Winton Dong

dht0620@126.com

CATHAY Pacific Group declared that as of Oct. 21 it had officially stopped the operation of Cathay Dragon.

As a famous airline company, Cathay Pacific Group has two brands, Cathay Pacific Airways and Cathay Dragon. With the closure of Cathay Dragon, the group is expected to tide over difficulties by reducing its cash burning speed. Meanwhile, more than 8,000 employees may lose their jobs because of the closure. Most of the layoffs will be new pilots and stewardesses who earn relatively less. According to Cathay Pacific’s 2019 annual report, the group had about 3,000 high-ranking officials who earned more than HK$1,000,000 (US$130,000) last year. If such high-income earners are still in their posts, I doubt the layoffs this time will have significant financial effectiveness.

With the spread of the pandemic, it is a common phenomenon to see hardships and even the shutdown of business operations all over the world. However, it is still a great pity to witness the closure of Cathay Dragon. As a Hong Kong-based airline with passenger networks covering destinations to the Asia-Pacific Region and especially to many big cities on the Chinese mainland, it was an important carrier for people traveling between the motherland and Hong Kong during the past three decades.

The original name of Cathay Dragon was Dragonair. Founded in 1985, Dragonair was acquired by Cathay Pacific Airways in 2006. Ten years later, Cathay Pacific rebranded Dragonair into Cathay Dragon in an effort to enhance brand awareness of its two airlines among customers.

Many people thought that the COVID-19 pandemic was the cause that led to the closure of Cathay Dragon. In fact, its crisis began much earlier during the Hong Kong unrest triggered by the extradition law amendment in the middle of 2019. For example, on July 26, 2019, the pilot of a Cathay Pacific flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong, instead of informing passengers about the weather and flight conditions, used the public address system to voice his support for the demonstrators, seriously violating work ethics.

I agree that a pilot has the right to air his or her political views, but not on flights or at airports. Such unethical actions have tarnished the image of Cathay Pacific as an international carrier company and aroused public concerns about its flight safety. Moreover, these actions also greatly dampened the enthusiasm of visitors from the mainland who were the major passenger resource for Cathay Dragon. According to statistics, there were on average only 15 Chinese tourist groups daily in Hong Kong in September 2019, a decrease of more than 90 percent compared with normal seasons.

The ravaging pandemic made things from bad to worse and gave a deadly blow to airline companies. Cathay Dragon stopped flights to and from Wuhan on Jan. 23 this year since the lockdown of this Central China city. It later suspended almost all flights to major mainland cities. According to statistics, Cathay Pacific Group as a whole normally handles 2.4 million passengers per month. But its monthly handling capacity now is only 30,000 passengers, sharply shrinking from the average by more than 98 percent.

Hong Kong’s success in the past 40 years is mainly attributed to its function as a super-connector between the Chinese mainland and the outside world. In the early stage of the nation’s reform and opening up, a large number of Hong Kong businesspeople took the lead in making investments on the mainland and accumulated huge amounts of wealth. In order to meet daunting challenges ahead, and keep its advantages and cutting edges, the special administrative region must be a proactive participant in and a contributor to the country’s higher-quality reform and opening up, try its best to integrate and become a key player in the development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

(The author is the editor-in-chief of Shenzhen Daily with a Ph.D. from the Journalism and Communication School of Wuhan University.)