From:    jeremyhildreth
To:         triplist
Date:     Fri 3/15/02 3:35 AM

Subject: Dispatch from Hong Kong

Dear friends,

As I travel the world for the next three months, I’ve promised to keep in touch with all of you as much as possible. Please feel free but not obligated to reply to these dispatches.

I arrived in Hong Kong two days ago, rendesvouing (did I spell that right? I don’t think so) with my travelling partner and good friend Chris Robbins, whom I met in college, and who is cutting class for the next month in order to join me here in Asia. We’ve been doing the usual HK tourists things (the Star Ferry, etc.), but being us, we’ve also done a few unconventional things.

We started out by having dinner at the Foreign Correspondents Club with Kin Ming Liu, who runs the Apple Daily, the second largest Chinese language paper in HK. Kin Ming used to be on the editorial side of the paper, where he ran several articles by both Chris and me, carefully translated into Cantonese.  The Apple Daily is highly critical of the Beijing government, and it’s reporters are not welcome in mainland China. Kin Ming enjoys being an unapologetic pro-market radical, however, and we enjoyed hearing is stories and his view that the Brits made a mistake in handing back HK to the PRC in 1997.

Chris, a third-year law student in Miami, was interested in the court system here in HK. Thus we spent this morning in the district court in Wan Chai listening to the case of ???, a young Chinese man who swam here from the PRC several months ago. Upon his arrival, he wanted (understandably) a bath. His mistake was to reach through someone’s open window to steal a bottle of shampoo. He was seen, caught, and arrested. He has plead guilty to immigration charges, which comes with a mandatory 15 month jail term, and says he is not guilty of burglary, the other crime he’s been charged with. Burglary carries a sentence of 3 years, and the sentences are consecutive, meaning the poor guy would spend more than 4 years locked up only to be sent back to the mainland regardless. Sort of a Jean Valjean situation, it appeared; just substitute Prell for a loaf of bread.

Apparently, illegal immigrants are treated this harshly because if they were not (the fear goes) HK, over night, would have more people flooding its borders than it could possibly tolerate. In between sessions we talked to the defendant’s legal aid solicitor, a haughty Liverpudlian who talks exactly (and even looks a little) like Paul McCartney (“Well, your lordship, that’s a rahther serious charge now, isn’t it?”).

Afterward, the prosecutor, a 36-year old Hong Kong Chinese woman wearing a black robe and a white wig like Rumpole of the Bailey, invited us back to her office for a tour of the supreme court. All of this was an interesting glimpse into the HK judicial system.

This afternoon, we paid a visit to Gunnar Moberg, the just-arrived CEO of the just-created Skandia Asia Pacific Ltd., a subsidiary of the company I used to work for. Skandia is venturing forth into the Asian long-term savings market and Mr. Moberg explained to us, among other things, what doing business with the PRC is like. Skandia’s negotiating a business license there. Encouragingly, he said that 5 years ago, when he first went to Beijing to open negotiations, he was meeting with government officials who were uniformly mid-60-year old, party line men who barely spoke English and hadn’t much of a clue regarding financial markets. Now, though, the officials holding these very same positions are 35-year old women with MBAs who speak perfect English. He thinks people will be surprised as how quickly things change for the better and open up in China. I hope he’s right.

Until next time,

Cheers,

Jeremy