Nothing had prepared the people of Hong Kong for the abrupt reversal in their fortunes that was to overtake them in this century. Adversity began with the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis but the economic downturn did not create the calamity that followed. The worst damage was social, where disaster was to be deep and prolonged. For the first time in decades, poverty became widespread. The numbers of workers who ‘despite working hard’, the government admitted, ‘consistently cannot earn reasonable salaries to satisfy the basic needs of themselves and their families’ was to reach almost 200,000.¹

Panic and helplessness paralysed...

Hong Kong did not deserve to suffer disaster in 1997. Its economic environment remained as attractive as ever, and it was underwritten by an excellent infrastructure, much of it technically breath-taking, a firmly probusiness government and an honest and efficient administration. Hong Kong stood high in global rankings as an international financial centre, as a source of manufactured products and as a telecommunications and transport hub. Its people seemed ideally suited to a capitalist regime.

Hong Kong’s fortunes collapsed during the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis, nevertheless, and its government and business leaders never recovered from the trauma. A World...

Hong Kong has always been a deeply ‘pro-establishment’ society. Support for democratic reforms has never meant a call for radical change. Most people share the same commitment to ‘small government, low taxation’ as officials and the business and professional elite. The average household would rather go hungry than seek Comprehensive Social Security Assistance (CSSA) when they lose their jobs (as the data in Chapter 6 will show). And the elderly have been even more reluctant to rely on social security benefits (as Chapter 6 will also show). The public have deep respect for the law and the courts, for the...

A family’s quality of life depends very heavily on the comfort and convenience of its housing. Hong Kong’s misfortune is that its homes are where its Third World legacy is most intractable. The housing stock’s defects are often so serious that they threaten health and safety. They have grown beyond the ability of individual families to remedy. The bill to be paid by contemporary society for past neglect has become both onerous and inescapable. Housing is also the challenge which Hong Kong’s rulers have consistently underestimated in the past. The third Chief Executive, Leung Chun-ying, called Hong Kong ‘a modern,...

Contemporary Hong Kong is paying a heavy price for the misguided government decisions on social expenditure made decades ago. In the 1940s and 1950s, the colonial administration and its partners in the business and professional elite insisted that the million people who flooded into Hong Kong after World War II had no right to health or welfare services. They were transients, not even refugees, the colonial administration argued, and they would return to the Mainland once the civil war was over and a stable government was in power.

As a result, officials tried to delay as long as possible the...

No matter how stubbornly the government had resisted increased social expenditure and how firmly it had collaborated with the business and professional elite in rejecting social reforms until the 1970s, the development of health, education and welfare services could not be suppressed indefinitely. The government had eventually accepted responsibility for providing more and better public housing and social services. This commitment was not to last, however. In the new century, not only did the government seek to limit its social responsibilities but the reforms of the last two decades were deliberately reversed.

A dismantling got under way of the social...

Comprehensive Social Security Assistance (CSSA) has become the key issue which defines the limits of the community’s compassion. In this century, because families had shrunk in size and life expectancies had lengthened, CSSA had to fill the gap created by the repeated refusal in previous decades to set up a system of social insurance to protect the average family against the financial burdens of illness, disability, unemployment, retirement and old age. CSSA has been under constant attack since it was launched in 1993. The general conviction was that ‘every poor person is poor because of a defect in his/her character’,...

The people of Hong Kong are ‘more demanding, better organized, better resourced, and better able to articulate their interests’ than ever before, a well-known political scientist has observed. Public hospital patients, public housing tenants, the elderly and the disabled all have organisations to lobby on their behalf and to protest against mistreatment and neglect by the government, he pointed out.¹ Yet, the political system has been able to evade the public’s demands on social issues with almost total impunity.

No group in the legislature is in the business of promoting welfare for its own sake. The ‘pan-democrats’ are usually labelled...

This book has described a severe decline in the wellbeing of the community and the rise of a new form of poverty. The defining feature of poverty in contemporary Hong Kong is that it cannot be blamed on economic recession, currency collapse, trade protectionism overseas, loss of competitiveness, political unrest or industrial or social strife. Hong Kong has escaped all such threats to its prosperity, chapter after chapter have demonstrated. This society has remained a model of political maturity and social discipline even though social reforms introduced in earlier decades have been dismantled as the government retreated from its responsibilities...