For the first time, a senior government official has said in public that the city should no longer be competing in the container terminal business. That would open the way for our biggest-ever residential mega-project
The “he” in the excerpt above is the chief of Hong Kong’s mainland affairs bureau, Raymond Tam Chi-yuen, and I consider this, the fact of said that Hong Kong should no longer be competing in the container terminal business, to be the most important part of the excerpt. It is important because this is the first time I have heard of a senior government official saying it in public. The context here is that Mr Tam is boosting a Beijing-sponsored scheme called the “Greater Bay Area”. Essentially it comes down to the idea that the major cities of the Pearl River Delta should not compete but work together for the good of all because then we can move mountains… and so on. This particular manifestation of hot air has been exhaled our way many times before, of course, and no doubt it has all the prospects for glorious success that it has had in the past. But that’s not what matters here. What matters is that a Hong Kong government official has finally conceded that a big container port in Hong Kong may not be part of this glorious success and we ought to concede the port business to rivals across the border which are now much better suited to it. They are better suited to it because they are closer to the mainland industrial centres they serve instead of at the end of a traffic-clogged road over a border crossing.
