GEORGE CHEN george.chen@scmp.comFOLLOW THE AUTHOR ON TWITTER@george_chen
PUBLISHED : Sunday, 23 August, 2015, 3:21pm
UPDATED : Sunday, 23 August, 2015, 4:47pm
A taxi drives past the car-hailing app service Uber's office in Cheung Sha Wan, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China. Photo: EPA
I first visited Hong Kong about 15 years ago as a tourist and the small plastic Octopus card left a very good impression on me – I can use it easily to do many things from taking the subway to buying drinks at 7-Eleven stores around Hong Kong at a time when cash remained the king in my hometown of Shanghai.
I remember one of the things that I felt a little bit disappointed during my first trip to Hong Kong about 15 years ago was riding a taxi. If I can use Octopus card to go almost anywhere by the city’s MTR subway system, why can’t I use the plastic card to pay for my taxi fare?
I can’t do that 15 years ago and even to this day, to use the Octopus card to pay my taxi fair is still an experiment for just a small number of cabs.
Are 15 years enough for Hong Kong to prove how the city has been gradually left far behind in the development of technology and innovation in many other big cities around the world?
Nowadays when you travel to Chinese cities like Shanghai and Beijing, we don’t talk about credit cards but smartphone-powered internet payment solutions like Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat. It’s not only easy for customers to pay but also good for customers to save some money as those internet services often team up with merchants to provide special discounts for your transactions.
Hong Kong’s Octopus card was once upon a time considered a great example of how technology can make people’s life easier and now it looks just more and more awkward as a legacy of the last century rather than something that Hong Kong can be proud of to show the world.
Once a leader in efforts to build a “smart city”, now Hong Kong is stuck in many aspects and my Octopus card experience from 15 years ago to this day may be just one small reflection of disappointments in Hong Kong’s development.
The problem has never been about technology but the mindset of the city’s administrators. No one can stop the development of technology. Secretary for Justice Rimsky Yuen said the government was not against new technology at all but new services powered by new technology must be done in accordance with the laws and regulations.
But let me ask Mr. Yuen a simple question – what if our laws and regulations were out of date? Some regulations may well fit the old “Octopus card” era but they already look inefficient and even strange to stay on in the internet era and the fast rise of a “sharing economy”, in which Internet-powered car service Uberand rental service Airbnb are already the new global industry leaders.
The government can easily place an administrative order to block Uber in Hong Kong today and blacklist Airbnb tomorrow. And then what?
It’s time to think differently or you just will be stuck with your Octopus card for another 15 years.
George Chen is managing editor of SCMP International Edition. For more Mr. Shangkong columns: facebook.com/mrshangkong or follow@george_chen on Twitter
http://m.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1851833/octopus-card-uber-mindset-blocks-hong-kong-future
