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economist.com Tuesday
[font=verdana, geneva, arial, sans serif][b]Tuesday[/b][/font]
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[/td][/tr][/table][font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-1]I CLOSEDyesterday's diary by noting how much more polite I found people here inHong Kong, compared with 20 or 30 years ago. Now an altogether moresinister explanation occurs to me: perhaps I look older, and amenjoying the dividend in respect with which Asia compensates thedrawbacks of ageing. At a lunch on this visit I sat for five minutesfacing an old acquaintance without evoking so much as a flicker ofrecognition.[/size][/font]
[font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-1]The sense ofhow much time has gone by was heightened by the occasion for the lunch:a talk at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC)by Stephen Bradley, theBritish consul-general in Hong Kong, to mark the looming tenthanniversary. He is one of those British diplomats who have devoted muchof their career to the place. Somewhere along the way he acquired thebad habit of comparing Hong Kong to an ornament. Lord Howe, Britain’sforeign secretary during fraught negotiations with China in the 1980s,used the analogy of a Ming vase. Mr Bradley went one better andproduced as evidence a Qing tea caddy.[/size][/font]
[font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-1]He had boughtit in Britain, where it had been gilded. The point he wanted to makewas that Hong Kong was a joint artefact, and that its continued successdepended on how much the British gilding had become part of the fabricof the place—on how hard it would be to rub off. It was aninternational city, he said, and when officials started to dismisscomplaints as being merely of concern to expatriates, it was time toworry.[/size][/font]
[font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-1]Some localshad fun with this, talking about how late it was to start discussingBritish guilt in Hong Kong. Myself, I always found something odd insuch British boasts. For decades the British seemed able to separatesome of the qualities they claimed to have brought to Hong Kong—therule of law, fair play, free press and all that—from the democraticsystem regarded at home as fundamental to all those qualities. WhenLord Patten, the last British governor, tried to squeeze a quart ofrepresentative government into the pint pot of rigged electionsSino-British negotiations had bequeathed him, many in the ForeignOffice were aghast.[/size][/font]
[font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-1]It was, to befair, a modestly gilded tea caddy—just thin lines of gilt along theedges. And Mr Bradley did express a hope that, by the 20th anniversaryof the handover, Hong Kong would enjoy universal suffrage. Indeed, hecited slow reform of the political structure as one of two areas ofdisappointment in Hong Kong since 1997. The other was the environment.[/size][/font]
[table=304][tr][td][table][tr][td][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][size=-2][color=#999999]AFP[/color][/size][/font][/td][/tr][/table][/td][/tr][tr][td][img=300,208]http://www.economist.com/images/columns/2007w18/HK.jpg[/img][/td][/tr][tr][td][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][size=-1][b]You look exhausted[/b][/size][/font]
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[font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-1]Thedeterioration in air quality is a huge preoccupation here. It has beenraining for a couple of days, and the air does not seem that bad to meafter Bangkok and Delhi. But the evidence is shocking. One widely citedstudy has blamed air pollution for 1,600 deaths a year. This isbeginning to have an impact on economic life as well. [/size][/font]
[font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-1]At the FCClunch, a Singaporean diplomat denied there was much truth to reportsthat expatriates were upping sticks from Hong Kong to breath morefreely (at least physically) in Singapore. But an investment bankersaid it was a real trend. Young, aggressive sell-side traders andanalysts thrived in Hong Kong. But when they settled down and startedfamilies, it was time “to move to the buy-side” in Singapore, and turnup for work at nine rather than six-thirty. When the Dutch conductor ofHong Kong’s orchestra, whose four-year-old son suffered from asthma,decided to move his family from Hong Kong to Wisconsin, it made thefront pages of the paper.[/size][/font]
[font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-1]Muchpollution of course, comes from mainland China—where a lot of the dirtyfactories are owned by Hong Kong investors. Interestingly, it seemslocal authorities in China are becoming less willing to house some ofthe worst offenders. Besides the growing clamour about air pollution,land now has a myriad valuable uses, wages have gone up, deterring thelabour-intensive sweatshops that sprouted in the 1980s and early 1990s,and China hardly needs to boost exports of low-cost manufactures. K.C.Kwok, the Hong Kong government’s economist, tells me some localgovernments are even establishing links with officials in Vietnam andBangladesh, to refer some potential investors on to them.[/size][/font]
[font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-1]Activists arevery critical of Donald Tsang, Hong Kong’s chief executive, for nottaking the problem seriously enough, though Mr Bradley said he hadnever heard him, as had been reported, dismiss complaints about airpollution as purely foreigners’ gripes. Indeed, Mr Tsang had assuredhim the environment was his top priority. [/size][/font]
[font=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif][size=-1]However, according to the [i]South China Morning Post[/i],when Mr Tsang, who was attending a trade conference in China, was askedabout Mr Bradley’s speech, he replied that, “the opinions of Hong Kongcitizens are much more important than that of any foreignconsul-general.” By Mr Bradley’s benchmark, that should be a cause forconcern. However, it is also rather rude, isn’t it? That’s reassuring. [/size][/font]
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