Review & Forecast xx/i
By Joel McCormick, AsiaWise
21 Jan 2002 11:23 (GMT +08:00)
You just have to know that Hong Kong is in trouble when it can't scrape together the cash to hold a couple of Bee Gees concerts. Where once Rollers were as common as TUMS tablets on Wall Street, it's come to this: the world's only 40-year-old pop group to mimic a sex change between chords wants a million a pop.
Is this a sign of bottoming out or must everyone wait till someone reports Hong Kong can't afford to park Petula Clark for a couple of dates at the top of the Excelsior? Imagine -- with its Lan Kwai Fong $8 dollar beer prices, Hong Kong can't stump up enough for the Bee Gees. They last performed in Hong Kong 26 years ago, when Chris Patten was sitting at New York Mayor John V. Lindsay's knee taking lessons in how to annoy Chinese power brokers. (Apparently, the mayor sent him down to Canal Street Friday nights to hustle triads running protection rackets.)
Okay, I might be out by a decade on Chris Patten's working as a Lindsay aide -- and maybe he never went to Chinatown. But you'd think the Bee Gees would be nice and affordable by now. Most people who went to their last date in Hong Kong must surely be shopping around for walkers now. Not everyone, of course -- Joan Chen would only have been 15 in 1976, and rattling around a very different Shanghai. Chiang Kai-shek was still on Taiwan thundering on about his three no's -- before expiring in early April. But even the Great Helmsman had his hands, albeit weakened by Parkinson's (and a cultural revolution), loosely on the rudder in Beijing.
Emperor Hirohito visited the U.S. that year, one of his rare outings. The Soviet Union was still held together with baling wire in 1975, the year it got a spacecraft up to Venus. Juan Carlos was proclaimed king of Spain, following the death of Western Europe's last dictator, Francisco Franco. It was a bad time for generalissimos -- and grizzlies, which were declared endangered in 1975 by the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Speaking of the U.S., White House aides H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and ex-Attorney General John Mitchell were convicted of their Watergate crimes that year. With the Beatles long since split, John Lennon fittingly released "Stand By Me," a song that would bring comfort to White House incumbents going forward. Barry Manilow (say, maybe Hong Kong can afford him) hit gold -- 100 million sales -- with his "Mandy" release that year. And -- this may be taken as a caution by venue operators -- Led Zeppelin fans rioted before a concert at Boston Garden, causing $30,000 damage.
On the political front, Maggie Thatcher put the boots to Grocer Heath and took over as leader of the Conservative party that year. It would still be a while before she would take power and turn the country into a unit trust package. Indeed, women were becoming a sharper-edged force in politics: Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency that summer -- and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford, vice-president-for-a-day successor to the just disgraced Richard Nixon, in September. But Ford still had the stamina to visit the Great Helmsman in December, the same month the Lao People's Republic was declared.
Central planning was still in the ascendance -- but Deng Xiaopeng was about to be refurbished for a third time, preluding a time when kids of Joan Chen's age, quite unbelievably then, could entertain the thought of going to a pop concert.
So far as present-day Hong Kong goes, the only conceivable venue for a Bee Gees-scale box office would be the 46,000-capacity Hong Kong Stadium, but it's long been under noise restrictions after complaints from people living in highrise slabs in the neighborhood. After Cantopopper Alan Tam broke picture windows in the mid-'90s -- a problem organizers tried to address by giving fans cotton gloves to muffle clapping -- it's been as quiet as a nursing home, which is what most international acts coming here should relish.
Michael Jackson, another warbler of the high note, was turned away in 1997. At writing, the stadium has exactly three bookings listed on its schedule -- all in MAY. Hong Kong's last big international act was a bargain-priced Elton John, who could be contained in Hong Kong's Convention and Exhibition Centre.
But the other signs of recession have been reposted, too. The Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) reports a 6% rise in private sector corruption reports (taking the opportunity to ask for more investigators). Serious crime reports in the civil service are down 8% but disciplinary action referrals there are up a whopping 120% -- this category of naughtiness referring to the accepting of free entertainment of one sort or another. "Entertainment and free prostitution services were often found to be a 'softening' process leading to more serious corruption," ICAC Operations Review Committee chairwoman Anna Wu Hung-yuk was quoted in one report as saying.
Absolutely, dull suits with briefcases emerging through velvet curtains would certainly be your tip-off of bigger things. The ICAC is right to be alert.
Another sign of bad times was the perennial shelving of Hong Kong's sales tax, a subject Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa returned to Saturday, explaining Japan raised sales tax and it was a disaster. The idea was first run up the pole long before deficits came into the vocabulary. Now the government is talking about running a string of them going out for years. "Our problem of budget deficits is very serious -- it may take three, four or five years for a return to a balance," Tung was reported saying in the South China Morning Post. "The Government must enhance efficiency and streamline its structure."
Tung then said the civil service was to be cut from "over 190,000 to 180,000" -- which would have been okay, had he not added that this would amount to "close to a 10% cut". He's got to stop cutting corners with mainland-made batteries and pop a pair of Duracells into his calculator -- I get closer to 5%.
If the government is that far the wrong way with its unemployment figures -- now 6.1% -- it's conceivable that the real figure could easily be as high as Canada's --- 8%, or thereabouts -- which would be a sobering thought.
And Hong Kong's future looks as dated as the Bee Gees. One can make out the ears of Mickey Mouse poking through a distant cloud wafting this way; on another, a sign that says "Cyberport." What does that word cyber mean, again?
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