signology

Signs are everywhere. We take them for granted, yet they are interesting objects in their own right. They are designed to convey a short message as directly as is possible, using graphics and/or words. Some don’t work very well, but we never think that they could be improved because we think we know what the message is. I’m not convinced.

When looking for a public toilet, especially in a hotel, I always look at both icons before deciding which door to enter. Some are obvious, but I’m often unsure until I’ve been able to see, and compare, the two. Some can be downright mystifying: a notable example in Hong Kong is Felix, a poseur’s bar at the top of the Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon, the work of pretentious New York designer Philippe Starck. The two doors are alongside, but the letters ‘m’ and ‘f’ are part of the design, so you won’t spot them at first. This seems to me to breach the fundamental rule in all communication: to ensure that the information you wish to convey is clear and clearly understood by the recipient. Form over function.

However, for signs that totally fail to convey the intended message, or that convey an entirely different message, I present a few from my immediate neighbourhood:

Very slowly.

A difficult choice.

Stor in the name of the lop.

The next sign is interesting rather than misleading, although I do need to explain why I find it mildly amusing. It is located on the edge of a main road, from where it directs walkers along a narrow footpath across the fields to what at first glance might be the name of a village. But the only village at the end of the path is San Wai, where I live. It is in fact a legacy fossil. The literal translation is ‘horse shit area’. Note that I translated shi as ‘shit’; the Cantonese do have a word for ‘poo’, fan. The name cannot have had a polite origin. As to who kept horses here: it can only have been the British. We overlook a former British army camp, then known as Gallipolli Lines, so I’m assuming that cavalry regiments were once garrisoned there.

rise and fall

The village of Sham Chung is located in the Sai Kung West Country Park, one of the wildest parts of Hong Kong. I first passed through it in 1974, and even then I was struck by some unusual features. For a start, it had two schools, and there was only ever one other school in the entire Sai Kung peninsula. The other oddity was the distribution of houses: in every other village in the area, the houses were clustered together, but here there were three separate clusters, on the north, south and east sides of a huge paddy field area.

The village is approached by the coastal path from Yung Shue Au, which happens to be the last place in Hong Kong where I saw rice being grown and harvested, in 1975. I wish I’d had a digital camera then. This village too was only approachable by the continuation of the path along the coast and over a narrow col, eventually reaching the fishing village (as it then was) of Sai Kung. The Sai Kung peninsula, in the 1960s, could truly be called a wilderness area. But everything changed in 1970, with the building of access roads to facilitate the construction of the High Island Dam Project, which was in full swing when I arrived in Hong Kong in 1974 (I often used to eat in the workers’ canteens).

After descending from Yung Shue Au, the path meanders through an area of wetland...

and follows the coast around the mangroves.

As Hong Kong expanded after the war, it quickly became clear that the territory’s existing reservoirs were inadequate, and it endured frequent and often severe water shortages during the winter months. This was addressed to a limited extent in the 1960s by the Plover Cove scheme, which involved building dams between a string of islands to enclose the bay of the same name. This reservoir can be seen across the Tolo Channel as you approach Sham Chung along the coastal path. It wasn’t enough.

The High Island scheme was breathtakingly imaginative: take the narrow four-mile channel between High Island and the mainland and build a big dam at each end. The water level when the reservoir was full would be more than 100 feet above the level of the surrounding sea. There is a question that should occur to the alert reader at this point: where was the water to fill the reservoir going to come from? This was the imaginative part: every accessible stream in the area had a dam built across it, hence all the access roads. These dams were designed only to take water from the streams when they were in flood (to safeguard village supplies). And every dam was connected, via a system of tunnels, to the reservoir.

The access roads meant that once-isolated villages, only accessible by sea or on foot, were suddenly thrust into the modern era. A building boom resulted, as indigenous villagers rushed to cash in on their ding rights (if you could trace your ancestry to a given village before the lease for the New Territories was signed in 1898, you had the right to build a 700-square-foot house in that village). Ding was a measure designed to encourage people to stay in their ancestral villages, but the vast majority of the resulting houses were sold on. In fact, the village where I used to live turned the ding system into a lucrative business whereby people with an entitlement were tracked down in Europe and told that a house would be built on their behalf and that the proceeds, less a generous commission, would be forwarded to them. This also explains why the houses in Sai Keng are much closer together than in any other village I’ve seen, to the extent that if your house isn’t on the outside, you will need to keep the lights on throughout the day.

One such access road reached as far as Yung Shue Au, which has since expanded. Sham Chung remained isolated, except for the once-a-day Tolo Harbour ferry, which linked it and other communities to the outside world. Its population, which had been 400 in 1970, quickly dwindled to almost zero. Many would move to the UK to work in Chinese restaurants. It is ironic that the govenment decided to install street lighting after most of the population had already left.

If you had been approaching Sham Chung on foot in 1920, you would have noted that the path was sweeping around the hillside into a small bay, at the back of which was a narrow channel between two low hills that led into a shallow lagoon. This channel was dammed by the villagers in the 1920s and the lagoon drained. The huge area of arable land that this created must have been a big factor in the village’s prosperity, hence the two schools and the ferry pier, which served a population that was well above the average for the area. The dam’s two big wooden sluice gates are still maintained.

The major environmental impact of the dam was that a substantial wetland area developed behind it. The villagers had enough land, and the area behind the dam was always flooding anyway, so they were happy to give it over to nature. The wetland flourished in the 1970s and 1980s, but this idyll was destined not to last.

The Sham Chung wetlands in 2006.

The same view (almost), a year later.

Many of the villagers sold out to a property developer in the 1990s, and Sham Chung was earmarked for ‘development’. Most of the wetland was trashed, in the benign guise of providing an organic farm that could be visited by disadvantaged children. Didn’t anybody tell them the area was always flooding? The farm is long gone, but the damage remains.

There’s more. Large ponds were dug as water hazards for a golf course. There was only room for five holes, however, and the greens were, shall we say, rugged, so nobody came. The developer’s plans for a spa resort, complete with helipad and organized outdoor activities, have been blocked, but you can be sure that they’ll try again. I have utter contempt for property developers. Greedy doesn’t cover it. All they see is dollar signs.

Into this bleak landscape stepped a native villager who had left Sham Chung in 1970 to work in a Chinese restaurant in Bristol. Tom Li subsequently emigrated to the USA, where he opened his own restaurant and became a master chef. He decided to return to his old family home and open a store, which is where I met him a few years ago, when we lived across the bay and I used to cycle to Sham Chung for something to do. He’s the main reason Paula and I still cycle there every Saturday, at least his noodles are, even though it’s a 45-mile round trip from Fanling. Actually, he’s so busy at weekends that we hardly get a chance to talk to him. Run off his feet. But he loves it.

Yesterday, though, he had only two customers. It poured with rain all day Friday and continued in the same vein. No chance of cycling down, but Tom was due to leave for Florida on Sunday night. He would be leaving Sham Chung on Saturday evening. So I drove down to Yung Shue Au and we walked through the rain (the water level in the first picture above was almost up to the path) to Sham Chung. He was sold out of fresh food, but somehow he managed to conjure a masterpiece out of the dry ingredients in his store, with a spring onion from his ‘garden’ (large flowerpot, actually). We can’t wait until February, when he comes back.

The houses on the south side of Sham Chung. Tom's store is the one with the big awning on the left.

the emperor’s cavalry on parade

What value do you place on an object? Do you value it according to how much you paid for it? Or do you value it for the pleasure it gives you during your ownership of it? These twin questions are the reason I’ve chosen to discuss a narrow strip of batik that Paula bought for HK$1 in Stanley Market long before it became a ‘must visit’ tourist venue and no longer became worth visiting (and long before we were married). I discovered it neatly folded away in a cardboard box, took a look and said immediately that we should get it framed. It now hangs in the front room of our house in the UK, and over the years everyone who has sat in that room has commented on it, even the Jehovah’s Witnesses that I used to invite in when I felt like some cheap amusement. They don’t come any more. I wonder if the last time they turned up on my doorstep has anything to do with it:

“Do you read the Bible?” one asked.

A very poor opening gambit. You’d think they’d know better by now.

“Yes!” I replied, pausing just long enough before continuing. “But I think that the Revelation of St John the Divine is the ravings of a deranged lunatic.”

“Well, if that’s the way you feel….”

Anyone who is constantly pestered by these door-to-door salesmen is welcome to try this tactic. It worked for me.

But back to this flimsy strip of cloth. It depicts the emperor’s cavalry on parade, or so we think the inscription reads (this is an archaic script with which neither of us is familiar). Be sure to click the picture to enlarge it if you want to see the finer details.

There’s a lot to see in this picture. First, whoever produced this little gem has been able to capture movement with what are basically very crude shapes. The swooping lines of birds create the rhythm of movement, and the second pair of riders are clearly riding hell for leather. But what about the first pair? There is an unknown menace off-picture, and the leading riders are doing their best to stop. The horse pulling the first chariot is also trying to stop, although the charioteers don’t yet seem to have apprised the danger. Behind, the horses have got wind of something untoward ahead, but their riders/drivers are oblivious to it.

And then we come to the quixotic figure who brings up the rear. His horse is unsettled, but he trots serenely along, without a care and totally unaware of the hazards ahead. I wonder if this is a metaphor for the human condition. It is certainly more than a static representation of the parade. There is also a kind of luminosity created by the orange and white in contrast with the black of the figures and the background, which focuses the viewer’s attention on the action.

And the pleasure we've had from listening to people's comments: all for one measly dollar. Well, yes, the framing cost rather more, but who’s counting? This picture is priceless.

comparative advantage

Ask almost any European about the history of their continent, and they will at the very least be able to tell you about some of the past rivalries between countries. The one between England and France has been ongoing for centuries. However, ask those same Europeans about rivalries, past and present, in Asia, and you are likely to draw a blank. The more knowledgeable will cite the rivalry, which often borders on outright hostility, between India and Pakistan, or that between China and Japan, but few if any will point to the understated rivalry between China and India. The 1962 border war that the two countries fought, over territorial claims with their roots in incompetent British surveying of the region in the nineteenth century, is largely forgotten.

They will be aware that both populations are of a similar size: these are, by a long way, the two most populous countries on Earth. They will know that both nations have rapidly expanding economies; and, if they are really switched on, they will tell you that both are ‘emerging superpowers’. But their powers of comparison will end there.

That this rivalry exists I infer from my own observations, two of which I present here. First, Hindu nationalists frequently claim that the whole of Chinese culture derives ultimately from Indian culture and traditions. It is true that Buddhism was a significant cultural export to China, and how it originally arrived in the country is the subject of a major Chinese literary classic, Journey to the West, but overall this claim is too obviously ridiculous to require further comment. And it is worth mentioning that Buddhism is now almost nonexistent in India, while, in typically Chinese fashion, this philosophy masquerading as a religion quickly acquired a local flavour in the form of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism. And it should not be forgotten that Chinese ships visited India during the Han Dynasty, not vice versa.

Second, a few years ago I edited The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Eastern Philosophy, and I was amused to discover that several Chinese contributors referred to “the Chinese subcontinent”. If India is a subcontinent, the reasoning appeared to be, then surely China is too. An ex-geologist wasn’t going to let them get away with that.

However, the most interesting aspect of this rivalry is the way it pits ‘the world’s largest democracy’, with its fractious cliques vying for power, against a regime that is widely regarded as totalitarian, where dissent is not tolerated. And the question that this begs is which of the two will ascend to global hegemony in the twenty-first century as the United States inevitably declines. Or will each act as a counterbalance to the other?

Anyone who has played the proprietary board game Risk will be able to predict the likely outcome. This game quickly reaches a point where there are only three players, and at this point the two weaker players gang up on the strongest. And the US strategic alliance with India follows this pattern. However, in the game the strongest player quickly loses their superiority, at which point they join the weakest player against the new strongest player. So alliances are fluid and subject to change at very short notice, with each player having as their ultimate objective the utter defeat of the other two. Such cynicism is a factor in the alliance between India and the United States, although ‘defeat’ in the twenty-first century will be measured in economic rather than military terms.

Before moving on to a detailed comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of India and China, it may be instructive to examine how each country dealt with the irritation of a Portuguese enclave on its soil (both had been established in the early sixteenth century). Following demands that Portugal surrender Goa, which were rejected, the Indian army simply marched in and unilaterally annexed the enclave in 1961. Meanwhile, as it had done with Hong Kong, China negotiated a friendly handover of sovereignty regarding Macau.

The way in which China arranged the return of its territory reflects the legalistic Chinese mind and is straight out of the Sun Tzu playbook (The Art of War). By contrast, the way in which India reclaimed Goa probably had much to do with the entire country having been under colonial subjugation until quite recently, and the problem was tackled in the way it was for reasons of national pride. As a postscript, Goa is now the richest Indian state, although this may be a reflection of the reason for its seizure by the Portuguese in the first place. It is unlikely to be based on any legacy bequeathed by these former colonial masters, if Macau is anything to go by. It was allowed to develop as a seedy little town that relied on gambling for almost its entire income. And lax governance before the handover of sovereignty in 1999, in an echo of the control once exerted by the mafia in Las Vegas, allowed the casinos to be run (discreetly) by triad societies, and gang-related violence was commonplace. Unsurprisingly, this is now far less prevalent under Chinese rule.

Another point that suggests a fundamental difference between the two countries can be gleaned from the most recent ‘rich list’ published by Forbes magazine. There are two Indians in the top five, and a further six in the top hundred. There are no mainland Chinese in that hundred, although there are three Hong Kong Chinese. However, Hong Kong has always been a separate economic entity, and this has not changed since the resumption of Chinese sovereignty, so the contrast remains valid. Given that the Chinese economy is more than 2.5 times the size of the Indian, then inequality of wealth distribution is clearly more extreme in the latter. This seems to me to be a serious long-term disadvantage.

A third point of difference is how the two countries have dealt with local foreign invaders in the past. The Mongol and Manchu invaders of China were eventually assimilated, becoming culturally if not ethnically Chinese, but the Mughals, descendants of the Mongol Timur Lang (Tamerlane), brought their own culture with them, and it is usually Mughal architecture such as the Taj Mahal that is thought of as quintessentially Indian. They also brought a new religion (Islam), always a bad move, in this case because it created a tension between indigenous Hindus and the Muslim newcomers that persists to this day. Although tensions have eased in recent decades, there are still sporadic outbreaks of inter-religious violence, the most recent major incident being in Gujarat in 2002.

This introduces the most significant difference between the two countries, which lies not in their systems of governance but in their levels of ethnic homogeneity. While India is a mosaic of different ethnic and religious groups, 98 percent of the Chinese population is Han Chinese. The relevance of this may not be obvious, but it must influence the ease with which it is possible to rouse nationalistic fervour: a large homogeneous population is more easily persuaded of a course of action because there are no competing loyalties; a heterogeneous population requires that compromises be made. However, whether this turns out to be a handicap depends on global events and trends in the next few decades: compromise can be a valuable tool in turbulent times.

India has the added disadvantage of its caste system: I assume that the situation has ameliorated in recent decades, but it cannot be a good idea to stifle talent at the low end of the social scale while promoting those with little or nothing to offer the wider community simply because of the family they were born into. There are echoes of the English class system here, although caste does seem to be a more pernicious discriminator. Of course, China does have its ethnic tensions, notably with its reluctant Tibetan citizens and with the Uighurs of Xinjiang, but these are peripheral areas that are not part of the Chinese heartland, and events in either place are unlikely to have a strategic impact on the rest of the country.

Having mentioned Risk earlier, it is appropriate that I point out two other board games that frame the most intriguing of all the contrasts between the countries: shaturanga and wei ch’i. The ancient Indian game of shaturanga is generally regarded as the forerunner of modern chess, while the Chinese game wei ch’i is now more widely played in Japan and is better known in the West as ‘go’. And while it is accurate to label chess a battle, go is a war and as such requires acute strategic vision in addition to tactical nous. It is in keeping with how the Chinese tackle any situation: they always play a long game, which is important to bear in mind when attempting to predict the aims, ambitions and future behaviour of their country. Chess, on the other hand, is a game with more short-term, limited objectives: as Francisco Pizarro discovered during his brutal conquest of the Inca empire in 1532, capture the leader and the game is won. There are no leaders in wei ch’i, making it impossible to achieve victory with a single stroke.

It is important to bear in mind that the Chinese have never, in their long history, had a say in the choice of their leader. In fact, it’s possible that, excluding a few much-publicized dissidents, they don’t even want such a choice: I recall a late-night conversation with a group of Chinese friends in which the consensus was that what the Chinese needed was another emperor! Indeed, it is likely that such an arrangement, with its roots in Confucian philosophy, is one reason for the ease with which the Chinese government has been able to secure the acquiescence of its population. They have an emperor, Hu Jintao, complete with his grand vizier, Wen Jiabao. But what sets this pair apart from the emperors of old is that in 2012 they will disappear from the scene. And I really do mean disappear. The era of the ‘paramount leader’ (Deng Xiaoping, who retained this pompous title even on his deathbed) is over. Jiang Zemin was a self-important imitation of his mentor Deng, but the blueprint for future leaders seems far more likely to be ex-prime minister Zhu Rongji, who retired in 2002 and promptly vanished from the radar. The West could learn a thing or two from this philosophy.

Meanwhile, although India is proud of its democratic traditions, this does come with disadvantages: the short-termism that is built into the capitalist system has repercussions, especially with respect to the speed and efficiency with which major infrastructure developments are planned and built. However, India has two significant advantages: it has a large pool of people who are completely fluent in English, which is likely to remain the world’s lingua franca for the foreseeable future; and it is a world leader in information and communications technology (ICT). Unsurprisingly, though, the Chinese are aware that this is the case and are already taking steps to remedy the situation. It is impossible to ride the Beijing subway, as an obvious foreigner, without someone coming up to you to practise their English. And thousands of Indian ICT professionals are currently working in China—teaching the locals the tricks of the trade. I’m irresistibly reminded of Lenin’s famous quote about the capitalist selling you the rope with which you eventually hang him.

In fact, India has earmarked US$3.4 trillion for infrastructure projects over the next five years, but this is dwarfed by what is happening in China, which inter alia is in the process of building a countrywide high-speed rail network at a speed that is little short of astounding. China already has the longest such network in the world, but within the next two or three years its network will be longer than that of the rest of the world combined. Budgets, naturally, are not disclosed, but one can assume that China can afford it, given its massive trade surplus.

Ironically, Hong Kong will be almost the last major Chinese city to be connected to the network. It is scheduled to be online by 2016, part of the delay being the result of widespread nimbyism in the territory and claims for compensation by those affected. Neither is a problem in the rest of China, for obvious reasons.

Short-termism is not a problem in China either. Take a look at the country’s activities in Africa: securing resources, certainly, but also buying influence. Cash in the bank a couple of decades down the line. This is what most alarms the West, because unlike the way European colonists ravaged and plundered the continent in the nineteenth century and gave nothing in return, China is giving something in return for what it takes out, notably in the form of major construction projects. The shadow of colonialism still hovers over Africa, and with this in mind it is not difficult to predict the direction in which most African countries will lean if it ever becomes necessary to take sides.

So, what is China’s global strategy? Its leaders are surely aware that the country will become top dog in the international hierarchy by mid-century, and I’m sure that every one of them has read The Art of War. It should be required reading in every seat of political power from the White House to the Kremlin. However, the one mistake we should not make is to draw global conclusions from its relations with its immediate neighbours. The spat with Japan over the Diaoyu Islands should be seen as a renewal of the age-old hostility between these two countries, dangerous possibly, but not part of a larger plan by China, except perhaps to put pressure on Taiwan (the islands are closer to Taiwan, which has its own claim to these barren rocks, than they are to the mainland).

Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea are more sinister. To make it clear how outrageous these claims are, I’ve included a map:

It can be seen at a glance that these claims are utterly without merit: most of the area claimed by China is closer to at least two other countries, and most of the southern half of the area claimed is closer to no less than five. However, unless you happen to live in the region, there should be no grounds for concern. The frontiers of the Chinese empire have ebbed and flowed over the centuries in time with the strength or weakness of the centre. But Chinese muscle flexing, because that is what it is, begs a wider question: why play the bully? You can be sure that there is a reason, but it’s the long game again. As is the highway that will one day connect India and China. China has already driven a major road through Tibet and into Nepal, which could be interesting: a poor Hindu country, nominally a cultural client of India, may well believe that its future prosperity lies to the east, which will offer more reliable transportation of goods and people to and from the outside world.

And as that highway edges closer to the Indian border, I leave you with one final image: a few years ago, the BBC’s satirical show Have I Got News for You featured an opening animation sequence that included a train à grande vitesse screaming across the French countryside and entering the Channel Tunnel, only to emerge on the English side as a rattling suburban boneshaker that would not have looked out of place in a provincial railway museum.