HO, HO, HO. You know the line, so often seen even in the pages of this newspaper, about how Hong Kong's prosperity is doomed because people can do things so much more cheaply across the border. We have just had a real assessment of it.
The director of the China National Institute of the World Trade Organisation, Zhang Hanlin, says Hong Kong is asking for too much in talks on closer economic partnership and will not give enough back in return.
'Hong Kong can't keep on asking us to open our markets to let you make more money,' he pleads. 'You can't just ask us to send our tourists to Hong Kong and allow your banks to come here and do business. You need to come up with something where we can have benefits as well.'
Let us translate this in terms of the circumstances that actually apply. It is difficult for us to offer benefits that we have not already offered. Our doors to the mainland are already wide open. Mainland enterprises can list on the stock market here, can sell anything here that they wish to sell, are welcomed with wide open arms to our port and are encouraged to offer us any service they can.
It is true that they face restrictions on investing here but these restrictions are imposed by Beijing, not us. We are hardly to blame that Beijing insists on keeping the mainland's capital account closed and its investment money bottled up within its borders. We would dearly love to see more of it.
And if tourists from the mainland are now flooding into Hong Kong, this is precisely because we have opened our borders to them and they think that Hong Kong is worth seeing.
