HK-based research foundation makes flashy research, BBC & SCMP pick it up
I saw this on the BBC Asia page yesterday:
“Mega-city move? Calls for Hong Kong and Shenzhen to merge into one city”
The people behind these “calls” is the Bauhinia Foundation Research Centre. Their director, Anthony Wu, is quoted as saying “If you look at the long term competitiveness of Hong
Kong, Hong Kong has only got seven million people, and… Shenzhen has
13 million people. You need to merge the two to create a bigger
metropolis to take advantage of China and the world.”
And he continues to argue that “Hong Kong should merge with China… as Hong Kong has the legal system and China the 5,000 years of culture.”
The article continues by giving more details of his radical plan, which, as you may have guessed, I have my doubts about. Are these grandiose, sweeping generalizations the best that a “research centre” in Hong Kong can come up with?
Then of course, there’s the local English newspaper, the South China Morning Post, which ran an editorial supporting Wu’s arguments and (quoting from the same BBC article) “argued that the ‘one country, two systems’ mantra, designed to guarantee Hong Kong’s autonomy under Chinese rule, was a ‘straitjacket’, which ‘but for history’ was holding Hong Kong back.”
I’m not even going to comment on that one.