EXTRACT FROM "MIDWEEK"
16.1.758
-7-
STRACHAN:
All these hawkers are illegal.
MANGOLD:
STILACHAN:
Well how do they manage to operate if they are illegal?
Well basically Government has got so many other things to do and perhaps there is corruption involved so they are left alone.
MANGOLD: ...He is again an illegal hawker is he?...(BACKGROUND) He's got no licence. Why doesn't he...can you just tell me, here he is without a licence, right across the road is the Wan Tai....Market, that is the legal market, why isn't he operating in that?
MANGOLD:
I think you'd better ask him.
Can you ask him....? (BACKGROUND)
Because everyone * is you know hawking on an illegal basis,
why should I be exceptional.
MANGOLD:
Woll why doesn't he decide to hawk on a legal basis inside the official market? (BACKGROUND))
STRACHAN:
He can't get a stall.
But we've just applied for stalls two weeks ago in the City district office. We've just put out a hundred...there's a hundred vacant and only thirty people are interested in taking them up. (BACKGROUND) Do you think you can make more money here than you can in the market?
MANGOLD: Has he ever had to pay a policeman to stay here? (BACKGROUND) ....How is it that people here tolerate corruption so easily? I mean it doesn't seem to worry them that much. Is ipecausecorruption's always a
deal between two satisfied parties?
STRACHAN:
I think corruption has been in Hong Kong for so long that it has become almost a way of life very tragically.
tragically. The little hawkers that we've just seen here this afternoon they are just a little fly in corruption...just one or two.... kept the big people, the Chinese call them the tigers, these are the people that we must get. The big people have got to be put behind bars if we're going to fight and win this battle against corruption.
MANGOLD: But the biggest Hong Kong polidectivity is the gambling business. Gambling is illegal in Hong Kong but the Chinese gamble as the British drink beer only with them it's a cultural obsession rather than a past-time. Yet apart from a handful of licenced Mah Jong parlours and horse-race betting shops and on-course betting for the races at Happy Valley, there is no honest way for the Chinese to gamble. So dishonestly, they pack the hundred or so illegal gaming casinos to play roulette, black jack and poker, or they drift into any one of the two-thousand restaurants and tea houses where illegal punting takes place.
claims quite
The price
simply that these places exist only through police connivance. is a profit kick-back running to hundreds of thousands of dollars a week.
BBH
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.