The Farewell skilfully depicts the modern Asian-American experience and is also surprisingly political: the theme of a ‘good lie’ is a metaphor for the collective delusion of living under the Chinese Communist Party.

Lack of funding, inadequate venues and the consistent import of productions from abroad are some of the reasons Hong Kong theatre isn't making an impact abroad.

Despite being described as a "world city", Hong Kong is failing to support or promote any of its theatre-makers at home and abroad. Many say this is because the city is run by bureaucrats; others feel it is due, in large part, to the lack of space and the high financial risk involved in first-time productions.

It came as no surprise when "too revealing" female flight attendant uniforms landed Cathay Pacific in yet another dispute with their employees.

Last week, it was announced that 25-year-old Hong Kong-born Birdy Cheng Yu-pang had acquired a place on the Mars One project, a one-way expedition to establish a "self-sustaining colony" by 2025 on the red planet. Given Cheng's belief that planet earth is polluted and hopeless, does this mission to Mars suggest a widely shared dissatisfaction with life?

There's something in the air, but it's not the smell of the approaching holiday season. Rather, it's the unwelcome return of smog which for the past week has hung over Hong Kong like a viscous cloak of invisibility. Recently, the concentration of one out of the four most threatening air pollutants, nitrogen dioxide, rose to 231.8 micrograms per cubic metre in Central, a level of concentration the World Health Organisation deems toxic and a cause of severe respiratory illness.

A little over three decades ago, the global perception was that China's contemporary art scene was virtually non-existent.

This month, Hong Kong has witnessed a worrying number of cases of individuals arrested after entering the city with large amounts of drugs. 

Jingan Young says plan to draw students from China and elsewhere fails to tackle lack of jobs.

Last week, Narcotics Commissioner Erika Hui Lam Yin-ming relayed the results from the Central Registry of Drug Abuse survey of local and international school students. Rather predictably, the number of reported and new drug users aged under 21 last year dropped by 20 per cent and 21 per cent, respectively, in comparison to 2011.

The path taken by the government and other public institutions to control drinking-related accidents and crime takes the form of stone-walling the consumer's choice: drinking in public.