Golf Club Divides Hong Kong
On an autumn afternoon at the Hong Kong Golf Club, hundreds of dogs strolled the verdant grounds with their owners in tow, enjoying rare access to the range, which charges new membership fees of up to $2 million. But these impeccable greens, in the northern reaches of Hong Kong, have become an unlikely battleground.
The Hong Kong Golf Club has been fighting a government proposal to carve out less than one-fifth of its 70 hectares of land and redevelop it for public housing. The open day for dogs was an effort by the club to rally support to the club members’ cause in a city known for its soaring inequality and acute shortage of affordable homes.
Hong Kong’s government has come under pressure from Beijing to reduce the wealth gap in line with the Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s promises of “common prosperity.”
But the land dispute puts on display tensions between Hong Kong’s attempts to redistribute wealth and the interests of the elite whom the government has relied upon for support. The city’s business leaders may be aligned with China’s Communist Party rulers, but many are also protective of Hong Kong’s capitalist wealth.
Hong Kong newspapers closely aligned with Beijing — eager to push the territory even closer ideologically to China’s Communist Party — have criticized the club, accusing it of ignoring the needs of working people. “If the golf course development plan is thwarted, the public impression of ‘business colluding with government officials’ will only get worse,” one of the newspapers, Ta Kung Pao, said in an editorial after an environmental review in August effectively delayed the housing plan.
It is not just avid golfers who are stirring opposition to the land swap. Some members of Hong Kong’s business elite see the city government’s plans to claim 13 hectares of club land as dangerous government meddling in the economy.
“A feature of capitalism is a gap between rich and poor,” said Shih Wing Ching, the owner of Centaline, the biggest property agency in Hong Kong, who has taken up the golf club’s cause, though he does not play himself. “If you try to erase the feature, say by taking away golf, then it’s not capitalism, it’s socialism.” And he says that is not what Hong Kong needs.
Both sides recognize that the small section of the club that might be claimed would make barely a dent in the housing crisis. For over 10 years, Hong Kong has been recognized by some measures as having the world’s most unaffordable housing market.
“Currently, the biggest aspiration of Hong Kong people is to lead a better life, in which they will have more decent housing,” Mr. Xi said on the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China in July. He urged the government to carry out reforms and “break the barriers of vested interests.”
The dispute over the course began in 2018, when Hong Kong solicited public input on where to acquire land for public housing, and a few pro-democracy legislators raised the idea of taking back land from the golf club. The land is owned by the government, which has leased it to the club since 1911. Polls showed that 60 percent of the public supported the plan.
But with the business sector strongly opposing the proposal, the government decided to develop only part of the land.
“A debate about this reflects the healthy society of Hong Kong,” said Ronny Tong, an adviser to the government. who is also a golf club member. “Ultimately, it’s an issue of two competing values.”