One of the changes I have noticed since our last (shall we say “popular?”) District Council was replaced by a more salubrious patriots-only gathering is that we now get decorations on Sha Tin lampposts. Sha Tin. File Photo: King Ho/Pexels. This adds to public gaiety, no doubt, but has limited effectiveness as a communication medium because the banners have to be quite small and the lampposts are quite tall. So you can’t really get any words in.
Early attempts in this area avoided the legibility problem because they were put up in celebration of anniversaries. All you could really see was a big number, but as you were seeing the same number in all sorts of other places, it was quite obvious what we were supposed to be celebrating.
The latest effort did not involve a number. Looking up at it while waiting for the traffic lights to change, I could not make out anything at all. My research assistant deployed her mobile phone, took a picture with the telephoto feature working flat out and announced that we were celebrating China’s 15th five-year plan.
Happily, I was able to catch up with this important matter when I came across a much bigger offering on the same theme outside an MTR station. It seems we are urged to “Pro-actively align with the 15th five-year plan” and “Follow a holistic approach to development and security”. The text seen on lamppost promotions across Hong Kong. Photo: GovHK. I hesitate to criticise the work of other writers, but I cannot resist the thought that the author of this offering needs to give some thought to finding the sort of language which means something concrete and sensible to the man in the street, who is rarely told to proactively align with anything, or indeed to follow a holistic approach to it.
Most English people of my generation are not bowled over by the idea of five-year plans. This is partly because rigid adherence to erroneous five-year plans caused two of the 20th century’s most catastrophic famines: in Ukraine in 1932-33 and in China in 1958-62.
It is also no doubt partly because UK governments have rarely attempted economic planning of this kind and the rare experiment (in the early years of the 1964 Wilson government) was not a success. The Treasury (which is what they call the Finance Ministry in the UK) has never developed a wish to run plans itself, but certainly does not want anyone else doing it.
Besides the history, there is the philosophical objection, usually attributed to Friedrich Hayek, to government direction of the economy. This maintains that official intervention is an infringement of freedom and also obscures the useful information provided by prices set in the marketplace.
Whatever you think of five-year plans, though, one does have to wonder if they really call for the sort of mass public participation that the campaign on lampposts and MTR stations appears to be seeking. Even if we replaced proactive alignment and holistic approaches with something more democratic in tone, it is far from clear what the average Hong Kong person can do to further the doubtless laudable aims of the national plan.
Apparently, we are going to have our own five-year plan in due course, sometime later this year. No doubt this will be a very valuable indication of what Hong Kong should be doing to further national objectives. Perhaps it would make more sense to wait for it. Advertisement to promote the National Security Education Day in Admiralty on April 11, 2024. Photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP. A separate question is whether the compulsive adornment of lampposts with announcements of public interest is a welcome innovation. Perhaps it is a dulce et decorum thing that citizens should be reminded of historic landmarks and invited to join in democratic festivals.
But there is a cost to hanging things on lampposts, and District Council members need to consider whether the message they are trying to get across really suits this particular mass medium. If the only thing you can get in at a legible size is two digits, then the merits of proactive alignment and holistic approaches should be advertised elsewhere. There is no point in hanging a message on a lamppost if people need a pair of binoculars to read it. [Table]
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