WTO MC6

This is the third day of the sixth ministerial conference of the WTO. While protests, seminars, cultural activities, etc. are being staged outside the conference hall days and nights; there is still no sign of any successful negotiation inside the door.

Well, for me, no deal is a good deal, especially if it's not going to do the poor any good. Just the same as the current polictical reform in HK, status quo is better than any change that turns our political system backward.

My first "encounter" with the WTO was my one-month stay in CUHK. My job there was to organize a conference on "Beijing + 10 meets WTO + 10", i.e. how WTO is going to affect women, with an aim to remind the negotiators and advocates the gender perspective. It turns out that I left CUHK quicker than I ever thought, but my interests keep going on.

If you are living in the Kowloon side of HK and you do not read any newspaper or watch the news, you will not notice that the MC6 is going on just across the harbour. The conference and the related NGO activities (watch out, the NGOs not only stage protests, there are also a variety of other activities from cultural performance, seminars and forums, to launching of a new book) are located from Wanchai (where the official and NGO conferences locate) to Causeway Bay (base of NGO activities), i.e. the northern side of the HK Island. Other than these areas, lives of HK people are rarely disrupted.

My office is located in Central, west to Wanchai. Most of the protests are not extended to Central. However, the security measures of the building are also escaluated. Well, no surprise. Our office located at CITIBANK TOWER! But the so called "escaluated" measures are simply blocking all the entrances except one and every one has to get his/her entrance pass out in order to get into the lift lobby. I always doubt how much more secured it can get, except making us walk longer.

The security measures are more serious at my old office. I went to pick up something from EOC this morning. Where it locates? The same clusters of buildings as the one where the NGO WTO forum is, and just next block to the real conference venue. So you can imagine that it looks like a police state around the buildings. Non-office users will need to get pass the x-ray machine to get going.

There are three more days till the end of the MC6. I will drop by the Victoria Park (an interesting place in HK where old people play tai-chi, youngsters compete in ball games, people shop at the biggest local "flower market" in CNY, and political events from left to right take place) tomorrow and over the weekend to have a taste of the NGO's WTO activities. It is expected that the protests will continue to escaluate if the negotiations are not in favour of the poor.