Jake doesn't often trumpet Hong Kong so this article is an outlier for him. As always, he gives data to support his view. Which I share: that Hong Kong still beats the mainland.
I see that every time I cross the border. Fun times to be had. Fun people to be met. But always a relief to get back home to Hong Kong. It works better, cleaner, faster, and more openly than the mainland.
I don't normally bother much with this sort of China-good-Hong-Kong-bad talk, but its persistence does fool some people into thinking it might be true. Let's set things straight.
As the chart shows, over the past 30 years Hong Kong has made a huge economic transformation from a manufacturing into a services centre.
For the avoidance of doubt, I have excluded tourism from these figures on net services trade. I have only included those sectors in which Mr Tao says we failed to benefit. Some failure.
The mainland never made such a transformation. The hi-tech successes of which you hear so many boast are mostly anomalies. The huge majority of mainland economic production always was, and continues to be, based on low-tech drudgery.
This includes most digital devices, by the way. They are hi-tech in design but low-tech in assembly, which is what the mainland mostly does and one reason it has to pay the rest of the world a fast-rising US$27 billion a year in intellectual property royalties.
Nor do we in Hong Kong exploit 150 million or so of our own people with trifling wages and wretched living conditions because they do not have official registrations for the places they work.Related: Beijing tries to win over entrepreneurs with praise and promises
