You'll need more than an umbrella

Hong Kong's culture of defenestration

“New York rain” is the local term for water that drips, annoyingly, from air-conditioners onto passers-by. In Hong Kong unwary pedestrians face more dangerous precipitation. On July 22nd a 78-year-old woman was rushed to hospital after a pair of scissors, hurled from a multi-storey building, lodged in her skull. The same day, a 28-year-old man in another part of the city suffered cuts after another pair of scissors hit him on the head, while a boy survived a brush with an iron bar lobbed from yet another high-rise window.

Despite all the modern sanitation at their disposal, many Hong Kong citizens still seem to prefer chucking rubbish out of the nearest window. As any housing estate resident will confirm, as well as a regular rain of beer cans and cigarette butts, other objects—used packets of Viagra, dirty cat litter, glass bottles, mattresses and even refrigerators—also fly past the window. Much of this is plain bad manners. But some also blame rising inequality for the downpour, which appears to be getting worse. Much of the object-throwing takes place in the city's public housing estates, where many of Hong Kong's poorer people live cramped together in tiny apartments. Many of their shoddily constructed buildings are crumbling: among the most common objects falling out of windows last summer were the windows themselves. As a result, the government had to spend HK$68m ($9m) on emergency maintenance of its housing.

Though the economy's recovery since the panic over the respiratory disease SARS in 2003 has lifted living standards, the fortunes of workers have lagged behind those of the middle classes. If people cannot heave their political masters out of office, they can at least heave a broken television out of the window. Given the mainland's far greater economic and social disparities, the authorities in Beijing must be hoping that this is one trend that does not spread north.

- Economist, 3 August 2006