Dark Side of Hong Kong: The Real Life Dystopia

this is Hong Kong the financial capital of Asia a place filled with Incredible wealth and a home of more ultra high net worth individuals than any other place on the planet and this is Hong Kong as well a place where every fourth person lives below the poverty line where the elderly are forced to scavenge for Waste just to survive and where hundreds of thousands of people live in the urban hell of so-called cage homes several decades ago Hong Kong began an incredible experiment that was supposed to turn it into a capitalist Paradise a place where the market is the king and money is power where anything can be achieved and where everyone is out for themselves but along the way something went horribly wrong and the result is a dystopian present where the rules of the game have been rigged with an insane housing crisis one of the highest inequality levels in the world and an incredible wealth paid for by an even more incredible poverty so what have happened to Hong Kong how bad it all really is and how bad is it gonna get this is the Dark Side of Hong Kong perhaps you have seen the statistics Hong Kong is the world's most expensive city to live in and many of its citizens are forced to live in conditions that would be unimaginable in any other place as rich as Hong Kong it has the least affordable housing in the world way ahead of already expensive places like New York San Francisco or La it would take over 20 years for an average citizen to save for an apartment if they did not spend any of their income and those who rent spend on average over 50 percent of their income on it more than in any other city in the world but even so people still need to live somewhere and so the phenomenon of so-called cage homes has emerged over the years the official name for those are a subdivided Flats because they are essentially normal Hong Kong Apartments further divided often illegally into a large number of extremely small living units to demonstrate how tiny these are this is an average apartment in Tokyo this in New York this one in Paris this one in Hong Kong and this is the size of an average subdivided flat AKA cage home which is even smaller than the average size of a standard U.S parking lot and many of them are way smaller than that but while this might seem like a simple case of supply and demand a lot of people in a small space in Hong Kong's case this is not really true and the reality is a lot worse the fact is that Hong Kong could quite easily build a lot more housing and decrease the price by doing so because only a quarter of its territory is built up and only seven percent of it is zoned for residential development but instead it is actively choosing not to do that but why is that well to explain we need a quick history recap but first let me tell you about the sponsor of this video brilliant if you're watching this you're probably a bit like me someone who loves to learn and likes to keep their mind and Char and if you are then you're gonna 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when it was taken from China by Great Britain and it started to slowly grow bigger it seemed like it will remain just as unimportant as it has always been but then after the second World War the British colonial government made a radical decision that defined the course of Hong Kong's future and made it into what it is today with both its successes and its flaws the government decided that Hong Kong will follow the principles that became known as positive non-interventionism basically the purest form of capitalism the idea was that government regulations and interventions are what holds the economy back and that the only thing that the government should do is to get out of the way and Hong Kong did exactly that until the late 20th century it had no tariffs and no Customs no minimum wage no official pension scheme no competition law and no social welfare system and most importantly it had extremely low taxes so that the money stayed in the hands of the private sector rather than being redistributed by the government but there was one big problem with this decision taxes are normally where countries get their money from and without taxes the colonial government had to find a different source of Revenue and it did since Hong Kong was a colony all the land was a property of the government and that has never really changed because the government never sold any of this land instead it has been leasing the land to real estate developers that want to build there and those leases have represented the main source of income for Hong Kong ever since but because these leases are the main source of Hong Kong's income they need to be expensive to make enough money and the way that the government keeps them expensive is by limiting their supply in other words the government is incentivized to keep the housing expensive because the more expense if it is the more money it makes and so it is only leasing a small part of the land that could be otherwise used to build property and it works for the real estate developers as well since they know that whatever they build is guaranteed to sell at whatever price they want because with the limited Supply there is zero competition and they have absolute Monopoly over the market but what that means for the regular people is that the amount of available housing is extremely limited and absolutely insufficient for the amount of people that live in the city and expensive housing is not the only unwanted result of the non-interventionism policy despite its high GDP in 2020 around 23 percent of Hong Kong's population roughly 1.6 million people lived below the poverty line which is way more than in almost any other country in Asia and the situation has been even worse in the population group of people over 65 as more than 4 40 percent of the elderly have been below the poverty line in 2020 resulting in the phenomenon of cardboard grandmas older people who are collecting cardboard boxes throughout the city so that they can sell them to recyclers for a small sum of money which is often the only job they can get and over the long term the situation has been actually getting gradually worse rather than better as the poverty rate has almost doubled since the 1980s but why is that actually why are there so many poor people in one of the wealthiest cities in the world when the unemployment is low and the economy has been growing well the thing is that while Hong Kong is one of the wealthiest cities this wealth is also extremely unevenly distributed but this did not happen by accident Hong Kong actually developed in two separate waves of progress first in the 1950s Hong Kong developed thanks to a wave of industrialization especially through textile manufacturing pushed by low taxes easy export and cheap labor that was available thanks to millions of immigrants coming in from China they needed jobs textile manufacturers needed workers and as a result Hong Kong made money but this has changed once Hong Kong found another easier way to make money in the late 1970s China had a new leader who replaced Chairman Mao and announced a new direction for the formerly isolated country launching its economic transformation and this has been a huge opportunity for Hong Kong being part of the UK with its low taxes English as an official language and a capitalist culture Hong Kong was a natural gateway to China and a base for Western companies coming to invest there and this has changed Hong Kong's economy completely the manufacturing started to disappear and local businesses started to focus on providing financial and Commercial Services instead and while these offered much higher added value and better pay for people who worked in those sectors they also offered a lot less jobs and all the people who have worked in the factories and who are now unable to land the few high-paid and high qualified jobs in finance were left behind and forced to find low-paying service jobs without any perspective of ever moving higher up or a proper salary while living in the most expensive city in the world that's getting more expensive every year and the government has not been too eager to help them either the principles of non-interventionism and the belief in small government have survived in Hong Kong even after the city-state was handed over to China in 1997 and the government that sees itself as an institution that should help to create wealth but not to redistribute it and promote individual responsibility has been reluctant to get too involved in the situation but here's the problem with this despite the claims of Hong Kong being the land of Entrepreneurship when it comes to business the playing field in Hong Kong has not been even remotely even the fact is that most of Hong Kong's economy is controlled by a small number of family Clans that have held a tight grip over it since the colonial era each of these families own and operate large conglomerates that have since established monopolies in all of the most important industries like shipping construction real estate or utilities they are the ones who benefit the most from Hong Kong system and they have so much influence that starting a business that would go against their interest is nearly impossible and so despite the official claims the option of starting a business is not as easy as it seems while at the same time Hong Kong's position as Asia's Main Financial Center is slipping away since the Chinese government has abandoned the principle of one country two systems and since it it has been exercising every tighter control of the city and taking away the freedoms that Hong Kong citizens used to have the value that Hong Kong has for foreign investors has been diminishing along with its autonomy and soon Hong Kong might turn into just another Chinese City with only skyscrapers cage homes and cardboard grandmas as memories of its former glory

Channel: Explained with Dom

Views: 458,300

Keywords: hong kong, dark side of hong kong, cage homes hong kong, urban crisis hong kong, housing crisis hong kong, poverty hong kong

Id: lm6wh3499KU

Length: 11min 33sec (693 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 01 2022