Hong Kong will take different approach to President Xi Jinping when it comes to alleviating poverty, finance minister tells mainland China academic
- In interview with political scientist Eric Li, Financial Secretary Paul Chan says city’s capitalist economy requires different approach
- Officials believe ensuring equal opportunities and making housing affordable is best way to succeed
Ensuring equal opportunities for all is how Hong Kong officials hope to alleviate poverty in the city, the finance chief has said, even though that differs from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s idea of achieving common prosperity.
Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po also said that with Beijing’s support, Hong Kong would diversify its economy by encouraging the growth of the innovation and technology sectors.
Chan was speaking in an interview with mainland Chinese political scientist Eric Xun Li, the advisory board chief of Fudan University’s China Institute. The interview was published on Guancha.cn, an influential website on the mainland.
Li asked how the Hong Kong government would narrow the city’s wealth gap, when Xi has made common prosperity an important policy goal.
Chan said Hong Kong’s situation was different from the mainland’s.
“Hong Kong is a capitalist, open and small economy,” he said. “We believe in active non-interference and a free market, and we have been trying to alleviate poverty by cash initiatives, such as social security allowance.
“In tackling poverty, we also try to ensure equality in opportunity. This is different from the concept of common prosperity.”
Chan said to tackle the wealth gap, the government needed to narrow the disparity in people’s income and assets.
“On the income issue, our economic development needs to be more diversified,” he said. “Apart from innovation and technology, we also need to provide more support in other areas, such as the cultural and creative industries.”
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Chan’s interview was published hours before the city’s government announced that Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor would lead a ministerial delegation to Shenzhen on Monday.
The group would include security chiefs and seven ministers, representing technology, financial services, and commerce. A source said financial and technological collaboration would be the focus of the biannual meeting with Shenzhen’s top officials, including Qin Weizhong, who was appointed the mainland city’s new mayor in May.
Hong Kong’s finance minister said he hoped that by offering better job opportunities, more young people would be able to choose a career based on their interests and not make a decision based just on where the vacancies were in the market.
“On the disparity in people’s asset, the biggest problem is housing,” Chan added. “When you don’t own a home, the difference between [the total value of] your assets would be very big [compared with the homeowners].”
The finance minister said that to boost home ownership, the government needed to build more subsidised housing, as well as establish a “better ladder”.
“They can buy subsidised homes first, and move up when their income and career gets better,” he said, suggesting Hong Kong would need to boost land supply by relaunching land-reclamation projects.
“From 1985 to 2000, we reclaimed 2,000 hectares of land. From 2001 to 2015, we only reclaimed 500 hectares, and the number has only become smaller in recent years.”
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Chan said he believed that after Beijing tailor-made a national security law for Hong Kong last year, and imposed a series of drastic changes on the city’s electoral system, the local government could be more focused on solving socio-economic problems.
In July, the United States government issued an advisory warning American companies operating in the city of the risks associated with the security law.
But Chan noted that, despite the notice, the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong had remained positive about the city’s business prospects.
“In the first year since the security law was enacted, the total value of the initial public offerings in Hong Kong’s stocks exceeded HK$500 billion [US$64.3 billion]. The increase was bigger than 50 per cent compared with the previous 12 months,” he said.
But he acknowledged that the Hong Kong government would need to do a lot of work to promote the city.
“It was quite rare to see relatively positive reports about Hong Kong in international media,” he said. “Maybe that’s because the Western media is biased and had their own political considerations.
“They reported a lot about the ‘black violence’ in 2019, and focused a lot about the chaotic scenes, but they did not explore why this happened.”
