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The View | As the extradition row erodes confidence in Hong Kong, Singapore is looking attractive to businesspeople who are quietly moving their money out
- Hong Kong’s leader Carrie Lam has, by insisting on pushing through the contentious bill, lost all credibility. More worryingly for the city, perhaps, professionals report it is increasingly tough to do international business here
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I am just coming up to 50 years in Hong Kong. I saw through 1997, and there’s a pretty good probability that I will see through 2047. That makes me a very connected observer of my city.
Last Sunday, a million people surged onto the pavements like the floods of a June rainstorm. In 1997, there was an air of hope and confidence in the special administrative region, thanks to the Basic Law. It allowed Hong Kong to have many years of relatively independent development, interspersed with some increasingly frequent cack-handed interventions. Hong Kong’s troublesome insistence on defending its 155-year-old way of doing things has clearly irritated Beijing.
China has a very long memory and revenge is a dish best eaten cold. The seeds of the extradition treaty were planted 16 years ago in the failed enactment of Basic Law Article 23, the National Security Bill 2003. That time, a mass march succeeded; the people’s voice was heard and the proposal was shelved. Beijing then understood that Hong Kong was a rebel province. It is payback time. The fugitive offender ordinance is unfinished business.
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The extradition treaty was a god-sent opportunity to enact a law that will, as the Chinese idiom goes, “kill the chickens to scare the monkeys”. There were a lot of chickens marching last weekend and the response by Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor to continue with enacting the ordinance regardless, has swept away the last vestiges of the authorities’ credibility.
That actually is not as bad as the news that has come out in private conversations with lawyers, bankers and businesspeople. They have indicated that it is getting increasingly tough to do international business here. Singapore is mentioned as a frequent competitor. A Singaporean friend said about their government, “they really have got their stuff together”. Although he didn’t actually say “stuff”.
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