The View | Tech chief should bite the bullet and tackle Hong Kong’s property tycoon oligarchs
As Cyberport chief, Nicholas Yang’s position was best described as building maintenance rather than technology development
If you are working in an industry of artifice and you know how artificial every single idea must be, you almost find it too easy to believe that other people are looking at it as if it is real.
When you are in the technology industry you are selling fantasy. That is how the government’s most recent initiatives to modernise and digitalise Hong Kong look to outsiders and taxpayers.
Last week, Innovation and Technology Bureau chief Nicholas Yang Wei-hsiung set a target for Hong Kong’s transformation into a knowledge-based economy from its financial services mainstay within 10 years. Yang emphasised the creation of high-value-added manufacturing industries through reindustrialisation, and developing regenerative medicine and healthy ageing through the concept of a “smart city”.
“We need to diversify our economy because our service sector is not providing enough quality jobs for young people,” Yang said. “We have economic growth, productivity growth, but the jobs are not good enough. Our young people need diversity of jobs.”
The relentless greed of our property tycoons is akin to a feast in a time of plague
Yang and his bureaucrat colleagues appear to have conjured up these urgent sectors for Hong Kong without any public or professional consultation. The thought process sounds as unscientific and superficial as former chief executive Tung Chee-hwa’s “hubs” concept, which sought to develop Hong Kong as a centre for Chinese medicine. Being an international wine hub was the only one that took off because it was simple and complemented Hong Kong’s well-developed warehousing, logistics and retailing infrastructure.
Yang should display courage and say that Hong Kong needs to migrate away from its property fixation and that our property tycoon oligarchs (not the financial sector) along with outdated government laws and policies, have dangerously distorted economic development and how our economy allocates capital.