REAR WINDOW IN HONG KONG
Eric Ellis, Hong Kong
07/01/1997
OLD TRADER GIVEN THE BRUSH OFF
What is the definition of optimism in Hong Kong? Try the change of colour at Jardine Matheson, the oldest and most hated of the Hong Kong trading companies.
From Sunday night, the silver-grey night profile of the Jardine Matheson building in Hong Kong has been bathed in coloured floodlights. Henceforth the rich hue of communist red will mark the building which is referred to in the vernacular - in that colourful way of the Cantonese -as "Edifice of Rather a Lot of Bottoms".
Is a new colour scheme going to redeem Jardine's image? The bottoms may take a lot of shading.
Jardine Matheson steamers helped found the old Honkers by peddling Indian opium up and down the China coast and into the Opium Wars of the late 1830s that led to Hong Kong's founding.
Such is the repulsion China has towards Jardines that it has literally airbrushed its HK HQ, Jardine House (pictured), out of its official cityscape, on Bank of China banknotes and on the new post-colonial insignia of government bodies, such as the police.
More concrete help may come from the frequent-flyer points Jardines' controlling Keswick dynasty has been racking up to and from Beijing for meetings with senior officials.
Jardines has been doing its damnedest to curry favour with the new regime lest it be run out of town, and rumour has it that the crusty Jardines board has finally accepted that Hong Kong will be run from Beijing and not from Jardine HQ as has been the case for much of that 146 years.
Company insiders say the betting from within is that after re-domiciling its corporate base to Bermuda and its primary listing to Singapore, Jardines wants to formally come back to Hong Kong where it still earns 70 per cent-plus of its income.
WELL CONNECTED
We hadn't visualised Kerry Packer as much of a China hand but he comes top of a list of Australians for guanxi, or what the Chinese call connections.
International Business Asia's annual Guanxi List records the most influential connections in the region.
This year Packer, former prime minister Paul Keating, WMC Ltd's Hugh Morgan and Davids Ltd's John David all feature.
For the first time, the list has also nominated women in the region who are considered to be among the best connected and most influential.
Janet Holmes a Court is the only Australian in a group including newspaper tycoon Sally Aw Sian, China's most senior woman in the Communist Party hierarchy Madame Wu Yi and Thailand's modern hotel and tourism pioneer Chanut Piyaoui.
HIGH JINKS
Away from the pageantry of the unfinished, leaking and fire-prone Convention Centre, where China and Britain solemnly exchanged vows last night, Hong Kongers have been typically eclectic in the way they have marked the handover.
On Saturday night, Hong Kong's Groovy Young Things celebrated the end of Britain's rule in the same way as it began - doing drugs.
About 10,000 funsters packed the Hongkong Investment Trade and Exhibition Centre to rave in the Red Dawn.
Surrounded by Warholesque images of Mao and PLA soldiers - and, just for some balance, a showroom of brand new Lexus and Mercedes Benz luxury cars -they paid the equivalent of $100 to dance from 10-10 to ageing diva Grace Jones and a pension-aged Boy George.
The punters favoured water and Lucozade over alcohol and the long lines for the public conveniences weren't simply for the usual reasons.
CHUCK-AWAY LINE
Before sailing off in the royal yacht at midnight last night, Prince Charles took a last opportunity to mingle with Hong Kong residents.
The emphasis in the royal comments was on long-term stability and future with China, describing the British Council building, adjoining the Consulate General, as "a visible statment of Britain's long-term commitment to fostering cultural and educational links with Hong Kong".
It went down well with the large cheering crowd up until the moment when he tried talking to individual members of the crowd. He asked one student what he was doing. "I'm on holiday," came the reply. "Then after that I'm moving to Vancouver."
CHANEL NO LONGER SUITS HK SOCIAL SET
A high-ticket fashion item that has taken a beating in Hong Kong sales is Chanel. It's a little hard to say this delicately, but Chanel dresses have lost something of their exclusive appeal - which seems to be related to the number of Chanel outfits worn across the border in Shenzhen.
In fact, the famous Coco Chanel suit has become the leitmotif of Shenzhen prostitutes and mistresses kept by Hong Kong businessmen for their trips to their factories across the border. As a result, sales of Chanel among Hong Kong tai-tais are off because to be seen in a Chanel suit is to invite derision among the social set, and an acknowledgement that business in Shenzhen may be a little too good for familial harmony.
DESIGNER MEMORIES
You're a Hong Konger with a date with destiny. The eyes of the world are on you, the world's media are in town with expense accounts in hyper drive, and historic moments are breaking spontaneously everywhere. What are you going to do?
Yup. It's time-capsule time.
Sales of shovels and earth gear have soared all across the former colony as thousands of Hong Kong residents have all had the same happy thought, to leave a little something for posterity to remember them by.
But there are time capsules and time capsules. Your serious one has to be put in the middle of Central, the upmarket shopping precinct.
It was quite a moving ceremony as local tai-tais, the designer-clad wives of Hong Kong's great and good, stood solemnly around their own time capsule, one whose "items collected for this project defined and characterised an era in Hong Kong".
In 50 years, local dignitaries will dig it up to discover a Louis Vuitton wallet, a Versace handbag and shoes, a Gucci handbag, a Chanel suit, a Hermes scarf, Dolce and Gabbana trousers, Alfred Dunhill pen, Salvatore Ferragamo handbag and a blouse from local fashion designer Joyce Ma.
DOUBLE OPPORTUNITY
Deng Xiaoping didn't quite make it to Hong Kong but his "one country, two systems" doctrine certainly did. It helped ensure last night's handover wasn't so much about historic moments as it was a marketing opportunity.
There are the unwelcome comparisons of water supply (one country, two cisterns). At the popular expatriate watering hole Delaney's Irish Pub, Mao is shown on a T-shirt downing a Guinness to advertise a new outlet "One country, two pubs".
French restaurant La Cite has "One country, two price systems - prix fixe and a la carte."
Then there's a limited-edition Handover Barbie in Chinese cheongsam, Reebok running shoes in the red and yellow of the communist flag as well as a well-sold bottle of wine labelled "Chateau Hong Kong, vintage 1997". It describes itself as a "Liberal Red".
FILIPINO BASH
Hong Kong's biggest group of expatriates isn't the British. It's the Filipino community, which numbers more than 120,000.
Most are the real backbone of the Hong Kong economy - which is to say, the ones that clean up after it.
Ahead of the handover, the official themes for every social event has been "unity". The Filipinos' own party for the handover over the weekend was dubbed "Unity with a Kitchen Mop".
It was sponsored by regional conglomerate First Pacific, which has a large quotient of Filipinos working for it.
This particular gig had Philippines First Lady Amelita Ramos in attendance and she tinkled the ivories and, like all good Filipino First Ladies, led her people in song for future prosperity.
QUESTION MARKED
Foreign fund managers will be making their own little voyage of discovery about the effect of the new regime on investment relations.
A Western fund manager last week made a call on rocketing red chip Guangdong Investments, run by former Hong Kong Stock Exchange boss Herbert Hui, to study what exactly it was that has propelled its share price northward by 60 per cent this year to an earnings multiple approaching three figures.
He asked perfunctory and mostly innocent questions of the management - what businesses were they in, who were their competitors, what was their corporate strategy, how did they see the future, etc, etc.
To all of which the answer was a curt "don't know". The fund manager went away none the wiser, unaware that on the other side of his firm's Chinese wall, its corporate finance division was raising capital for the State-owned firm.
A few hours later, our hero was called by his boss to ask what happened down at Guangdong Investment, whose management had apparently called up to complain that anyone should dare question how they ran their business. Enter theme from Twilight Zone.