The View | Will Occupy Central send Hong Kong down the road to irrelevancy?
Political instability is stoking fears that the city's role as a trading and financial centre will diminish
Hong Kong is suffering from a renewed bout of existential angst, an abiding fear that this great trading and financial centre will one day be irrelevant.
This is one way to interpret the rather paranoid pushback against Occupy Central protests - with one group making a video in which the business district is represented by a heart, and animated blood spurts everywhere when the Occupy Central knife cuts in.
Hong Kong has been through this before. In the years before the handover, many professionals obtained foreign passports, and some poor folk had to go to such extremes as migrating to Australia, with its dangerously thin ozone layer, or to Canada, where they risked death by boredom.
But in time many of these emigrants wandered back to Hong Kong. The worst fears of a post-handover deterioration in civic and political rights were proved wrong, and economic opportunities remained robust, thanks to increasing integration with a booming mainland economy.
Market-based reform … is a vote in favour of a ‘merit-based’ system
Has something changed? If so, will money fly out of Hong Kong, the stock market deflate, property go bust? These are the economic questions that lurk in the background of the current political strife.