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Review | Ex-colonial adviser lashes post-1997 Hong Kong governments for mismanaging, but who could have done better?

Leo Goodstadt points to 20 years of failure on housing, education and ties with mainland China, and says political leaders are incompetent, out of touch, in hock to vested interests and ignore experts ... much like politicians everywhere

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Leo Goodstadt headed Hong Kong’s Central Policy Unit from 1989 to 1997. His new book pulls no punches about Hong Kong’s development since then. Photo: Jonathan Wong

A City Mismanaged: Hong Kong’s Struggle for Survival

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by Leo F. Goodstadt

Hong Kong University Press

3 stars

A City Mismanaged is policy analysis as blood sport. Leo Goodstadt needs no introduction in Hong Kong circles; those outside might need to know that he was head of the colonial Hong Kong government’s Central Policy Unit from 1989 until 1997, the year Chinese sovereignty was restored. He has penned a no-holds-barred smackdown of the four post-colonial Hong Kong administrations.

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The policy failures he focuses on – housing (a subject that Goodstadt has written about before), tertiary education and economic relations with China – should come as no great surprise to anyone who reads the newspapers, but Goodstadt recounts the trajectories in point-by-point detail.

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