Unsafe and substandard housing
A horrific fire at a Hung Hom tenement block killed four and injured 19 people on 15 June. The tragedy was made worse by the generally poor state of the building and its sub-division into small, overcrowded rental cubicles. A proliferation of such cubicles – to generate more rent by cramming in more impoverished tenants – jeopardized fire safety and meant fire doors were inaccessible to these tenants. Many tenants are immigrants from mainland China. Such problems are widely known and yet the government has done very little. The chairman of the government-run Urban Renewal Authority (URA), Barry Cheung Chun-yuen, warns that, “more than 110,000 families live in unhealthy and unsafe homes”. Meanwhile, the URA itself serves the developers in their drive for higher profits, as shown by its undeclared policy of “social cleansing” – the expulsion of low-income residents – from areas like Shun Ning Road in Sham Shui Po where URA-led renovation projects are underway. The numbers living in poverty are rising. Hong Kong’s median household income was the same in 2009 as in 1999 – HK$17,500 per month. But the number of households earning less than HK$10,000 (US$1,283) per month rose from 498,000 to 649,000 over that decade. One particular hard hit group are the elderly, given the lack of a universal pensions system. According to Oxfam, the poverty rate among Hong Kong’s elderly reached 40 percent in 2010. The Mandatory Provident Fund (MPF), designed by and for the banks, which have since its inception creamed off a whopping HK$33.3 billion in administration fees, is viewed by 80 percent of Hongkongers as a scam for “cheating” them. Around one million women – housewives, part-time workers and the elderly – are excluded from the MPF and lack any mandatory pension cover. The OECD (a lobby group of the 30 most developed capitalist economies) reports that a low-income worker in Hong Kong who starts work at the age of 20 and retires at 65 will receive pension payments worth just 35 percent of average lifetime earnings, compared to around 71 percent on average for OECD countries. The deepening social malaise has produced a big shift in political attitudes in recent years, although as yet this lacks a coherent ideological expression. An important symptom of this radicalisation is the phenomenon of “anti-rich sentiment” and “anti-business sentiment” that is being discussed and micro-analysed in the media and academia. The term “property hegemony” has also entered widely into the political debate as an expression of the domination of the property and finance tycoons. The capitalist establishment is beginning to sense the first tremors of an approaching political quake. Li Ka-Shing, the richest man in Hong Kong and 16th richest worldwide, recently lamented, “Hong Kong has been politicised”. Li’s two main companies, Cheung Kong (Holdings) and Hutchison Whampao, which give him a vice-like grip over the property, hotels, telecom, retailing and container shipping sectors, have a combined stock market value of HK$663 billion – equivalent to 38 percent of Hong Kong’s GDP (HK$1.7 trillion in 2010). Nationalist ideas can turn into a witch’s brew of unforeseen consequences, with competing political elites fostering ethnic, linguistic or regional divisions in order to divert attention from their own misdeeds. Thus, alongside Beijing’s admonitions for greater patriotism, there has been an upturn in anti-mainland sentiment in Hong Kong, scapegoating mainlanders – not the regime but ordinary people – for a multitude of problems from housing costs to inflation to overloaded maternity wards at public hospitals. In one recent opinion poll, 70 percent opposed mainland immigrants receiving the HK$6,000 budget handout. While not wanting to displease its masters in Beijing, and wanting to preserve the financial privileges enjoyed by Hong Kong capitalists in China, government policies are inflaming racist and chauvinistic sentiments. One example is the decision to slap controls – new quotas – on mainland mothers giving birth in Hong Kong, rather than imposing controls upon the private medical profiteers that abuse public resources to promote lucrative ‘medical tourism’. The socialist alternative is abolition of private medicine and democratic control over a much-expanded healthcare sector.
