too fancy a break on Thailand’s debauched west coast.

My first observation: I have never been mistaken for a Russian oligarch so many times in my entire life. Yup, there’s a direct flight from Moscow to Phuket, which means lots of stunning ice maidens and horrific, vodka soaked, flame-haired 50-something divorcees. Then there are the men. Mis-matched primary colour wearing oafs, skin as pallid as cold pelmeni. I hate to regurgitate stereotypes but they don’t smile, they don’t talk, they just drink and growl whilst shoveling Borscht into their mouths at the many Russian restaurants that have depressingly sprung up in the area….

They played a persistent, menacing counterpoint to our lovely, smiley, patient Thai hosts who, to be fair, managed to make everything better. Phuket is actually not all bad and the beaches of Kata and Karon offer more relaxed, up-market holidaying options for those not prepared to join the Full Moon party loons in Patong.

A trip to Phuket, however, really isn’t complete without a visit to this town:

If Hong Kong is a coke-fuelled banker then Patong is his methamphetamine-addicted younger sister. Up. All. Night. A walk down Bangla Road is enough to cause temporary cerebral cortex shut down. Sketchy touts brandish laminated cards offering ping pong shows and shove live iguanas and slow lorises at passers-by; ladyboys – and not particularly hot ones either – grab at balls, arms, and anything else that comes close; sadness, tragedy, sex and sheer unbridled joy sit cheek to jowl, often in the same person.

IMG_1092Tattoo parlours proclaim “15 years experience. Brand new needles”; stunning Thai girls gyrate hypnotically around their poles with the agility of Olympic gymnasts; dirty electro blares out of every available speaker; cockroaches scurry; Japanese tourists gravitate between awe and terror – literally having no frame of reference for this shit. Even staff in the Boots at the top of the road are pre-op trannies.

A chance encounter with a flyer led us down to the beach on New Year’s Eve for electro festival Sydictive Element. A vanity project which encountered numerous hurdles as over-officious local government and police chiefs waited for their palms to be crossed with baht, the beach party to end all beach parties finally went ahead. Some DJs didn’t show but those that did will be glad – it’s not every day you get to play to 20,000 people on a stage moored a couple hundred yards off shore.

Never been to a rave on a beach before. Would be back in a shot. As the beach area was only 600 metres long and fairly narrow it meant everyone could get a good view of the floating stage, with its monumental soundsystem, giant LCD displays and floating VIP area. At midnight, flying lycra-clad ladies attached to hanging wires soared overhead as fireworks exploded around us to the tunes of Bassment Jaxx and beach-front party go-ers let loose a thousand paper lanterns.

Phuket: you party good. I shall return with reinforcements.

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London: we’ve been doing this for centuries

19 Dec

covent garden christmasI’ve just been back to London this week for a pre-Christmas wedding, which involved the ceremonial catch-ups with mates and ex-colleagues and a particularly lovely encounter with a bacon and cheese toastie, which will stay with me for a very long time.

Festive London really is a lovely affair. Christmas as we know it in the UK is pretty much a Victorian invention so it’s probably fitting that the capital – with its imposing monuments, churches, statues and stations from this period – does it better than anywhere else. Even Covent Garden comes into its own at Christmas – I dunno, there’s just something very festive about cobbled stones, failed actors and terrible mime artists.

It’s always bitter sweet, going home after any length of time abroad and it can be difficult to get over the feeling of having being left behind. London had its best mockney attitude on for Christmas, though, and did its best to persuade me to stay. Eccentric little bars, restaurants, cafes and clubs are dotted all over the place from Soho to Exmouth Market, Borough to Brixton. Menus glued to the inside of Cannon and Ball albums, blackboards scrawled with the lyrics of classic indie songs, bar staff with more piercings, tattoos, casual unaffected humour and just plain weirdness than you can shake a stick at: London is just better at this shit than anywhere else.

In Hong Kong, of course, the biggest tragedy of the absurdly high rents is that any budding entrepreneur looking to succeed in the hospitality space needs a combination of luck, friends in high places, plenty of money and a business plan aimed at servicing wealthy ex-pats, tourists and super-rich locals with lots of money but no taste. This is the Armani and Cristal set, who’d rather preen with a cocktail halfway up a skyscraper than slum it in an artsy dive bar basement. The fact that there are few alternatives to get wonky in Honky is a tragedy.

London’s not all good though. I was staying in Elephant and Castle, an area which has redefined the meaning of underachievement. Zone 1, 10 mins by Tube to the City, West End, etc etc and yet a wasteland of brutalist 1950s housing estates, 99p Shops, Halal butchers and payday loan shops. This is urban planning by the bastard child of Corbussier and Waynetta Slob and it has been waiting for renewal for about 20 years while successive local councillors bicker over the small print.

If this was Hong Kong, Elephant would have been restored to its rightful place as the Piccadilly Circus of the south by now. No political infighting, no squabbles over funding – just getting shit done. Then again, it would have probably ended up with 35 x 7-11s, 5 x private members’ bars, 3 x shopping malls filled with luxury fashion and jewelry brands, far too many escalators and housing that no-body who currently lives there can afford. I love Hong Kong – “sometimes misguided but always enthusiastic” – but it needs to loosen up a bit or its poor citizens will be drinking in vapid grief-holes for the rest of their days.

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Clocks still flapping? Clockenflap 2012

4 Dec

One of the most frustrating things about living in Hong Kong for any length of time is the absolute paucity of good live music. I’m not talking about Hong Kong’s burgeoning local indie and rock scene – um, wherever that is – but world class bands and DJs.

clockenflap1

Enter Clockenflap 2012, a music and arts festival held on a scrap of disused land in West Kowloon. It is quite simply the only thing going on here, bar the odd club night and an occasional flying visit from a DJ with every ‘s’ in his moniker replaced by ‘z’. It started off life in 2008 in Cyberport – unfortunately not as cool as it sounds – with a mission to bring decent music to HK and provide a platform for local talent.

This year was the first to charge for entry and by all accounts was the busiest yet (Hong Kong-ers prefer the idea of paying for stuff). Even if the quality early doors left a bit to be desired, there were six stages, a film tent and several after-parties…which in my book is not a bad set-up at all.

Klaxons killed it on Sunday, De La Soul were surprise hit of the weekend and Primal Scream just about made it to the end without collapsing or forgetting where they were. And Black Bart DJs – bedecked in neon-coloured Native American headwear – were as understated as ever.

With a backdrop like Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, there’s not much that can go wrong. Cheap-ish beer, decent food and some heroically skimpy festival attire (female) ensured the weekend passed by in a blur of alcohol, terrible dancing and bumping into things. The bankers-on-their-day-off vibe (you wouldn’t see expensive red wine being glugged at T in the Park), the massive queue for the bogs, and the unfathomably risk averse security staff who took offense to any shoulder-climbing, just added to the charm.

Can’t wait to flap our clocks in 2013. I’ll see you down the front, yeah?

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China, the land that political correctness forgot

22 Nov

dalian girlChina is a fascinating and unique country. So unique, in fact, that you can almost forgive its rampant racism, its quest for global economic pre-eminence at all costs, its many and varied human rights abuses and its citizens occasionally pooing on the subway. This is, after all, a nation-civilisation that has always thought of itself as the centre of the world – the Middle Kingdom – with the Western global hegemony of the past couple of centuries a mere blip.

In fact, one of the mistakes us round-eyes make when looking at the inexorable rise of the Orient is to try and appraise it on our terms, which are Western terms, and shoehorn it into our historical narrative, which is a Western one. (This intro-ramble, by the way is basically a disclaimer for the following words, which some may unhelpfully regard as me sneering at the Chinese. That was only partly the intention.)

I am energised, fascinated and slightly terrified by what’s going on across the border in the People’s Republic. Case in point, this article from state-run rag the China Daily (via some forum). Yes, it’s apparently a survey of foreign nationals in China ranking the nation’s cities according to how fit their birds are.

For the record, girls from Dalian in the north-eastern province of Liaoning, are the tops, apparently due to their superior height, fair skin and strength of personality. Those from south of the Yantze, it says, are more graceful and yielding, but don’t have much personality – which has surely been a problem for men the world over since the dawn of time.

According to the report, Nanjing girls are ‘cultural’, Beijing girls are ‘capable’, Shanghai girls are ‘pretty’, and Guangzhou girls are ‘realistic’ … and make good soup. Now, without wanting to sound too sexist here, would you go for the Page 3 Stunner from Shanghai or the hunchback offering you a bowl of shark’s fin in broth? Yeah, thought so.

I’m sure equally bizarre, hilarious and terrifying things are happening all over the world. But all over the world, unfortunately, is not here; the country which will be the undeniable global superpower for the next few hundreds of years and therefore set the moral and cultural agenda for others to follow. Oh well, when in Rome…

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Andrea Yu: flack, hack, discuss

16 Nov

andrea yu hodgkinsonI was at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club’s 30 anniversary on Ice House Street last week. Now I do like to complain about the patchy Wi-Fi, the braying, ruddy-faced “it’s all gone downhill since ‘97” members and the lack of pork scratchings at the bar, but it’s actually pretty bloody good. Not only can you get sozzled for around a tenner – no easy feat in Hong Kong – but to be surrounded by faded images and clippings from some of the defining moments of the 20th century is pretty awe-inspiring for a hack. From the savage conflicts in Vietnam and Korean, to Nixon toasting Zhou Enlai and Mao and Chiang Kai-Shek celebrating after the Japanese surrender, the reportage scattered all over the walls of this venerable old building tell of brave journalistic deeds.

This long pre-amble is to put into context the rather depressing PR efforts of the Communist Party and the plight of one particular ‘journalist’ at the centre of the only interesting thing to happen during the Party Congress this week – Andrea ‘Yu’.

Now, Yu sprung to fame by virtue of being one of the few foreign journalists during the endless Congress press conferences to be picked by officials to ask questions. In uber-paranoid China, only hacks from the state-run press are usually called upon, because the Party would rather not open the floor to those who might asking challenging questions. However, it turns out Yu, much to the chagrin of other laowai journos at the event, was picked on four separate occasions to ask questions. Hmmm.

In her defence she told WSJ that she was chosen so frequently by virtue of sitting in the same spot at every press conference and by making direct eye contact with the moderator. Really? It’s that simple? Oh, no, there’s one other, minor reason why she kept on getting picked: her employer, Australia-based Global CAMG Media International, is actually majority owned by Chinese state-owned media, and her Chinese colleagues wrote all her questions down for her.

Thus, we were treated to gloriously incisive questions such as: “Please tell us what plans and policies the Chinese government will be implementing in co-operation with Australia.” Or how about the challenging: “After the 18th Party Congress, what policies and measures will there be to support overseas Chinese media to publicise and promote Chinese culture, to propel Australian-Chinese cultural exchanges to the next level?” Brilliant. Worthy of Paxman, that one.

If you want to hear the hapless Yu explain herself, prepare to cringe at the following interview with a real Ozzie hack.

I was undecided whether Yu was simply a naïve young hack who did her best – in fluent Mandarin and English, no less – at an intimidating event and with employers who expected a certain line of enquiry from her. And then I found out from Beijing Cream that her real name is actually Andrea Hodgkinson. How do we know? Because she is referred to thus on the cover of a Chinese magazine where she appears in a rather lovely dress. CAMG apparently tweeted a picture of that magazine cover, and then hastily deleted said tweet. Something to hide guys?

You may ask, with the entire weight of its state media to ask soft questions, why did the Party effectively get a foreigner on board to do exactly the same? Well, it’s all about cache, and seeing a white-face-round-eye serving up the kind of embarrassingly banal questions that make Charlotte Church look like David Dimbleby was all part of China’s ongoing attempts to legitimise its one party system and soften its image in the eyes of international onlookers. In its insulated, culturally homogenous cocoon the Party obviously believed it could get away with it – that no-one would notice or mind that it had hired an attractive young bilingual laowai to basically do its own PR.

At the FCC event last Friday, chief secretary of the Hong Kong government, Carrie Lam, spoke eloquently and passionately about the Club, about Hong Kong and about the importance the new administration attaches to press freedom. Seeing what happened across the border this week makes those words even more telling. If ‘Yu-gate’ was to be the first salvo in the new Party leadership’s soft power media efforts, then let’s hope this initiative at least has been well and truly raped in a ditch.

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Atmosphere, I love a Party with a happy atmosphere….*

9 Nov

jiang zemin laughingHong Kong is bracing itself for an influx of bewildered mainland Chinese searching for pencil sharpeners, kitchen knives and balloons, if reports about the 18th Communist Party Congress are to be believed.

Yes, it’s the carefully choreographed, once-every-five-years PR exercise this week, and as usual in China, the Party officials are out to stage manage the event down to the last detail.

Even for an institution that’s institutionally paranoid – how else do you rule a land mass the size of China, with a population over 1 billion for more than 50 years? – the Party Congress takes paranoia to a whole new level.

First there’s the obligatory internet clamp down, which has prevented discussion about anything remotely politically sensitive, blocked several foreign media outlets’ web sites, and even interfered with VPNs – which for those in the know is the only way to circumvent the Great Firewall and access banned content.

However, this year’s affair has also given rise to some rather unusual extra precautions.

Taxi drivers in Beijing have been ordered to remove all passenger window handles and keep them firmly locked, and told to keep an eye out for anyone carrying balloons or ping pong balls.

The reason, apparently, is to prevent said items being distributed with reactionary slogans drawn on them. That, as we all know, is how the French Revolution started.

Toy airplanes have also disappeared from the shelves of Beijing stores – presumably to prevent some kind of tiny 9-11 happening to Communist Party HQ, and pigeon fanciers have been told to keep their birds locked up – this was apparently an old school, pre-internet way of sewing political dissent.

The sale of knives has, a little more understandably, been banned for the week – leaving budding chefs in need of a new Sabatier in the lurch – and the edict has been rather excessively applied to all blades, including pencil sharpeners.

Evil bastards, pencil sharpeners, I once saw a man mugged by one in Brixton…

Finally, the inappropriately named Ministry of Culture has reportedly cancelled a US amateur production of To Kill a Mockingbird. Needless to say, the group performed in Hong Kong with no adverse effect on the political stability of the region.

* Yes, this actually happened. We are all responsible.

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Honkers – come and have a play

22 Oct

Mount Parker hong kongIf you’re lucky enough to get accepted on the Japanese Exchange and Teaching (JET) programme – a one-way ticket to fun, adventure, intimate knowledge of the locals and alcohol-related liver damage – you’ll be treated to a seemingly endless parade of pre-and post-orientation seminars. The purpose of these sententious survival guides is to teach the naïve young uni grad of the dangers of culture shock. It goes something like this:

According to JET, culture shock forces individuals “to re-examine assumptions and social behaviours which were once thought absolute, and may cause discomfort, disorientation and emotional conflicts”. The four stages are as follows: initial euphoria (honeymoon); irritation and hostility (culture shock); gradual adjustment; adaptation and biculturalism (‘going bamboo’ as my granddad might have put it).

Now, the whole lot played out as predictably as a particularly bad Hollyoaks plot for the three years of my particular tour of duty, but here’s the thing – it’s not really happening in Hong Kong, which is a blessing and a massive disappointment.

The problem with Hong Kong is it’s one of the easiest places in the world in which to live. Once you’ve found somewhere to live (probably as expensive as a London flat but a bit smaller) utilities, internet, phone are all set up on the day. There’s no council tax and income tax is a famously low 17%. Ikea delivers and assembles furniture for an embarrassingly tiny fee. Hailable mini buses zip around the island for less than 50p, or you can get a real taxi for about a third of the price of a black cab in London. There are international supermarkets and authentic Western restaurants on every street corner. And great, cheap local Chinese hole-in-the-walls. The locals are at least on grunting terms with English. There are wonderful beach-side bars and sleepy villages, and more hiking trails than you can shake a stick at.

All of which was beginning to stress me out a bit, until I gave up trying to play this the Japan way – knuckle down at the local lingo, learn cultural no-nos: adapt, change, enjoy. It’s an international city state which prides itself on being all things to all people, which has a rich cultural history if you want it but won’t push it down your throat. Most Hong Kong Chinese would not like to be mistaken for a mainlander, and a lot of their difference comes from living in this cultural melting pot. That’s right, I just said melting pot.

In this spirit I ate a brunch of Eggs Benedict last Saturday, caught a £3 cab down the road a few miles to Quarry Bay and went on a stunning 10km hike across Hong Kong island – and was back in Central in time for several pints of cider and a steak sandwich down the pub. Looking for the difference can be exhausting and not much fun if you come to Honkers, enjoy it on your terms.

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