Opinion | Life goes on in Hong Kong
By Tom Fowdy
On Monday night I landed in Hong Kong for a trip. I'm a nostalgic person so even as I visit new places, I also gain a great deal of value and sentiment out of visiting places that I feel emotionally attached to and of significance in my life. It will soon be 9 years since I lived in Hong Kong as an exchange student at HKU. The city has changed tremendously in some aspects since that time, especially if you only go by the mainstream media. The HKU campus culture at that time was becoming extremely radical and hypersensitive, with an all-embracing paranoia of mainland China looming over the minds of the students. It was a foreshadowing of things to come.
Fast forwards, and that radical campus activist culture no longer exists. For some that might represent a grim development, with many of its strongest advocates having left for the United Kingdom. If you believe the mainstream media narrative, then Hong Kong has apparently become an oppressive, totalitarian police state whereby people are randomly and arbitrarily arrested facing life in prison. Various op-ed pieces have made no secret in pushing this historically anachronistic and absurdist line of argument that the city is "finished" so to speak, and enjoy promoting that well-known bastion of liberty known as Singapore as an "alternative" financial center.
This is not true. Contrary to all that is claimed, life goes on as normal in Hong Kong. Despite politically motivated travel warnings, the city continues to be brimmed with foreign tourists from western countries, including Americans, British and Australians amongst others. Restaurants and bars remain characteristically full at night, with people chatting, eating, and socializing loudly as they always have done. Far from a total exodus, local young people continue to be seen everywhere enjoying themselves and just getting on with life. There is no sign of the city having lost any of its vibrancy or charm, despite the contemptuous description of it becoming "just another Chinese city."
That's because Hong Kong was never built on so-called democracy and freedom, and it was never designed to be. It was a free-market-orientated city that was built on the back of British colonialism exploiting Chinese people, markets, and resources, which was under the direct rule of London. It is ironic so to speak, that its final governor, Chris Patten has served to become a so-called "voice" in support of his former colony, the man who was never elected by the population of Hong Kong in the first place. Thus, the history of the territory has been revised and many people have been fooled into this false narrative that Hong Kong was a free and democratic city under the benevolence of British rule, but that has now been taken away by big bad China.
On the back of such historical revisionism, it is therefore misleading to claim that amidst national security laws, Hong Kong suddenly does not adhere to the rule of law anymore and its days as an international financial center are over, not least because it brazenly lies about 150 years of its history. Thus, these narratives have no application in reality. A small portion of the population indeed chose to leave (As a British person I really do question the sanity of some to substitute here for there), yet Hong Kong's population overall is in fact continuing to grow as returning residents and new migrants actually outweigh the departees. Of course, the city will progressively start to identify more with China as the generations pass, but that does not mean its unique charm and way of life are going to disappear, such fears are cynical rather than legitimate.
That is because again, contrary to all hysteria, China finds Hong Kong's unique assets as strategically and economically important. The city has forged its success as being a "gateway" to China, albeit one which served Western interests as opposed to Chinese ones. The fundamental grievances are rooted in the fact this is no longer the case, and that American political influence has been forced out of the city. It was the hope of the US and its allies that Hong Kong would serve as a conduit to influencing and changing China, an ideological and political trojan horse which in the 1990s, would unleash the "end of history" theory to transform the whole country into a similar capitalist utopia, a direction it was believed Beijing was heading in back then. History isn't over, but Fukuyama's theory is now.
Still, life goes on here. Hong Kong has transitioned well, the sky has not fallen down, and nor has the booming life here dried up and evaporated away. Not everyone is an ideological zealot wanting to cause an insurrection and flee to England. For some, this is home and it always will be, and that's all that matters.
The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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