Car-crazy Hongkongers are known to pay astronomical amounts for personalized licence plates. The rich and famous of the region have been paying millions of Hong Kong dollars for years to get fancy little plates of their own.

A plate that read "I Love U" fetched the highest price, HK$1.4 million (US$179,000), this year. And if that wasn't enough, crooner-actor Aaron Kwok paid HK$250,000 (US$32,051) for a plate with his name "Aaron," followed by a man who got a "Handsome" tag for his car for "just" HK$130,000 (US$16,666).

You may consider this a sheer waste of money. Or, you could view it with indifference. And of course, you could say there's nothing wrong with the wealthy having fun with their own money, especially if it's in support of a "cause."

Yes! The money from this year's auction is to be spent helping charities.

Two hundred-odd licence plates were up for grabs at the Hong Kong auction earlier this year. They fetched an amazing HK$11 million (US$1.4 million).

And the news was rightly (or wrongly, depending on which way you look at it) all over the place from newspapers to television and magazines to the Internet.

But Hongkongers, it seems, have company at last. Their brethren in one of the seven ancient capitals of China, Kaifeng, are making a similar wave.

But no brouhaha has followed even after the city's personalized licence scheme has earned 100 million yuan (US$12.75 million) since it was introduced last year.

Sure, there are differences between the two. You have the rich and famous as the players in Hong Kong, and you have the media to splash it all across their portals (no pun intended).

But with a new system in place now, some not-so-rich indulge in the "self-aggrandizement game," too. And for others, it's a matter of being "creative" with words.

To each his own thought!

But it's true that you have to create a licence plate with eight letters or numbers, and pay HK$5,000 (US$641) to the Hong Kong government to reserve the plate that will be put on auction. What's more, a licence plate registered with a company may be held forever. The only stipulation is that you have to register it with a car within a year.

The system in Kaifeng is perhaps akin to the one followed in several US states. A person just has to walk into the motor vehicle department office and choose a number. If the plate is not on the road, he or she gets it by paying a certain amount.

But all the same, the craze has caught on in Kaifeng, with hundreds, if not thousands, of people from outside flocking the city to get a personalized plate. Nothing wrong with that, especially if the money earned from registration of new numbers increases by as much as 40 per cent in a year.

Wait a minute! Forty per cent more vehicles on the road! Doesn't that mean more pollution?

It's heartening to see the Hong Kong government and the people holding auctions to help charities. The gesture could only be welcomed, for there cannot be a better cause than serving the people.

But won't we be serving them better by guaranteeing their, and our, children a better future by ensuring that they inherit a cleaner, if not absolutely clean, environment?

(China Daily 12/01/2006 page4)