Dai Pai Dongs are the street side noodle stalls found in every Asian City with a Chinese population. The government of Hong Kong is trying to do away with them here. As an editorial in the South China Morning Post pointed out today, the attempt is another example of bureaucratic stupidity.
Sure the stalls can be a bit of a nuisance. That’s why they are licensed. Yes, they tend to attract complaints about hygiene but nobody knows how many of those complaints are the result of government harrassment. What they are, that cannot be measured, is a tourist attraction. They contribute to the sense a visitor has that he or she is in a Chinese City. They contribute to this feeling in ways that all the malls, tall office buildings, Disneylands and fancy, expensive restaurants can’t.
As I’ve said in other postings, if Hong Kong wants to attract high spending tourists from other than the China Mainland, they have to provide attractions that mark Hong Kong as an exotic place. Singapore has its outdoor food marts, yet the Hong Kong government is trying to kill off something that has a similar ambiance.
Dai Pai Dongs licenses can only be passed on to spouses, which means eventually they will disappear. In a recent missed opportunity to show some common sense, the government refused to allow a Dai Pai Dong run by the owner’s children that had been operating for 40+ years to renew its license when the owner died.
This is just one example, among many, of the government’s inability and/or unwillingness to recognize that a city’s attraction for tourists is not it’s newness but it’s quaintness.
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