Then & Now | How Hong Kong’s Covid-19 quarantine camps could be repurposed after the pandemic – World War II history offers examples
- China recently stepped in to build Covid-19 quarantine camps to help Hong Kong during its fifth wave of infections
- These camps will be put to other uses after the pandemic, just as the city’s World War II camps were repurposed
Desperate times, the truism wearily maintains, call for desperate measures. Hong Kong has finally proved to be no exception, as the Covid-19 pandemic trudges inexorably into its third year globally and, locally, enters its fifth (and almost certainly not final) wave.
In recent weeks, Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor has repeatedly invoked stirring wartime analogies, and other steel-spined, resolute metaphors, in the city’s ongoing “fight” against the virus. This recently discovered “Blitz Spirit”, belatedly embraced by Hong Kong’s own general officer commanding and her cadre of peacetime-promoted, depot-grade staff officers, must be welcomed.
Especially so, after the serially disheartening succession of false starts, shattered hopes and broken promises that Hong Kong has experienced in recent years, followed by the “phoney war” interlude, when precious little vital preparation against a much stronger enemy lurking just beyond the gates was even attempted.
One can only wish them well, and fervently hope that, at long last, Hong Kong’s long-suffering people can feel – as British prime minister Winston Churchill memorably declaimed after Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s decisive North African victory at El Alamein in 1942 – “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
When menaced by “hostile external forces” such as Omicron, no beleaguered wartime commander – even one of Lam’s unquestionable competence and imagination – can achieve much without the unremitting logistical support of reliable allies.
As we have witnessed, the sheer scale and diversity of assistance Hong Kong has recently received from mainland China is extraordinary. As if an all-powerful wizard’s wand had been suddenly waved, sizeable expanses of previously impossible-to-find vacant land – all in out-of-the-way locations – were identified and made available, virtually overnight.