Big Lychee, Various Sectors

After being imprisoned for participating in the pan-dems’ 2020 primary elections, Joshua Wong now faces a second NatSec conviction for ‘collusion with foreign powers’…

He is accused of conspiring with self-exiled activist Nathan Law and “other persons unknown” between July 1 and November 23, 2020, to request foreign countries, organisations, or individuals based overseas to impose sanctions, blockades or engage in other hostile activities against Hong Kong or China.

As with Jimmy Lai or Long Hair, the authorities no doubt fear that the high-profile Wong would be a problem outside prison.

A nightmarish experience several decades ago involved waking up around 5.30am. I sensed a malodorous presence in my slum-apartment. I went to take a pee, and found the bathroom was ankle deep in yellowish-brown lumpy water. At this very moment, an early riser on the floor above pulled their flush, and my toilet welled up, spewing more stuff onto the floor. The faster I tried pulverizing and sweeping the putrid slime-liquid down the drain with a broom, the faster the toilet overflowed with yet another upswell of…

You get the picture. A few hours later, a slightly-amused old plumber had turned up. After taking in the scene, he had gone down into the alleyway beside the building to poke hooks and rods up a drainpipe. After 10 minutes he pulled out a foot-long – and obviously dead – rat, followed by the rest of the building’s accumulated sewage.

So I am not a huge fan of our sleeky rodent friends.  HKFP reports that rats caught by a government contractor avoid their prescribed fate (instant drowning in water and bleach), but are restricted to apples and sweet potato. Wait for the twist in the last sentence…

Hong Kong authorities have suspended a rodent control contractor after workers were found to be keeping captured rats overnight instead of sending them to be disposed of. 

…The contractor did not properly store rat cages and failed to “humanely” dispose of the rats on the same day they were captured. 

…The suspension came after local media outlet HK01 reported that a rodent control contractor operating in Kwai Chung had stored rat cages on a slope near Shek Lei Adventure Playground overnight and fed the captured rodents with sliced apples and sweet potato.

A site supervisor told the media outlet that workers sometimes “forgot” to take the captured rodents to designated waste collection points, where the rats were to be drowned in bleach and water. The supervisor said they were not raising the captured animals.

I sold the apartment in 2017. The whole surrounding site will soon be reborn as a Henderson Land ‘visionary residential condominium development redefining sustainable urban living in Upper Central … harmonizing environmental performance with architectural elegance’. Purchasers should be aware: the marble and gold bathrooms will be haunted by a sodden, foul-smelling, four-footed, furry ghost.

An RTHK story for those nostalgic for the old Hong Kong…

Police on Monday said they have arrested 125 people over suspicions that a triad syndicate used intimidation, arson, criminal damage and other violent means to corner the lunch box business at building sites.

The Organised Crime and Triad Bureau said a recent surge in residential projects in East Kowloon created a sharp rise in demand for takeaway meals among construction workers and it is thought that a triad group decided it wanted to seize control of the market.

…Acting Senior Superintendent Au Yeung Tak said a triad group is also suspected of threatening legitimate meal box suppliers using “methods such as extortion, arson, criminal damage and other illegal violent means”.

…The bureau said it arrested 48 men and 77 women, aged between 22 and 81, and seized assets worth HK$4 million, including luxury watches, delivery trucks and gambling paraphernalia. 

The operation reportedly brought in nearly HK$1 million a month. Which, divided by 125 people equals HK$8,000 each – maybe half of which was actual profit. No answer to the really important question: what the food was like?

More in keeping with the times – HKFP reports…

Ami Chan appeared at the Eastern Magistrates’ Courts on Monday for the second day of her trial in relation to the protests and unrest in 2019. 

Chan, who was arrested in 2019 but refused bail, left for Australia in 2021. She was charged when she returned to Hong Kong four months ago.

The defendant was 15 when she was arrested. She was 21 when she was charged in March this year

…According to the prosecution, she was carrying two laser pointers and two cans of spray paint when police arrested her on September 8, 2019, in Fortress Hill.

Magistrate Wong pointed out that at the time, the nearest place where protesters clashed with police was Causeway Bay.

“That’s some distance away,” he said.

Focus Taiwan on an exhibition of protest-era T-shirts – many of which could possibly get you arrested in Hong Kong today…

T-shirts worn in past democratic movements and public events in Hong Kong reflect the city’s evolving public culture and social history, the head of an academic association said at an exhibition highlighting Hong Kong T-shirts in Taipei on Sunday.

Chan Kin-man (陳健民), president of the Taiwan Society for Hong Kong Studies (TSHKS), said organizers of public events, marches, rallies and democratic movements made T-shirts of different colors, slogans and designs to express their messages, making them a distinctive feature of the city’s public culture.

Most of the T-shirts on display at the exhibition are black, though some are white or brightly colored, reflecting the distinct characteristics of the various public issues and events they represent.

Ryan Ho Kilpatrick on ‘Sinicization’, with reference to Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt and Hong Kong…

…to treat Sinicization, in Communist Party parlance, as synonymous with Hanification, is to miss out on a crucial point. That is that, according to influential Party theorists and advisers, even ethnic Han people must be “Sinicized” as well — because it denotes not only the forceful spread of an ethnic identity but a political one. 

…Professor Jiang Shigong … notes that the Hong Kong cultural elites he earlier chided as too Westernized to grasp the profundity of Xi Jinping’s speeches had, in fact, retained Confucian rites, feudal hierarchies, and a classical language largely lost on the mainland. Paradoxically, they are both too Western and too Chinese. And it is actually the latter — an enduring sense of attachment to “cultural China” but not “political China” — that is even more dangerous to the Communist Party, for it represents what Jiang refers to as the ceding of “cultural leadership”…

Jiang worked for the Liaison Office for a while, and has written extensively on Hong Kong.  Article includes a link to his essays, and a pic of one of his works seen at Hunter Bookstore.

From Joel Chan…

Latest data as of 31 Mar 2026 shows there were a record 4,798 prisoners on remand (presumed innocent) in Hong Kong jails, which is a record 43.24% of the total prison population (of 11,096).

By Bangkok officials, at least.

Thailand has 463 times the land area of Hong Kong, and a population nearly 10 times bigger – the kingdom has 363 people per square mile, versus Hong Kong’s 18,200. The kingdom’s nominal per capita GDP is a seventh of Hong Kong’s. Last year, Thailand had around 33 million tourist arrivals last year, while Hong Kong had nearly 50 million. 

Which of the two places wants to boost tourist arrivals, and which wants to curb the numbers?

Bloomberg (paywalled) reports…

The Southeast Asian nation, famed for its beaches and city nightlife, is only targeting about 33 million foreign visitors this year, well below the nearly 40 million who arrived in 2019.  

…“We’re not too worried about the number of tourists because we want to generate more revenue from each visitor,” [Thai tourism official] Nithee said. “We focus on quality markets.” 

We leave the riffraff to Hong Kong.

…The agency is targeting travelers drawn by medical care, wellness retreats, concerts, festivals, golf, marathons and other sporting events because these visitors tend to stay longer and spend more.

The agency’s website also leans heavily into the luxury and wellness angle…

…But with tourism accounting for about one-fifth of Thailand’s economy, the ecosystem of hotels, restaurants, food markets, transport operators, dive shops and tour companies which has sprung up around that depends on large volumes of visitors.

Thailand has the space – and the low-paid workforce – to accommodate more low-end tourists. But they think they can and should do better than that.

Some weekend reading…

From Postcolonial Politics, a short (by which the authors mean ‘long’) article on how Hong Kong has never decolonized.  The analysis has to produce results that support an ideology – so partly interesting, partly a bit loopy…

After the failure of the “Umbrella Movement” in 2014, localist and “anti-mainland” sentiment grew further and faster, pushing more young people to declare themselves “localists” in order to counter the increasing influence of the mainland Chinese government, and a new form of colonialism.  …demonstrators claimed the right of Hong Kong people to elect their own government and employed the argument of the specificity of Hong Kong’s socio-cultural identity. But where does this specificity come from? 

Wishing to avoid having a population that was either pro-CCP or pro-KMT, and unable or unwilling to Anglicize floods of new arrivals, the 1960s colonial government cunningly engaged in…

…the construction of a Hong Kong identity, based on an American and European-style consumer society. The worker, the producer must become the consumer. The political and social changes of the 1960s and 1970s therefore closely resembled the transformation of everyday life, especially in the sphere of leisure, which took place in Britain and Western Europe in the late 1950s and 1960s. It was above all the privatization of daily life, the withdrawal into the home and the family facilitated by the miniaturization of the media for the consumption of cultural products (transistors, inexpensive televisions, and later the audio cassette), which were significant for the construction of this new identity. Such privatization implied the fragmentation of collective life, especially with regard to workers and their unionization. 

It was nothing compared with what smartphones were to do. 

The authors are essentially seeing the 1967-97 development of a Hong Kong identity as a contrived plan to maintain British rule. Beijing officials would of course heartily agree. Certainly, administrations during that era laid on the ‘community’ stuff with gusto. But it was likely as much to do with keeping up with changing public attitudes as managing them. Hong Kong during that period was pretty much the freest society in Asia, and the local population had the opportunity and means to carve their own identity – and did. Leftists often find it hard to imagine that non-Westerners have their own minds. But they sort of anticipate this criticism…

In the construction of the Hong Kong identity, the worst aspect was the institutional denial of the agency of the Hong Kong people by the colonial authorities. In the twenty-first century, historical reality has constituted many parts of Asia as constituents of modernity and not merely its exploited objects. It is a modernity that bears the marks of colonialism, is full of contradictions, unfinished processes, turmoil and hybridity. But is it really any different from the rest of the modern world where women and the working classes constitute the domestic colonized? In Asia, these contradictions and consequences of capitalist development have simply been exacerbated causing a concomitant amplification of the human suffering and dilemmas that go hand in hand with urban capitalist industrialization in general.

Entertaining if you have nothing important to do.

War on the Rocks looks at the challenges of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan…

Three key missions at the heart of any cross-strait campaign have never been successfully executed under modern threat conditions: an amphibious landing against a credible coastal anti-ship missile threat, a large-scale airborne drop against modern air defenses, and a large, opposed air assault at extended range. In other words, the People’s Liberation Army would have to make history three times in the same campaign.  

…The familiar point is that invasion would be difficult. The sharper point is that Taiwan would not need to defeat the invasion force outright. It would only need enough surviving capability to disrupt the sequence. In a campaign built around tight timing and limited lift, the threshold for disruption is far lower than the threshold for destruction. China would have to move, land, reinforce, and sustain exposed forces under fire. Taiwan would only have to break that sequence.

Lift makes the problem more concrete: China would need to deploy sufficient combat power ashore in the opening hours to prevent the beachhead’s isolation before follow-on forces arrive. That makes amphibious lift central to the campaign. If China cannot meet that threshold in the opening waves, it must either accept a dangerously thin landing force or compensate with airborne and air assault operations. Those workarounds create the second and third Nevers.

Essentially, you can’t launch an invasion without large, slow ships and planes full of troops and equipment moving right up to the defenders. Unlike in the past, defenders today have numerous smaller and faster missiles and drones to mess things up.

The SCMP interviews Hongkongers spending the holiday across the border…

…[Edward Wong said] that Hong Kong eateries, which often required table sharing and imposed dining time limits, were less competitive than their mainland counterparts.

“Restaurants on the mainland are more spacious and offer better service,” he said.

Simon Chiu, a 66-year-old retiree, headed to Shantou in Guangdong with his wife to join a group of friends for a short getaway.

…Chiu said Hong Kong’s dining scene lacked fresh ideas and creativity while the mainland offered better value for money.

“Most importantly, many of our friends have headed north during the holidays, so we would be the only ones staying behind if we remained in the city,” he said.

Maggie Tsang, 42 … set aside around HK$1,000 (US$127.50) for food and children’s game parades, ball pits and family facilities at shopping centres in Futian district.

She said playgrounds and child facilities on the mainland cost about half as much as those in Hong Kong.

“It is also much more affordable as we are travelling with another family, splitting all the bills with us,” Tsang said.

Raymond Yeung, a 48‑year‑old technician … said … Shenzhen offered more options for family activities.

“You have more space in Shenzhen to play, and there’s more greenery too,” he said.

Why is the overcrowded and overpriced side of the border the one trying desperately to boost its tourism industry?

From the Standard – NatSec police arrest Hunter Bookstore owner Leticia Wong and her husband…

…for allegedly distributing seditious materials and utilizing a youth exhibition on student suicides to brainwash children with anti-government hatred, all while facing accusations of laundering massive amounts of overseas funding from anti-China organizations.

[They] … were recently arrested by officers from the Police National Security Department on suspicion of “doing an act or acts with seditious intention.” 

Wong is also implicated in an additional money laundering charge for allegedly receiving multiple suspicious payments amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars from overseas anti-China organizations. 

According to informed sources, in addition to selling and displaying publications with seditious intentions, the involved bookstore frequently utilized seminars and sharing sessions targeted at teenagers and students to instill anti-government ideologies. 

Recently, the bookstore held an exhibition regarding the “issue of student suicide,” but the exhibits contained a massive amount of content intended to disparage the central and Hong Kong governments, instilling a psychology of hatred in young children. 

Human Rights Watch marks six years of NatSec in Hong Kong…

The Chinese Communist Party and state have comprehensively reengineered Hong Kong’s foundation of governance, reshaping its leadership, personnel, institutions, and ideology. The authorities no longer present national security as an exceptional response to the 2019 protests, but as a standing principle of administration. They have enforced citywide compliance by punishing increasingly minor acts and targeting ordinary people for peaceful expressions. 

…The government cites national security to justify censoring expression across the arts, film, and publishing. Even restaurant licenses now include national security clauses. 

…The draconian national security regime has been used by the government to stamp out dissent and act with impunity, with far‑reaching consequences. The deadly Tai Po fire in November 2025 is an example of this new approach. Despite ample evidence pointing to government negligence, no officials have apologized or shown any indication of accepting accountability. Instead, the authorities silenced critics on social media and arrested a student and a YouTuber for “sedition” after they spoke out. The government also barred victims from displaying banners on their homes and journalists from accompanying survivors as they returned to their apartments to retrieve their belongings. 

Benedict Rogers in Union of Catholic Asian News…

Almost three decades on, those promises lie in tatters, those treaty obligations and constitutional protections shredded.

Over the past decade, and particularly the past six years since the National Security Law was imposed, most of Hong Kong’s basic freedoms — of expression, association, and assembly, along with media freedom — have been dismantled, and other freedoms — of religion and academic thought — increasingly undermined.

Hundreds of political prisoners remain in jail, including the media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, serving a 20-year sentence, barrister Chow Hang-tung, and trade unionist Lee Cheuk-yan. Independent newspapers have been forced to close, civil society has been shut down, pro-democracy political parties have ceased activities, and the legislature has been transformed from a vibrant multi-party quasi-democratic entity to a puppet rubber-stamp body of pro-Beijing goons handpicked by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)

Hong Kong has been transformed from one of Asia’s freest and most open cities into one of its most repressive police states. The only features that mark it out from mainland China are that it retains its own currency, and the internet is still more freely accessible. The ‘Great Firewall’ of China has not yet engulfed Hong Kong, although what you post or share or even ‘like’ on social media can get you arrested and some websites, such as that of Hong Kong Watch, which I co-founded almost a decade ago, are blocked.

HKFP reports the closure of Undergrad, the Hong Kong U student paper founded in 1952…

…after failing to recruit enough members for its editorial board … 

In a statement, the 2025 editorial board attributes the move to ‘the natural ebb and flow of history’ – a nice touch of irony, perhaps.

HKFP points out that in recent years…

At least six universities, including HKU, have seen their student unions disbanded, evicted, or stripped of institutional ties. 

How many independent student unions or publications still exist in Hong Kong?

In the Standard…

An off-duty police officer attached to the National Security Department admitted on Monday (Jun 29) to secretly filming beneath a woman’s skirt at an MTR station and attempting to seize a colleague’s loaded service revolver.

Ko Chun-chung, 39, pleaded guilty at West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts, sitting as a District Court, to one count of unlawful recording or observing of intimate parts and one count of attempting to possess a firearm without a license.

From a book review by Ian Johnson in Foreign Affairs… 

…the country’s own leaders implicitly doubt the very concept of their nation. Government officials and many ordinary people vehemently proclaim the sanctity of China’s borders, even as many of its border regions are run under a state of near-martial law. Official narratives, meanwhile, forbid a coherent explanation of how China obtained these lands.  

…Chinese leaders behave as if they were running an upstart nation with no history—one that has to demand that visitors refer to it as “the People’s Republic” and repeat that there is only “one China,” located within sacred and immutable borders. The country today “is a multiheaded creature of no certain or reliable identity,” Xu Guoqi writes in his new book, The Idea of China: A Contested History. “If there were a clear or reliable identity, today’s leaders would not be so obsessed with trying to impose one.” 

…It remains unclear whether Xi’s version of China has any values beyond holding on to the territories of the old Qing empire and keeping the Chinese Communist Party in power, or whether the CCP’s project is capacious enough to accommodate the country’s historical hybridity. 

…the rise of the modern nation-state forced the ruling Qing dynasty to deal with other countries as equals rather than as barbarians or vassals. Outsiders might have called the Qing’s territories “China” or some similar variant, but the empire’s officials rejected the term. In their eyes, there was no country of China; there was only the Great Qing, and some of their diplomats insisted—unsuccessfully—that foreigners call them by that name. 

…The basic idea is that all people who have ever lived inside the current boundaries of the People’s Republic are now and always have been “Chinese.” This applies, most absurdly, to conquering foreign military leaders, including Genghis Khan, whose mausoleum is found in the current region of Inner Mongolia. There, officials lionize him as “a great man of the Chinese people.” 

HKFP reports a rare thing in Hong Kong these days: a demonstration. But it’s not anti-government. Well, it’s anti-UK government…

The Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions (HKFTU) on Tuesday protested against the jailing of retired police officer Bill Yuen, who worked as a manager at the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office (HKETO), which represents Hong Kong’s government in London. 

The jailing of Yuen was a “complete political manipulation and judicial fabrication, interfering with China’s internal policies and Hong Kong affairs,” Stanley Ng, HKFTU chair and a lawmaker, said in Cantonese.

Two dozen people showed up. Their banners and placards featured slogans in English as well as Chinese, which is unusual in the pro-Beijing milieu. Ng and the FTU did not invent their own phrases or demands – they are standard-issue terms used by Beijing officials. For example, the PRC ambassador in London…

…[urged] the UK to reverse what he called a political manipulation against China, halt the arrests and convictions of Chinese citizens, and stop supporting anti-China groups.

Ambassador Zheng leads us to the interesting part: both the convicted men – Bill Yuen and Peter Wai – hold UK citizenship. When they convict UK citizen Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong, the Hong Kong/Chinese authorities insist that he is Chinese. When the UK courts convict such dual nationals in London, they are… still Chinese.

Some weekend reading and viewing…

Donald Clarke’s Chinese Law Notes on Beijing’s new ‘ethnic unity law’…

Will China actually use these provisions to prosecute foreigners it doesn’t like? Perhaps they are hoping to get the benefit of scaring people without paying the cost in bad publicity of actually prosecuting anyone. There’s just no way at this point to know, and whatever aims the central government has in mind (assuming it has a unified view), we can’t be sure officials at lower levels won’t try to score points by patriotically prosecuting meddling foreigners. You can avoid danger, of course, by staying out of China—and Hong Kong, and Macau, and any countries, with or without extradition treaties, that are likely to be vulnerable to Chinese pressure.

Via his Substack, Michael Kovrig on ‘buck-passing and bandwagoning’ among European countries when it comes to resisting Beijing’s mercantilism…

Last year every EU member state ran a trade deficit with China for the first time, with the total EU-China deficit hitting €359 billion (yep, about a billion euros a day) — roughly double the pre-pandemic figure. China’s exports to the EU are up another 16% in the first half of this year. The Economist notes that bankruptcies are running at levels last seen in 2015. Germany, the industrial heartland, shed 143,000 manufacturing jobs last year…  

Compounding the problem for European leaders is that the Chinese Communist Party has demonstrated willingness to mete out punishment against countries that impose trade and investment barriers or otherwise frustrate its ambitions. It has a track record of weaponizing access to China’s market, squeezing dependent firms to influence government policy, and using control of supply chains for coercion. That’s why at the European Council meeting, the session in which leaders debated the threat was billed as focusing euphemistically on “global macroeconomic imbalances.” One is reminded of the dictum of another French statesman, Talleyrand: speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts. 

…States facing a rising threat decline to confront it and instead hope somebody else will bear the burden of doing so. For the EU, each member would be better off if the bloc collectively balanced against Beijing. But for any single government, the smart move, given that the others are hanging back, is also to hang back…

In Foreign Affairs, Patricia Kim doubts whether Beijing’s transactional and tightly focused foreign policy can translate into international leadership…

Unlike the United States, which built a network of alliances and underwrote the postwar order, and the Soviet Union, which controlled a formal bloc of communist states through the Warsaw Pact, China has shown little interest in assuming responsibility for a rival order or even a tightly organized coalition. Beijing instead seeks global reach without entanglement, partnerships without binding obligations, and great-power status without the burdens of leadership. 

…China has been practicing what might be called a “China first” strategy—prioritizing its narrow interests while disclaiming global responsibilities—long predating the current “America first” policy championed by the Trump administration. 

…China sustains its partners [such as Russia and Venezuela] economically and shields them diplomatically but won’t defend them when it matters most.

…Many partners publicly back China at international forums … these gains … may bolster the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party and help Beijing shape international discourse, but they rarely translate into meaningful alignment or costly action. It remains unclear whether China could lean on its friends in a major crisis.

There are already signs that Chinese leaders doubt the reliability of their partners. For instance, when the Trump administration imposed sweeping global tariffs at the height of last year’s U.S.-Chinese trade tensions, Beijing feared that its partners might strike side deals with Washington—restricting Chinese exports in exchange for tariff relief. Chinese officials responded with threats of “reciprocal countermeasures.” 

…Even as confidence in the United States has wavered and American allies have strengthened economic ties with China, Beijing has struggled to convert that engagement into strategic alignment. For states such as France, Germany, Japan, and South Korea, China is an important economic partner and a consequential great power that must be dealt with, but it is seen as neither a potential security partner nor a credible leader of a durable global order.

A video showing Hong Kong ‘going backwards’. The account that posted it on Chinese social media has been banned.

A 1960s Dutch psychedelic band called Dragonfly did something like this – in the second half of their vid…

From HKFP…

Police said in a statement just after midnight on Thursday that a woman, 33, and a man, 32, were arrested on Wednesday. The pair allegedly displayed and sold “seditious” titles and “received multiple remittances from foreign political organisations,” they said. 

Local media reports identified the woman as ex-Civic Party district councillor Leticia Wong, who runs Hunter Bookstore in Sham Shui Po…

In the statement, police said the two allegedly sold seditious titles that stoked hatred against Hong Kong authorities, the judiciary, and law enforcement agencies. They were suspected of violating the city’s homegrown national security law, the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, commonly known as Article 23. 

…Last year, HKFP reported that Hunter Bookstore had faced dozens of inspections and audits by various government departments. 

…In March, independent bookseller Pong Yat-ming and three of the staff members of his Book Punch store were reportedly arrested on suspicion of selling seditious titles, including a biography of jailed media mogul Jimmy Lai. 

No details as to what the ‘seditious’ books are, let alone how they stoked hatred of the authorities. Nor of the ‘foreign political organizations’ that sent ‘multiple remittances’. However, the Standard states that…

Hunter Bookstore had been selling books that defame the central and SAR governments and glorify the 2019 unrest, including the biography of Jimmy Lai and works by anti-government figures. It also hosted talks and sharing sessions targeting young people, and collaborated with other anti-government shops on exhibitions and film screenings.

Government statement. A pic of police ‘rectifying’ the shop window here.

From a year ago – a Japanese outlet’s feature on the store…

Friends and customers often ask Wong if she’s afraid to be selling these kinds of books.

When I ask her the same question, she replies, “I want to ask the opposite. Why are you afraid? What exactly is so frightening? If you look fear in the eye, you might realize it’s not as terrifying as it seems.”

Hunter Bookstore has been inspected several times by government officials.

“They’re just trying to intimidate. If I’ve broken a law, they can arrest me,” Wong says calmly.

The LA Times picks up the story.

RTHK reports…

Secretary for Culture, Sports and Tourism Rosanna Law on Tuesday said she is confident the tourism sector could meet the government’s target in accounting for about five percent of the city’s gross domestic product by 2029.

…Law said the target is not “aggressive”, given the city’s track record in being a tourism hub.

Last year, the industry accounted for about three percent of the city’s GDP.

“I think with improved connectivity, with high-speed rail and good cross-boundary facilities, it’s natural that the flow of people in Hong Kong and nearby cities, including Shenzhen, would improve and would increase,” she said.

…While many residents have headed to Shenzhen during weekends or on long holidays for its increasing number of attractions and low prices, the minister said it is “unrealistic” for the SAR to expect other cities, which compete with Hong Kong for tourists, to remain unchanged.

Instead, the city should continue to grow, she said, offering attractions that benefit locals and tourists alike.

So if we can build on our current tourism levels – 50 million in 2025 – we can push the industry’s share from 3% to 5% of GDP. Based on raw visitor numbers, that implies an increase to over 80 million tourists. Where will the extra 30 million people go? How do they fit onto the sidewalks, trains and buses?

And, although 3% vs 5% of GDP sounds like a lot of money, how do we know tourism actually boosts net wealth? Assuming the extra visitors increase demand for certain retail spaces, their presence will push up rent for existing stores, which in turn increases the cost of living for local residents. In some cases, stores serving local consumers might end up going out of business. Local entrepreneurs will see narrower opportunities. On a net basis, the extra two percentage points of GDP might simply be cancelled out by lower GDP in other sectors.

Hong Kong bureaucrats have a fixation with tourism – perhaps because it’s so easy to measure visitor numbers and interpret them as a sign of success. That said, Rosanna Law seems to recognize that by cramming more tourists into Hong Kong, you worsen local quality of life and encourage residents to cross the border for cheaper and less crowded leisure experiences…

“First of all is of course ensure that whatever we are offering to our local people, it should continue to be of good quality, value for money. But together, I think we also have to ensure that whatever we are offering to our visitors, from our nearby cities would be attractive, novel, and also value for money,” the official said.

“This way, I think the flow of people, the flow of visitors will be mutually beneficial.”

But maybe it’s not mutually beneficial. Higher-spending Hongkongers go to Shenzhen for weekends, while more Mainlanders bring packed lunches over the border to have their photos taken standing outside colonial architecture…

Looking ahead, Law said Hong Kong would continue to offer cultural experiences at historic buildings — similar to the old Yau Ma Tei police station exhibition — which she described as very successful.

“We are actually thinking of how to enrich it [the experience] even further, and to maybe even collaborate with nearby shops. One of them has already introduced a nostalgic theme in their packaging,” she said.

“So I think that is a good potential of showing what Hong Kong is like, and what is uniquely Hong Kong to our visitors.”

Haw Par Mansion in Tai Hang, for instance, could showcase the unique East meets West cultural environment of the SAR, Law added.

The 30 million extra visitors go to Haw Par Mansion. Overcrowding problem solved.

The Hong Kong government’s strategy: try desperately to keep rents absurdly high – regardless of far lower costs just over the border – while simultaneously striving for economic vibrancy. (In order to enable over-inflated civil-service salaries, perhaps?)

A couple of other stories of note today.

From the Standard – the average size of new homes in Hong Kong has fallen from 50.4 sq m [542 sq ft] in 1996 to 37.2 sq m [400 sq ft] in 2024…

Nearly half of the units completed in 2024 were under 40 sq m, compared with only 4 percent in 2000, the study said.

Despite the recovery of Hong Kong property completion from the post-2000 trough, the unit size is shrinking, the report said.

Private housing showed diverging trends in sizes: the share of completions under 40 sq m rose from 18 percent in 1995 to 45 percent in 2024, while that of 70 sq m or above decreased from 26 percent to 11 percent, the study said.

Large private homes have shifted from a mainstream product to a marginal share of new supply, it added.

Again, purely down to government policy of prioritizing land revenues over basic living standards. How does it help Hong Kong?

And HKFP reports on a mother pleading guilty to manslaughter after beating and starving her five-year-old child to death in Sham Shui Po. Warning: this is about as grim as it gets.