Luxury storefronts have been replaced by pop-up shops selling masks. Whole floors of skyscrapers are deserted. Streets once crammed with locals and visitors jostling for space are quiet
HONG KONG — Luxury storefronts have been replaced by pop-up shops selling masks. Whole floors of skyscrapers are deserted. Streets once crammed with locals and visitors jostling for space are quiet.
This is “Asia’s World City,” Hong Kong’s self-appointed title, after more than two years under some of the world’s toughest pandemic rules. The city now wants to reclaim that cosmopolitan status by taking its biggest step toward living with COVID-19: scrapping a crushing quarantine mandate that at one point required 21 days in a designated hotel and easing restrictions on the global gatherings that gave it its reputation as an international metropolis.
But uncertainty lingers over the new approach, which still prohibits visitors from going to places considered high risk — like restaurants, bars and gyms — during their first three days in the city, and many industry leaders say the changes are not enough to pull Hong Kong out of an economic recession and restore its once-clamorous social life.
There are deeper worries, too. The fact that Hong Kong began to diverge from China’s “zero COVID” policy only after Beijing gave its blessing has touched off worries over the city’s broader loss of autonomy. Before the pandemic, the former British colony was already changing in irreversible ways after months of citywide pro-democracy protests. Beijing then unleashed a devastating crackdown that shut down or pushed out some of the people and things that made Hong Kong unique to the rest of China: a politically boisterous, irreverent, semi-autonomous city.
“For Hong Kong’s international credibility, it is shot to pieces,” said David Webb, a longtime corporate governance activist in Hong Kong. As the city scrambled to get a grip on a COVID outbreak earlier this year, its leaders fumbled. They lurched back and forth between insisting on ever-more-restrictive policies that mirrored China’s own draconian approach and backing off, panicking residents and triggering an exodus, predominantly of foreigners.
©2019 New York Times News Service