Stuart Wolfendale

So, throughout the Easter holiday, Hong Kong’s Chinese language news bulletins were drenched with this story. Clutches of noisome Mainlanders appeared out of China brandishing watches in the worst of taste, demanding refunds. Hectoring confrontations with embarrassed, rascally looking young salesmen with dyed hair were staged for the cameras. More Mainland tourists had their pictures taken in front of the ominously shuttered, mostly heavily fingered shop than were taken at Disneyland.

As soon as they opened on Tuesday morning, the Consumer Council had in a Chinese young man carrying a heavily boxed watch which he had bought for a song and turned out to be made of cast iron. The Council’s concern and contrition almost upstaged Donald’s conquest of Bejing on the 1pm news.James Tien, the new political placeman heading the Tourist Board, popped his shirt buttons flexing muscle on a public holiday. In a characteristic show of practical application, he promised that some sorts of rules would be introduced preventing people who cheated tourists ever selling things to tourists again. But to you and me, apparently, they can sell the Koh-i-Noor diamond as often as they like.It is very clear that through the CCTV programme, political and commercial persons here received a message from the fierce and the proud and cringed and licked to the power of 6.4. What has done for decades for Japanese , European and American tourists, will not do for the Chinese people.As my colleague, chum and fellow club hearty, Jake van der Kamp wrote in his Tuesday column, why herd sheep if you don’t intend to fleece? It is a delightful metaphor underscoring with a razor the pointlessness of feeling sympathy for tourists who come here on zero cost tours in the serious hope of carrying home treasures at prices you could only hope to get off convent girls on crack.However, if the people that James Tien stands in for are so scared that the PLA might stir from its barracks and come to sort out the Kowloon camera, clock and gold booty cowboys that they put some muscular retailing regulation into place, we all might feel the benefit.It would be especially gratifying if the streets of Tsimshatsui, the Grid of Shame for years, could be tempered by restraint and the wannabe gangsters behind glass  selling the  clocks and cameras came to earn a living in the manner of the rest of us. Just to indulge me over a particular annoyance, could the first to the prison hulks be the Pakistani copy watch touts who own the pavements of Tsimshatsui on visitors’ visas? Come to think of it, though, at least they tell you straight up that what they are flogging is fake.