Abstract

At present, Hong Kong does not have a publicly-managed mandatory contributory retirement protection scheme. The Hong Kong Government launched a consultation on the universal pension scheme in 2015. The Government’s plan provoked many controversies and eventually failed. This paper will examine the problem of the welfare ideology and system in Hong Kong from a historical perspective, taking the universal pension scheme as an example. This paper argues that the reason for the failure of the universal pension scheme was that Hong Kong people do not have a complete sense of citizenship and hold a distorted welfare ideology for historical reasons. This paper is one of the first to offer some reflections on the question of poverty and lack of social justice from a historical perspective.