Jake's View | Belt and Road middleman role is a dead end for Hong Kong
The future doesn’t lie in things we used to do or that government wants us to do, so Belt and Road is a non-starter and middleman is out
In a rare interview, Victor Fung Kwok-king, a respected businessman ... told the Post “Hong Kong needs to work very hard on its traditional role of being a middleman between the West and the mainland in order to grab the business opportunities from the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ ”.
SCMP, May 8
Let’s get something straight right away about this Belt and Road business. It still has some mileage left in it for political bluster and toadying but otherwise it’s a dead one. Let’s drop it.
It only came into being three years ago because the then president of the United States, Barack Obama, was proposing to exclude China from a Pacific regional trade union that he was talking of setting up.
In any event it was the US that excluded itself from this peculiar institution. A new president decided that trade agreements are bad for trade. Yes, it’s a story for the comic books, strange but true.