By Tom Fowdy
It is soon coming up to six years since the western media proclaimed, following the passage of the national security law, the so-called "death of Hong Kong." According to such narratives, which persisted in various publications over the years that followed, such laws were detrimental to the rule of law in the city, would trigger an exodus of its population, undermine it as an international financial centre, and thus make it "just another Chinese city."
Of course, this is not say that Hong Kong didn't face its struggles within that period. The scale of destruction and unrest caused by the riots, the challenges posed by the COVID pandemic, and linked to the first factor, a hostile geopolitical climate spurred by American competition against China. Hong Kong had always framed itself as one of the most open cities in the world, indeed even being known as "Asia's world city", yet it faced a world which was now structurally closingdown: Geopolitical tensions, tariffs, technology embargos, wars, energy crises, all which have had a harrowing effect on the economic conditions which ultimately made the city great.
Yet it is now February 2026, and Hong Kong is still here, and in my opinion, far from facing a terminal decline, has found its feet again. How so? First, the National Security law narrative pushed by the Western media has been opportunistic, selective, and deliberately weaponised, based on the flawed logic that the same states that want to deny the city the right to national security provisions on a convenient ideological premise infamously reserve those same sovereign rights for themselves, ironically so in Britain. Hong Kong didn't become a police state, but life did return to normal, and more to the point, those who fled to Britain have not ended up better off, given that my country is suffering from clear economic stagnation.
I note that such legal provisions did not even damage Hong Kong on an academic and educational level (again being claimed by critics), as its institutions have actually gone up in global rankings. The University of Hong Kong, which I was privileged to attend, is now 11thworldwide in the latest QS ratings, and the 1st in Asia.
This builds into our second point: That Hong Kong's status as a global financial centre is effectively unmoved. The media relished at the prospect of decline here, but it didn't happen, not only because the narrative surrounding the NSL was exaggerated, but more to the point, Hong Kong's infrastructure, global role, and asset base are just not replaceable. One cannot just "whisk a new financial centre out of thin air", especially when it is so integrated into global markets and capital. Even at the peak of US hostility towards China, no US President dared disrupt Hong Kong on the financial or capital side with sanctions precisely because they knew the collateral damage was too severe. I predicted that at the time, it aged well concurrently. It goes without saying that the Hang Seng index is now higher than it was before the riots started.
Thirdly, these changing geopolitical tides have effectively strengthened, as opposed to weakened, Hong Kong, as the city has successfully pivoted and reinvented itself in the face of challenges. As US markets on Wall Street became a politically unreliable place for Chinese companies to list, Hong Kong took advantage as a safe-haven, aptly positioned to be "China's gateway to the world", and it experienced an IPO boom in listings. In fact, Hong Kong was the number one destination in the entire world for such listings in 2025; this is the opposite of what they said would happen. That alone has an aggregational and confidence building affect which makes it illogical for Western companies to leave on the grounds of ideological protest. Hong Kong is anchored to China, one of the world's most important markets. Singapore, their much-touted alternative (which ironically has even stricter national security provisions than Hong Kong) just doesn't have that.
In conjunction with this, Hong Kong's leaders have pursued a pragmatic and wise path of diversification. Although the city was created by the British to serve western interests, there is a world out there, and the Special Administrative Region (SAR) has strengthened its ties with new regions, such as Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, expanding ties, agreements, and institutions alike. Moreover, America's own actions have made such engagement easier because the shock of Trump's global tariff and trade wars, as well as his own de-escalation of conflict with China, have opened the gateway to renewed engagement between China and Western countries.
Overall, the past few years have been tough, but the evidence points to the reality that Hong Kong has gotten through it all. It has shrugged off the "wishcasting" of a much hoped-for decline and continued to serve as an anchor for free markets and enterprise in a troubled world. This should be no surprise to those who haven't bought into the recent historical revisionism that pretends the city was a democracy that was "taken away." Hong Kong was built by the British Empire to be a commercial and financial centre, not as a democratic experiment or ideological cause. It thrived on stability and the rule of law, not chaos, so when the chaos was ultimately removed, it didn't "decline"; it went back to the way it always was. Life goes on.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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