Mind the Gap | How should Hong Kong ‘drain the swamp’?
The convictions of Hong Kong officials Donald Tsang and Rafael Hui with property tycoon Thomas Kwok shows how high the developer-official collusion has climbed.
When Kellyanne Conway, current counsellor to the President of the US, joined the Trump campaign last year she remarked to the candidate Donald Trump “that he should be polling stronger because he was running against a joyless candidate.”
In Hong Kong’s race for Chief Executive, we are confronted with joyless candidates, joyless policies and a joyless election.
A long suffering and forgotten section of the population yearns for solutions, with or without democratic elections. Yet only the underclass in the US manages to overturn the system in the most subversive election ever. But even as a special administrative region, none of the candidates have elaborated about hopeful quality of life or positive business policies.
I’m still looking for a good speech from one of them: engaging, interesting, showing us their heart and what they truly care about. Instead, I’ve seen more passionate interviews for the manager position of a convenience store.
Twenty years running and there is still no solution to a real estate problem that is easily solved if political leadership existed.
The call to “Make America Great” or “America First” doesn’t resonate in this city. Hong Kong is the most expensive housing market in the world for the seventh year in a row. The median home price was 18.1 times the median annual pretax household income last year, according to a recent annual report from Demographia.
No wonder foreign business people say Hong Kong has lost its zing. Like a marathon poker session, Hong Kong’s property game has concluded. A small number of winners hold all the chips while the rest of the population and economy must bear a heavy price.
