Every community has them - the questions that you just don't ask. In Hong Kong, lots of people want to know: 'Why is the sky black?' But they avoid the related question: 'Who dunnit?' The reason is easy to understand, because nearly every one of us bears part of the responsibility. If the novelist Michael Crichton were to write a thriller about Hong Kong's air quality, titled perhaps Dark City, its characters would include tycoons, their Shenzhen mistresses, earnest bureaucrats, corrupt officials, limousines with dual licence plates zooming across the border, lots of unwitting bystanders and an inconvenient legislator with a big mouth.
The legislator might be someone like Choy So-yuk, Hong Kong's Bella Abzug lookalike. On Wednesday, she asked Environment Secretary Edward Yau Tang-wah a few sharp questions, in the course of a Legislative Council session. How many factories does Hong Kong have in the Pearl River Delta? How much damage are they doing to the air? And what are we doing about it?
The context was a mid-term review of air-quality targets by the Hong Kong and Guangdong governments, released to the public on January 8. The study found that, due to undercounting of emissions in 1997 - the base year - emissions would exceed the 2010 targets by 89 per cent for respirable suspended particulates, 40 per cent for nitrogen oxides and 38 per cent for sulphur dioxide.
'It's absurd,' said the redoubtable Ms Choy, a long-standing member and former chairperson of Legco's environment panel. 'How could you only tell the public 10 years later? Now the government is saying it can make it up in terms of the percentage but not in terms of the absolute amount. And why are we not scolding our own people over there?'
Mr Yau's answer, delivered in session, repeated information that had already been made public with the release of the mid-term review. The original data from Guangdong left out such polluting industries as cement, ceramics and mining, accounting for the miscalculation.
The lack of such data is a bit like leaving the cheese out of a cheese sandwich. But the more profound omission is one of spirit. The absence of factory-based waste and air-pollutant inventories that would enable regulators and the public to clearly identify offenders suggests that nobody, on either side of the border, really wants to know. For 30 years, as Hong Kong and Guangdong developed a nimble economic compact that left both much richer, that has probably been true.
