The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Nature fans get green fix at Hong Kong flower show Posted: 18 Mar 2013 05:31 AM PDT
Though most residents have no outdoor space for gardening, thousands flock to the annual 10-day event, which started on Friday and covers six football pitches in the central Victoria Park. In contrast to the surrounding apartment and office blocks, the park has been overtaken by cascades of orchids – the show's theme flower – along with tulips and kitsch floral sculptures, from giant ants to pandas and toadstools. Some visitors come just to photograph the lavish displays, but many are picking up plants and gardening equipment. The park is lined with stalls selling seeds, pot plants, compost and garden tools. It's a testament to the fact that, despite Hong Kong's cheek-by-jowl and high-rise lifestyle, its residents crave greenery and are making the most of the limited space they have to grow plants. Queenie Wong, 25, who is studying Chinese medicine at Hong Kong Baptist University, holds a tiny fern in a pot, which she has just bought from one of the stalls. "I don't grow anything at home because I don't have the space. I'll take care of this plant in my university office, which is where I spend most of my time," she says. Like many in Hong Kong, 11-year-old Zoe Shum makes do with a balcony at home for her horticultural ambitions. "I grow bamboos on a balcony, but I wish I had more garden space to grow more things. At school we have lots of plants and they're really pretty," she said. For 30-year-old Amy Tang, the show is a chance for her parents to stock up. "I bring my parents here every year because they like to shop for plants for their balcony – and we like just looking at the flowers," she said. Hong Kong's popular image is of a frenetic commercial hub where making a fast buck trumps all other concerns, but flower show chairman Horace Cheung says its seven million people do enjoy connecting with nature. "We may be a busy, densely populated city but there is increasing awareness of how planting and growing things can enrich the environment and our lives," he told AFP. Small plots for vegetables and flowers, made available to residents as part of the government's community garden scheme, are heavily oversubscribed, says Cheung. "We have to have a ballot for plots every time they come up because of the demand," he said. Residents pay HK$400 (RM159.71) to do a gardening course which includes working on a 2.25 square metre plot for four months. The year 2011-12 saw more than 10,600 participants across 21 gardens, according to the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, which also runs the flower show. The event was launched in 1968. Organisers expect around 500,000 visitors at this year's show, which features a series of gardening talks and an information stall to promote sustainable living – another contrast in a city where avid consumption often outpaces environmental concerns. Joseph Leung, an executive director at Hong Kong theme park Ocean Park, is promoting its vibrant stand at the show, which includes edible plants, recycled containers and an aquaponics section on how plants can grow without soil. He believes Hong Kong residents are indeed concerned about their environment and want to simplify their lives. "People are more interested in sustainable living. I think they have got to a point where they are so busy that they want to stop and go back to basics," he said. "When it comes to improving our environment we have to start somewhere – we have to start at home." – AFP/Relaxnews |
| Documenting Malaysia’s path to a neo-liberal utopia? Posted: 17 Mar 2013 11:37 PM PDT
This enabled the British to create an inherently factionalised politics in which racial groupings could be pitted against each other. This racial and ethnic orientation was so deeply entrenched that it persisted even after Malaysia became independent in 1957. To this day, the party that has ruled Malaysia since independence — now called Barisan Nasional — consists of three sub-parties purportedly representing the Malay, the Chinese and the Indian communities. A political system organised along racial and ethnic lines is of course deeply debilitating. The initial spirit of co-operation that accompanies the euphoria of independence weakens as the euphoria subsides, and it becomes increasingly difficult to surmount the particular interests of the different communities, except through the rhetoric of a certain kind of nationalism. However, this rhetoric is relatively easy to see through, since it rests on the shaky but unstated assumption that under the umbrella of "one nation" as in 1 Malaysia, the interests of the dominant community can be presented in the form of the universal, that is, in ways that can be shared by the other communities (or at any rate be rendered acceptable to their elites, who had of course by this time been thoroughly incorporated into the national ruling elite dominated by Umno, the Malay party). Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia's prime minister for 22 years, gave this racially-based politics a novel and decisive twist, by bringing about a convergence between it and the neo-liberal economic paradigm that had started to prevail since Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan came to power in the 1970s to 1980s. The outcome is that the Malaysian economy was pushed from its peripheral status along the road towards a more advanced semi-peripheralisation, as it was opened to metropolitan finance and to the supply chains spreading rapidly outwards from the expanding Chinese economy. The upshot of these developments was impressive in many ways. Malaysia became an "East Asian tiger", as massive infrastructural projects were implemented and production zones set up. But there were significant drawbacks: the fruits of prosperity were not distributed evenly, environmental despoliation became an increasing problem that the government made little or no attempt to redress, and the haphazard urbanisation so characteristic of the move towards semi-peripheralisation became evident as people flocked from the countryside to the prosperous Kuala Lumpur (KL), with its huge traffic gridlock, atmospheric pollution, housing scarcities and pockets of exacerbated poverty. This is the context for this excellent documentary — M-C-M': Utopia Milik Siapa? — on Malaysia's distressed and distressing housing situation. Boon Kia Meng, its director, belongs to a new and emerging political constellation that is starting to take root amongst younger Malaysians, especially those who are urban and well-educated. This constellation is post-racial, and encompasses members of all the ethnic communities. Its modus operandi is the alliance, bringing together environmentalists, advocates of gender and sexual equality, anti-capitalists, anti-poverty campaigners, human rights groups, workers' rights activists, campaigners for affordable housing, and so on, all clustered round the notion that the prevailing political order has failed ordinary Malaysians, whilst of course conferring immense privileges on a small elite. As yet, this new politics, like the Occupy Movement (with which it has notable affinities), eschews any participation in the official politics of representation. This official politics, as in the US and UK, is deeply marked by corruption and its allied nepotistic networks. The Malaysian political order has, and will, certainly not open itself to an alternative social-movement politics of this kind, in this way paralleling the heavy-fisted approach of Western governments towards their Occupy movements, which were infiltrated by their secret services and brutalised by paramilitary units at nearly every turn, all in the name of "national security". Now to the film itself.
KL adheres to the basic pattern of the new Asian city (to use the title of a book by my Korean-Australian former doctoral student Jini Kim Watson), namely, exponential horizontal and vertical surface expansion, an exploding population, a city government that is out of its depth more often than not, a typically choked traffic system with the ensuing pollution, stresses on health and social service systems, the palpable co-existence of conspicuous consumption with abject poverty, escalating land and property values, and the inevitable shortages of affordable housing. Boon's film concentrates on the latter two features of the "new" KL. The film uses standard documentary techniques, done to near perfection. There are interviews with those on the receiving end as it were, typically young professionals who were initially hopeful but who were subsequently disillusioned as it dawned on them that the totally unaffordable housing market was going to price them out. There are interviews with those who keep the system going (real estate sellers, mortgage brokers), some of whom had clearly swallowed the deceptive logic behind the whole wretched system — a logic that to those who do not benefit from it seems little better than a form of racketeering. There are snippets from the inevitable TV adverts puffing up the utopia of individual home ownership, as well as the self-congratulatory speeches of banking CEOs who report on yet another year of record profits, derived in large part from their home-loan activities. But the overall effect, conveyed by the neutral sounding voice-over, is stark, and the unfolding narrative is cumulative and inexorable. Boon's film focuses on the following crux, expounded with a vigorous eloquence by the surveyor Dr Ernest Cheong: If the majority of young Malaysians (i.e. those most in need of housing) earn RM5,000 or less, and the typical property developer in search of the maximum profit is only interested in building "high end" properties that can be sold at RM700,000 or more, then how can someone who earns RM5,000 (and who therefore only qualifies for a housing loan of RM150,000) be able to afford something vastly beyond their price range? Two possible answers are likely: The hapless young Malaysian earning RM5,000 or less and working in KL either lives in an overpriced rabbit-hutch in a central location, or else moves to Rawang and Nilai (where in bygone days members of my family were rubber planters in estates that have long since disappeared), or even further to Seremban, in order to buy something reasonably decent they can afford. But they then have to spend RM20 or more a day commuting to their workplace in the centre of KL. Some choice! The film shows us that there is so far no solution in sight for this predicament. The private sector is only interested in the maximisation of profit, and the government, still wedded to neo-liberalism, is not unhappy to accommodate this state of affairs, and thus shows no interest in facilitating the construction of affordable low-cost housing. The film begins with M-C-M', and after providing a compelling account of Malaysia's housing situation, it concludes with just that… M-C-M'. (M-C-M': Utopia Milik Siapa? can now be viewed for free on Youtube. Click here.) Kenneth Surin is Professor of Religion and Critical Theory at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA. He teaches philosophy, critical theory, and international political economy. |
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