China Will Keep Hong Kong’s Capitalist Ways
Reducing Beijing’s reliance on the dollar is taking on a new urgency. That’s where the freewheeling financial center comes in.
Hong Kong has convinced Beijing it’s indispensable.
Photographer: Lam Yik/BloombergHong Kong’s decision to target overseas dissidents with HK$1 million bounties has renewed fears that China is tightening its grip. What’s next? Will Beijing change the society’s easygoing ways and export its “common prosperity” drive to the city, once labelled by the libertarian economist Milton Friedman as the “freest market in the world”?
The pro-democracy movement is indeed a sore spot for Beijing — it felt compelled to silence the protests with a new national security law in mid-2020. Nonetheless, President Xi Jinping has a strong incentive to keep Hong Kong’s capitalistic ways intact — so the financial hub can work its magic.