A survey released in mid-May by the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong said 42 percent of its members were considering leaving Hong Kong in the next three to five years, mostly because of misgivings about Beijing’s push for national security laws in Hong Kong starting in late June last year.
Among the various expatriates, the business community is considered to be the last to hold out. After all, Hong Kong was once a paradise for people, with a mix of Chinese and foreigners, and a mix of all five sides. It has been said that Hong Kong attracts people from all over the world because of its many “world firsts”. In addition to being known as the world’s number one in life expectancy, cost of living, average education expenditure, and insurance, it also has the world’s busiest cross-border railroad and the world’s largest single airport cargo terminal. The Global Financial Centre Index ranks Hong Kong consistently in the top five among more than 100 financial centers in the world according to five categories of competitiveness: business environment, human capital, infrastructure, financial industry development standards, reputation and overall assessment.
The fact that such excellent business conditions can no longer retain foreign businessmen can only mean that the harm brought by the Hong Kong version of the national security law to Hong Kong has exceeded all the advantages of Hong Kong. The Hong Kong version of the national security law is tantamount to announcing to the world that Hong Kong is no longer a free port with great inclusiveness. Inclusiveness, the greatest characteristic of this international free port, has been gradually disappearing though little by little in the last 20 years or so, but the introduction of the Hong Kong version of the national security law has deprived everyone of the room for illusion.
For the media, Hong Kong’s inclusiveness is freedom of the press, but freedom of the press has been gradually eroded since the 2010s. According to Reporters Without Borders’ annual Global Press Freedom Index ranking, Hong Kong ranked 18th out of 180 countries and territories in 2002 and 70th in 2015, slipping into the zone of partial loss of freedom. In its 2021 report, the agency noted that since the implementation of national security laws in Hong Kong in June 2020, China has been able to intervene directly in Hong Kong, posing a serious threat to the local press, and has now fallen to 80th place.
Reporters Without Borders specifically mentions in the report that the Hong Kong government arrested and prosecuted Apple Daily founder Lai Chi-ying under the national security law, and that Hong Kong’s public broadcaster, Radio Television Hong Kong, is being intimidated by the government across the board.
Beijing did not consider why Hong Kong is attractive
In the eyes of academics, Hong Kong once had a valuable academic freedom. The existence and disappearance of the University Service Centre (USC) at CUHK is a testament to how Hong Kong’s inclusiveness has gone from strength to weakness and back to nothing. Founded in 1963 as the home base of Western China researchers during the Cold War, the Centre was incorporated into CUHK in 1988 and renamed the China Studies Service Centre, with the most comprehensive library of contemporary China studies, known as the “Mecca of China Studies”. “I visited the Center for a short time in 1997, and its collection was a treasure for post-1949 China researchers.
Hong Kong was once seen by international investors as a gateway to mainland China without political risk. Low taxes and complete financial services facilities, an independent judiciary and a free media environment all made Hong Kong particularly attractive. Beijing has always wanted Hong Kong to remain a financial center, and the Hong Kong government has wanted to maintain its economic prosperity, but it has largely never considered what exactly makes Hong Kong attractive. Beijing, accustomed to controlling everything, has usurped Hong Kong’s freedom of the press, academic freedom, and deprived Hong Kong people of their freedom of assembly, and finally, in the name of eliminating subversion, secession and sedition, has completely undermined the international commitment to the implementation of one country, two systems until 2047 by passing a Hong Kong version of the National Security Law. All of this, of course, has affected the international business community’s perception of Hong Kong’s business environment, leading to the survey described at the beginning of this article.
Young Chinese today cannot possibly understand why the Chinese viewed Hong Kong as a paradise when there was a wave of flight from Hong Kong; they do not even understand that it was Hong Kong and Taiwan capital that fueled China’s reform and opening up in the early 1980s. In the war of words, they even forget the fact that whenever natural or man-made disasters occurred in the mainland, Hong Kong people always gave generously to help. History’s greatest mockery of the Chinese is the fact that the Western world opened its doors to China, not only failed to democratize China, but helped the Communist Party rise to power, and lost a Hong Kong that had hosted countless Chinese refugees and was extremely tolerant.
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