Donald Trump says Hong Kong markets will ‘go to hell’ because of Chinese control
- ‘Hong Kong can never succeed having China, as opposed to the thousands of geniuses that ran it, having China run it,’ US president says in televised interview
- City has been the beneficiary of billions of dollars in ‘very expensive incentives’, which the US is taking back, he says
Hong Kong “can never succeed” under Chinese control and its markets will “go to hell”, US President Donald Trump said in a televised interview on Thursday.
“Once China got aggressive and took it over, I took everything back. Everything’s back now. And it will fail,” he said, speaking by phone on the Fox Business channel.
Trump described Hong Kong as having been the beneficiary of billions of dollars in “very expensive incentives”, which the US was now taking back, he said.
“Hong Kong is a very complex problem because we’ve given tremendous amounts of money in the form of incentives to make Hong Kong free, to make Hong Kong work – and to our detriment,” he said.
“All of those incentives that they had for the Hong Kong market, in order to keep a certain amount of freedom over there, knowing they have China looming over the top of them – but all of those incentive, billions and billions and billions of dollars I gave, that we gave, to Hong Kong, I’ve taken back now.”