Devaluation of HK residency
In the old days, being a Hong Konger was a symbolic identity people looked up to.
According to the Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI), Hong Kong ranked in the top three most competitive financial markets worldwide, and was best known for its liquidity, transparency, stability and effective regulatory standards.
Hong Kong had been named one of the safest cities globally, based on personal, digital, health and infrastructure security.
My hometown was a then autonomous territory, where there was a minimal degree of Beijing’s political, legal intervention and local residents had been enjoying a maximized and elite level of civil liberties and human capital development respectively.
However, in recent years, Hong Kongers have awakened to the fact that our citizenship might no longer be as good as it was.
Since the handover, Hong Kong has topped the global priciest cities ranking. The local housing index has doubled.
Here housing index refers to the Centa-City Index (CCI). The index reflects secondary private residential property price for a referring month based on formal sale and purchase date.
Despite the world-leading living costs, Hong Kongers are enjoying by far lower rates of positive real salary changes than neighboring emerging economies, including Vietnam and Thailand, and leading Asian economies, such as China and Singapore.
The 1.4 percent real salary growth in Hong Kong for this year was, at large, lower than the average growth rate (3.2 percent) in the Asia-Pacific region.
The educational and linguistic competitiveness Hong Kongers used to be proud of has been weakening, sharply.
According to the 2018 Global Partnership for Education table, tertiary education rates and overall quality of education, Hong Kong was absent from the top 10.
The latest Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment survey, which evaluates the quality, equity and efficiency of school systems, indicated that Singapore bypassed Hong Kong and topped the list in Asia, and even in the world.
Ironically, the self-positioned Asia’s world city of China performed worse in English than developed and developing neighboring Asian populations, according to the latest English Proficiency Index.
These advanced economies include Singapore and South Korea, and developing economies include Malaysia, the Philippines and India.
The Causeway Bay Books disappearances five years ago, when five owners and staff of the store that sold books critical of the Chinese Communist Party were kidnapped by Chinese agents — from Thailand, Hong Kong and mainland China — followed by the recent imprisonment of pro-democracy advocates who initiated the “Umbrella movement” and the proposal last year and extradition bill have demonstrated Beijing’s rapidly escalating intervention in Hong Kong’s legal system and its political autonomy.
The socio-political unrest in the past 12 months has resulted in the deterioration of mental health among Hong Kongers to the worst level in eight years, with 41 percent of respondents in a survey published late last year on the territory’s happiness levels and mental health saying that their mental health had been negatively affected by the unrest.
The mental health crisis in the territory demonstrates its decreasing livability, and is a bad sign for Hong Kongers.
It is noteworthy that Hong Kong’s financial market dropped out of the top three in this year’s GFCI, primarily due to the socio-political unrest. The continual, entrenched public resentment against the Hong Kong government and Beijing hints that the unrest may resume once the COVID-19 pandemic is contained in the territory.
Having a Hong Kong passport is no longer as desirable as before. From a holistic perspective, Hong Kong has been losing its overall competitiveness, while that of Singapore, major Chinese cities and others are either bypassing it or gaining ground.
Nowadays, I rarely hear people referring to my hometown as the Pearl of the Orient. Instead, it is a city of multifaceted crises.
Jason Hung
London
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