The government has finally realised it cannot just hand out public money for so-called fung shui claims without transparent guidelines, and is in the process of drafting some in light of the claims flooding in over alleged disturbance of fung shui by construction of the express railway line to Guangzhou. Undoubtedly, this is a significant step towards regulating an area that can easily be abused due to the subjective nature of geomancy. But it makes one wonder: does that mean the government has been handing out millions of public money each year without guidelines before? How did it manage to calculate the value of damage caused by bad fung shui? Was money handed out arbitrarily just to keep a disgruntled villager happy? These questions arise quite simply because the government has not been transparent about how it decides to spend public money on claims that a public work disrupted someone's fung shui.
Hong Kong's civil service is deservedly renowned for efficient administration, which is why it is so frustrating to hear government officials say time and again that certain records were not kept or are unavailable, in tune with the stance against legislating freedom of information and archive laws. And as the South China Morning Post has already shown, the concern over transparency over such claims is not purely academic. Post investigations have established that at least HK$72 million had been paid for minor works over the past decade. In one example, a village head convinced the government to build a new bridge on the grounds that nearby public works affected his fung shui. Incidentally, the new bridge would provide vehicle access to a strip of land of which the village head owns one third.
In announcing the drafting of the guidelines, Secretary for Development, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, said the move was designed to 'enhance operational transparency'. But she then went on to refuse requests to reveal more about past handouts for alleged fung shui disruption, saying that before she would retrieve such details, she would have to first consider whether such a move was 'valuable and meaningful'. However, it was valuable and meaningful for Lam to reveal that between 2007 and last month, HK$1.24 million was handed out to conduct tun fu rituals to ward off effects of bad fung shui. Either Lam does not wish the public to know the full picture, or no-one in a large team of bureaucrats thought of creating a file to record these fung shui claims.
Neither scenario reflects well on the government, but oddly enough, it is the former which is the more preferable. One would like to think that the government keeps a detailed record of every similar compensation claim which is easily accessible to the decision-makers. Every time a fung shui claim is submitted, the decision-maker, despite not having any guidelines, can check whether compensation has been granted in similar scenarios before. Reference can be taken from those past cases as to the amount which should be awarded. One would very much hope that the government, even without guidelines, has been compensating such claims under some systematic order. But if, as Lam has implied, records are so hard to retrieve, then one is left concluding that public money has been handed out arbitrarily. One villager could have received a paltry sum, while another in a different village could have received 10 times more for a similar scenario, because he was more persistent, or worse still, more important or influential. The government needs to provide a full account of how such claims were handed out to convince us we are not living in a lawless society.