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Shades Off | Hong Kong’s Covid-19 rules are symbolic of wider obstacles to progress
- Hong Kong losing its thunder to Singapore is one matter; the perception that it is stuck in the past and not foreigner-friendly is more disconcerting
- Our city is world class at building infrastructure, but seemingly incapable of resolutely improving lives. This must change under the new administration
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The word “progress” is defined as “development towards an improved or more advanced condition”. I’ve lived in Hong Kong since the late 1980s and while technology has made life easier, I can’t say things have got better for the majority.
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The problems of then still seem to be largely with us now, with the economy at the top of the heap, followed by housing, care for the elderly and disadvantaged, and the search for talent, and extending through matters like racial discrimination, rubbish disposal and recycling. I have a sense that the place once billed as “Asia’s world city” is stagnating, even regressing – rather than moving forward.
Obviously, a comparison of pictures of then and now shows there are more and taller buildings. The MTR has expanded from three lines to nine and from a few tens of stations to 98. Victoria Harbour, once heavily polluted and largely inaccessible from land, is clean enough for an annual swimming competition and has waterside paths and parks.
There’s the airport at Chek Lap Kok, the West Kowloon Cultural District and tourist attractions ranging from the Geopark, Disneyland and the Big Buddha to the Ngong Ping 360 cable car and the Observation Wheel on the Central waterfront.
Ambitious development plans have been laid out for the New Territories and Lantau. All manner of promises have been made to build more public housing, improve hospital services and make Hong Kong greener and cleaner. But first, the government has to move beyond its mindset that Covid-19 is still a threat and start treating it as endemic and requiring vaccine boosters, as much of the rest of the world beyond China is doing.
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The impact of social distancing restrictions that include hotel quarantine for arrivals, mandatory mask-wearing in public, use of tracking and tracing apps, and limits on venue capacity and business hours can be seen in the gross domestic product data for the second quarter of this year.
Growth was down 1.3 per cent from a year earlier, better than the 3.9 per cent contraction for the previous quarter, but dragging down the forecast for 2022 to the range of -0.5 to 0.5 per cent. Compare this with the data of the city’s decades-long regional rival, Singapore, which has all but removed its coronavirus restrictions. Its economy grew 4.4 per cent year on year for the second quarter, and its growth range for the year is 3 to 4 per cent.
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