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Inside Out & Outside In
OpinionComment
David Dodwell
David Dodwell

Hong Kong’s economy is reeling from the one-two blow of local protests and US-China trade conflict, but it will survive

  • The impact of the unrest has been quick and devastating, especially on tourist business, but the city has lived through worse crises
  • Longer-term damage from the trade war is more of a worry, but Hong Kong is not alone in this

Reading Time:4 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
Demonstrators stand in front of a shuttered mall in the Causeway Bay district of Hong Kong on October 7. Short-term harm inflicted by the protests is already severe, and is likely to get worse before recovery becomes possible. Photo: Bloomberg
David Dodwell
To all those in Hong Kong and overseas who are asking whether, or how severely, our summer upheavals will harm business, the answers are simple: there can be no “business as usual” as long as violence persists; the profoundly underwhelming policy address will do nothing to rebuild business confidence; for now, harm is short term rather than structural, and; for the real long-term dangers to our economy, we should look further afield, to the US-China trade conflict and the looming prospect of global recession.
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For those of us kept waiting all summer for the policy address to provide initiatives that would calm anxieties and begin the rebuilding process, Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s mercifully brief video presentation was a masterpiece in fudge and procrastination.

I get a sense, when we eventually manage to add up the different housing and land supply initiatives that dominated the address, that we will find a package that could eliminate the queue for public housing by 2025.

The nearest we got to a visionary statement along these lines was in paragraph 12: “I hereby set a clear objective that every Hong Kong citizen and his family will no longer have to be troubled by or preoccupied by the housing problem, and that they will be able to have their own home in Hong Kong, a city in which we all have a share.”

If this had been British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s policy address, the prose would have been different, and would have led every news report on Thursday: “I promise you today that by 2025, the queue of 270,000 Hong Kong people waiting for their own homes will be gone. We have a menu of policies to deliver, and I will die in a ditch rather than fail you.”

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