From The Standard:
A senior economist and bureaucrat in Beijing has penned a blistering condemnation of the Hong Kong government in a local Chinese-language newspaper, denouncing the administration for inserting itself into the free market and relying too heavily on the mainland for economic handouts since the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
“Relations between the Hong Kong government and central authorities are not based on market principles, but more upon the desire for greater interests and handouts,” wrote Yi Xianrong, a director at the Institute of Finance and Banking of the high-level Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Yi, writing in Ming Pao Thursday, said Hong Kong’s economic integration with the mainland was inevitable. But he called on Hong Kong to hold on to its laissez-faire principles in the process, arguing that those principles had served as a guiding example for the mainland’s own dramatic liberalization and development over the past three decades. [Full Text]
