Just Saying | Beijing is making Hong Kong’s property tycoons sweat bricks – it was long overdue
- Yonden Lhatoo says the writing has been on the wall for a while, but developers who control the city’s housing market have now been put on notice that enough is enough
“Don’t these people have anything better to do? Don’t they have to go home?”
This kind of tongue clicking is quite prevalent nowadays among citizens who don’t particularly care for Hong Kong’s anti-government movement, as they question the mental state of those involved in the latest iteration of mass protest – boisterous flash mobs congregating at shopping malls to sing songs of defiance late into the night.
I really wouldn’t know if they have anything better to do, but as to why they don’t go home, the much more pertinent question would be whether home is worth going back to at all. Chances are many would rather stay out having “fun” in this summer of our discontent than return to those depressing cubicles we call homes in the dystopian world of housing in Hong Kong.
Sarcasm aside, while the anti-government and anti-Beijing protests are politically charged and driven, the underlying economic issues fuelling this uprising have always been obvious, with decades of failed housing policy at the core.
So it’s not surprising now to see Beijing piling pressure on our property tycoons to not only stand up and be counted in opposing all the protest chaos and violence, but also to cough up what they owe to society after so many uninterrupted decades of their unfettered monopoly, enabled by successive governments, over the city’s housing market.