This is an excerpt from David Webb’s newsletter today:
Thought for the day: after locking up hundreds of tourists in a hotel to boost the tourism industry/in the vain hope of isolating HK from swine flu, we are now the only territory in the world to shut down all schools, ironically at the same time as announcing plans to make HK an education hub by dolling out land to “private universities”. Is the government giving up on our public universities? How can you build a university with only 200,000 sq ft of floor area anyway - equivalent to about 10 floors of the Cheung Kong Centre? Meanwhile HK Disneyland responds to the kindergarten/primary shutdown by launching a special unlimited entry pass for children before the end of June. At least, we thought, there is some entrepreneurialism left in HK, albeit imported. But not so fast - lest we forget, this is the world’s only Government-owned Disneyland. The offer no longer appears on the Disney web site.
It just seems to me that the Hong Kong government has been telling people that they are pushing some industries to grow, but at the end most end up dying… Since the Tung Chee Wa’s era, we have seen: dot com, Chinese medicine, Islamic finance, wine trading, etc. But none of them are really prospering at the moment. Hong Kong government really need to think hard why this is happening. Are the policies too short-sighted? Has the government spent enough resources in promoting these industries? Maybe the environment in HK is really stifling the entrepreneurial spirits that were founded in HK thirty years ago?
