During the 2012 campaign for the position of chief executive of Hong Kong, Henry Tang, the wealthy opponent of CY Leung, the winning candidate, delivered a message to the people of the Chinese special administrative region. They should stop complaining about the high price of residential property and instead aspire to be like Li Ka-shing, Hong Kong’s most prominent tycoon, he said.
The message did not go over well. One of the local newspapers promptly did a survey of young people to establish whether they indeed aspired to emulate Mr Li, whose net worth is almost $35bn, making him the 13th richest man in the world, according to Forbes. By an overwhelming margin, the reply was negative. Instead, they said they aspired to emulate one R Singh. The then obscure Mr Singh, it turned out, was a Punjabi truck driver who had just won the lottery. Since that time, the antipathy for the tycoons has only grown as property prices have continued to rise and are way beyond affordable for even relatively well-off residents of the city. The government controls the supply of land for development, auctioning parcels at its own discretion.
Now the mass discontent with the system that results in high prices has combined with annoyance at the increasingly palpable influence of Beijing and the influx of mainland money. The conjunction of these sources of frustration has led to ever more vocal opposition in Hong Kong to the governments on both sides of the border.