25/7/2018-9

Zhang Bingliang: Hong Kong people need to jointly choose to build a house

Hong Kong Wenhui Newsletter This year’s book fair is being held. Zhang Bingliang, former director of the Transport and Housing Bureau, retired from his post to review his five-year tenure as a director. When he attended the book fair to introduce a new book yesterday, he said that in the face of housing problems, different communities in Hong Kong’s entire community should make joint choices and use different methods to pave the ground. Otherwise, building a home is difficult.

Zhang Bingliang said that many young people in Hong Kong who have come into contact with them are concerned about housing problems, including rising property prices and independent housing rentals. To solve this problem, the whole society must work together and make joint choices. In the development of housing, the problem often encountered is that all Hong Kong said that it would build houses, but went to the 18 districts of Hong Kong. Each district said that it should not build houses in its own district.

Multi-pronged approach to increase land supply

Taking Singapore as an example, he pointed out that Hong Kong people think that Singapore is doing a good job far away, but in fact Singaporeans need to choose, they need a lot of reclamation and develop jungle. Returning to the reality of Hong Kong, Zhang Bingliang believes that the problem of insufficient land supply should be solved in a multi-pronged manner. There should be corresponding measures in the short, medium and long term, including the rezoning of land use, the development of brownfields and reclamation.

Zhang Bingliang, former president of the Hong Kong Institute of Education (now Hong Kong University of Education), joined the government as the Secretary for Transport and Housing in mid-2012. This has given him further insight into government administration and real politics.

Solving problems from reality is very complicated

Zhang Bingliang said that it is very complicated to solve problems in the real world from the perspective of the government. It is not as orderly and rational as scholars’ research and observation. What the government sees is what it can’t see when it has been engaged in public policy research for a long time. And the situation. He described the five years of “every day in the fight”, exhausted and accumulated many problems.

After resigning as the Secretary, Zhang Bingliang believed that it should be a good idea to sort out and sum up the experience of the administration, the successes and failures, and the challenges and contradictions faced and experienced. Publishing a book can be a public record of personal experience. More importantly, it also allows the society to understand more about the process and causes of policy thinking and evolution, the rational and irrational factors in politics, the different considerations of politics and administration, and even decision-making. Accidental and inevitable.

Two new books review housing transportation policy

He completed the writing of 190,000 words in half a year, published two books to review the housing policy and transportation policy, and named it “The Unavoidable Reality.” In the preface to the book, he pointed out that the title of this book comes from the warmth of the former US Vice President Al Gore’s “The Unwillingness to Face the Truth”. I hope that through his narrative, more people will understand the real dilemma of Hong Kong’s public policy today. And the policy limitations caused by sometimes real politics.