Hong Kong’s amazing success over the May 1 Golden Week holiday was to attract huge numbers of tourists. The 1.1 million mostly Mainland visitors coming into the city represented an increase of around 20% over the previous year. However, many were not the high-spending sort we are told benefit the local economy. Social media carry photos of young Mainlanders sleeping overnight in McDonalds, while 60-strong day-trip groups paying as little as RMB40 a head were being herded around the West Kowloon parks and other cheap but photogenic spots.
CE John Lee says we ‘must welcome’ them all. I was once a youthful backpacker myself (sample of wretched nocturnal arrangements here), and I don’t begrudge elderly villagers from Pearl River backwaters a once-in-a-lifetime chance to gaze across the Fragrant Harbour. The problem is the excessive numbers of them, all going to the same spots that already have inadequate space for locals. Places are near bursting point. Either at least pedestrianize the streets and lay on enough transport – or just stop encouraging mass-tourism in this mindless pursuit of higher and higher visitor numbers.
Unless, it’s not about tourists (as in landlords/rents) at all, but just about swamping the city with outsiders as an end in itself – perhaps some sort of collective punishment, or a way to reinforce the principle that the government runs the people, not vice-versa.
The Secretary for Stuff No-one Else Wants to Do says Hong Kong has space to cram in even more tourists. It’s a test of a) the population’s admirable patience and b) the government’s equally impressive imperviousness to public opinion. Which will break first?
Asia Times on China’s ‘deflationary death spiral’. Good example of headline writers exaggerating the gist of a story, which is interesting enough…
Tariffs are drying up international demand for Chinese goods, and in a bid to keep factories alive, Beijing is urging exporters to turn inward. However, that pivot is compounding the very problem it aims to solve.
Chinese authorities have been positioning the domestic market as a pressure-release valve for the manufacturing sector. But the influx of export-grade inventory is creating excess at home in a consumer environment that is already highly restrained.
This is accelerating a destructive process: prices are falling, and not because productivity is rising or technology is improving. They’re falling because companies are desperate to shift stock and survive.
From religious journal First Things, a plea for a new pope with a ‘better China policy’, including blunt language from Hong Kong’s Cardinal Zen/Chan…
Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Cardinal Parolin is the architect of the [Vatican-China power-sharing] deal and its chief enthusiast. Beijing has not-so-subtly signaled that he is China’s top pick for the next pope. At a press conference on April 22—one day after Pope Francis’s death—Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Guo Jiakun dangled the prospect of “improvement of China-Vatican relations” through “continued” partnership, and no one among the leading papal candidates has more experience working with China than Cardinal Parolin.
The deal endangers faithful clergy in China. A stark reminder of this reality came last month when the Chinese state security authorities indefinitely detained Bishop Peter Shao Zhumin of the Catholic diocese of Wenzhou without due process. This is the sixty-one-year-old underground prelate’s eighth detention over the last seven years.
…Joseph Cardinal Zen of Hong Kong accused Cardinal Parolin of “manipulating” Pope Francis into approving the deal by falsely claiming that Pope Benedict XVI had approved its draft. In an October 2020 blog post, the Hong Kong cardinal didn’t mince words: “Parolin knows he is lying, he knows that I know he is a liar, he knows that I will tell everyone that he is a liar.”
Beijing has taken advantage of the agreement, and the Catholic Church is suffering for it. A better policy—one that does not share the pope’s important power of appointing Catholic Church leadership with an atheistic government and that supports the perpetuation of the Church through a faithful underground—is long overdue.
HK gov press releases about supposedly-impressive tourist numbers, and HK’s newspapers that run this nonsense unquestioned, ignore 2 salient details.
First, the mainlanders average spend in HK, which is sweet bugger-all. Second, the fact that a similar number of HK natives head north – and spend far, far more – every holiday, many in no small part to escape the incoming hordes.
Tourism is now a net loser for HK’s economy, and increasing the numbers of mainlanders just increases the bleeding. Get used to it; the last thing the HK administration cares about is public opinon.
Personally, I think an all dominating religious sect with silly costumes, run by old men with outdated ideas, goes hand-in-hand with the CCP.
Loved your backpacker list, Hemlock.
I traveled solo through the Mainland as a shoestring backbacker for two months in 2007, just before the Olympics. Back then, rural hospitality was in full force—country bumpkins loved to point at a foreign face, and aunties made it their mission to force-feed you (I was skinny then) on 24-hour train rides to Kunming.
That said, my attempt to sleep rough in a park in Nanjing ended with an arrest, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too generous toward those taking shelter in McDonald’s at the expense of the local homeless.