The Correspondent, January - February 2007

CORRESPONDENT JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2007

THE OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS’ CLUB, HONG KONG

THE

He spoke.

Who listened? >> LOFTY AMBITIONS

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CORRESPONDENT

contents

COVER PHOTOGRAPH: KEES METSELAR

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Cover Story

F.W. de Klerk: senior statesman’s words fall on stony soil

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World Wading through Stalin’s gene pool Real Estate

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No place for lofty ambitions in hidebound Hong Kong Through the Lens

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Small is beautiful?

Travel

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Made in Hong Kong: Amsterdam’s Chinatown Then & Now

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Central in 1970 and 2007 Media Max Kolbe wields his stiletto

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Book Review The Changing Face of China by John Gittings Charity

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Why Chris Dillon hikes for hospices Out of Context

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Eric Wishart of AFP

Letters From the President Merchandise Around the FCC Professional Contacts

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Letters

From Peter Isaac, President, National Press Club, New Zealand

THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS’ CLUB, HONG KONG 2 Lower Albert Road, Central, Hong Kong Tel: (852) 2521 1511 Fax: (852) 2868 4092 E-mail: <fcc@fcchk.org> Website: <www.fcchk.org> President: Chris Slaughter First Vice President: Keith Bradsher Second Vice President: Kevin Egan Correspondent Member Governors Paul Bayfield, Jim Laurie, Kate Pound Dawson, Matthew Driskill, Ilaria Maria Sala, Luke Hunt, Jeff Timmermans, Ernst Herb Journalist Member Governors Francis Moriarty, Jake van der Kamp Associate Member Governors Andy Chworowsky, Rob Stewart, David Garcia, Steve Ushiyama Hon Treasurer Steve Ushiyama Finance Committee Convener: Steve Ushiyama Professional Committee Convener: Keith Bradsher House/Food and Beverage Committee Convener: Dave Garcia Membership Committee Convener: Steve Ushiyama FCC Charity Committee Conveners: Dave Garcia, Andy Chworowsky

The minority of journalist members gives clubs such as ours the reputation for freedom of speech not found in other clubs. This point was crisply made in Nicholas Demuth’s letter (The Correspondent Sep-Oct 2006). So was the point about this minority allowing clubs such as ours to criticise the establishment, and to do so without the self criticism that other clubs deem mandatory in such circumstances.

It is the reason for example that we (in New Zealand) have an open invitation to any parliamentarian from Taiwan to speak to us and do so without let or hindrance.

They would not for example find that at the last moment their platforms have suddenly dissolved, along with their invitations, as has happened before in New Zealand when other clubs, more easily pressured, withdrew their invitations at the last moment Journalists seek controversy.

Members drawn from other voca-

tions sensibly seek to dodge it.

As a press club, there is no other option but to steer towards the storm. Those who disapprove can resign, as the secretary of our club did at the end of last year on the grounds that by hosting a speaker on a sensitive issue we were navigating in uncharted waters, to use the secretary’s term.

The secretary, a lawyer, was thanked for his dedicated service over the years. But his resignation was accepted without question.

Sillily, the established print media point to the thin blue line of authentic journalists among the 600 members of the National Press Club in Wellington.

Yet it has been ever thus with such clubs wherever they are. In our archives is a piece from The Washington Post of 1970 explaining the need for the Washington club to take on more and still more non-journalists to keep the Washington National Press Club alive.

Freedom of the Press Committee Convener: Francis Moriarty Wall Committee Convener: Ilaria Maria Sala General Manager Gilbert Cheng

The Correspondent © The Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong The Correspondent is published six times a year. Opinions expressed in the magazine are not necessarily those of the Club.

Publications Committee Convener: Paul Bayfield Editor: Diane Stormont Editorial and Production Hongkongnow.com ltd Tel: 2521 2814 E-mail: fccmag@hongkongnow.com Printer Hop Sze Printing Company Ltd Advertising Enquiries Sandra Pang Pronto Communications Tel: 2540 6872 Fax: 2116 0189 Mobile: 9077 7001 E-mail: advertising@fcchk.org

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From Kent Hayden-Sadler, Absent Member, Britain I thoroughly enjoyed reading the Vespa article (The Correspondent, SepOct 2006). My abiding memory of Ray Cranbourne and his scooter is that after a few beers in the FCC he could never remember where he’d parked the damned thing and always had to get a taxi home.

Special thanks to Morton’s, The Steakhouse – Hong Kong for its kind support of the FCC Charity Ball 2006

Contributions The Correspondent welcomes letters, articles, photographs and art-work (in softcopy form only, please – no faxes or printouts etc). We reserve the right to edit contributions chosen for publication. Anonymous letters will be rejected. For verification purposes only (and not for publication) please include your membership number (if applicable) and a daytime telephone number. Contributions can be e-mailed to fcc@hongkongnow.com. Disks should be dropped off at the Club or posted to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong, 2 Lower Albert Road, Central, Hong Kong and marked to the attention of The Editor, The Correspondent. FTP is also available and is encouraged for large files. Please e-mail us for the settings. The deadline for the next issue is March 25, 2007.

THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

Club Activities xxxxx

> FROM THE PRESIDENT R

iddle me this: Q: When is an exit not an entrance?

A: When it’s the back door of the FCC. Soon after you read this (and possibly before we go to print) our intimidating and well-armed guard will be hanging up his body armour, locking away his trusty sub-machine gun and tucking his many cans of mace – hopefully, unused – back into his cavernous pepper-spray cabinet. The state of siege around the Main Bar will have ended; the strictly-enforced curfew will have been rescinded, no longer will members be encouraged to give lists of names to the secret police, and emergency airlifts of San Miguel from the Yacht Club and samosas from the LRC will no longer be required. Hooray for liberty!

Man, what an ear-bashing we’ve been getting over the decision to put a guard at that damned door! The original intention was that he would remind members that it is intended to be an emergency exit only … and not as a way for people to slip out to suck down some smoke and then surreptitiously slip back in. And it seemed like it was working out rather well, actually.

At first, he served as a kind of uniformed doorman, letting people back into the bar after they’d nipped out for a nicotine hit. Then gradually, he began gently reminding people that it wasn’t an entrance; more recently, he has been posted outside, so that re-entering hasn’t been an option. His name is Giv, by the way, and he’s quite a nice guy … not a menacing figure at all. Go on, say hello. His contract is up as of the end of February, by which time, we’re confident everyone will have taken it on board that since the door is actually an emergency exit, it is not intended to be used as an entrance.

Speaking of which, the smoking ban certainly seems to have been welcomed by many members, judging by the amount of e-mail traffic I’ve received since we first announced that we would be complying with the law.

Okay, a couple of outraged notes, and a fair bit of overthe-bar grumbling, but the written responses (all of which are posted on the bulletin board for Members’ titillation, edification, and enjoyment) have, in the main, been quite supportive. Alas, my own backsliding has continued to the point that I’ve stopped bumming ‘em and have started buying my own packs again. But my intention to quit remains intact, if somewhat dented … and I take comfort in the sterling performance of our own former resident chimney and Journalist

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Member Governor, Jake van der Kamp, who has managed to stay off the vile weed since going cold turkey on January 1. Good on you, Jake!

A couple changes on the Board. Correspondent Member Governor Keri Geiger has left us for the green fields and pleasant pastures of Georgetown University, where she is working on her Masters’ degree in Security Studies. Unfortunately, Giv arrived after Keri had left Hong Kong, so we never got her input into the decision to put a guard at the emergency exit, more’s the pity. At any rate, we wish her every success, and hope to see her around the bar again soon, even if only for a visit. Meantime, the Board has prevailed upon Dow Jones Newswires Equities Editor Jeff Timmermans to take up Keri’s vacant seat. Please join us in welcoming him; he’ll do an excellent job representing the interests of Correspondent Members.

Over the past couple months, we’ve had a number of great events, and we’re looking forward to more in the months to come; Sarah Liao will speak on Hong Kong’s commitment to the environment, film doyenne Nancy Kwan will be visiting Hong Kong and the FCC again (with cameras, no less!), the AWSJ’s Jeremy Wagstaff will talk tech, and David Tang will talk business – but will smoke no cigars, obviously. First Vice-President Keith Bradsher has been doing a great job with the Professional Committee, as has our new events coordinator, Hilda Wang, who recently replaced Alice Fong when she decamped to Beijing via London.

Last but not least, the Human Rights Press Awards are just around the corner. This year we’ve had a record number of submissions, a testament to the growing importance of this event to the local journalistic community. Of course, that also means a tremendous amount of reading for us to catch up on before the judging, but that’s another matter. Hats off to Journalist Member Governor Francis Moriarty for once again putting in the long hours needed to make this event a success, as we’re sure it will be.

If only we were as confident that once unguarded, the back door will remain an exit-only sort of portal!

But as some of us know all too well, old habits are sometimes hard to break. Apologies if I’ve seemed a little obsessed here. Maybe I should hire a guard to keep me away from my cigarettes .... I understand there will be one looking for work soon.

Christopher Slaughter president@fcchk.org

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Cover Story

Left to right: Anson Chan, FCC First Vice President Keith Bradsher and F.W. de Klerk. Photos by Kees Metselaar.

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THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

Missed Opportunities Philip Bowring laments the parochial attitudes of Hong Kong’s political classes

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W de Klerk must surely be one of the more remarkable people to have addressed the FCC in recent times. He can of course talk on his feet, vigorously, intelligently and without notes, once a basic requirement for politicians but singularly lacking in such notables as George W. Bush and Donald Tsang. But de Klerk was not just a man who was prepared to see the error of his ways and in doing so helped save South Africa from racial war. He is the only state leader ever to have renounced the nuclear weapons that it already possessed.

Yet his FCC address was almost completely ignored by the local media, conspicuous by its absence from the lunch. And he was ignored by the leaders of “Asia’s World City”.

That seemed particularly surprising given that China is currently making a huge drive to win friends and influ-

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ence in resources-rich Africa. Indeed the day de Klerk was at the FCC, President Hu Jintao departed for Cameroon, his first stop on an extensive African tour which also took him to South Africa.

It is not clear whether the apathy shown by Tsang and co. was due to pique at the fact that de Klerk was in town as a member of a small group of former power-wielders of which Anson Chan is a member. Or that he had just come from Taiwan. Or that he was a has-been white guy from a now black majority-ruled nation.

But more likely is that the explanation lies not in malevolence but the ignorance that stems from a lack of interest in global issues.

That is perhaps not surprising. Members of the bureaucratic élite of which Tsang is head have lived their lives in a civil service cocoon and have scant experience of the outside

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Cover Story

world beyond being part of official delegations. Likewise the business leaders courted by the government are, by and large, those engaged in property and other businesses centred primarily on Hong Kong itself and whose outside interests are limited mostly to the mainland.

To curry favour with Beijing, their rhetoric too is mostly about cooperating with the mainland, building national consciousness. Yet one cannot at one and the same time be a “world city” while also focusing on meshing with a mainland in which Hong Kong will always be an also-ran relative to Beijing and Shanghai, and perhaps Guangzhou as well. Hong Kong’s strength lies in its unique status and international links but these are being slowly eroded both by policies and attitudes.

Take CEPA (the Closer Econom-

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ic Partnership Arrangement) with China. It may bring some small benefits to a few service industries but is just the kind of bilateral deal which is undermining the World Trade Organisation and hence the multilateral system on which Hong

Kong more than most depends.

Take immediate crossborder relations. Of course everything should be done to ease movement of goods and people. But while Hong Kong makes pious noises about cooperation, authorities on the other side pursue their local selfinterests (and some very sleazy deals) with vigour.

Even a central government supposedly keen to burnish its local image can be deaf to Hong Kong’s requests for reasonable, non-special, treatment. Mainland air traffic restrictions on Hong Kong add hugely to airline costs and limit Chek Lap Kok’s capacity, almost regardless of the number of runways.

It is not difficult to spot some

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ethnic cleansing at work in government departments, tertiary education and the quasi-non-governmental organisations which have proliferated since 1997 and provide cushy jobs for former civil servants.

Brown-skinned Asians, whether or not locally born, are particular sufferers from this trend.

Hong Kong is supposed to be making efforts, like other economies, to attract international talent and money. But in reality it lags far behind the likes of Singapore. There is for example a Capital Investment Entrant Scheme to admit investors.

As of the end of 2006 1,910 applications had been received of which 978 were approved. Of these, “foreign” nationals made up only 30 per cent.. The vast majority were Chinese nationals holding overseas residence, and Taiwan and Macau residents.

The recent scheme to give entry permits under the so-called Qualified Migrant Admission set the limit at just 1,000 a year. As of the end of 2006, a mere 83 had been approved. Details of nationality have not been released.

It is in any event a mean-minded scheme as it gives holders merely the right to enter and stay for one year while they find a job. Compare that with the sort of schemes offered by Australia or Singapore and one can see why Hong Kong is unlikely to get many applicants other than from the mainland, or perhaps from South Asians who will likely find the hurdles very high indeed.

Legislating against racial discrimination is no cure for inner prejudices. But if Hong Kong really is a world city it should stop dragging its feet on this issue, surely a far more offensive phenomenon than smoking in restaurants or engaging in filesharing. It could start by setting an example with its own Immigration Department.

Burying its head in the sand over pollution so as not to upset vested interests mainly does damage to the long-term health of Hong Kong people – even those living on the Peak, in Shouson Hill and Repulse Bay. But

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Legislating against racial discrimination is no cure for inner prejudices. But if Hong Kong really is a world city it should stop dragging its feet on this issue. the damage to its position as a global business centre is already well-evident anecdotally and is likely to get worse. Being the cleanest major city in China is not much of a boast. It may attract mainlanders, but what about foreigners? Seems the government does not care too much.

The government points to various statistics to show that Hong Kong is attracting capital and is becoming more international. But the fact is that the boom in the financial sector, which has been the main driving force of the economy over the past two years, has been due to the surge in mainland IPOs. Hong Kong’s advantage for mainland issuers is still intact and has swelled the presence of Wall Street investment banks now paying extravagant rents for IFC2.

Continued reform and opening of the mainland market may, sooner or later, take this business to Shanghai.

Where will Hong Kong be then? The easy money being made on the back of the China boom has caused Hong Kong to ignore international opportunities. The stock exchange, a little monopoly run for the benefit of the local broking fraternity and its hangers-on, has almost no external listings other than from the mainland and a few from Taiwan. Its futures exchange has singularly failed to develop contracts based on non-local issues. The links between Hong Kong and Southeast Asian Chinese capital are far weaker than they used to be and Japan’s presence has visibly declined. Even Japan Air Lines is cutting flights.

The whole tenor of tourist promotion is towards mainlanders who are anyway starting to realise that Hong Kong is not a shopper’s paradise and that the top designer labels are available on the mainland. The nonetoo-successful Disneyland is perhaps an illustration of how the authorities have failed to recognise that Hong Kong’s appeal lay in its uniqueness, its topography, its quirkiness and its food. But instead the government has subsidised a park with no local characteristics, and allowed shopping malls to obliterate Hong Kong’s past and pollution to obliterate the view of a shrinking harbour.

Judging by the rise of Non Government Organisations and civic pressure groups, this is not what the people want. But it is what is thrust upon them by self-styled leaders who follow the path of survival by doing what they think Beijing and the local oligarchs and paymasters want. If Tsang really believed in his “world city” talk, instead of spending large amounts of time touring mainland provinces, he would be in Seoul looking at urban improvement, Europe and North America examining methods of dealing with pollution and ensuring that Hong Kong welcomes talent from all corners of the world.

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World

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THE CORRESPONDENT NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2006

Blood Relative Wading Through Stalin’s Gene Pool Written and Photographed by Steven Knipp

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he resemblance, you have been told, is uncanny. Yet, even still, when the man himself finally steps out of the shadows, it causes a momentary hesitation, a faltering of step for the visitor. And indeed it is true. Even the photos don’t accurately portray it.

Yevgeny Dzhugashvili is a compact, solidly built man. His neatly trimmed moustache is white but, at age 70, his grey hair is still thick. He has a fine broad forehead, a strong nose, large ears and dark, watchful eyes. He speaks slowly and quietly.

His home is a small, working-class apartment in Tbilisi, the capital of the mountainous Republic of Georgia which, 16 years ago, was a privileged

THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

part of the once mighty Soviet Union.

Yevgeny’s family name is virtually unknown beyond Tbilisi. Yet Yevgeny carries an enormous psychological burden, for he is the grandson of one Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili – better known to the world as Joseph Stalin, one of history’s most infamous mass murderers.

According to the prominent Moscow-based Russian human rights group, Memorial, Stalin, who ruled the USSR from 1928 until his death in 1953, was responsible for the deaths of probably 14 million people, including those starved to death by his purposely launched famines of 1932-33 and 1946-47.

Stalin also imprisoned some 25

million people in his network of brutal Siberian work camps known as the gulags. What’s more, in 1950 Stalin gave his personal approval to North Korean leader Kim Il-sung to attack South Korea; the resulting war killed 600,000 soldiers on both sides, more than a million South Korean civilians, and more than a million North Korean civilians as well.

Stalin’s savage lifelong paranoia was such that his own native country of Georgia actually endured the largest percentage of people executed or exiled to life in prison for imagined crimes.

The dictator’s legendary viciousness even destroyed his own family.

Stalin’s first two wives died under mysterious circumstances. His son

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World

Yakov – Yevgeny’s father – served as a Red Army officer during World War II. When he was captured by the Germans, the Nazis proposed that he be exchanged for a German field marshal held by the Russians. But a furious Stalin felt that his son was both a coward and a traitor for allowing himself to be captured alive. He told the Germans: “I have no son.”

Yevgeny’s father died in a German prison camp, though whether he was shot or committed suicide is unknown, leaving Yevgeny without either parent at age seven. Stalin’s other son, Vassili (Yevgeny’s uncle), died an alcoholic in 1962 and his aunt, Svetlana, famously fled to the US five years later.

Retiring as a colonel after 30 years of service in the Red Army, Yevgeny today lives on a $300 monthly pension. I spent an hour talking to him through a translator, trying to get

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He steadfastly believes that his grandfather only did what was necessary to build up the Soviet Union into a great power a measure of the man who never met his infamous grandfather, yet refuses to accept the undisputable historic records of his monstrous atrocities.

Though born in Russia, Yevgeny has lived much of his life in Georgia. He has a Georgian wife, two Georgian-born sons and several Georgian grandchildren, whom he dotes on. All of them speak Georgian to each other. Yet he

long ago refused to learn the Georgian language. Of course this has only served to isolate him more. When asked why he continues to live in Georgia, 16 years after the country broke free of Russian control, he says: “I live in Georgia because Stalin was born here, and I don’t want to lose these roots.

“My life can be divided into two parts,” he admits to my translator, “when Stalin was alive, and after his passing.” He was allowed to enter university, for example, without taking exams, simply because of his name.

Later, when Stalin died of a stroke, and his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced his grandfather for his brutality, Yevgeny himself was denounced, though he was barely 20. And “even now,” he says, “I am often denounced.” Yet he steadfastly believes that his grandfather only did what was necessary to build up the

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Soviet Union into a great power, an opinion often mirrored by others of his generation.

In 1999, Yevgeny tried for the first time to enter politics himself, by launching a new political party in Georgia called the Stalinist Bloc, which sought the return of the old Soviet Union. But the movement failed, and in any case the Georgian electoral commission barred him from taking part in the elections because he was not a Georgian citizen.

He has travelled abroad only once, to Holland in 2005 to mark the 60th anniversary of the historic 1945 meeting at Yalta between his grandfather, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.

While at a history conference, sponsored by a Dutch university, he met the grandsons of both Churchill and FDR. Yevgeny says he enjoyed speaking to Roosevelt’s grandson, James Roosevelt,

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but found Churchill’s grandson, Winston Spencer-Churchill, arrogant.

In the end Yevgeny Dzhugashvili seems a rather sad character, living out his entire life in the shadow of someone else – someone whom he never met. His apartment had an air of gloom, despite the late afternoon sunshine streaming through the windows. There are several huge photos of Stalin staring down from the walls, an ornate clock, and a faded world map which shows the world frozen in time, as it was when the USSR was still a global power.

When pressed, he rants on about how the US and Israel are “both out to destroy Russia”. And he claims that the various peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe such as the Rose Revolution in Georgia and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, which helped pull the old USSR apart, were insti-

gated by the United States “so as to get at Russia itself”.

But I somehow got the sense that he was merely going through the motions of what people expected of him. He seemed like a man dwelling on the surface of the Earth but not really living on the planet.

When my translator and I were back outside on the street and began to walk away from his apartment building – which ironically overlooks a place called Liberty Park – I had a feeling of being watched. I turned around and glanced upward. Yevgeny Dzhugashvili was standing on his balcony. He started to wave. It was the only time I saw a slender smile cross his face. In the end I was surprised to find myself feeling sorry for him. A foolish failing, perhaps, and one which his merciless grandfather would no doubt have despised me for having.

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Real Estate

Lofty Thoughts Converting old factories into flats, restaurants and boutiques is a common part of the redevelopment process in many big cities. Chris Dillon looks at why it hasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t taken off in Hong Kong.

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THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

More than 90 per cent of Hong Kong’s factories were built after 1970. Concrete boxes are the norm, and there aren’t many architectural details to give these buildings character.

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f you’re under 30 or new to Hong Kong, you may not know that our city was once a major manufacturing centre. Hong Kong’s low labour costs, central location and deep harbour made it a natural place to produce clothes, toys and a range of other goods. A visit to the Hong Kong Museum of History quickly confirms how important light manufacturing was to our economy from the end of World War II until the 1970s.

But as wages rose, the price of local real estate increased and China started welcoming foreign factories, Hong Kong’s appeal as a manufacturing base began to decline. Today, manufacturing plays a relatively minor role in our economy. But at the end of 2005, Hong Kong had more than 17 million square metres of factory space, of which more than 1.2 million square metres were vacant.

In the Americas, Europe and Australia, large cities faced similar challenges when manufacturers left inner city neighbourhoods in search of less expensive labour in developing economies and cheaper, more modern space in industrial parks. Factories would be abandoned or sit vacant until artists, students and other pioneers began to move in, often illegally. The new residents of these “loft” appartments lent these neighbourhoods a sense of flair and excitement. In time, investors and speculators began buying the factories, and areas such as New York’s SoHo,

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Flatiron and Tribeca were revitalised.

The original loft-dwellers were motivated by a desire for cheap, plentiful space. As industrial neigbourhoods were renewed, they were displaced by wealthy professionals who also wanted space and a central location. Both the pioneers and the yuppies liked the idea of an alternative lifestyle and escaping the blandness of the suburbs.

With their large, open spaces and abundant natural light, lofts are now found in many cosmopolitan cities. So why don’t we have them in Hong Kong?

One reason is architecture. Overseas, lofts are often located in 50- to 100-year-old buildings with high ceilings, exposed brick walls, hardwood floors and large windows.

With money and imagination, these buildings become shells that can be transformed into unique, visually interesting homes, offices and boutiques. By contrast, more than 90 per cent of Hong Kong’s factories were built after 1970. Concrete boxes are the norm, and there aren’t many architectural details to give these buildings character.

Financing is another issue. On an indexed basis, where 1999 equals 100, the value of factory space plummeted from 171.4 in 1996 to 71.7 in 2003. By the end of 2005, values had rebounded to 135.9, well below peak prices.

This volatility left lenders gun-shy. An informal survey in 2005 found firms that were

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Real Estate

Hong Kong people also value conformity.

Ease of resale and financing make a 400-square-foot flat in Sha Tin more desirable than something as conventional as a remodelled walk-up in SoHo.

willing to provide a factory mortgage used valuations that were five to 40 per cent below market, would lend 50 to 60 per cent of that value, and wanted a one-percentage-point premium over the prime lending rate. Mortgage terms like these make conventional flats much more attractive.

Hong Kong people also value conformity. Ease of resale and financing

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make a 400-square-foot flat in Sha Tin more desirable than something as unconventional as a remodelled walkup in Soho or Noho. For most people, the idea of living in a converted factory is simply beyond imagining.

Regulations governing local property are perhaps the biggest obstacle.

As part of Hong Kong 2030, a strategic plan for the territory’s physical devel-

opment, the Hong Kong Government commissioned a number of working papers, including one that examined the feasibility of converting selected industrial buildings in Ma Tau Kok and Yau Tong into lofts.

The working paper assumed the loft conversions would occur on a whole-building basis, which would limit participation to large develop-

THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

“The main attraction is the dollar-persquare foot ratio.

You save a lot of money and it’s contrarian — when we’re home the other residents aren’t.”

ers and exclude the smaller companies and individuals who usually pioneer these developments. It also specified that the factory buildings’ plot ratio (the net floor area divided by the net site area) would need to be reduced to meet the regulations for residential buildings, a condition that would require considerable amounts of demolition and negate the point of the conversions. One of the working paper’s conceptual plans even included a clubhouse, something that is common in Hong Kong apartment blocks but that would be decidedly out of place in most lofts.

Despite these challenges, the paper concluded that loft conversions could be viable in Hong Kong, but only if developers were not charged a premium for changing the building from industrial to residential use. The authors recommended that government consider changes to the premium policy to facilitate loft conver-

THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

sions. However, the Planning Department said that no progress had been made since the working paper was published in September 2002.

So, if it is impossible to legally convert a factory into loft, what are the alternatives?

According to the Buildings Department, living in an industrial space would qualify as “unauthorized building works” and result in a maximum fine of $200,000, additional fines of up to $20,000 for each subsequent day that the tenant failed to comply with an order to vacate the premises, and a maximum of one year in jail.

If this doesn’t deter you, there are landlords in Hong Kong who will happily look the other way. Mr. J, who has lived with his wife in a 2,000-squarefoot industrial space on Hong Kong Island for the past two years, loves it. “The main attraction is the dollarper-square foot ratio. You save a lot of money and it’s contrarian — when we’re home the other residents aren’t.

About the only downside is that occasionally you’ll hear industrial machinery at night.”

Aside from noise and surprise inspections by the Lands, Buildings

and Fire departments, there are some other disadvantages. There is the risk of contamination by previous tenants, who may have used noxious chemicals. Many factory buildings have been neglected and leak when it rains. You could end up with a metalstamping plant next door.

However, low prices (and the ability to throw loud parties) can be a powerful incentive. Currently, rent for factory space in Aberdeen starts at $5 per square foot, while units can be purchased for less than $1,000 per square foot. That is substantially less than the $3,000-plus per square foot to buy residential property in Aberdeen, or $12,000-plus for a flat in nearby Shouson Hill.

While it is unlikely that Hong Kong will embrace loft living with the enthusiasm found in London, the Planning Department says it will address the conversion issue again in a round of public consultations scheduled for the first half of 2007. And it’s possible that the combination of rising real estate prices and renewed interest in preserving Hong Kong’s heritage may give this movement the boost that it needs.

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Photography

Then

Now

The changing face of Hong Kong Central in 1970 and 2007. These photographs were taken from the same spot looking east. The 1970 photograph shows the Connaught Centre (now Jardine House) under construction.

Š Bob Davis

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Web: http://www.bobdavisphotographer.com E-mail: bobdavis@netvigator.com

THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

Media

Max’s Stiletto

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irst up: hearty congratulations to Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, who has been awarded the titles of honorary professor and Master of Journalism along with the education merit medal from Guayaquil University of Ecuador on the occasion of his birthday.

The Korean Central News Agency reports that inscribed in the medal are the words “To the great leader Kim Jong-il” and “In high praise of feats performed for university education.

January 15, 2007.”

An awards ceremony took place on January 15. Present were Salomon Quintero, vice-president of the university, Hector Chavez, dean of the Social Communication Faculty, Alva Chavez, secretary general of the Latin American Institute of the Juche Idea, who is director of the Doctoral Institute of the Social Communication Faculty of the university, personages of the academic circle, teachers and students.

Alva Chavez, speaking at the ceremony, praised Kim Jong-il as a great politician, thinker, theoretician and strategist.

Further south, in Phnom Penh, it is with much sadness that this column notes the death of Ly Kim-song, the office manager for Agence France-Presse, who helped many a journalist and photographer in Cambodia.

Mr Song, as he was known to everyone, died suddenly on January 14, after a period of illness.

He was 64, and leaves behind his wife, Tat Kim Huoy, three sons, two daughters and seven grandchildren.

Diminutive in stature – he described himself as “svelte and sexy” – Song worked his heart out. He translated, spotted errors in news stories, controlled the accounts, sorted satellite dishes and phone lines, massaged egos, launched and nursed many a hangover, dealt with belligerent

defuse a crisis over staging elections.

The government, which is widely seen as being backed by the military, can “restrict publication or broadcast of any anti-government” articles, cartoons or discussion in print or electronic media, the notice said.

BY MAX KOLBE authorities and dilettante journalists, and knew who could be counted on and who could not.

Meanwhile, Bangladesh is warning anyone caught breaking new media regulations imposed under emergency rule faces five years in jail.

The caretaker government announced that freedom of speech and assembly would be restricted when it imposed a state of emergency to

Oh master!

THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

And in Australia, the advertising watchdog has struck a blow for the “whingeing Pom” by upholding British complaints about a beer commercial.

The Advertising Standards Board blocked a Tooheys New Super Cold radio promotion after ruling that use of the popular Australian description of Brits was demeaning.

Apparently the commercial included British men singing “Land of Hope and Glory” with the lyrics replaced by synonyms of the word whinge – including whine, moan, slag and complain.

The ad ended with a voice-over saying “Introducing Tooheys New Super Cold, served so cold it’s a Pom’s worst nightmare.”

AFP

In Beijing, China has scored a gong, winning praise from Reporters Without Borders for a relaxation of some media curbs.

The Paris-based press freedom advocate said it was lifting its call for a boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympics in response to China’s efforts on press freedom. Like a ban was going to happen.

Reporters Without Borders acknowledged there were “signs of change on the eve of next year’s Olympic Games in Beijing”.

Chinese President Hu Jintao then announced a new drive to control the Internet, while government censors said they were planning to step up monitoring of prime time TV. Broadcasting authorities in China will allow television stations to air only “ethically inspiring” programmes in prime time.

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Through the lens

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THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

A Surreal Little World Over the years, photographer Kees Metselaar has worked in war zones. He’s shot natural disasters. His assignments have ranged from upmarket corporate “events” to mundane gripand-grins. But his eye for the offbeat remains as sharp as ever as documented by this dispatch from Shenzhen.

H

ow do I describe Shenzhen’s Window of the World? Bizarre?

Yes. Quaint? In parts. Plain mad?

Good point. This is a place which groups together a hundred or so World Wonders, from the Eiffel Tower to Angkor Wat, set down right in the middle of the expanding western suburbs of the original Shenzhen Special Economic Zone.

Just over the border from Hong Kong, this is the international section of Shenzhen’s first ever theme park, Splendid China, which offers visitors a taste of the motherland’s famous monuments in replica. China is heaven for amusement park lovers. There are more than 3,000 of them nationwide, varying from simple, old-fashioned fairgrounds with rides and rollercoasters to highly complicated extravaganzas such as the Bruce Lee Park and the Genghis Khan Yurt Village in Inner Mongolia. And of course Hong Kong itself has Disneyland and Ocean Park.

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19

Through the lens

Located right next to the exit of the last station of metro line number one from Lo Wu, reaching the park is simplicity itself. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a big square with a monorail buzzing overhead and, of course, a food court. The monorail provides an aerial view of the whole area, including some new housing estates and suburbs. The most popular restaurant seems to be KFC where families and groups indulge in large tubs of fried chicken. La Grande Bouffe local style.

The actual park starts with the

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THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

World Square, a UN-themed facility complete with Hellenic and Romanstyle pillars, a relief wall and an amphitheatre that can accommodate 10,000 people who crowd in to see cultural programmes and lightshows.

Facing the entrance, where copies of the Venus de Milo and David contrast with the relentless development of the neighbourhood over the road, a young local couple are visiting.

She is doing the sightseeing and he is taking care of the baby in the pram.

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Modern fatherhood.

My favourite â&#x20AC;&#x153;Wonderâ&#x20AC;? is the Eiffel Tower. It reaches about one third of the height of the original and that is high enough. From the top, some 100 metres high, you get a great view of the Pyramids of Giza, nestling against an upmarket neighbourhood of townhouses and high-rises under construction. Just like Egypt really.

To the south are Dutch-style windmills against a backdrop of a European-style coastal neighbourhood with views over the water of the hills

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Through the lens

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THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

separating the New Territories from Kowloon.

In my eyes, the whole area resembled a theme park. It was difficult to say where the so-called Wonders ended and the Shenzhen neighbourhoods began.

Wanting to see the windmills from close up, I strolled passed a field of plastic, brightly coloured tulips and interrupted a wedding photographer.

The couple seemed all lovey dovey and I congratulated them on their nuptials. “Thanks, but we are only

THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

models,” was the unexpected answer.

Just like everything else here.

The leaning Tower of Pisa is miniature, tucked away behind some bushes. And there’s the opportunity for a bit of Alpine skiing in the shade of a fake Matterhorn. Separated by a glass curtain labelled “Snow View”, skiers in rented kit glide down a slope of packed snow as if they were holidaying in the Tyrol. On the warmer side of the window, diners feast on winter hotpot while watching the Winter Olympics hopefuls at play.

Walking back to the train station through the Arc de Triomphe, and bypassing the Eiffel Tower, the sun is setting and I almost feel like I’m in Paris. There is no time left to visit London (Buckingham Palace) or Washington (the White House) – this time.

As I head home I realise there are no “Wonders” from Hong Kong. But silly me, naturally they wouldn’t be in the international section. They’re probably in Splendid China. But what did they choose? And do any of them them still exist?

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Travel

Made in Hong Kong Amsterdamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Chinatown is a home away from home for the visiting Hong Konger, reports Vaudine England who takes a look at how it came to be.

THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

T

ake a dark cold night in Amsterdam. Pop into a Chinese take-away for a taste of home and youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll be transported back to Hong Kong almost instantly.

The staff speak Dutch, of course, but also Cantonese and English. Many are former New Territories villagers who chose to migrate to continental Europe rather than to Britain or the New World and found the Netherlands to be a congenial new home.

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THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

When they get to Holland, Chinese have a strong network to plug into, among an estimated 100,000 or more Chinese residents. They have Chineselanguage newspapers, radio stations and even political representation.

The Zeedijk, the Warmoestraat, the Geldersekade and the Nieuwmarkt are areas of the old southern banks of the city and formed the shipping quarter of old Amsterdam. The Zeedijk, part of this system of dykes and canals, used to be full of junkies, heavy drinkers and hard-faced whores. Now it’s the heart of Chinatown.

Respectable burghers once feared to tread here. Now they, alongside droves of tourists, flock to the neighbourhood for the good Chinese food found around the He Hua temple, built thanks to a combination of Dutch architecture, Taiwanese imports, local and overseas Chinese money and local political encouragement.

The Waag, or weighing station of the old port, is the heart of the area: a cobbled square, flanked by fresh flower and fish stalls, and roads radiating off in all directions, with the street signs in Chinese as well as Dutch.

The several Chinese supermarkets are sources of Asian produce, from Thai rice to lychees from China, from pickled mud fish to Japanese seaweed, and more. Outdoors the mixing continues with Chinatown boasting large numbers of Thai, Malay and Indian as well as Chinese restaurants.

In between the exotic escort agencies and Chinese apothecaries, generations of Chinese families – many from south China or Hong Kong – have created a rich and diverse community.

Take the Wah Kiu book store on Geldersekade, one of the main streets through Amsterdam’s Chinatown. Many of the growing numbers of Chinese tourists to the Dutch capital like to pop into the store to pick up books they are not allowed, or are unable, to buy back home in China.

The two generations of the Chow family who run the Wah Kiu stores – one in Amsterdam and one feeding the larger Chinese community of Rotterdam – have been tracking Chinese tastes since they arrived in 1976.

The older Chows were from Shang-

years outside Holland.

“I spoke Dutch from my school days here and went to the Vrije Universiteit (Free University) to study business,” says Chiwah, switching deftly between Chinese, Dutch and English as she served her customers’ needs.

Chiwah went to Chinese school on Saturdays when she was growing up and says third generation children like to do the same: “They still have the idea they want to understand Chinese.”

But it’s not enough for a shop to survive on Chinese books alone nowadays. She explained her father had started by selling books only, but that second generation Chinese (“like me,” she laughed) find reading books in Chinese too tiring.

“We read Dutch better than we read Chinese, so there is less demand for Chinese books,” she said. Around

Many of the growing numbers of Chinese tourists to the Dutch capital like to pop into the Wah Kiu book store to pick up books they are not allowed, or are unable, to buy back home in China.

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hai but moved to Hong Kong “because of politics”, said Chiwah Chow, the 30-something daughter managing the phones at the back of the shop. Her father, the pioneer, still runs the till at the front counter. He’s most comfortable speaking Chinese, but prefers English to Dutch, reflecting his earlier

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Travel

The Pinda-man H

idden away in a crammed second-hand book shop, for the bargain price of one euro (HK$9.43), a dog-eared and torn slip of sheet music titled Pinda Pinda Lekka Lekka explains the origin of the Pinda-man. The drawing on the cover shows a Chinese man in cap and coat, looking as if the cold is getting to him, with a large tin hanging off a strap round his neck. On the tin it says “Pinda 5 cents”.

Peanuts are pinda in Dutch, while lekka means yummy, and the simple song and attendant imagery take many Dutch back to the 1930s when hard times hit the small Chinese community and many turned to selling peanuts on the streets to survive.

The older generation of Dutch cherishes fond memories of the Pinda-man. For many dwellers outside the cities the peanut men were the first Chinese some Dutch had seen.

her, the store now sells all manner of gadgets, toys, slippers, souvenirs, stuffed animals, Chinese lanterns, chimes, tea, jade, and more, as well as books.

Hong Kong newspapers are available – at a price. A copy of the Sing Tao Daily costs 2.20 euros (HK$21) while the Oriental Daily News costs a whopping 6.50 euros (HK$61). Free papers available include the Wah Kiu Tong Sun, a Chinese paper published every three weeks by Chiwah’s brothers, who divide their time between Rotterdam and Amsterdam.

Chow family members got Dutch citizenship early on, through their father’s investment in business. Her brother is on the committee of business owners for the Chinatown district but her family isn’t interested much in politics beyond that.

The biggest problem they face is car parking, or rather the lack of it.

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“The whole street is complaining!”

Chiwah said.

It was in the late 1800s that Chinese faces began appearing in Amsterdam and in the larger port city of Rotterdam. They arrived as stokers, sailors and cooks on ships from the East. Many bunked down together in dormitories which became the precursors to today’s Chinatowns.

The 1915 seamens strike provided an opportunity for more Chinese migrant workers. Most were recruited

by Dutch shipowners to break the strike and keep trade moving.

By 1933, the largest group was in Rotterdam, numbering more than 1,000 men. No Chinese women are recorded as settled in Holland before the world wars.

Alongside the maritime fraternity were small groups of traders who arrived in Holland in the early 20th

In the late 1800s, Chinese faces began appearing in Amsterdam and in the larger port city of Rotterdam.

Many bunked down together in dormitories which became the precursors to today’s Chinatowns.

THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

century, on a route from Shanghai to Marseille. They roamed through Europe seeking opportunities and selling trinkets, beads, shoelaces, ties and more.

In the 1930s, the Chinese were heavily hit, as were others, by economic crisis. One old sailor, called Ng Kwai, started to sell sweets and candies on the street and found that peanut cookies from south China were a hit. The “pinda man” (peanut man) was born (see sidebar). Many of his compatriots soon followed.

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Some of those who still found it difficult to make a living went back to China in the late 1930s, amid allegations that some of the older or poorer were pushed on to ships back to their homeland. By 1939, there were only about 800 Chinese left in the Netherlands.

During World War Two, a few Chinese restaurants and shops remained open, with some managing to store rice, but even these families ran out of food before the war, and German occupation, was over.

It is in the half century or so since the end of the war that Chinese communities across the Netherlands have grown – and from a wide range of sources.

The first post-war wave was from Indonesia when the Dutch colonial era ended there in 1949 and people, fearing republican rule, chose to flee.

These people were mostly well-educated, Dutch-speaking Chinese-Indonesians who faced few problems integrating in Holland.

Also in the late 1940s, Chinese

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Travel

from southern China, especially from Zhejiang and Guangdong provinces, arrived as they fled civil war and later, the Communist victory.

Chinese from Hong Kong also began arriving and, if they had British papers, their path through Dutch immigration was easier. During the countdown to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong, many Chinese took this route.

A fourth group came from Suriname, the former Dutch colony in the Caribbean. Indonesian Chinese, many of them Hakka, were among the migrants who moved to Suriname from Indonesia. Many then joined the waves of emigrants to Holland in the late 1970s when Suriname became independent and a third of the population left.

A fifth group of Chinese arrived in Holland in the late 1970s. They were the ethnic Chinese boat people from Vietnam. At this time, there was also a steady trickle into the Netherlands of ethnic Chinese from Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia.

The Inspraakorgaan Chinezen, or IOC, founded to stand up for and represent the Chinese, advises government and acts as intermediary between government and Chinese people of all kinds. IOC data shows that Mandarin-speakers are becoming more dominant in the community, outnumbering the Cantonese.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the development of the Chinese community abroad has had a lot to do with food. When post-war Dutch people spoke of “going into town to eat”, it usually meant going to a Chinese restaurant.

Now there’s the Sea Palace floating restaurant, moored close to the central train station, offering dim sum, VIP rooms and 700 seats in what it claims is Europe’s first floating restaurant. One step further east of the station, and there’s a restaurant called Star Ferry.

Chinese restaurants, then and

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now, are famous for providing large servings for low prices. But for many Dutch, “Chinese food” meant dishes that were actually Indonesian, such as nasi goreng. In the 1980s, however, a move to more “authentic” Chinese food got under way.

The latest stage in the process is the recent emergence of Asian fast food shops, exploiting the Dutch love for a fast, hot feed in night-life districts, as part of a long night of fun.

Now, yet another wave of Chinese arrivals is on its way – the tourists from mainland China who can now get visas to travel in the European

Union. Before 2004, no numbers were kept for this category. Now tens of thousands are coming each year, to visit the diamond factories, the windmills, the red light district – and Chinatown.

There’s more business than ever before, said Chiwah Chow of the Wah Kiu book shop, much of it fuelled by growing mainland tourism.

Years ago, she and her family used to live above the shop but now the whole family can afford homes in the suburbs.

But ask Chiwah where she really feels she is from and she laughs: “I’m made in Hong Kong!”

A Circular Progression T

he Chinese mitten crab, or wolhandkrab, first reached Dutch waters in the bilges of ships from China about 100 years ago.

The crabs settled into the fresh waters around Amsterdam and other harbours, and managed to cross large swathes of land to reach the salt water needed when it was time to mate.

In recent decades, the mitten crab has become an extra source of income for Amsterdam’s eel fishermen, who sell them to local Chinese restaurants.

Now, reports an expert on city ecologies Martin Melchers, the mitten crab is being exported to the dining tables of China.

THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

Books

Reporting China John Gittings has been described as many things – Maoist, sinologist, moralist, author and reporter. Vaudine England caught up with him after his December 5 FCC luncheon address.

J

ohn Gittings has covered China inside out for decades in magazines, newspapers, columns and books – his latest book, The Changing Face of China, from Mao to Market, has just been re-issued in paperback. The stages he went through in learning his subject, covering it and then looking back and putting into context the different ways of looking at China over the years, provide a rich picture of what is surely a basic issue for any thoughtful correspondent, anywhere.

That issue, which exercises Gittings and others, is how the way one looks at a subject defines it, and changes it. Rare are those who manage to go through all the upheavals of a place – experiencing the highs of thrilling change and the lows of despairing cynicism – and come out at the end still loving the place they started with.

“I don’t feel disillusioned about China at all,” Gittings says. “Millions and millions of Chinese are trying to do something for themselves. At the grassroots there is a sense of nationhood, of belonging to China, which has certain values and standards. At Tiananmen Square, ordinary mothers and fathers come to the Square to remonstrate with the troops. Ordinary working class parents were accosting the workers’ army and asking them to stop and think. People continue to believe in certain values, which are not necessarily socialist, but humane.”

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Books

“We tried to place what was happening in China in a theoretical context so we took seriously – too seriously I think – what Mao was saying about the future of socialism in China.

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Having seen the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, the destitution and greed, the brutality of the regime, the often unrelieved trauma of China’s past decades, it’s a wonder that Gittings can sustain this love affair.

Perhaps it’s the idealism he admits to that has pulled him through.

Gittings started out as a Hong Kongbased China watcher, writing about China, but unable to visit it, working for the old Far Eastern Economic Review and writing a column for the South China Morning Post called “Eye on China by China Watcher”.

He took his first steps across the border in 1971, with a delegation of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, a body sympathetic to the great communist revolution, or at least to the idealism of the revolution that Gittings thinks still exists.

“Yes, that’s why people call me a Maoist.

But I was never a real Maoist. Real Maoists believed every word that Mao and his wife said.

“We tried to place what was happening in China in a theoretical context so we took seriously – too seriously I think – what Mao was saying about the future of socialism in China.

“It was valid up to a point, but in the process we sometimes lost sight of what was happening on the ground.

“I’m not repudiating anything, although I note some of my colleagues have, but it became clear as time went by that things were seriously wrong.”

The fascinating point here is that even as a first generation of journalists got over their early illusions, new generations of academics, even statesmen, were the next to line up to be moved.

“The Chinese are very good at that sort of thing, and the first to be seduced was Kissinger – look at his memoirs!” chuckles Gittings.

To him the message is that how we look at something changes what we’re looking at – and we’re often wrong. Historically, visions of China have been imbued with romance and exoticism. Now, every few years, a new peak in the cycle of business enthusiasm is reached when suddenly Only China Matters – all money rushes to China, China is the dragon whose back we must all climb.

The reality of course is always more nuanced, more complex, less gripping to single-minded editors on the other side of the world, but more interesting to those close

up and watching carefully.

“China is not likely to explode or to collapse. Nor is it an exotic alternative, and that is healthy in a way not to see it as so exotic.

It is part of our world,” says Gittings.

But that conclusion took a long time coming, and a lot of self-examination. “In the end I think we managed to convey something of what was happening ... we were able to see the Cultural Revolution seriously as a clash of ideologies, a clash of power and also as a clash of different interest groups in society, and I think in a way we saw it more clearly then than we do now when we just say: 10 years of chaos, 10 years of violence, all down to Mao’s arrogance. I think our view today has become somewhat over-simplified.”

On his first trips to China in the 1970s, “one could say, perhaps literally, I was wearing a Mao hat or a Mao cap because we bought our Mao caps the first day we arrived in China and kept them on until we left!

“It is commonplace now to look back on that type of experience and to say this was a Potemkin tour and we saw nothing of value and that we were fooled or we allowed ourselves to be fooled by what we saw. And you meet Chinese who tell you, yes, we fooled you, and we laughed while we were doing it, and you meet people who were my companions and who have, so to speak, recanted and say ‘I renounce and deny everything I said then’.

“Again I don’t think it was quite so simple.

I think it was possible under those conditions if you asked the wrong questions you sometimes got the right answers, and if you used your eyes ... I recall visiting a machine tool plant in Shanghai where the divisions between the workers on the shop floor and the management were so intense they had to hustle us out early because the workers were assembling, glowering at us on the lawn outside and it was all written up on the factory blackboards too, the whole continuing struggle. And that was a clue, 1971, to the fact that the Cultural Revolution was not over.”

Nowadays with the controversy over concepts of embedding, when journalists are taken in as part of a military troop to cover the war in Iraq, one could perhaps argue over a drink in the same way.

“Certainly by the time I went back for the second time, in 1976, (it was) just after the big anti-Gang of Four demonstration in Beijing

THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

when every single sweeping machine and cleaning machine in the entire city had been mobilised to scrub the stones of Tiananmen Square clean of the slogans and poems and manifestos which the demonstrators had written. And it was quite clear how seriously the Cultural Revolution had gone wrong.

“We also had then the advantage of Deng Xiaoping’s scatological denunciations of the Gang of Four, whom he described as a group of people who could sit on the pot and not know how to shit.

“So I don’t think that Potemkin visits were without value and I think they have their place in the historical record,” says Gittings.

Covering China in the 1980s was a glorious privilege and joy, he thinks now, describing it as the golden age of covering China, when the high degree of interest back at one’s editors’ desks matched the growing accessibility of the story.

“There was an immense hunger to know where the new New China, as I called it in my book, the new New China was heading. I can remember the excitement when I wrote a story about the re-establishment of key secondary schools, which doesn’t sound quite so great now.”

This new mood of excitement was dashed by the events of Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

“I can remember in May 1989, when the students were already in the square, going for a briefing by the British Foreign Secretary then, Geoffrey Howe, as to how they saw the situation unfolding in China. And he took a very relaxed, almost weary, view of it, and he said, our people in Beijing have advised us that what is happening in Tiananmen Square is just another demonstration in the endless cyclical cycle of Chinese politics.

“Well it was much more than that. I think that when we came to report it, it was incredibly important that we were there, but the foreign press allowed itself also to be used as a sounding board for rumours which became facts.

“Very simply, we would report rumours from Beijing which were re-published in Hong Kong as facts, which were faxed back to Beijing – this was the great era of the fax – so these were faxed hyper-facts or pseudo-facts, and we then reported them as facts.

“I think also we lacked military experience so we couldn’t quite figure out what

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was going on, and we had illusions about the strength of the liberal camp in the Chinese leadership, when those illusions should already have been dashed.

“Finally I suppose after Tiananmen Square we had another set of illusions replace those, maybe not everyone here, but most of us believed that the Chinese Communist Party was going to collapse very soon. So I think a mixed record from Tiananmen Square,” says Gittings.

By the 1990s, coinciding with Gittings’ own retirement from daily journalism, and perhaps reflecting some of that idealism again, he thinks journalists are doing better in their reporting of China than before.

But a lack of balance remains. For example, the visit of President Bill Clinton to China in 1998 was covered first as a story about clamping down on freedom of expression, and ended in a blaze of China-love as Clinton told a press conference in Hong Kong that Jiang Zemin was a man of vision – because Clinton had been allowed to talk on a little-watched television show about democracy in China.

“There has been also a tendency I think as Western media interest has declined – I’m talking perhaps more about Europe than about the United States – it’s harder to find the right buttons to press, and so you tend to press the obvious ones: Tiananmen Square, Tibet, one child families... The syndrome I’d sum up is that of the babies-in-ditch syndrome, where it’s easier to write about Chinese throwing babies into ditches than to write about the Chinese who pick the babies out of ditches and the fantastic efforts being made by western NGOs and by Chinese NGOs to look after orphans,” he says.

It is now time, he believes, to view China as a part of the larger world, with ordinary people trying to do ordinary things, as occurs anywhere else, and not as some wildly different species.

“We would report rumours from Beijing which were re-published in Hong Kong as facts, which were faxed back to Beijing.

So these were faxed hyper-facts or pseudo-facts, and we then reported them as facts.”

The Changing Face of China, from Mao to Market

By John Gittings Oxford University Press, 2006.

ISBN13: 9780192807342 / ISBN10: 019280734X HK$140.0 For more information, see: http://www.johngittings.com/

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Cover Story Charity

Keeping Memories of Dad Alive On his first outing, Chris Dillon damaged his knee tendons.

But he continues to participate in the annual Hong Kong Hike for Hospice. In this article, he explains why.

I

n early 2004, my father’s cancer Set in a low-rise complex in a leafy Court was comfortable and homey. returned. The lung cancer that che- residential neighbourhood near the And where hospitals can be impermotherapy and surgery had driven Rideau River, the hospice is a 20-min- sonal, the staff and volunteers at the into remission some years earlier had ute walk from my parents’ home in May Court quickly recognized everycome back and spread rapidly to his the Glebe. While the hospice served one in our large family. brain. The prognosis was poor. terminally ill people, it was different Over the next week, I spent most My mother, a strong woman and a from any hospital I’d visited. Where of my time at the May Court. Between qualified nurse, cared for my father at hospitals are often busy, noisy places, my mother, my siblings and their home as long as she could. Eventually, the May Court was tranquil. Where spouses and children, and my uncles, his deteriorating condition and need hospitals are institutional, the May there was always someone with dad. for round-the-clock care This was made easier by the became too much to manhospice’s facilities, which age, and the palliative-care included several day rooms specialist recommended where we could spend time that dad move into a hosalone or with family and pice. Our family reluctantly friends. There was a garden agreed, knowing it was the with a broad rolling lawn to right decision. On July 17, keep children entertained.

2004, dad entered the hosKitchens were available, so pice at May Court in Ottawa, we could eat when and what Canada. we wanted, and we were welLike all adults, I knew come to spend the night in a my parents would die one comfortable recliner next to day. And like many expats, I dad’s bed. hoped I could be with them We never felt out of place when that time came. Foror in the way at the May tunately, I was able to make Court, and the medical techseveral trips to Ottawa in nology never overshadowed 2004, including one shortly the man. The hospice’s calm after dad was admitted to atmosphere encouraged the May Court. reflection, and made it easier It was only after I had for us to record our memobeen in Canada for a few ries and impressions in the days – and had time to combedside journal that the hosprehend that my father was pice provided. dying – that I began to notice At about 4:00 pm on the people and the organisaJuly 25, my father died, surtion that were taking such rounded by his family. I later Chris and Alex Dillon cross the finish line at Hike for Hospice 2007. learned that the staff lookgood care of him.

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THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

ing after dad had been scheduled for a shift change, but had stayed on because they knew that his death was imminent. That gesture embodied the spirit of the hospice movement.

The hospice at May Court greatly improved the quality of my father’s final days and our time with him.

By treating my father with dignity, compassion and respect, the hospice made a difficult process easier for each of us.

After the funeral, our family agreed that we needed to repay the kindness that we had been shown. Some of us participated in fund-raising events to support the hospice movement in Ottawa, while others made donations.

When I returned to Hong Kong, I knew that I needed to get involved.

I contacted the Society for the Promotion of Hospice Care (http://hospicecare.org.hk), and met Janet Chui, the SPHC’s then campaign manager, and Executive Director Kwan Kam Fan to see how I could contribute. That’s where I learned about the Hike for Hospice, an annual fund-raising event that finances the society’s activities.

These include promoting the use of hospice care, providing bereavement support services, and developing and delivering end-of-life training programmes for caregivers.

The society is involved in many fund-raising activities, but the hike best fit my schedule and interests, so on the morning of January 16, 2005, I boarded the bus for Tai Lam Country Park. I enjoy walking, and a 16-kilometre stroll seemed like a pleasant way to spend a Sunday morning and raise some money for a worthwhile cause.

I was partially right – it was a relatively easy way to raise money. As is often the case, Hong Kong people, including several FCC members, were generous. But I was decidedly wrong about the ease of the hike: it may have only been 16 kilometres horizontally, but it was at least a further two kilometres vertically. Four hours and 52 minutes later, I crossed the finish line.

THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

The opening ceremony of Hike For Hospice 2007, with Dr. C. H. Leong, chairman of the Elderly Commission, former Chief Secretary Anson Chan, and Jim Thompson, chairman of the Hike For Hospice Organising Committee.

I was exhausted, elated and, surprisingly, blister-free.

Having learned my lesson in 2005, I was ready to try again in 2006.

With two friends, I signed up for the 16-kilometre route through Pat Sin Leng Country Park. When we reached Checkpoint #4 – at an elevation of 680 metres and a scant 6.8 kilometres from the finish line – we were astonished at how easy the hike had been. That changed quickly. A short distance into the downhill section of the route, my knees began to feel sore.

As we continued, “sore” turned into decidedly painful, and soon inspired a range of heartfelt profanity. After four hours and 17 minutes, I crossed the finish line walking like I had been kneecapped.

The next day, I hobbled to a physiotherapist, who informed me that I had illiotibial band syndrome, a condition in which the tendon on the outside of the thigh, alongside the knee, becomes inflamed. After 90 minutes of stretching and twisting, I felt much better. I was also delighted to learn that I hadn’t permanently damaged my knees. The physiothera-

pist showed me a range of warm-up stretches, which I promptly forgot.

I also forgot the pain, because when the SPHC’s new campaign manager, Rita Lau, emailed me asking if I’d join the 2007 hike, I immediately said yes. This time, however, I had a secret weapon: my nine-year-old son Alex. On February 4, the two of us completed the 12-kilometre course through the western portion of Pat Sin Leng Country Park in a very respectable three hours and 27 minutes. And courtesy of several warm-up walks and some stretching exercises that I found on the Internet, I didn’t need to visit the physiotherapist afterwards.

And yes, I’ll probably sign up again in 2008. That’s because the hospice movement is universal – it provides comfort to everyone, without exception. Second, by specialising in palliative care, hospices make efficient use of people and resources. Third, there is nothing like a three-hour hike to turn a can of beer and a curry lunch into a feast. But most important, the Hike for Hospice for me is a very tangible way of keeping my father’s memory alive.

35

People

JON MARSH HITS 50!

Helping him celebrate were: (L to R) Angelica Cheung, Kit Sinclair, Robin Lynam, Annie Marsh, Mark Graham, Karen Malmstrom, Ewan Campbell, Teri Fitsell, Jeremy Bolland, Kevin Sinclair and Howard Winn. Jon is seated front.

Photo: Simon Wait

ANOTHER ANTIQUITY Pictured left is the Ice House in the 1920s. At that time, the ground floor, housed the Dairy Farm company’s delicatessan and butchery section.

Note the floor tiles. Photograph reproduced with kind permission of Dairy Farm International Holdings Ltd.

36

THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

Travel

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Gillian Bickley David Macfarlane Arthur Hacker Richard Caska Clare Hollingworth Arthur Hacker Barry Kalb Peter de Krassel Wendy McTavish Pacific Century Sandra Burton (Magazine) Murray Zanoni Pacific Century Glendon Rowell Tim Noonan & Chris Watts Hong Kong Writers’ Circle James Spence Esther Morris Wang Dawen Brandon Royal Rebecca Lee Vaudine England

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THE THE CORRESPONDENT CORRESPONDENT MAY/JUNE JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2005 2007

Computer bag: $165

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37 37

Professional Contacts FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHERS BERTRAND VIRGILE SIMON — Editorials and corporate brochures Tel: 2526 4465 E-mail: info@red-desert.com.hk Website: WWW.RED-DESERT.COM.HK RAY CRANBOURNE — Editorial, Corporate and Industrial Tel/Fax: 2525 7553 E-mail: ray_cran bourne@hotmail.com BOB DAVIS — Corporate/Advertising/Editorial Tel: 9460 1718 Website: www.BOBDAVISphotographer.com HUBERT VAN ES — News, people, travel, commercial and movie stills Tel: 2559 3504 Fax: 2858 1721 E-mail: vanes@netvigator.com ENGLISH TEACHER AND GHOSTWRITER MARK REGAN - Writer of fact or fiction, biographies, memoirs and miscellanea. Also feature writing, reports and research.

Call: 61081747 E-mail: mrregan@hotmail.com Website www.markregan.com FREELANCE ARTISTS “SAY IT WITH A CARTOON!!!” Political cartoons, children’s books and FREE e-cards by Gavin Coates are available at <http://wwwearthycartoons.com > Tel: 2984 2783 Mobile: 9671 3057 E-mail: gavin@earthycartoons.com FREELANCE EDITOR/WRITER CHARLES WEATHERILL — Writing, editing, speeches, voiceovers and research by long-time resident Mobile: (852) 9023 5121 Tel: (852) 2524 1901 Fax: (852) 2537 2774. E-mail: charlesw@netvigator.com PAUL BAYFIELD — Financial editor and writer and editorial consultant. Tel: 9097 8503 Email: bayfieldhk@hotmail.com MARKETING AND MANAGEMENT SERVICES MARILYN HOOD — Write and edit correspondence, design database and powerpoints, report proofing and layout, sales and marketing, event and business promotions.

Tel: (852) 9408 1636 Email: mhood@netfront.net SERVICES MEDIA TRAINING — How to deal professionally with intrusive reporters. Tutors are HKs top professional broadcasters and journalists. English and/or Chinese. Ted Thomas 2527 7077.

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38

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THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

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THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007

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39

Out of Context

What members get up to when away from the Club

Écossais de la Garde

I

t was Eric Wishart’s birthday, and as it was decidedly quiet at the Agence France-Presse headquarters in Paris where he worked, he decided that a lunchtime celebration was in order. So he and colleague Peter Mackler decamped to the local brasserie for a good French lunch, complete with a couple of bottles of wine. Afterwards Peter returned to work, but Eric decided to continue his celebrations (with former FCC President Sinan Fisek).

Then Peter reappeared and said: “Eric, I thought you’d like to know: a plane has just hit the World Trade Center.” Yes, Eric’s birthday falls on 9/ll.

And that brought an abrupt end to the celebrating, because Eric was Editor in Chief at AFP, and the next hours, days and weeks he spent his waking hours organising his agency’s coverage of the biggest story in his journalistic career.

Scotsman Eric was a news story himself when in 1999, as Hong Kongbased Asia-Pacific editor for AFP, he was elevated, much to his own surprise, to become the agency’s first non-French editor in chief. The Times opined that his appointment meant that “one of the last blocks in France’s linguistic Maginot Line as fallen.”

More mundanely Eric’s promotion, while mould-breaking, was a sign of AFP’s recognition that its development depended on the expansion of its English services.

Eric was Editor in Chief for six years – longer than anybody else – before returning to Hong Kong to direct AFP’s Asia-Pacific operations from the agency’s magnificent new offices on the 62nd floor of Central Plaza.

Not bad for someone of humble origins in local Scottish newspapers.

He recalls that when he was a trainee journalist in the early 1970s his weekly pay cheque was a Dickensian £6.50. “It was still the era of hot metal and typewriters, the era of journalism when if you screwed a story up, the chief sub rolled it up in a ball and threw it back across the newsroom at you.” Did that ever happen to Eric?

“Yes, he missed,” laughs Eric. “But it was humiliating.”

“Journalism in Scotland in that era comprised factory closures, murders,

(“Very impressive, intimidating. The film doesn’t do him justice”).

He wanted to leave Scotland, so he joined AFP in 1984. “In those days, to have made it in Scottish newspapers, normally you were alcoholic, divorced and had lost your driver’s licence, or a combination of all three.”

Eric believes that now is a great time to be a journalist because digital technology combined with satellites and the internet have transformed the profession.

He also thinks the growth of citizens’ journalism is interesting and positive, but certainly does not mean the death of traditional journalists. If anything, citizens’ journalism demonstrates the value of having news covered by members of the professional media who check the facts and get it right.

And does he still look forward to the big story, like 9/11. “Yes, the bigger the better.” But, maybe, not on his birthday.

– Jonathan Sharp

“In those days, to have made it in Scottish newspapers, normally you were alcoholic, divorced and had lost your driver’s licence, or a combination of all three.”

40

train crashes, fires – with the hero dad rescuing his children from the fire, not mentioning the fact that he had got drunk and fallen asleep on the sofa with a cigarette. It was very grassroots journalism.”

At the same he wrote about music and recalls interviewing Johnny Cash

THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2007