Hong Kong’s high-speed rail to debut amid concerns

HONG KONG: Hong Kong’s highspeed rail link to China is set to open on Sunday, connecting the city to the mainland with a 25,000-kilometre high-speed route for the first time. While the project is a win for residents hoping to visit cities of eastern and central China by train — and for Chinese tourists eyeing the bright lights and luxury stores of Hong Kong — the rail line has faced a number of controversies during the eight years of its construction.

“In the long run it will be a very big burden for future generations,” said Tanya Chan, a Civic Party legislator and one of the rail line’s vocal opponents. In a similar vein to many of Hong Kong’s mega projects, the rail line was completed three years late and came with a hefty price tag of HK$86.42 billion ($11 billion), according to government figures.

The government has also pledged HK$800 million a year in subsidies to the MTR corporation — the private company that operates the subway system and will also run the rail line — to be paid out for the next ten years via a subsidiary company.

On top of the large financial investment, the rail line’s projected ridership figures and internal rate of return — a measure of an investment’s profitability — continue to fall. This is important information that Chan says was made public too late. But it is the terms of the rail line’s immigration arrangements with China that have caused the greatest stir and that are to become the subject of a constitutional legal challenge later this year.

“It’s destroying our rule of law and it’s a blatant violation of Basic Law,” Chan said, referring to what is known as Hong Kong’s ‘miniconstitution.’ “Obviously the Chinese government together with the Hong Kong government have broken the promises they have made.”

Under the arrangements, Hong Kong has leased part of its highspeed rail station to the Chinese government.

In the Chinese section of the station, mainland law will apply and Chinese immigration agents will have full legal jurisdiction — an arrangement that legal experts say violates Hong Kong’s Basic Law.

The Basic Law stipulates that Chinese law will not apply in Hong Kong until 2047, as part of the terms of the return of Hong Kong — a former British colony — to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, known as “one country, two systems.”

The Hong Kong Bar Association has vocally opposed the immigration deal, which opens a number of legal questions, from how a detention or arrest may be carried out to what might happen in the case of an accident or death on the Chinese side of the station.