golodhendil
Active Member
I haven't watched that particular segment so I can't comment on exactly what happened (not that I would trust a lot of what John Stossel says anyway), but that is most certainly not a realistic portrayal of HK. HK is "liberal" to the big capitalists, big corporations and big real estate developers, but is much less liberal to the average "little guy" and certainly not culturally liberal or socially liberal in much of the North American sense.I would point out that liberalism is about more than being tolerant of sexual preference. That's definitely part of it, but ranking how liberal a city is based around homosexual tolerance isn't really useful. You can't even sell street food here without going through some kind of Kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare worthy of East Germany, so how liberal are we at the end of the day? I remember watching a 20/20 segment on Hong Kong where John Stossel actually set up a business selling 20/20 hats in under a day. That's liberalism. In Toronto you would probably get shutdown by some confluence of NIMBYistic neighborhood associations claiming your restaurant is an affront to moral decency or one of the dozens of bureaucrats who exist to enforce arbitrary standards. The entire strain of Toronto benevolent "we are smarter than you" bureaucracy that has banned everything from Sunday shopping to lane-way housing and private liquor sales is wholly illiberal.
In terms of setting up a business, the first hurdle would be to actually get a place. Rent in HK is infamously high, largely propped up artificially by government policies that favour the developers; even a 100 sqft store in the suburbs could cost $4-5k CAD in monthly rent, and a 50 sqft slither of space in the core could go for $1-2k per sqft. Even if you have the initial capital to enter the game, the licensing process in HK is actually one of the worst for world cities. Setting up a retail in one day is unheard of; you'll be lucky if it only takes a month, and if you're setting up an eatery you'll be going among multiple government departments for at least 3 months to half a year.
If you're looking at a street stall, sorry, HK has stopped licensing them for decades already and is still actively pushing to phase out street vendors. What you see on the streets today are either grandfathered, or illegal (the majority), and if the latter you can expect to be harrassed weekly, if not every few days, by the multiple law enforcement agencies that patrol the streets. I have personally been caught among stampedes of hawkers running for their lives with their carts (with oranges rolling and cooking oil splashing) when the anti-hawker units arrive, and many hawkers have actually died from tragic accidents resulting from this.
If Toronto has a "I know better than you" bureaucracy, HK has a "don't give me trouble or I'll throw you in jail; as long as Li Ka Shing makes money I'll be happy" bureaucracy. So much for a "liberal" capitalist paradise.
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