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Mind The Gap | Opinion: Hong Kong’s tech companies need local status in China to succeed

Hong Kong’s companies are treated as foreign entities under Chinese investment laws, and that’s where Carrie Lam’s new administration must prioritise to change

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Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee penned an excoriating opinion column in the South China Morning Post earlier this month declaring that Hong Kong is a “city in decline”. She said it might be too late to reverse Hong Kong’s inability to reinvent or evolve its economy.
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Besides the malignant discordance of public discourse, which can occur in any civil society, she pointed out that Hong Kong’s misinterpretation and fixation on 50 years of “no change” in its political order and system of governance created an obsession with safeguarding its pre-1997 lifestyle, including the primacy of property development.

That obsession blinded Hong Kong’s leaders to the profound and systemic technological revolution taking place in the rest of the world, leaving the city creatively bankrupt.

I interviewed her about the same topic in February and she spoke with the same steely determination and unvarnished criticism about Hong Kong’s intellectual corruption and the banality of its response to competitive erosion.

Whether it is a result of successive government leaders’ inability to define or protect Hong Kong’s autonomy under the Basic Law or the inescapable gravity of mainland China’s economic expansion on all fronts, Hong Kong people look and feel like unaccomplished second-class citizens of China.

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Now Ip is set to join the cabinet of Hong Kong’s incoming leader Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, the woman she regularly criticised during her unsuccessful campaign for the chief executive’s job. Whether Ip’s support for change will be influential, rather than ephemeral dissent, remains to be seen. Change usually comes from an outsider or outside forces.

Grasping at economic transformation, innovation and invention is necessarily risky, expensive and frustrating. And academics who are trying to capture this elusive mix in Hong Kong have been sarcastically criticised in local media for wasting money on their attempts to “connect” ideas and create “ecosystems”.

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