Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, and while there was never universal suffrage, most other civil liberties and the rule of law were upheld, by and large, under British administration. And that is giving way, slice by slice, to Chinese "guanxi" (i.e., "connections", "who do you know") and authoritarian politics. :-/
This is funny given the fact that in HK what school you go to largely depends on how much money your parents have (buy bonds issued by schools) and what is their occupation. This is strictly prohibited in mainland China - a private school recently asked education level of parents on one of its admin forms, that became national news and that school got punished in days. Selling school bonds to effectively bar average…
The school system is suboptimal indeed, and good private schools are very expensive and require some machinations to get in. Nevertheless, HK fairs very well in the international PISA studies (ahead of China, incidentally) [1].
Public hospitals in HK are good, modern, efficient, and inexpensive. Private hospitals provide an alternative if you want more personalised or faster service.
However, of this pertains to civil liberties and the rule of law (which my post was about).
The notion that access to education and health care is better in China (or more justly distributed, without special favours for the well-connected) is very questionable, as the other post highlighted.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...