Hong Kong’s business elites feared mainland anti-corruption exposure

Evidence

Normally, Hong Kong’s (very rich) economic elites had tried to stay out of mainland politics. But the extradition bill worried them. It was no secret that many of the Hong Kong “tycoons” got rich while breaking a lot of laws. “When we started to open up factories in China,” admitted Felix Chung Kwok-pan, a pro-business legislator representing the textiles sector, “a lot of things had to be done by special ways, through corruption, bribery, or whatever.” Xi Jinping had been running an anti-corruption campaign in the PRC since 2012 (this was a big decade for anti-corruption crusades), and many tycoons thought they might be vulnerable to more of the same. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 742

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Hong Kong’s legislature reserved half its seats for corporate interest groups under British rule — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 573