Hong Kong's boom belies growing wealth divide

HONG KONG, May 30 (Reuters) Its name means ''Heavenly water village'', but the town of Tin Shui Wai in the flatlands of northern Hong Kong is far from idyllic.

Rising up a decade ago from fish ponds and paddy fields a stone's throw from the Chinese border, Tin Shui Wai today is a sleepy community studded with monolithic 40-storey public housing blocks filled with 270,000 residents -- many of them the city's poorest and newest immigrants.

Despite leafy surroundings and relatively new and spacious apartments, Tin Shui Wai has become known as a ''social time bomb'' given a dearth of local jobs, its remote location and high rates of poverty and domestic violence.

''This place is just like an isolated island, a pond of stagnant water,'' said Lam Kwan-wai, a resident who went bankrupt and moved to Tin Shui Wai in 2002 a year before Hong Kong slipped into a recession during the global SARS epidemic.

In a year that marks the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong's reversion to Chinese rule, Tin Shui Wai has become a rallying cry for disgruntled Hong Kongers who feel excluded by the financial services-led boom in Asia's top financial centre behind Tokyo.

But the Gini coefficient a widely used measure of income disparity shows Hong Kong has become one of the most inequitable societies in Asia, putting in focus the affluent city's entrenched working-class poverty.

It's ''the highest among Asia's newly industrialised countries'', said Wong Hung, a social work academic at Chinese University. The coefficient increased from 0.476 in 1991 to 0.525 in 2001 -- the most recent figure -- on a scale where 0 represents perfect equality and 1, complete inequality.

Taiwan, in contrast, had a figure of 0.326 in 2000.

''The divide between the rich and poor is widening despite our economic improvement over the last four years,'' Ronald Arculli, the Chairman of Hong Kong's stock exchange told Reuters.

''As a community, we need to tackle issues like that.'' SIMMERING TENSIONS China's economic emergence is fostering a growing population of ultra-rich in Hong Kong, with property and stock prices well above 1997 highs, and the city now home to an estimated 270,000 local-dollar millionaires some feeding off a seemingly endless train of billion-dollar public share floats.

But in a study by Oxfam and Chinese University, the number of ''working poor'', or those living on less than HK5,000 dollar (640 dollar) per month, or half Hong Kong's median household income, had grown to around 350,000 or five percent of the population in 2006.

While Hong Kong's leader Donald Tsang has acknowledged the problem, he is criticised for not ploughing much of the city's 7.5 billion dollar budget surplus in the fiscal year ended March into poverty alleviation. He has also resisted calls by unionists to implement an across-the-board minimum wage.

Some academics predict that an updated Gini coefficient, due out in mid-year, is likely to show an even sharper divide.

''We suffered during the tough times and now the economy has recovered. But it doesn't benefit us,'' said Chung Ping-shing, a home-decorator who spends up to three hours commuting daily from the far-flung district in search of work, meaning he sees little of his wife and two sons.

''I have been involved in district affairs for more than 20 years and I have never seen any districts that are worse than Tin Shui Wai,'' said Albert Chan, a pro-democracy legislator.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE A bestselling book on the touching plight of 12 women in the district resonated with the public and sparked a degree of soul-searching toward low-income families and welfare dependents in the capitalist haven's poorer areas.

''Town planners began asking themselves how a new town could turn into a ghetto in just a couple of years time,'' said the book's author, Eva Chan.

''Even the triads are not active,'' said Lam, the bankrupt resident, ''because there's no business and it's not viable to recruit members here,'' he added, referring to Hong Kong's organised crime gangs who tend to prey on skid-row kids.

Tin Shui Wai has also been shaken by a spate of extreme domestic violence cases, often involving new immigrant families.

In 2004, a man chopped his mainland Chinese wife and two young daughters to death, before killing himself.

Last year, three women in their 30s suffering from emotional problems partly due to unhappy marriages committed suicide together in a Tin Shui Wai flat. They left several notes, one of which said they had ''nothing to love in their life''.

Such tragedies have led the government to boost some social welfare services in the district and start building sorely needed civic facilities, including a library slated for 2011.

But for some, it's too little, too late.

With 36 per cent of the population in the district under 24 years old, youth problems could be the next social time-bomb.

''It's difficult to find a job. They have no money and nowhere to go,'' said the legislator, Chan. ''Juvenile delinquency, drugs, triads, theft -- all these will come.'' Reuters RN DB1000