Recruiting in China

Ten years after the change-over, Hong Kong is positioning itself to become Asia's New York City.

By George Wehrfritz
Newsweek International

July 2-9, 2007 issue - On the rare days when Hong Kong's Victoria Peak isn't shrouded in smog, one of the world's great maritime hubs is on display from its heights.

Northward in Kowloon, modern container ports—their giant cranes lined up like robotic elephants on parade—load waiting freighters. Barges scurry like worker ants, flags from every port of convenience flap in the breeze and jetfoils buzz back and forth from Macau.

For decades, as East Asia's export economies rose to pre-eminence, the scene has grown more frenetic year by year. But sometime soon—or perhaps that day has already passed—the vast natural harbor that first attracted British opium traders to this spot on the South China Sea in the 1840s will reach its own peak, and start to fall.

The big question in Hong Kong—and it's one that has echoed since the jittery pre-handover days back in 1997—is elemental: what's next? Official statistics suggest a port that's maxed out, a maritime hub that has slipped from number one in the world to number three and sometime next year will likely be overtaken by a city that didn't even exist until the final few years of British rule: neighboring Shenzhen. What will happen, many Hong Kongers justifiably worry, when shipping follows the manufacturing up the Pearl River Delta into mainland China? Will their city slip to the global economic periphery, as some analysts forecast, becoming the 21st-century equivalent of Venice?

Ten years after the Union Jack flew over Hong Kong for the last time, change is most certainly afoot. But change, as they say, can be good. And although Hong Kong's traditional status as East Asia's premier shipping hub is already lost, the city is on the cusp of a reinvention so profound that the view from the peak will likely look quite different in a few decades. First there will be fewer freighters and barges. Then, perhaps, the dockyards will yield to new urban landscapes as they've done previously in places like London and New York. And, if all goes to plan, the scene that unfolds below the peak won't depend so much on whether the winds kick up to clear the toxic skies.

Think of Hong Kong as China's New York. Not today's N.Y.C., to be sure, but the Gotham that had hovered on the verge of bankruptcy in the 1970s and then struggled to reinvent itself by deregulating its two stock markets and becoming the world's leading financial center at the dawn of the digital age. Now China is the growth engine, and the transformation underway entails providing the financial savvy, rule-based business culture and global logistical reach that the vast Chinese economy demands but can't create for itself. ''Every economy changes as the major players [in the global arena] change," says Hong Kong's Financial Secretary Henry Tang. ''In the past we have always used China as a manufacturing base, but now we look to it as a market [with] a huge demand for world-class financial services. Hong Kong is where we supply it."

A ''paradigm shift" is underway in the city, Tang says with confidence. And in Hong Kong's case the consulting jargon actually fits, economically as well as politically. Truth be told, Tang and his fellow cabinet bosses are struggling to come to grips with what's happening all around them. Whereas New York confronted urban decay, high crime and tense race relations, Hong Kong's challenges center on today's rich-poor divide, quality-of-life issues such as air pollution and the city's still-unmet yearning for one-person, one-vote democracy.

Indeed, the influence tycoons exert on policymaking is under attack as never before. And the government's management—or, say its critics, mismanagement—of precious waterfronts and green spaces are major concerns among the middle class.

Although opinion polls show that most Hong Kong people support China's national government, Beijing's ham-fisted efforts to manage the city's democracy debate is engendering fear that the motherland could ultimately renege on its pledge to allow Hong Kong ''a high degree of autonomy."

Perhaps most significant, "a dynamic generational shift" is underway, argues former legislator Christine Loh, founder of the influential think tank Civic Exchange. A new and politicized middle class has emerged, one that's well traveled, technologically savvy and committed to more than getting rich. Their issues include the environment, education and protecting Hong Kong's cultural heritage—the common denominator being better official accountability. ''[This generation] presents the tycoons and the government with its next challenge, and it is where [questions over] how our society ought to be run and where our priorities lie will come to a head."

By most accounts Hong Kong is on the mend as it prepares to begin its second decade as a special administrative region of the People's Republic. Back in 1997, euphoria over the gala July 1 handover yielded quickly to an Asia-wide financial crisis that sent stock and property markets tumbling. Then the city sank into political indecisiveness, suffered a deadly SARS outbreak and after a botched 2003 government move to pass a new public-security law, experienced the largest political protests on Chinese soil since the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations in Beijing.

The setbacks cost Hong Kong's first chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, Beijing's confidence and eventually his job (he resigned citing ''health issues" in early 2005). And since then, Tung's successor, the bow-tie-clad Donald Tsang, has renewed public confidence, delivered strong economic growth and vowed ''to break barriers and realize Hong Kong's potential in an ever-changing world," as he said recently.

The clearest evidence of Hong Kong's transformation comes not from official rhetoric but in the city's economic data. Since 1997, market capitalization on the main stock exchange has ballooned almost fivefold to just under $2 trillion, about one sixth the size of the New York Stock Exchange today. Over the past three years, Chinese companies have raised about $84 billion with initial public offerings in Hong Kong, and, according to the accounting firm Ernst & Young, the city's main bourse generated 17 percent of the total capital raised worldwide during the first 11 months of 2006, ahead of London (15 percent) and New York (11 percent). The main driver was the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China's $22 billion dual listing, which garnered $16 billion in Hong Kong and $6 billion in Shanghai. This flurry of activity broke an old pattern whereby Chinese companies, fearing a lack of liquidity in Hong Kong, preferred listing simultaneously in either London or New York. ''We have always been successful, but these past few years have really put us on the map," says Tang.

Hong Kong's financial sector now accounts for 13 percent of GDP, up from 10 percent in 1997. And as big as it is, today's IPO boom represents only a part of what Hong Kong's money tribe can offer China.

Consider: the IPO market sends capital into the mainland from outside investors (both Hong Kong Chinese and foreigners). But increasingly, China's main challenge isn't raising funds abroad, but disposing of the enormous pools of money it has amassed by running huge trade surpluses.

Now trapped inside the country's closed financial system, this liquidity is too hot for China's banks and stock exchanges to handle. This year's stock bubbles in Shanghai and Shenzhen, for example, feature extreme volatility, rampant insider trading and price inflation driven by too much money chasing too few good companies.

China's embarrassment of riches represents a huge opportunity for Hong Kong. According to the city's top government economist, K. C. Kwok, Beijing has little choice but to channel ever-larger amounts of financial business Hong Kong's way. One example is a scheme enacted late last year that will allow Chinese banks to invest $75 billion in overseas assets, with much of it expected to land in Hong Kong. Another influx is coming from Chinese multinationals, which are gradually being freed from a longstanding requirement that they repatriate foreign earnings back to the motherland. A third source (and by far the largest) is Chinese households, which together have an estimated $2 trillion in savings squirreled away. ''Imagine you are a mainland Chinese sitting on a pile of money in your bank account," says Kwok. ''You look at all these companies going to Hong Kong to list and you think, 'Why can't I invest there, too?' "

Tourism is another growth sector with promise beyond filling hotel rooms or selling tickets to Hong Kong Disneyland. Since Beijing permitted its citizens to visit Hong Kong four years ago, not only have they bolstered a local travel industry slammed hard by the SARS epidemic, they've also revived the prospects of Hong Kong's private hospitals. Some had been struggling until Chinese nationals began showing up for everything from heart surgery to maternity care. ''You can't just walk in and get a [hospital] room because Chinese who are rich enough and do not trust their own hospitals are there," says Jimmy Lai, publisher of the Apple Daily and a harsh critic of Beijing. ''If you believe Hong Kong's rule of law, free-flowing information, professionalism and integrity are part of our comparative advantage, you can assume that the more we integrate with China the more our advantages will be manifested." Even the old port is transforming into a modern service industry. From 1995 to 2005, the percentage of Hong Kong's GDP derived from freight transport and storage stagnated; its contribution to the economy rose just a single point, to 4.8 percent, while container traffic to Shanghai and Shenzhen doubled every few years. But in a shift that remains ''off the radar screen" to many analysts, says Kwok, trade and logistics actually rose as a percentage of the city's GDP, from 18 to 23 percent, during the past decade. The new business comes from services that include managing complex supply chains that link Asian factories to American and European consumers, regional product sourcing and third-country trading that doesn't bring products into Hong Kong at all. ''We're seeing the globalization of production," says Kwok. ''And Hong Kong is the nerve center for a lot of these activities."

This shift is tectonic, and it gets to the heart of issues that now fuel much of the political debate in Hong Kong.

Like Japan, Hong Kong pours a staggering amount of concrete—much of it in the service of vested interest. It has spent $3.8 billion a year on capital expenditures since the handover, a figure roughly equal to what India now invests annually on its ambitious national highway program. The bulk has gone into new roads, additional reclamation (some along the scenic downtown waterfront) and campus like facilities built at taxpayer expense to bolster the nascent science and technology industries. Next on the drawing board: a massive government office complex that will occupy the last harborside plot near Hong Kong's postcard central waterfront, as well as a logistics hub, another container port and a massive bridge to Macau all located on Lantau Island, Hong Kong's largest remaining wilderness area.

Such projects are increasingly a tough sell in a city where public opinion is turning decidedly greener and local campaigns to preserve historic areas slated for redevelopment garner substantial middle-class appeal. Pressure groups have formed to demand more parkland, oppose demolition of historical landmarks (like the Star Ferry Terminal in Central, which recently went under the wrecking ball) and limit the height of buildings in certain areas to preserve views and keep breezes flowing. Even the business community has begun to lobby for waterfront redevelopment modeled on successful projects that have revitalized docklands in cities like Melbourne, Barcelona and London. ''It's not that people are against construction," argues Ma Ngok, a political scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "They're against [Hong Kong's] development-led ideology."

The opportunity costs of bad policy could be enormous. Hong Kong's environment is already deteriorating rapidly; air pollution, which on average reached hazardous levels every third day in 2006, is now a major deterrent to the professional talent the city needs to maintain its edge in finance and logistics. Last year, in a survey conducted for the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong by A.C. Nielsen, 95 percent of business executives said they worried the city's smog would harm them or their families, and more than half said they knew professionals who had declined work opportunities in Hong Kong because of the city's poor environment. Earlier this year the city took a major PR hit when the Hong Kong Philharmonic's vaunted Dutch conductor, Edo de Waart, abruptly moved his wife and kids to Wisconsin to escape the city's ''terrible" smog.

Hong Kong's have-nots can't vote with their feet. But because they'll someday wield ballots, their lot is a major political issue. Since 1997, working-class incomes have stagnated; unemployment peaked at nearly 10 percent a few years back but has since fallen by more than half, and living costs have risen sharply. Job insecurity is also rife as labor-intensive industries continue their exodus to China. Since 1995, official data show, the percentage of semiskilled workers in the economy has declined by almost a quarter and now accounts for just 16 percent of total employment. That's good news in that it illustrates Hong Kong's climb up the service chain.

But because the government didn't implement compulsory education until 1978, there's a huge demographic of workers now in their 40s and 50s who can't easily be retrained for the information age and who cling to menial jobs paying meager wages. ''I was a bus washer 20 years ago, and I know a woman who cleans buses today," says legislative councilor Leung Kwok-hung, a.k.a. Long Hair, a 51-year-old Marxist political activist who won his seat in 2004. ''Her salary is lower than what I got and her working hours are longer than mine were. It's ridiculous."

Hong Kong's tycoons are famous for their resistance to political change. They never pushed for democracy under British rule, and since the handover they've argued that the city is not yet ready for it, or that universal suffrage would threaten the economy because low-income voters would elect populists promising costly social programs. ''This is their blind spot, their idée fixe, about people who have no money," says Loh. ''They think everyone who is poor wants welfare, and they kind of discount the middle class, which is concerned about aging parents, the state of public health and have kids in good public schools." Loh and other activists say the root of the debate lies in interest-group politics and a business elite that believes ''if we give average people a political say, they're going to upset our apple cart."

The old apple cart is toppling anyway.

Labor-intensive industries are leaving, and no matter how much the government invests in cross-border roads and additional container terminals, Hong Kong's days as the pre-eminent maritime gateway to a vast continental economy are over. As with New York and London, necessity is proving the mother of invention.

To avoid decline, Hong Kong has begun to rethink how best to manage its precious green areas, rescue its historic waterfront from overdevelopment and otherwise enhance itself as a financial center worthy of global attention even as it better addresses the needs of the city's have-nots. Ten years ago such ideas amounted to heresy; now they are central to the political debate. As always, Hong Kong is showing the world it can learn, adapt and stay ahead.