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Hong Kong SWOT Analysis by Jeffrey Smith Summary People who point to the "Four Tigers" of Asia as examples of developmental success tend to give credit to state planning and state partnership with big business. While it is true that those governments did invest in big business, other nations have done so with fewer positive results. Common to all the East Asian success stories was land reform. Their land reform was not the type which takes land from some and gives it to others. Instead, those Pacific Rim governments captured land rent. Most of the Asian Tigers used taxes on land but one used a lease for land; that was Hong Kong. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the British Empire demanded the land for Hong Kong – about eleven hundred square kilometers – from a weak Chinese central government. The British rulers wanted to keep strict control over land that was still in many ways a part of a foreign nation and so decided not to sell any of the land but instead to lease sites for 75 years. Too few people wanted to lease “Crown land” for that length of time so the Governor extended the term to nearly a century. That lasted for a number of years until London returned the term to 75