Econ_Sep_22

56 International

The Economist

September 22nd 2018

Hong Kong

NoWanda

FANYgovernment could congratulate

itself on a stormwell-weathered, it was

surelyHong Kong’s. Mangkhut, the stron-

gest of the 16 typhoons since the second

worldwar forwhich its observatory has

hoisted the highest, number10, signal,

inflicted no recorded deaths and just 363

injuries. Waglan Island in the east sus-

tainedmeanwinds of161kph (100mph),

the second-highest on record, and gusts

of 260kph. The storm surge at Tai Po Kau

on themainland, of 3.4m, was the highest

recorded. But people still found reason to

blame the government.

When typhoonWanda struckHong

Kong in1962, it killed183 and left 72,000

homeless. In the early1960s huge shanty-

town populationsweremoved into safer

government high-rises. Meteorological

prediction and administrative prep-

aration have improved beyond all recog-

nition. Regular updateswere posted as

Mangkhut advanced. Fishing fleets and

merchant craft evaded its path. The au-

thorities evacuated low-lying villages

and opened shelters for the homeless.

Buses evacuated thousands of residents.

Flood barrierswere erected.

The orderly populace heeded in-

junctions to stay indoors—turningHong

Kong into a ghost city on September 16th.

Still, when the storm struck, no one had

experienced anything so violent. Win-

dows popped fromoffice towers and

rivers of paper flowed up into the clouds.

An external elevator shaft on a high-rise

construction site buckled and collapsed.

Ahuge scaffolding front ripped off a

building as easily as a sticking plaster.

Trees fell like ninepins, and1,000 sections

of roadwere blocked by trees or debris.

Train tracks and ferry pierswere dam-

aged, andMangkhut left the airport with

a backlog of 2,000 flights.

But as the clean-up began on Septem-

ber17th, so did the grumbling. Schools

were closed for two days, as somewere

damaged and streetswere still covered

with glass and broken branches. But

grown-ups had to struggle to get towork

despite disrupted underground, bus and

rail services.

Tens of thousandsmobbed the Face-

bookpage ofCarrie Lam, the chief exec-

utive, demanding to knowwhy no holi-

day had been declared. One of her

advisers helpfully explained that the

government “has no power tomeddle

with all the contracts between employers

and employees.” In the 1960s similar

argumentswere used to explainwhy the

residents of those shanty towns had to

stickwith the seven-dayworkweek.

Hong Kong has been transformed since

then. But it remains a city run for the

benefit of business.

HONG KONG

The government’s efficiencyand its people’s common sense save lives

Windows crashed again

it was among the ten most powerful ty-

phoons to hit the region since 1949. Mang-

khut subsequently spun through the

much-poorer provinces of Guangxi and

Yunnan, though by then it had weakened

froma typhoon to a tropical storm.

“ThankGod it only lastedone day,” said

a shaken resident of Dongguan, a factory

citynot far fromHongKong,who stayed in-

doors for 48 hours. In Guangzhou, the pro-

vincial capital, tower-blockwindowswere

blown out. Somany trees fell in Shenzhen,

bordering Hong Kong, that commuters

who ventured out the next morning

quipped that going to work meant clam-

bering through “jungle”. Several districts

of Yangchun, a riverside city that had lain

directly in Mangkhut’s path, remained un-

derwater two days after the storm.

Near the seafront in Zhuhai, a main-

land city of more than 1.5m people next to

Macau, high winds whittled palm trees

into sharp spindles. One resident recounts

pushing his sofa against hiswindows, fear-

ing that the rattling glasswas about to shat-

ter. But he says the cityhas cleared upmore

swiftly than after Hato, and that the Chi-

nese government’s preparations seemed

more comprehensive, too. Days before

Mangkhut arrived, the government began

sending locals text messages warning

them to stockpile food and water and pre-

pare to stay in their homes. The instruc-

tionswerewidely obeyed.

Moving feat

Authorities in Guangdong estimated that

the winds had directly caused more than

4bn yuan ($580m) of losses and that four

people had been killed (three were pinned

beneath trees and onewas struckby an ad-

vertising hoarding). Those figures may be

incomplete, but on the whole southern

China weathered the storm better than

was feared. In advance, at least 2.5m of

Guangdong’s 105m residents were moved

to safer places, said state media, though it

gave few details of such a massive opera-

tion. Many of those who were moved ap-

peared to be coastal-dwellers and con-

struction workers, who often bed down in

flimsy dormitories. They were sent to

schools, stadiums and exhibition halls.

Most flights and all high-speed trains were

cancelled. Some 50,000 boats observed a

halt to fishing.

The government bragged that its enor-

mous newbridge across the Pearl River es-

tuary survived unscathed, and reassured

locals that two nuclear-power stations lo-

cated on Guangdong’s coast had also es-

caped damage. China’s leaders have lately

sought to improve the handling of natural

disasters and other emergencies. In April a

hopeful sign was the government’s cre-

ation of a new Ministry of Emergency

Management, drawing together staff who

had previously laboured in a dozen differ-

ent departments.

Aswell as cleaning up catastrophes, the

new outfit is expected to accelerate efforts

tomake vulnerable settlementsmore resil-

ient. China is the same size as America but

has four times as many people; moreover,

they are crammed into low-lying coastal

megacities in the east of the country, such

as those sprinkled across Guangdong.

Few countries have as much to lose as

China from a world of rising seas and furi-

ous winds, but Bangladesh is even more

vulnerable. For Mr Huq, the researcher,

and representatives of the “least devel-

oped countries”, a negotiating body at the

’s climate-change talks, the central

question about storms in the Asia-Pacific is

who pays for the damage. Although China

is nowtheworld’s biggest emitter of green-

house gases, America and Europe are esti-

mated to have emitted 37% of the global to-

tal between1850 and 2012. The Philippines,

by comparison, emitted 0.5%. That has trig-

gered repeated calls for wealthy countries

to help poorer ones pay for the cost of the

effects of climate change, not least from

tropical storms. Those calls are unlikely to

grow softer. But, with the Carolinas still

reeling fromFlorence, andMr Trump in the

White House, America, at least, is unlikely

to offer an encouraging answer.