We all, I hope, welcome the attention which is now being paid to the problem of poverty in Hong Kong. The government, and the people who monitor it, have taken a long time to get round to this. There are many problems involved in doing anything useful about poverty, but that is no excuse for ignoring it.

This was not just a matter of social forces eroding the living standards of the grassroots beneath the surface of events. On the contrary, what happened was the social safety net reluctantly erected by colonial bureaucrats was deliberately and publicly dismantled. Yet we did not notice.

I say we, because the group of people who did not notice included me. We may contrast this with what happens in other countries when social benefits are reduced or changed, even if there are good reasons for the move, such as the government being bankrupt. People complain; they protest; there are demonstrations and not infrequently, riots. In Hong Kong, nothing like this happens at all. To get any sort of real public disorder here we have to import Korean farmers.

Now there may be something in the notion that people can only worry about so many things at once. Being blessed with slow progressive change towards a distant and elusive target means being cursed with constant arguments about where we are going and when we are going to get there. And then people have other things to worry about, like global warming and strange new diseases. And they are increasingly bombarded with non-news about things they don’t have to worry about: celebrities behaving badly, the 500th cure for cancer, the Hong Kong soccer team and so on.

Still, I think there was something more permanent going on than a society bamboozled by its own distractions. Long before the handover Hong Kong did not really do social welfare.

This is not anyone’s fault. Many of the people in Hong Kong were refugees, or the off-spring of refugees. They had not chosen Hong Kong but had fled somewhere worse, and many of them hoped to move on to somewhere better. Hong Kong itself was more than a city, less than a country. It was neither intimate enough to be a home, nor imposing enough to be a focus of patriotism. And, moreover, it was once administered by foreigners.

Some script writers and politicians tried to see in local history the sort of communities you find in long-established villages. But this was always a bit of a con. Much of the “Below the Lion Rock” spirit was made up after the event. In refugee camps people do not identify with the community. They compete for good exits. I remember the interesting spectacle presented by a large group of Legislative Council members singing — for television — a song called “Our Home is Wong Tai Sin”. But of course their homes were not in Wong Tai Sin and people whose homes were in that salubrious suburb would have been quite happy to swap them for better accommodation elsewhere.

Indeed this rootlessness was encouraged by official policy. The colonial government thought it was doing people an enormous favor providing them with housing, and had no intention of providing the additional favor of a choice of location. You went where you were sent when you reached the head of the queue or won the Home Ownership lucky draw.

This explained some features of the local media which puzzled me 30 years ago. There were no local papers, of the kind you find in towns and suburbs elsewhere. And the papers catering for Hong Kong as a whole were puzzlingly preoccupied with foreign news. Local news was all about business and politics; the rare reporter who was interested in social or labor issues would struggle to get his or her articles in the paper.

Hong Kong has never, I fear, done social solidarity. We do not have one trade union movement; we have three. There is no proper Labor Party. Come to that there is no proper Conservative Party either — just a lot of competing self-interests. People who emerge at the top of the system as millionaires or senior officials see their success as entirely a result of their own superior merit, and other people’s lack of success as indicating fecklessness or stupidity.

So I think there is a problem here, which will not be solved merely by changing to another set of politicians. In real communities the government does not run APIs telling people we are all in this together.

The author’s work in journalism has won him honors in the Hong Kong News Awards and the International Radio Festival of New York. He is well known as a columnist, reviewer and broadcaster.

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