Chasing red herrings in the age of globalization

Both environment and health as significant aspects of our personal and social well-being have remained conceptually underdeveloped and become practically more unrealizable after the 1997 changeover. More precisely, under the British rule, and later the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) governance of the past ten years, both environment and health have been taken as "something out there" to be protected or sought for outside the realm of our daily life. There has been little, if any, attempt to look for root causes of environmental degradation and human ill-health in our entrenched habits and personal and social goals. Changing such habits and critically examining many of the accepted goals would, of course, almost automatically mean questioning consumerism and the mainstream, affluent lifestyle that many of us are aspired to. Hence, it is not surprising that the HKSAR, which continues to subscribe adamantly to the ideology of "prosperity and stability", has hardly ever confronted issues of environment and health in such reflective and critical context. In fact, any discussion which alludes to the darker side of pursuing economic growth and developmentalism would be taken as “obscene” or "blasphemous” in this land long colonized by the worship of material possession and packed with self-congratulations for its own wealth-acquisition tenacity.

It is with such a conservative approach to the environment and health on the part of the government, business sector and many civic groups (professional groups, green groups and others which claim to be concerned about environment and health issues) that the past ten years have seen continuous surge of campaigns and promotion endeavors in "environmental protection", "social hygiene", "food safety" and "epidemics control" etc. Yet, without pointing out that the worsening state of the environment and human health lies mostly in the increasing dictate of people's livelihood and lifestyle by the big corporations, as well as government policies and civic efforts which accommodate such dictate, these campaigns and promotion endeavors can, ironically, only lead to further deterioration of the situation. For example, when people are told that they can restore the environment by taking part in tree planting activities in designated sites while all the time no attention is being paid to the felling of old trees in numerous areas acquired by developers for property development, they in fact become more and more alienated from the living environment which has been nourishing them and connecting with them in the complex ecological web. And, when they follow advice of experts to consume many pills, nutrition supplements or different kinds of natural food to improve their health or slim up, while failing to notice how globalized food industries have long taken away nutrients from and put too many additives to our daily food, they become more and more alienated with their own bodies and physique. Moreover, they are actually adding impetus to the race for future environmental and health disaster by becoming increasingly reliant on government insecticide spraying or mass killing of animals to "clean up" the environment and guarantee their physical fitness. The adverse effects of such reliance are aggravated by people taking for granted their own and their children’s twisted living style which includes getting minimal rest, addicted to fast food, and leaving physical labor to domestic helpers and other (low-paying) imported laborers.

In sum, people have been exposed to more and more environment and health (mis)information which turns them further away from the road of reflection on how they have been over-consuming, overworking, throwing away too much, and regenerating too little. Instead, more and more are people being infused with the culture of dependency on multinational corporations which sell natural potions, green products, health and organic food, eco-entertainment, packaged environmental education, health and other insurance plans, and (in fact) "life plans" to meet growing need to ameliorate the uncertainties brought about by deteriorating environment and people's sense of failure as regard how to stay healthy.

The lack of awareness of, or the will to confront, the close relation between our living style (as dictated by the globalized economy and culture) and degradation of the environment and human health has, in the past ten years, led to escalation of two specific trends in Hong Kong. They are:

1. There being no real discussion on crucial ethical values relating to environment and health, as all values not reducible to monetary ones are sidelined.

2. Lacking in local perspective and growing urban-biased approach in tackling environmental and health enigmas.

We shall discuss these two aspects respectively.

When GNP rules

1. GNP is the dominating factor in not only public policies of the HKSAR but also the consciousness of most of its citizens. Hence, decisions relating to land use and related matters are made with practically no attention being paid to values not reducible to monetary worth (including ecological values and state of physical and psychological fitness of humans). In fact, human sickness and diseases, pollution of all forms, mental distress and all kinds of mishaps resulting from poor environmental and living qualities can contribute significantly to economic growth, and growth of such growth rate, as the commodification of work and services in the areas of medical and hospitalization, social welfare, counseling, body and “spiritual” care, cleaning up of polluted places, related researches and promotions, among others, has turned all the otherwise bad consequences into positive figures under GNP calculation. On the other hand, pre-globalized ways of life, which are far more sustainable - in being rural, communally self-sufficient, non-expansionist, self-reliant, containing lots of small-scale and short-distant exchanges, home-made products and self-employment, free services, and making full use of local conditions while paying due regard to limits posed by such conditions - have little to contribute to the GNP. They are, therefore, in past decades and even more so in the previous years, deemed obsolete and have become the target of aggressive elimination.

Under the British rule, especially in the last few decades of its governance, construction projects, big or small, undertaken by the government and private sector were cheered as "progress", without consideration of the projects' short or long term adverse impacts on sustainable living of the community. In times of "social and political crises" (e.g., people losing confidence in the future of Hong Kong after the Tienanmen crackdown in 1989), huge construction projects to rejuvenate the economy were universally seen as effective remedies. Often, despite one or two skeptical voices sounding out the potential huge environmental destruction resulting from big projects such as the “Airport Core Programme”, the whole society was behind the idea of creating more investment opportunities for business. When communities of Ma Wan, Yum O, Chek Lap Kok etc. were dissolved because of the “Airport Core Programme”, hardly anyone felt sorry for the disappearance of yet a few more forms of local economy and communal life. There have been further extermination of non-mainstream local communities under the banner of economic, social and cultural progress after the changeover. The most spectacular projects belonging to such category include: Hong Kong Disneyland and other big constructions in Lantau Island, setting up of Urban Renewal Authority in 1999 to more aggressively push forward urban redevelopment in (a.k.a. the Manhattanization of) Wanchai, Kwun Tong, West Kowloon and many other old neighborhood, and quite a few railway and subway lines either completed in recent years or currently under construction which connect to sites with increasing property prospects. Naturally, there are numerous highrise buildings and luxury apartments mushrooming all over the territory in the past years. All of these are seen as HKSAR's pride. From time to time arguments over whether to preserve a certain building or kind of trade or industry were raised but hardly have more holistic questions of ecological sustainability been addressed in these contexts. Needless to say, these constructions have, each in its slightly different way, contributed to further erosion of unique landscapes and ecological sustainability involving humans and non-human members of the communities. Yet the most disturbing situation is that most members of the neighborhood under threat of dissolution chose to eventually accept some form of compensation and move out. A culture of defending the way of life of one's community with firm resolve is yet to be formed and consolidate.

The so-called “85,000 incident” illustrates quite well the city's enigmatic indulgence in developmentalism. The incident is well remembered as marker of the misrule under C.W. Tung, and has partially contributed to his downfall in 2005. The incident began with Tung announcing, shortly after becoming the Chief Executive in 1997, a land use cum housing policy of providing 85,000 living quarters (50,000 of which are public housing units) each year, so as to meet the housing demand of the community. The announcement was met with great skepticism and hostility. It was later considered one of the causes of the subsequent fall of property prices, which occurred at the end of 1997, when the Asian market crashed. In 2002, when asked about the policy, Tung declared that it "no longer exists", and his inconsistency was since then much a subject of tease for his critics. However, for all the while, the society's focus was on the impact of the “85,000 policy” on property price and then later, on the “weakness” of Tung's governance as demonstrated by his inability to implement a publicized policy. There was hardly ever any in-depth assessment of the “85,000 policy” itself in terms of sustainability and the related value concerns. Among such concerns are, first, the need to suppress property prices so that people have more room to plan their own lives in being less subjected to the pressure of having to take up (mostly environmentally unfriendly) jobs to pay mortgage or fulfill the basic housing need, and, second, releasing land-use planning from developers' imperative to fan consumerism and exercise assault on the environment, so that the importance of sustainable living of the community can be reinstated.

Rapid phasing out of the local and subsistence perspective

Local perspective inevitably implies sustainability, as there is no external body to bear the adverse consequences of unsustainable practices. Such perspective is also most likely to be one of “subsistence”, as “subsistence” implies non-expansionist, independence, and self-reliance. In abandoning subsistence, a society is easily manipulated by consumerism which celebrates the desire for lots of products and discarding them freely when new ones are acquired. As a result, sustainability is lost either in one's own community or, in most common cases, in poorer communities outside one's own territory, where havoc on other people's livelihood and environment is inflicted without even being realized by those overseas “consumers” living in non-subsistent economy, or so-called affluent society. This is the power relation so commonly found among today's countries, and HKSAR is no exception. More and more do we abandon production for our own consumption and dump our rubbish to our neighbors' homes in this age of escalated globalization. Locally, the countryside (less urbanized zone), commonly known as the New Territories and the outlying islands, were home to certain forms of subsistence economy and culture. There small farms and fishing villages used to supply a significant proportion of meat, fish and vegetables (and in still earlier decades, rice as well) that locals consumed. Small shops and marketplaces which sold local handicrafts, fresh and processed food etc. were abundant in number. However, in the recent few decades, Hong Kong has experienced the gradual dismissal of the subsistence and local perspective in matters of economics and in terms of cultural identity, both through government's “genocidal “ measures such as helping massive number of villagers of the New Territories to emigrate to the United Kingdom, Holland, and Germany since the 1970s, as well as through the “modern“ curriculum of schools furnishing universal education which spreads the message of Hong Kong's taking the new identity of first, an industrial economy, and currently, a knowledge economy, both of which are consumer-oriented and far excel the “primitive”, subsistent way of living as typified by the rural communities which the new economies have replaced and displaced. Beginning in the 1990s, and increasingly so in the new millennium, Hong Kong's self-proclaimed trait as a “knowledge society” (a.k.a. IT society, or society of continuing education) is narrowly defined by its capability to generate incessant consumption among its population. Its countryside, which throughout the ages has engendered indigenous knowledge which entails ecological sustainability, has been almost completely discarded.

Under globalization, the concentration of “food industry” in the hands of a small number of multinational retailers and producer companies suppresses the food price to the extent that unless individual places or countries stand firm against the pressure of WTO and the temptation to join the global market competition game in defending their own local agriculture, fishery and other subsistent activities, local food producers could by no means sustain and also gone would be the kind of freedom, integrity, and respect for nature that these activities stand for. Not surprisingly, these values are the necessary components of a community's ability to maintain its people's physical and psychological well-being. Without appreciating how important it is to breathe in fresh air, enjoy the boundless outlooks, have clean water and soil to nurture human and other living things, know what local herbs and other materials to acquire for medicinal use, and know where we came from and that our histories and heritage will be passed on, how can people in a community maintain their health and well-being? By destroying its own countryside and the basics of life therein nurtured, the Hong Kong community is fast approaching a stage where it no longer has any material or sensual basis for leading or even envisioning a life not totally dependent on the monolithic and monopolistic global economic forces.

In the past ten years, Hong Kong people have been informed by the government and the media on how serious their food safety problems are, and how much they are under the threat of epidemic outbreaks. After every round of such scare, including SARS, bird flu, food contamination of all sorts, Dengue fever, and Japanese Encephalitis, the people were brought to realize that the government is not able to provide much help in preventing the health disaster concerned from happening or recurring. For example, food safety inspection in Hong Kong is not at all transparent and seems to be always lagging behind times – as in previous cases, almost all of the alerts and subsequent inspections came after other countries or places had raised the alerts or done the inspections. Sadly, despite such incompetence, people were also made more and more dependent on the bureaucracy and the associated expert groups in “tackling” these problems. E.g., the prevention of Dengue fever lies in government's spraying insecticide all over the countryside, while a little common sense would have informed us that the spraying only causes mosquitoes (and other insects) to become increasingly insecticide-resistant. Moreover, the spraying has certainly caused a lot of contamination in water resources of the countryside. Ironically, not only has the government never reminded people that an ecologically sustainable countryside is the root of a healthy environment for all, it actually continues to spread the antithetical message by taking the food scares and epidemic scares as pretext to further diminish the countryside's capacity in food provision and nurturing of the environment. The government, for instance, instead of helping to make local free-ranch chicken farming an option for greater diversity in local agricultural practice, so as to prevent outbreak of bird flu which is often generated by factory chicken farming, and to break the habit of reliance on imported food the origin of which is often hard to trace, has adopted a three-pronged policy to in effect eliminate all local chicken farming. The policy is to crush local free-ranch poultry raising, to introduce imported chilled poultry from the mainland, and, for the longer term, to establish a central poultry slaughter-house in Hong Kong which would virtually put an end to all local poultry raising, as it would eliminate the only competing edge (namely, freshness) of local poultry farming in forcing it to supply only chilled poultry after taking the animals to the central slaughter-house to process. Similar anti-farming and anti-countryside measures have been introduced in face of other “health and hygiene” problems, such as foot-and-mouth disease of pigs. Never has the government drawn the public's attention to the simple truth that Hong Kong cannot be a healthy place without its countryside being preserved as home of local food production as well as gradually reverted/converted to more sustainable farming practices and subsistent livelihood (including free-ranch pig and chicken farming). On the contrary, the countryside has become the target of defamation in every round of health scare. With the opening up of “Frontier Closed Area” planned for 2010, where further urbanization and more property speculation is expected to begin as soon as possible, Hong Kong's ecological integrity will be further eroded. The building of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, which is a project favored by all parties concerned (the British colonial government had previously rejected the proposal of building such a bridge partly because of its potential catastrophic consequence), is expected to channel much of China's southbound traffic to take Hong Kong as its terminus, thus creating disaster for the environment and people's health in the vicinity.

On the other hand, the government, business, and green groups' “conservation endeavors” in the countryside has set very dangerous precedent in opening the door to future exploitation under the disguise of conservation. These precedents include (1) A “nature conservation policy” which invites public-private partnership or NGOs to undertake various development cum preservation projects on environmentally-sensitive sites in the countryside. Twelve sites have been picked for the first round, to be followed by others. This, in effect, means giving green light to property development in previously forbidden zones. (2) Similar concept has in fact been promoted and implemented as “solution” to controversy over development on environmentally-sensitive sites, such as those in Long Valley and Tin Shui Wai. In the case of Long Valley, the Kowloon-Canton Railway (KCR) - Lok Ma Chau Spurline was redesigned to avoid cutting through wetland of the region (which actually was a massive floodplain with agricultural activities). However, the government made concession and allowed the KCR Corporation to build “green” low-density luxury residence in the region. In Tin Shui Wai, where fish ponds had in the past attracted many birds as well as providing means of livelihood for the villagers there, property development was approved, assuming ecological loss can be compensated by creating a wetland park. In all of such projects, what has been conveniently overlooked is the most crucial factor of conservation, namely, sustainable human activities (agriculture, fishery etc.) co-existing with other members of the ecological community. The aforementioned model of “nature conservation” hailed by the government, business and green groups in fact drives away both sustainable human activities and delimits an arbitrary boundary for “nature”. It is therefore not likely to enable the countryside of Hong Kong to remain a source of nourishment and inspiration for a sustainable future of the whole community.

Neglecting the importance of “sustainable livelihood in the rural context” to a community's environmental viability and people's health leads inevitably to the impoverishment of one's cultural awareness and sensitivity. Recent campaigns on cultural heritage conservation conducted by professional groups and civic groups have, not surprisingly, focused on urban “landmarks” (e.g. old Star Ferry Terminal in Central, Queens' Pier in Central) while mass destruction in the countryside (at the “margins”) went basically uncontested. While one may take an interest in questioning the reclamation of Victoria Harbor in recent years (despite the long history of reclamation there), one tends to be totally apathetic to the damage of harbors, coastlines, river valleys, scenery and ecology of the New Territories. Little notice is paid to the fact that Tuen Mun of N.W. New Territories was the military outpost under different dynasties of the Chinese Empire since the seventh century. Nor has the community heeded the possible “zero sum game” of fast development (destruction) of the New Territories being taken as a “compensatory measure” in the case of a moratorium placed on development along Victoria Harbor.

Global responsibility

While the GNP-focus, the lack of local outlook, and the urban-biased approach are posing immense impediment to the maintenance of ecological integrity and health of the populace in Hong Kong, such predilections are also making Hong Kong a contributor to regional and global degradation of such regards. The liberal use, and free disposal and discharge of, anti-biotics as well as tens of thousands of toxic synthetic substances including the government promoted “elixir” against epidemics – bleaching agents - are hurting the environment and health of communities far beyond Hong Kong. On the other hand, the most widely propagated government-led clean-the-air campaign (“Action Blue Sky”), which is nothing more than an ad hoc gesture in response to the continuous worsening of air quality, is almost a farce not only in terms of local “pollution control”, but also under the circumstance of the calamitous escalation of global warming. Effective measures to improve air quality and/or reduce Hong Kong's share in “warming up” the earth have not even been taken as possible options of the SAR. These include applying pressure on local developers to stop the unnecessary tearing down and construction spree, reverting the totally irrational “male house policy”* which was initiated by the colonial government, fully endorsed by the Basic Law, and rigorously implemented by Donald Tsang when he sought votes from the village elders, applying stricter control on the number of private automobiles, banning “screen-like buildings”, and, no less if not most importantly, adopting punitive measures to Hong Kong investors who own polluting factories in the Pearl River Delta and other regions of China.

Instead, the official “Action Blue Sky” proclaims the government has made full effort to redress the air pollution problem already by encouraging utility companies to switch to burning natural gas instead of coal. However, this is in fact no more than creating a false sense of security, as switching to natural gas can reduce certain kinds of particulate in the air, while making no improvement as regards global warming and other pollutions. As for the Hong Kong business sector, the only issue related to global warming that has captured their attention is the potentially profitable brokerage business in “greenhouse gas quota”, which involves selling China's unused pollution quota to other places and countries.

This sort of “global outlook” which focuses narrowly on business opportunity has been heavily promoted in the Hong Kong community. Today especially, when students go through schooling, the successful ones will become “global elite” who are fully capable of converting all kinds of things into commodities and trade them, while being fully convinced that humanistic (non-monetary) concerns related to ecological sustainability and human health, which are “outside syllabus” of schools, are too intangible and that only the inept ones will take them seriously.

Fortunately, against all odds, there are individuals who are dedicated to autonomous endeavors in educating the public about the connection between subsistence livelihood and protection of the environment and human health. One distinguished figure is Ms Wong Wai King of Tai O (Lantau Island) who relentlessly campaigns against encroachment of developer-cum-green groups as well as running a community museum on Tai O cultural heritage. For Hong Kong to have a sustainable future, the community needs to learn from her untiring fights in the past decades.

* “Male house policy” allows each son born to an indigenous household (family residing in the New Territories before 1898) to build one three-storey house on his family farmland.

Man Si Wai
June, 2007