He Left a HK$50,000-a-Month Civil Service Job to Dig Through Hong Kong’s Land Data — Harder, but Happier | Hong Kong Street Life ⑰

“Hong Kong Street Life” is a QDaily column by outside contributors, devoted to setting down, as quickly as it can, whatever sketches it can manage of a place that is changing fast.

“Hong Kong has little land and many people”: six characters that every Hong Konger has had drilled into them by school textbooks since childhood, and the standard justification for reclaiming land from the sea to build new towns. Could the idea itself be a false premise?

Expensive, cramped, tiny — three words sum up housing in Hong Kong, and the city’s land problems have worked their way into its bones. Hong Kong covers 1,106.42 square kilometers and holds an average of 6,777 people per square kilometer; in the poor district of Sham Shui Po the figure reaches 43,381, the fourth-highest population density in the world. In 2019, a wage-earning household would have to save every cent it makes — eating nothing, spending nothing — for 21 years to afford an ordinary flat. Hong Kong has been the world’s least affordable housing market for seven years running. That gap between people and land, tangled up with politics and policy, has produced warped subdivided flats, “nano” luxury units, a lopsided ratio of public to private housing, and much else.

Overheard 3, released in 2014, was the first film bold enough to take on the hidden dealings of Hong Kong’s land system. Its plot turns on a village strongman scheming to grab a property project for himself. This film about “ding trading,” a scam built on village housing rights, became the starting point for a piece of research.

It was that film that gave Huang Zhaohong the idea of researching the New Territories’ small houses. He is a civilian researcher at Liber Research Community. He looks a little tired but speaks firmly; the night before the interview he sat over documents until four or five in the morning. Last January the study he led, No Deceit Too Great for a Ding: A 2017 Study of Ding Trading in the New Territories (《丁不厌诈：新界套丁研究报告 2017》), was published, using hard evidence to unravel a long-standing mystery: just how widespread the scam really is.

The countryside of the New Territories holds several thousand hectares of land, and that land is a mess. Under the Small House Policy introduced in the 1970s, every male indigenous villager in the New Territories has the right, once in his life, to build a house without paying a land premium — but he may own no land at all. That is the “ding,” the male heir, in “ding trading.” The trading is the developers’ half: they have the land but cannot legally build on it, so to control village-house development rights they buy ding rights from indigenous villagers, then use those villagers as fronts to apply for building permits and put up what are effectively large housing estates. Working the loophole, they resell the units at a huge profit — which amounts to defrauding the government.

The government has never had real investigative data on ding trading. No Deceit Too Great for a Ding surveyed 642 villages and estimates that nearly a quarter of all small houses in Hong Kong are implicated — at least 9,878 of them. The researchers went through the houses one by one, combed 40 related court records, and used large volumes of Google Maps data to build a database of suspected ding-trading cases, which drew plenty of attention of its own.

“Hong Kong basically has plenty of land,” Huang Zhaohong says. The trouble is that it isn’t used where it counts, and illegal ding trading is one source of the disorder. He hikes often, and he cannot forget a field of green grass in Sai Kung, ringed by rivers on three sides — his back garden, as he thought of it. Seven or eight years ago it was suddenly fenced off and became a villa for a foreign resident, the product of exactly this kind of deal.

Where land is involved, interests knot together, and the only way to force a window open may be plain, hard evidence.

Liber Research Community, the group he belongs to, has been absent from none of Hong Kong’s major land debates in recent years. Huang is one of its seven researchers. Crowdfunded and independent of government, the group studies Hong Kong’s land problems and sets out to break the myth of “insufficient land supply.” In seven years it has published four books and more than a dozen research reports, each of which has set off public argument and forced a government response — one stone, a thousand ripples.

In 2013, Not a Land Supply Problem: The Myths and Realities of Hong Kong’s Land Issue introduced, for the first time, the idea of “brownfield land” — farmland and industrial land that has been abandoned or spoiled, such as scrapyards, container yards, and recycling depots.

Two years later Liber Research Community published Brownfield Traces, counting nearly 800 hectares of brownfield land by hand. It also showed that when the Housing Department was building public housing at Wang Chau, it abruptly dropped the brownfield option in favor of green-belt land, cutting the number of flats from 17,000 to 4,000 — a loss of more than three-quarters. Nine months later the “Wang Chau incident” broke, and the press revealed the collusion of interests between the Chief Executive and the rural establishment. Hard to Tax the Rich described how speculators buy property through shell companies to avoid tax; Hidden Options exposed 927 idle government plots available for short-term public rental that the government had never disclosed; Draining the Pond to Build examined how the four big developers have long hoarded farmland and fish ponds and left them derelict while waiting to apply for development, threatening the ecology of the ponds in the process.

The day after the ding-trading report came out, Huang Zhaohong was invited onto a radio program to face Hou Zhiqiang, chairman of the Sheung Shui Rural Committee, who controls large tracts of land in the northeastern New Territories. Huang deliberately brought several sales brochures with him: the law requires that they not present the development as an estate, so they list only the names of the indigenous sellers. Why, he asked, does this one village have twenty different surnames? Villagers uniting to return home and build houses to live in, the other side replied. Then why sell them all at once? “Right, the villagers are in financial difficulty, so they’re selling the houses for cash.” Huang could not resist firing back: is the feng shui so bad that twenty men go bankrupt the moment their houses are finished?

“The government knows, everyone knows, the rural gentry know — they all pretend not to see it.” Last April the Lands Department said it would refer suspected cases to law enforcement; nothing has been heard since. A case challenging indigenous small-house rights has recently gone to judicial review, and he has been supplying the lawyers with policy documents. You train soldiers for a thousand days to use them for a single moment; he has not lost heart. “Small houses aren’t a problem you solve overnight, but if you don’t face the problem you’ll never change it.”

What Huang Zhaohong wants is to use research to loosen a rigid system. He is 30. He joined Liber Research Community as a volunteer in 2014 and came on full time in 2017. Before that he spent five or six years as a civil servant — a grade II Executive Officer (EO) — and by the time he left he was earning HK$50,000 a month. The EO starting salary is high, and many people see it as a plum job.

He studied politics and public administration at university, and after graduating he passed the civil service exam. He had been full of ideals: he could get inside the system and change it, he thought, and really make something of himself. It did not work out that way.

As a civil servant he saw the government’s absurdities up close, and did plenty of things against his conscience. What disappointed him most was watching the procedural justice left behind by the British colonial administration fall apart year by year.

Every year the government runs a resource allocation exercise to set the budget. Ideally each front-line department would assess needs from the bottom up: to expand services for the elderly, say, it would first use census data or research to estimate how much a district’s elderly population will grow over ten years, then submit a funding request, and the government would weigh what was urgent against what could wait and allocate accordingly. Over his six years there, he watched the meetings that decide resources multiply, with plans slotted in abruptly at the whim of senior officials. “If you believe reason can solve problems, then rational decision-making matters — and the whole system has completely collapsed.”

The worst of it came in 2016, when he was at the Commerce and Economic Development Bureau and the government decided to create an Innovation and Technology Bureau with no study to justify it at all — two or three pages of documents, and it was announced. “What is Hong Kong’s strategic position for the next ten or twenty years? Which technologies? How does it fit with mainland China’s tech industry so the two aren’t in a race to the bottom?” The bureau was set up on a whim, with a blank blueprint, and several lawmakers questioned it. Only after the Greater Bay Area was officially announced in 2015 did Huang Zhaohong work out, from the bureau’s choice of partners and its land-grant plans, what it was for: to let mainland tech companies use Hong Kong’s role as a financing center to go global. “That’s the kind of thing the US-China trade war is worried about now — whether Hong Kong becomes a white glove, used to steal foreign technology, using Hong Kong’s international standing to do things companies can’t do directly on the mainland.”

Looking back at what he had set out to do — put what he had learned to use, serve the government — Huang Zhaohong can only sigh. “I overlooked power relations. The way political economy is structured now, a monopoly controls how interests get divided, and policy isn’t made through rational discussion.”

Before leaving the civil service he spent five months at the Legislative Council doing research. The pressure was heavy — you clocked off but the work never ended — and that finally pushed him out. On the job, everything had to rest on official data. When the Legislative Council was at last able to study brownfield land, including the contested brownfield development at Canary Wharf in London, it took only the figures for jobs created and investment, and ignored civilian estimates of the after-effects: gentrification, inflated property prices. “There’s no such thing in this world as a piece of data that is genuinely true and calls itself objective. Every number that gets made carries a value.”

And Hong Kong’s land data is full of holes. Land supply information is not transparent: you buy it plot by plot, and pay extra for every additional item.

Liber Research Community lets the numbers do the talking, and the hardest part is finding the numbers. A small knife felling a big tree has always been their way of working. With no money to buy land data in bulk, they have had to do it by hand, recruiting a team of volunteers to pick out suspected brownfield sites from satellite images and aerial photographs using Google satellite view, ArcGIS, and similar tools. Huang Zhaohong’s ding-trading research also relied on about ten volunteers examining village houses one by one on the map, plus six interns who went to the Public Records Office and photographed 150 policy documents on small houses with their phones.

Sometimes he finds it ironic that it is easier to push for change from outside the government. “We can never match their resources, so we look for the issue most worth doing, the weakest point, a policy problem the government can’t deny. That’s where the effect is biggest.”

In 2014, Liber Research Community’s brownfield figures were written into the platforms of several political parties. In 2015 the Chief Executive announced in the Policy Address that the government would develop brownfield land at Hung Shui Kiu, Yuen Long South, and New Territories North.

Liber Research Community also found that Hong Kong’s brownfield land had been expanding for 25 years and reached 1,521 hectares by 2017, much of it hoarded by the four big developers, with farmland left to go derelict.

He criticizes the government for doing nothing and ignoring where the problem starts. “The biggest land problem comes from the government handing the main right to develop over to the developers, and that could have been avoided,” he says. Hong Kong’s land system is a leasehold system with fixed terms, usually 75 years; in law the government can control land and take it back, yet it lets the four big developers hoard it. “There’s no supply problem. There’s plenty of land you’re not using. If the government took back the brownfield sites, there’d be supply.”

Land policy is not the same thing as public housing policy. With the property market climbed out of reach, Hong Kong people need the affordability problem solved. Chief Executive Carrie Lam plans to shift the ratio of public to private housing from 6:4 to 7:3. Yet there are now 267,000 public housing applications, the wait has risen to nearly six years, and the shortfall is a full 67,000 units; in recent years public housing supply has consistently fallen behind the annual target of 20,000 units, in some years by almost half. Private housing keeps getting finished, and every big government redevelopment ends in luxury flats.

Liber Research Community estimates that one-third of the brownfield land that has not been planned for would be enough to build 84,000 public housing units and solve the problem.

The road to making the case for brownfield land is long. In 2017 the government set up the Task Force on Land Supply to work out an overall land strategy, which set off the “Great Land Debate.” Liber Research Community joined in too, publishing Real Options for Hong Kong’s Future Land Development: An Honest Study and Public Consultation.

Last October, Chief Executive Carrie Lam proposed spending HK$500 billion — nearly half of Hong Kong’s fiscal reserves — to build an artificial island of about 1,700 hectares in the central waters, with roads and railways linking it to the rest of the city, which she expects to bring property prices down. More than ten thousand people marched against it.

Watching the government push the reclamation plan whatever else happens has disappointed him further. He describes it as a public relations exercise for a decision already taken. “East Lantau is national strategy, with enormous construction interests behind it. But this public policy choice, this decision, isn’t based on reason, or on any justification. That’s a huge problem.”

The common fallacy is that more supply brings prices down. Hong Kong’s high property prices are partly the Hong Kong government’s own doing. The money the government makes from selling land goes straight into the Capital Works Reserve Fund and becomes the funding for construction projects, Huang Zhaohong explains — “sell land, get money, reclaim more sea, then sell that land too.” He calls it a revolving door for funds: to keep the construction machine turning, “you have to push land prices up so you can subsidize the future; you have to sell land for the money to come back. But selling at that price hurts people’s lives.” Expensive land, expensive rent.

“These lies are full of fallacies,” Huang Zhaohong says. Set against developers building an artificial island to increase supply and bring prices down, brownfield land can supply just as much housing, more cheaply and more effectively. Reclamation costs about HK$1,300 per square foot; compensation for most brownfield sites is only HK$300 to HK$500. In a poll published last year by Green Sense, 60% of Hong Kong people backed developing brownfield land and 30% backed reclamation.

“Prices are falling because there are fewer speculators. Supply has nothing to do with the fall; it isn’t the main factor at this moment. It’s investment, speculation, and government policy. If you don’t fix that, a hundred artificial islands won’t help.”

Hard to Tax the Rich, the work of another researcher, aims at an even more important loophole in policy on property speculation: a small number of outside speculators buy homes by transferring shares in shell companies, escaping almost every government tax. The study went further, picking a set of buildings and checking the land registry, and verified 126 cases of companies buying property, one of them involving a member of the national committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. As long as the Hong Kong government leaves the loophole open, it will keep letting hot money move out freely and leave housing sitting empty — and it has badly misread what is actually happening in Hong Kong’s residential market.

Take The Arch in West Kowloon, Huang Zhaohong says: they verified that as much as 40% of its units are held by companies and that 73% of the overseas buyers come from mainland China, and in one case a mainland immigrant who bought property in Hong Kong avoided a full HK$30 million in tax.

Like pulling apart a chain of linked rings, one research question drags in another. He counts them off on his fingers: start from a concern for land, and housing connects to policy, policy connects to the tax system... All of it runs into the same wall. “The problem is that the Hong Kong government won’t change.”

He could have stayed in government, kept an iron rice bowl, and lasted to retirement. “I think I could have carried on and got to HK$100,000 a month. Not very senior, but no worries. The only price of that life is what I said — it’s as if you’re already dead, doing the same thing until you’re sixty.” He quotes Benjamin Franklin: dead at twenty-five, buried at seventy-five. For years he had gone with the current inside a grinding education system. “I’ve finally found what I want to do. I want to keep taking part in public life; it suits me. Why wait?”

Giving up any hope of buying a flat — no regrets at all? “I never thought about buying a flat!” He laughs out loud. He is glad, instead, that he can throw himself into what he wants to do, skipping meals and sleep, often working until five or six in the morning over his documents. His income has dropped sharply and his family doesn’t understand, but in work that fits him he has found a satisfaction he never had before.

He has company here. Chan Kim-ching, who founded Liber Research Community, likewise turned down a part-time consultancy at the Central Policy Unit paying HK$90,000 a month, just so he could do his own research. With no wealthy backer, Liber Research Community lives on crowdfunding: seven researchers, HK$150,000 a month in expenses. Its finances have reached crisis point more than once, and roughly 400 monthly donors have kept it alive. In English the group calls itself Liber Research Community; its Chinese name means “local research society.” It also runs events to push people to produce and share knowledge themselves, genuinely trying to build a community that cares about research. Even so, it has lately struggled to find anyone willing to join.

If the government came calling one day, would he go back? He shakes his head. No. “When I worked in government there was a phrase we used all the time: blend into the background. You disappear into the crowd, nobody notices what you do, and the important thing is to deliver a policy, not to judge whether the policy is good or bad.”

“Without a truly democratic system I won’t go back, and I don’t think today’s government would appreciate someone like me anyway.” He sighs that the government treats civilian researchers as an obstacle. “The government isn’t accountable to Hong Kong people. Plenty of people doubt that what it does is for Hong Kong people at all.”

The mountain of vested interests is too big, and they are like the old man in the fable, carrying it away one basket at a time. Huang Zhaohong still cannot forget that back garden of his in Sai Kung, even though it was wiped off the map long ago. He jokes that he is chipping stone — the Cantonese phrase for grinding through tedious work bit by bit. Liber Research Community calls itself local, he says, not only because it wants to do something for Hong Kong people, but because it wants to treasure every piece of land, and push for even the smallest change.

Unless otherwise noted, the cover image and all images in this article were taken by the author.