Monitor | Hong Kong's relationship with mainland is no one-way street

If you were to judge Hong Kong's relationship with the mainland solely on the basis of what government officials here say, you would get a thoroughly confused picture.

On one hand, the government paints Hong Kong as a supplicant, begging for scraps from Beijing's table. In a volatile world, officials make out that the city's economic future relies on winning ever more special favours from Beijing.

In the financial sector, this dependence is so great that the chief executive is even setting up a new Financial Services Development Council designed specifically to plead our cause on the mainland.

On the other hand, our officials are putting up barriers to mainlanders coming here to spend and invest.

Having talked for years about how selling health services would become a new pillar of Hong Kong's economy, last year the government banned mainland women from the city's private maternity wards - the one area of the health sector that had actually succeeded in attracting significant numbers of customers.