Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying (梁振英) has been dogged by scandal from his first days in office and his personal integrity is routinely impugned by much of the public. It is no surprise that his popularity is plummeting.
Leung has only himself to blame. He seems incapable of connecting with ordinary Hong Kong citizens, instead coming across as a shifty politician who often dodges direct questions, offers vague answers and evades responsibility for major failings by apologizing for minor shortcomings.
Leung staked his reputation on being able to tame Hong Kong’s absurdly inflated property market and has failed miserably. Indeed, Hong Kong is now the most expensive city on the planet. It takes at least 13.5 years of mean household income to buy an average home, according to one recent international survey. The comparable figure for London and New York is 7.8 years and 6.2 years respectively.
Rising property prices are making middle-class home owners multimillionaires, while their children — even with a good university degree — can hardly afford private housing without parental help.
Leung has advocated that young people leave Hong Kong to work in less-expensive countries.
Leung came into his job with a self-destructive attitude. Like his mentor, Tung Chee-hwa (董建華), Hong Kong’s first chief executive after its return to China, Leung harbors a deep antipathy toward the British and the professional civil service, a legacy of colonialism.
He adheres to the Maoist idea that a country is divided between “the people” and their “enemies” (never mind that he was the youngest and first Chinese partner in a British property-surveyor firm in Hong Kong, and that Tung studied nautical engineering in the UK).
However, treating the civil service as a potential enemy was clearly stupid, because only the civil servants know how the government actually works.
Neither Tung nor Leung had any operational government experience, which was most clearly demonstrated in their indifferent attitude toward public appointments. The anti-corruption police arrested Mak Chai-kwong (麥齊光), Leung’s first secretary of development, only 12 days after he was appointed. His successor, Paul Chan Mo-po (陳茂波), was soon exposed as a one-time slum-lord.
The information that undermined both officials had been buried deep in official documents, and could have surfaced only because someone, or some group, in the civil service with access decided that it would be best to leak it.
In Tung’s administration, two Cabinet secretaries also had to quit following damaging disclosures. With a couple of notable exceptions, the mediocrity of most of Leung’s appointees elicited sighs even from his political allies.
The same incompetence is at the root of his failure to deflate the property bubble. While he has announced grandiose plans to increase the future supply of land for development and has increased stamp duty twice, the market has figured out that he does not understand that he needs to manage expectations by removing obstacles in the current development pipeline.
His measures have increased prices while shrinking the number of transactions — precisely the opposite of what is needed.
One major roadblock that Leung fails to appreciate is caused by an obscure 1981 UK Privy Council ruling, Hang Wah Chong Investment Co Ltd v Attorney General of Hong Kong, which gave the government unlimited authority to behave as a revenue-maximizing private monopolist.
Thus empowered, the civil service has been behaving without regard to the public interest, as delays shrink supply, while boosting prices. A substantial amount of floor space would have been available already if government authority were exercised responsibly.
Yet, the same law could allow the chief executive to instruct the civil service to act to minimize social damage. Maximizing public revenue is not always consistent with the goal of social and economic stability. After all, Hong Kong is facing a clear and present danger that the property bubble will end in tears for many.
Dissatisfaction with this state of affairs is not confined to the powerless.
Victor Li Tzar-kuoi (李澤鉅), the son of Hong Kong’s most powerful property baron, Li Ka-shing (李嘉誠), astonished the public recently, saying in court testimony that it was a “painful experience” to deal with the government’s imperious Urban Renewal Authority.
Another roadblock is the Hong Kong dollar’s exchange-rate peg to the US dollar under the antiquated currency-board arrangement, a colonial relic still used by Gibraltar, the Falklands Islands and St Helena (territories with a combined population of roughly 40,000). Under this system, the US Federal Reserve in Washington sets Hong Kong’s interest rates and money supply.
The mantra since the handover to China in 1997 has been that this system has served Hong Kong well.
However, the high rate of asset inflation in Hong Kong is due partly to an undervalued currency, set at HK$7.8 to US$1 since 1983 (though allowed to trade within a narrow band between HK$7.75 and HK$7.85 since 2005). Market forces have set the real effective exchange rate by jacking up asset prices.
Hong Kong, a trading economy par excellence, thrives on market forces. Yet its policymakers remain frozen on the issue of the exchange rate.
The betting in Hong Kong today is that, unless Leung can somehow reboot his administration, he is likely to follow Tung in leaving office before his term expires.
Sin-ming Shaw, a former fellow at University of Oxford, is an investor based in Asia and Argentina.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
China’s recent aggressive military posture around Taiwan simply reflects the truth that China is a millennium behind, as Kobe City Councilor Norihiro Uehata has commented. While democratic countries work for peace, prosperity and progress, authoritarian countries such as Russia and China only care about territorial expansion, superpower status and world dominance, while their people suffer. Two millennia ago, the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius (孟子) would have advised Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that “people are the most important, state is lesser, and the ruler is the least important.” In fact, the reverse order is causing the great depression in China right now,
We are used to hearing that whenever something happens, it means Taiwan is about to fall to China. Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) cannot change the color of his socks without China experts claiming it means an invasion is imminent. So, it is no surprise that what happened in Venezuela over the weekend triggered the knee-jerk reaction of saying that Taiwan is next. That is not an opinion on whether US President Donald Trump was right to remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro the way he did or if it is good for Venezuela and the world. There are other, more qualified
This should be the year in which the democracies, especially those in East Asia, lose their fear of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “one China principle” plus its nuclear “Cognitive Warfare” coercion strategies, all designed to achieve hegemony without fighting. For 2025, stoking regional and global fear was a major goal for the CCP and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA), following on Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) Little Red Book admonition, “We must be ruthless to our enemies; we must overpower and annihilate them.” But on Dec. 17, 2025, the Trump Administration demonstrated direct defiance of CCP terror with its record US$11.1 billion arms
The immediate response in Taiwan to the extraction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by the US over the weekend was to say that it was an example of violence by a major power against a smaller nation and that, as such, it gave Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) carte blanche to invade Taiwan. That assessment is vastly oversimplistic and, on more sober reflection, likely incorrect. Generally speaking, there are three basic interpretations from commentators in Taiwan. The first is that the US is no longer interested in what is happening beyond its own backyard, and no longer preoccupied with regions in other
RSS