Why UK not in HSBC's credit card promotion programme?
Decided to check out HSBC's recently marketed Home & Away promotions, which has its own website page. We are greeted by 'HSBC credit, the one card for home and away.' The idea is that we flourish our HSBC credit card in the numerous countries listed and are entitled to discounts. OK, so let's see what there is in Britain. We look under Europe and are shown the top five countries: Greece, Malta, Poland, Russia, and Turkey. So we click on 'other destinations', and another 50 countries roll into view - Jersey, Ireland, Kosovo ... but still no Britain. So with all the speculation over the positioning of HSBC's headquarters, could Britain's omission be a kind of corporate Freudian slip?
But we gather the omission is deliberate. The product was started in Asia and is being rolled out around the world, but appears for the moment to have encountered copyright problems in Britain. As one reader puts it: 'I applaud HSBC's widely stated ambition to be 'the world's local bank', but might it not be prudent for them to make sure that the United Kingdom is a bigger part of their strategy than, say, San Marino or Libyan Arab Jamahiriya?'
Making sport of NPC-speak
Every year the annual National People's Congress provides sport for netizens who collect quotes of NPC deputies and publish the most shocking on the internet. These remarks, as the People's Daily Online observes, are jokingly referred to as leiyu, or 'thunderous remarks', reflecting the stunning effect of a particularly crass remark.
These days, the website says, what happens in the Great Hall of the People, where the NPC is staged, no longer stays in the hall, thanks to live broadcasts of press conferences on the internet and blogs and so on.