Life in Hong Kong getting harder as inequality goes through the roof

HONG KONG / LONDON (June 14): Mrs Lau can’t help but glance nervously at the calendar. Her next paycheck isn’t for a week, and she doesn’t have enough money to feed her family of four crammed into her small, government-subsidised Hong Kong apartment. Her husband can’t work, and the kids don’t understand why their mother keeps buying stale food.

"We’ll eat rice soup for all three meals," said the 42-year-old, a cashier at the Wellcome supermarket chain controlled by the Jardine Matheson group. Lau, who asked that only her surname be used, has been the sole provider for her 7-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son since her husband injured his back. She makes the equivalent of US$5.40 ($7.50) an hour, nowhere near the US$15-an-hour minimum wage in cities like Seattle, where the cost of living is cheaper.

It’s an increasingly familiar tale in Hong Kong, a city of soaring skyscrapers and glittering luxury boutiques that’s become perhaps the epitome of income inequality in the developed world. Two decades after Britain handed the former colony over to China, its richest citizens – billionaires such as Li Ka-shing and Lee Shau Kee – are thriving, thanks to surging real estate prices and their oligopolistic control over the city’s retail outlets, utilities, telecommunications and ports. But not people like Lau.

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