Thursday 12 November 2009

O, great motherland of China, we all love you

Is that sufficient to keep the propaganda committee away from me?

You know, it's been almost 13 years since the handover, and most of Hong Kong has gone from fearing the mainland to trying to to everything they can to please them/it. Why? Well, Hong Kong is all about the money, and this 1.4 billion market just north of us is just too good to resist. Hong Kongers are doing everything to wrangle their way into the market. Some do nice things like build schools, others fund government official's kids' Ivy League educations, and some do nothing. But even the last group wouldn't go out of their way to criticise the Motherland. No, no, that would be fatal.

Mainland leaders aren't the smartest, but they've managed to produce soft propaganda to have HK by the nose. How? Making it easier for HK businessmen to go into China to set up businesses, letting the floodgates open for the nouveau super riche to come and treat Hong Kong like a giant shopping mall... It's all money, honey.

The philosophy behind this is that as long as HK is fairly prosperous, no one will complain about their rapidly diminishing rights. Who needs rights when you can live comfortably in your 5,000 sq ft apartment on the Peak? Well, that's if your electronics factory hasn't been closed down because you let someone else pay for your local official's new car. Censorship? What's that? Just shut up and eat your abalone.

Tuesday 5 May 2009

Hong Kong: Heritage preservation

Hot on everyone's lips, ears and eyes recently is the topic of heritage preservation, mostly in the domain of architecture.

I was therefore glad, though surprised, to hear that the Monocle team had their finger on this too.

Interviewed in The Monocle Weekly was Dr. Ho Yin Lee (who funnily enough, seems to have a slight Singaporean accent), Assistant professor and director, Architectural Conservation Programme, The University of Hong Kong, who proposed that this interest in heritage preservation arose post-1997, when people started to really think about Hong Kong's identity and basically realised that the remnants of history are meaningful and not just slabs of crumbling concrete waiting to be demolished to make way for shiny new malls.

Examples of this are a boom of projects like The Pawn and JCCAC. The former was, to my knowledge, mostly a privately funded project. Projects funded by the Hong Kong Government itself have been heavily criticised by both the public as well as architects and historians for preserving nothing but a facade and basically pumping concrete into old structures.

edit: April 1 2010 [1]
Recently, the hottest area in question is Wing Lee St. in Sheung Wan, said to have been 'saved' from redevelopment by the highly successful movie Echoes of the Rainbow.

Read more about it here.

edit: April 1 2010 [2]
I was just told about this website, Hong Kong Place, which is a great resource for anyone wishing to learn more about Hong Kong architecture through history, as well as government policy with regards to preservation. It seems to have been set up voluntarily and unfortunately is all in Chinese. Anyone want to volunteer translation services?!

Wednesday 25 February 2009

How it all began






It's been more than a week since this edition came out, but was only tempted to download it when I saw that they interviewed Jimmy Lai, Asian businessman, media mogul and founder of both Next Media and Giordano.

The Lai interview itself was a bit of a letdown - I think Tyler Brûlé spoke more than Lai did - but the issues covered in the program - namely Taipei, pop/idol culture in South Korea and heritage preservation in Hong Kong, were spot on. I was extremely impressed by the relevance of the content and the authority with which this international magazine spoke about my region. So much so that I realised there seems to be a gap in the market and the blogosphere for indigenous English-language reportage from an international perspective.

The last sentence there might have appeared self-contradictory, but it's not. We need to look at ourselves in a mirror, through an outsider's lenses.