Kung Hei Fat Choy

Year of the Dragon, a year of great charges ... Percy Chan files from Hong Kong ... Life in the SAR: great wealth alongside striking poverty ... Lower bunks at a premium ... Mainlanders reducing the locals to second class citizens ... Pollution ... Traffic ... Land prices ... Ai WeiWei and taxes ... FILTH 

The scene on any weekday on the taxi queue, in front of the Louis Vuitton Shop at The Landmark, Pedder Street, Hong Kong ,encapsulates almost all of life in the HKSAR.

Not 40 yards away from the entrance to LV, a kneeling hunchback dwarf, naked to the waist, is attempting to eke out a precarious existence by soliciting alms from indifferent passersby while forlornly playing a harmonica, and using a karaoke machine.

He is not doing too well and hopes mainly to solicit charity from visiting Europeans - we locals hurry past with a studied indifference - far more Levite than Samaritan here in HK - and of course, from a Taoist perspective, things can only improve for him in the next life. 

The scene, like many others across the CBD evokes memories of England before the Statute of Charitable Uses where veterans and others would expose their wounds with a view to obtaining charity from the better off - and this despite the fact that the HKSAR currently has very little by way of social security, and enough funds in the kitty to cover two years of recurrent expenditure right now without raising another penny. 

Lower bunk: A$160.00An intrepid young social worker, doing an Orwell at Wigan Pier, (but without, one hopes, the tuberculosis) has gone underground and is living in a government-licensed (under the Bedspace Apartments Ordinace (sic)) bedspace in mid-Kowloon, where the entire area which measures 700 sq feet is divided into 38 (yes 38) "bedspaces", each of which is six feet by three feet or smaller.

There are two toilets and a lot of fleas and cockroaches. Yet, even here, the property market asserts itself. It costs HK$1,300 for a lower bunk, and a little less for an upper berth.

In front of LV itself is an ill-suppressed gaggle of mainlanders, corralled by security within a narrow entrance, and each eagerly awaiting the chance to get her hands on some luxury item with which to beguile and impress the less happy inhabitants of the PRC.

They will be hoping to spend their ill-gotten gains and avoid the "administrative arrest" which befalls anyone unfortunate enough to attract the attention of the authorities.

On the mainland it is still a little like The Trial - you know the passage: "Joseph K must have done something wrong because one day he was suddenly arrested."

Or perhaps Pierre Joseph Proudhon is more accurate: "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." 

The presence of mainlanders has become a very sore point in Hong Kong where we locals are now feeling like "second class" citizens in our own city.

For two weeks a vocal protest group has been picketing the Dolce & Gabana store in Kowloon where locals were prevented from taking photographs in front of the window display, while well-heeled mainlanders were encouraged to do so. 

Uproar over who can take snaps of D & G windows

A belated "apology" by the fashion giant has done little to assuage local anger. 

At a higher level, local obstetric facilities are being overwhelmed by the some 35,000 mainland mothers who now give birth in Hong Kong annually with a view to ensuring that their offspring benefit from local citizenship, which accrues as a sort of jus soli.

Every effort to limit the increasing influx has proved unsuccessful so far. Immigration officers have been confronted with the unpleasant task of attempting to determine whether any of the teeming thousands of women who cross the border daily are, in fact, pregnant and intending to make an "emergency" dash to a local hospital. 

Recently there was uproar on a Hong Kong train when a young girl from the Mainland dropped dried noodles on the floor of the carriage. Insults flew as resentments bubbled over. 

Back at the taxi queue stands your correspondent, surrounded by domestic helpers with babes in arms, tourists beladen with trophy purchases, and hapless locals, awaiting a cab.

The taxi queuing system does not operate well here - that is mainly because the road system is taken over by the drivers to the rich and famous who, unconcerned about the police or traffic wardens, stop their cars to pick up their masters and mistresses without caring at all about traffic flow.

The well-to-do dart out from the safety of The Landmark, to make their escape, to The Peak or Mid-Levels, without the need to consort with the common riff-raff.

There is no need here to fear the officious inspector from Waverley Council who leaps from his truck, camera at the ready, to augment the council's funds with a quick fine for hesitating in a "no go" zone outside Westfield, Bondi Junction (but Westfield isn't The Landmark, and Sydney isn't Hong Kong).

Not a day passes without some letter in the paper inveighing against constant traffic infringements by the rich -their drivers often lie asleep in vans, engines idling, while the mistress is off shopping. The police can, at most, ask them politely to "move along" without issuing any tickets at all. On the other hand, try driving the wrong way up Caine Road in a private vehicle and you will be booked in a second.

Ai WeiWei: sudden tax problemAt least it isn't quite as bad as the Mainland.

There the leading artist and resistant Ai WeiWei has received massive public support to pay a tax demand that was suddenly raised against a company with which he was associated.

This would seem to be official payback for "nuisances" he has caused, such as inquiring into the high level of school deaths during the Sichuan earthquake (due to corruption in the supply of building works), and exposing official abuses by his art-work.

He has already been "administratively" detained for three months.

Land prices are also under pressure. It would seem that much of the "boom" on the mainland comes from constant increases in fixed, asset investment - roads, bridges, buildings.

They do not, as a rule, produce much immediate return to a lender. But as the banks are all centrally controlled, that has not hitherto been a problem with respect to "bad debts".

That time may soon be over, which would have a serious knock on effect for all of you in Chatswood, and even Woollahra.

Meanwhile, as the pollution increases, international schools are coming under even greater pressure from the numbers of intending students.

The expatriate population is up some five percent on last year as a large number of unemployed bankers and others from the UK (up 20 percent) flock to the city.

Under the old colonial regime they were the FILTH - "Failed in London Try Hong Kong". As yet no new acronym to dignify them has gained currency. 

Chinese New Year is here and a surge of the "winter monsoon" approaches.

Kung Hei Fat Choy for the Year of the Dragon - a year in which large events and great changes traditionally occur!