Mind the Gap | Opinion: Hong Kong’s tech companies need local status in China to succeed
Hong Kong’s companies are treated as foreign entities under Chinese investment laws, and that’s where Carrie Lam’s new administration must prioritise to change
Besides the malignant discordance of public discourse, which can occur in any civil society, she pointed out that Hong Kong’s misinterpretation and fixation on 50 years of “no change” in its political order and system of governance created an obsession with safeguarding its pre-1997 lifestyle, including the primacy of property development.
That obsession blinded Hong Kong’s leaders to the profound and systemic technological revolution taking place in the rest of the world, leaving the city creatively bankrupt.
I interviewed her about the same topic in February and she spoke with the same steely determination and unvarnished criticism about Hong Kong’s intellectual corruption and the banality of its response to competitive erosion.
Whether it is a result of successive government leaders’ inability to define or protect Hong Kong’s autonomy under the Basic Law or the inescapable gravity of mainland China’s economic expansion on all fronts, Hong Kong people look and feel like unaccomplished second-class citizens of China.
Grasping at economic transformation, innovation and invention is necessarily risky, expensive and frustrating. And academics who are trying to capture this elusive mix in Hong Kong have been sarcastically criticised in local media for wasting money on their attempts to “connect” ideas and create “ecosystems”.
