Hong Kong — Meet the Oyangs, Artists of the Afterworld. Oyang Ping Chi, (left) son of Oyang Wai Kin (right), has dragged the ancient Chinese art of creating paper offerings for the dead into the 21st century, building on a business his father established more than a half-century ago.

Burning “hell money” — Bank of Hell notes in denominations of millions of dollars — along with paper replicas of life’s luxuries — is an important part of the ritual of smoothing the journey of one’s loved ones into the hereafter.

In high-rent Hong Kong, the craft is fading away. It retains a foothold in older neighbourhoods. The Oyang family business is unusual in that it is thriving. In recent times that is largely thanks to Ping Chi’s skill at creating replicas of sought-after designer goods — from iPhones to luxury cars — all destined to be burned along with hell money banknotes.

In This Article:

ccccccc	Up in Smoke: A Chinese Tradition	Po Wah: Hong Kong’s Oldest Paper Offering Shop	Oyang Ping Chi’s Story	Environmental Concerns

But creating paper funerary objects is definitely a sunset industry. Competition from cheaper workshops over the border in China, environmental concerns about the toxic effects of burning offerings and a dilution of “traditional values” among some members of the younger generation are taking a toll.

Up in Smoke — an Age-Old Tradition

Burning paper offerings -– replicas of money and various everyday items -– to commemorate the dead has long been a Chinese tradition.The Chinese believe their dead relatives can receive and use the items in the afterworld.

Chinese people buy and burn paper offerings on important remembrance days such as Tomb Sweeping Festival, Ghost Festival, Double Ninth Festival, Chinese New Year and other traditional holidays.

But in China, no one does it better than the Hongkongers. Ancient traditions are preserved well in this financial centre.

Not having undergone communist doctrine and the rampage of the Cultural Revolution, Hong Kong people have been better able than their mainland counterparts to preserve many traditional Chinese customs. The city where “the East meets the West” is in many ways more “Chinese” than China.

Po Wah Paper Offerings — a Hong Kong Icon

Oyang Wai Kin (pictured right), Oyang Ping Chi’s father, fled to Hong Kong from neighbouring Guangdong province during the Chinese civil war in the 1940s. He started out as an apprentice in a relation’s paper offering shop.

Later he founded his own business, Po Wah Paper Offerings, which now has a history of almost half a century.

“The dragon heads and lion heads we made used to be exported to the United States.” — Oyang Wai Kin

Soundtrack in Cantonese. Click on | Captions | to view English subtitles

At the age of 73, Oyang senior still goes to work every day — but he spends much of his time overseeing the work of his son, Oyang Ping Chi.

Oyang Ping Chi’s Story:

“I sell goods for the dead,” the younger Oyang said. “You see, each family spends from a few hundred to tens of thousands of Hong Kong dollars on these paper offerings. And the next day, they just burn everything up.”

“Most young people in Hong Kong are well educated,” he said. “They have bigger dreams than playing with bamboo and wrinkled papers all the time.”

But Oyang Ping Chi is dedicated to this traditional craft. And he does it the most innovative way.

When children’s scooters were a hit a few years back, Ping Chi made one using bamboo and paper. He hung the paper scooter outside the shop and within three days it was sold to a young mother who had just lost her son.

She bought the scooter without bargaining. Ping Chi’s first experiment earned him HK$300.

He went on to make more innovative paper offerings: Macintosh computers, digital cameras, Sony Aibo electronic dogs, video game machines, basketballs, and even sushi platters. Local newspapers dubbed him the “Artist of the Afterworld”.

As news spread, orders came in from both young and old customers, asking for very specific paper offerings. Fans of the local rock band Beyond ordered an electric guitar for the late lead singer Wong Ka Kui. One customer ordered a parrot for his bird-loving dead friend.

“There’s a potential market for artistic and trendy paper offerings,” said Ping Chi. He has decided to dedicate his energy and time to updating and perhaps even saving this traditional craft by combining it with modern ideas. He plans to open an online paper offering shop this year to attract more business.

On a typical day, Po Wah Paper Offerings has a daily turnover of around HK$5,000, which triples during busy seasons. …………………………………………………………………………

There are 227 registered paper offering retailer shops like this in Hong Kong, according to Hong Kong Paper Offering Workers’ Union figures. Union chairman Chen Kiang estimates that Hong Kong people spend at least HK$500 million a year on paper offerings. Kuang Jeoi, a paper offering master in Hong Kong “The minimum daily wage for a Hong Kong craftsman is $400-500. But workers in Guangdong (China) works on a monthly salary of HK$2000.” — Kuang Jeoi, a paper offering master in Hong Kong

That’s not enough in high-cost Hong Kong.  Fewer young people are interested in learning the craft of making paper offerings and families are turning to the mainland to buy the paper offerings

The Paper  Offering Workers’ Union reported that the number of paper  offering craftsmen  in Hong Kong  has dropped in the last 30 years from a few thousand in to barely a hundred. Skilled masters number fewer than 10 men. They are all over 70 years old.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS

In Hong Kong, the laws changed in the 1990s.

“The government launched a series of environmental protection and fire control regulations,” said Ping Chi . “The paper offering business was seriously affected.”

The main materials of paper offerings are bamboo, plastic foam and coloured paper, which generate black smoke during combustion. Hong Kong’s Environmental Protection Department applied a range of rules under the Air Pollution Control Ordinance, including specific controls on dark smoke emissions and open burning.

Burning of paper offerings in public housing was banned.

External links:

• Hong Kong Red Cross
• St James’ Settlement

Ko is one of a number of young entrepreneurs to have embraced the coffee culture — and turned it into a thriving business.

Click on the map below for directions to the coffee shops mentioned in this article.

View Coffee Shop Map in a larger map

Ko opened Coco Espresso in 2007 after returning from Australia where he had acquired his skills and knowledge about coffee making.

Located in Sheung Wan, in the western part of Hong Kong Island, Ko’s little café welcomes customers with an aroma of coffee that fills the whole room.

Most of his patrons were foreigners at first, Ko said, but more local people came to visit the café after it was featured in a TV show hosted by Moses Chan, a Hong Kong-based actor.

“He is a key figure who has supported the coffee boom in Hong Kong,” Ko said.

In January 2009, Chan hosted a weekly TV programme titled Coffee Confidential on TVB, Hong Kong’s largest broadcaster.

In the nine-episode series, Chan recommended secret coffee spots in Hong Kong, from small boutique coffee shops to internationally famous coffee outlets.

Baristas interviewed on the programme shared their knowledge about coffee with the audience.

Barista, derived from the Italian word for “bartender,” refers to a person who prepares and serves coffee drinks.

The television series was later edited into a book, My Coffee Guide, which features 30 Hong Kong cafés.

“Thanks to Chan, so-called coffee connoisseurs emerged in the city,” said Ko. “They know what cappuccino really is now.”

Dixon Ip, another barista, runs a coffee shop in an old shopping mall in Quarry Bay, on the eastern part of Hong Kong Island. Despite its less-than-convenient location, his Xen Coffee is thriving.

“Luckily, Moses picked up my siphon coffee in his book. And it brought new customers to my café,” Ip said, pointing at an article clipped from My Coffee Guide and posted on the wall of the tiny cafe.

Most of new customers show up in Xen Coffee holding the book in their hands, Ip said.

STARBUCKS KICK-STARTS A TREND

Hong Kong’s growing coffee culture took root in 2000, when Starbucks Coffee Company, the international chain, opened its first store in a territory where tea culture was traditional and pervasive. Its debut introduced Hongkongers to drinks with exotic names such as “cappuccino” and “caramel macchiato”. Ko was one of them.

“At that time I went to Starbucks quite often. I thought drinking coffee there was the display of status and that by doing so I could show others how I enjoyed the leisure time,” he said.

Later, Ko went to Australia to learn coffee making. “That’s where I encountered authentic coffee,” he said. He worked for a coffee shop in Sydney, run by his uncle. “I went to the Sydney Coffee Academy, a café and barista training centre too.”

Kyoko Kitamura’s Kitamura Coffee was established in 2003 in Happy Valley.

“I believe I’m the first roaster in Hong Kong. There weren’t many coffee shops in the city back then and I was sure I got ahead of the times in the coffee business,” said Kitamura.

“Now it seems Hong Kong’s coffee culture has entered the next phase. People are looking for something beyond Starbucks.”

In 2008, Starbucks opened its 100th outlet in Hong Kong, according to its company website. While its coffee chains are expanding in the city, independently owned coffee houses entered the market one after another and became competitive with the big names.

MUTLINATIONAL CHAINS VS INDIE COFFEE SHOPS

Shirley Ng, in her thirties, said big coffee chains and small shops serve different purposes.

“Starbucks is available wherever people look. I go there to buy coffee when I’m in a hurry or when I want to hang out with friends,” Ng said in an interview at Bonfire Café, a small modern café in Causeway Bay.

“But not for the actual coffee itself. Siphon coffee here is way more tasty and authentic.”

Suki Lo, 25, a barista with five years of experience working at Starbucks, has a serious interest in coffee.

“I like to try coffees at little cafés on my days off,” she said. “Big coffee chains are still popular because of their convenience and fast-paced environment.

“But I agree that small cafés serve you coffee of better quality.”

Along with the growing popularity of small coffee shops, some young baristas stand out as influential coffee artists.

COFFEE ARTISTRY

After three years of training, Tracy Kwok, a 25-year-old barista from Epoch Café in Wanchai, won the Hong Kong Grand Barista Championship in 2009. She uses espresso as a pen and draws complicated designs such as hearts and swans on the foam of milk.

Kwok thinks Starbucks and Pacific Coffee, another corporate chain with 73 branches in the city, bring a positive influence to Hong Kong’s coffee culture. People are now aware of “what is good coffee and what is not,” she said.

Recently Coco Espresso quit serving lunch, which used to be a main source of profit, because sales of coffee drinks had jumped over the past year. Ko plans to focus more on serving espresso-based beverages so that he can further develop the coffee culture in Hong Kong and spread his coffee secrets.

“I want Hongkongers to know that coffee should be drunk within 10 minutes to enjoy its best smell, flavor and taste,” Ko said.

“One day I want to install only bars without chairs. Coffee lovers come in and enjoy a quick coffee standing at the bar. Just like a café in Italy.”

Photographs by Marco Lui

Echoes of the Rainbow by Alex Law and Mabel Cheung (pictured right) won the Crystal Bear Award at the Berlinale Film Festival on February 2, the first time a Hong Kong film won the category since it was introduced in 1978. It went on to sweep four prizes in the Hong Kong Film Awards in April, including the best screenplay and best actor.

Supported by the Hong Kong Film Development Council to the tune of HK$3.6 million ($462,390) in public money which helped fund its production in late 2008, the movie tells the tale of a shoemaker’s family set in the 1960s.

And now many hope Echoes may mark the revival of “Made in Hong Kong” films and a return to the golden days of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“Echoes proved that Hong Kong could still produce high quality movies that can reach to global audience,” said Wellington Fung, secretary-general of the Film Development Council. “After a lost decade in Hong Kong’s film industry, we are now experiencing an awakening phrase.”

Hong Kong could still produce high quality movies, Fung said.

Less than 20 years ago, the city was renowned as the leading film production hub in Asia. Local actors and actresses such as Chow Yun-fat, Jackie Chan and Maggie Cheung became household names locally — and  internationally.

From modern romances to gunfire gangster fights, Hong Kong film-makers churned out an average of 120 to 150 movies every year in 1980s, Fung said. The industry boom peaked in 1993, when about 240 films were released — [there were] two new movies showing in cinemas every three days, he said.

“Producers thought people would always come to watch the movies no matter what they were about and how they were like,” said Fung, who co-founded the Media Asia Group, a major movie production company in Hong Kong, in 1994.

“The market was completely saturated and the production quality turned bad. Audiences started losing confidence in Hong Kong movies.”

In 2008, Hong Kong film-makers produced only 54 movies.

In an attempt to boost production of Hong Kong movies, the government set up a HK$300 million Film Development Fund in July 2007 to provide as much as HK$3.6 million for “small-and-medium” projects with budgets not exceeding HK$12 million. The Film Development Council, which manages the fund, raised the budget limit to HK$15 million in March this year and the contribution level to up to HK$5.25 million.

The council has received 23 applications since the launch and approved 13 of them, including Echoes of the Rainbow, according to figures as of April 9. Total funding has reached HK$35.3 million.

Production of Echoes, scripted 10 years earlier based on Alex Law’s experiences of growing  up in Hong Kong, could not have happened without government’s financial support, the director said in  a sharing session at The University of Hong Kong in April.

“The idea was rejected by producers. They said ‘no one would like to watch your childhood memory on big screen’,” Law said.

[Continued below the Timeline]

Timeline of Echoes of the Rainbow

Another objective of the fund is to kick-start the career of potential directors.

“Filmmakers with less experience often have difficulties in convincing investors to put money in their projects, because they don’t have much profile yet,” Fung said. “The fund acts like an initiator — gives support to their debut so that they can build reputation and secure private investment on their own later.”

Crossing Hennessy did not need public funds

He quoted Ivy Ho, a two-time screenplay award-winner who directed her first movie in 2008 with the public funding, as a “successful example”.

Ho’s debut, Claustrophobia, received HK$1.6 million from the Film Development Fund. Crossing Hennessy, her second film released this year, did not require financial support from the government. She was able to raise sufficient private funding, Fung said.

New movie production start-ups increased 31 per cent to 71 films last year, a sign that the industry was expanding again. As more and more directors are recognized by audience locally and internationally, Fung believed that the “golden age” of Hong Kong movies will return one day, benefiting from a growing viewership in Guangdong Province, China.

“The worst of times for the Hong Kong film industry is over,” he said. “We don’t need to aim at the whole Chinese market. Guangdong itself has more than 90 million Cantonese-speaking people, more than enough for the movies to survive.”

External links: Art Radar Asia - May 12 – Reports on the creative collaborators who were an integral part of expressing  Birch’s vision of Hope and Glory.

Venue: Artistree, Cornwall House, Taikoo Place, Quarry Bay, Hong Kong

Dates: April 8 to May 30, 2010.

Over and over again they sing: trying to get the line just right. These young actors are rehearsing for a forthcoming performance, directed by local thespian Micah Sandt.

Watch them at work below:

English-language amateur dramatics has a long history in Hong Kong — stretching back to the colonisation of Hong Kong by Britain in 1842.  The oldest amateur dramatic group, the Hong Kong Players, can trace its origins to 1844.

The return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 made little difference. Within the past five years, Hong Kong has experienced a drama boom with some 20 amateur production companies producing about 28 productions a year.

Journalist and amateur dramatist Teri Fitsell puts this blossoming down in part to coincidence.

“Many [people] arrived at the same time who were keen on theatre,” she said. They included expatriates and returning locals educated as actors, directors, set-designers, make-up artists and so on.

It is especially “hard to get a job in Hong Kong if you are an actor,” said Fitsell, who volunteers for three of Hong Kong’s most established drama companies. For those who wish to keep practising their profession, the only way is to lock into the amateur scene.

Professionals Raise Standards

The arrival of these professionals raised the bar, she said. This in turn has attracted even more people to the amateur scene.

This was the case for Samantha Krieger.  “I had been living in Bangkok and Tokyo, but the amateur scene in those cities could not compare to Hong Kong,” she said.

Andy Burt, who teaches drama at the French International School in Hong Kong, formed his production company, Orpheus, last year.

Its first performance was Arcadia by British playwright Tom Stoppard. The production was well received and was listed as the top English language play of the year 2009 by the English-language South China Morning Post newspaper.

“It wasn’t hard to find the actors for Arcadia, especially when you … have lived and directed plays in Hong Kong for 16 years. I basically hand-picked them all,” Burt said.

Burt’s subsequent play Romeo and Juliet, performed in January 2010, featured Fitsell’s son, Hamish Campbell.

Campbell, who plans to take up a place to study drama at Brunel University in England in autumn 2010, spent his gap year between high school and university immersing himself in stage-work in Hong Kong. Hamish, like his his older sister, Molly, is a veteran performer here. The siblings carved out a reputation for professionalism during their school days.

At the time of writing, the 18-year-old was participating in eight productions, including the leading role in Sondheim’s Into the Woods.

Molly, who is already studying drama at Brunel, has observed that she finds that the amateur acting scene in England is often of a less professional standard than in Hong Kong, said her mother, Teri Fitsell.

Snakes in Paradise

One of the biggest problems that drama companies in Hong Kong face is a shortage of venues.

“You’ve only got the Fringe [Club] which has two 90-seat theatres, you’ve got the McAulay [Studio at the Hong Kong Arts Centre], which has  also only 90 seats, and then you leap from that to 400 [seats]. What we need is 200-seat theatre,” Fitsell said.

Many hope the long-talked about cultural district the Hong Kong government is planning in west Kowloon will fill the gap.

“They have been talking about it for 10 years now and still not a brick has been [laid] yet,” Fitsell said.

Money is another problem

While established companies such as the Hong Kong Players can return a surplus from its annual Christmas Pantomime, which funds smaller productions year round, many smaller groups rely on the box office returns to fund their costs, such as theatre hire, the set, costumes and rights.

The Odd Couple, the most recent production in which Fitsell participated, played the McAulay Studio in mid March and cost around HK$55,000 to put on.

True, the government-aided Fringe Club offers no-cost theatre hire, but it is closing for renovation soon.

This cost factor tends to deter companies from producing more serious productions. “When we did the award-winning play, Rabbit Hole, about a couple whose son dies, nobody came, because of the subject matter,” Fitsell said.

For more information:

Box Office:

www.ticketek.com.hk (Hong Kong Ticketing)

Companies:

www.hongkongplayers.com (Hong Kong Players)
www.hksingers.com (Hong Kong Singers)
www.acthongkong.com (ACT)
www.hkfringe.com.hk (The Fringe Club)
www.hkac.org.hk (Hong Kong Arts Centre)

]]> http://www.vox-asia.com/news/2010/05/booming-amateur-stage-acting/feed/ 0 http://www.vox-asia.com/news/2010/05/face-to-face-with-ai-weiwei/ http://www.vox-asia.com/news/2010/05/face-to-face-with-ai-weiwei/#comments Thu, 06 May 2010 14:50:59 +0000 Nini Suet http://www.vox-asia.com/news/?p=2752

Hong Kong – “Impulsiveness is the most valuable trait for human beings,” said Ai Weiwei, one of the most headline-grabbing political artists in China.

“Ultimately, impulsiveness determines your passion, your instinct and who you truly are!” Ai told a gathering of cyber-acquaintances gathered on the outdoor terrace of a popular Hong Kong watering-hole on April 12.

His guests had one thing in common: their contact with Ai — and in many cases, each other — had occurred via Twitter, the micro-blogging service that limits posts to 140 characters.

To some, Ai is an insensitive, unyielding dissident, an adamant activist whose advocacy of freedom and human rights reveal him to be nothing more than a trouble-maker of the first order.

To others, he is a passionate artist, a courageous blogger, and a heroic figure who stands firm against repressive forces around the globe.

Twitter user at Ai Weiwei's CUHK talk. Photos by Michelle Yun.

Loathed and/or loved for his unrelenting activism, Ai relies heavily on the Internet and social media tools, such as Twitter and his personal blog to communicate his views.

His online discussions and cyber-exposures of controversial subjects have been blamed for fomenting a number of “internet riots” against government cover-ups. One of the best known is his Sichuan Earthquake Names Project that  listed the names of student victims of the 2008 disaster.

Ai is @aiww on Twitter. His mission, he said, is to leap the web-filtering system in China known as the Great Firewall. He hails the Internet as the foundation for individuality.

“The emergence of the internet refined the nature of human beings,” said Ai, “you are able to select information online to make your own judgement and expression without being restrained by your social and political status ”

Against a backdrop of shimmering Hong Kong high-rises, Ai and his cyber-friends — brought together via Twitter — dined and wined away a breezy evening. Though a seemingly carefree social gathering, Ai nevertheless touched upon serious issues in China today. But he was hopeful about China tomorrow.

In a conversation with Vox Asia, Ai emphasized the important role young people in Hong Kong could play in bringing about change.

“Hong Kong is a strategically positioned political city that contains all types of conflicts between history and reality,” said Ai. “Youth here have a solid education and thorough understanding of culture, so I think they should play a more dominant role to achieve social and cultural transformation.”

View the video collage below for a snapshot of Ai’s Twitter gathering.

The informal Twitter-generated evening gathering was followed by a more formal forum at the Chinese University of Hong Kong the following day.

This face-to-face meeting with Ai attracted scores of students of all age groups from a variety of departments. Many more joined in via live streaming and tweeting:

Living up to his reputation as the most outspoken, even brusque, Chinese contemporary artist, Ai pulled no punches: Examples:

Q: “Some say that art should be art and politics should be politics?”

Ai: “In our country, everything is related to politics. We are born to be victims of politics.”

Q: “Why don’t you leave the country that you hate so much?”

Ai: “I like filthy and smelly places. I can stay in China because I cannot tolerate it –- if one day I can tolerate China, that’s when I need to emigrate.”

Q: “How do you want to be remembered?” Ai: “A 280-pound fat man who spent some crazy and hectic time in the world.”

(Photographs by Michelle Yun)

Behind its red wooden door, however, lies the headquarters of Wokai (“I Start” in Chinese), a non-profit micro-finance service, registered in Oakland, California. Its mission is to provide small loans to China’s poor in an effort to help them lift themselves out of abject poverty. An estimated 200 million Chinese survive on less than US$1.25 a day.

Dubbed the “Facebook for Farmers,” Wokai has raised US$167,414 from 976 contributors to help 341 recipients.

Inspired by the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus, who founded the micro-credit institution Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, Wokai is one of a growing number of micro-finance initiatives in China.

“Seeing China today, you have cities that are growing at such a quick rate, and the countryside is basically stagnant,” Casey Wilson, co-founder and CEO of Wokai, said in an interview. “The only way to start addressing poverty in China is to create sustainable ways of building the countryside, and I thought micro-finance is one of the only tools to do so.”

Wilson describes Wokia’s methods:

With four chapters outside China and an office in Beijing, Wokai relies on its web site for its peer-to-peer loan matching structure that allows potential lenders to browse through the profiles of pre-screened borrowers and select those they wish to help. The minimum donation is US$10.

Wilson launched Wokai in 2007 with Courtney McColgan, a fellow student at a Chinese language programme at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. The two 25-year-old Americans shared a common interest in economic development in China, and Wokai emerged as their joint vision to empower the poor through micro-loans.

“You have about 100 small micro-finance institutions (MFI) of which many are doing great work in China, but they don’t have capital to expand to more clients and increase their impact,” said Wilson.

“We thought what if we can work with these institutions and connect borrowers to contributors around the world.”

The industry benchmarking service, MicroBanking Bulletin, estimates that of the 1,084 MFIs it tracks globally, the median asset size is US$6.4 million with an average borrowing balance of US$525 and an average lending balance of US$145.

Wokai offers loans averaging approximately US$300. This, it said, it sufficient to make a difference when it comes to meaningful investment in simple business improvements or entrepreneurial ventures, such as buying additional livestock or new products.

Most of the targeted loan recipients reside in Inner Mongolia and the quake-affected Sichuan province, and nearly 90 percent of the contributions come from the U.S.

Borrowers are charged an annual interest rate of 15 to 20 percent, which is significantly lower than the International benchmark of 30 to 40 percent.

The repayments are subsequently re-distributed, according to donors’ wishes, to help others in need, and are eventually pooled into a long-term investment fund to generate new loans after three years.

“Careful field partner selection, internationally proven micro-finance best practices and detailed diligence have all been crucial in keeping the default rate low at 0.5%,” said George Xiangwen Zeng, co-president of Wokai’s Hong Kong Chapter, in an interview.

Although a pioneering venture founded on a marriage of altruistic drive and business savvy, Wokai is kept at arm’s length by the Chinese authorities.

It is prohibited from registering as a foreign non-profit entity in China and so operates under a foreign business status that allows it to solicit funds from overseas donors for distribution by the domestic field partners — but prevents it from raising funds directly within mainland China.

Despite China’s gradual relaxation of lending regulations in rural areas, grassroots micro-finance institutions have experienced only moderate success. Some industry experts have identified the lack of government involvement as the root of the problem.

“The role of government is essential to business survival in the mainland, and it’s no different to any NGO efforts,” said Clare Pearson, overseas executive editor of the philanthropy magazine, Charitarian, the only privately-owned English-language publication with official publishing licenses in both China and Hong Kong.

To tackle the access problem, Wilson is seeking a domestic NGO partnership to allow Wokai to tap the domestic donor base.

It is not alone. Other financial institutions are seeking government approval to operate within the micro-finance sector — and to raise funds within the mainland. That includes Grameen China, a joint micro-finance initiative between the Grameen Trust and e-commerce solution provider, Alibaba Group.

This is good news, Daniel Goodman, co-President of Wokai’s Beijing Chapter, said.

“Wokai functions as a capital raising intermediary with the goal to raise funds for rural poverty alleviation in China,” he said. “The entry of additional players and the further growth of micro-finance will help strengthen the industry and increase the number of potential partners we can work with in the future.”

Wilson expects the company to have recruited 10,000 donors by the end of 2010, and to hit a sustainable donor base of between 50,000 to 100,000 in the next three to five years.

“Up until now we’ve been almost exclusively volunteer-based and obviously that’s not sustainable,” said Wilson, “we’d like to reach sustainability off the revenue coming in from our web site when contributors have an option to donate an additional 10 percent to support our operating costs.”

Highlights:

• China’s online game market revenue will reach $9.2 billion by 2014 — Niko Partners
• Online gaming revenue in China seen expanding 32 percent in 2010 to US$4.7 billion from $3.6 billion — JP Morgan
• Sales of “virtual commodities” booming

Top right: Such is the lure of these MMORPGs that it it not unusual to see youngsters playing them to the brink of exhaustion. Photo by Deirdre Wang Morris.

“I had worked in India and Europe, and after I came back, I realized that Hong Kong students lack creativity, and had no interest in anything outside of Hong Kong,” he said. “That is why I set up the institution.”

The workshop is voluntary at the Pentecostal School

Law founded his Inter Cultural Education Centre (ICE) in August 2009. In the ensuing months it has conducted “creativity workshops” in two secondary schools and three universities.

Its goal is to deploy a broad range of trainers – drawn from overseas, from among Hong Kong’s local ethnic minorities and from the ranks of the disabled – to organise workshops for students to broaden their vision and encourage them to become better global citizens.

At the Pentecostal School, an Anglo-Chinese secondary school located at Ho Man Tin in Kowloon, 17 students attended the workshop on the first day. The course started on February 10 and was due to last for two months.

Few of the students demonstrated much awareness of Law’s mission.

Many said they hoped it would help them improve their English. Only one anonymous student wrote down: “I hope I can learn more knowledge about the world”.

The workshop was composed of various games and group activities.

It started with the youngsters dividing up into two rows: boys on one side and girls on the other.

Their first challenge is to ensure they got around the group and talked to every individual.

Each received a sheet of paper with questions starting: “Have you ever … Do you like … Is it true that you … “.

Their task to find out more about their fellow attendees within minutes –- and to talk to everyone in the room.

Each task is different. One requires them to form groups, design a group logo and chant, and share their values and ideas.

They have to communicate in English. They need to perform on stage. This session is conducted by a trainer from Britain and there are guests from Africa who played musical instruments.

There is no formal grading. No As, Bs or Cs.

They have to communicate in English. They need to perform on stage.

“I like this workshop, it is very different from the ordinary classes I have, but [is] full of games and fun,” said participant Thomson Chan Long Sung.

Law graduated from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2007. His partner, Susanna Yu Shu-hui, who is also a director of ICE, graduated from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2009. Many of the ICE management team are still at university.

ICE has yet to turn a profit so Law and Yu work part-time to support themselves – Law teaches English and Yu works as a management associate and wealth planner at ING Life Insurance Company (Bermuda) Ltd.

Law is worried about money. Revenues from the workshops barely cover basic costs including trainers’ salaries, website development, company registration, and marketing. “I haven’t gone shopping for a long time, neither do I socialise with friends much,” said Law.

The pair regard ICE as a social enterprise, which means a business that has a mission beyond merely making profits: either helping the underprivileged, or tackling social problems. Both Law and Yu think that ICE is working to solve one of the biggest problems in the education system in Hong Kong, which is a lack of global vision.

Their efforts have won recognition. ICE emerged as Hong Kong Social Enterprise Challenge (HKSEC) champion in early 2010, beating out 215 other teams.

“They (the ICE team) will definitely bring changes, not necessarily to the whole education system, but the learning attitudes of the Hong Kong local students,” said Mingles Tsoi, project director, HKSEC.

Yu said the social enterprise concept is not well-recognized in Hong Kong, although a public opinion poll conducted in February 2009 by The University of Hong Kong’s Public Opinion Programme shows that 59% of respondents were aware of the goals of social enterprises and were willing to pay more to support this kind of business..

Their first client, the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals Lo Kon Ting Memorial College, is Law’s alma mater, and it referred the ICE to the Pentecostal School.

Pentecostal School students allows students to decide for themselves whether or not to register.

Tsoi of the HKSEC said that the ICE project was feasible because of its inexpensive start-up costs, its rooted values and Law’s international network.

Yu does not let its financial teething problems get her down. “Definitely we are going to expand, first greater China, and then go global,” she said.