While the government asked us to conserve water in view of the drought in Guangdong, I urge you to use as much water from the tap as you feel like in Hong Kong. Why? Because we’ve paid for that!

The Big Brother is charging us a lump sum of HK$3 billion every year till 2011 for the water supply from Dongjiang, no matter if we use up the agreed supply or not. We’ve already been paying around HK$ 2.5 billion annually from 2006-08 for the dirty valuable water. We also happened to have a lucky year in 2005; our local reservoirs were filled 94.64% full. We ended up pouring 1.09 hundred-millions cubic meters of fresh water into the sea, amounting to +HK$ 300 million worth of water.

Up to date, our reservoirs are 81.39% full in total. We saw a slight drop of 3% compared with the same time last year. So that’s our position. We spent billions of dollars to buy water from the Big Brother without touching our own storage. Why? Hell knows!

Of course it’s important for us to have a variety of water supplies to offset the risk of having a shitty dry year where all our reservoirs run empty. But depending solely on our Big Brother is not going to cut it. We have had a water desalination plant before, why not study other possibilities as well? Depending on water like this for our future daily use is something I don’t even want to think about.

This is Henry’s fifth guest post for The Dark Side. He is one of the founders of the Libertines Pub and also writes for Global Voices Online.