Then & Now | Hong Kong has lost its mojo. We all know why. ‘Night Vibes Hong Kong’ campaign to re-energise nightlife can’t change that
- Official efforts to revive Hong Kong nightlife won’t work when Chinese tourists have no need for overpriced hotel rooms and residents have so many alternatives
- But Hong Kong hasn’t lost its mojo merely because its people – those that haven’t emigrated of late – spend their money in Shenzhen, Japan or Thailand
From the 1950s to the 1980s, Hong Kong’s vibrant, internationally famed nightlife scene owed its very existence to the absence of comparable regional equivalents.
Tokyo and Osaka were nigh impossible for non-Japanese speakers, Manila and Bangkok were raunchy and sleazy, Singapore put itself to bed early, and by the early ’50s, the Communist assumption of power in mainland China had extinguished Shanghai’s once mind-boggling plethora of nocturnal recreational possibilities.
Those who could do so decamped in droves to the British colony and, in their new locale, recreated much of what they had unwillingly left behind.
“Night Vibes Hong Kong”, the latest desperate-looking official endeavour to magic up creative solutions to obvious economic problems, neatly sidesteps any real attempt to honestly examine just why these challenges exist in the first place.
Much as one cannot awaken someone who pretends to be asleep, so it would appear with the latest raft of underwhelming suggestions to “revitalise” and “re-energise” Hong Kong’s flagging nightlife industry.
