Thursday, October 21, 2010

The Thunder and the Bird

By Chip Tsao | published Oct 21, 2010

Would hosting the Asian Games at the fabulous cost to the taxpayer of HK$45 billion make Hong Kong people more “health-conscious”? This is the theory the SAR government wants us to believe. By building a few replicas of water-cubes or bird-nests in the vein of the glamorous Beijing Olympics, in a highly dense city where land is too scarce even for garbage dumping, the government opens itself up to accusations of pissing away public money. Taxpayers should not bean-count the biblical budget but instead look at the project’s “intrinsic values,” or so argues the SAR government, admitting that investment in the Games would bring about little return.

That means another face-buying trade—the construction of grandiose projects as a panacea for some psychological inadequacy, a pattern common among numerous newly independent African colonies back in the 1960s. Most notable was the late president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, who embarked on a spending spree of white elephants ranging from American-style motorways that rarely had any traffic (his subjects were largely using ox-carts), to huge football stadiums for no footballers (his people were used to the simpler daily exercise of running rather than the sophisticated 11-member team game, a lesson the British had maliciously refused to include in their enlightening colonial rule, unlike horse-racing here in Hong Kong), to a luxurious Ford Thunderbird convertible for one of his mistresses. Such extravagance was designed to show the world “African unity,” but it was also supposed to make his people feel proud for having been freed from Western rule.

It would be a bit far-fetched to assume that the SAR government suffers from the Nkrumahian syndrome, but the new HK$2 billion government palace being erected at Admiralty and the HK$6 billion West Kowloon Cultural Centre both echo the nationalistic vanity of the former African tribal leader. Like Ghanians, we Hongkongers have little interest in sports apart from mahjong and foot massages. Even the few made-in-Hong Kong global brand names, like Bruce Lee and Donny Yen, have hardly unleashed a harbor-wide passion among Mongkok taxi drivers and Kwun Tong housewives for the art of kung fu. Sports, art and music are widely seen as “junk disciplines” by parents, who prefer their children to excel in math, economics or physics because only those can pave the way for lucrative careers as CEOs at Citigroup.

Licenses to broadcast the Games live won’t sell well even in China, as the word “Asian” carries little monetary value, unlike the Euro Cup and FA Cup, which are in the same league as LV and Prada. No wonder the government is making sounds of total financial defeatism.

The convertible Nkrumah bought for his mistress was nicknamed “the thunder without the bird.” It’s time to learn the post-colonial lesson—­though we are the Chinks, and they the “Hak Gwei,” and we are an ocean apart. Calling SAR government officials and Nkrumah birds of a feather does sound a bit provocative, so get ready for some thunder.

Labels: ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home