My city's better than yours nyah nyah nyah I noticed today that a number of papers have published articles about the Mercer Quality of Living Survey. Depending on where each papers' city ended up, there was then a certain amount of crowing or eating crow in each article. I kind of get the idea of measuring a city based on infrastructure, or "quality of life", or maybe even some other intangible factors such as Art. But I do think all this pointless crowing or worrying about where each city ended up in the survey should be tempered with this one point - to create the survey Mercer measure "Carefully selected factors representing the criteria considered most relevant to international executives."

Let's see - what would an international executive look for in a city? Low tax rate (hello Singapore), good airport, cheap domestic help, sizable expat community, no need to learn the local language (hm, this is all Singapore).

But what does that have to do with the needs of the city's permanent inhabitants? Things like the environment, town planning, vibrant arts scene, easy access to good quality education, diverse employment opportunities, good government etc etc.

Let's face it - an "international executive" will go wherever they (or their company) think they need to go to do business. Even if someone didn't want to be transferred to Seattle (50th on the list), you can bet it wouldn't be too hard for the company to find someone else that would be prepared to go.  ¶ 4:21 PM (0) comments links to this post

  Smog, gloom, time It's been some time since I posted anything here - time flies when there's a bub in the house. Also since it seems our lives really only revolve around the bub it feels like there's not much to say anyway.

However the world goes on, so here's an update from my corner of it. I was hoping the economic crisis would make an impact on the smog that rolls across the China border, but no such luck. The smog is BACK this week, as foul and putrid as ever. Which raises an interesting question for the Hong Kong government - if all the factories in Guangdong are closing , where's the smog coming from? Could it be - gasp - Hong Kong? The government's smog abatement strategy continues to be hoping the wind will blow it away. So as the Chinese economy continues to deflated we may see some more pressure on the HK govt to Do Something.

And the economy, by the way, really is cactus. Property prices are dropping like smog-confused pigeons, who might also have bird flu, which has reappeared in the territory. Planeloads of broken expatriate bankers are leaving, someone is throwing bottles of acid at crowds of shoppers - and on and on it goes. Which is why we're taking a short break in the land of Oz. Merry Christmas!

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  Once again, Time Magazine picks the peak If Time Magazine features something on its front cover, you know that "something" has jumped the shark. I'll never forget the breathless article about the new generation of internet entrepreneurs - the cover featured a guy whose genius idea was an online dating concierge service for nerds, and had attracted huge amounts of venture capital. That was back in 2000 (I think) and looking at that cover I knew instinctively that the internet bubble was close to collapsing - too much money being thrown at bad ideas, and the clueless editors of Time Magazine had fallen for it.

So earlier this year, on the cover of Time Magazine, they featured the headline "NYLONKONG: A Tale of Three Cities". See what they did there? New York, London, Hong Kong. The article goes on to describe the three cities as:

Yet these are places that know how to meet a challenge. They've done it before. From being dismissed as long past their prime a quarter of a century ago, New York, London and Hong Kong have gone on to extraordinary heights. Tying themselves together, they have also knitted the world into a seamless fabric, financing and transporting the container vessels and the streams of data that have made today's global economy a phenomenon that has increased the life chances of countless millions. Welcome to Nylonkong, and the world it made.

Contrast and compare with this quote from today's Wall Street Journal:

The financial crisis is hitting many drivers of London's growth as a global financial capital in recent years. London's economy appears to be changing in fundamental ways, and, with it, the psyche of the City.

And in The Standard

Thousands of workers gathered outside a shuttered toy maker in Dongguan, southern China, demanding unpaid wages as factories in the region, hit by falling demand and now the global crisis, struggle to survive. Manufacturers in the once-booming Guangdong province have suffered over the past year and a half from tight curbs on loans, rising labor costs and China's stronger currency, which makes their products more expensive.

And of course New York is the home of Wall Street, where all this mess started anyway.

So the lesson is this - if you, or your industry, or your country, or your culture, are featured on the cover of Time Magazine, your time is over.  ¶ 10:21 AM (1) comments links to this post

  Milk, Panics Living next door to a leviathan is disturbing in some ways - there is always a general 'background noise' of things happening in China, but every couple of months or so something happens that directly impacts our life in Hong Kong. So for the last couple of weeks it's been the Melamine in Milk Scandal. This is a truly horrible scandal - farmers and producers adulterating their milk with melamine, that milk being turned into infant formula, and 50,000 children in China developing kidney stones because of it. And that's just the infant formula - the milk has been used in a huge variety of products - coffee, cakes, biscuits, sweets and more. It seems like every time I go to the supermarket here now I see people gingerly examining cartons of milk, trying to work out where it was produced. You can almost see them thinking "Will this milk kill me?" as they stare at the label.

We've always had the feeling that we don't really know what we're consuming here in Hong Kong - it seems like there's simply too much for the local authorities to test, and the events of the past weeks (where supermarkets are announcing product recalls before the government does) seem to confirm that feeling.

What's also interesting is the secrecy - the Chinese government knew about the tainted milk months ago, but didn't want to spoil the Olympics!

Meanwhile, a blast from the past. Riding the bus the other night I found an old Team Clean poster from 2003, which was part of the HK government's efforts to clean up the city in the wake of the SARS crisis - a crisis incidentally that was made worse by the Chinese government's deliberate suppression of news about the disease.

Nothing changes.



Discarded fishballs are particularly worrisome...

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  Not the good sushi?!? Sad news today - Melbourne's best sushi handroll shop is closing. I first ate their handrolls in 1996 - they were excellent and remained so for years. Never any dodgy fish, the rice was always just right - basically a guaranteed good lunch every time. All around the city other sushi places sprang up, and they were all shite. Dammit.  ¶ 1:24 PM (0) comments links to this post

  Typhoon Nuri Hello Typhoon Nuri - welcome to Hong Kong! At 1.40pm today Nuri is very close indeed and looks increasingly likely to hit us. The wind has picked up a lot here - the view of the harbour from our place is mostly obscured by rain and cloud, but the seas are the roughest I've seen. There were a few cruise ships moored nearby earlier today, but they've moved further into the harbour for shelter. All buses, ferries, and trains have been canceled. We're sitting back enjoying the sound of the wind. I wonder how much stuff will go flying off people's balconies if the typhoon gets any closer?

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  A couple of things I enjoy Since beginning a new job, I've spent a bit more time traveling through Hong Kong, which has reminded me of a couple of things that I really like about this city.

The past couple of weeks, every time I went for a walk or a bus ride, I invariably encountered people crouched by the side of the street burning hell money and arranging offerings for the Hungry Ghost Festival. This fascinates me - why that particular piece of the street? And how do they know it's their job to set up the offerings in that spot? Watching someone intently setting up delicate china cups of rice wine in the gutter, oblivious to the double-decker buses racing past their heads is one of the simple things that make this city come alive for me. I'd post a photo, but despite the public nature of the activity, there is something about it that seems quite private as well, and so I've never taken a photo of it.

The second thing I've been reminded of is the semi-illicit thrill engendered by the imminent arrival of a Typhoon. At the moment Typhoon Nuri is heading directly towards the city. All around my office people have the Hong Kong Observatory website open on their computers, hitting refresh every once in a while to see if the typhoon has gotten any closer, and whether the Observatory is going to Signal No.8. A Signal No. 8 of course means that we'll all have to go home, and work for the day will be over. We all want a Signal 8, as long as no-one gets hurt of course.  ¶ 1:30 PM (0) comments links to this post