Why is GMA going to Hong Kong in the Year of the Monkey ?

HONG KONG – Probably she doesn’t realize it, but the impending visit of President Macapagal-Arroyo to Hong Kong next Friday, January 23, is causing some discomfiture on the part of the HK authorities; i.e., the Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China. This is because it’s the equivalent of compelling the bureaucrats, policemen and security men involved with the hospitality and protection of visiting Heads of State to work on the Chinese equivalent of Christmas Day.

Friday is the day after Chinese New Year, which falls on Thursday (January 22), based on the lunar calendar. This means that everybody is on holiday, and most employees and workers are, in truth, out of town.

As early as yesterday, they began "knocking off" from work, and heading for the old home town to celebrate the expiration of the old year and to welcome the Year of the Monkey, which arrives Wednesday on the stroke of the midnight.

Guess GMA didn’t realize the implications of her insistence on arriving in Hong Kong on this inconvenient Friday – but the HK authorities are gearing to welcome her nonetheless. Her actual target is to be here on Saturday, when El Shaddai, the powerful Catholic sect which has a strong membership here, has scheduled a Prayer Rally to be presided over by El Shaddai’s grand archon, Brother Mike Velarde.

Is La Gloria’s flying visit in pursuit of piety? Rather in pursuit of votes, what else? Her parachuting into the midst of El Shaddai’s faithful in Hong Kong is premised on the idea that "the family that prays together votes together," with apologies to Father Peyton.

Hong Kong, indeed, is vote-rich. Out of the 130,000 OFWs (overseas Filipino workers) employed here, no less than 88,677 registered to vote next May 10, a remarkable 53 percent, far bigger a percentage than most OFW destinations. You can say that the Filipinos in Hong Kong are both politically active and civic-conscious. So GMA doesn’t want to miss any opportunity to get on their good side.

It has long been clear that "governance" has much less to do with the President’s peregrinations than vote-acquisition. A "Bayanihan Center" has already been designated in Kennedy Town, not far from Hong Kong’s Central quarter, so the more than 88,000 voters can cast their ballots conveniently.

Mrs. Daphne Kuok, one of our close friends (from the old Beijing days), a beautiful Filipina who speaks fluent Putonghwa (Mandarin) and Cantonese, and is a member of the Special Board of Election Inspectors, assured me that the OFW voter turn-out will be significant.

She’s very active in Filipino community, and told me that much goodwill was earned for the government by the immediate past Consul General, Ambassador Victoria Bataclan, who’s just been transferred – after her short stint here – to Stockholm, where she is the new Ambassador to Sweden.

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This is a very wet Sunday evening as I write.

Last Friday, when I got here, Hong Kong was sunny but cold… about 19 degrees. Friends here told me, however, it had been much colder the day before, with temperatures dropping to 12 degrees Celsius at night. Saturday was warmer, 22 to 23 degrees C, but overcast. Now it’s pouring, the downpour obscuring the magnificent harbor, where tourist ships, like those huge "Star Cruiser" boats, and the "Cruise Ferries" come and go, taking boatloads of tourists to Vietnam, Indonesia, and other exotic port destinations.

Other ferries sail just outside the harbor to international water, actually Floating Casinos where Hong Kongists or other tourists can gamble to their hearts‘ content, instead of having to go all the way to Macau.

Although Chinese New Year neon lights and the fantastic light displays of old are no longer event (the economy is in deep recession), and the fantastic pre-New Year sales of former years aren’t "on" this week, Hong Kong is experiencing a slight improvement in its economy. The hordes of European and American tourists, of course, are no longer coming, as they used to in the old carefree, pre-9/11 terrorist days and before the Bubble burst (hence Gweilos, while a few can still be spotted sporadically, are thin on the ground). Fear of SARS has also contributed greatly to tourist decline.

On the other hand, many tourists are now arriving from next-door Mother China. The Chinese, increasingly affluent in their home cities, are coming to Hong Kong in droves to understand better their own new-style brand of Communist-Capitalism. "To become rich is glorious," the late Chairman Deng Xiaoping had once enthused. The glorious nouveau-riche are today patronizing the once-forbidden delights of the former British crown territory. Shanghai, though, with streamlined Pudong backstopping the old Bundists (the Shanghai Gang, after all, once controlled, and still has residual power in the Beijing politburo) is fast moving up to challenge, and, eventually, out-strip Hong Kong.

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Over here, it’s not just SARS (a third case has just been confirmed in next-door Guangdong province) that worries Hong Kong. It’s avian or bird flu. The deaths from "bird flu" in Viet Nam have been noted. Fewer people here are ordering and ingesting their favorite dish, Cantonese Chicken. Not even my kumpadre, businessman-industrialist Joseph Lim who runs two factories in Shenzen, and whose Solid Corp. represents SONY in Xiamen as well. When Joseph took us to dinner in our old haunt, the posh China Club the other night, however, we defiantly asked for "Peking Duck" (no ideological statement intended). The China Club hasn’t lost its fabulous kitchen. We enjoyed the best Sharks Fin soup we’ve had in years.

The caveat intrudes, on the other hand: If even a small percentage of the 1.3 billion Chinese could afford to have Shark’s Fin soup every day, how many sharks would we have left in the ocean within five years? Not very many, I’ll wager. "Jaws" and the Killer Shark, have been replaced by Killer Man – hungry for the delicious fin.

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The Hong Kong dailies are full of crime stories. It’s not true that they sweep crime under the rug so the tales of danger won’t discourage tourists. It’s evident, though, that Hong Kong is much safer than Metro Manila. Look at yesterday’s three-column article in the Sunday Morning Post. It was headlined: "Six Slain in 18 Days, in a Bloody New Year."

Let’s face it. In Metro Manila, the mordant statistics are closer to "Six slain in 18 HOURS."

Last Friday, the South China Morning Post ran an even more lurid headline in the "CITY" Section: "Crime Surges to 8-Year High." The article by Stella Lee said that "crime surged 16.5 percent. . . ."

The crimes noted didn’t seem appreciably threatening, however.

What’s fascinating is that "assaults on police officers soared 52 percent to 7,608 cases, and criminal intimidation rose 10.4 percent, to 933 cases."

What? They no longer fear the cops as much?

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THE ROVING EYE . . . Yesterday my daughter, Sara Soliven-De Guzman wrote the column in this space. Alas, I see from downloading it on the website that "The STAR" copy-editor ruined her piece by dropping a line from the poem she quoted. For the sake of restoring the clarity of the message intended to be delivered, we reprint the poem in its entirety in this corner:

God, give us men!

A time like this demands strong minds;

Great heart, true faith and ready hands;

Men whom the lust office does not kill;

Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;

Men who possess opinions and a will;

Men who have honor . . . men who will not lie;

Men who can stand before a demagogue

And damn his treacherous flatteries without winking!

Tall men . . . sun-crowned . . who live above the fog

In public duty and in private thinking;

For while the rabble, with their thumb-worn creeds,

Their large professions and their little deeds,

Mingle in selfish strife, lo! Freedom weeps,

Wrong rules the land and waiting Justice sleeps!

God Give Us Men by Josiah Gilbert Holland was one of the three poems my late father so cherished, and which guided his life, that he had them under the glass of his desk in his office. As kids, we saw them so frequently under that glasstop, and so admired papa, that we committed them to memory. The other two were Written in the Hearts of Men, which this writer has quoted frequently in my speeches, and, finally, that great admonition, penned in inspiration by Rudyard Kipling, IF.

Indeed, if we all only lived by those precepts, we’d be a great nation.