Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "De-industrialization was Hong Kong’s Biggest Mistake" video.

Jon, Your comment three or four minutes in, that the British never intended Hong Kong to be more than a trading post, is spot on. My maternal grandfather, an energetic and intelligent man and a textile manufacturer, in the English Midlands, died wealthy, a pounds multi-millionaire at a time when the UK pound was worth five US dollars. He started out poor, and the Mechanics' Handbook of his boyhood was my daily reading, a couple of pages a day in the toilet, for some years. Good sound technical reading which has helped me in my own business careers. As a teenager he invented, developed, and patented an improved way of connecting the ends of any power-take-off belt, then invested the income in his own factories, and Bob's Yer Uncle. He had four wives and twelve children, and WWII didn't help the textile industry much, but he still managed to pay for a good deal of my education, and I'm grateful to him. One of the memories of my childhood was my mother reporting what my uncles were worried about, all those Australian cops hired to keep down the Hong Kong textile mills. It didn't work. The last of our English mills closed in the 1970s. The Hong Kong folks who put them out of business have since had to worry about Vietnamese, Malaysian, and other Asian competitors. Some of them financed by my daughter the engineer... One lesson is that drunken, crooked, superannuated Australian cops are not the best people to hire, even for dubious work. A better lesson is that the parts of the family who moved onto other industries have done very well, thank you very much, and we wish honest hard-working Chinese well in everything they do.
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@HonISfirE Services produce everything Singapore exports to the world -- as C.S. Lee correctly reports, above. The biomedical, pharmaceutical, and semiconductor industries are 90% research services, then maybe 10% a bit of cookery and growing services or photolithography, and a wee bit of packaging service, all followed by the service of shipping stuff out. Oh, yeah, and billing and collecting. Banking and investment services.
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If you think Hong Kong has no public goods, you need to look at an aerial photograph of the border. The Hong Kong side of the clearly visible line is all parks and forest land. The, uh, "Peoples'" side is trashy housing and broken-down commercial sites. As for all the people puking and mewling about the service industry, you simply need to thin a bit more about what goes on inside a factory: every factory I've ever worked in has had aisles full of fork-lift trucks providing transportation services between locations where workers provided labour services at machines which dod punching, drilling, folding, bending, and other such-like services. Upsstairs there were always rooms full of people in whirts and ties. They provide financial and planning services, sales and warehousing services. Hell, even coffee and snack services.
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@richinparadise What on Earth are you nattering on abaht? The British financial industry withered in 1914, died entirely by about 1942. There are a few leftover rich toffs here and there, but their finances tend to be based in places like Grand Bahama.
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Anonymous @softmechanics3130 You wouldn't happen to have a fact to go with your half-baked opinion, would you? (My apologies to the good and useful number 0.5.) Germany no doubt has a thicker and deeper loam of older industries, but I think you will find that South Korea, like Japan, is an avid importer of German machines, technologies, advanced chemicals -- and of course luxury automobiles. When you do the homework you obviously don't know that you haven't done, you will find, too, that South Korea exports machines and advanced technology to Germany. The cutting edge of the world's industry knows no boundaries, though there are some residual frictions at some "national" "borders" here and there.
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@DLL-y4p Quite right -- and doing very well at it, despite the ver-ree tough competition from Shanghai and Tientsin, modern, post-industrial economies almost as advanced as Hong Kong's Central itself.
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Richard, you call yourself "a HKer." Where do you hike? If you ever get interested in the economy of Hong Kong, you might want to take a look at a map of the place. The British military reservation is all empty land. Most of the islands of Hong Kong are fertile cropland. All the land on both sides of the railway, up north to the border with the peoples' Republic, is farm- and woodland. Each of those three classes of land is larger in area than the skyscraper-laden land of Central, where the very prosperous and productive financial and manufacturing industries are located -- and even Central is surrounded with parks and woodland which stop only at the Shenzhen border. You're quite right that the land sells for very high prices. This is because buyers want to put it to profitable use, and land owners either want the money now or think it more prudent to hold out for more later. I hope you'll get a chance to visit and get to know the place some time.
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@charlesmadre5568 You get an important half-truth into your two sentences. This makes you a couple of planetary orbits closer to reality than most of the silly posters here. A small number of people here are, like you, in the same universe as Hong Kong itself. Nevertheless, the lunacy, ignorance, stupidity and stumblebum inability to see and think which characterize most of the posts here are a wonder to behold -- as I'm sure you agree.
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