China Report

China Report I am reporting this week from Hong Kong, where I’ll be spending a few days before traveling to Shanghai and then to Beijing. Reports that the real estate market here has cooled down are exaggerated, and I’m observing cranes and more cranes producing yet more housing in a market that is already astounding in terms of the density of development. What strikes me more than all the new development is the Hong Kong mass transit system – it is clean, efficient, and on runs time. Eighty percent of the Hong Kong workforce uses mass transit and the government regularly improves and maintains its railways, buses, and light minibus services. The US transit infrastructure, in comparison, is in decay and funding is funneled into preservation, not improvement, of the systems. This contrast has been a real wake-up call for me this week, but I know that all we’ll get this political season is more rhetoric and lots of chatter, but no constructive focus on a fix.