Wrong Kong Part 4

For Beijing, The Trouble With Hong Kong Is It’s Full Of Hong Kongers

How does a city with a massive housing crisis also have an immigration problem?

Because if there’s one thing the global corporate “elite” agree on, it’s mass immigration lowers labor costs. Hong Kong property tycoons know it increases the price of scarce housing, too.

Hong Kong was a crowded place in 1997 when the city returned to China. The population was 6 million. Today, the population is 7.5 million.

Where have those people come from?

Mostly Mainland China. Which is why Beijing also loves immigration to Hong Kong. China hopes to make Hong Kong just another Chinese city. A great way to do it is to overrun the city with Mainlanders who don’t have those troublesome legacy views about one country, two systems or any experience with rights and voting.

It’s primarily done with something known as the the One-Way Permit.

In place since 1995, it allows up to 150 mainlanders each day to move to the city.

Note how the quota is given in days in an attempt to minimize the number. 150 a day is 54,750 a year. Seems small, right?

Well, over 25 years, that’s 1,368,750.

Which is why these new Mainlanders now account for about 13 per cent of Hong Kong’s total population.

In January, Hong Kong’s dreadful Chief Executive Carrie Lam once again ruled out reducing or scrapping the 150 quota, accusing political activists of “brainwashing” residents into blaming people from across the border for housing shortages and inadequate resources.

Of course, as we saw in our last chapter, Lam’s belief that more supply does not affect demand does not apply to housing.

In addition to lowering wages and increasing the price of housing, this flood has created a crowded nightmare for average people. The rich can access the city’s 15 elite but expensive private hospitals. They also send their children to private “international schools.” Those privileged places are beyond the reach of average Hong Kongers who bear the burden of the extra crowding.

Public Health: Overcrowded and Understaffed

The Hospital Authority runs the city’s 43 public hospitals and institutions that provide care for about 90 percent of inpatients. It employs about 40 percent of local doctors.

I’ll repeat that: 40 percent of doctors treat 90 percent of patients.

The result is those public hospitals routinely operate at 130 percent capacity, meaning staff move beds into corners and corridors to accommodate the overflow.

Anecdotally, my wife’s uncle suffered a stroke on the MTR. He was rushed to a public hospital. When my wife went to visit him 3 days later, he was in a room with 10 other patients. There was barely enough room for her to stand beside his bed without brushing the bed of his neighbor.

Hordes In Maternity Wards

Before 2012, Mainland women flocked to the city to give birth. Then the government imposed a ban prohibiting all local public and private hospitals from allowing Mainlanders to have babies in Hong Kong. To get around that, Mainland women now have “emergency” births in the city.

The result is the city’s public hospitals were stuck with a record HK$52 million in bad debts last year, according to the Hospital Authority. Much of the bill is Mainlanders refusing to pay their fees after receiving treatment in Hong Kong. The outstanding charges last year were a 15 percent increase on the previous year.

Over 202,000 children were born in Hong Kong to mainland parents between 2001 and 2012. Those children automatically became Hong Kong permanent residents, adding to the strain on the city’s small and crowded education system.

More galling? Many of these Mainlanders continue to live over the border in Shenzhen. Under China’s Hukou system, children born in Hong Kong don’t have the residency permits required to live in Shenzhen, so they must go to school in Hong Kong.

They add to the strain on the city’s already crowded education system, where 40 children in a class is not uncommon.

Here’s how that affects locals. From the SCMP:

“The mother in a greyish green baseball cap staggered out of the school on Choi Yuen Road in Sheung Shui. She slouched down in the middle of the pavement and broke into tears.
The school was the centre where parents living in North District would learn the results of their children’s primary school placement. Naturally, they all wanted their children to attend school within the district.
But the mother had just learned that her six-year-old son was allocated to a school in Tai Po district – more than half an hour away by train – instead of a place at a school just five minutes’ walk from home.

Now she would have to abandon her plan of securing a job and instead tend to her son’s daily journeys, she said tearfully. Her truck driver husband would have to continue to be the family’s sole breadwinner.
The elated faces of some parents from the mainland told another story. Their Hong Kong-born children were allocated to schools in North District – the best possible result given the district’s proximity to their home in Shenzhen over the border.
Yu Lai-ping, who came to the school to find out about her own daughter’s allocation result, said she “totally understood” the despondent mother’s feeling. Yu’s daughter was also assigned a school in distant Tai Po.
“We are all Hong Kong taxpayers, while the mainland parents don’t pay any taxes,” Yu added. “Why do our children have to travel to schools so far away every day while theirs get places in schools near our home?”

The influx of cross-border children forces local schools to open extra classes to accommodate growing student intake. Schools that only had two or three first-year classes back in 2011 now must open six or seven such classes to keep pace. To accommodate the sudden expansion, they need to use reserved classrooms and convert rooms built for other purposes into classrooms. For every two extra classes, three new teachers are required.

The situation is expected to last until 2030, when the last batch of babies born to mainland women before the ban are due to graduate from secondary school and enter tertiary institutions. Of course, after the cross-border influx ends and the new student intake plummets to the previous level, these additional teachers might have to be let go and the extra classes disbanded.

Mainlanders also clog the city’s universities — the best ticket to a better life in Hong Kong or abroad. Since 2000, the number of Mainland students in Hong Kong has tripled to 12,037. They now make up the biggest group after locals, who struggle to get university places as it is.

Back at high school, with up to 42 kids in a classroom the only way to organize them is in old-fashioned rows. Teachers often use microphones. There is little group work or student participation. It is difficult to give children individual attention.

The net effect of that is new methods of hands-on learning like STEM can’t be used. Instead, teachers must use traditional methods of rote learning that leave Hong Kong students turned off school and unable to think creatively.

We’ll consider the impact of that in our next chapter.