The Rich China - Hong Kong

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Hong Kong

You join me on a ferry from Macao to Hong Kong. It's a super fast, I think it's called a catamaran, or something, but whatever it's called, it's certainly fast - so fast, they make you wear a seat belt, but that might just be for show. Perhaps they feel they can charge you more if they make you feel like you're on an airplane. Out of the window, tinny islets glide past and we zoom past innumerable little fishing boat, or perhaps their runnish floats. The interminable mist makes it hard to tell. Southern China spends about nine months a year shrouded in cloud and mist, and I'm beginning to remember how dispiriting it is. On a more positive note, the sea has changed from dirty brown to pale blue. This means we must have finally escaped the effects of the Pearl River delta. Hong Kong is far enough away from the mainland to be free of it, but Macao and Zhuhai's waters are permanently muddied by it.

The sea is a very choppy today, and we're experiencing what a pilot might call major turbulence. As I write, the captain has just announced that "the boat is pitching heavily, and we're experiencing a heavy swell and you should please return to your seats and fasten your seat belts." Just before the captain had finished speaking, the sweet sound of vomiting into paper bags made me question the wisdom of that last glass of wine last night, or rather the bottle of wine that preceded it. The rocking of the boat is also bringing back unpleasant memories of when Sandra and I were thrown off a jet ski two months ago in Thailand. I'm not really worried though. Actually, I've never been sea sick, unless you count the sense of nausea brought on by watching Leonaro di Capio's romantic histronics in 'Titanic', but the sound of quadraphonic vomiting is rather unpleasant.

We're heading into Hong Kong now, I think. The mist means I can't be sure, but the small fishing vessels are being replaced by massive tankers. Hong Kong has the busiest port in the world, but will soon be replaced by Shanghai. However, we're not heading to the report, as containers aren't that interesting at the end of the day, are they? Through the mist, I can now make out the magnificent Victoria harbour, whose skyline must be unmatchable, and the catamaran has slowed to impulse power as we dock at Central, Asia's answer to Manhattan.

I shouldn't wax too lyrical about Hong Kong. Whenever you see it as the backdrop to some movie or other - James Bond seems inordinately fond of the place, colony of the crown or not - it's always swelteringly hot, and beads of perspiration glisten in the scorching sunlight on the heads of wispy young girls in Suzi Wong dresses, while rickshaw drivers avoid the triad gangs using ancient marshal arts to fight each other and Jackie Chan for supremacy.

The reality, of course, is far more mundane. When we docked, everything was enveloped in that omnipresent Chinese mist, and the temperature was a damp 15 degrees. The Cantonese busily and joylessly went about their daily lives in drab clothes, and the place looked about as exotic as Birmingham in the autumn.

I had never noticed it before, but Hong Kongers don't look happy - busy and purposeful, certainly, but not happy. Perhaps it's just because I've spent the last nine months in Thailand, 'the land of smiles', and those guys are so happy they'd make Santa's Elves look like a miserable bunch of workaholic dullards. In Thailand, one of the worst insults that can be leveled against you is being 'serious'. The word only has negative connotations there, so it's not surprising that Thais who visit China are rarely impressed by the place, or more particularly, the people. Certainly, Hong Kongers don't have the steely-eyed grimness of Muscovites, but they also don't go through their day with a smile on their face, a song on their lips, and a magical glint in their eye. On the other hand, neither do I, and if I ever start doing so, I've instructed my wife to shoot me, or at least poke me in the eye with a chopstick, which she has agreed to do - all too readily, come to think of it.

But let's return to our trip. We went through the tedious formalities of customs, and I went through my habitual moan about my passport being filled with stamps for traveling from one part of China to another. The problem, you see, is that for foreigners, traveling between Hong Kong, Macao and China proper are require form filling and passport stamping from their boys in black and blue, the border guards - men trained for years in how to go through their entire working day without ever showing the slightest flicker of human emotion. I wonder how they do it. Perhaps they have to sit through old episodes of Star Trek and study Science Officer Spock until they are brainwashed into believing they are part Vulcan and incapable of emotion. These are the things you think of in the endless border queues.

Anyway, after the border formalities, we brought our slightly queasy stomachs onto dry land, and set about looking for a loo. This is not as straightforward as you might think, as Asian Shopping Centre architects set out to hide them in the unlikeliest of places, believing that if they make you walk around for long enough, you'll make an impulse purchase. Personally, I've never enjoyed shopping, and I'm even less likely than normal to pop into Benetton to buy a fluffy jumper when what I really want to do is empty my bladder. But after ten minutes that seemed like longer and another ten minutes to find the exit of the shopping centre (those wily architects also hide those, the fiends), we found ourselves in Hong Kong amidst the skyscrapers.

To be more precise, we were on an elevated walkway. The centre of hong Kong is full of them, and to be honest, I think they're wonderful. I kind of feel like I'm walking on air, removed from the traffic fumes and the eternally red pedestrian traffic lights. It's all a bit like being an extra from a Star trek episode, a contented automaton in a futuristic metropolis. However, if you're not careful about where you're walking, you can easily end up in another mall, and if you wander too far, you may never find your way out of it again.

However, we kept our bearings, and soon descended into the middle of Hong Kong's financial district, where all the best skyscrapers are to be be found. Hong Kong has more skyscrapers than any other city on earth. I'm not talking per capita of population or anything, I'm talking absolute numbers here. It has a whopping 7,417 of them; 2,000 more than its nearest rival, New York. Moreover, they're set between the backdrop of Victoria Harbour on one side and a mountain on the other, which only adds to their appeal.

A skyscraper, you might object, is just an ugly building, but I don't agree. In Central Hong Kong, they look like works of art. They have style and panache. The architects actually seemed to be trying for once (perhaps they grew tired of hiding toilets in shopping malls) and their financial backers must have locked their eunuch counterparts in a mall toilet and used their balls for once. The centre of Hong Kong is what all cities should look like, and we should live and work in these gleaming utopias, challenging the sky and aiming upwards, upwards, ever upwards. We could get 10-year-olds to design them before the educational system has robbed them of daring. Even London could be squashed into a fraction of its present size if we tore up the suburbs and let people live in buildings they could be proud of. Not rabbit hutches, not council-built Lego sets, but real buildings. The retreat of the countryside could be halted, and land returned to agricultural production. Children could fight in the school yards about who lived in the coolest skyscraper. All would be perfect, evermore! Or perhaps it's a terrible idea, but Hong Kong's skyscrapers can turn a boy's head.

In the centre of Central, we took a break, a lunch break. We went to some Yuppie place and had a smoothie, or to give it its proper name, a 'Power Booster', and ate a 'Tofu Full-On Energiser', and forked over a powerful sum of money for the privilege. However, all the staff enthusiastically wished me a good day, and seemed inordinately keen on me enjoying my meal. I don't know why they were so taken with me...

The other clientele were very well dressed, and spoke with that semi-American accent the ruling elite in Asia seem to cultivate in their children. In the group of four pretty young things next to me, for example, there were four different races speaking with same accent, dressed the same way and displaying the same gestures. Is this the 'new global society' I hear so much about, and if so, why did it make me so uneasy?

Perhaps because it's not quite the egalitarian meritocracy it first appears to be. They might look good in a 'United Colors of Benetton' ad, but these future captains of industry are none other than the offspring of the present captains of industry, preened in exclusive private schools, and set to inherit the earth. The positions of power and prestige are not won by hard work and aptitude on a level playing field. They never were. They are passed on from generation to generation. The poor, for the most part, are excluded through lack of opportunity. I wondered if this was the same in mainland China. When the Soviet Union fell from grace, the 'communist aristocracy' scrambled around and grabbed the wealth to preserve their place at the head of the trough. I wondered if the cadres in China were doing the same thing.

My analysis came to an abrupt end when I noticed the group I was studying had realised I was staring at them and taking notes. Even though I am white, which is always a status symbol in Asia, they recognized by my relatively shabby appearance and lack of brand names that I did not belong in their class - not quite 'white trash' but certainly not an 'alpha male'. I stopped writing before they called the police and had me thrown to the dogs, or thrown to the chickens, or whatever animal they throw you to in this part of the world.

In the afternoon, we took a funicular up the side of the mountain, and took in the view from 'The Peak', Hong Kong's park/shopping centre at the summit of one of its mountains. I'd like to say it inspired me, but I've already seen it so many times that it did nothing for me, so I spent my time ear-wigging on a telephone conversation between an obese English woman and her family back home. She spoke of nothing else but what she had bought and how little she had paid for it. I earwigged and earwigged, convinced that she would have to change the conversational topic sooner or later, but she didn't. Eventually, she hung up, and I was forced to seek other entertainment. I looked at the mist for a while, and felt glum.

In the evening, we had a fantastically expensive but mediocre Indian meal in one of Hong Kong's ridiculously termed 'budget' restaurants. Trying to recover from the shock, we went to a bar and paid eight dollars for a beer in one of Hong Kong's backpacker bars. This particular backpacker was hemorrhaging cash, and decided to head for China proper, where a beer costs a dollar, as God intended.

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