Category Archives: Other
What’s really driving China’s ambition to buy up Hollywood and win the World Cup?
This post can also be read at SCMP.COM
The globalisation of the film industry is going to mean that “you can’t tell whether it’s a Chinese film or a Hollywood film any more.” That was according to Warner Bros’ CEO and Chairman Kevin Tsujihara last week as he heralded Sino-American co-productions now in the pipeline at Flagship Entertainment, a joint venture involving WB, Hong Kong broadcaster TVB and China Media Capital, the Chinese state-backed investment firm.
Perhaps you are a film fan. If so, how does this make you feel? Do you want to watch films that scramble all evidence of who made them and why – films with nothing to offer in the way of cultural specificity? You don’t? Well, that’s simply inconvenient. Chinese tycoons, in league with enthusiastic American partners, have their sights on establishing new global entertainment empires capable of capturing box office gravy in both East and West alike, and they want your money.
There’s nothing new about people in the entertainment business trying to maximise profits, you might protest, and you’d be right. What’s grating, I think, is the subtle suggestion that this coming together of cash, talent and storytelling – One Script, One Road, if you like – is just one big exercise in global cuddliness.
There have been other deals. Perfect World Pictures last month announced a co-financing partnership with Universal Pictures. Hunan TV is sinking US$1.5 billion into Lionsgate. Huayi Brothers and Fosun International are also investing heavily in American movie ventures. Moreover, the purchase in January of Legendary Pictures (Godzilla, Jurassic World) by the world’s biggest cinema chain operator (and China’s biggest private property developer), Wanda Group, for US$3.5 billion, has been branded “China’s largest-ever cultural takeover.”
U.S. anti-trust laws – look up the Paramount Decrees – are supposed to prohibit ownership of both movies and theatres. Wanda already owned AMC Entertainment, America’s second-biggest theatre chain. Why has nothing been made of this? Cynics might say it’s because the Yanks really, really want direct access to China’s booming box office, which is forecast to outstrip their own in the next couple of years. In that mission, however, they are also likely to find themselves dancing to the tune of the Chinese State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), a body whose latest set of rules, targeted at TV producers, amounts to a laundry list of prohibitions, including bans on content that is “to the detriment of national image [or] endangers national unity and social stability”, “exaggerates social problems, displays excess, or shows the dark side of society”, “sets a negative character as a main character”, or “breaks with national sentiment”.
It is inconceivable that the propaganda risks and opportunities associated with inviting Hollywood into the Chinese multiplex have not been weighed by Beijing. Equally unlikely is that Xi Jinping himself has not had a hand in urging Hollywood-bound cash outflows. Establishing a modern consumer society in China that bears at least some of the hallmarks of America’s is a recurring theme of his leadership. One need only consider cinema’s counterpart on Xi’s two-pronged fork of consumerist expansionism to forget the notion that this is entirely about “rebalancing” the economy, however.
That other prong is sport – or, more specifically, football (the proper variety, not the American version). Led by Li Ruigang, a man dubbed “China’s Rupert Murdoch”, in November the very same China Media Capital paid 8 billion yuan (HK$9.5 billion) for the broadcast rights to the Chinese Super League for the next five years. For their part, meanwhile, Wanda last year not only took a 20 per cent stake in the Spanish football club Atletico Madrid but paid US$1.2 billion for the Swiss-based sports marketing company Infront Sports & Media, a company that holds the exclusive sales rights to broadcast Fifa events from 2015 to 2022, including the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
Until very recently, global interest in the CSL was trace to non-existent. As reported diligently by the Post’s own James Porteous, it has increased somewhat in 2016 as Chinese clubs have taken to offering players double what they’re earning in Europe in a frenzied spree of spending fuelled by that injection of cash from CMC – who are evidently betting on a huge increase in demand for domestic football content and increased interest in the game generally.
To that end, China plans to have 20,000 designated football schools by 2017, raising participation to unprecedented levels. Professing himself a fan of the game, Xi has also made it known he wants China to host a World Cup and ultimately to win one. To be clear, then, the objective is to become a global power in the world’s most popular sport.
In his book Civilisation: The West and the Rest, Niall Ferguson wrote about China trying to replicate the West’s historical va va voom in pursuit of prosperity, or “downloading its best apps”: competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, the Protestant work ethic and consumerism. The evidence suggests China has a few problems with its version of the third-mentioned, but in terms of consumerism, well, blockbuster movies and football as drivers of economic growth would seem like straightforward rips.
Only nothing’s as straightforward as Xi might wish. Just as Western moviegoers are likely to vote with their feet and stay away from the kind of films that adhere to SARFT’s worldview, Chinese football isn’t about to become exportable any time soon, and it’s far from certain that the subscription base needed to make the numbers add up domestically will materialise.
Matthew Syed argued in The Times (of London) the other week that Xi’s backing for football is about political indoctrination and control, that it is characterised by “top-down planning and the use of vast (unaccounted for) resources”, and that the paramount leader has rallied tycoons behind his cause in return for political favour.” “The attempt to rise up the rankings, and to stage the World Cup,” he wrote, “is testimony to the growing paranoia of China’s elite. Repression has escalated under Xi as the economy has slowed and propaganda is set to do precisely the same. In that sense, football is a mere pawn in a game of much higher stakes.”
It is certainly true that China’s leadership is facing multiple headwinds: slowing economic growth, shrinking employment, crashing markets, a growing suspicion that serious financial, economic and social problems are being papered over. And indeed, building up the nation’s leisure-industrial complex might be viewed, by the Marxist and the capitalist alike, as a useful expedient via which citizens / consumers can keep themselves (and not the streets) occupied. The official narrative is that buying Hollywood in order to censor it and demanding domination of a sport at which you are currently useless speaks of cultural confidence. It could just as easily be read as stemming from profound insecurity.
The best obtainable snapshot of impending doom in Hong Kong
This blog post can also be read at SCMP.COM
It is a rare thing these days to find oneself at liberty to read an entire day’s newspaper in a sitting. “Distracted from distraction by distraction … in this twittering world” writes T.S Eliot in Burnt Norton, and he is not wrong. Alright, I skipped 11 other lines with that “…”. Plus: they hadn’t even got television news yet in his day, never mind Twitter. Nor did he have children. But still, he was a man ahead of his time, old T.S.
Printing newspapers will be done away with some day soon, you know. Either that or they’ll become a niche curiosity, like cars with steering wheels, or ivory cufflinks. Or cufflinks of any sort, for that matter. Either way, it’ll be your fault, blog reader – you, with your low attention span and gadabout reading habits, your social media and your windows and your apps. Newspapers are dying because you’ve stopped buying them. You’ve decided to spend the money on other stuff: hot milk blasted with coffee, Netflix, gifts for other people’s already-spoilt children. Frankly it’s a nonsense and you should have a talk with yourself. Just think of the money you’re saving by not smoking all day like everyone did not that long ago. And don’t imagine you’re excused by saying you never used to read the thing anyway. In the old days plenty of people bought a daily newspaper simply in order to leave it unopened on a telephone stand. They threw it in the bin the next day, or hid it under a carpet to be rediscovered years hence, or used it to wrap their grandmother against the cold in winter. And they did so because to buy a newspaper was the right thing to do.
In truth I am out of the habit of stockpiling newspapers under carpets and as guilty as anyone of not reading the ones I remember to buy. But, every so often, mindful of that thing Carl Bernstein said about good newspapers serving up the best obtainable version of the truth each day, I do make an appointment to sit down and read all of the South China Morning Post. It’s still the most therapeutic way, I find, of fathoming what’s what in Hong Kong. Instead of venturing online in search only of that which interests me then falling prey to all manner of bait-mongers, I’m effectively saying: gimme what you’ve got, warts, biases and all.
The snarl I’m coming to is this, though – the snapshot of the truth I gained from scouring the pages of the SCMP the other day was anything but therapeutic. It was, on the contrary, a vision of impending doom, catastrophe, unease, horror, pain, decline, dissolution, war and possibly apocalypse. Such, in fact, was my distress that I failed to take solace from the likelihood that non-newspaper readers are every bit as vulnerable to this tide of ruin as newspaper readers. And in that magnanimous vein, I think I perform a service by relating it.
In the news pages I learned the following: that there is a Cold War-style stand-off at the DMZ; that China is suspected of building a radar system in the Spratlys that may hasten World War III; that intimidation of journalists is being redoubled with a new threat of graft proceedings against state media workers; that the Communist Party’s revolutionary princelings are hunkering down for a “protracted war”. In the introduction to an Insight column, I discover: “One of the most talked-about topics these days is undoubtedly China”. It is an effort to read on.
In Hong Kong there is an alarming rise in HIV cases. There is rape, robbery and assault. Meanwhile, it is suggested financial secretary John Tsang’s budget handouts are having a “placebo effect” on a soon-to-be flatlining economy. Standard Chartered has reported annual losses and its top directors won’t be getting a bonus for 2015. Surely a public fund will be raised, you ask, not unreasonably. In America, a man has been fired from the staff of one presidential hopeful for alleging that another presidential hopeful said the bible did not contain all the answers to everything. (Relax, he said the opposite.)
I read some more about the fallout from the violence in Mong Kok the other week. Richard Wong writes that Hong Kong’s “growing socioeconomic divide… has deepened anxiety, insecurity and conflict in day-to-day life.” Expect more social unrest. In the Property Section, it’s all about property prices “sinking”. I briefly wonder if this is a good thing, at least for all the people who currently can’t afford to buy, but there is no mention of this. Instead, there is cause to worry that spending is down at Chow Tai Fook. It is “depressed”, you see. Draw up one of those keyword cloud things and you will have a picture of the toxic verbal traffic in my head: “economic woes”, “market volatility”, “bleak outlook”, “deeply divided,” “Senator Ted Cruz”.
Finally, there is some light relief as I turn to the sports pages. One of global football’s most dedicated mercenaries, Sven Goran Eriksson – now manager at Shanghai SIPG – says that China will win the World Cup “in a decade”. If you’re laying a carpet, make sure that one goes down nice and flat.
Hong Kong may be a little insecure but it’s no slave
This blog post can be read at SCMP.COM – http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1882086/hong-kong-may-be-little-insecure-its-no-slave
When Xi meets the Queen – what won’t happen
This blog post can also be read at SCMP.COM –
The last time a Chinese leader was given a state reception in Britain, in 2005, Queen Elizabeth pulled on her smartest red hat and coat and put it to President Hu Jintao and his lady wife: “Have you come far?”.
The monarch’s civility was slightly undermined, however, by her heir to the throne – Prince Charles played truant, muttering off-stage about human rights and the Dalai Lama. The UK’s then-Prime Minister, Tony Blair, meanwhile, spoke excitedly of “an unstoppable momentum” towards democracy for China. When the Chinese delegation left, the staff of Buckingham Palace were ordered to count the spoons.
OK, fine, that last bit was guesswork. It is impossible to know what goes on in the households of heads of state. It may be that Prince Philip, aka the Queen’s other half, aka Phil the Greek, hides spoons in guests’ luggage for his own sport. Still, now that Britain is desperate to become “China’s best partner in the West” – as the country’s Finance Minister George Osbourne put it in Beijing the other week – the parameters for any meaningful exchanges not involving the (proverbial) hoisting up of British skirts when Xi Jinping touches down in London later this month have narrowed.
In any event, here are just a few of the possible turns unlikely to be taken by events after plain-speaking Phil, 94, has broken the ice with a joke or two about the Japanese and fallen sleep.
1. David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, will insist that in return for a) welcoming Chinese involvement in new UK nuclear power plants, b) turning a deaf ear to American concerns about the security implications thereof, c) jumping on board with the Beijing-led Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, and, above all, d) investing £700,000 (HK$8.2 million) to assist Chinese citizens who may wish to go on holiday to places in the north of England, British ministers do not in future expect to incur the Chinese state’s diplomatic wrath for talking to harmless old men from Tibet.
2. Mindful of the Chinese love of pork, Mr Cameron will then seek Mr Xi’s advice on how to handle those who write and publish materials alleging Prime Ministerial misadventures involving dead pigs. And how to stamp out seditious communications in general.
3. Mr Xi will thank the Prime Minister for dancing so nimbly to China’s tune but remind him, portentously, that always someone must pay the piper. The Queen’s bagpiper will nod sagely. China’s paramount leader will then thank his hosts for knowing when to “shut up about all that human rights crap, not like the Americans”, adding that Mr Osborne is a man of high principle who is respected throughout China and the world and that the two countries are now best friends forever. He will also promise to keep throwing chickenfeed at the minister’s pet projects and that the £700,000 will not be spent by officials on a night out in Macau.
4. Onto his second whiskey sour, Mr Xi’s charm offensive will continue with an apology to Britain’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee, whose members were barred from entering Hong Kong earlier this year. He will blame the unfortunate episode on an administrative cock-up, praise Britain for giving the world parliamentary democracy and vouch that his administration approves of universal suffrage – for voting out contestants on Chinese Idol.
5. The Queen will ask after the well-being of Zhou Yongkang and observe that by contrast to the unfortunate former Minister of Public Security’s grizzled rug, Mr Xi’s own hair seems vibrant for a man of his years. She will then ask the President if he would like to pet one of her corgis.
6. Jeremy Corbyn, the new hard-left leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, will attempt to engage Mr Xi in a discussion of Lenin’s 1904 pamphlet One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, and about the timetable for achieving socialism on earth.
7. Charles will announce “sod it, I never wanted to be a constitutional monarch anyway”, harangue Mr Cameron for being a pushover, and for doing so little on behalf of the endangered Patagonian Toothfish, let rip on China for being ghastly and appalling, and then finally settle in to some light Buddhist chanting, the noise from which will waken Phil the Greek from his slumbers.
Scots and Japanese locked in new space race
This blog post can also be read at SCMP.COM –
It’s become one of those things people drop into conversations to make themselves sound knowledgeable: Japanese whisky is the best in the world nowadays. Better than the stuff from Ireland and America, don’t you know, and also that place where they make Scotch. Yes, yes: Scotland.
It is true that the Japanese are winning all sorts of awards for their whisky. Most notably, something called the Whisky Bible last year named Yamazaki Single Malt Sherry Cask 2013, by Suntory, the world’s best whisky, with nary a Scottish entry in the top five.
The ascendancy of Nipponese nips should come as no surprise. For a start, it is well-known that the Japanese are terrible swots and brilliant at copying other people’s things and making them better. And secondly, they’ve been at it for long enough: Suntory was founded in 1923, which is ages ago. Back then, most Scotch was still undrinkable, and most people in Scotland were blind and/or raving mad on account of it.
The sudden popularity of Japanese whisky, catalysed by the whole winning awards thing, was not foreseen, however – even by its distillers. Which is why, as it happens, they’re running out of casks that are ready to bottle.
Meanwhile, the Scots have not taken this reverse lying down. No danger – if the Japanese (and the Taiwanese, whose Kavalan Solist Vinho Barrique won best single malt at this year’s World Whiskies Awards) can make proper whisky, then, by the ghost of John Logie Baird, cultivating a little tea is not beyond the ingenuity of my fellow northern Britons.
Earlier this year, a smoky-tasting white tea grown on Scotland’s very first tea plantation, in Perthshire, by The Wee Tea Company, was duly named best tea in the world at the Salon de The awards in Paris. I have no idea why the French consider themselves so expert on the subject, but there you have it: Scotland rules tea.
Now I read that, contrary to the notion of it being the quintessential English drink, Scotland also rules gin. According to the London Times, UK exports of gin are up 37 per cent in five years, largely due to demand for premium tipples from Scottish distilleries, including Hendrick’s and Tanqueray. In Georgian and Victorian times, Londoners drank so much gin it rendered men impotent and women sterile, but seemingly now even that which is labelled “London dry gin” is more likely to originate from Scottish stills than English ones. One can almost hear Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s secessionist First Minister, cackling away.
Now that things are going all “craft” on the gin front, Hong Kong, predictably, has its very own circuit of gin bars run and frequented by men with awful Victorian-sized beards and charging modern-day Shoreditch prices, only doubled. Good luck to them, although the drink’s aptness to induce maudlin tendencies does not, perhaps, commend it altogether in an era of impending economic dissolution.
It has long troubled me, incidentally, that your average Hong Kong barman cannot grasp that gin and tonic is served with lime (or indeed lime juice instead of tonic, if you’re the subaltern in John Betjeman’s A Subaltern’s Love Song). All too often lemon, with the wrong gin, introduces an unwelcome hint, I find, of Pocari Sweat – the Japanese sports drink made from Pocaris, that lesser-known member of the citrus family.
I hasten to add here that on its own Pocari Sweat is a faultless beverage and an excellent hangover cure. As such, I can think of no more fitting product to pioneer branding on the moon – as it will next month, when its owner, Otsuka, sends a rocket there with a capsule containing Pocari Sweat, in powder form. The company’s laudable idea is that at some future date, present-day children inspired by the mission to become astronauts will touch down and be able to relieve their hangovers, or perchance simply their thirsts, by mixing the powder with the (currently arid) moon’s own water.
What is not admitted by the Japanese is that their designs are very much part of a beverage-centric space race in the making. The Scots, their principal adversaries, struck an early blow: some vials of unmatured malt from Ardbeg Distillery on Islay have just returned to earth after being transported to the International Space Station on a Russian rocket in October 2011. The whisky had orbited the earth for 1,045 days and was found afterwards by the distillery’s tasters to have a more “intense” flavour, although it’s unlikely they were about to declare “it tastes just the same” after going to all that trouble.
Another other piece of whisky-related news is that Whisky Galore!, the 1949 Ealing comedy set on a remote Scottish island, whose inhabitants appropriate a shipwrecked cargo of whisky, is currently being re-made. I would not be surprised to discover that the whole story has been relocated to space, nor that some role had been found for the Japanese as villains.
In praise of the SCMP’s ‘Around the Nation’
This blog post can also be read at SCMP.COM –
A woman destroys an ATM machine in a fit of rage. Another wins a hair-growing competition. A man, drunk, drowns in a manure pit. I know I am far from alone in finding the South China Morning Post’s Around the Nation page one of its most compelling sections. Countless conversations with editorial staff and SCMP loyalists assure me of this. Often, however, there is a tone of slight hesitation in their admissions – a wavering, I think, lest too pronounced an enthusiasm be taken to intimate a lack of seriousness about news.
Anyone familiar with this blog will acknowledge that if it does not always provide the final word in serious-minded comment, then it will at least include one or two from somewhere nearing that end of things. More generally, the SCMP is considered a serious organ – the sub-editors may quibble at the word, but its news and analysis tends more towards the intellectual than what used to be called “human interest”, even when it was about pets. With ATN, this order is subverted. Reader, a word here in its praise.
For those of you who don’t know what I’m referring to, buy the paper and you’ll see it: Around the Nation is a round-up of stories that have been making the headlines in sundry corners of the mainland. Some are routine – a new infrastructure project here, a government denial about something over there. Others are anecdotal but still marginally un-extraordinary: a man cracks a window during a quarrel on a bus with his girlfriend; a woman has to receive medical help after playing mahjong for three days solid. The most memorable can usually be filed under bizarre, gruesome, heartwarming, comical or downright appalling, although none of these categories is exclusive.
You would probably be right to identify this as tabloid journalism. A fine tradition, and one in which I’ve dabbled, and frequently defend, but make no mistake – it’s often voyeuristic, mawkish and vulgar. The snobs have a point. Doubtless, too, it serves as an instrument of distraction, particularly in a country such as China where “proper” journalism gets throttled. And this is all before one considers how things have evolved online, where it seems the only way for media organisations to thrive is to deploy armies of clickbait wallahs to churn out titillating content, and to hell with its veracity.
There is, I think, a case to be made that our appetite for the weird and wonderful, the salacious and the shocking, is such that a journalism that caters to it offers a valve – one that’s not inimical to but rather part of life in a civilised society. This applies, moreover, regardless of how far that society may or may not be shaped by the principles of Athenian democracy. In its way, though, ATN offers both less and more than this valve function.
For one, ATN is mediated, a digest from other sources, for English readers in Hong Kong and elsewhere. There’s therefore an element of revelling in the wacky things that seem to happen in the mainland, puzzlement at the jarring effects created by awkwardly-translated phrases or sketchily-explained cultural mores, uncertainty at the degree of comic intentions. (What are we to make, for example, of this detail, included in a story about a pig which surprised visitors to a Buddhist temple in Wenzhou province by prostrating itself as if in prayer? “Photos posted online amazed some internet users, while others claimed the animal was suffering from a vitamin E deficiency.”)
At the same time, details omitted leave us wanting to know more, or attempting to piece things together in our imaginations, as we skip from the fantastical to the mundane to the brutal, mind-mapping the country, wondering what’s fact, what’s hearsay and what’s been embellished by eager hacks. The stories about mahjong casualties and failed blackmail attempts on local officials have an ageless quality, like folktales. Earlier this year it seems there was a spate of burglars breaking into homes then falling asleep.
Meanwhile, the outbreaks of violence or cruelty, the crazy people doing crazy things, the health scares, the exam stress – all contribute to a sense of modern China, even if they don’t tell us what modern China is. In Henan, a grave-visiting business opens for people who don’t have time to visit their own deceased relatives. In Chongqing, a farmer sells his ox to go looking for his runaway son.
ATN may be tabloid journalism by numbers on the one hand; on the other it offers a dispassionate window on a diverse country enduring the pangs of development. All human life is there. Animal life too.
How the positivity industry prefers us to worry
This blog post can also be read at SCMP.COM –
I’ve been receiving a torrent of communications from the positive thinking brigade lately. I don’t know what prompted it. Maybe it was something I googled. Or something I wrote on here: maybe I create such an impression of charlatanry that I’ve been fingered for susceptibility to charlatanry in general. Reader, how should I know?
At any rate, the email invites have been coming thick and fast: from mind coaches and self-belief gurus, character educators and positivity activators. They wish to show me the way, they say, to unbridled confidence, success, happiness. Some merely offer to help me build my “personal brand”.
As described in The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-being, a recent book by a chap named William Davies, this is all very lucrative stuff. Vast operations are at work nowadays to benefit from making us worry – about how optimally engaged we are in our jobs; how fulfilled and confident we are in ourselves; in short, how brilliantly we’re doing. I doubt very much if the sum of human happiness is increased at all.
According to Davies some occupational psychologists are keen on companies sacking workers who do not show the proper enthusiasm for their advances. The Maoist tenor of that approach might sound a little extreme, but it does seem to chime with my experience on the handful of occasions when I have been forced by employers to attend motivational workshops and the like.
What I have noticed, see, is that for everyone in these situations who instinctively gets it, for everyone who has his or her self-belief calibrated the way the psychologists might desire, others are there out of fear: fear of not getting ahead; worse, of being left behind. Often they appear to have been ambushed by the notion that being bumptious and insufferable is the only way to get where they want to be.
Perhaps the idea that most frightens such people, then, is this: that self-belief and self-promotion may not in fact be enough, on their own, to guarantee making it to the top, that no matter how good your personal brand or your CV, unfortunately other factors, such as ability and, yes, connections, also come into play.
As an aside, a couple of years ago the veteran Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten published a memorable, if somewhat canting, riposte to a young journalist who had asked him how he’d built his personal brand. The main lesson was never to intimate that a columnist might be a self-publicist. However, Weingarten also railed, righteously, against the internet generation’s preoccupation with “eyeballs” and against that weasel thing “content” (which, lexicography being satire’s carousel, must – I submit – be ripe for replacement by the equally nebulous “ingredients”).
The point, sort of, is that brands are essentially shallow constructs – no matter how they’re dressed up in marketing’s “Vision, Mission, Values” b***cks. Online, though, everyone’s at it: the imperative is to demonstrate how fascinating and fabulous you are. Problem is, a world full of shiny, happy, self-confident people doesn’t ring all that true. No matter what the “science” of positive thinking says, and no matter how much we fake it, we can’t all be winners all of the time, can we?
Maybe it’s partly a question of upbringing: I was always taught not to bang on about myself, not to brag. If nothing else, socially it’s a killer – nobody’s really interested in people who are full of themselves; it’s the listeners and the empathisers who tend to make the best friends. And the same must go, I suppose, for the super-engaged and the super-motivated – the grown teacher’s pets who spend every waking moment composing work emails. How do they have lives?
We ought to worry, I think, for the future mental health of those toddlers we keep hearing about who have four-page CVs and are being put through kindergarten interviews. For most people, I imagine, the knowledge that the world does not revolve around oneself arrives as a blessed relief. Unfortunately, the plainest truths often run against the cultural grain.
Overheard at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club
This blog post can also be read at SCMP.COM –
“Now George, I’ve said I’ll take care of this so behave yourself.” It’s late and two elderly English couples are trying to settle their bill. The women perch squiffily on their stools, looking about ready to drop off. George is putting up a valiant effort but it’s clear he’s losing ground. “This is my club, George, and when we go to your club you always pay for us.” And then comes the clincher: “It’s just Christian values, George. They might be unfashionable but that’s how I was brought up.” A reverential lull is allowed to fall on the conversation. “Christian bloody values.”
“I think we have to be wary of making FGM an issue about ‘us’ and ‘them’, you know,” says an Australian woman, loudly. “The whole attitude is very neo-colonial, don’t you think? I mean, who gets to decide that western ideas about sexual freedom are superior? Colonialism was all about male phallic dominance – we mustn’t encourage a colonialism of the clitoris.”
“It sounds just like the old days,” says the local Chinese journalist, referring to a recent flashpoint: the incident of the Swedish diplomat throwing a tantrum at staff after being denied a table for 12 guests. “In fact, some things haven’t moved on at all,” she tells her companions, three suited western males. “White people have always felt superior in this club, but foreign journalists are still paid more in Hong Kong, so what’s changed there?” The men sip their drinks and give the matter some thought. “Of course, the Vikings had a decent-sized empire,” offers one. “But they never made it this far east.”
A Scotsman is telling a story. “I’ve just come out my building and I’m walking down the hill,” he says. “And you know where those posh flats across the road are? Right, well I’m going past and something catches my eye, like something going down really quick. And I look over behind this skip on the road and there’s a guy lying there. His legs are all mangled and he’s not moving, and he’s, well he’s f***ing dead – there’s no point even checking for a pulse. What the f*** can you do? So, anyway, I call for an ambulance and – no kidding – the guy says they’re too busy and can I call back. Eventually I persuade him to take a note of where I’m calling from and hang up. Meanwhile, there’s a crowd of people gathered around the dead guy and they’re all out with their phones taking pictures. Seriously, I have no words.”
Something dabs the right corner of my vision like a damp cloth. I look across the bar and a couple are crying together; sotto voce, yet somehow unguardedly. Look away, instinct says – but these don’t seem like normal, private tears. He’s mid-40s, with an intent face, Western; she’s younger, Asian, but with a CNN accent gone slurry from wine. It’s 4pm. They’re insensibly sloshed, holding hands and, I realise, praying to the Almighty Lord. Through a cloud of ecstasy, I hear her call: “Help me, Jesus, to be my better self.” The bartender, on his rounds, sets a bowl of peanuts before them. “More drinks?” he asks.
“Well, y’see, when y’leave the place you can get lifetime membership,” says Jack. “That’s what I got – this here card. Just a piece of cardboard back in those days, with your number on it and the photograph. That’s me there. Yeah, well, I was considerably younger then. It’s been 20 years since we went home to America. Always wanted to come visit again, my wife and I, but we never did, God rest her soul. I’m here now, though. Yessir, I’m doing it like we said. Changes? Oh, you bet. Hey, but you know what? It’s like old Marcus Aurelius said – the universe is change. I’m just taking it all in. And y’know, the FCC is still standing. That’s something.”
The gospel according to Mr Magic Miracles
You can also read this blog post at SCMP.COM –
Mr Magic Miracles is explaining to me how the interests of business and health are inimical. “You charge a lot of money, you decide you don’t want to make the patient better,” he says. “You just want him to come back and pay you more money. Me, I cure people instead. Too much money, I don’t need.”
It occurs to me to that “Miracles” as he most frequently refers to himself, might be on the cusp of some kind of revelation – an outlier’s indictment of social good being thrown over for cartel interests, or some such. But he’s driving, and I don’t wish to distract his attention from the large scrapbook of testimonials he is now excitedly leafing through at the wheel for my benefit.
In an excellent column in the newspaper last week, Peter Guy pondered whether predatory capitalism must always prevail over the common interest in Hong Kong. The city, he wrote, “is obsessed with wealth and its symbols. There isn’t much more to the Hong Kong psyche besides making money.”
I won’t venture to gainsay Peter’s pessimism. There is a spirit of well-reasoned wisdom about it. But still – here I am in Miracles’ van and he is preaching rather a different gospel.
According to his card, Miracles, aka Patrick Yan Kin Lam, is a “mover and healer”. I’ve been helping a friend to move house; the job’s a good ‘un and Miracles is dropping me off. That’s the moving part. Now he’s telling me about his magic powers.
“Everything is connected,” he says. “My technique is like a massage. Something is blocked in the body, it causes pain – I find the blockage and re-open it. No medicines, no herbs, nothing. I learned this by myself. By experience I can find the blockage. ”
A spry 63, Miracles’ story begins 30 years ago, with a friend who was suffering from chronic back ache. “Many times, doctors treat him, but none of them can help. Common sense tells me I must be able to help my friend. He trusted me – and so I tried to use my own way. And it works! After a few times practising on him, no pain.”
In the early days, it took Miracles 10-12 minutes to send his patients into remission. Nowadays, two minutes is usually long enough. “Two minutes!” he yelps. He can hardly believe it himself.
The scrapbook is a catalogue of satisfaction. Miracles’ clients are Chinese, Western, Japanese, Russian, Filipino. Their ailments range from back injuries and sciatica to bad sinuses, colds, high fever and insomnia. There is a woman who had been told she’d soon be in a wheelchair – cured. A man plagued by sporting injuries has been able to extend his footballing career. He signs off “Marlon Brando”, but the entries appear genuine and all include phone numbers.
The medical establishment is not, as a rule, interested in the likes of Miracles, but that hasn’t stopped doctors coming to him with their own complaints. “One was a chiropractor,” he says. “He couldn’t touch his toes. After Miracles – perfect. I found some dead air inside his spine and I used my finger to force it out, to get rid of the dead air. I don’t expect professional doctors to understand this – they do not research dead air.”
I ask him about the removals business. Wouldn’t he better off phasing it out and focusing on his healing work?
“Moving business is OK,” he says. “I can support myself, support my family. I don’t want to retire. What are you doing with your life, retired? Playing mahjong? From time to time I hurt my back, but providing I can reach, I can fix myself. Miracles is word-of-mouth – any treatment is HK$300. But it’s no use for business, because my patients only come once. To me, it’s against my conscience anyway – human beings should help one another.”
My stop is up ahead, but Miracles pulls the van over at a 7/11, jumps out and returns moments later with a can of Blue Girl. “For you,” he says. “My VIP customer, ah! Tell your friends about Magic Miracles.” I find myself quite disheartened at having no medical infirmities to be cured.
kenny hodgart 