Stuart Wolfendale

There must be universities, which have faculties of public relations where you study presenting that which is not, getting journalists drunk and organizing events with nymphets and very big balloons. Their courses will include case studies of how not to show yourself to the world and one that could become a fast favourite for students is the people of Mui Wo versus the Christian Zheng Sheng college for the rehabilitation of young drug offenders.

 

When ancient traditions such as total self-interest, ritual villainy, despoliation and the stoning of mutes and idiots are threatened, Hong Kong’s island villages have a habit of turning nasty. In recent weeks, in their fight to prevent this school being relocated up its creek, Mui Wo, on Lantau island, has presented a face more bleached and scraped than a chimpanzee’s arse.

 

The group of locals that came together took whatever text books PR has, tore them out and shredded them in front of assembled cameras. In a public meeting with the school staff and in front of the school’s children, adults shouted rudeness and jerked kiddy sized hand banners up and down. The feared, rehabilitating children sat to the side, neat, polite, calm but troubled- not by substances but by adults.

 

Enough to make you want to take something yourself were the women screeching in rage, which no quantity of sexual equalization will ever stop being a shocking harridan signal that the crowd is off the rails and ploughing through the bystanders.

 

The argument that these people needed the building involved for a local school was done serious damage by preliminary press enquiries, which revealed that, up to now, no more than fifty sets of parents, had ever wanted to send their kids to it. It was beginning to look, to little surprise, that the stoning instinct was really running the show. In one short afternoon of invective, Mui Wo managed to swing nearly all of Hong Kong against it.

 

Adversity must have lead to madness and the use of gweilo residents in support. In a Sunday morning open air debate on RTHK, spokespeople for the protestors seemed to set up camp round two wide Caucasian men who sat there in shorts and said little.

 

Amongst local Chinese , the popular  impression of Westerners who live in Hong Kong is that the rivers of fortune have run pretty strongly for them already and  to be standing as hard done by next to New Territories peasants is a whopping cheek. The added problem for ‘gweilos’ who live on the islands is that, in the public mind, they don’t stay standing for very long. The belief that they spend much of their good fortune in the Blind Beggar and Brain Hemorrhage Bar by the beach is hard to overcome.

 

The Mui Wo crowd had only one step further and worse to go than inviting large white men with weathered faces and full sports shirts to sit against well behaved Chinese teenagers on camera. They could have asked in the Japanese.

 

So unlovely has been this pictorial public child bashing that the Heung Yee Kuk has only just been able to show Mui Wo any support and with palpable embarrassment. To embarrass the Kuk in anything, let alone a matter of clan self interest, is a remarkable achievement and should earn the Mui Wo case its place in the textbooks- and defeat.

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