Watch This | Kishore Mahbubani: Imperative for world to see HK still enjoys autonomy under 'one country, two systems'

Kishore Mahbubani, former Permanent Representative of Singapore to the United Nations and currently a Distinguished Fellow of the Asian Research Institute at the National University of Singapore delivered a keynote address entitled "Can China Outcompete the U.S.?" in a presentation in Hong Kong on April 25. In the Q&A session after the speech, when asked what HK should do in the event of a conflict between the US and China, Mahbubani said that HK enjoys the status of "one country, two systems" and how to exercise the high degree of autonomy therein required a lot of political judgments, and the US and the Western world need to be made to realize that HK remains autonomous.

Mahbubani pointed out that HK is part of China and as such, as a city in China, cannot do anything that will endanger the national security of China, and "that is a clear-cut red line". HK enjoys a high degree of autonomy under 'one country, two systems', and what can be done and what cannot be done require a lot of political judgments; at the same time, HK has to work very hard to make the US realize that HK remains autonomous. He said that recently in the US, he felt that many Americans believe HK has lost all its autonomy, so one of the priorities must be to convince the world that HK still retains a lot of autonomy in critical areas and that HK is able to effectively carry on with the "one country, two systems".