ASIA: Three great protests - In Hong Kong, Sri Lanka and the Omkareshwar Dam in India

September 6, 2012
Contributors: Basil Fernando
Source: Asian Human Rights Commission

When people are hurt by the actions of authorities, they protest. When the hurt is deep and widespread it could give rise to collective modes of protest. Three such protest movements are now taking place in Asia. One is in Hong Kong, where the protesters are young students, supported by parents and a large section of society. They are protesting against proposed curriculum changes, which the government claims have been introduced to cultivate positive moral values and patriotism. However, students and parents see it as a to move to brainwash the young and to undermine Hong Kong's deeply held democratic values.

Another protest is going on amongst the university students and their teachers in Sri Lanka, against the attempt by the government to reduce expenditure in education and limit the opportunities for education under the guise of modernization. They demand that the percentage of expenditure on the education budget should be increased to 6% of the GDP. The government is resisting this protest by closing down all the universities indefinitely.

A third protest of the most unusual nature is taking place in India, where a group of indigenous people have submerged themselves neck deep in water for over 12 days now, protesting against eviction from their land without compensation. They are being evicted for the construction of the Omkareshwar Dam, and they are protesting against the illegal increase in the water level, beyond that which was allowed by the Supreme Court of India. There protest is called Jal Satyagrah.

China supports HK's access to FTA with ASEAN: minister

Xinhua | 2012-8-30

China supports Hong Kong's access to the China-ASEAN Free Trade Zone (FTA) as it facilitates the economic integration of the southeastern Asian nations, said the Chinese Minister of Commerce Chen Deming on Wednesday.

Chen made the remarks when speaking to the media at the sidelines of the on-going 44th ASEAN Economic Ministers Meeting in Cambodia's tourist City of Siem Reap.

Chen said that Hong Kong's access to the FTA is listed as one of the widely discussed topics during the ministers' meetings. Some of the ASEAN nations had voiced their desires to initiate the negation about Hong Kong's entrance.

[Hong Kong provides] Emergency relief for flood victims in Cambodia and Thailand

Friday, November 04, 2011

Hong Kong (HKSAR) - The Government has accepted the advice of the Disaster Relief Fund Advisory Committee and approved two grants from the Disaster Relief Fund totalling $3.5 million to two relief agencies to undertake relief projects for flood victims in Cambodia and Thailand.

Announcing the grants today (November 4), a Government spokesman said that the Committee hoped the two grants - $500,000 to the Adventist Development and Relief Agency, China for victims in Cambodia and $3 million to World Vision Hong Kong for victims in Thailand - would help provide relief to flood victims in the two countries.

"To ensure that the money will be used for the designated purposes, the two relief agencies have been asked to submit evaluation reports and audited accounts on the use of the grants after the relief projects have been completed," the spokesman said.

The Middle Kingdom: A center of repression against Nobel prize celebration?

Celebrating Nobel, woman arrested for splashing champagne

October 11, 2010

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• NEW: Rights group: "This is an absurd case"
• The revelers were marking the victory of a Chinese dissident
• A security guard walked up while a bottle was being opened, the woman says
• She's been released on bail and must appear before police in November

Hong Kong, China (CNN) -- A woman celebrating the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a Chinese dissident has been charged with assault for accidentally splashing champagne on a security guard outside the Chinese central government's liaison office in Hong Kong.

"The officer walked up as I was opening a bottle of champagne and he was splashed," said Ip Ho-yee, 22. "It was a minor incident. I never guessed that opening a bottle of champagne would lead to this."

Ip, who was arrested Sunday afternoon, made her comments in Cantonese.

The security guard was not injured, but he made a complaint, so Ip was arrested and charged with common assault, said Hong Kong police spokesman Lawrence Li.

"This is an absurd case," said Law Yuk-kai, director of Human Rights Monitor, a group based in Hong Kong. "This just shows who's the boss," Law said, referring to the mainland Chinese government.

The British returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, with China's promise that Hong Kong could continue to govern itself for the next 50 years. But critics of Beijing say the mainland government has encroached on Hong Kong residents' rights and interfered with the special administrative region's government.

Ip was released on her own recognizance and is to appear before police in late November, said the police spokesman.

She and others were celebrating the Nobel victory of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who is serving an 11-year prison sentence after repeatedly calling for human rights and democratization.

Liu was sentenced in 2009 for inciting subversion of state power. He is the co-author of Charter 08, a call for political reform and human rights, and was an adviser to the student protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the prize to him on Friday.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said the awarding of the prize to Liu was "blasphemy against the peace prize" that could harm relations between China and Norway.

The Nobel Committee stood by its choice and said it had expected China to react strongly.

"We have a very strong tradition of awarding the prize to human rights activists of many different kinds," Geir Lundestad, director of the Nobel Institute, told CNN.

"This is a tradition we are very proud of, and this is a tradition for which the Norwegian Nobel Committee has received much applause," Lundestad said. "We felt that if we were serious about this tradition, we did have to come to terms with the question of China in this perspective, and this is what we then did this year."

A record 237 names were submitted for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel committee said. Thirty-eight of the nominees are organizations. Nominees are not revealed for 50 years.

Hong Kong Investors Take Cambodia Tour

By Ros Sothea, VOA Khmer
Original report from Phnom Penh
12 October 2009

Hong Kong trade officials recently spent three days in Cambodia looking at ways the two might boost bilateral trade, though Cambodian officials remain skeptical trade could grow substantially any time soon.

The delegation of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, a special trade agency of Hong Kong’s government, was seeking to broaden its markets in the wake of the global financial downturn.

Trade between Cambodian and Hong Kong was $618 million in 2008, with only $10 million of that coming from Cambodian exports. Cambodia is ranked as Hong Kong’s No. 42 trade partner, according to figures from the Hong Kong trade council.

Tina Phan, who is in charge of mainland Southeast Asia for the council, said the relatively small trade between Hong Kong and Cambodia meant a lot of room to improve business ties, especially as US and European markets have narrowed.

“Because of the financial crisis, we have to go out more and find more new things, new markets,” Phan told VOA Khmer. “And the Cambodian market is one of the markets that we are looking into now. We want to promote trade between Cambodia and Hong Kong.”

Hong Kong, an island territory of 7 million people, exports more than 30 types of goods to Cambodia, mainly garment products and telecom equipment, while importing some footwear and children’s clothing from Cambodia.

Phan said she had invited some of Cambodia’s private enterprises to an exhibition in Hong Kong in October and November.

The Hong Kong trade delegation met with officials from the Council for the Development of Cambodia, Chamber of Commerce, banks and craft associations.

However, officials remained dubious over increased trade.

“Hong Kong has not much interest in our market,” said Keo Nimet, international relations manager for the Chamber of Commerce. “Before, we showed our market’s potential and handed out business books for Hong Kong visitors. But we have never seen anyone come to our market since.”

Disparities between the two markets were the “main challenges” for increasing trade, he said. For example, Cambodia can export garments, but Hong Kong already claims top standards as a clothing exporter.

Hong Kong has shown interest in importing rice from Cambodia, but there has been no agreement, said Cheav Pha, head of market development and management at the Ministry of Commerce.

Hong Kong only wants to import unique products they are unable to produce, “such as products made from silk,” said Men Sineoun, president of the Artisan Association of Cambodia, which exports some $10,000 in silk products to Hong Kong annually.

Hong Kong has very few projects in Cambodia, investing only $4 million in garment factories from January to August this year, compared to $332 million by China as a whole. In that same period, investment from Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam and South Korea ranged between $100 million and $200 million.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong is the seventh-largest investor in Vietnam, with annual trade between the two in 2008 estimated at $4 billion, according to Hong Kong government figures.

Vietnam is better industrialized, Keo Nimet said, creating a better base where investors can find resources at hand without importing from another country. Still, he said, Cambodian trade could be increased with Hong Kong in the next five or six years if such cooperation were pushed by China’s national government.

Cambodia's trade with Hong Kong down 24 pct to end July

PHNOM PENH, Oct. 7 (Xinhua) -- Bilateral trade between Cambodia and China's Hong Kong dropped 24.39 percent in the first seven months year-on-year, local media reported Wednesday.

Citing the data released by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, the reports said trade between the two sides fell to 288 million U.S. dollars from 380.94 million dollars last year.

Hong Kong's total exports to Cambodia fell to 279 million dollars from 375.5 million dollars, while Cambodia's shipments in return increased to 9 million dollars from 5.44 million dollars during the year up to the end of July.

The figures were released Tuesday at a press conference to attract Cambodian companies to hold trade exhibitions in Hong Kong.

"The drop was because of the global financial crisis. However, now trade between Cambodia and Hong Kong is becoming stable because the economy is not so bad; it may not drop further," Johnny Wan, senior exhibitions manager at the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, was quoted by the Phnom Penh Post as saying.

Cambodia's main exports to Hong Kong were food items, garments and footwear, and gemstones, he said. "Cambodia has so many good products, but foreigners may not know much about them, so Cambodia should promote more ... through trade shows and marketing," Wan said.

A coming of age for Cambodian artists

"Prison Guard," by Leang Seckon is one of the works on display in a Hong Kong exhibition of contemporary Cambodian art at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery. (10 Chancery Lane Gallery)

Wednesday, March 18, 2009
By Alexandra A. Seno
International Herald Tribune (Paris, France)

"Perhaps the Hong Kong show's most intriguing work - though not for sale - is by Than Sok, born in 1984. He constructs houses out of bright yellow incense sticks as installations, and then burns them, a commentary on how people become disposable commodities - once to the Khmer Rouge, now to eviction enforcers and factories."

HONG KONG: In this crucial year for Cambodia, a show in Hong Kong - entitled "Forever Until Now: Contemporary Art from Cambodia," and running until April 25 - is a rare and thoughtful cultural survey exploring the country's journey from tragedy to hope, seen through the evolution of its art.

The show, at the 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, along with several other events, mark a turning point for an international affirmation of Cambodian artistic life today. In December Cambodian artists will be represented for the first time at the sixth Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Australia, and a few weeks before, the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial in Japan will again showcase the Southeast Asian nation.

As the United Nations conducts its trials in Phnom Penh to seek justice for atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge, it seemed fitting - though it was not deliberately timed - that the international art world should be giving special recognition and visibility to Cambodia now. Under Pol Pot's rule in the 1970s, up to a fifth of the population of eight million perished - including 90 percent of the country's artists.

Because organizers are playing down the commercial side of the art, the Hong Kong show is left to focus more on the themes present in Cambodia life.

The gallery's owner, Katie de Tilly, worked as a fund-raiser with Médécins Sans Frontières and visited Thai refugee camps holding Cambodians in the 1990s.

The exhibit takes over the Chancery's Central District gallery and a space in the Chai Wan factory building, 25 minutes away by taxi. "Forever" features video, photography, painting, sculpture and installations by 14 of Cambodia's most important artists. It has something for everyone: decorative, serious, escapist and sophisticated.

"When I went to visit in June, I could feel Cambodian art was at the beginning of something," said de Tilly, and so she decided to document it. A longtime Hong Kong resident, she represents luminaries like Huang Rui, a leader of China's 1980s avant-garde movement, and the American painter Julian Schnabel.

At about the same time Russell Storer, the contemporary Asian art curator at the Queensland Art Gallery, a government museum that organizes the Asia Pacific Triennial, took his own research trip to Cambodia, and came back "very excited about the artists," he had met, he said. "Forever" includes the three artists selected by Mr. Storer for Brisbane.

Erin Gleeson, an American historian of Asian art who lives in Cambodia, curated the Chancery exhibit, conscious that it needed to go beyond what she called "the two Ts" - temples and trauma - that most people reflexively associate with the nation. Though those themes provide a starting point for some of the pieces, making them accessible, Ms. Gleeson keeps it all interesting by highlighting the merit and context of each work.

At the entrance of the main gallery, to set the mood, she hung "Pray for Peace," an eerie but optimistic 2008 oil-on-canvas by Vann Nath portraying Cambodians worshiping under a stormy sky. Now very ill and in his 60s, Mr. Vann Nath is one of only seven survivors of Tuol Sleng, the notorious camp where Pol Pot's functionaries killed up to 20,000 people.

Next to the piece, on a continuous loop, is "S-21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine," the 2003 multi-award-winning documentary on Tuol Sleng, by a film festival favorite, Rithy Panh. The painting is for sale for 55,000 Hong Kong dollars, or about $7,100; the video is not, though it is widely available from DVD retailers.

Seven paintings by the late Svay Ken (from 75,000 to 100,000 Hong Kong dollars) occupy a place of honor in the Chai Wan gallery. They are scenes from daily life, made in the naïve, folk style for which he became known. Mr. Storer, who chose him for the triennial, said that "Svay Ken was a senior painter, self-taught, who lived through the turbulent history of the country and represented it through his work." He died in December at age 75. "Forever" also includes three amateurly rendered canvases by his 25-year-old granddaughter, Ouk Sochivy, who only began painting last year.

Back in Central, four colorful collages by Leang Seckon, who was born in 1974, are memorable for their crowd-pleasing appeal. Leang Seckon is the best-known artist of his generation, and Cambodians recognize him for his art collaborations with a 1960s pop icon named Dy Saveth, as well as for his solitary work. In "Prison Guard," he narrates the life of Duch, the man in charge of Tuol Sleng who, while awaiting trial, converted to Christianity and became the only Khmer Rouge leader to publicly repent.

Perhaps the Hong Kong show's most intriguing work - though not for sale - is by Than Sok, born in 1984. He constructs houses out of bright yellow incense sticks as installations, and then burns them, a commentary on how people become disposable commodities - once to the Khmer Rouge, now to eviction enforcers and factories.

Ms. Gleeson estimates that there are only 40 working artists in Cambodia and that this is a special, nearly innocent, moment in time because they seem to make things almost purely out of a need to express themselves. "There is no art market because this is just the beginning. Artists do not produce for the market," she said.

Yet validation happens. Sopheap Pich was born in Battambang in 1969 and left Cambodia after 1975, passing through a Thai refugee camp. His family resettled in the United States, and he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, finishing a Master of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999.

Returning to Cambodia in 2003, he switched to sculpture. His rattan and bamboo pieces made an impact among the video and high-concept installations at the prestigious Best of Discovery section at Shanghai's "SHContemporary" art fair in 2008. Mr. Sopheap Pich was chosen for Fukuoka and Brisbane this year. He is also finishing a commission for a university in Saudi Arabia and preparing for a November solo exhibit at the Tyler Rollins Fine Art gallery in New York.

Ms. Gleeson credits him for helping raise international interest in Cambodian culture. "Sopheap is an icon for the younger artists," she said. Childhood memories of woven local baskets and handcrafted toys inspire works made out of natural materials, like "Cycle" and "The Duel." Yet he employs a very contemporary approach Storer called a "highly sophisticated yet a deeply grounded response to place and personal experience."

Vandy Rattana, another artist in the show, has a series of large, documentary photographs of a Phnom Penh slum as it burned down last April. Of his art, he said simply, "I need to tell a story."

Before financial bubbles and busts, this was the reason artists lived - for art's sake.

Cambodian art: Past to present

Leang Seckon's "Prison Guard" depicts Duch, who is facing a genocide tribunal starting Tuesday.
Sopheap Pich's "Cycle 2" depicts joined stomachs showing the ties and strains of communities.

Story Highlights

• Fourteen artists, ranging in age and practice, displaying their works
• One work depicts Duch, a former Khmer Rouge leader facing genocide tribunal
• Cambodia's arts were stunted by the 1970s genocide and civil war
• Some 50 artists now practicing their craft in the Southeast Asian country

Tuesday, February 17, 2009
By Miranda Leitsinger

Hong Kong, China (CNN) -- Bamboo, woven into the shape of human stomachs. Red, sky blue and orange pencil shavings glued onto a large canvas form a woman's traditional hair clip. A collage of magazine clippings, drawings and found materials depict Cambodia's tumultuous modern history.

These are a few of the offerings on hand in Hong Kong at one of the first large international exhibitions of artists from Cambodia. The work by 14 artists varies in practice-- video, photography, collage, wood shavings, paper, bamboo and painting-- as well as in themes, from reflecting on the Southeast Asian nation's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime to the emerging modern Cambodia, with traffic lights and all.

"Every artist in this show is referencing ancient tradition and recent history," said Phnom Penh-based curator Erin Gleeson, noting the wall-size depiction in folded paper of the serpent Naga (which in Cambodian culture represents the people's mythical birth) to a collage of 20th-century Cambodia and its six different regime changes.

"The show is looking at the present -- 'Forever Until Now' is the title -- and it is this lineage of the past, you see that in the show, and then you see artists that arrive at the present," she added.

The show opens Friday and runs through March 22 at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery. Gallery owner and director Katie de Tilly said she believed it was important the artists get international exposure.

" ... it's really at the beginning of their art emergence. Obviously, they've had a very hard history," she said. "This is really the beginning of contemporary Cambodians who are expressing very original ideas in their artworks and I think that that's what makes it very unique and to show to the rest of the world."

Cambodia, which lost an estimated one-quarter of its population or at least 1.7 million people -- including an estimated 90 percent of its artists -- under the 1970s Khmer Rouge regime, has a small but growing artistic community: there are some 50 practicing artists out of its 14 million people, Gleeson said.

The genocide and ensuing war, which only ended in the last decade or so, stifled the development of the arts in one of the world's poorest countries.

"The legacy of that is now in every facet of a developing society," said Gleeson, who noted the country had no art books when she arrived in 2002 on a fellowship to teach art history. "There's an absence of infrastructure for them, there's an absence of materials, there is no art store. ... they are quite inventive about mixing materials to make them of a higher quality or last longer, but in many cases they don't know archival techniques."

The harsh weather conditions -- a dusty, hot season and a rainy monsoon -- add to the trying work conditions.

"Everything's against them," she added. "Their parents in many cases are coming from a really disadvantaged background, as the majority of the country is economically."

Some of the art included in the show looks at the Cambodia of today, such as Leang Seckon's "Three Greens" -- an acrylic painting showing children in school uniform crossing a road with a yellow light, red light and three green lights, along with cows and roosters. The piece shows the changes in a country that recently got stop lights, with animals, people and traffic mingling on the main roads of the capital.

Sopheap Pich, a Cambodian-American whose family migrated to the U.S. in 1984, works with bamboo and rattan -- materials often used in Cambodian traditional farming and crafts -- to make sculptures.

His work, "Cycle 2," is the joining of the stomachs of an infant and an elderly person that for him brought up ideas of Cambodian traditional village life.

"You belong to each other, you help each other out," he said. "But also, if you look at the lines and you see how it's shaped by hand, it's not very perfect, so it's also about struggle...

"You could say it's a cycle of trying to hold onto each other, now we are living everywhere in the world, Cambodians are all over the planet," he added. "All this technique and pattern that I am quite obsessed with ... it's about this idea of trying to hold on with very simple means."

Chan Dany, a 25-year-old artist who graduated from one of the country's three art schools, creates textured patterns that appear almost like tapestry using pencil shavings in various colors. The works on display in the show are from a series based on Cambodian architectural decor, such as door and window shutter carvings, and include ancient Khmer forms whose shapes are derived from nature.

"When I started learning art, the teacher introduced a lot of new ways of making art, new ideas that were very difficult for me, so I had to think a lot," he said through a translator. "So then I looked around at what my classmates were doing and I started to think about what they weren't using for their work, so I started to collect the things that they didn't use when they were making art and started to think about my way of making art using those materials."

"I like the first piece I did (using the pencil shaving technique) because I had never done it this way before and since then I kept on making it," he said.

The younger artists "seem to be expressing something more fresh," while the work by artists from the older generation is "much more heavy," de Tilly said.

Some of the works of the Khmer Rouge period include a painting by Vann Nath, one of seven people to survive the regime's infamous S-21 torture prison. His painting, "Pray for Peace," depicts women wearing traditional Cambodian funeral scarves praying en masse under troubled skies by stormy seas.

Another work, Leang's "Prison Guard," tells the life of Duch, a former teacher who ran S-21 and goes on trial Tuesday before a U.N.-backed tribunal on charges that include crimes against humanity.

The art scene has been growing slowly in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh over the last few years: Sopheap started a group to promote contemporary Cambodian art practices and two art institutes offer programs apart from the Royal University of Fine Arts.

One factor that has also made Cambodian contemporary artists different from their counterparts, for example in neighboring Vietnam, has been the lack of outside influence, such as was the case with Chinese contemporary art 30 years ago, de Tilly said.

"Cambodia still is very much influenced by itself and so the development is happening on a slower pace but as well very interesting," she said. "They seem to not have as much international exposure to materials, magazines, publications, so you really do feel -- it was the same just after the Cultural Revolution in China -- that they didn't have exposure to many publications and things, and so their art was developing at that moment in time."

" ... it's very interesting to document it and see what's going to happen in the future," she said.

Part of the exhibit will be shown at another of the gallery's venues in Hong Kong and will run through April 25.

Year of the Ox Is Looking Inauspicious [-Imagine how it would be in Cambodia?]

Devotees praying on the Chinese New Year at the Wong Tai Sin temple in Hong Kong. (Photo: Garrige Ho/Reuters)

January 27, 2009
By MARK McDONALD and BETTINA WASSENER
The New York Times

HONG KONG — Hong Kong’s gleaming past and current troubles are right there, plain to see, on Vincent Chan’s wall — photographs of more than a hundred Bentleys, Rolls-Royces and Jaguars for sale, luxury cars dumped by their once-flush owners in need of some ready cash.

Mr. Chan sells only one or two cars a week now — a third of the sales his dealership has made in recent years. And under pressure from his bank, he is prepared to sell any of his cars at a loss, just to free up some money. He is ready to haggle.

The Chinese Lunar New Year began Monday, and projections for the Year of the Ox from astrologers, lawyers, bankers and fishmongers are anything but auspicious.

“The mood is confused and desperate,” said Kerby Kuek, a feng shui master and Chinese astrologer. “Two years ago, people would ask me if they should change from a medium house to a big house, or from a Nissan to a BMW.

“Now people ask me directly, ‘When am I going to get laid off?”’

Mr. Kuek said he was getting the same fearful questions from clients as he heard in 2003, when Hong Kong was rocked by the epidemic of SARS severe acute respiratory syndrome. Foreigners fled, tourism disappeared, local people went around in surgical masks, and the economy, of course, buckled.

Hong Kong’s other economic calamity came with the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis. Property values dropped 50 percent.

But Mr. Chan, 58, does not see a current parallel to that dark period, which he called “completely horrible.”

“We haven’t had any suicides this time!” he said brightly. “So, you see: Not so bad as ’98!”

Most of his customers are expatriates, and the global crisis and the ensuing recession in Hong Kong are forcing many of them to economize. (Which explains the huge backlog of cars in Mr. Chan’s jammed warehouse.) Some expats have been recalled to their home countries, especially those in banking, law and finance, while others have been fired outright.

But gloom can be relative. There are no signs of mortgage defaults in Hong Kong, and people are not losing their homes like they are in the United States. And even if thousands of expats have been handed one-way tickets back to New York, London and Sydney, a number have chosen to remain.

“There isn’t the desperate urge to leave like there was during SARS,” said Shriram Chaubal, chief operating officer of GeoClicks, which runs a popular Hong Kong Web site called GeoExpat.com. “They know Hong Kong is a lot better than wherever they’d be expatriating back to.”

But Mr. Chaubal said friends and clients working in the manufacturing, retail, and food and beverage sectors were worried. And while enrollments have grown a bit at the Discovery Bay International School, the principal, Grant Ramsay, has heard plenty of gruesome layoff stories on the parental grapevine.

“We certainly know a dip is coming,” he said. “So it’s eyes wide open and bracing for the worst.”

And the worst appears yet to come. Donald Tsang, Hong Kong’s chief executive, delivered this blunt warning last Tuesday: “Hong Kong is in the grip of the financial tsunami.” He predicted more layoffs and company closings after the New Year holiday.

The economic numbers — macro and micro — certainly support Tsang’s baleful analysis. The Hang Seng stock index, for example, was off 48 percent in 2008.

The unemployment rate ticked up recently to 4.1 percent, a mild cough compared to the tubercular rate of 8.8 percent in 2003. But a new Citigroup analysis warns that “this cycle appears worse,” with no appreciable recovery until 2011.

Personal bankruptcies, up 85 percent from a year ago, are increasing 10 percent per month, said Thomas Tse, a partner at the law firm Yip, Tse & Tang. He expects bankruptcies to double between now and late summer, eventually ensnaring 1 percent of the city’s working population, largely on personal loans and credit card debt.

A dozen years ago, a bankruptcy was a traumatic loss of face, a deep humiliation in a society that prizes propriety and thrift. But now, after a dozen years of economic peaks and troughs, Mr. Tse said it carries much less of a stigma.

John Carroll, a historian of Hong Kong, said people here were “legendary for their resourcefulness and ability to recover” from economic shocks.

He pointed to rebounds from labor strife in the mid-1920s; the Japanese occupation from 1941 to 1945; United Nations and United States embargoes during the Korean War that prompted a shift from trade to light industry 50 years ago; and Hong Kong’s more recent move to a service economy after industrial jobs were shipped to mainland China.

Anil Daswani, head of research at Citigroup in Hong Kong, wrote a strategy report last week that admired the city’s transformation from a trading port into “a genuine global financial powerhouse alongside London and New York.”

“Hong Kong has always prospered by being able to reinvent itself,” he wrote, “and we are of no doubt that during this downturn it will do it again.”

The go-go years in the middle of this decade certainly burnished the city’s reputation as an Asian hub for business, banking and excess. Those were the days when the Peninsula Hotel, in a single order, bought 14 custom-made Rolls-Royces specially painted in “Peninsula green.”

The Hong Kong wealthy remain wealthy, and stratospherically so. But for people a few rungs down the economic ladder, the impromptu weekend trips to Bali or Tokyo, the jewelry binges, the full-on lush life — that is mostly over.

“The whole party-party thing, the let’s-go-splurge thing, that’s clearly not happening now,” said Chaubal of GeoClicks.

If there is any time for Hong Kongers to party, however, it is now. The New Year holiday in Asia calls for a long break from work, with money spent on new clothes, big dinners, flowers and gifts. But this year, in street markets and marbled malls alike, the buzz of commerce is more muted. And with consumers more cautious, prices have plunged.

Caterpillar fungus, a kind of Chinese cure-all that is cooked into stews, has dropped in price by a third, down to about $250 an ounce. Crocodile jerky, sea cucumbers, shark’s fin and dried fish bellies have seen similar reductions.

Kumquat trees, a traditional holiday gift that symbolizes prosperity, are the same price as last year, although more buyers are going for the lower-priced potted shrubs rather than the grander 5-footers.

And at his showroom on Dragon Road, Mr. Chan has a ’96 Rolls-Royce Silver Spur for sale. Marked down from $48,000, the sticker now says $38,000 — and even that is negotiable.

Mr. Chan is making other changes. He has always reserved four tables at a good restaurant where he treats his employees and a few dozen loyal customers to a New Year’s dinner. This year he has cut back to one table, staff only.

He is also cutting back on the money he is putting into the red-and-gold envelopes traditionally given to children, staff members and service people during the holiday. In previous years he has put in a crisp bill of 100 Hong Kong dollars, worth about $12.80. This year he will use 50-dollar notes.

“They won’t be angry,” Chan said. “Everybody knows the problems with the economy. They know what’s happened.”

A former garage mechanic, Mr. Chan bought a 1956 Vauxhall junker when he was a teenager, fixed it up, and sold it for five times the money. He has been buying and flipping cars ever since.

“If I sell a car now and lose money, O.K., I’m still alive,” he said. “I can always make money again.” He snapped his fingers. “This is Hong Kong. We’re gamblers.”

Chinese scientists working on new HIV vaccine

2008-01-23
China Daily (Taiwan)

HONG KONG: Scientists here and on the mainland are working on an AIDS vaccine to protect against three variants of HIV sweeping across southern and western areas of the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Chen Zhiwei, director of the new AIDS Institute in Hong Kong, said scientists have been using gene sequencing to track how HIV viruses on the mainland are evolving, and their geographical spread.

Two closely related HIV variants had been spread by intravenous drug users (IDUs) from southwestern Yunnan Province; one to as far as Xinjiang in the northwest, and the second to Guangdong in the south.

The third variant is in Yunnan and southern Guangxi province, which Chen said is passed mainly through heterosexual sex.

Chen, who worked alongside the well-known HIV/AIDS scientist David Ho in the United States before moving to the Hong Kong institute, said scientists in the US and China have developed a vaccine based on the two HIV variants spreading among IDUs, which they hope to test on animals by the end of the year.

"If you want to make a vaccine, it is better to have a local strain as a target to work on," Chen said.

The HIV variants circulating in south and west China are similar to those found in India, Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, as well as in Taiwan and Hong Kong, he said.

"The epidemic in China has evolved over time. Previously, the major risk factors were IDUs and the tragic story of blood donation in central China.

"But after these people got infected, they passed it on and it is now in the general population," Chen said.

"After 2006, heterosexual sex has been playing the major role in transmission of the virus. Infections have gone up in the general population and from mother to child."

The presence of these variants in Taiwan and Hong Kong also could be a telltale sign of the traveling routes of drug users in the region, Chen said.

The AIDS Institute hopes to help set up HIV screening centers in China, which is estimated to have about 700,000 people living with HIV/AIDS.

10 [from Hong Kong] get food poisoning in Cambodia

August 15, 2007
New.gov.hk (Hong Kong gov't news)

The Centre for Health Protection is investigating the suspected food poisoning of 10 people who fell ill after eating in Cambodia on August 7.

The man and nine women, aged 22 to 59, were holidaying in the country when they developed abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea after a dinner buffet.

On their return to Hong Kong, two sought treatment at Tuen Mun and Prince of Wales Hospitals while another consulted a private doctor. All are in stable condition and no hospitalisation was required.

Hong Kong authority seized 196 kilos of cannabis suspected of being smuggled in from Cambodia

Fight crime: Police seized 195 kilograms of suspected Cannabis worth about $10.1 million in the retail market.

June 2, 2007
Man arrested for drug trafficking

news.gov.hk (Hong Kong)

Police have arrested a 36-year-old man for trafficking in dangerous drugs following the seizure of 195 kilograms of suspected Cannabis worth about $10.1 million in the retail market.

Police Narcotics Bureau officers arrested the man at 2 Tat Wan Road in Tai Po at about 5pm yesterday. He was brought back to a stone hut adjacent to 18A Sun Uk Ka Tsuen in Sheung Wun Yiu where a total of 195 slabs of vacuum-packed cannabis herbs weighing about 1kg each were found in the hut.

Police believe they have shut down a major drug syndicate which shipped cannabis into Hong Kong from Cambodia to meet the local market demand.

The man will be charged with two counts of trafficking in dangerous drugs and will appear in Fanling Magistrates' Courts on Monday.