Hong Kong nightlife: not coming back any time soon

The White Stag Wanchai during Sevens, April 2018. Just before the 
Hong Kong “pro-democracy” protests, and Covid

There’s a post in today’s South China Morning Post: "Face it, Hong Kong’s bars won’t recover unless enough expats return”. 

And the thing is: expats are not returning. Nearly four years since the pandemic, and they’re made other plans. 

I blame the government for this. The Covid lockdowns in Hong Kong were way too severe and lasted way too long. We only stayed because we didn’t have jobs we had to go to: we’re retired and comfortable. But we know heaps of people just from out street, let alone from the whole of Hong Kong, who either went back to home base or relocated to somewhere easier on all the curbs. 

Let’s recall that the severe lockdowns were not necessary. That’s not hindsight. Many of us said so at the time. 

The government has tried to lure some of the expats back. They started a program last year. So far to little effect; yet they’re needed, as April Zhang notes the article:

• The expatriates and international travellers who went away have mostly been replaced by mainlanders – but hanging out in bars is a predominantly Western social practice.

More notes, from here: 

The simple fact is that the people who drove the nightlife have left in large numbers. The idiocy of the HK government (and a few of their cheerleaders in the F&B sector ) was to think that their departure was only temporary and it would flip back quickly whenever the Covid situation normalised. But the thing is most of those departures were permanent.

The relevant folks are basically:

• Expats, both gweilos and ABC/CBC/BBCs [Australian, Canadian or British Born Chinese]
• Affluent and highly educated HK Chinese - this demographic was way over-represented in the departures during 2019 and Covid years
• Affluent HK South Asians

The reality is that, during 2019 - 2022, almost everyone in the above categories had better options. Most had foreign citizenship and the few who did not had pathways out through BNO or skilled migration. This is one area in which the HK Gov severely miscalculated. Again, they thought it would be temporary.

But nightlife is a lot like business confidence. Once you lose it, it’s very difficult to get it back.

Add to this the fact that many of the people (in the above categories) who drove the nightlife in the 2000s and 2010s went from being in their 20s and 30s to being in their 40s and 50s. When a person of that age makes the move home, most will be going for good.

It will take YEARS for HK nightlife to become even a semblance of its former self and even then, it won’t be the same. And it can’t - because the HK nightlife of the 2000s and early 2010s - which was effectively an extension of colonial era HK life - was an accident of history that can’t and won’t be repeated.

I’m afraid the party has permanently moved. There is no adequate successor city, unfortunately, and so it’s dispersed to various places: Tokyo, Shanghai, Bangkok, Singapore all have bits and pieces of what used to be our nightlife.

None of this affects me in particular: in my eighth decade I’m not much of a clubbing dude any more.  But it’s always nice to know it’s there and that you live in a swingin’ city. That used to be the case, and is not so much any more. And that’s sad.