Analysis UP THE CHINA RABBIT-HOLE - The TV Docudrama Series (Update)

[Sleezy]

So do I.

Funny thing is ... I’m sitting, as we speak, in Pro Drinkers Corner working on Episode 6.

It’s overdue, I know, so I’ll be posting half of it tomorrow, hopefully ... the rest to follow.

I’d promised to copy the first (Vietnam) segment of Episode 4 into the Peter Chant thread yesterday, the sixth anniversary of the thread’s creation ( Ford Fairlane ) but wasn’t in the mood. Maybe tomorrow, too.

I love footy too much. It runs ... ruins, at times ... my life.

My girlfriend steals my phone and tells you all I love footy. And sports.

I love her a lot. It is very frustrating.

 

[Lockhart Road]

UP THE CHINA RABBIT-HOLE - The TV Docudrama Series


EPISODE 6

The Alberton Papers


Theme music:

‘Walk Don’t Run’ (The Ventures - with Russell Ebert on drums)




SCENE 37 -
Early March 2017, Allan Scott Power HQ, Alberton.

Camera catches Ugo Alsthom driving to work, unable to resist flicking an eye at the screen on his phone, checking a text, as if he can’t believe what it says, as if he’s terrified it will disappear if he doesn’t, having been dangled before him only to be deleted without trace by some evil dastard with a personal hatred of him, some evil Liberal Party dastard going hard at it to bring him down. Camera follows Ugo as he crosses the line between postcode 5015 and postcode 5014, parks, jumps out of his car, bursts through the not-easy-to-burst-through glass main door of PAFC HQ. Camera follows him as he bounds up the single flight of stairs. Does he pay attention to the receptionist? No. Does he acknowledge her greeting, spot her ‘nothing new, just Ugo being Ugo’ headshake? Of course not.

Camera follows Ugo down the corridor into the main PAFC office, follows him as he performs a balletic slalom along one row of desks into the next (every twist and change of direction timed to coincide with the decisive twang of a twangy guitar or the smash of cymbals in a drum sequence care-of the theme music).

PAFC’s workers are looking up one after the other, looking astounded, looking at him as he speeds by. This is not the sort of Ugo physical momentum they’re accustomed to. They’re not used to any. Something has happened, something absolutely critical to Ugo’s world ... his reaction to it translating into anything from atomic bomb to arachnophobia.

Everybody is now standing up, staring at Ugo as he races to the open door of Rick Mattinson’s office, grabs hold of the jamb with his left hand as if it’s there for life-support, thrusts his head around it and -

ALSTHOM: “Premier Li! Premier Li! We’ve got Premier Li! He’s going to come to the SCG for round 1! He’s going to come down to the changing rooms and say hello to the players and the coaches and ... ! Premier Li, Rick. Premier ... Li!”

MATTINSON (finally looks up): “Who’s Premier Li?”

Ugo, breathless, steps all the way into Rick’s office, closes the door behind him, throws himself into one of the two guest chairs in front of Rick’s desk ... lunges at Rick and proceeds to spill the beans, revved-up like the Rolls-Royce engines on the superjet to wherever in the real world Ugo Alsthom is off to: direct flight, non-stop, no breaks, no detours, no diversions.

Camera view is from outside Rick’s office, through the clear glass window. No sound whatsoever. The office has gone dead quiet. A dropped pin would echo, even a blink would resound. Every pair of eyes is wide open, trying to interpret Ugo’s animated body language, Ugo’s Mambo Italiano-style hand signals, his overflowing effervescence, his unbridled enthusiasm - all of it rendered into raw contrast by Rick’s passive pillar-of-salt rigidity ... then his slow, gradual, frame-by-frame comprehension of what he’s being told Ugo-style about the Politburo pecking order in Beijing ... and its sudden consequences for PAFC.

Rick Mattinson now looks excited, too. He’s caught the bug.

He’s been Ugo’d.

Voice of Narrator:
This morning seems to be going crazy rich Asian down Alberton way. That’s what you think? You’re right. A China madness has infected the customary subdued hard-at-work atmosphere inside Allan Scott Power HQ. What can be going on? Ugo ... what the hell has he gone and done now?

Let’s find out. Let’s really find out. Let’s travel back in time again, identify some different sliding doors and lucky breaks and stuff like that. It’s going to take time to do that properly. It’s going to take attention. There’s not a niche anywhere for impatience. And, no, I don’t see the need for an editor. James Clavell’s only instruction to his editor when he thumped on his desk the mighty manuscript for ‘Noble House’ was: “Don’t you dare alter a thing! Not one single comma!” I’m not Clavell. For one thing he’s gone, left us for his stool at the Pro Drinkers Corner in the sky. I just like to think like Clavell used to think ... when it comes to editors.

So ... here comes a long short story, the one that kick-started the story that has been built upon it. I apologise not one tiddly little bit for telling it in full.


SCENE 38 - (Flashback - forty-six years)
October 1971, Tsimshatsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong.

Theme music:

‘Early Morning Rain’ (Peter, Paul and Mary)




Voice of Narrator:

One Hong Kong dollar.

Doesn’t sound much, does it. One Hong Kong dollar is nothing today, but it could be a small fortune way back in 1971.

Enough, in fact, to buy myself a future - one that is still going on. Slowing down measurably, for sure, but nevertheless going on.

Remember what I’ve said about coincidences and omens? This next one is what my mother, in her antique speak, would call a ‘corker’. This anecdote of how I came to be recruited by Arnhold & Co. in December 1971 ... how that scenario was set up, directed and enacted with the assistance of two new-found Hong Kong friends of mine, is one more fluke - no more and no less a fluke than any of its predecessor and/or successor flukes.

The guest stars in this cameo are 1) a diminutive Chinese bartender in the Miami Bar, one of the hundreds of Hong Kong ‘girlie’ bars in business at the time, this one in Cameron Road, Tsimshatsui, and 2) an always-speak-in-a-low-voice Queenslander who was one of an adept commune of sub-editors employed by the South China Morning Post. We’ll call the former Johnny, the latter Barrie; it’s easier that way because those are their real names.

Time for me was getting short. My time was running out. I was searching desperately for a job that would keep me in Hong Kong. My six-month visa was facing expiry and my funds were expiring with it.

By the time I landed the position with Arnholds, and reported for duty with them on that Monday just before Xmas in 1971, I was down to a single red note in my wallet. One-hundred Hong Kong dollars.

So how did I land the job? That’s what’s essential for you to discover at this particular juncture in the saga. For all we know, it might’ve determined the distant future of the Port Adelaide Football Club. It certainly determined the birth of the China Strategy forty-two years later ... consequently whether or not Premier Li Keqiang is going to bestow the blessing of the Politburo upon the SCG, and consequently upon PAFC and their China adventure, in round 1 of the 2017 AFL season.

And this will all have hinged on HK$1.00. One solitary Hong Kong dollar.


Theme music:

‘Computer Number 9’ (Andy Fisher)




Setting:
The Miami Bar, Cameron Road, Tsimshatsui, alias TST. The Wurlitzer is putting out a song Road had heard on jukeboxes in other bars when he was in Hong Kong on R&R for a few days and nights in May, 1969, two and a half years ago. It’s a vocal take on part of the melody to Dance of the Hours in Walt Disney’s Fantasia - another one, corrupted with phrases and one-worders, unlike Alan Sherman’s ‘Hullo Muddah, Hullo Faddah’. LR’s never heard this song anywhere else, never since May 1969 on AFVN Radio Saigon, certainly not on radio back in Australia. He absorbs the lyrics, thinks they’re still as ridiculous as they used to be, wonders why he’s invested a coin to listen to them again when cash is so tight. But he’s got himself in a situation others would consider ridiculous, so the haphazard lyrics fit his mood. Who knows, there might be a clue to the solution he’s seeking, the way out he’s searching for, somewhere among the nonsense.

‘Computer Number 9’? What the hell was a computer doing anywhere in 1969? And just like back in ‘69, once he’d heard the dopey lyrics, he couldn’t get them off repeat inside his head. This was back in the days before the onset of severe bilateral tinnitus, which might or might not have been the more preferable ordeal.

‘ ... yellow bluebird ... shaving lotion ... chicken farmer ... sex promotion ... ‘ Hell, words, get outta my skull! ‘ ... automatic ... philharmonic ... antistatic ... electronic ... supersonic ... telephone line ... ‘ Just. Get. Outta. My. Head! ‘ ... television ... intermission ... love tradition ... in the kitchen ... there is no sense ... in this nonsense ... it’s a love song by Computer No. 9 - ‘

JOHNNY THE BARTENDER: “‘Wan’ ‘nother one Carlsber’?”
ROAD (sigh of relief): “Thanks, Johnny.”
JOHNNY: “You talk Barley?”
ROAD: “Barrie? This morning. I phoned him. He’ll be here in a few minutes.”

Notes:
Johnny had taken a liking to LR, because LR was the sort of customer the bar needed during the quiet hour - a regular. He was staying in a rented room in a guest-house in Chungking Mansions, a high-rise, down-market, curry-and-pot stinkfest Greenwich Village a few blocks south on Nathan Road in the direction of the harbour. For every Carlsberg that LR bought, two dollars per can, Johnny gave him one for free without being asked. It was important to have somebody occupying at least one bar stool at all times.

This was about Americans on R&R.

The war in Vietnam was still going on, the American military was still coming to Hong Kong on leave. Americans hung loose and spent loose, liked to hang and spend in friendly, cosy bars. An empty bar did not look friendly or cosy to a GI doing a recce between the scarlet curtains, so LR filled a role as a natural sit-in decoy who enticed customers to come in, sit around him, thereby risking duck hunters being in the vicinity without knowing it. That gave the bar girls, sitting in privare cubicles down back, drinking cha from Duralex glasses, chain-smoking, fanning themselves with hands of thirteen-card poker (a mah jong variation) their chance to make some fast money - which is exactly why they’d walked out on their demeaning penny ante factory jobs for the lure of the R&R bars in TST and Wanchai. Any chance to make fast money made them happy. If the Miami Bar girls weren’t made happy regularly they took it out on Johnny. A couple of dozen fast-money-mad Cantonese bar girls ganging up on an emaciated little character like Johnny, assaulting him from all sides with stereophonic guttural Cantonese slang derogatives, is not a pretty sight. Sure ain’t a pretty sound.

“Diu lay lo mo ahh! Diu lay lo mo chow hai! Pook gai ahh! Hum gaa chaan a’lay!” Screw your old mother! Screw your old mother’s malodorous nether region. I wish you fall down die! I wish your whole family die!

The Miami wasn’t a classy establishment. It was ... basic. It wasn’t a big place, lucky for Johnny. The big girlie bars, especially those on prime Wanchai corners like the Ocean, the Pussycat, the United or the Candlelight had up to 200 girls on their roster, in their late teens, some older, some as young as fourteen, plus live music at nights to allow their worn-out Wurlitzers some R&R. Discotheques were the ‘in’ thing, large and loud and libidinous. But to make money in a disco a girl had to be adept and comfortable making her moves in the perpendicular as much as the horizontal, and speak classier English than the one-liners which were all that was needed to survive valkyrie-like in a basic TST bar.



Crowded Hankow Road, TST, looking north during twilight 1971, just after John Doyle hung his distinctive, revolutionary ‘Bottoms Up’ shingle. (It would hang there for twenty years, until the authorities developed the shakes a few years before the 1997 Handover and had it removed.) Doyle hired ex-Windwill girl Pat Sephton to manage the velvet, incense and multi-mirror establishment’s four fully circular bars, each bar with its own colour scheme, each bar with a ‘climb-over-here-and-see-me-sometime’ lounge in the middle on which lounged one or two (once even twins) multi-cultural lasses serving cocktails topless. Doyle and Sephton made a profitable pairing. Bottoms Up was an instant TST icon.

 

[Lockhart Road]

Topless bars were just starting, in TST to begin with; ‘Bottoms Up’ was opened by ex-journalist Aussie John Doyle in Hankow Road where ‘Gaslight’ used to be, and now the Tsai family, think-on-their-feet entrepreneur Shanghai stock, were following up with their own riske chain: ‘World of Suzie Wong’ alias ‘Basement 18’ next to Doyle’s establishment; ‘Club Kokusai’, which went underground for an entire block from its topless bar below Nathan Road through its Japanese-style nightclub below Lock Road; the ‘Danshaku’ in Peking Road ... now, ‘Club Maze’ at the top of the escalator from the ground floor of Chungking Mansions.

If anybody was myopic enough to ask a twenty-four-year-old rocks-off driven LR why he’d fallen in love with Hong Kong and never wanted to leave, he’d point in any direction, all directions, and reply: “Go find out for yourself. It won’t take long if your genes are up to the shock.”

One afternoon Johnny had asked LR a different question.

JOHNNY: “Why you have no job?”

Voice of Narrator:
I told him, beginning my history with my having a first taste of Hong Kong on R&R in May 1969, returning for two weeks on my pre-discharge leave in September 1969 - when I made initial contact with Dean Barrett and knew from that moment on, with a passion, that Hong Kong was the place for me, day-job and nightlife both. I told Johnny how I’d resumed my public service career, saved money, which wasn’t an issue as I was on a very good screw, was handed promotions and extra earning opportunities, such as overtime, whenever they occurred. I was the dreaded golden child of the era.

You see, by ranking fifth in the state of 150 who sat for the Commonwealth Public Service entrance exam, basically an IQ test, the department I was assigned to start work at on the first business day in January 1964, in my last month of being sixteen, was Repatriation Department, Pulteney Street next to McLeod’s, across the road from the Somerset. It is now elsewhere in the city under the moniker of Department of Veterans’ Affairs, alias DVA.

Damned ironic that ... you think?

This was me in October 1969 - honorably discharged national serviceman, infantry, NCO, nine months active service in South Vietnam, six years total federal government service (therein lies a twist), fit, sporting, suntanned in summer thanks to my resumption of surfing down south, intelligent, good-looking enough on a dark night, pushy, ambitious, egotistical ... hang on, tone down that last bit ... Most of all, I was there, I was on the spot. I was thus put on the fast track for greater things, like being appointed Deputy Commissioner of Repatriation before I made thirty-five. Shows to go you. At age twenty-four and a half, when I chucked all of this in by insisting (yes, I had to insist - to defy an embargo suddenly imposed by Canberra on ‘special leave’) on a year’s leave without pay so I could fly away and chase my dream in Hong Kong, I walked the Repat corridors with the title of Secretary, Procurement and Contracts Board. No, cobbler, I was not a glorified pimp. I was purchasing officer for the entire department, including RGH Daw Park, the Repatriation General Hospital.

Let’s return to that twist I mentioned. When I was called up, I fundamentally was transferred, via the Department of Labour and National Service, from one Commonwealth Government department to another. A part of Pig Iron Bob Menzies’ sales pitch for reintroducing the ballot in 1964 was that any national serviceman would after two years not only be restored to the job he’d been wrenched out of, he would not suffer any loss of income because of his Army service. The disadvantaged employer, you see, was supposed to compensate for any shortfall in the draftee’s earnings, with the support of Canberra, upon claim. I put Pig Iron Bob’s election promise to the test.

As I’d not, in reality, changed employer at all, as Canberra paid my salary both sides and throughout my period of conscription, I put in a stronger than the norm claim for lost earnings. My Army pay was less than half what I’d been taking home at Repat. It was a try-on, indeed it was. But it worked. By that I don’t mean that I got a juicy cheque cut with my name on it. Canberra would never go for that. It would set too expensive a precedent, correct as the precedent might be. Instead, my direct Repat superiors put their empathetic heads together and privately ruled that I had a case. I was given compensation in kind, via preferential treatment when it came to, as I’ve mentioned, promotions, overtime, special duties that came with danger money such as carrying the loaded Colt .38 once a fortnight as I moved floor to floor, then out to RGH Daw Park with the paymaster and his burlap bag bursting with banknotes, coinage and comptometer (yes, comptometer) print-out paper rolls, plus any other special opportunity that showed up for a golden child like me.

Shows to go yer, as I’ve already said. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

JOHNNY: “But if you so smar’ ... if you smar’ like you say, why you leave school so young? Why you don’ go university? All smar’ young guy mus’ go university. Why no’ you?”
ROAD: “In fourth-year high school ... that’s called ‘Leaving’ ... the student who sat next to me had a sports car.”
JOHNNY: “Red spor’ car?”
ROAD: “White. Rusty white. More rust than white. It was an old Singer Sports. It was useless, broken down all the time. But it looked good, and I felt good when I sat in it. I decided I wanted a sports car.”
JOHNNY: “Your paren’ not happy ‘bout that.”
ROAD: “My mother always called me a ‘determined child’.”
JOHNNY: “Tha’ good or bad?”
ROAD: “It was not good in her mind. But when she said it, it meant that she had admitted defeat. We did a deal that I study accountancy at night school.”
JOHNNY: “You do tha’?”
ROAD: “I tried. Twice. Not really tried. I gave up. It bored my arse off.”
JOHNNY: “Why you mother like ‘countancy so much?”
ROAD: “Because of Dean Barrett. She admired him, wished her sister, my Aunt Elaine, had married him.”
JOHNNY: “Who he Dea’ Barlett?”
ROAD: “The boss of China Light and Power.”
JOHNNY: “Jung Gwok Deen Lek? You joke me.”
ROAD (nodding): “CLP.”
JOHNNY (eyes wide): “Wah. Why Dea’ give you no job?”
ROAD: “I’m not qualified.”
JOHNNY: “Ha. Now we go back where we start. You say to me why you really leave school early. No spor’ car bush-s**t.”

Voice of Narrator:
He was right, smart little Johnny. Tom Rijpstra’s Singer Sports was only the clapped-out cherry on top of the chocolate nut sunday of my alluva sudden age-sixteen urge to be different, to be an individual, to refuse to follow the crowd, to reach out for the independence of earning a salary.

Now what was the clue among the lyrics of ‘Computer No. 9’, as they came out of the Wurlitzer in the Miami Bar on Cameron Road, Tsimshatsui?

What was the lyrical lightbulb moment I was in dire need of?



Actually there was none. The clue was in the title. Computer No. 9. Take a look at Arnholds’ listing in the 1971 edition of the annual Hong Kong Dollar Directory. That’s right, the 1,592-page brick of information every institution paid to broadcast their data, called the HK$ Directory. A Hong Kong dollar. Their listing on pages 132 and 133 reveals Arnhold & Co, Ltd. as ‘Engineers and Contractors’, their address as ‘No. 9, Ice House Street’.

Engineering + No. 9 = Computer No 9.

‘Computer’ in Cantonese is ‘deen lo’ (electric brain). ‘Electric’ = China Light & Power. ‘Deen lo’ could be phonetically romanised as ‘Dean Lo’ = Dean the Man. This brings in CLP and Dean Barrett. See? It was all in the song title.



JOHNNY: “Wan’ ‘nother one Carlsber’?”
ROAD: “Thanks, Johnny.”
JOHNNY: “Here he come now Barley. Hey, hi Barley!”
BARRIE: “G’day Johnny.”


Theme music:

‘Crockett’s Theme’ (Jan Hammer)




Notes:
To the theme music, the Post alias Nam Wah Jo Bo sub-editor named Barrie, having completed his shift across the harbour in Quarry Bay, enters the Miami Bar, Cameron Road, TST, Kowloon, Hong Kong ... to meet up with the hitherto voice on the phone that goes by the name of Lockhart Road.

They shake hands. Exchange one-liners. Barrie also orders Carlsberg.

BARRIE: “Apologies if I sounded gruff on the phone.”
ROAD: “I prefer gruff to bullshit.”
BARRIE: “So do I. But when you said that you’re looking for a job writing for a newspaper but have no qualifications apart from credits in English and Latin in your exams, it struck a sore spot.”
ROAD: “Apologies are mine. I’m learning all the time. Thanks for suggesting we get together, even after I spoke to you like a freshly-bored a-hole.”
BARRIE: “You stuck up for yourself. I have to admit that I’ve never before been demanded by a stranger to explain to him what my qualifications are.”
ROAD: “That’s just me. I won’t get where I want being a pushover.”
BARRIE: “What I said about forming the Hong Kong Journalists’ Association to keep fly-ins like you out of the game is true. Hard but true. In this town you’ll be taken to the cleaners, taken advantage of, underpaid like hell, if you don’t have a journalist’s proper qualifications and the HKJA therefore can’t represent you in any labour dispute.”
ROAD: “Fair enough. As I can’t see myself gaining journalism qualifications in a hurry, looks like I have to look elsewhere for a salary.”
BARRIE: “How hard have you been looking?”
ROAD: “Can’t say. I’ve nothing to compare it with. I haven’t been sitting on my arse, that’s for sure.”
BARRIE: “Got a copy of your resume?”

LR hands it over. Barrie scans it, suggests some improvements.

ROAD: “Thank you. Could I have my own copy of your business card? Johnny loaned me his and wants it back.”
BARRIE: “No problem. Johnny’s a good little Viet Cong.”
JOHNNY (taking the card back from LR): “I no Viet Cong. I Chinese dinkum bloke.”
BARRIE: “You look Viet Cong, Johnny. Gotta take care, mate. Dive in your spider hole lickety-split. Here come the Yanks.”

Four young westerners with flat-top Marine haircuts, enticed by the sound of English conversation, flick apart the scarlet curtains, and follow each other in. The bar girls rise up as one, like the next wave at a surf beach, move in from down back, flitter and chatter around the newcomers like moths checking out a just switched-on light bulb on a hot summer night. A round of ten-dollar ‘Hong Kong teas’ is just the start of a well-worn process known to culminate in any or all of the girls being rented for a week, fully paid in advance. Marines, GIs, any Americans on R&R are like that: flush with funding plus an impatience to spend it all in one hour in one place, an impatience born of justifiable uncertainty as to their immortality back in Vietnam.

BARRIE: “There’s one thing you gotta do ... “
ROAD: “All ears.”

Voice of Narrator:
This is it.

Set aside the last chance for love, eve of destruction ambience. Cantonese bar girls in midsummer moth mode, set them aside, too. The Hong Kong tea ceremony and rent-a-body-cum-tour-guide routine aside. Sound-pumping Wurlitzer and ‘Computer No. 9’ aside in particular ... afoot is the dinky-die lightbulb moment. LR and Barrie are destined for the dinkum mate sort of mateship. What Barrie is about to instruct LR to do, to do tomorrow, is the clincher ... even though it’s going to need a month or so to manifest itself.

BARRIE: “Go to Union House in Central, the corner of Chater Road and Pedder Street. Go up to the office of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce. Tell them you want to place a classified advertisement in the ‘Positions Wanted’ section of the next issue of their monthly bulletin. It’s distributed to all Chamber of Commerce member companies ... there are a great many of them ... believe me the bulletin, all of it, gets read by serious business people.”
ROAD: “I can do that.”
BARRIE: “Let’s draft your ad now. Johnny, you got a pen?”

They agree on something professional, a thirty-word summary of LR’s c.v.

BARRIE: “Lodge it tomorrow. If you miss their deadline, you lose a month, and from what you’re saying you can’t afford to lose a month.”
ROAD: “First thing in the morning. Nine a.m. What’s the damage?”
BARRIE: “For thirty words ... one Hong Kong dollar.”

 

[Lockhart Road]

SCENE 39 -
Next morning, nine o’clock sharp.

Camera follows Road as he disembarks from the ‘Star’ Ferry, climbs the ramp, walks through the concourse, up on to Chater Road, turns right, walks past the rear entrance to the Mandarin Hotel, crosses narrow Ice House Street, passes St. George’s Building - alias the control tower of the Kadoories, who own China Light & Power, one publicly-listed darling of the investing public in a portfolio of darlings. Union House looms large and next ...

Road knows this route by heart.

Union House. It’s been redeveloped into what nowadays is Chater House.

Camera trails Road into Union House, follows him to the west wing of the lobby to check out the office directory on the wall. Union House is a broad structure. It has separate elevator lobbies serving its east and west wings. Road gives up on the west, crosses to the east, checks the directory, spots what he needs and rides up to the 9th floor. He puts weight on the door of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, it swings open, metaphorically slides open. He steps in with a smile and a “Jo sun”! (Good morning) to the easy-on-the-eye efficiency-exuding Chinese receptionist.

In 1971 the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce is not alone on the 9th floor of Union House.

Voila ... 9th Floor.

Computer No. 9 strikes again.


Theme music:

‘Counting By Nines Song’




Voice of Narrator:
I knew the route because a couple of months earlier I’d landed a temporary job as admin officer with the Australian Trade Commission whose premises were also 9th Floor, Union House, in the west wing. It lasted six weeks, the interval between the sending home of a clerk my age who was caught DUI and the arrival of his replacement. I’d made a cold call, as I’d been doing at offices big, small, in-between all over the city, on both sides of the harbour, armed with my c.v., such as it was. That intense, concentrated employment search was a crash course on how Hong Kong’s corporate wheels spun and meshed. It was an invaluable high-pressure orientation. Some upon whom I cold-called reacted with a stuck-up Karl Krupp-style brush off, others used thirty minutes checking the clock, until the opening of the Members’ Bar in the Hong Kong Club gave them cause to politely adjourn the exchange.

I particularly recollect riding high up in Prince’s Building to the office of a director of Jebsens, a Scandinavian operation, HK agents for Siemens, Volkswagen, Hapag-Lloyd, Maersk Line. Petersen was his name, still is for all I know. He announced he’d decided to be Saint Nick that morning and give me sixty of his precious seconds to deliver the gift of his advice minus Xmas stocking. “Get on Qantas and leave tonight,” he told me. “Hong Kong is localising. There is not a place left for an unqualified foreigner like you. Never will you get a job in this city. I promise you that.”

My next appointment that same morning was in Shell House a block or so along Queen’s Road, with Bob Gaff, senior partner with accountants and auditors Coopers & Lybrand. Bob’s advice was the exact opposite. “You’ll get a job in Hong Kong, I promise you. Your written English is excellent. The locals can’t write well enough in English to make as much money as they’d like to be making. Keep at it. You’ll get what you’re after. Someone will hire you. Go talk to these people. Tell ‘em I sent you.” Bob handed me a list he’d had typed up consisting of a dozen names and contact data. The concrete jungle had more than a pulse; at times it had a heart. Bob Gaff wasn’t the only interviewer human enough to do a kindness like that for me. Many years subsequently, in 2001, when I was researching and writing the history of PricewaterhouseCoopers for their imminent centenary, I interviewed Bob long-distance - he’d retired to the south of France - and reminded him of our meeting in Shell House, and his kindness, thirty years earlier.

A year or so after I’d started in the job that Computer No. 9 foretold care-of its hidden message, I came up behind Director Petersen of Jebsens waiting for a red light to turn green. He’d had a skiing accident in Europe. One leg was plastered thigh to ankle; he was on crutches. I had to physically clamp down on an urge to stretch out a surreptitious shoe and flick a crutch into the traffic on Des Voeux Road. Karma. Enjoy it privately, LR, I told myself.

Many many years later, in 2011, when I was working on the history of the Hong Kong Country Club - a bastion for billionaires for whom I picked the title ‘A Place of Social Resort’ - I obliquely wrote into my back-flap profile the moral of my 1971 encounter with Mr. Petersen, who had been Country Club chairman at some intervening stage. Karma, it was again, in writing this time. ‘Always seek a second opinion,’ is what I wrote.

During the course of my quest for employment in 1971 I’d come very close to landing an assistant’s position with a textile import-export operation in Kowloon called Lark International, co-owned by an urbane American called Ira Kaye, who saw something in me. His Chinese partners, however, didn’t go along with it; they didn’t want another gwai lo (foreign devil) to appear on the payroll.

Desperation is the mother of downsized ambitions. I’d applied in writing for all sorts of vocations: a police cadet (eyesight failed me on the spot), TV newsreader, nightclub bouncer (two years infantry, what else?), sub-editor for UPI, reporter for the English-language press (Hong Kong published four such dailies, most prominent being the Post) the pursuit Barrie disabused me of) ... then back to ‘go’, virtually, via the Australian Trade Commission and a Commonwealth Public Service-issue desk, in admittedly a different hemisphere, that had become temporarily vacant.

This time, armed with an introduction from somebody, when I called on the Trade Commission, 9th Floor, Union House, I’d been taken eastward down Chater Road to lunch at the Hong Kong Cricket Club (the following year I’d be a member myself) by the senior admin dude, Bruce Denham. He read to me the riot act - which wasn’t at all unreasonable considering the downfall of my predecessor, and the fact I was resident in the infamous Chungking Mansions - and recruited me as ‘local’ staff on HK$2,300 per month. What got me the post was, of course, my instant availability, plus the employer’s insurance that I was still on Canberra’s books as absent on ‘special leave’ and could be checked up on, even intimidated.

My six weeks under Bruce Denham’s wing and watchful eye brought with them a couple of fond memories. There was the morning I was sitting by the rail of the ‘Star’ Ferry as it filled up at the TST pier to carry a boatload of commuters and tourists across Victoria Harbour to Central. My row wasn’t occupied, apart from me, until a familiar silhouette loomed from the right and lumbered with the help of a walking stick down the row towards me. It was Pig Iron Bob Menzies, followed by his better half, Patty.

They sat right next to me. Menzies nodded, said “Good morning,” as he’d seen that I’d recognised him; Patty sweetly said something similar. I said nought. Here was the very prime minister of Australia who’d brought back the draft, who had drawn my birth date out of the barrel and sent me off to war (actually I’d sort of volunteered, but don’t mention that). Here was the super-mega-politico who’d slid open the first of my adult sliding doors, to have me, after twists and turns and forks in the road, being sat there on the ‘Star’ Ferry right up next to him. For a long time I sat, thinking on all this, as the ferry putted and churned across the harbour, trying to come up with a flash of brilliance. Finally, when the journey was all but over, I had it. I knew exactly what I should say.

“My father hates your guts.”

Pig Iron Bob did not react. He hadn’t heard what I said. That’s probably due to the fact I didn’t say it out loud. However, I did think it at max volume.

As the ferry passengers disembarked at Central pier, I watched as Menzies was helped into the back of a black limo, no doubt arranged for him by the young lady who’s next up in this story of mine. A month or so later, at home in Melbourne, Sir Robert Menzies was to suffer a massive stroke, resulting in severe and cruel paralysis which sentenced him to a wheelchair in public for the seven years he had left to live. Clearly, I was already having a telling effect on the people with whom I was rubbing shoulders.

But the memory I value most from my six weeks as a local employee of the Oz Goverment in Hong Kong in 1971 is eighteen-year-old Christina Hui - the meet-and-greet girl, the ‘first impression’ girl, the PR girl ... all five feet ten inches of incomparable northern Chinese metabolism. She was, I believe, a daughter of the senior marketing manager at the Trade Commission.


That’s me in the middle.


That’s still me in the middle.


Looks like I got squ...eeeezed out.

Christina grew up, into a big girl, became a top catwalk and photographic model in Hong Kong, tried her luck in Hollywood and was chosen as a Bond girl. She appeared in Playboy. But, male sports fans, I’d met her when she was eighteen, starting out, cute and very human. We’d ‘worked together’ much too fleetingly. Neither were the same thereafter. Well, I know I wasn’t.

I invested the first month’s $2,300 at Kenny’s - the Indian custom tailors in Carnarvon Road a block from Chungking Mansions. It was the best bar in town. Free beer every beer, not every second one. I bought two suits, one a subtle-striped middling grey, the other a plain darkish green which I put on for my interview with the gentleman - the real gentleman to whom I would, years later, dedicate my first internationally published novel - who was to respond to the classified advertisement that I placed, on Barrie’s top notch advice, in the ‘Positions Wanted’ section of the monthly bulletin published by the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce.

For one Hong Kong Dollar.

But you already know about that.

 

[Lockhart Road]

SCENE 40 -
Thursday afternoon, December 1971.

Setting:
The phone call comes in to the apartment-size guesthouse on the 14th floor of Chungking Mansions. The standard black Bakelite rotary-dial gives out its standard ring. Thursday afternoon, about three p.m., drizzle outside, chill north wind coming down from China. Road has caught a change-of-season dose of ‘flu. Winter is here; these days Hong Kong still has what can be called a winter. LR is flat on his back in his room, suffering, telling himself he has no time to suffer, he has to get up, get out, get going, keep going. The Chinese owner of the apartment that he’s subdivided into rented rooms picks up. He knocks on LR’s door.

The phone and its ring may be standard ... the call is not.

It is Road’s turn for a cold call. A cure for his cold, in fact. A cure, looking back on its effect, for all his ills.

VOICE ON PHONE: “Good afternoon, my name is Maurice Green. I have seen your advertisement in the Chamber of Commerce bulletin, and I think that we may have something to talk about with you, if you are still available. I am the chairman of Arnhold & Company. We are an engineering company - “
ROAD: “I’m not an engineer.”

Voice of Narrator:
Now this was a bad start. I knew I’d made a blue. Never but never introduce a negative. Never but never but never start off with a negative. All I needed to say was: “I see.” Nine out of ten people would’ve hung up on me at this point. But Maurice Green was a thorough gentleman. He had never hung up on anyone in his life. He had never raised his voice in his life. He had been a thorough gentleman all his life. Not only had I been impossibly lucky having somebody, anybody, catch sight of my ‘positions wanted’ cry for help, I was doubly impossibly lucky that the person who did was Maurice Green.

Mr. GREEN: “I don’t need an engineer. I need somebody to help make life easier for my son Michael so he can spend all of his working time being the managing director of this company ... “
ROAD: “I see.”
Mr. GREEN: “We are starting to grow fast. A construction boom is just starting to get moving. We import and supply top quality, many of them famous, brands of plant and equipment to the construction and engineering industries ... mainly from British manufacturers.”
ROAD: “I see.”
Mr. GREEN: “Excellent. I need ... my son needs ... somebody to write his letters for him ... to look after all the visitors we’re receiving, all the visiting principals who are now coming to Hong Kong all the time. This is using up too much of his time. He needs to have time to be managing director, not a dictator of letters or a personal tourist guide. Can you do that for him? For me?”
ROAD: “Yes, Mr. Green. I can do all that.”
Mr. GREEN: “Can you come and see me in the morning? We are at Room 302, 9 Ice House Street in Central.”
ROAD: “I can come and see you right now, Mr. Green.”
Mr. GREEN: “No need for such hurry. You sound like you have a bad cold.”
ROAD: “It will be gone by the time I get off the ‘Star’ Ferry. Salt air will fix it.”
Mr. GREEN: “Excellent. I will be waiting for you.”

Notes:

Maurice Green had an accent that was hard to pin down. It was British but not original British. It was acquired British, elocution-trained British. Too crisp not to be. Road would later learn that the British in Maurice’s voice lured the listener away from Jewish Romanian inflections that had been there since his infancy. ‘Green’ had been taken as a surname when Maurice’s parents had at the turn of the century fled from the anti-Semite pogroms, made it overland to Paris and from there set sail for a new life in Hong Kong, arriving circa 1904. Maurice and his brothers and sister had been born subsequently and raised in the Criterion Hotel, initially in Pottinger Street in the ‘old’ part of town, then on Queen’s Road directly across from the top of the steps that rose up from Central Market. His father, ‘George Green’, who’d earned his crust as a cooper in Romania and, as he was the male of the family though not the worker, was registered as hotel ‘proprietor’. Maurice’s mother Annie did the thinking, all the work, while George excelled at entertaining the clientele in the Criterion Hotel bar.






Maurice’s parents had taken over management of the hotel from his aunt who was the one to summon them from Paris out to Hong Kong when she got word they’d escaped from Romania. In 1914, to avoid fallout from the war due to their Romanian origins, the Green family relocated to Shanghai and operated a hotel also called the Criterion, then in the 1920s another in Singapore called the New Travellers Inn. Maurice would sail to England for his tertiary education, qualify as a mechanical engineer, join Arnholds in Shanghai upon his graduation. He would eventually become a director in charge of the branch in Tianjin after Sir Victor Sassoon absorbed the ‘engineers and contractors’ into his empire in the 1920s to play a role in his dream for the redevelopment of Shanghai, which Sir Victor oversaw from his flagship, Sassoon House and Cathay Hotel combined.

Maurice Green was twice ruined whilst serving as a director of Arnholds. The first time came in December 1941 when the Japanese military completed its occupation of international settlements in Shanghai, Tianjin, and elsewhere - concurrent with the strike on Pearl Harbor. Maurice was manhandled into an internment camp in Weihsien, Shandong. His wife and son Michael, a toddler, had escaped China on a steamship only to be trapped in Manila, and interned themselves, at Santo Tomas; they convinced themselves they would never see Maurice again, as there was no news of him, so their post-war reunion came as a miracle. The second ruination came less than four years later, with the fall of Shanghai to the PLA in late May 1949. The Greens were on leave in England, read the tragic news in The Times.

After that, all that was left of Sassoons, as far as Maurice was concerned, was the Arnhold office in Hong Kong, at 9 Ice House Street, rented from Hongkong Land. There was a one-bedroom apartment at the top of the building, Holland House (9 Queen’s Road today), in which the Greens lived, with Michael sleeping on a sofa. All Sassoons could afford for their ex-director as a ‘superannuation’ gift was what remained of Arnhold & Co. in Hong Kong - essentially a collection of British engineering agencies and a mountain of debt.

Maurice set about rebuilding the company, and his life for a third time. When he noticed LR’s classified advertisement and phoned him in Chungking Mansions, he was seeing a glimmer at the end of the tunnel to ‘making it’. Thirty staff were by then on the payroll. Michael - ‘Young Green’ to the staff, while Maurice was of course ‘Old Green’ - had graduated from Magill in Canada and was taking over the running of Arnholds as managing director; if only somebody could be found to save him half of every day being occupied with correspondence and taking care of English-speaking business visitors mainly from the U.K.

LR had been blessed with the best kind of good fortune ... good timing ... with it a bonus: the guardian angel named Maurice Green.



Voice of Narrator:
“Suet Chong Gai.” Say it correctly to the taxi driver, with ‘gai’ in the upper tone, and he’ll take you to Ice House Street. Say it wrong, corrupt ‘gai’ with a lower tone, and you’ll end up at the nearest place selling frozen chicken. Very likely not the nearest place, not if your Cantonese is that ‘laap sup’ (rubbish). Very likely a place far far away, with a meter reading to match.

I didn’t need a taxi that Thursday afternoon in December 1971. I walked the short walk from the ‘Star’ Ferry pier. Actually I flew. I was right about the cold. It was forgotten, gone, history. It had done its job. It made sure that I’d been on the premises when Maurice Green’s call came in.

The spruce new custom-tailored business suit helped with the critical first impression, no doubt about that. I wanted to get my knees under a desk the next morning, a Friday, but was requested to report on the Monday. Salary: HK$2,500 a month, with a co-signed one-page letter which sufficed as an employment contract. Three months probation, then a salary review. It was a low, quite fair base - from which my personal income would fly up ... and up ... and away.

I flew up ... and up ... and away, with it.

No-one knew better than I did exactly how lucky I was. What I didn’t know, yet naturally hoped, was this was only the start.

The first real task, make that real test, I was given was to manage, within a budget set by me, the redecoration of the 2,000 square feet of office on the pointed south-east corner of Ice House Street and Queen’s Road, Central. For someone who is an ex-Secretary, Procurement & Contracts Board of an Australian Commonwealth Government department in SA complete with a Repatriation General Hospital, aged just short of twenty-five, it was a walk in the short green. No pun intended.

So there I was. In position. In deep cover, so to speak, ready for what was ahead, whatever that might be. And as I worked by day and night and won my fair share of business, and as I played by night and weekend and won myself a family ... this strange, incredible, unique place called Hong Kong changed around me, day by day, old building gone by new high-rise come, old sea-side section gone by new land reclamation come ....

Oh yes, they are so right when they say that Hong Kong will be a nice place when it’s finished.


Theme music:

‘Tar and Cement’ (Verdelle Smith)

 

[Lockhart Road]

SCENE 41 - (Flash forward, forty-four years, four months.)

Saturday, lunch time, 16 April 2016.


Setting:
Royal Garden Hotel, Tsimshatsui (TST) East, Kowloon, Hong Kong.

When Road was looking for a job way back in 1971, TST East was swampland. The night he’d touched down on R&R in May 1969, he and a half-dozen mates who flew on leave with him in a Pan Am 707 out of Tan Son Nhut, Saigon, were bussed from Kai Tak Airport to a colonial British military barracks on Chatham Road to be briefed, warned, handed a leaflet which repeated all the warnings in case of deafness or just-not-listening, and allocated hotels. LR and B.R. Jones (also WTFRW) shared a room in the Park, directly across Chatham and on the north corner of Cameron Road across, incidentally, from the Miami Bar near the south corner.


Notes:

In the early 1980s TST East was reclaimed. A shopping, hotel and commercial district was developed on it. The height of the buildings is uniform, seventeen floors each, due to the proximity of Kai Tak Airport. Coming back to TST East this Saturday morning, 16 April 2016, to meet up with Thorold Keene again, feels to LR like he’s revisiting his Hong Kong origins ... forty-plus years on.

Thorold isn’t supposed to be in Hong Kong. He’s been so delayed flying out of Shanghai the night before, after all the excitement of the MoU, he missed his Cathay Pacific connection HK to Adelaide and has had to stay overnight. In the early morning Keene sent Road an email inviting him to lunch.

LR has not slept well, again. He has been up since four a.m. assisting Graham Cornes. Next week is ANZAC round, and Graham has been persuaded to tell his readers a story: how Peter Chant and Port Adelaide’s China coup fit together.

It’s a day on which everyone at the Club should be proud. Keene is indeed so proud he can’t stop grinning. LR is so proud himself, and of himself, he brings Keene a gift: a few of his books for the CEO to read or browse through on his overnight flight to Adelaide. The books add a few kgs to Keene’s luggage, en route to either Keene’s library or his stockpile of cockroach crushers.


KEENE: “Yes, it all went so very well. Thank you for all you’ve done to help.”
ROAD: “Ugo ... was he a star?”
KEENE: “He was. And that’s a relief.”
ROAD: “How does he feel about China State Net?”
KEENE: “He’s not sold. But then his focus is Mr. Gui and CCTV-5.”
ROAD: “It won’t hurt to keep State Net on the back-burner for a while, as we get our other ducks in a row in Shanghai.”
KEENE: “That’s what I was thinking.”
ROAD (nodding): “Gives us a chance to build our image, our profile, in the eyes of Mr. Xiao and Mr. Rong ... so they know we really are equals, big as they are.”
KEENE: “I agree with the approach.”
ROAD: “And we gear the publicity activity into ramping up the equality.”
KEENE: “I’ll have a word to our GM Media. He’s out shopping with Rucci.”

LR opens his iPad, taps into it, shows Thorold Keene the article that’s just been uploaded under Graham Cornes’ byline.


https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/spor...s/news-story/56313d8b7207ed3063b6617eddae54d4


KEENE: “How will we know when China State Net are confident we’ve reached equality?”
ROAD: “This time, they’ll initiate contact.”


SCENE 42 -
Sunday, 17 April 2016 - Manuka Oval, Canberra.


Setting and notes:
Keene has arrived in the ACT late, via Adelaide. Camera focuses on his face as he settles into his seat in the grandstand, shaking congratulating hands to left, right and centre.

The ball is bounced, and the camera records his expression as it changes.

The CEO’s grin turns to something else. He cringes instead, watching the Power players dump excrement on his internal flame care-of their insipid performance versus the Giants. Instead of proudly raising the Club’s bar even higher than it was on the international stage in Shanghai, they all play flat as road-kill. How can this be? Is this not the same world the CEO was in last Thursday, the same planet Thorold Keene was on last Thursday? Now he feels crushed, lugubrious, let down by his players, and by their coaches, especially by the senior coach who during the pre-match rev-up warned the team, perhaps alerted them to the concept in the process, that just because Robbie Gray and Chad Wingard were back from injury to strengthen the side they’d better not leave all the work on the field to those two alone. Good distrust strategy, Ken. Never would they think of doing that if you hadn’t mentioned it.

2016 was going the way of 2015. Manuka made sure of it. Thorold Keene, the CEO, having planted the Power flag in Shanghai, deserved much, much better than a no-show like this from his on-field division as a ‘welcome home, champ’.

Karl Krupp’s testy opinion, delivered to the players by Twitter from Hong Kong where he was spending his post-Shanghai weekend, contributed nada to Club harmony. Just the opposite. It set in motion a disharmony ... and the Knee-jerk Kaiser, the King of 140 Characters, the Tzar of Tweet, has still not worked it out.

At Alberton, something was right ... and something was wrong.

China, instead of being universally hailed as a significant victory in the making, was about to gain a reputation for being a ‘distraction’.

The season would conclude unsatisfactorily, with something called an internal review. It put the senior coach on the spot. It made him squirm. But he sucked on it, mustered up his self-respect, did his level best to regroup and turn into a better, more with-it, more modern thinking, more intelligent senior coach. But intelligence is what we’re born with, or born without. Brains can’t be grown on stubborn ground.


Notes:
Meanwhile, off-field, viz China, leading into season 2017 and the first match for premiership points in history to be played there, Jiangwan Stadium in Shanghai takes shape, Ugo Alsthom takes Sports Diplomacy to new heights, and a scene on the sidelines of a footy match is set for admission to PAFC’s memory vault.


SCENE 43 -
(Flash forward - late March 2017, round 1, Sydney Cricket Ground.)

Setting:

Premier of China, Li Keqiang, wearing an ear-to-ear grin and a Power scarf - at times a Swans scarf with it just to be diplomatic for the cameras. At his left is the Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, wearing a cautious smile and a Swans scarf. Buzzing around, wound up tight as the twangiest string on Hank P. Marvin’s guitar, is Karl Krupp; he appears to be mainly wearing his right hand - reaching out, trying hard, too hard, to make something unnecessarily perfect here, trying too hard to unnecessarily fix something miniscule there, carrying on like a wide-open handbag ... an untidy accessory to the main event, the sort of untidy accessory that the bald Aussie blue bug-eyed blowfly makes of itself at a beach barbecue in January.

The Internet uploads the pictures like a Hoover uploads hairs on a carpet. The pictures are sucked into cyberspace and rained down all over the planet. The pictures land all over China. The message in those pictures is loud and crystal clear. The omnipotent Politburo of the PRC approves Australian Football as an alternative skilled team sport. The PRC Politburo welcomes Australian Football to China. The most colourful, if hackneyed, headline might be translated as:

AUSSIE AERIAL PING PONG TAKES TO CHINA’S FIELD OF DREAMS.


“But who,” the CCTV sportscasters and political commentators ask each other, “is that third tit?” “What’s he doing?” “Why is he there?” “Ah, I think he’s trying to pick the lint off Premier Li’s suit.” From that moment on, Karl Krupp would be known all over China as 爪 ... ‘The Klaw’ ... all over the English-speaking world as ‘Karloff’ (as in Boris Karloff).









“Don’t mind him, Mr. Premier, he’s just picking the lint off your suit.”


Ugo Alsthom, operating quietly, deftly and well in advance behind the scenes with DFAT, has done it again. He’s pulled off another spectacular coup for the Port Adelaide Football Club by applying his newly-discovered global science of Sports Diplomacy.

http://www.atimes.com/article/premier-li-keqiang-relaxes-footy-match/


SCENE 44 -
Early May 2017 ... Hong Kong

Setting:
Late Tuesday afternoon a few weeks before the first match, Power versus Suns at Jiangwan Stadium, Shanghai: Pro Drinkers Corner, Happy Valley Bar & Grill, Road and Robbins’ weekly PAFC China Advisors meeting.

The volunteer duet of card-carrying Cocklediver cobbers have got the signal from Thorold Keene - via an email that reads:

They’re back.




Theme music:

‘Batman Theme’ (The Marketts)




Notes:

Keene has himself received an email request from Xiao Junxi, via Dirk Struan IV, for Mr Xiao and two colleagues to be officially invited by PAFC to the inaugural AFL match in Shanghai, and to a function or more associated with it. This is the first progressive, as distinct from platitudinal, communication from China State Net in seventeen months. The initiative has without doubt been motivated by international and China-wide publicity generated by Li Keqiang and Malcolm Turnbull thanks to their attention-grabbing double act at the Sydney Cricket Ground, which itself was motivated by Ugo The Different.

Road and Robbins read again, then again to be sure, the communication from Mission Control, Alberton, Postcode 5014/5015, as it appears on LR’s iPad.

ROBBINS: “What happens now?”
ROAD: “We go to Shanghai for the match early, and we go to work. This is the exact opening we’ve been waiting for. Now we have to position ourselves. We do this together. Side by side. Teamwork. Co-ordination. You and me ... Robin.”
ROBBINS: “Whatever you say ... Batman.”
ROAD: “You’re only being polite and duly respectful because it’s my shout.”


SCENE 45 -
May 2017, Shanghai.
The week leading up to the AFL match at Jiangwan Stadium on Sunday, 14 May 2017.

Setting:
Aerial camera views of the city, focusing on the T-junction made by the Bund and Nanjing Road, landmarked by the Cathay / Peace Hotel. Camera travels outwards, wider, comparing what Shanghai looks like today with flashbacks to the 1930s, the great golden era of Sir Victor Sassoon, Arnhold & Co., and the like.

Visual flashback to the commencement of construction - by order of Chiang Kai-shek - of the athletics stadium and cultural complex north-east of the city centre in the as yet undeveloped rural district called Jiangwan ... the district which Chiang and his corrupt administration harboured such ambitious and ‘patriotic’ plans for. Intensely jealous of Sir Victor’s popularity was Chiang Kai-shek. Fiercely distrustful and critical of the opulence and decadence of the Paris of the East flourishing within the sanctuary of the International Settlement and French Concession on the west bank of the Huangpu River, that’s Chiang Kai-shek.

His grand plans for the complex at Jiangwan, however, excluded an Australian Football match contested for premiership points eighty-plus years later.

https://www.bigfooty.com/forum/thre...coast-shanghai-bund-to-jiangwan-town.1164989/


Voice of Narrator:
Shanghai, Shanghai. Look at it down there. Topographically unspectacular, flat as a billiard table. Artistically spectacular. Historically spectacular. Not pretty, not even attractive, just ... spectacular.

But, take note. Now that Shanghai was in this game that we’re playing, the game has changed, dramatically.

Spectacularly.

Nobody at Port Adelaide had an inkling how much their game was about to change when Mr. Gui had come knocking, so enthusiastically, his cheque book out, talking big picture, talking the universal caper, talking personal legacy to his home town ... and they couldn’t resist him, just had to find the way, whatever it was, to accommodate him and do so at full speed.

On the virtual eve of the match in Shanghai, it is apparent the full-speed accommodation of the full-speed Mr. Gui is testing every iota and aspect of Alberton’s resources ... testing every ounce of PAFC’s resolve to go it alone, to position the Club ahead of the AFL pelaton, ahead of AFL House itself, well ahead ... to protect itself by stealing a long march, to protect itself by the sheer stretch of its breakaway into the Celestial Wonderland that is, and always will be, China.

Rick Mattinson gave all of this a name. He called it a ‘white-knuckle ride’. In one of my emails to him at the time, I told him he’d ‘bitten off more than he could chew’. I meant the whole of PAFC, not just him. He agreed with me.

PAFC needs specialist help with anything extra, especially anything extra-special, rising up at this eleventh hour. The Club’s China Advisors have got the signal to provide such help. China State Net is coming their way.


Theme music:

‘Ride The Tiger’ (Jefferson Starship)





(Episode 6 to be continued.)

 

[Janus]

You looked like you could have come straight off the pages of a James Clavell novel when you were younger, LR

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

Lockhart Road I hope you don't mind but I am going to comment on several parts of your last few posts/ Alberton Papers chapter, that really struck me last night. Probably my favourite Chapter so far.

‘Walk Don’t Run’ (The Ventures - with Russell Ebert on drums) - he definitely has Russell's nose.

ALSTHOM: “Premier Li! Premier Li! We’ve got Premier Li! He’s going to come to the SCG for round 1! He’s going to come down to the changing rooms and say hello to the players and the coaches and ... ! Premier Li, Rick. Premier ... Li!”

MATTINSON (finally looks up): “Who’s Premier Li?”

I could just image how excited this would have caused Ugo to become, and those at Alberton in the know. This is the classic -HTF - How The F**k - did that happen moment, of all this China venture for me I think. Mr Gui was big, but we were planning to snare a potato farmer like him. This was just something else. I reckon there should have been a similar reaction at AFL house, but the dullards there probably first reaction was - that's nice. This was from the very bottom of the bag of magic tricks Ugo and others have pulled out over the last 5 years.

The Miami Bar -

next time I'm in HK I have to find some of these bars where you meet all these colourful characters. I like the 2 for the price of deal Johnny had you on. We all need to get to know a character like Johnny in life, and not just for the free booze.

BARRIE: “Go to Union House in Central, the corner of Chater Road and Pedder Street. Go up to the office of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce. Tell them you want to place a classified advertisement in the ‘Positions Wanted’ section of the next issue of their monthly bulletin. It’s distributed to all Chamber of Commerce member companies ... there are a great many of them ... believe me the bulletin, all of it, gets read by serious business people.”

You can talk all you like about Seek, Linkedin and other modern digital equivalents, but something like this can't be beaten. Have one spot where you know everyone in business will check it out, rather than the fragmented system we have today for information, just can't be beaten.

Bob handed me a list he’d had typed up consisting of a dozen names and contact data. The concrete jungle had more than a pulse; at times it had a heart. Bob Gaff wasn’t the only interviewer human enough to do a kindness like that for me.

- Last night I watched SBS Dateline and saw an example of a HK heart in the concrete jungle. The show synopsis said - Hong Kong has more ultra-rich people than any other city/country, yet 1 in 5 people still live in poverty. Dateline asks - why is the gap between rich and poor is so extreme? I caught the 2nd half and it concentrated on a mother and her young daughter Cherri, maybe 8 or 10 years old, and how a family of 5 lives in a 3 room flat. The pressure was on the little girl to do well, as she knew in the long run she had to help out her family, when she gets older and had to do well at school. They showed old people having to sell cardboard to survive as old age benefits now can only be accessed at 65 not 60 until recently. Host Marc Fennell wasn't that hopeful, but the little girl is optimistic about the future and said near the end before the credits, - "some people in HK are very caring and have a big heart. They'll help people in need. If the rich can share the wealth with the poor, then they can work together, and earn money." See
https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/1465187395958/Dateline

My six weeks under Bruce Denham’s wing and watchful eye brought with them a couple of fond memories. There was the morning I was sitting by the rail of the ‘Star’ Ferry as it filled up at the TST pier to carry a boatload of commuters and tourists across Victoria Harbour to Central. My row wasn’t occupied, apart from me, until a familiar silhouette loomed from the right and lumbered with the help of a walking stick down the row towards me. It was Pig Iron Bob Menzies, followed by his better half, Patty. They sat right next to me. Menzies nodded, said “Good morning,” as he’d seen that I’d recognised him; Patty sweetly said something similar. I said nought. Here was the very prime minister of Australia who’d brought back the draft, who had drawn my birth date out of the barrel and sent me off to war (actually I’d sort of volunteered, but don’t mention that). Here was the super-mega-politico who’d slid open the first of my adult sliding doors, to have me, after twists and turns and forks in the road, being sat there on the ‘Star’ Ferry right up next to him. For a long time I sat, thinking on all this, as the ferry putted and churned across the harbour, trying to come up with a flash of brilliance. Finally, when the journey was all but over, I had it. I knew exactly what I should say.

“My father hates your guts.” Pig Iron Bob did not react. He hadn’t heard what I said. That’s probably due to the fact I didn’t say it out loud. However, I did think it at max volume.

I PMSL and LOL very loudly and probably woke up the house. Poor old Bob suffering that stroke a month later meant Carlton built that platform/ramp at Princess park for his driver to drive the Rolls Royce up behind the goals, so he could watch home games and not have to leave the car. For those who have never seen it before, see the picture at
https://twistedhistory.net.au/2016/...s-car-into-grandstand-to-watch-football-game/

But the memory I value most from my six weeks as a local employee of the Oz Goverment in Hong Kong in 1971 is eighteen-year-old Christina Hui - the meet-and-greet girl, the ‘first impression’ girl, the PR girl ....

Everyone needs to work with a Bond girl type at least once in their life.

Road has caught a change-of-season dose of ‘flu. Winter is here; these days Hong Kong still has what can be called a winter. LR is flat on his back in his room, suffering, telling himself he has no time to suffer, he has to get up, get out, get going, keep going. The Chinese owner of the apartment that he’s subdivided into rented rooms picks up. He knocks on LR’s door. The phone and its ring may be standard ... the call is not. It is Road’s turn for a cold call. A cure for his cold, in fact. A cure, looking back on its effect, for all his ills.

There is a sticker that says - s**t happens. There should also be one that says - serendipity happens.

VOICE ON PHONE: “Good afternoon, my name is Maurice Green. I have seen your advertisement in the Chamber of Commerce bulletin, and I think that we may have something to talk about with you, if you are still available. I am the chairman of Arnhold & Company. We are an engineering company - “
ROAD: “I’m not an engineer.”

Sliding doors indeed. Maurice Green sounds like a wonderful character and more importantly human being. How many people have to rebuild their lives? But how many people have to rebuild it several times because of war and other tragedies. Former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw at the end of last century wrote a book interviewing and talking about those Americans who had to survive a depression and then WWII and then build a life after 20 tough years, and he dubbed them the Greatest Generation. Some have dubbed them the G.I. Generation, One could say that the Generation that had to survive WWI and then the depression, and then WWII, could also fit that definition. ( The WWI participants tend to be called the Lost Generation by historians).

However way you slice it, it sounds like Maurice Green is definitely from that Greatest Generation spirit, even if he wasn't a yank or born in the 1920's or early 30's.

To have a job where the boss wants you to help his son take over the business and gives you a high degree of autonomy, and working with such a worldly character would just about be the dream job, to test you, as well as give you opportunities for down the track.

Krupp has probably never asked you about your background. For the uninitiated The Sassoon's were known as the Rothschilds of the east, partly because of a similar wealthy dynasty, partly because a Rothschild female married into the family, partly because like the Rothschilds the family split locations to drive business and the furthest away section was the most profitable, and partly the similar Jewish background and drive.

Krupp being a "finance guy" probably still wouldn't get it if you told him. I have discovered to my surprise over the years as i have meet people from media and finance industry, that the autocue readers and market watchers have about as much depth as a flea's footprint. Take them away from the script and the instantaneous movement and there isn't much depth.

Do people at the club understand the Sassoons? Do they understand the Jewish history in Shanghai and how it shaped things there? (went there to escape blood shed of Russian revolution, then Hitler, ended up facing the Japanese, then holocaust survivors went there and then the communists kicked them out) Do they know the cities history? Do they know you had a direct link to one of Victor Sassoon's chief lieutenants?? I wished you had told me earlier of your link. Mind you, it was probably a good thing you didn't, as it saved you listening to a million questions I would have fired off at you.

SCENE 43 -
(Flash forward - late March 2017, round 1, Sydney Cricket Ground.)
Setting:
Premier of China, Li Keqiang, wearing an ear-to-ear grin and a Power scarf - at times a Swans scarf with it just to be diplomatic for the cameras. At his left is the Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, wearing a cautious smile and a Swans scarf. Buzzing around, wound up tight as the twangiest string on Hank P. Marvin’s guitar, is Karl Krupp; he appears to be mainly wearing his right hand - reaching out, trying hard, too hard, to make something unnecessarily perfect here, trying too hard to unnecessarily fix something miniscule there, carrying on like a wide-open handbag ... an untidy accessory to the main event, the sort of untidy accessory that the bald Aussie blue bug-eyed blowfly makes of itself at a beach barbecue in January

.

And he was completely oblivious to how bad the claw looked.

Rick Mattinson gave all of this a name. He called it a ‘white-knuckle ride’. In one of my emails to him at the time, I told him he’d ‘bitten off more than he could chew’. I meant the whole of PAFC, not just him. He agreed with me

People take it for granted how tough Shanghai 2017 was to pull off. Because it looked calm on the surface, and it went smoothly, the overwhelming majority of Port fans and AFL fans thought it was piss easy. i remember someone complaining that the club was unprofessional because a mate doing business in China couldn't buy tickets yet, like it was as simple as logging on to Ticketek and buying tickets.

I was lucky enough to talk to KT for 10-15 minutes after the game behind the southern goals, he was on the ground I lent over the fence of the first row. He had a big smile of great satisfaction and great pride as we said hello. But as we spoke, it became more of a, thank * that is over and we made it, type expression. He said he had to give the staff time off as they would burn out if he didn't, given how hard they had worked the last few weeks and that week in particular. Despite the calm exterior, this had tested the club to its maximum. As JFK said at Rice Uni in Texas in 1962 - We choose to go to the moon China in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.

Shanghai 2017 was our Apollo 11, we were tested and we did the other things and succeeded. Shanghai 2018 was our Apollo 12 and everything seemed a bit ho hum to the average punter. Do we need an Apollo 13 moment to get the interest back up from the general public and understanding of how hard this really is and how much of a risk it still is?? It feels like on field we have been more Apollo 13 than Apollo 11 since Shanghai. Maybe that real test is to come.

Keene has himself received an email request from Xiao Junxi, via Dirk Struan IV, for Mr Xiao and two colleagues to be officially invited by PAFC to the inaugural AFL match in Shanghai, and to a function or more associated with it. This is the first progressive, as distinct from platitudinal, communication from China State Net in seventeen months. The initiative has without doubt been motivated by international and China-wide publicity generated by Li Keqiang and Malcolm Turnbull thanks to their attention-grabbing double act at the Sydney Cricket Ground, which itself was motivated by Ugo The Different.

Road and Robbins read again, then again to be sure, the communication from Mission Control, Alberton, Postcode 5014/5015, as it appears on LR’s iPad.

ROBBINS: “What happens now?”
ROAD: “We go to Shanghai for the match early, and we go to work. This is the exact opening we’ve been waiting for. Now we have to position ourselves. We do this together. Side by side. Teamwork. Co-ordination. You and me ... Robin.”

I remember you telling me about the Gala dinner before the first Shanghai game as we walked to the train station after the game, and you were on the same table as China State Net and your plans to get them on board. No wonder your frustration at the slow progress and they now have broken up the dynamic duo. Now we need a new superhero - maybe the Ten-66 CEO - to get the job done.

 

[Lockhart Road]

Thank you so very much, REH. Mate, what a marvellous post. Thanks some more.

 

[manureid]

LR is a fellow Repat Hospital staffer!

 

[Tibbs]

Thank you so very much, REH. Mate, what a marvellous post. Thanks some more.

Great reading again LR ... Just great. Thank for taking the time to pen this for us. The behind the scenes look at what has unfolded in China, along with the historical Hong Kong links, have been fascinating!

 

[Lockhart Road]

Great reading again LR ... Just great. Thank for taking the time to pen this for us. The behind the scenes look at what has unfolded in China, along with the historical Hong Kong links, have been fascinating!

Thanks, mate, again.

It’s been a therapeutic exercise for me thus far - something I’m now quite certain that I had to do, and am very glad to have done it.

As I wrote on page 1 this is not a story I plan to hide by taking it with me when I go, denying others such as yourself the right and the opportunity to read it and decide for yourself what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s in-between so far as the Club’s, and my, China adventure is concerned.

There is more to come in Episode 6.
What’s posted above is about 60% of ‘The Alberton Papers’ part of the story.

 

[Sanders]

Who actually is Ugo meant to be?

 

[Lockhart Road]

Who actually is Ugo meant to be?

Key Corporations:

• Electricity Grid of South Australia (EGSA) - Sole owner and controller of South Australia’s UHV and EHV power transmission network.
• Ten-66 Funds Management Pty. Ltd. (Own 20% of EGSA.)
• China State Gas & Power Net (more simply: China State Net) - 100% China State Owned Enterprise. A Fortune 500 top ten corporation with more than 1,500,000 employees worldwide. (Own 46.5% of EGSA.)
• Zhudan Jinan Development (100% owned subsidiary of China State Net.)

Cast: (in order of appearance)
Thorold Keene (CEO of PAFC)
Robin ‘Rockin’ Robbins (Hong Kong based volunteer China advisor to PAFC)
Daryl Ander (Melbourne based CEO of Ten-66 Funds Management)
Lockhart Road (as himself)
Mrs. Road (as herself)
The Great Man (as Himself)
Rick Mattinson (GM, International Memberships & Merchandise of PAFC)
Thomas Doolittle (Senior Manager International, Ten-66 Funds Management)
Karl ‘Kaiser’ Krupp (TV anchorman, media heavyweight, chairman of PAFC)
Carlito ‘Chicken’ Cacciatori (Director of PAFC, CEO of Mick McGuane Media)
Ugo Alsthom (Director, The PAFC International Sports Diplomacy Program)
Dirk Struan IV (Chairman of Electricity Grid of SA)
Primrose Yao (Executive Officer, PAFC China Partnerships Division)
Xiao Junxi (VP International of China State Net, and director of EGSA)
Rong Qi (Melbourne based manager of China State Net, director of EGSA)
Ms. Fu Mingfeng (CFO of China State Net, International Division, Beijing)
Ablert ‘Able’ Kwang (GM of Hongkong Guohua Power Engineering Ltd.)
Zhang Ai (Deputy GM of Zhudan Jinan Development, Beijing)
Zhen Pugu (Deputy Director, China State Net, International Division, Beijing)
Oliver ‘Subito’ Sutton (CEO of Electricity Grid of SA)

Real-life guest appearances by:
Michelangelo Rucci and Tom Richardson (InDaily)
Andrew Fagan and Nigel Smart (Crows brain trust, singular)
Sam Agars (Sports journalist, South China Morning Post)
Caroline Wilson, Mark Robinson, Patrick Smith and Gerard Whateley
AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan
John Schumann
Mick Mummery OAM and John England OAM (WTFRW: ex-C Coy., 9RAR)
Graham Cornes
Eric Edmonds (WTFRW: ex-C Coy., 9RAR)
John Leigh (Director of CLP Group: China Light & Power, Hong Kong)
Gui Guojie
Ambassador Frances Adamson
Zhang Bin (CCTV-5 China national sportscaster)
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull
Premier Li Keqiang
[1971] Johnny (Bartender, Miami Bar, TST, Kowloon, Hong Kong)
[1971] Barrie (Sub-editor, South China Morning Post)
[1971] Sir Robert and Dame Patty Menzies
[1971] Christina Hui (Hong Kong fashion model and Bond girl in ‘Moonraker’)
[1971] Maurice Green (Chairman of Arnhold & Co., Ltd., Hong Kong)
[1980] Mike Amalfitano (President of Youngblood Industries, Boston, USA)
[1980] John Chan (Sales engineer and interpreter, Arnholds)
Darren Cahill (International tennis coach, son of Jack Cahill)
Lockhart Road’s son and daughter (as themselves)

Special guest appearance by:
Angelica Cheung - Editor-In-Chief VOGUE China published in Shanghai: (print version distribution 1.6 million glossy copies per month, and 370,000,000 page views per month on-line).

Posthumous appearance by: L/Cpl. Peter Chant (WTFRW, C Coy., 9RAR)

Narrator: Lockhart Road

 

[Lockhart Road]

UP THE CHINA RABBIT-HOLE - The TV Docudrama Series


EPISODE 6 (continued)

The Alberton Papers


Theme music:

‘Great Southern Land’ (Icehouse)




Voice of Narrator:
At this point, let’s examine a globe of the world, alias Planet Earth. Here’s a blow-up one that’s easy to read:


Place your fingertip on Shanghai. Run your fingertip down past Hong Kong around the curve of the South China Coast, down the coastline of Vietnam, hop to Singapore then from one isle in the Indonesian archipelago to the next, take a wallaby hop across the Arafura Sea and come down in Darwin. Trace the line of the Ghan, down through the red centre, down, down ... and under. If your finger slips into the globe’s nether region called the Southern Ocean and makes for Antarctica then you’ve gone too far. Backtrack to the southern terminus of the route travelled by the Ghan ... and you’re there.

You’re in Adelaide.

You’re at the bottom of the world ... just about.

Immediately after my Army service I was in a state of transition. Confusion, some would call it. You’d think I should be glad to be home, to stay home. I was but I wasn’t. I was determined to get back to Asia, to Hong Kong or in the worst case as close as possible to it.

Thing is, I was no orphan.

I was the first, the eldest employee, at Repat to be called up. Supposedly the odds of being conscripted were 12:1 against. But, in a gang of half a dozen Repat delinquents that I ran with, all save one had their birth-date drawn and received through the mail the first dark-brown envelope. Two failed the medical, one with flat feet, the other with flatter feet. The three that remained including me, went through basic training at Pucka, ended up in Infantry, then Vietnam. My fellow Repat draftees, whom we’ll know as Ken and Tony, were a year behind me; Ken worked in Accounts, same as I did, Tony in Pensions. In early 1971, with all three of us back in civvy street, a position was advertised out of Canberra for a tour of duty as a member of the Australian Medical Assistance Team in Saigon.

Within twenty-four hours all three of us had applied.

Most senior applicant was Yours Truly. I also had experience as purchasing officer of pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, technical instruments, etc., a preferred qualification. A shoo-in for Saigon was I, you’d reckon. But no. Tony, youngest, least qualified for the position, was selected best qualified for the position. The reason was as human as it was semi-inhuman. Ken and I had the same superior by the name of Arthur, whose trademark was long-distance halitosis; he was tasked with submitting a recommendation on both of us. Arthur didn’t want to think about losing either of us, didn’t want to risk upsetting one of us by making a decision; thus his judgement was that we were a dead heat, neither one a stand-out. Nice guy, meek guy Arthur did not want to be responsible for any sliding door, not for Ken, not for me. For god sake we’d already been absent for two years. Enough was enough. Arthur preferred to have us around now that we were back.

Tony’s department head, on the other hand - call him Jones just to narrow it down - wasn’t enamoured with Tony. Jones was privately, truth be known, even regretful that Tony had made it home from the war. Jones wanted to send him off for longer. Jones seized his chance. He wrote up Tony as if he was Spiderman. Tony got the job and back to Vietnam he went, as a civilian this time. Tony would come to Hong Kong on R&R early in 1972, when I had started with Arnholds, and we got together one liquid night to talk universal harmony. Jones was a friendless front-on bastard, Arthur was an odiferous wimp, but things had worked out for us both, we agreed.

Not for Ken, though. He was destined to be stuck in South Australia, pursue his love of table tennis, develop terminal cancer attributed to Agent Orange and die just short of his 65th birthday.

Back then, post-Army, I would look at a globe of the world, pinpoint exactly where Adelaide was relative to the rest of the planet. Every time I did that it would make me more determined to do something about it. Having survived Vietnam and having introduced myself to Hong Kong I was not going to live the rest of my life at the bottom of the world ... upside-down.




It’s a climb from the bottom of the Earth up past the middle to the Tropic of Cancer. Going the other way, getting from China to the bottom is, looking at the globe, quite a tumble. Like falling off the edge. It’s not inconceivable it felt that way to Mr. Xiao Junxi, Vice President International of China State Net, the first time he flew into Adelaide. He would’ve been intrigued to find on arrival that South Australians are acrobatic folk, genetically adapted to their inverted environs, fitted at birth with magnets in the soles of their feet. They existed on the underbelly of the world upside-down, yet not once did Xiao see any of them fall off.

They’re a weird mob way down in Adelaide, South Australia, Xiao would’ve thought to himself. And he would not have been wrong.

As for the secret China rabbit-hole, from Adelaide it did indeed go up. I can vouch for that. I’ve been up it numerous times.

Theme music:

‘White Rabbit’ (Jefferson Airplane)




SCENE 46 -
Saturday night, 13 May 2017.

Setting:
Shanghai, Nanjing Road, Portman Ritz Carlton Hotel, PAFC Gala Dinner.

It’s a party. People mixing and mingling to mix-and-mingle music. AFL House and national media celebrities, football legends, card-carrying members of the Rich and Famous, all individually attracting their own crowd. Voices competing, laughter punctuating, excitement building palpably, making the air throb and wobble, making the skin tingle. It’s only a curtain-raiser, this party, for a grand occasion - a gala dinner above Nanjing Road on a Shanghai Saturday night.

Camera follows LR and Robin as they stride along the passageway leading into the function, striding like, dressed like, they’re set on getting amongst it inside the high-rollers’ den on the Galaxy casino floor in Macau: polished-up Power 2017 Member badges flashing, PAFC black white silver teal ties worn with the pride of the true believer, jackets dry-cleaned, eyes peeled ears pricked wits about them. Tonight, it’s clear, the dynamic duet won’t be taking prisoners.

LR takes point, Robin runs interference just off his right shoulder. Ahead, in the middle of the throng, temporarily obscured, totally unaware, is their target.

His name, as we know, is Mr. Xiao Junxi.

ROAD: “Hi ho Silver!”
ROBBINS: “Hi ho yourself.”


Theme music:

‘Piltdown Rides Again’ (The Piltdown Men)




The venue is the Ritz Carlton’s atrium, open overhead, flowing crimson fabric draped across to fake a ceiling, which doesn’t improve the acoustics at all.

Voice of Narrator:
Seen. There he is. Spurious persons are laying claim to chairs at the table assigned to Mr. Xiao and his companion. I’d better get a move on or I’ll be squeezed out and be rendered useless, same goes for Robin. This is by no means the best organised gala dinner in history. Seating allocations are not apparent, just a number in the middle of each table. Ours is 16. Here goes. We’re coming off half-back, breaking out of defensive 50 into offensive 50; Robin is still running interference. The ball is in my hands. Mine. No way am I doing a Jasper Pittard -

ROAD: “Good evening, Mr. Xiao. My name is Lockhart Road. I’ve been asked by Mr. Thorold Keene to look after you and your colleagues tonight. I suggest we claim these chairs right here before we lose them. This is Mr. Robbins. He’s my colleague. We are your hosts. We both have been asked by Mr. Keene to make sure that you and your colleagues from China State Net have an entertaining time here in Shanghai tonight ... also at the football match tomorrow ... “

Voice of Narrator:
This is where a PAFC business card would come in handy, you might think. Let’s not get into that. In fact, handing Mr. Xiao and his colleague - singular as it’s turned out - my own anonymous business card adds to the mystery of who the hell I am. Exactly what I aim to foster - an ambiance of mystery.

Notes:
An SA trade mission, 200-plus and led by SA Premier Jay Weatherill is in town, contributing to, multiplying the chaos that’s spread and now reigns re seating priorities plus general community niceties. “Hey, this’s my seat.” “No it’s not, it’s mine.” “No it ain’t, it’s mine.” “And who might you be?” “I’m Stephen Rowe. Who are you?” “I am Gina Rinehart.” “Hey g’day, Gina. This is your seat. Can we take a selfie together?” “Get out of here.” “Hello Gina, I’m Mark Evans, CEO of Gold Coast Suns. Can we talk sponsorship?” “You get out of here, too. I’m not at the least interested in sponsoring contact sports.” “Oh dear. Sorry. This is a bit of a scrum isn’t it.”

Robin finds himself squeezed out of table 16. Road should’ve moved faster, but he was holding back in expectation of Thorold Keene making an appearance to provide an official intro, but he hasn’t and there’s no sign he’s going to. In fact LR only got the text from the CEO confirming his services were needed as host for Xiao an hour or so ago; Road suggested to Keene that he introduce him at the appropriate juncture as his ‘teacher’. ‘That word resonates with traditional Chinese,’ LR had texted.

Road, keen to be seen to be paying his way, has been angling for the task of hosting Xiao for some time, making the very special guest feel as very special as possible, whilst releasing the CEO to get on with the plethora of alternative business duties that confront him in Shanghai this weekend.

LR organises for Xiao to sit on his right. On Xiao’s right sits his companion, Ms Fu Mingfeng, whose card shows she is employed by State Net’s international division but is otherwise nondescript and unhelpful. He makes a mental note, based on experience, to treat Ms. Fu, whose English is first class, as Mr. Xiao’s equal, and be seen to be doing so. One never knows who people really are in China and, being Xiao’s intermediary, she’ll be vital to future communication.

He’s made another discovery, that the Chinese executive on his left, a Mr. Bao, is with China Southern Airlines, stationed at their HQ in Guangzhou. He thinks about putting in an authoritative bad word re the crows ... decides against it.

As the night progresses, and progresses well, LR moves the chat with Mr. Xiao and Ms. Fu from family photos on phones and associated stuff - Xiao’s wife is from Hong Kong, living in Sydney with two teenage children who attend blue-blood colleges - on to Hongkong Electric Corporation, one of his pre-planned targets for conversation. Xiao confirms to Road he will be in Hong Kong during July for a regular HEC board meeting. China State Net owns 20% of HEC, the smaller versus CLP of the two power utilities in Hong Kong, and Xiao is one of three State Net directors on the HEC board. This the key link, LR has identified, in his plan to establish a personal long-term trusting relationship with State Net via Mr. Xiao Junxi.

Voice of Narrator:
Summary of the night. On the whole, it indeed goes well. I’ve achieved my personal aim of making initial contact with Xiao and planting a seed for the future. Elsewhere, in the atrium of the Ritz Carlton, there were a few things that haven’t gone so well - on stage, for example, where Karl Krupp signed a multi-million-dollar long-term partnership deal with a start-up from Xian who materialised right after Premier Li Keqiang, but who would disappear just as abruptly ... and, as well, there’s a minor disaster at the table where Robin has ended up.

Poor Robin Headrest. He wasn’t rockin’ in the treetops this Saturday night.


SCENE 47 -
Elsewhere at the gala dinner: table 7 in the middle of the atrium.

Robbins has been shifted around like a virtual no-show, from table to table to table, until he finds himself at last stationed at one hosted by a PAFC director. Unfortunately for Robin, the director is Carlito ‘Chicken’ Cacciatori.

CACCATORI: “Will we win tomorrow?”
ROBBINS: “I think - “
CACCIATORI: “We’ve got to win tomorrow! What happens if we lose?”
ROBBINS: “I think - “
CACCIATORI: “If we don’t win tomorrow ... “
ROBBINS: “My feel is that - “
CACCIATORI: “Will we win tomorrow?”

Robbins wakes up; Cacciatori is not talking to anyone, just himself. Cacciatori is in a state of private panic. He’s turned from swarthy facade to a pasty shade of pale. Robin has seen this transformation before - in Brunetti, in the Melbourne CBD in late February 2015, when LR scared the Chicken halfway to myocardial infarction by hinting at Cacciatori’s kryptonite: a business plan.

Rockin’ Robbins checks other tables, decides there’s no such thing as a helpful table service at this gala dinner, picks up the long spoon, dips it in the tureen of sharksfin that is going cold, fills his soup bowl, tucks in. He assesses the pros and cons in passing his knife and fork - included in the table setting to cater for greenhorns - to the distressed PAFC board member from Melbourne so he can deal with his torment with overt determination ... something blunt with which to stab himself in the heart, and should that fail due to there being no such target, something unsharpened with which to carve into one of his wrists.

ROBBINS: “We’ll win by 72 points.”
CACCIATORI: “Do you think so? Oh I do hope you’re right. How can you be so confident? Do you know something I don’t? Who are you, by the way - ?”
ROBBINS: “We’ve met.”
CACCIATORI: “We can’t afford to lose tomorrow. We just can’t lose. It will be a disaster if we lose tomorrow. Oh, we won’t live it down if we lose - “

Robin calls quits on the Chicken, tries to elevate his own spirits by turning away and starting a conversation with somebody hopefully less morbid, less gallows bent, less graveyard grey, somebody like, er ... Peter Goers.

 

[Lockhart Road]

SCENE 48 -
Sunday, 14 May 2017, Jiangwan Stadium, Chairman’s Marquee.

Notes:
Camera does all the work. No need for aural dialogue.

Daryl Ander is here, one of the minor crowd in the Chairman’s marquee.

He has brought three guests, each an executive of one or other prominent PRC State Owned Enterprise, e.g.: China Merchants Group, China Resources and/or China Life. Daryl is familiar with them via his day job as CEO of Ten-66 Funds Management. Infrastructure deals in Australia have been done, are soon to be done, or will one day be done with all of them. Plus others.

Road makes a point of organising for Daryl Ander and Xiao Junxi to renew their acquaintance in the marquee ... for Daryl to meet and exchange cards with Ms. Fu Mingfeng who, his overnight Internet research has revealed, is CFO - Chief Financial Officer - of China State Net International.

For PAFC, Daryl Ander is, has been and will remain into the future ... important.

Robin Robbins is not only a good tipster, he’s clairvoyant. The Power beat the Gold Coast Suns by exactly twelve goals = 72 points.

The Chicken to this day still refuses to recognise him on sight.


SCENE 49 -
Breakfast, Monday, 15 May 2017, morning after the match at Jiangwan Stadium - Executive lounge, Level 43, Portman Ritz Carlton Hotel, Shanghai.

Alsthom and Road are discussing the weekend, when Thorold Keene shows up to tell Alsthom that LR was performing ‘at his best’ on Saturday night, hosting Xiao Junxi on his orders at the gala dinner.

(Keene had come across from his table at one stage during the gala dinner to shake Xiao’s hand, and explain that Lockhart Road was his, Keene’s, teacher on things China. At that instant Xiao Junxi clicked on to what was happening. This was, he realised, a traditional Old China Coast tactical massage at work. Road looked on as Xiao’s tenseness evaporated, his tight shoulders lost their tightness, his smile turned into a genuine smile in place of an almost-grimace.)

KEENE (to Road, on hotel level 43, inclining his head in Alsthom’s direction): “But you know, LR, on the subject of State Net, Ugo is still not on board.”

Keene and Ugo exchange glances. Ugo shrugs.


SCENE 50 -
Pro Drinkers Corner, Happy Valley, one evening a few days after the match at Jiangwan Stadium.

Notes:
Road meets with Ablert ‘Able’ Kwang, his Deep Throat on things PRC. Able is the GM of Hongkong Guohua Power Engineering Ltd., a subsidiary of CITIC (China International Trade & Commerce), their HQ in Beijing.

The two had worked together late 1980s / early 1990s from the Causeway Bay office of a Swiss trading organisation, after LR left Arnholds for a second time. The nickname ‘Ablert’ originated from a typo perpetrated by the government department responsible for issuing mandatory ID cards to school children at a certain age. The application read ‘Albert’, the card came back with ‘Ablert’. He decided not to make an issue of it and lose time by pointing out the error, and inevitably the name grew on him. LR had decided that ‘Ablert’ was too obvious a utensil-up and abbreviated it Australian-fashion to ‘Able’ ... once it had become quite evident that able was as Able did.

After the 1997 Handover, LR had started a joint venture with this subsidiary of CITIC Beijing, this Hongkong Guohua Power Engineering. Their focus was on CLP, who at the time were 25% owned by publicly-listed CITIC Pacific. That focus widened inevitably to Hongkong Electric Corporation (HEC). LR brought Able in as general manager cum number two. The pair travelled China together for nearly three years, became close, wholly trusting of each other.

Able had remained eternally grateful to LR for providing him with employment - a due in traditional Chinese minds akin to the respect afforded one’s teacher. Able sought LR’s business advice at regular intervals, insisted on picking up every lunch, dinner and drinks tab, charged them all to his own entertainment account, supported by a handwritten and chopped receipt from the vendor, an antiquated necessity still insisted on by the auditors of CITIC Beijing.

LR tells Able Kwang about his Shanghai weekend, asks about Ms. Fu Mingfeng.

ABLE: “The Politburo has brought in a rule prohibiting co-travel by members of the opposite sex unless they are of equal Party rank.”
ROAD: “Aha. So Ms. Fu wasn’t Xiao’s ‘companion’ at all. She was there to work, not just to interpret, to keep notes. Ms. Fu was a high-ranking spy. Thank you, Able ... that fits superbly.”

LR gets to work developing his personal relationship with Xiao, using Ms. Fu as conduit, as back channel, by email. July doesn’t work out; Xiao declares he has not enough room in his schedule while he’s in Hong Kong for the quarterly HEC board meeting he told LR about at the gala dinner in Shanghai.

Patience rewards. Then comes November 2017.


SCENE 51 -
Adelaide, North Terrace, November 2017.

Notes:
Xiao is visiting Adelaide for an EGSA board meeting. Ugo Alsthom has been in touch with Xiao Junxi via Primrose Yao and has been able to comply with Xiao’s request for an audience with the SA Premier in his office in Parliament House to discuss business, including EGSA’s next project, the NSW UHV Interconnector. Xiao and his new travelling colleague, Mr. Zhen Pugu (Deputy Director, China State Net, International, Beijing) then cross North Terrace for a lunch meeting with Keene, Alsthom and Primrose Yao.

Thorold Keene and Ugo Alsthom have come armed.

Keene carries a long, cylindrical gift-wrapped package. Ugo carries what looks like a gift-wrapped cricket bat.

As a special gift for Xiao - a gift that means something personal, not a same-old, same-old gift, a gift that shows thought and feeling have been invested in its selection - Road suggested to Ugo a top-shelf branded cricket bat, signed ‘by the Australian test team’. Keen cricketer Rick Mattinson has done the rest.

No surprise this raises eyebrows at PAFC. Road remembered that Xiao, at the gala dinner in Shanghai in May, proudly showed him a photo on his phone of his fifteen-year old son in whites and pads, a cricket pitch in the background. ‘My son loves playing cricket for his college,’ Xiao had laughed.

Because of the short warning, the bat is presented ‘nude’, then taken away and later re-presented complete with signatures of all the Adelaide Strikers ... who subsequently win the 2017-2018 Big Bash competition. A good omen, perhaps. Sports diplomacy can incorporate cricket together with Australian football.

(Road is later assured by Primose that the unusual, unexpected, insightful gift broke the ice with Mr. Xiao ... again.)

Then comes the coup de grace.

Keene sucks in a deep breath, introduces to Xiao his pet project - the concept of China State Net funding the ambitious project codenamed the Alberton Oval Precinct Redevelopment.

Xiao’s eyes have been wide ever since he left the SA Premier’s domain on the other side of North Terrace, feeling a gratitude towards PAFC for brokering the meeting. It’s been a good day for him and for China State Net, majority owners of Electricity Grid of SA. What substance to put in his report to his superiors in Beijing: 1) A positive personal audience with the Premier and 2) now this. The two, Premier and Alberton project, fit together like yin and yang, like Mandarin ducks ... like Romulus and Remus.

Thorold Keene decides to go for the jugular. He picks up the second elongated, gift-wrapped package - a cardboard tube containing a series of architectural drawings, computer simulations and aerial photographs.

Keene makes room on the table, spreads out the drawings and simulations and photographs.

He puts his fingertip on the project title in the bottom right-hand corner of the topmost architectural drawing. It reads:

ALBERTON OVAL PRECINCT REDEVELOPMENT - STAGE 1

Xiao’s eyes grow wide again as he takes it all in.

XIAO (via his translator, Mr. Zheng): “China State Net have worked this sort of thing before. In Brazil. We designed and built a sports complex and campus for indigenous youth, for their education and training purposes. Out in the jungle.”

Camera pans in, focuses on the faces around the table, focuses on the papers laid out to cover the table, focuses on the text in the corner of the top drawing.

ALBERTON OVAL PRECINCT REDEVELOPMENT - STAGE 1

Alias THE ALBERTON PAPERS.


Theme music:

‘Riff Blues’ (Buddy Morrow)




Voice of Narrator:
This sounds pretty positive. This sounds extremely pro-active. This sounds exactly what the Port Adelaide Football Club was looking for through their metaphorical binoculars when they first stepped into China via Hong Kong just over four years earlier.

If you, too, are thinking that’s how this all sounds ... you would be right.

But ....

At about the same time this was happening on North Terrace, Adelaide, an incompetent, naive, greedy Labor politician in Canberra, a man serving the Federal Opposition as its deputy whip - Sam Dastyari by name - is fired for a second time by Leader of the Opposition Bill Shorten. Dastyari has been nobbled, caught on secret camera and by wiretap, cosying up to a Chinese Communist Party agent of influence at the front door of a soiree at a posh Mosman manor house. He has confessed to conduct unbecoming.

Nine fleeting months ago Premier Li Keqiang, wrapped in AFL club scarves, had stood before the cameras at the Sydney Cricket Ground, wearing a jolly China face, animating China goodwill that projected itself around the world.

Now a rank imbecile had let loose the dogs of cold war ... whose biting and barking and scratching would soon be heard from Canberra to Beijing and back again.

Things do change. Sometimes they even do a 180 at a rapid rate.

The obstacles, and the imperfections, they just don’t want to give up.


Theme music:

‘You Can’t Fall Up, You Just Fall Down’ (Tower of Power)




Next:

Episode 7 -
INSIDE EVERY MOUNTAIN A DRAGON SLEEPS -
March 2018 - December 2018

• Warning signs, political freeze and Canberra ineptitude.
• There are more than just the Nine Dragons to Hong Kong.
• Road, solo, sets up continuity with State Net, plays the dinkum line.
• Watersheds, and zero difference between volunteers and rivals.
• The case for Daryl Ander versus PAFC’s China future without him.
• The self-induced apparent demolition of Lockhart Road.

—————————————

 

[dirty2]

Well done lockhart.. keep it coming. I carnt wait for the next episode.

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

GremioPower we need your investigative skills.

Need you to find out the When, Where, For Whom, How Long, How Much etc of the development below;

Thorold Keene decides to go for the jugular. He picks up the second elongated, gift-wrapped package - a cardboard tube containing a series of architectural drawings, computer simulations and aerial photographs.

Keene makes room on the table, spreads out the drawings and simulations and photographs. He puts his fingertip on the project title in the bottom right-hand corner of the topmost architectural drawing. It reads:

ALBERTON OVAL PRECINCT REDEVELOPMENT - STAGE 1

Xiao’s eyes grow wide again as he takes it all in.

XIAO (via his translator, Mr. Zheng): “China State Net have worked this sort of thing before. In Brazil. We designed and built a sports complex and campus for indigenous youth, for their education and training purposes. Out in the jungle.”

Camera pans in, focuses on the faces around the table, focuses on the papers laid out to cover the table, focuses on the text in the corner of the top drawing.

ALBERTON OVAL PRECINCT REDEVELOPMENT - STAGE 1

Alias THE ALBERTON PAPERS.

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

But ....

At about the same time this was happening on North Terrace, Adelaide, an incompetent, naive, greedy Labor politician in Canberra, a man serving the Federal Opposition as its deputy whip - Sam Dastyari by name - is fired for a second time by Leader of the Opposition Bill Shorten. Dastyari has been nobbled, caught on secret camera and by wiretap, cosying up to a Chinese Communist Party agent of influence at the front door of a soiree at a posh Mosman manor house. He has confessed to conduct unbecoming.

Nine fleeting months ago Premier Li Keqiang, wrapped in AFL club scarves, had stood before the cameras at the Sydney Cricket Ground, wearing a jolly China face, animating China goodwill that projected itself around the world.

Now a rank imbecile had let loose the dogs of cold war ... whose biting and barking and scratching would soon be heard from Canberra to Beijing and back again.

Things do change. Sometimes they even do a 180 at a rapid rate.

The obstacles, and the imperfections, they just don’t want to give up.


5AA's promo for their breakfast show, when the Dastaryi s**t hit the fan, had David Penberthy, who worked several years at the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, a couple of years as editor, accurately describing Dastaryi as someone who if he wasn't in parliament, would be one of those spivs on Parramatta Road selling dodgy used cars.

 

[Janus]

GremioPower we need your investigative skills.

Need you to find out the When, Where, For Whom, How Long, How Much etc of the development below;

Thorold Keene decides to go for the jugular. He picks up the second elongated, gift-wrapped package - a cardboard tube containing a series of architectural drawings, computer simulations and aerial photographs.

Keene makes room on the table, spreads out the drawings and simulations and photographs. He puts his fingertip on the project title in the bottom right-hand corner of the topmost architectural drawing. It reads:

ALBERTON OVAL PRECINCT REDEVELOPMENT - STAGE 1

Xiao’s eyes grow wide again as he takes it all in.

XIAO (via his translator, Mr. Zheng): “China State Net have worked this sort of thing before. In Brazil. We designed and built a sports complex and campus for indigenous youth, for their education and training purposes. Out in the jungle.”

Camera pans in, focuses on the faces around the table, focuses on the papers laid out to cover the table, focuses on the text in the corner of the top drawing.

ALBERTON OVAL PRECINCT REDEVELOPMENT - STAGE 1

Alias THE ALBERTON PAPERS.

This would have been to do with their acquisition of CPFL Energia.

 

[Grave Danger]

5AA's promo for their breakfast show, when the Dastaryi s**t hit the fan, had David Penberthy, who worked several years at the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, a couple of years as editor, accurately describing Dastaryi as someone who if he wasn't in parliament, would be one of those spivs on Parramatta Road selling dodgy used cars.

In Adelaide Crows followers parlance Dastyari was The Next Mark Arbib.

 

[OneGreatClub]

Couldn’t locate the Legendary China thread so put this here.
Wonder if it is timely that Andrew Bassat has joined the Saints as their new club President this year.
Seems astute and has shown an interest in China in the past.
Will watch with interest how much $$$ value the Saints get out of the Shanghai adventure after all of Port’s years of groundwork and if he is smarter/ more driven than Koch.
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2017/05/...ely-in-china-as-he-takes-zhaopin-private.html

 

[Lockhart Road]

Episode 7

UP THE CHINA RABBIT-HOLE - The TV Docudrama Series


Theme music:

‘Hong Kong Express : 2047’




Joint Declaration of the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the People's Republic of China on the Question of Hong Kong.

... ... (Clause 3.12) The above-stated basic policies of the People's Republic of China regarding Hong Kong and the elaboration of them in Annex I to this Joint Declaration will be stipulated, in a Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, by the National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China, and they will remain unchanged for 50 years (from 1 July 1997).

(Signed in the Great Hall of the People, Beijing, by Margaret Thatcher and Zhao Ziyang on Wednesday, 19 December 1984.)




Voice of Narrator:

KOWTOW

Two years earlier, in September 1982, Thatcher had flown to Beijing flushed with conquest in the Falklands, a dose of ‘flu and the resolve of a grocer’s daughter’s to lay down the law to Deng Xiaoping. Britain’s leases - on Hong Kong Island (1841, ‘perpetual’), Kowloon Peninsula (1861, ‘perpetual’), and the New Territories (1898, for 99 years) - were all, by her definition, ‘legal documents’. Deng’s response was to make a few items rudely clear to her. It had been Whitehall who in 1979 instigated discussion on extension to the NT Lease ... not Beijing. Whitehall put the issue on the table because HSBC demanded clarification of the future - or else the Bank would be unable to approve new commercial loans and mortgages on NT properties requiring repayment beyond 30 June 1997. Hong Kong would cease to function.

“Sovereignty is paramount,” said Deng. “Leases and mortgages and indeed the survival of Hong Kong are of minor importance. In fact, not important at all. China’s sovereignty over Hong Kong is non-negotiable. Consequently, I shall willingly take over Hong Kong as a wasteland ... rather than surrender China’s sovereignty over Hong Kong, or any part of it ... again.”

Thatcher left the meeting in a state of shock. Her ‘flu had intensified into a dangerous impediment to her reasoning and her vision. She could not see anything but the fury of Deng ... a leader small in stature but swollen with purpose, pride and patriotism ... a rock who felt not a tickle of fear, nor of doubt ... a soldier who’d fought the dirtiest of fights in the pits and trenches and caves of the Revolution, against the Japanese, then the Nationalists ... a war hero who had won his war and dispatched his foe to exist on a leaf of an island in the Taiwan Strait ... a packaged colossus, altitude five feet flat who had twice survived persecution, prison and purgatory to reappear yet again to plot how to reunite and lead his country into the new age ... now to be told by an Englishwoman who wore her hair like concrete, who hectored with the shrill of a headmistress, who came on with a face as red as a stop sign from which poked a snotty proboscis, that he - Supreme Leader Deng Xiaoping - was obliged by international law to concede that she and her foreign gang could hang around for as long as they pleased on that pimple on China’s arse they called ‘Hong Kong’.

“Ta ma de! They can’t even pronounce it properly, these foreign devils!”

Margaret Thatcher stumbled going down the steps outside the Great Hall of the People. She fell foward on to her knees, slid on her knees down the rest of the steps to the bottom. There, she put both hands on the ground and looked up. She was facing Mao’s tomb, a hundred metres away. She had just made a spectacular, if involuntary, kowtow. This was an omen. Loud and clear. Thatcher was going to fail. And fail she would.

NINE DRAGONS

Physically barricading Kowloon off from the rest of the New Territories is a range of mountains known as the Nine Dragons. These mountains were the core of the 1898 defensive strategy behind the 99-year lease which Britain extracted from Imperial China. The crown colony, until then ending as it did at Boundary Street as per today’s map, was vulnerable to land attack from the north by France, Russia, Germany, even China itself. Thus, as a bulwark against overland invasion, imperialist mandarins ruling Peking on behalf of the Emperor were corrupted into admitting Hong Kong farther into China to incorporate the tactical high ground - the aforementioned Nine Dragons.

Why 99 years? It’s a reasonable question. Whitehall decided it wouldn’t be clever to provoke a perilous game of one-upmanship with the other foreign powers matching it with Britain in grabbing bits of the Middle Kingdom via so-called ‘leases’ of, or of about, that length. Japan, at that time, was not regarded a grade A member of the China Posse, even after it seized Taiwan and much of Korea as reparations for the war Peking lost in the mid-1890s. (Britain was confident, too, that it had Meiji Japan safely tucked under its diplomatic wing.)

A few years later Japan would mercilessly wallop Russia in its next war and take over the remainder of Korea, including Liaoning Peninsula - on which Moscow held a lease it had signed with China in March 1898, a few months prior to the Brits in Hong Kong and Kowloon celebrating their acquisition of the New Territories. The same mandarin co-signed all of these documents put in front of him by the foreign powers. He was Li Hongzhang. He became a filthy rich mandarin. China’s history records Li Hongzhang as becoming a filthy rich traitor. Chinese historians regret he died of natural causes.

TRICKS DEPARTMENT

Nine mountains make up the chain called the Nine Dragons. The average height is about 500 metres, Tai Mo Shan being the highest at just under a thousand. Chinese mythology has it that each and every mountain has a dragon asleep inside it - hence the Nine Dragons. It’s best not to disturb a dragon’s slumber, because once it’s awakened it can perform some weird and wonderful tricks ... short of breathing fire, something Chinese dragons don’t bother with, leaving that stunt to fairy-tale western dragons.

But, having been disturbed, a Chinese dragon is inclined to overperform in its tricks department - which includes time travel in all directions, as well as limitless and instant metamorphosis into any form it chooses, even human form. This is what happens if the dragon is motivated, mad enough to start breathing fire ... if it could.

Should such a stage be reached ... keep clear, look on from a distance, and enjoy the dragon dance.


EPISODE 7

Inside Every Mountain a Dragon Sleeps





SCENE 52 -
Beijing, first week of March 2018.

Setting:
Conference room in China State Net HQ, just past Tiananmen Square on West Chang’an alias the Avenue of Everlasting Peace ... the same roadway on which a lone student blocked the path of a row of tanks in early June 1989 - his short heroic suicidal gig in the global spotlight before he vanished forever after.

There is the feel of power in the air ... the feel of power inherent to the HQ of an employer of over 1,500,000 people in all but five provinces of China, plus four hemispheres of the world: east, west, north, south. The feel of power inherent to an upper top ten Fortune 500 corporation. The feel of power generated by the supreme electrical power generator on Earth. The feel of power that can make one feel ... if one feels even slightly unequal ... overpowered.

Various camera angles, mainly from high in the corner farthest from the door, taking in the long rosewood conference table, and the enormous hand-painted landscape in its hefty black frame. It is a landscape of surrounding mountains, with a foreground of giant stone animals real and mythological lined up along both sides of the approach pathway to the Ming Tombs north of the capital. The closest and thus largest statue in the painting is a phoenix, wings spread as it rises from ancient ashes, as if depicting the ascent of today’s China, freed from the shackles of a corrupt and degrading past. The landscape, the work of a venerated artist and calligrapher, and bearing his personal vermillion chop, covers one entire wall.

The painting projects ancestry and legend. Its thick lacquered frame projects strength. Put together, what is projected is longevity, resilience and triumph.

In front of the painting eight people sit, gathered at one end of the table for a meeting. They are discussing something to do with the bottom of the world - something cultural, something sporting, something progressive, which the trio of visitors to Beijing, from Alberton, South Australia, dearly want to encourage the five Chinese participants to approve ... at this very meeting.

The visitors keep glancing up at the mighty black-framed painting on the wall. They appear to be a little cowered. Who can blame them?

Present:
Thorold Keene, Ugo Alsthom, Primrose Yao representing PAFC; Messrs. Xiao Junxi and Zheng Pugu and Ms. Fu Mingfen representing China State Net, plus two business-suited executives from Zhudan Jinan Development, a wholly-owned subsidiary of State Net from the blue-collar province of Shandong.

Shandong is where Confucius was born, where the best beer in China is brewed and sea-slug alias biche de mer is the traditional dish, traditionally foisted on greenhorn foreign devils at banquets all over China washed down with locally- brewed mou tai to put their mettle to the test. Shandong’s rocky and rugged contours broadcast a land where the people grow up bigger, taller and no less industrious or intelligent than any Chinese in the Middle Kingdom.

One Zhudan Jinan representative, obviously the senior, is a stocky, shouldered, muscular fellow who looks like an ex-PLA commando, a senior officer who has strangled people to death with his own hands. His name is Zhang Ai.

Why are he and his colleague present? Zhudan Jinan Development and their owners State Net have co-operated on international projects, most recently, and most relevant to the Alberton Oval Precinct Redevelopment, in Brazil.

Zhang Ai’s card is another of those printed with a purposely misleading title: Deputy General Manager. He is, in truth and predominantly, the commissar of the Chinese Communist Party on the payroll of Zhudan Jinan - in attendance to keep a sharp ear on what is said in the State Net conference room, a close eye on the body language, his in-built antenna tuned to each of the other seven people present, including his offsider who is tasked with writing in shorthand into his notebook everything he picks up at this meeting ... a meeting that has a basis and a necessity which Zhang Ai (the name, depending on tones used, could be translated as ‘Roadblock’) has both Party commissar doubts about and inbred suspicions of.

Road block ahead, just around the next bend in the road, reads the message behind the deadpan face of Mr. Zhang Ai.

It’s a message nobody receives.

Key notes:
As at the first week of March 2018 there is a great deal of pressure inside Allan Scott Power HQ, Alberton. The pressure is building day by day, focused on the CEO, drilling a hole through his skull aimed at his grey matter. Revenue budgets for 2017-2018 are not being met. Not even close. The income from commercial partnerships and sponsorships is drastically behind target. The Club is missing a Joint Major Sponsor. Renault has been lost. No substitute willing and able to commit to a million dollars a year has been secured. Not one of the candidates look promising. The 2018 season looms. Karl Kaiser Krupp and the PAFC board are doing nothing to help, nothing constructive, just piling on the pressure. This is the CEO’s problem, not theirs. Teamwork left on the last train out of Alberton.

Thorold Keene can’t see a way out, can’t see any solution, nor any saviour ....

The Alberton Oval Precinct Redevelopment is, as has been pointed out, the pet project of Thorold Keene. He is focusing on 100 per cent funding by China State Net of all stages of the Redevelopment. He has told nobody else at PAFC about this particular opportunity. He has been holding his State Net cards very close to his chest. He fears failure, dreads the very thought of failure, has done from the start - has done ever since the morning at Brunetti in Melbourne at the end of February 2015, at which Keene’s volunteer China advisors introduced him to Daryl Ander, CEO of Ten-66 Funds Management.

He has not been able to envisage that a project such as this could come off. It is all too ... big. It is all too ... impossible. However, subsequent to the ‘cricket bat’ lunch on North Terrace in November 2017, followed by an official meeting during which blueprints and budgets and timeline were laid out at China State Net HQ in Beijing on Friday, 19 January 2018, has come this conclusive summit in the first week of March.

At this meeting ... kindly pay attention to this ... an oral commitment to fund the project, the complete project, has been made by Xiao Junxi - who sits through proceedings wearing a comfortable smile, armed as he is with the green light from his superiors, sought and received after the 19 January meeting. Not only that, a date is set for a contract, at the least a Memorandum of Understanding, to be signed, and photos to be taken, at a ceremony in Shanghai, perhaps the Cathay Hotel / Sassoon House again, in May 2018 concurrent with the second AFL match for premiership points at Jiangwan Stadium.

Thorold Keene, the under-pressure PAFC CEO, is daring to feel confident that this big ... impossible ... thing... is going to come off.

Who would’ve thought?

Ugo sends LR his own thought in a text.

BY END THIS MONTH YOU AND ROBIN MAY BE THE HEROES OF PAFC.

 

[Lockhart Road]

SCENE 53- That evening.

Setting: Pro Drinkers Corner, Happy Valley, Hong Kong.

ROBBINS: “How are we going to handle the fame?”
ROAD: “Let’s worry about that after we’re famous.”
ROBBINS: “Okay for you ... you’re already a legend at Alberton.”
ROAD: “Mate, I’ve long ... for much longer than that ... been a legend in my own lunch time.”

Notes:
Minutes after the previous State Net meeting in Beijing, on Friday, 19 January 2018, Thorold Keene was already enthusiastic enough to send LR a long text from the steps outside the power giant’s building. It was a heartfelt message of personal gratitude. It lauded LR’s ‘deft touch’ in assisting and advising the Club thus far, and said that if anyone deserved to be kept informed on what had just happened with State Net, it was him. The text was a communication, more than a message. LR will never forget it - despite what has gone down since.

Trouble was, warm though the words were, the text went cold during the eight hours they took to get from Beijing through to LR’s vintage 2011 Nokia 2C-01.

Ugo had sent LR a heads-up, told him: ‘Stay by your phone’ without telling him why. That had been eleven o’clock that Friday morning. By seven no text from Keene had made it through China and Hong Kong cyberspace. LR sent Ugo a chaser. This cleared the line and the CEO’s text appeared at once.

The eight hour delay was, still is, interpreted by LR as an omen. There could be trouble ahead, it indicated to him ... hopefully a short delay at worst.

Voice of narrator:
Malcolm Turnbull had in 2017 approved his administration’s push for anti-foreign interference legislation to counter Dastyari-type covert antics seen by ASIO et al as aiming to undermine security in Australia. It was trumpeted as a one-size-fits-all legislation. No nation was singled out as provocateur for it, certainly not the USA. Trump’s yell madly, punch next, then shoot-to-kill intelligence agencies had instigated, helped formulate, and applauded in China’s face the Aussies’ new Yankee-esque law. Beijing, of course, at once reacted, although quietly. A relatively noiseless, nevertheless weighty, deep freeze was brought down by Beijing on its relationship with Canberra.

This was certainly not the same Turnbull who witnessed the signing of the PAFC and AFL MoU in Shanghai in April 2016, not the Turnbull who played scarf games with Li Keqiang at the SCG in late March 2017, nor the Turnbull who after that sought out Li for a private meeting at an ASEAN conference, to be informed that on the wall of the Premier of China’s office there hung a framed photo of the two of them frolicking at a game of Australian Football, handballing a Sherrin to each other. The future for AFL was looking good in China, thanks to that other Turnbull.

Contrastingly, a gang of Brutus types with knives under their togas closed around this new Turnbull, and in the blink of an eye he was in Canberra no more. China had extra incentive to look at how politics is done in Australia and wonder where all the statesmen had gone. The country was being run by delinquents. Inmates had taken over the asylum.

All this describes an unhelpful platform, as at early March 2018, on which to be negotiating something ‘big’ let alone ‘impossible’ with an agency of the Central Government. It explains Mr. Zhang Ai’s ‘commissar’ attitude to the meeting with PAFC at State Net HQ in early March, and thus his road block that lay in waiting around the bend.

It’s easy to say now that the Club should’ve seen it coming. In fact they did. But State Net was, is, Central Government, and the fact that two meetings had been approved in Beijing in six weeks, and an oral commitment given, forgives Thorold, Ugo and Primrose ... and ultimately Chairman Krupp and his subservient board of directors ... for being optimistic that the Alberton Oval Precinct Redevelopment had been adjudged to be a special case not subject to political interference.

Nevertheless, it could only be a special case as long as it remained secret.

China State Net’s charter restricts them from direct investment in overseas charity or community causes and projects. State Net requires a third party to act as facilitator, to be a conduit for the transfer of currency, of funding. This is where Zhudan Jinan Development come in, based on the precedent set in Brazil. At the meeting, Mr. Zhang Ai pledged to obey the command of his employers, State Net, and to co-operate as facilitator.

But Mr. Zhang Ai is human. He has feelings even though he pretends not to. Mr. Zhang Ai is human enough to resent being pushed around.

ROAD: “Ugo will tell us all about what gives tomorrow.”
ROBBINS (no less cynically): “And the new Joint Major Sponsor, no doubt.”
ROAD: “You reckon there’s likely to be one? Ever?”
ROBBINS: “Who knows? But Ugo and Thorold are under the gun so they might feel forced to pretend that it’s State Net ... just to get the board of directors off their back for five minutes.”
ROAD: “That means going public with this news? Would not be smart.”
ROBBINS (nodding): “Worse than tempting fate. Especially in the current cold political climate. But they have to inform Krupp. Two long-distance flights to Beijing in six weeks. Thorold’s absences from the office will have Krupp doing some probing - “
ROAD: “He’ll be looking for credit for himself.”
ROBBINS: “No doubt he will. But they’ve got to report something positive to him this time.”
ROAD (sighs): “May as well shout it from the rooftops.”
ROBBINS: “Krupp gets paid big on his day job to do just that. He’s looking for new stuff to shout every morning on TV. Am I wrong?”
ROAD: “Hopefully. Let’s see. Minor miracles happen.”
ROBBINS: “So does sheet.”

Theme music:

‘Chinese Checkers’ (Booker T. & the MGs)




SCENE 54- Next day.

Setting: Chairman’s Bar, 2nd floor, Hong Kong Football Club, Happy Valley.

Notes:
Lunch: Road and Robbins, Ugo en route back home to Alberton. He stops over regularly now, stays at the Crowne Plaza on the Causeway Bay / Happy Valley corner of Leighton Road and Wong Nai Chung Road where the double-decker trams trundle by and the next corner accommodates the HKFC. Consequently, Ugo’s quick PAFC meetings with the Club’s volunteer China advisors are held less nowadays in the FCC and more in the refurbished Chairman’s Bar ... once Ugo has registered for reciprocal HKFC membership at the desk so he can pick up the tab, sign the chit and feel cool, like a local, like an HKFC member, spend thirty minutes in the fitness centre, shower, change, meet with Road and Robin Robbins in one of the Football Club’s venues to update and exchange views.

Ugo has now done a 180 on China State Net. He is chasing them desperately. Desperation has in fact set in strong, is something of a pandemic in postcode 5014 / 5015. Executive staff, especially those responsible for making China a commercial success, e.g.: Ugo and the CEO - for there are, by now, no others - are in the crosshairs of the PAFC board who demand to hear not guesses, not promises, not estimates, not flying pandas; the directors demand to see real results post haste. Everything is so behind target ... and round 1, season 2018, is a fortnight away. To be able to announce a coup incorporating China State Net and by extension Electricity Grid of SA will make a couple of reputations yet to be made, save face all round, rescue careers, maybe even - going by Ugo’s agitated body language - prevent a suicide.

The danger is, consequently, that the temptation, the itch, to leak news on the aforementioned coup too soon, even hint at it too soon, is growing harder and harder to scratch ... as each day goes by and the next board meeting, and the ordeal for the CEO and Ugo that will come with it in lieu of an orchestrated leak, draws closer.

What concurrently draws closer is the SA State election the coming Saturday, 17 March. Jay Weatherill is under pressure of his own to be returned to power. The polls are solidly against him. This makes Ugo even more of a desperado.

Uneasy, to put it mildly, is his disposition. Confidence seems to drain from him as LR and Robin look on, as they try to untangle his verbiosity, as they sit with him in the Chairman’s Bar ... trying to work out how to help yet avoid the push-back that an offer of help may provoke. Ugo takes criticism very personally. So does his boss, but Thorold Keene doesn’t bruise quite as easily as does Ugo.

This pair. They are trying to save the world, individually, all on their ownsome. In the process, they are actually competing for kudos with each other.

Voice of Narrator:
I, too, do not take kindly to personal criticism. In fact my reaction to it can be more dangerous than Keene’s and Ugo’s combined. What makes it less of a risk is that I know any opinion I have is right, and any criticism of it is consequently wrong. It’s useful armour to be wearing going into a debate, a negotiation - at least as far as the first punch is concerned. Ugo wears no armour, only a thin cloak of vulnerability.

At Alberton the cause of the Club’s commercial failure, in both China and in the national Australian market, is deep-rooted. It’s like a cancer that’s been allowed to grow, having germinated in earlier desperate times, before the advent of the China Strategy, when the Club was reduced to chasing head-down, arse-up after non-paying, virtually non-existent ‘major’ sponsors in the style of MyATM, Soaring Securities and equally non-soaring non-start-ups. During those dark days the cancer, like a locked-in mushroom cloud, grew unrecognised but not unfelt.

The panacea to this cancer of commercial lack of vision, inability, and fear of failure induced by recent past record of commercial failure, was meant to be ... yes, China. ‘Clear air’ China where there was no AFL competition ... no expectation of, nor excuse for, commercial failure.

It all began well. Renault in pre-season 2013. EnergyAustralia end January 2014. Two logos of status, one on the chest, the other on the back. When EA opted out for 2017, Oak was there, in waiting, to replace them. But now Renault was gone, with no entity in the wings to step up or come in fresh. Worse, there was nobody on the ever-rotating payroll capable of spotting, hunting down, cornering, and closing a replacement Joint Major Sponsor.

Ugo, you will recall, is a self-confessed commercial virgin - a man for the cause, not for the collection on pay day. Thorold is an overworked, over-pressured, under-prioritised CEO with far too much on his desk at any point in time to turn himself into someone who, when needed, slips into a phone booth for a few moments, rustles about, then emerges with a cape and a capital ‘C’ on his chest - ‘C’ for Commercial - capital ‘C’ for ... well, Capital.

My strong advice to the CEO in a dedicated email prior to Xmas was not to rush a replacement JMS, not to devalue prime advertising property in the process of making a quick decision for the sake of making a quick decision. My advice seemed to be heeded. It might have been incorrect advice, or it might have been correct advice incorrectly implemented. Most probably it was correct advice with, to my surprise, and to my chagrin, no-one at the receiving end to implement it.

Whatever. That was then, and now is now; it’s now that counts, and there’s precious little of ‘now’ left.

Six months on from bye-bye Renault, hi-ho whoever ... and it’s high time to think up something different, to lift up the line of sight, bring in the periferal vision. It’s high time to ... as my Belgian soulmate from Pauwels Trafo used to say to me when we found ourselves on the brink of losing a transformer deal we dearly did not wish to lose ... “Do something drastic.”

ROAD (to Alsthom): “Here’s my advice. When you get back to Alberton, go see Thorold Keene and demand two things. One - invite Daryl Ander to join the Club board and sit in the last vacant seat; then the Club will have a director with the necessary experience at, and contacts with, large China commercial projects. And there will be someone capable, keen and readily available, with authority, to help you, Ugo, from day one ... “
ALSTHOM: “And my second demand of the CEO?”
ROAD: “Do what I’ve been telling him, and you, to do re that vacant real estate on the back of the players’ tops.”
ALSTHOM: “Put on the ‘SHANGHAI’ logo?”
ROAD: “Exactly.”



ALSTHOM: “But we’ll lose a million dollars.”
ROAD: “Wrong. Wrong thinking. You’ll invest a million dollars. The way you’re going you’ll end up losing all that money anyway for zero return. You’ll end up squandering the most valuable piece of your prime real estate for not so much as a ziplok bag of beads. This way - my way, dear Ugo - you’ll be constructing your own opportunity ... providing yourself with an instrument, a weapon ... to recover all your investment ... plus extras ... from Gui - ”
ALSTHOM: “You can’t guarantee that will happen.”
ROAD: “Ugo ... if you’re running around in circles chasing up guarantees ... on anything... you are doomed. Dead in the water. But listen to me, plepase - I will give you one solid watertight guarantee, Ugo - my personal guarantee that this is the best advice you will get - ”
ALSTHOM: “Karl Krupp and the Club board will want something more concrete than that.”
ROAD (drops his eyes, sighs audibly): “Ugo ... you, yourself ... Ugo ... are really starting to get on my nerves ... ”
ALSTHOM: “Sorry if - ”
ROAD: “By putting SHANGHAI on the back of our playing top you show Mr. Gui that you’re fully backing him and his beloved Shanghai. By doing that you put him in a position where he’ll feel obliged to repay the trust you’ve clearly placed in him. All you’ll lose, Ugo, doing precisely what I’m telling you to do ... all you’ll lose is what you’ve already mentally marked down as lost - ”
ALSTHOM: “But - ”
ROAD: “Show a dose of gumption, Ugo! Show me, show Robin, show yourself ... show the members, show the supporters, show the world, Ugo, that the heart of an entrepreneur beats in the breast of the concrete jungle beast that is ... or should be ... the Port Adelaide Football Club!”

A long silence ensues ... then:

ALSTHOM: “We are desperate ... I’m not sure we’re that desperate ... yet.”

ROAD (stands up): “Desperation begets confusion, begets blindness. And from the sound of things you’re confused and bloody blind for sure down there. No. I can’t do any more to help, Ugo. I’ve wasted enough of forty-something years of China experience on you lot already.”

Red Adair, alias Lockhart Road, has left the building.

 

[Lockhart Road]

SCENE 55- The following Tuesday evening, before the SA State election.

Election 2018: ​

Both Labor and SA Best commit to Port Adelaide’s Alberton Oval upgrade​

PORT Adelaide’s $35 million Alberton Oval upgrade now has the backing of two political parties after Labor on Saturday pledged $8 million towards it if it is re-elected.​

Setting: Pro Drinkers Corner, Happy Valley, Hong Kong.

ROBBINS: “The only piece of the jigsaw Krupp didn’t announce was State Net.”
ROAD: “That must’ve been excruciatingly painful for him.”
ROBBINS: “Do you think he feels pain?”
ROAD: “Judging by the way he shakes hands.”

Notes:

The previous Saturday, the following linked articles went public via PAFC media channels and the Advertiser.

http://www.portadelaidefc.com.au/news/2018-03-10/major-precinct-development-announced

http://www.portadelaidefc.com.au/news/2018-03-10/alberton-precinct-development-qa-

https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news...e/news-story/9650dcb010ee3f203b65bc0b1103f4f3


Fate ... reacting to its ear lobe being squeezed and twisted between the thumb and forefinger of Karl Kaiser Krupp and Carlito Chicken Cacciatori ... responds with the worst imaginable combination of results.

The results are catastrophic for the Port Adelaide Football Club.

The Labor Party - having been in power for sixteen years - and ex-Premier Jay Weatherill, decisively lose the SA state election. Mr. X doesn’t win a single seat.

Not. A. Single. Seat.

All the politically pledged funds designed to reinforce the commitment by China State Net for the Alberton Oval Precinct Development to become reality in time for the Club’s 150th Anniversary in 2020 fly out the window, disappear into the ether of election promises.

The needs, let alone the goodwill, of the Liberal Party, winners of the election, have been overlooked, perhaps ignored, during the panic of getting the ain’t-gonna-happen news out to a heard-all-this-before public.

Ugo would have been distraught, even wondering if he had a future.

The following weekend, on the green turf of the SCG, the scene of international political triumph for PAFC twelve short months ago, the Power players run out for the contest with ‘Oak’ on their chests.

And ‘Oak’ on their backs.

Anybody with half a brain would examine this chain of events and come to the logical conclusion there was no-one at postcode 5014 / 5015 with half a brain.


SCENE 56-

Theme music:

‘Gravity’ Soundtrack. (Steven Price)




Voice of Narrator:

Here’s the view from outer space, looking down on what’s happened to the China Strategy of PAFC. Planets that had been perfectly aligned have been shunted out of kilter, each bounced off its axis into a direction that conflicts with all the other planets.

There’s been a big bang, caused by combustible elements and a spark out of the sphere of control of PAFC ... beyond the control, also, of Xiao Junxi and China State Net.

The cause, and its aftershocks, of this big bang are essentially associated with geopolitics on both sides of the Pacific.

The big bang was primed and set to go off long before the election of The Donald. China had been making no secret of its military muscle-flexing and creation of artificial strategic outposts in the South China Sea, its economic engineering among the Pacific Islands and other vulnerable territories, and its far-flung security blanket codenamed Belt and Road. All this slotted into place, like an international billboard that sent the message to the erstwhile ‘foreign powers’, who up to 1949 had trampled on China with impunity, that the Middle Kingdom was not just back, it was entrenched as a first among equals ... it was now a pro-active power on Earth ... and it was never going to be on the receiving end ever again.

The big bang has been exacerbated by Trump’s direct or indirect hawkish influence on Turnbull who, don’t forget, had been doving about in Shanghai on Thursday, 14 April 2016, just under two years earlier, and again in March 2017 at the SCG. Emanating from such Canberra intelligence operatives as ASIO, and megaphoned by a keen and compliant media - a sadly primitive, imperceptive and uneducated media when it comes to China - anti-Beijing hawkishness discovered a host of egg-shell thick skulls to penetrate in the cold corridors of Canberra. Then up popped Sam Dastyari.

The sideshow crafted to pick up on and to broadcast distrust of everything Chinese had found its essential clown.

So here we are, in this docudrama, stuck in the mud of March 2018.

In Melbourne, they say, beware of four seasons of weather all in one day. When it comes to China, so their prophets warn, run for the hills when the gods of meteorology trot out the four worst omens - hailstorm, waterspout, tornado and earthquake - in a row. If that should happen, expect the end of the world.

There wasn’t an earthquake, as there had been in 1976, the Year of the Fire Dragon, epicentred deep beneath the network of coal mines at Tangshan and killing, conservatively, over 200,000 people - an omen which foretold Mao’s death a few weeks hence and thus the demise of the first Communist Chinese Dynasty.

There wasn’t a hailstorm, a waterspout or a tornado of any significance.

What would become evident, to me at least, was a fifth deadly omen - the Sin of Compleat Silence ... to which the Port Adelaide Football Club would contribute with a bizarre determination.

Communication, international communication in particular, is a form of art. Even after working for five years on an ambitious project on the far side of the world, a project that both Karl Krupp and Thorold Keene had repeatedly publicly categorised as vital to the Club’s future and financial security, the communication art form was not evident at Alberton. In spite of repetitious castigations and warnings from certain China advisors being greeted with chastened but fake promises to make amends, the communication art form was yet to materialise out of postcode 5014 / 5015. In its place was, far too frequently, communications vacuum.

Indeed the cause of the misfortune overtaking PAFC in March 2018 is the aforementioned Big Bang plus its aftershocks. The surprise element didn’t help. It’s not easy, after all, to keep a weather eye on what gives from the bottom of the globe; that’s what communications, listening posts, qualified advisors are for ... provided they’re properly in position, asked regularly for opinions and eye-witness reports, and taken seriously.

What the Club could’ve done but didn’t - what it refused to contemplate - was to construct, aided by the guidance of its China advisors, a remodelled strategy to deal with this adversity. To deal with it by putting it to use ... by taking advantage of it. That’s how China would handle it, every time.

And that has just this instant reminded me of an anecdote, one relevant to dealing with adversity - about an incident that took place during my very first visit to China, for three days at the end of September 1980.