©GettyCrowded in or crowded out? High and low-rise Hong Kong
Early in his ill-fated campaign to become Hong Kong’s chief executive, Henry Tang told the city’s young people to stop complaining about property prices. Local tycoons were not born with billions of dollars, pronounced the magnate turned politician in a newspaper interview last year. Those unhappy about the success of Asia’s richest man should ask: “Why can’t I become the next Li Ka-shing?”
The response – in a city where the median home price is 13 times annual average household income, the highest multiple in the world – was derision. Just months before, a Catholic priest sparked a furore on Halloween by saying: “Ghosts and spirits are not scary. People like Li Ka-shing are the real man-eating devils.” Both incidents highlight a widening inequality that is generating anger among ordinary residents. Many feel a cosy relationship between government and business in one of the world’s most liberal economies is benefiting a handful at the expense of the bulk of the city’s 7m-strong population.
Looking back to the “Hong Kong dream” of the 1970s and 1980s, Vincent Lo, chairman of Shui On Land and one of the city’s wealthiest men, says there were “lots of opportunities for everyone. Now, young people just don’t feel they have any possibility of ever getting there themselves, of ever becoming a tycoon.”Leung Chun-ying, the man who beat Mr Tang to office in March, says he will change this. He has promised a more interventionist government that can make life better for the vast majority by supporting smaller companies and making housing more affordable. Backers of big business, however, worry that he will hurt the free market model that has turned Hong Kong into a leading financial centre. Either way, on his success hangs Hong Kong’s future as a leading financial centre.
Property has long been the key to economic power in Hong Kong. The British government put in place a system where most public expenditure in the colony was paid for by proceeds from land sales, allowing the city to become the low-tax regime favoured by global investors. For decades, the business landscape has been dominated by the four biggest property developers.
Since the handover to China in 1997, the government has kept to the same policy. As the sole freeholder of land it sells leaseholds at high prices, making them affordable only to developers with very deep pockets, who transfer the cost to home buyers. Because it has until recently refused to increase the supply of land, property prices have climbed more than 70 per cent since 2009. This has been compared by local residents – who have gone from typically spending about a third of household income on housing to nearly half – to de facto high taxation. Average income tax, the primary levy in the territory, is 17 per cent.
Three events in the past two months suggest the golden age of tycoons is under threat. First it emerged that an illegal basement with a vast wine cellar had been built beneath the home of Mr Tang, initially Beijing’s favoured candidate. This stirred up anti-tycoon sentiment, ultimately handing victory to Mr Leung, with his grassroots background, who takes office on July 1. Public opinion swayed the decision of an election committee of just 1,200, or 0.02 per cent of the population, selected mainly from the business and professional elite. It also influenced Beijing; though China has no official say, some of the committee say it made its choice known to them.
Then, last month, the Kwok brothers who head Sun Hung Kai Properties – Asia’s largest developer by market value – were arrested for suspected corruption in an investigation also involving a former senior official.
Refugees who built empires but leave a patchy legacy
Hong Kong’s wealth lies in the finely manicured hands of a few tycoons who made their fortunes overwhelmingly in the property market, writes Henny Sender. They remain the beneficiaries of a system whereby the local government makes most of its money by selling land development rights at auctions in which only a few have the resources to bid. With supply tightly controlled, prices remain high and both sides prosper.
It was not always like this. Hong Kong is a city of refugees. After mainland China fell to the communists in 1949, the most successful of the refugees who ended up there were initially the industrialists of Shanghai, many of whom had made their fortunes in textiles. Recreating their manufacturing empires in their new home under the British flag, many turned to Standard Chartered for finance, helping that institution to become the colony’s pre-eminent bank.
Over time the more flexible business refugees – such as the families that controlled the Nan Fung and Wing Tai groups – transformed themselves into property developers.
But ultimately the biggest fortunes were made by refugees from neighbouring Guangdong and Fujian, who arrived in the colony with none of the industrial baggage of those who came from Shanghai. The standard-bearer for this group is Li Ka-shing, the ports-to-property tycoon who is Asia’s wealthiest man. He and others among that later wave of refugee tycoons often obtained finance through HSBC, boosting the fortunes of that bank, part of whose roots lay in Shanghai.
The commanding position of real estate in Hong Kong business meant others were often crowded out. Twenty years ago, big manufacturers such as Patrick Wang of Johnson Electric could not borrow from banks without property as collateral, regardless of how robust their order books and cash flows were.
But that grip appears to be loosening. While some of the property empires – such as Mr Li’s Cheung Kong – remain in their founders’ grasp, some are in the midst of raging family battles for control in the wake of the demise of the patriarch, such as at Sun Hung Kai, the group currently the subject of a judicial investigation.
Many smaller property developers have been squeezed out as the government has put ever larger lots of land up for auction. As a result, some prominent figures in the industry – such as Ronnie Chan, who inherited the Hang Lung group from his uncle – backed the campaign of Leung Chun-ying, the “anti-tycoon” candidate, in his successful bid for election as chief executive of the Hong Kong administrative region.
It may seem curious that tycoons have gone from role models to reviled. Hong Kong’s free-market reputation, intact 15 years after its return to China, has been a keystone of its economic boom. Unemployment is a mere 3.4 per cent and the economy has grown 17 per cent over the past two years. The government has US$285bn in reserves – almost as much as Indonesia, a country with 240m people. Per capita gross domestic product is about US$35,000,
But the fruits of prosperity have gone to a small group. The bottom 10 per cent of households ranked by income make less even in absolute terms than 10 years ago. The city, according to a UN study, has the developed world’s widest income disparity, making it just a little less unequal than nations such as Ecuador and Cameroon. One in four children in Hong Kong live below the poverty line and the situation has not improved in the past decade.
“We all hear about the amazing growth in GDP, but none of us ordinary people feels the benefit,” says Cheung Yuet-ling, a civil servant in her 30s. “Average pay has not kept up with inflation and there is no end to the increase in rent and property prices, which suck up most people’s income. It’s the big developers who get richer and they are not sharing with the rest of us.”
Not for much longer, according to the incoming chief executive. In his first interview with foreign media since his victory, Mr Leung said Hong Kong must pull away from a “small government, big market” model, and that he would address imbalances in the economy and make companies “pay for their costs to the community”. Though details remain scarce, proposals include forcing business to provide more subsidised housing.
If his more hands-on government can improve the lives of the thousands of families packed into dangerous and often illegal cubicles, known as “cage homes”, without harming economic growth, Mr Leung will knock a hole in the non-interventionist model laid down by Sir John Cowperthwaite, the city’s financial secretary, in the 1960s. Treated as sacrosanct by successive governments, it prompted economist Milton Friedman to write an article entitled: “If only the US were as free as Hong Kong”. If Mr Leung takes his campaign too far, critics say, the city will lose ground to Singapore and Shanghai as wealth and power shift to the east.
Mr Leung has close ties to China. Years before handover, he started building ties with mainland officials and, by the time he was in his 30s, in the 1980s, he had been appointed by Beijing to a powerful committee that drafted the territory’s constitution.
Some in Hong Kong’s business elite describe him as “a dangerous communist” – though he denies persistent rumours that he is a party member – who could destroy the city’s free-market foundations, which have generated so much wealth. His strongest critics are close to the tycoons. “This is an earthquake, given the backdrop of the general feeling that the tycoons have had it too good for too long,” says a former senior police official.
Nothing illustrates this more than the arrests of Raymond and Thomas Kwok – who between them have a fortune estimated at US$18bn. They have not been charged and insist they are innocent. But their arrests by the Independent Commission Against Corruption on March 30, along with Rafael Hui, former head of the civil service, galvanised public anger about perceived government and business collusion.
This week Joseph Lau, another developer, has been asked to give evidence in a corruption trial in neighbouring Macau. In February, Icac launched a separate investigation into whether Hong Kong’s outgoing chief executive Donald Tsang received illegal favours from business people after local press reports that he travelled on yachts and private jets owned by tycoons. After stepping down, he had also arranged to move into a penthouse renovated by a wealthy developer but abandoned the plan in the face of mounting outrage.
In the small world that is Hong Kong, Mr Hui had been appointed to his civil service post by Mr Tsang. Mr Tsang’s brother, a former police commissioner, is a board member of an arm of New World Development, a property developer.
Many in business maintain that only big developers need worry about the plan to increase the supply of affordable housing, and that the tenets under which the territory has functioned will be protected. Christopher Pratt, chairman of local conglomerate Swire Pacific, says: “Hong Kong is still so useful a financial centre to the rest of the country” that Mr Leung is unlikely radically to change its free-market economy. Despite the rise of Shanghai as a financial centre, Hong Kong remains China’s biggest capital market because it has its own fully convertible currency and sound infrastructure.
Businesses engaged in industries outside property are hoping the chief executive will address a loss of competitiveness against Singapore in recent years. Hong Kong has lost its dominant position in sectors such as shipping and logistics. Commodity suppliers including BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Vale have moved the bulk of their shipping operations to Singapore, where there are tax incentives and other policies to boost the industry.
In a city the British took over in 1841 to provide a free trading port on China’s doorstep, business and government have always been close. Previously, says Leo Goodstadt, a policy adviser to the colonial administration, Chinese members of the elite were to some extent seen by the majority as a protector of their interests against the British. There is no longer the same sense of “them and us”, he says.
Grassroots disillusionment is linked to the fact that more than 90 per cent of GDP is generated by the services sector, especially finance – which offers few opportunities to those with little education and skills. “More business is moving to the mainland and there is no need to recruit in Hong Kong,” says Mr Lo, who has backed Mr Leung since early in his campaign, one of the few tycoons to do so.
Adding to the resentment is the fact that many tycoons receive most of their income from tax-free dividends. For example, the family of Raymond Kwok received dividend payments last year of HK$1.36bn ($175m) compared with his salary of HK$2.52m, making taxable income less than 0.2 per cent of the total.
Fears that Mr Leung’s ties to the mainland will threaten civil rights and the independence of the judiciary mean he enters government with a public approval rating of just 40 per cent. He needs to gain support before the next election in 2017, when universal suffrage is promised. That is being taken as a source of hope that he will deliver on his campaign promises to draw a clear line between government and business.
Whether it is Asia’s richest man or an elderly woman living in a poor neighbourhood, he says: “I am the chief executive of the Hong Kong people, and each person has a special meaning to me.”
香港迎来梁振英时代
唐英年(Henry
Tang)在参加香港特首竞选初期，曾告诫香港年轻人不要再抱怨楼价。这位投身政界的商业大亨在去年接受报纸采访时宣称，香港本地的大亨们也并不是一生下
来就拥有数十亿身家，那些不满亚洲首富的人应该扪心自问：“为什么做不到下一个李嘉诚？”唐英年最终在竞选中失利。唐英年这番言论引来了一
片嘲讽。在香港，楼价中值是家庭平均年收入的13倍，这个倍数是全世界最高水平。就在几个月前，一位天主教神父在万圣节前夜发表的言辞激起了一场轩然大
波：“邪灵恶魔并不可怕，李嘉诚这种人才是吃人的魔鬼。”这两件事都显示出日益扩大的不平等正激起香港普通民众的愤怒。许多人觉得，香港作为全世界最自由
的经济体之一，政府和商界之间的亲近关系让极少数人获利，却损害了这座城市700多万人口中绝大部分人的利益。
在回顾20世纪70、80年代的“香港梦”时，香港大富豪之一、瑞安房地产(Shui On Land)主席罗康瑞(Vincent Lo)说：“那时每个人都有很多机会。现在年轻人根本不觉得他们有任何实现梦想、成为大亨的可能性。”
今
年3月击败唐英年当选香港特首的梁振英(Leung
Chun-ying)声称他将改变这种局面。他向民众承诺政府将更多干预经济，通过支持小企业，让民众买得起房，来改善绝大多数市民的生活。然而大企业的
支持者却担心他会伤害让香港得以成为领先金融中心的自由市场模式。不管怎样，香港作为领先金融中心的未来，都取决于他能否成功。
房地产长期以来一直是香港经济实力的关键。英国政府在香港这块殖民地建立的体制中，政府大部分公共开支来自卖地收入，使这座城市得以成为低税率地区，受到全球投资者的青睐。几十年来，四家最大的地产开发商在香港的商业版图中一直占据着主导地位。
1997
年香港移交中国以来，港府一直沿用同样的政策。作为唯一的土地永久产权所有人，政府以高价出售土地租约，只有财力雄厚的地产开发商才买得起，而后者则又会
将成本转嫁给购房者。由于港府直到最近一直不肯增加土地供应，因此香港楼价自2009年以来已经攀升70%以上。住房支出通常占香港居民家庭收入的比例，
已经从三分之一左右增加到了将近一半，香港市民将这种状况比作事实上的高税收。香港主要税种所得税的平均税率为17%。
最近两个月发生的三
起事件表明，商业大亨的黄金时代正面临威胁。第一起事件是，北京最初属意的特首候选人唐英年在家中违规建造了一座地下室，其中包含了一个巨大的酒窖。这起
事件激起了反商界大亨的情绪，最终有草根背景的梁振英赢得了选举，他将于今年7月1日就职。舆论的导向左右了选举委员会的决策。这个委员会仅有1200名
成员，相当于香港总人口的0.02%，其成员主要从商业界和专业人士精英中挑选。舆论对北京也有影响。尽管中央政府并未公开表态，但是选委会的一些成员透
露，中央政府向他们表明了意向。
之后，新鸿基地产(Sun Hung Kai Properties)老板郭氏兄弟上个月因涉嫌腐败被捕，这宗调查中还牵扯到一名香港前高级官员。新鸿基地产是亚洲市值最高的地产开发商。
商
界大亨从行为楷模变为千夫所指，这个过程值得玩味。香港自由市场的声誉在回归中国15年来一直未曾动摇，它一直是香港经济繁荣的基石。香港失业率仅为
3.4%，过去两年中经济增长17%，政府外汇储备达2850亿美元，几乎与有2.4亿人口的印度尼西亚相当，人均GDP约为3.5万美元。
然
而繁荣的果实落到了少数人的手中。收入最低的一成家庭的收入，即使按绝对金额计算，也比十年前更低。根据联合国的一份研究，香港的收入差距是发达经济体中
最大的，不平等程度仅略好于厄瓜多尔和喀麦隆等国。香港有四分之一儿童生活在贫困线以下，而且过去十年中状况并未好转。
“我们都听说GDP增长惊人，可是我们这些普通人一点也感受不到受益，”三十余岁的公务员张悦玲（音译）说。“平均薪水跟不上通胀，房租和楼价涨个不停，把多数人的收入都吸走了。大开发商越来越富，可他们并不会和我们这些人分享。”
. . .
不
过，候任特首梁振英表示，这种情况不会再持续多久了。梁振英在胜选后首次接受外国媒体采访，他表示香港必须脱离“大市场、小政府”模式，并说会着手解决经
济不平衡的问题，让企业向社会支付它们应承担的成本。尽管透露的细节仍然很少，但已经提出的措施包括供应更多的资助房屋。
如果梁振英所主张
的干预色彩更强的政府，能够改善成千上万挤在“笼屋”（一种危险的小隔间，通常是违规的）中的香港家庭的生计，同时又不伤害经济增长，那么就会打破20世
纪60年代香港财政司郭伯伟爵士(Sir John
Cowperthwaite)确立的不干预模式。历届政府都认为不干预模式是不可动摇的，经济学家米尔顿•弗里德曼(Milton
Friedman)还为此撰写过一篇题为《愿美国像香港一样自由》(If only the US were as free as Hong
Kong)的文章。批评人士称，如果梁振英在他那条路上走得太远，随着财富和实力向东转移，香港就会在与新加坡和上海的竞争中失利。
梁振英与中国内地有紧密的联系。在香港移交之前，他就开始与内地官员结交。上世纪80年代，年过而立的梁振英就被北京委任进入了权力极大的香港基本法起草委员会。
香
港一些商界精英把梁振英称作“危险的共产党员”（但他否认了有关他是共产党员的持续传言），可能会破坏香港的自由市场基础，而这一基础为香港创造了大量财
富。他最主要的批评者都与商界大亨关系密切。一位前高级警官表示：“这是一场地震，因为现在普遍的看法是，大亨们享受的好处过多，而且时间也过长了。”
没
有比郭炳联(Raymond Kwok)和郭炳江(Thomas
Kwok)两兄弟被捕一事更能说明这点的了，据估计，二人的财富总计高达180亿美元。他们还没有受到指控，并坚称自己无罪。但3月30日，二人以及前香
港政务司司长许仕仁(Rafael Hui)被香港廉政公署(Independent Commission Against
Corruption)逮捕一事，激起了公众对于显而易见的官商勾结的愤怒。
最近，另一位地产开发商刘銮雄(Joseph
Lau)在澳门被要求在一项腐败庭审中作证。今年2月，香港廉政公署对即将离职的香港特首曾荫权(Donald
Tsang)是否从商人手中收受非法好处一事单独立案调查。此前有香港媒体报道称，他曾乘坐属于香港富商所有的游艇和私人飞机出行。他还计划在卸任后迁入
由一家开发商翻新的豪华顶层公寓，但面对公众日益高涨的愤怒情绪，最终放弃了该计划。
在香港这个小小的世界里，许仕仁被曾荫权任命为香港政务司司长。而曾荫权的胞弟、前香港警务处处长曾荫培现在担任房地产开发公司新世界发展(New World Development)旗下公司的董事。
……
很
多商界人士坚持认为，只有大型开发商才需要担心扩大居屋供应量的计划，让香港得以运转的那些原则将受到保护。香港综合企业太古股份(Swire
Pacific)主席白纪图(Christopher
Pratt)表示：“香港仍是一个对中国其他地区有所裨益的金融中心。”因此梁振英不太可能从根本上改变香港的自由市场经济。尽管上海已崛起为一个金融中
心，但香港仍是中国最大资本市场，因为香港拥有自己的完全可兑换货币以及健全的基础设施。
房地产行业以外的企业希望，这位新特首将解决香港
最近几年竞争力输给新加坡的问题。香港已丧失了在航运和物流等行业的主导地位。包括必和必拓(BHP Billiton)、力拓(Rio
Tinto)和淡水河谷(Vale)在内的大宗商品供应商已将其大部分航运业务迁往新加坡，新加坡提供税收激励和其他政策，来促进该行业的发展。
1841
年，英国占领香港，将其作为中国大门口的一个自由贸易港口。在这座城市，企业与政府的关系一直很密切。香港政府前政策顾问顾汝德(Leo
Goodstadt)表示，以前，从一定程度上来说，大多数人认为这些中国的精英人士会保护他们的利益不受英国侵犯。但他表示，如今，“他们和我们”的关
系已经不再是以前那种感觉了。
在香港，90%以上的GDP都来自服务业，尤其是金融业，而对那些所受教育有限并且缺乏一技之长的就业者而
言，他们很难在这一行业找到工作，草根理想的破灭与这种现状不无关系。罗康瑞说：“越来越多的企业迁往了内地，他们不需要在香港招人。”罗康瑞在梁振英竞
选之初就对他表示了支持，这与其他大多数富豪形成了鲜明对比。
更令民众不满的是，许多富豪的大部分收入都来自可以免于交税的红利。比如，郭炳联家族去年获得了13.6亿港元（合1.75亿美元）的红利收入，相比之下，郭炳联的薪酬仅为252万港元，应纳税收入仅占其总收入的0.2%。
由
于人们担心梁振英与内地的关联将对香港的民权以及司法独立构成威胁，梁振英的入职民众支持率仅为40%。他需要在2017年举行下届选举前赢得更多的支
持。按照此前的承诺，香港届时将实行普选。这也让人们抱有期望，期待梁振英能够兑现竞选承诺，在政商之间划出清晰的界限。
无论是亚洲首富，还是住在贫民区的老妪，他说：“我是香港人民的特首，每一个人对我而言都有特殊的意义。”
译者/何黎
