Top Quotes From David Webb’s FCC Fireside Chat
Renowned activist investor David Webb spoke extensively at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club about a range of topics including his past career, plans for non-profit platform Webb-site and his future hopes for Hong Kong.
On May 12, David Webb – a renowned and influential activist who campaigned for various issues including retail investor rights, corporate transparency and better governance – spoke at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong. He answered questions for over an hour in what could be his final public appearance as he battles late-stage prostate cancer.
finews.asia reviewed the event, which is available on YouTube, and outlined some of the top soundbites he delivered during a candid exchange that lasted for around an hour.
On the Wealth He Made to Retire at Age 32
«I'd made enough money to be fairly certain I wouldn't need to work again so I could offend whoever I liked in Hong Kong.»
On Activism
«I've always been a bit of an activist. If I stayed in the UK, I might have ended up in politics.»
On Being Called the «Long Hair» of Finance
«Leong Kwok-hung (nicknamed «Long Hair») and I don't have exactly the same politics. I'm certainly not a Marxist. In 2003 […] Chinese media wanted a way to explain what I was doing. And so they said, he's «cheung mo» (Cantonese for long hair). He's an activist. And it kind of stuck.»
On Hong Kong’s Problems Today
«It's very sad that Hong Kong has moved away from the laissez-faire economy that made it so successful in the 70s to 90s, indeed since the second World War. In fact, let's go back further since 1841. Basically, we had a small government that stuck to its core duties to ensure that people had access to education, to healthcare and a safe social safety net for the less fortunate. Now we've moved to a system which is closer to the mainland in terms of central planning.»
On Plans for Webb-site
«I did plan and later announced that I would make a repository available that is now on the 1 of May online. So data scientists, NGOs, statutory bodies, who are interested in taking it forward can do so. There's a complete backup of all the data from the database and all of the code that I wrote over the years to run the site and to collect the data. I can't name it but there's a statutory body that has shown interest in taking parts of this forward, hopefully making it publicly available.»
On Battling Cancer
«If I'm lucky, I'll get to my 60th birthday on the 29th of August. I fought the disease as hard as I could and I'm still fighting but there is an obvious end to it.»
On Hong Kong’s Future
«I believe in the long run that China and Hong Kong will be less autocratic, more democratic and will move away from the authoritarian system because there's no way to maintain economic growth by central planning. Failure to move forward eventually will lead to, in my view, economic stagnation and pressure to reform. And I hope that it happens top-down, that we get wise next-generation leadership that pursues proper opening up. We may have reached in Hong Kong what I would call peak authoritarianism.»
