Jake's View | Why is Hong Kong upset about an export industry that doesn’t exist? Look to Beijing for the answer
Hong Kong doesn’t have an aluminium industry. I doubt these domestic metal exports represent anything but paperwork subterfuge to make China’s contentious trade surplus with the US look smaller.
The Hong Kong government and industry players lashed out yesterday at Washington’s plan to impose tariffs on aluminium imports from the mainland and the city, which has been dragged into escalating Sino-US trade tensions. - SCMP, February 28
I have an updated version of the Pokemon Go game for you. Let’s see if you can find Hong Kong’s aluminium products export industry. Big prizes on offer.
Go on. It should be easy. I accept that you will not find one of the giant smelters that turns bauxite ore into aluminium ingots. Any of these, with their huge demands for electricity, would be uneconomic in Hong Kong.
But this still leaves you with lots of possibilities for mini plants that turn empty aluminium soft drink cans into window sidings, or air conditioning vanes.
And even if we are not talking of melting and repouring the stuff, surely we must have plenty of shops that cut and bend aluminium into shape for the aluminium-based products that we manufacture and export to the United States.
Get on the hunt. There are big prizes, as I say. If a threat to this crucial Hong Kong industry so angers our government and “industry players” that they “lashed out” at a US proposal to impose tariffs, then it must be easy to find their places of work. Haul out your smartphone and let’s play Aluminium Go.
It is to laugh. What we have here, of course, is the usual deliberate confusion of domestic exports and re-exports.
