Above: Dementia Wellington’s support has been invaluable.
Today my father turned 83.
Itâs a tough life that began during the SinoâJapanese War, with his father being away in the army, and his mother and grandmother were left to raise the family on their land in Taishan, China.
In 1949, the Communists seized the property and the family had to start again, as refugees, in Hong Kong.
Ever the entrepreneur, during the Vietnam War, Dad and his business partner, an US Army doctor by the name of Capt Dr Lawson McClung, set up a mail-order business for deployed troops. As I recall it, Lawson said that he would be able to secure jobs for my parentsâmy late mother was a nurseâat his stepfatherâs hospitals in Tennessee. We either had a US green card, or one was merely procedural.
My mother realized we had family in Aotearoa and I remember going with her to Connaught Tower, to the New Zealand High Commission. I didnât know what it was for, but filling in the gaps it must have been to secure forms for immigration. As Plan Bs go, it was a pretty good one.
In 1976 came another move as we headed to New Zealand, originally on holiday, given that my grandfather had taken ill whilst here. As we flew in to Wellington, Dad pointed at the houses below. âThose are the sorts of houses New Zealanders live in.â I thought it was fascinating, that they didnât live in apartment blocks.
That first night here, on September 16, 1976, it was Dad who tucked me in, which at this point wasnât typical: it was usually my grandmother who did this. He asked if I wanted to see the two Corgi toy cars that my grandmother had bought me prior to the trip, which I could have if I behaved myself on the flights. I did. He took them out of the luggage and I had a brief look at them. This was an unfamiliar place but it was just a holiday and things would be back to normal soon.
It was during this holiday that word came that our immigration application had come through. My parents regarded our presence here as serendipitous. They neglected to tell their four-year-old son that plans had changed.
For the first 18 years of my life, I regarded âthe familyâ as being my parents and my widowed maternal grandmother, who lived with us ever since I could rememberâand I remember an awfully long time. We even had a photo taken around 1975â6 of the four of us, that I just remember represented everyone dearest to me.
As âthe familyâ lost one member to a stroke brought on by Parkinsonâs disease and complications from diabetes, and another to cancer, by 1994 it was just Dad and me.
At the beginning of the 2010s, Dad had a bout of shingles. By 2014 he was forgetting individual words, and I insisted he get checked out for dementia. Around the time of his 80th birthday, in 2015, the diagnosis from the psychogeriatrician was formal, although he could still speak with some stuttering and one or two words unreachable by his brain. The CT scans showed a deterioration of the left side of his brain, his speech centre. Within half a year there would only be one or two words per sentence that were intelligible.
The forms for an enduring power of attorney were drawn up as 2016 commenced. He was still managing, and he had his routines, but in mid-2018 we decided he should get some respite care.
He wasnât happy about this, and it took four hours of persuading, as well as a useful and staunch aunt, who got Dad to put on his shoes and head up with us to Ultimate Care Maupuia.
We had thought the second visit in late July would be easier but it took 19 hours over two days, an experience which we do not want to repeat.
Dad had lost the ability to empathize with us and was anxious and agitiated. While he insisted he could look after himself while home alone, there were signs over the last year that indicated he could not. He fell while having the âflu in mid-2017 and Amanda and I came to a house with all its lights off. We had no idea how long he had been down. By 2018 he would cry if left home alone. Even at his most insistent that he could look after himself, we returned after the first day of trying to coax him to Maupuia to find that he had not eaten.
The second day was when I called everyone I could think of to find a way to get to respite, since we werenât going to be around to look after him.
You name it, I called it, Age Concern aside. Dementia Wellington, the police, the rest home, Wellington Free Ambulance, Driving Miss Daisy, Care Coordination, Te Haika, and so on. I spoke to 11 people that day.
Te Haika said that the issue wasnât mental, but legal, which was about as useful as telling an American Democrat that Donald Trump was the Messiah.
Driving Miss Daisy said that I wasnât in their area but a colleague was, not that I ever heard back from that colleague.
Dementia Wellington, the police, and Free Ambulance were brilliant, as was my lawyer, Richard Brandon of Brandons. Our GPs at Kilbirnie Medical Centre were also excellent.
The up shot was that Free Ambulance could take Dad if the enduring power of attorney was enacted, and that would take a declaration of mental incapacity by the GP, which was duly written. He was also good enough to prescribe some medication to calm Dad down.
However, because it wasnât an emergency situation, there was no telling when Free Ambulance could come by.
It did make me glad that they were one of the charities I gave to this year.
However, you donât ever imagine a situation where you effectively drug your Dad to be able to put his jacket on and take him to a rest home for respite care. I felt like part of the Mission: Impossible team, except the person being drugged wasnât a Ruritanian dictator, but someone on the same side. When I say Mission: Impossible, I donât mean that series of films with Tom Cruise, either.
On September 16, 1976, you didnât think that in 42 yearsâ time your Dad would have dementia and youâd need to break a promise you made years ago that you would never put him in a home.
You also feel that that photo of âthe familyâ has been decimated, that youâre all alone because the last adult in there isnât around any more for you to bounce ideas off and to have a decent conversation with.
I realize I hadnât been able to do any of that with Dad for years but it feels that much more painful knowing he canât live in a place he calls home presently.
And you also realize that as a virtually full-time caregiver who has cooked for him for yearsâand now you know why I didnât reenter politics in 2016âthat his condition really just crept up on you to a point where what you thought was normal was, in fact, not normal at all.
You also realize that the only other time he was compelled to leave his home without his full volition was 1949, by a régime he had very little time for through most of his lifetime. You donât expect to be the next person to have to do that to him, and thereâs a tremendous amount of guilt that comes with that.
Earlier this week, our GP reissued his letter in âForm 5â (prescribed under the Protection of Personal and Property Rights Act 1988), which I drafted, since these procedures arenât altogether clear. It makes you wonder how people without law degrees might cope. Tomorrow I will meet with Care Coordination and see if Dad can be reassessed based on his current condition. He was only very recently assessed as not needing long-term care so it will be interesting to see if they accept that he has deteriorated to this extent. Iâm not a Mystic Meg who can make a prediction on this.
The rapidity of Dadâs changeâone which he himself noticed, as years ago he would complain that his âbrain felt different today compared to yesterdayââhas been a surprise to us, although mostly he is happy at Maupuia and interacts positively with the staff. Itâs not all smooth sailing and there are days he wonders when he can come home.
And I find some solace in that his father, and his mother-in-law, wound up in care for less. My grandfather had PTSD from the war and was unable to cook for himself, though even at the end he was bilingual (being educated in the US) and had successfully quit smoking after 70 years. My grandmother needed care because of her insulin injections but was also mentally fit.
But part of me expected that Iâd see it through with Dad to the end, that these rest homes were some western thing that separated families, and here is part of that immigrant experience.
The reason you didnât see as many Chinese New Zealanders on welfare wasnât down to some massive savingsâ account, but a certain pride and stoïcism in being to keep it to yourself. Youâre in a strange land where thereâs prejudice, and thatâs often enough for families to say, âF*** everyone else, weâre getting on with it and doing it ourselves.â
And thatâs what we did as âthe familyâ. We fought our own battles. Dad was once a helluva correspondent whose letters used words like proffer and the trinity of ult., prox. and inst., and plenty of officials got the sharp end of his writing. When Mum got cancer we brought in our own natural medication because westerners couldnât fathom that the same stuff cleared my grandfatherâs liver cancer in 1976 and healed several other members in the whānau. Dad sacrificed everything to try to save Mum and that was the closest example I had of what youâd do for someone you love.
When youâre deep in the situation, rationality goes out the window and youâre on autopilotâand often it takes serious situations, like two daysâ angst and stress of trying to get someone into respite care, to make you think that staying at home isnât the best for someone who did, even though he wonât admit it, thrive under rest home care.
We know that if we left it even later, it would be even tougher to get Dad into care and he would resist his new surroundings more.
Todayâs lunch at Maupuia was curried beef on rice in recognition of Indian Independence Day, a much nicer meal than what I might have made for Dad.
He has staff to hug and laugh with even if I have no idea where heâs putting his dirty undies.
And while aphasia means he hasnât made any new friends yet, I have faith that heâll do well given the circumstances.
Itâs those circumstances that mean the situation we find ourselves in, with Dad at the home, is one which weâll roll with, because, like 1949 and 1976, forces outside our control are at play.
Iâd love to make his Alzheimerâs go away given that I already lost one parent prematurely.
My mind goes to a close friend who recently lost her mother, and her father was killed in a car crash around the time my Mum died. Basically: not all of us are lucky enough to have both our parents peacefully go in their sleep. Many of us are put through a trial. And thereâs a real reason some of us have been hashtagging #FuckAlzheimers on Twitter, if out of sheer frustration.
For those who have made it this far, here are the points I want you to take away.
âą Immediately upon finding out your parent has dementia, get your enduring power of attorney sorted out, for both property and personal care.
âą Dementia Wellington is an excellent organization so get yourself along to the carer support groups, second Monday of every month. Dementia New Zealand canât help at this level.
âą Care Coordination has been very helpful and their referral to Dementia Wellington proved more effective than phoningâhowever, I should note that the organization changed for the better between Dadâs original diagnosis in 2015 and how they are today.
âą You do need âForm 5â from your GP or someone in a position to assess your parentâs mental capacity to kick off the enduring power of attorney.
âą Itâs OK to cry, feel emotionally drained and ask your friends for support. Itâs your parent. You expected to look after them and sometimes you need to let others do this for everyoneâs good. It doesnât mean you love your parent any less. It also doesnât mean you are placing yourself or your partner above him. It just means you are finding the best solution all round.
Dad is still “there”, and he recognizes us, even if he doesnât really know what day it is, canât really cook for himself, and doesnât fully understand consequences any more. Iâm glad I spend parts of every day with him while Iâm in Wellington. And while this wasnât the 83rd birthday I foresaw at the beginning of the year, he is in a safe, caring environment. I hope the best decision is made for him and for all of us.
Thatâs it for ânet neutrality in the US. The FCC has changed the rules, so their ISPs can throttle certain sitesâ traffic. They can conceivably charge more for Americans visiting certain websites, too. Itâs not a most pessimistic scenario: ISPs have attempted this behaviour before.
Itâs another step in the corporations controlling the internet there. We already have Google biasing itself toward corporate players when it comes to news: never mind that youâre a plucky independent who broke the story, Google News will send that traffic to corporate media.
The changes in the US will allow ISPs to act like cable providers. I reckon it could give them licence to monitor Americansâ traffic as well, including websites that they mightnât want others to know theyâre watching. As Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, puts it: ‘We’re talking about it being just a human right that my ability to communicate with people on the web, to go to websites I want without being spied on is really, really crucial.’
Of course I have a vested interest in a fair and open internet. But everyone should. Without ânet neutrality, innovators will find it harder to get their creations into the public eye. Small businesses, in particular, will be hurt, because we canât pay to be in the âfast laneâ that ISPs will inevitably create for their favoured corporate partners. In the States, minority and rural communities will likely be hurt.
And while some might delight that certain websites pushing political viewpoints at odds with their own could be throttled, they also have to remember that this can happen to websites that share their own views. If it’s an independent site, it’s likely that it will face limits.
The companies that can afford to be in that âfast laneâ have benefited from ânet neutrality themselves, but are now pulling the ladder up so others canât climb it.
Itâs worth remembering that 80 per cent of Americans support ânet neutralityâthey are, like us, a largely fair-minded people. However, the FCC is comprised of unelected officials. Their ârepresentativesâ in the House and Senate are unlikely, according to articles Iâve read, to support their citizensâ will. Hereâs more on the subject, at Vox.
Since China censors its internet, we now have two of the biggest countries online giving their residents a limited form of access to online resources.
However, China might censor based on politics but its âGreat Wallâ wonât be as quick to block new websites that do some good in the world. Who knew? China might be better for small businesses trying to get a leg up than the United States.
This means that real innovation, creations that can gain some prominence online, could take place outside the US where, hopefully, we wonât be subjected to similar corporate agenda. (Nevertheless, our own history, where left and right backed the controversial s. 92A of the Copyright Act, suggests our lawmakers can be malleable when money talks.)
These innovations mightnât catch the publicâs imagination in quite the same wayâthe US has historically been important for getting them out there. Today, it got harder for those wonderful start-ups that I got to know over the years. Mix that with the USâs determination to put up trade barriers based on false beliefs about trade balances, weâre in for a less progressive (and I mean that in the vernacular, and not the political sense) ride. âThe rest of the worldâ needs to pull together in this new reality and ensure their subjects still have a fair crack at doing well, breaking through certain partiesâ desire to stunt human progress. Let Sir Tim have the last word, as he makes the case far more succinctly than I did above: ‘When I invented the web, I didnât have to ask anyone for permission, and neither did Americaâs successful internet entrepreneurs when they started their businesses. To reach its full potential, the internet must remain a permissionless space for creativity, innovation and free expression. In todayâs world, companies canât operate without internet, and access to it is controlled by just a few providers. The FCCâs announcements today [in April 2017] suggest they want to step back and allow concentrated market players to pick winners and losers online. Their talk is all about getting more people connected, but what is the point if your ISP only lets you watch the movies they choose, just like the old days of cable?’
I see thereâs an opinion piece in Stuff from the Chamber of Commerce saying the Wellington City Council should sell its stake in Wellington Airport, because it doesnât bring in that much (NZ$12 million per annum), and because Aucklandâs selling theirs.
Itâs not too dissimilar to calls for the Council to sell the Municipal Electricity Department a few decades ago, or any other post-Muldoon call about privatization.
Without making too much of a judgement, since I havenât inquired deeply into the figures, itâs interesting that the line often peddled by certain business groups, when they want governments to sell assets, is: âThey should run things like households, and have little debt.â
This never applies to themselves. When it comes to their own expansion, they say, âWe donât need to run things like households, we can finance this through debt.â
The same groups say that governments should be run more like businesses.
However, their advice is always for governments to be run like households.
Has it escaped them that they are different beasts?
I wouldnât mind seeing government entities run like businesses, making money for their stakeholders, and said so when I campaigned for mayor.
Doing this needs abandoning a culture of mediocrity at some of those entities. Some believe this is impossible within government, and there are credible examples, usually under former command economies. But then there are also decent examples of state-owned enterprises doing rather well, like Absolut, before they were sold off by the Swedish government. If you want something current, the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp. is one of the most profitable car makers on the planet.
The difference lies in the approach toward the asset.
But what do I know? I come from Hong Kong where the civil service inherited from the British is enviably efficient, something many occidentals seem to believe is impossibleâyet I live in a country where I can apply for, and get, a new passport in four hours. Nevertheless, that belief in inefficiency holds.
Change your mindset: things are possible with the right people. Donât be a Luddite.
And therein lies why Stuff and I are on different planets.
Above:Autocade can be hard workâand sometimes you have to put up less exciting vehicles, like the 2001â7 Chrysler Town & Country, for it to be a useful resource.
March 8, 2018 marks 10 years of Autocade.
Iâve told the story before on this blog and elsewhere, about how the site came to beâannoyed by the inaccuracies and fictions of Wikipedia (who said the masses would be smart enough to get rid of the mistakes?), I took a leaf out of the late Michael Sedgwickâs book and created a wiki that had brief summaries of each model, the same way Sedgwick had structured his guides. I received an emailed threat from a well known British publisher (Iâm looking at you, Haymarket, and as predicted in my reply, your thoughts proved to be totally baseless) when we started, and 12Âœ million page views later, weâre on 3,628 models (I think we finished the first day on 12), with our page on the Ford Fiesta Mk VII leading the count (other than the home page). Autocade began as a wiki but with so many bots trying to sign up, I closed off those registrations. There have really been about six contributors to the site, all told: myself and Keith Adams for the entries, Peter Jobes and Nigel Dunn for the tech, and two members of the public who offered copy; one fed it in directly back in the day when we were still allowing wiki modifications. I thank everyone for their contributions.
A few years ago, I began running into people online who used Autocade but didnât know I was behind it; it was very pleasing to see that it had become helpful to others. It also pleased me tremendously to see it referenced in Wikipedia, not always 100 per cent correctly, but as Autocade is the more accurate site on cars, this is the right way round.
When a New Zealand magazine reviewed us, the editor noted that there were omissions, including his own car, a Mitsubishi Galant. Back then we were probably on 1,000 models, maybe fewer. All the Galants are now up, but Autocade remains a work in progress. The pace of adding pages has declined as life gets busierâeach one takes, on average, 20 minutes to research and write. You wouldnât think so from the brevity, but I want it to be accurate. Iâm not perfect, which is why the pages get changed and updated: the stats say weâre running on 3·1 edits per page.
But it looks like weâre covering enough for Autocade to be a reasonably useful resource for the internet public, especially some of the more obscure side notes in motoring history. China has proved a challenge because of the need to translate a lot of texts, and donât think that my ethnicity is a great help. The US, believe it or not, has been difficult, because of the need to calculate cubic capacities accurately in metric (I opted to get it right to the cubic centimetre, not litres). However, it is an exciting time to be charting the course of automotive history, and because there are still so many gaps from the past that need to be filled, I have the chance to compare old and new and see how things have moved on even in my four-and-a-half decades on Earth.
Since Sedgwick had done guides up to 1970, and paper references have been excellent taking us through the modern motor carâs history, I arbitrarily decided that Autocade would focus on 1970 and on. There are some exceptions, especially when model lines go back before 1970 and it would be a disservice to omit the earlier marks. But I wanted it to coincide roughly with my lifetime, so I could at least provide some commentary about how the vehicle was perceived at the time of launch. And the â70s were a fascinating time to be watching the motor industry: those nations that were confident through most of the 20th century with the largest players (the US and UK) found themselves struggling, wondering how the Japanese, making scooters and motorcycles just decades before, were beating them with better quality and reliability. That decadeâs Japanese cars are fascinating to study, and in Japan itself there is plenty of nostalgia for them now; you can see their evolution into more internationally styled product, rather than pastiches of othersâ, come the 1980s and on. The rise of Korea, Spain, China, India, Turkey, México and other countries as car-exporting nations has also been fascinating to watch. When Autocade started, Australia still had a domestic mass-produced car industry, Chrysler was still owned by Americans, and GM still had a portfolio of brands that included Pontiac and Saturn.
I even used to go to one of the image galleries and, as many cars are listed by year, let the mouse scroll down the page. You can see periods grouped by certain colours, a sign of how cars both follow and establish fashion. There are stylistic trends: the garishness of smog-era US cars and the more logical efficiency of European ones at the same time; smoother designs of the 1980s and 1990s; a creeping fussiness and a concentration on showing the brandâs identity in the 2000s and 2010s. As some of the most noticeable consumer goods on the planet, cars make up a big part of the marketing profession.
The site is large enough that I wouldnât mind seeing an academic look at industry using the data gathered there; and I always thought it could be a useful book as well, bearing in mind that the images would need to be replaced with much higher-resolution fare.
For now, Iâm going to keep on plodding as we commence Autocadeâs second decade. The Salon de Genève has brought forth some exciting débutantes, but then I should get more of the Chrysler Town & Country vans up âŠ
Since Flyme 6.2 for the Meizu M2 Note, Meizu has ceased providing automatic updates of its OS to rooted phones. There are a lot of pages and YouTube videos about unrooting, and after finding that none were relevant, Iâd like to add to the din with what worked for me.
Meizuâs own instruction to go to the Flyme website is right. Head there, grab the relevant update.zip from their downloads (in my case, it was the simplified Chinese one), and put it into the root directory of your internal storage.
However, clicking on the update file from the default file manager brings up a dialogue, saying you can only update if you tick the box permitting the process to delete all your data. Don’t do it.
Even though Meizu has a section in the security settings to let you root the phone, thereâs no equivalent page to unroot it. Once rooted, the original page giving you the warning about warranties, etc. doesnât show up again. All you see is a page telling you what programs have root access. And thereâs really no point getting SudoSU or other packages if youâre unsure of what to do.
The solution is so deceptively simple that Iâm surprised it canât be easily found online. I can’t even see it on the Meizu forums. Hereâs the low-down so you donât have to spend hours trying to locate it.
1. Switch off your phone.
2. Switch it back on pressing both the power and volume buttons, then let go when the Meizu logotype appears. (I had to do this twice but I got there.) This puts the phone into recovery mode.
3. Youâre then given two options: one to clear your data and the other to upgrade. Since youâve already got update.zip in the root directory, select the upgrade option. Don’t wipe your data.
Thatâs it. No unrooting, no extra downloads.
Iâm now running Flyme 6.3 for the Chinese edition of my phone.
I have to hand it to Meizu for making the process work pretty well. Unlike some other companies, these OS updates actually work out of the box. Itâs just a shame there are more hoops to jump compared with Flyme 5 or even 6.1.
My good friend Stefan Engesethâs Sharkonomics hit China a year ago, and itâs been so successful that the second edition is now out. It looks smarter, too, with its red cover, and Iâm sure Chinese readers will get a decent taste of Stefanâs writing style, humour and thinking.
I even hope this will pave the way for translations of his earlier works, especially Detective Marketing and One: a Consumer Revolution for Business (the latter still remains my favourite of his marketing titles).
Iâve written a brief quote for Sharkonomics and the publisher (with some nudging from Stefan) has taken the time to make sure my Chinese name is accurately recorded, rather than a phonetic translation of my Anglo transliteration, which, of course, then wouldnât be my name.
Stefanâs inventive and innovative thinking might seem left-field sometimes, till some years pass and people realize he was right all along. Take, for example, Google wanting to build a high-tech neighbourhood in downtown Toronto, announced in October. Notwithstanding the hassles Google has created on its own turf in Silicon Valley, itâs the sort of project we might expect from the giant now. But would we have expected it in 2007? Probably not, except Stefan did.
In 2007 (though he actually first floated the idea a year earlier), Stefan blogged about his idea for Google Downtownâwhy not make real what Google Earth does virtually? Why not shop at places that already know all your personal preferences, if thatâs where things are heading? The town would have free wifi and youâd be paying for it with âyour selfâ (the space, Iâm sure, was intentional). In 2008, 500 people heard his plans at a conference and laughed. The following year, he met Eric Schmidt and mentioned it to him. Eric paused and didnât laughâand maybe the idea sunk in.
Itâs not the first time Stefan has hatched an idea and it gained legs, from Coca-Cola delivering its product through taps to Ikea making flat-pack fashionâboth have wound up being done, though the latter not quite in the way Stefan envisaged.
[Prof Anne-Marie Brady of the University of Canterbury] said the Chinese-language media in New Zealand was subject to extreme censorship, and accused both Mr. Yang and Raymond Huo, an ethnic Chinese lawmaker from the center-left Labour Party, of being subject to influence by the Chinese Embassy and community organizations it used as front groups to push the countryâs agenda.
Mr. Huo strongly denied any âinsinuations against his character,â saying his connections with Chinese groups and appearances at their events were just part of being an effective lawmaker.
I wound up at three events where the Chinese ambassador, HE Wang Lutong, was also invited. This makes me a spy, I mean, agent.
I even shook hands with him. This means my loyalty to New Zealand should be questioned.
I ran for mayor twice, which must be a sure sign that Beijing is making a power-play at the local level.
You all should have seen it coming.
My Omega watch, the ease with which I can test-drive Aston Martins, and the fact I know how to tie a bow tie to match my dinner suit.
The faux Edinburgh accent that I can bring out at any time with the words, âThere can be only one,â and âWe shail into hishtory!â
Helming a fashion magazine and printing on Matt paper, thatâs another clue. We had a stylist whose name was Illya K. I donât always work Solo. Sometimes I call on Ms Gale or Ms Purdy.
Jian Yang and I have the same initials, which should really ring alarm bells.
Clearly this all makes me a spy. I mean, agent.
Never mind I grew up in a household where my paternal grandfather served under General Chiang Kai-shek and he and my Dad were Kuomintang members. Dad was ready to ćć·„ and fight back the communists if called up.
Never mind that I was extremely critical when New Zealanders were roughed up by our cops when a Chinese bigwig came out from Beijing in the 1990s.
Never mind that I have been schooled here, contributed to New Zealand society, and flown our flag high in the industries Iâve worked in.
All Chinese New Zealanders, it seems, are still subject to suspicion and fears of the yellow peril in 2017, no matter how much you put in to the country you love.
We might think, âThatâs not as bad as the White Australia policy,â and it isnât. We donât risk deportation. But we do read these stories where thereâs plenty of nudge-nudge wink-wink going on and you wonder if thereâs the same underlying motive.
All you need to do is have a particular skin colour and support your community, risking that the host has invited Communist Party bigwigs.
Those of us who are here now donât really bear grudges against what happened in the 1940s. We have our views, but that doesnât stop us from getting on with life. And that means we will be seen with people whose political opinions differ from ours.
Sound familiar? Thatâs no different to anyone else here. Itâs not exactly difficult to be in the same room as a German New Zealander or a Japanese New Zealander in 2017. A leftie won’t find it hard to be in the same room as a rightie.
So Iâll keep turning up to community events, thank you, without that casting any shadow over my character or my loyalty.
A person in this country is innocent till proved guilty. We should hold all New Zealanders to the same standard, regardless of ethnicity. This is part of what being a Kiwi is about, and this is ideal is one of the many reasons I love this country. If the outcry in the wake of Garnerâs Fairfax Press opinion is any indication, most of us adhere to this, and exhibit it.
Therefore, I don’t have a problem with Prof Brady or anyone interviewed for the pieceâit’s the way their quotes were used to make me question where race relations in our neck of the woods is heading.
But until heâs proved guilty, Iâm going to reserve making any judgement of Dr Yang. The New York Times and any foreign media reporting on or operating here should know better, too.
Hong Kong’s skyline in 2008, photographed by Scrolllock.
Has it been 20 years since Dad and I sat in front of the telly to watch both Britannia sail out of the harbour and China set off a magnificent fireworksâ display to celebrate getting Hong Kong becoming one of her possessions again?
Following some of the 20th anniversary commemorations through the media, notably the BBC World Service which followed them keenly, I had very mixed feelings.
Having been born British in the then-colony (whilst cheering the All Blacks today, natch) I have some nostalgia for the Hong Kong of old. If it werenât for some aspects of colonialism, my mother wouldnât have secured a decent job at Wellington Hospital (viz. an English and Welsh qualification) and I probably would never have learned English before the age of three. It all helped.
It was the spectre of 1997, specifically the fear of what the Communists would do after July 1, 1997, that prompted my parents to make plans to emigrate as early as the 1970s.
Of course, history as shown that largely those fears have not come to pass, although the Umbrella Revolution highlights that universal suffrage is not a reality in the city.
In a post-Brexit (or at least a post-Brexit vote) era, these past two decades also highlight that British nationalism is meaningless and little more than a tool for politicians to yield for propaganda.
You can fairly argue that that is what nationalism always has been. It could also equally be argued that nationalism is founded on some rose-coloured-glasses past, painting a picture that actually never existed.
American nostalgia looks back at a 1950s’ economic boom while ignoring segregation while British nostalgia shows a child pushing his bike up a hill to DvoĆĂĄkâs New World Symphony.
Brexiters, rightly or wrongly, want to reassert a British self-determination founded on a British national character.
Most Britons I talked to, regardless of their politics, agree that if you are Hong Kong British, then you are British. That should be some solace to the families of those HKers who lost their lives fighting under the Crown in both World War II and the Falklands.
Yet there is no reality to this claim when it comes to government. Fearful of an influx of Hong Kong British emigrating to the UK, the British National (Overseas) category was invented in 1985, to replace our previous status as Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies. It didnât do the wealthy any harm, mind: a lot went to Canada and Australia and took their money there. Others stayed and invested in China, and helped fuel the growth of Shenzhen as a technological powerhouse. The Hong Kong Chinese person is generally industrious, many having descended from refugees from China in 1949 who decided to make the most of the freedoms in the colony. That work ethic was certainly nothing any Briton in the UK needed to fear, yet somehow we were classed as Johnny Foreigner.
When I went to the UK in 2001 with that BN(O) passport, I had terrible trouble at immigration, denied entry when queued up with other British subjects. I wound up at the back of the queue with some white South Africans, who were less than impressed and said, âBut thatâs apartheid.â Correspondence to the High Commission, Foreign Secretary, and Shadow Foreign Secretary went unanswered, though I did get a response from the PM.
In other words, the fears within Enoch Powellâs âRivers of Bloodâ speech held more sway in Blairâs Britain than any sacrifice in the Falklands (even if, I should point out, Powell was not addressing immigration per se). Today, I wonder if they still do.
The Tiber was greater than the Atlantic.
Labour were quick to point out how wrong the Tories were with BN(O) back in the 1980s, but in 2001, Labour wasnât working.
Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, said at the time of the handover in 1997 that Britain would âwalk with youâ, that Britain had won assurances that elections in Hong Kong would be free and fair, and that if China ever failed to live up to this pledge, Britain would take the matter to the United Nations under the Sino-British Joint Declaration.
In 20 years, Britain has not lifted a finger.
We might get lucky like the Gurkhas one of these days if Joanna Lumley wants to come to our aid. But we certainly canât rely on any politician.
Being British (I retained my nationality and applied before the deadline to be a BN(O)), you can see how the pro-Brexit position was hard to stomach to me. The likes of Nigel Farage and the “other” New York-born politician with funny hair, Boris Johnson, seemed to revel in some idea of British unity, but anyone from Hong Kong will tell you that in politics, that is an empty concept.
Only one of my friends who was pro-Brexit voted based on the idea of an independent Britain being more efficient when freed from the whims of Brussels, and I respect him for it; most of what I saw was aimed against immigration. The current PMâs belief in safeguarding the interests of British subjects should be cold comfort to those affected: if they couldnât defend our interests, will others fare any better, especially with a minority government in a Conservative Party that actually remains as divided as ever?
Not that I am championing the Peopleâs Republic of China for its handling of relations between mainlanders and Hong Kongers; it has equally been exclusive of us and our unique culture. I have already gone into the Umbrella Revolution elsewhere (even if the TV One website omitted my televised comments about Wikileaksâ reporting of US State Department interference as this goes against the western narrative), and this doesnât need exploring again. The disappearance of publishers critical of Beijing should sound alarm bellsâI note that one of them was a British subject, but the best the UK could muster was an expression of concern. I cannot help but wonder if this is the fate that awaits Britons on the Continent should something happen to them.
Some negatives aside, I am happy that when I visited a âChineseâ Hong Kong in 2006, I found a city whose character was intact, and I remarked at how unchanged that was. In subsequent visits in 2008, 2010 and 2012, that core remained. Given all the paranoia before 1997, âOne country, two systemsâ has certainly not been as bad as many of usâincluding those of us who moved our entire lives abroad because of those fearsâpredicted. I wish all HKers well on this 20th anniversary.
I’m not so sure that GM going into talks to sell Opel and Vauxhall to PSA (PeugeotâCitroĂ«n) is that big a surprise.
We obviously hold a lot of nostalgia for these brands, and itâs only right that we perceive GM as selling its family jewels. Opel has made some great cars over the years, and Buick in China and the US, Vauxhall in the UK, and Holden in Australia rely on this division to provide it with product.
But it wasnât long ago that I said I foresaw the next Holden Commodore being a four-door booted model based on a Chinese Buick Regal thatâs on the same platform. While Iâve been proved wrong with scoop photos and inside information from journalists in the immediate term, longer-term this doesnât look so far-fetched, in a future where Peugeot owns OpelâVauxhall and GM has no choice but to consider Chinese sourcing seriously.
Therefore, GM isnât thinking that itâs selling off the family jewels, at least the GM where Chinese partner SAIC is overwhelmingly calling the shots.
What they are thinking is this: âWe should be able to develop the whole lot in China.â They werenât nostalgic over Holden, and they wonât be thrilled with the losses at Opel. Itâs willing to sacrifice it to make its own position stronger. Weâve already seen that SAIC has called it quits when it comes to British assembly at Longbridgeâthatâs now all done back in China.
Thereâs been such a massive technology transfer from the US to China over the last few years that Europe is seen as surplus by the folks in Shanghai. They have all the platforms on which they can make products globally. They may even, rightly or wrongly, think that the remaining brands can get them into Europe, even if GM had pulled its Korean-made Chevrolets out of there.
Holden can be used to westernize the product and the Australians have shown they can do it well.
Iâm not saying I agree with this, as a long-time Opel fan. I was looking forward to the new Commodores coming out of RĂŒsselsheim. The car looks the business, itâs roughly the size of the recently deleted Ford Falcon (therefore, Iâm not sure why people are so upset about its size), and the majority of buyers donât even know which set of wheels the powerâs going to. Iâve got an Astra K coming in a few months at Lucire.
What youâre going to see is GM basically being a Shanghai-run firm with China supplying global markets and the US operations kept going for their brand cachet.
In the meantime, a hypothetical PSA-run Opel will continue with the existing plans till the end of these modelsâ life cycles, then China will become the manufacturing hub for numerous markets.
SAIC already makes a load of Cadillacs, Buicks and Chevrolets for the domestic market, and theyâll want to pump them out more widely.
Theyâve also shown that they can take new GM platforms and turn them into Roewesâor old GM platforms and turn them into Baojuns.
PSA, meanwhile, with 14 per cent controlled by Chinese firm Dongfeng, will pursue a strategy of streamlining platforms and be focused more on Europe. It could pay off as cross-town rival Renault has done well with Nissan, Mitsubishi, Samsung, Dacia and AvtoVAZ, but it wonât nearly be as secure. The two French groups have been obsessed with one another for as long as I can remember, for years spending more time rivalling each other than actually coming up with what customers wanted.
Dongfeng may have to cough up more lolly and it could become a larger shareholder than the Peugeot family or the French government. But will it have the sort of geographical coverage that Renault has?
Thatâll be what PSA will be asking itself, knowing that itâs reasonably strong in Chinaâbut also realizing that it hasnât been clever at creating models that can be sold globally (the current CitroĂ«n C6, DS 5LS and the DS 6 among them, sold exclusively in China). Nevertheless, there are savings to be had, though the most obvious fear is that Opel and Vauxhall will go the way of Panhard and Talbot, brands that fell into either Peugeot or CitroĂ«nâs hands over the years and become defunct at the expense of the parent companiesâ. Is there a desire to extend the groupâs brand portfolio beyond Peugeot, CitroĂ«n, DS, the various Dongfeng lines, and the ex-Hindustan Ambassador?
The official statement is non-committal enough and gives nothing away: âPSA Group and General Motors confirm they are exploring numerous strategic initiatives aiming at improving profitability and operational efficiency, including a potential acquisition of Opel Vauxhall by PSA.
âThere can be no assurance that an agreement will be reached.â
In any case, we always said that SAIC was playing a long game. MG was a toe in the water. GM is the real deal.
Controlling GM means they can do as they please, and whatâs good for China is good for General Motors.
My good friend Stefan Engesethâs 
