Congratulations on your prosperity, but go cautiously in the Year of the Rat
Hong Kong’s underperforming Disneyland theme park has high hopes for the Chinese Year of the Rat, which arrived in boisterous style last week. As one of the few businesses heavily invested in rodent symbolism, the creators of Mickey Mouse are offering special discounts for the New Year period and have enlisted local pop stars to serenade the crowds.
This may help Disney reach its targets, but in the wider economy caution seems to be the watchword for the Rat year. Feng shui masters come into their own as the new year gives way to the old. They issue massive almanacs of predictions and dispense advice from temple stalls for fees that range from modest to truly impressive. Mostly people ask about their love lives, but on the business side of things there appears to be a consensus that the Year of the Rat will see the economy cool; investors are advised to be prudent. It will be a year dominated by the wood element — which is good for wood-related industries, such as paper makers, Chinese-medicine producers and textile manufacturers. It’s also pretty fine for agriculture, mining and the building industry, though unfortunately Hong Kong only has the last of these.
But personal fortunes in the Rat year are largely dependent on the year of your birth. So if you were born in 1924, 1936, 1948, and so on in a 12-year cycle, pay special attention. Feng shui master Gladys Mak Ling-ling expects good fortune for rats but they are advised to keep away from high-risk investments. I’m a tiger: for me, according to Ms Mak, there is no prospect of promotion in my career but I might do well to focus on longterm investments. Also, intriguingly, there is a strong hint of frequent travel overseas.
Those who believe that precedent is a pointer to the future will be interested to know that in 1996, the last Rat year, the Hong Kong stock market rose 18 per cent and in the Rat year before that, 1984, it was up 30 per cent. But these rises pale in comparison with the Rat year of 1972, when the market rose by 232 per cent. This seems to reflect the sage advice regularly given by a seasoned Hong Kong investor when anyone asked for a hint on where the market was heading. He would appear to ponder the question and then say firmly: well, anything can happen. One of the most reliable indicators of public sentiment for the New Year is the amount of money people are prepared to put in lai see or lucky money packets. Children are the main beneficiaries of this largesse but employers dish them out to employees and you are expected to give lai see to more or less everyone who provides some kind of personal service. Anyone careless enough not to dish out a packet to, say, a doorman, can expect to become familiar with the task of opening doors for themselves and finding their own taxis on wet and windy days.
So, the question is how much to put into these packets. The Hong Kong Research Association keeps tabs on this by conducting annual surveys. It found that a clear majority of people were prepared to put a HK$20 bill in the red packets (about £1.30) but the number of people prepared to tuck in a HK$100 bill (£6.60) was down 8 per cent on last year. Indeed a brave 9 per cent of those questioned said they were planning to give nothing at all.
The rapidly declining stock market and other forms of economic uncertainty are blamed for this outbreak of lai see parsimony. But for employees the more formal New Year bonus is an integral part of their remuneration: most staff expect at least one month’s extra pay. This year’s bonuses are looking good because the previous Year of the Pig, traditionally a time for prosperity, did not disappoint and gave employers the means to be generous. In the sector I know best, the catering industry, some employees are enjoying a three-month bonus, while others are happy to get a single month’s extra because in the Dog year, which preceded the Pig year, even a month’s bonus was considered healthy as Hong Kong crawled out of a nasty economic downturn. The Chinese New Year is a positive minefield for us gweilos (literally translated as ghost people, but taken to mean foreigners) who live in Hong Kong. Unlike local Chinese who grow up knowing the dos and don’ts of the season, we have to tread carefully to avoid upsetting the feng shui that determines fortunes in the year ahead. There is, for example, no question of getting a haircut during the New Year and you need to remember that on the third day of the year, greeting people is an absolute no-no. This is Dispute Day and very bad things can happen.
Thankfully, the locals are pretty relaxed about the inabilities of gweilos to understand more or less anything Chinese. But we are expected to say kung hei fat choi like everyone else when seeing someone for the first time in the New Year. This can be literally translated as ‘congratulations on your prosperity’. Wee Kek-koon, a columnist for the Sunday Morning Post magazine, explains that the greeting originated among 19thcentury merchants in Canton whose foremost concern was making money, so they thought it appropriate to focus on this during the luckiest period of the Chinese calendar. Elsewhere in China a simple ‘Happy New Year’ will suffice but, as what’s left of China’s Maoist preoccupations are eradicated, there is growing use of the Cantonese greeting.
This really is not the time of year to mock tradition or superstitious belief. Indeed the local stockbroking arm of Paris-based Crédit Lyonnais, now rather preoccupied by other matters such as the fate of its rival SocGen, used to bring in a prominent feng shui master to produce a highly influential ‘Feng Shui Index’, which established an astonishingly good track-record for investment predictions. The Hong Kong branch has dropped this annual practice and it is left to stock analysts with their spreadsheets to fill the prediction void. It has to be said that they are not notably more successful.
Personally I am sceptical about most superstitions. But during Chinese New Year kumquat trees, which are supposed to attract prosperity, stand outside my door, on which is plastered a large poster bearing the Chinese character for good fortune. Only the foolish shun this form of insurance.
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