Good story. Hong Kong's demise is a heartbreaking outcome. There was a time when I would respond, "Hong Kong!" without hesitation when asked what my favorite city was. I last traveled there in the '90s; I think going back now would feel like visiting a grave.
Great one Noah. My wife and I with our two kids have decided to leave our city last month and moved to London. It was devastating to see how Hong Kong, our home, has changed. No one would ever want to leave their home but people did throughout history. Years later when we look back, it would be a lot more clearer than it is now.
I commend you Franco for your decision. Ultimately, time is the overriding variable that guides us. It’s almost unfathomably hard to leave a place and culture in which one’s very attitudes towards life and values were shaped. Much of one’s identity isn’t clear until there’s a chance to look back, to consider one’s home culture in retrospective, to a place and time that’s long gone. As an emigrant, you carry the seeds of your childhood culture, the memories of your parents and all your extended family, the spirit of a time and place. A bit like the Olympic torch I suppose. Keep the light and spread the good.
Appreciate it Will for your beautiful words and goodwill, I am sure we will all find our place in time. Take care of yourself as well and the people you love!
My tear-gassed in Hong Kong story took place in 1967. The protesters were all carrying Mao's little red book. I got too close to the action and tasted the same acrid fumes that Noah describes here.
This was followed by a long harangue on a bus close to the Chinese border. I was the only Westerner on the bus, when an elderly Chinese man singled me out for an angry, finger pointing lecture on, as best as I could understand, the evils of imperialism.
Politics aside, my most enduring memory of Hong Kong during my visit (I was a 22-year-old, hitchhiking around the world) is one that can never be reprised. I took a ferry to Lan Tau island, walked footpaths to one of its summits, passed old women carrying buckets hung from yokes across their shoulders, stayed at a Trappist monastery for the night, and hiked to a shimmering sandy beach to catch a boat back to the mainland the next morning.
The beach I hiked to is now a resort (Discovery Bay) not far from Hong Kong Disneyland.
The ending to this article is my favorite. Rather like the analogy that ideas spread like a virus, via culture. Oppression doesn’t work long-term, and even genocide still leaves witnesses, who remember how it was. Memory is very hard to kill, and transmutes society.
Hong Kong was a real estate oligarchy long before the PRC took over. That's why Dan Wang calls it the least dynamic place in Greater China.
When I lived there in the nineties I didn't really understand how public finances worked, but I gather the city got most of its revenues from selling land development rights, not from taxation. (So the Heritage Foundation's claim that HK is a low-tax paradise is mostly phony. Instead of taxes, people pay ridiculous rents.)
Sorry if this is a distraction from Noah's theme, but someone really needs to analyze the city's economy from a YIMBY perspective.
That also explains the expansion of Kowloon and the New Territories as new lands were needed to sell for housing to fund government budgets. It likely also explains the PRC's development of Shenzen Zone as a way to curb that expansion.
My sense is that HK has always been a place that sucked up to rich people and the west, and that's why it has a special place in the hearts of people like the Heritage Foundation. Still at least it could claim freedoms denied to the likes of Singapore, but sadly not anymore.
I visited HK during the protests a few years prior (in addition to many other times) and was struck by the civility of it all. Even though the financial district was occupied for weeks, the protesters and police still treated each other respectfully, streets were cleaned daily and there was no violence. You could walk through the protest site as if it were a jovial urban camping ground.
I fell in love with the HK spirit back then, the optimism against the odds.. and it broke my heart to see it being crushed just a few years later..
I was lucky to see a bit of the real Hong Kong, maybe 15 years ago now. This is so well written, if so sad. I hope for a better outcome in Ukraine . . .
Great piece. I love the HK people and culture. Some of it has seeped into Guangdong over the years (given language and cultural affinity and frequent travel) and even young professionals and cadres from Shanghai and Beijing living in HK (or who were frequent visitors pre-Covid) recognize how special HK is.
Xi recognized it, too. After the lab leak he realized he couldn’t risk having HK, with free speech and a free press, being part of China in its “basic agreement” form. He probably worried there would be western repercussions and needed to circle the wagons and assert control over HK as well as Chinese citizens generally through Covid policies. It seems Xi had little to worry about, not realizing how completely western corporations and government bureaucracies had been bought off by the Chinese.
Beijing’s new idea seems to be to turn HK into a honeypot for Western interests - happy for the mainland to have primacy and for mainland cities to be promoted over HK, whilst using HK to keep a toehold into Western financial markets.
What year was it effectively abrogated in? Correlation is not causation, obviously. I admit it is very possible China simply chose to be opportunistic during a crisis with the rest of the world distracted (much like Russia/Georgia in 2008) rather than making a Covid-based calculation that they couldn’t afford free press or assembly or speech in HK and wanted to circle the wagons before western repercussions.
But comparing what China did in 2020 to 2019 is not a good argument. The basic law has been eroded continuously since 1997. It was cancelled in 2020, whether coincidentally, opportunistically or strategically.
So far as I'm aware, Treeamigo, the Basic Law has not been cancelled. The new laws passed in 2020, like previous statutory modifications, were passed under the color of the Basic Law. As has occurred before, many HK citizens, members of the remnant independent HK press, and foreign governments saw the new laws as violations of the Basic Law that deeply undermined it--and they were right to see them in this way in 2020, as they had been before. The steps taken prior to 2020 were not prompted by the pandemic, and while the specific dynamics of 2020 were embedded in the tensions created by the pandemic, I see no argument that the pandemic showed to the CCP that the Basic Law was inconsistent with incorporating HK into the PRC. I think that became clear to the CCP years ago, and the Party determined then that the best approach was to gaslight via gradual processes, rather than to renege on the 1997 treaty directly.
As for the "lab leak," while it's plausible that Covid-19 was released as a result of a lab leak, it is also plausible that it spread through contamination in the Wuhan markets. I think the early attempts to deny the possibility of a lab leak were a very misguided way to respond to the manner in which "lab leak" was initially treated in the press as either an intentional government action or as the unintended outcome of biological weapons research. The latter of those two is not impossible (I believe the first is), but it is an entirely separate issue from the lab leak theory per se and was, in my view, a gratuitous speculation meant to express and inflame anti-PRC sentiment and deflect attention away from the poor initial US response to the pandemic. If the press and some scientists who tried to dismiss the lab leak idea had labeled the weapons research claim in that way at the outset, while acknowledging the plausibility of an unintentional lab leak, I think they would not have suffered the loss of trust that they legitimately encountered. In my view, no one should be stipulating that there was or wasn't a lab leak since we do not now know, and may never know, whether there was one.
Nobody familiar with HK thinks that 2020 was just a small incremental change of the type going on for the past 20 years. It was the year that Beijing chose to kill off the old HK.
As for your views on who should be allowed to think or say what re: Covid, they are self-refuting.
I am very happy with my Covid origin hypothesis and am in good company, but if a more likely intermediate evolutionary vector (other than humanized mice in a lab) emerges, I will change my view. As each day passes, the probability of that degrades.
I certainly don't think the 2020 changes were small, Treeamigo, but as the CNN article you cite notes (thanks for a good link), the law was implemented "on the back of more than six months of often violent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong last year . . ." The article does suggest that the Party may have hoped the pandemic would reduce international pushback, but the trigger for the law was the scale of the protests, not the occasion of pandemic.
My view of who should be allowed to say what is that people can say whatever they like, but the justification for what they say will vary. Deciding that it's valid to treat the lab leak theory as established fact has no justification, in my view. And as for your final statement, I think the logic runs that we are far more likely to be able to find definitive evidence of a lab leak than definitive evidence of market spread, so that as each day passes without definitive evidence, the lab leak theory's likelihood declines. However, I think that exercise is misguided: unless definitive evidence (or something near it) emerges, we simply do not know what actually happened. Anyone's allowed to say that they do, but they don't.
Wow, what an adventure! Thanks for writing about a place I will probably never visit and in such a personal way. I could picture you and BB eluding the police behind your new-found friend.
I was intrigued by your comment "...global Islam can’t even be bothered to stand up for the Uighurs". What could or should the two billion or so Muslims do for the Uighurs?
Unfortunately the protests became increasingly violent as time went on, playing into the hands of the PRC, helping China to legitimise the crackdowns and paving the way for the institutional anti-democratic changes that ultimately suppressed them.
Young HK's were not well served by the western press that tended to uncritically lionise the protesters, rather than stepping back and assessing where things were likely to lead.
It would be unsurprising if some of the most violent protesters were not Chinese security agent provocateurs: that is how things tend to fan out in these sort of situations.
None of the above is to deny police brutality and Chinese oppression.
We do, however, to be beware of our own double standards and hypocrisies: Chicago 1968; Bloody Sunday 1972, before getting too culturally self righteous.
At the the end of the day, the Chinese state combined tactics and strategy; the protesters largely behaved as students with an outcome that was quite predictable at the time.
That is the real lesson that should be borne in mind in the future, even though it requires reason to be elevated over emotion.
MAGA is a political movement toward authoritarianism, driven by fear. It’s a case study in how reason has failed to check the power of emotion. Elevating reason over emotion typically involves a time delay. One’s initial emotional reaction is held in check in order to give the mind time to reason. The ability to check oneself, is a definition of maturity. If a person always succumbs to the fear response that originates in the amygdala, their reasoning powers are, by definition, stunted, and their reactions can be classed as “immature.”
That's probably true, but I wouldn't write it as if the protester had better alternatives. It was highly unlikely to succeed, I'm sure the protesters mostly knew it, and that they also knew that the outcome of not protesting was even more certain. Don't think they had any smarter move there, it's kind of what ruthless power is good at - not leaving other option to freedom than desperate moves.
Agree. Trashing the Legislative Council chamber, for example, which happened quite early on, was a bad mistake. However, the protesters were faced with an utterly intransigent local government and chief executive who absolutely refused to engage - also a disastrous mistake. But Hong Kong's chief executives and government secretaries, or ministers, have been, or are, almost exclusively drawn from business or the civil service. None have a political bone in their bodies.
If it was a peaceful protest, I'll agree with you Noah but it's not. It's a riot and an organized crime. Attacked of police stations, destroyed government buildings, burning subway stations, burning the University campuses, blocked numerous streets and beat up other residents. How can you support that kind of rude and destructive activities? Many Hong Kong residents couldn't even go to hospitals because the rioters blocked all the major streets and subways. If you don't support the DC capital riot, why are you supporting the Hong Kong riot? I don't get it. Hong Kong was a very peaceful city with ultra low crime rate. The anti-government riot totally destroyed that.
Good story. Hong Kong's demise is a heartbreaking outcome. There was a time when I would respond, "Hong Kong!" without hesitation when asked what my favorite city was. I last traveled there in the '90s; I think going back now would feel like visiting a grave.
Great one Noah. My wife and I with our two kids have decided to leave our city last month and moved to London. It was devastating to see how Hong Kong, our home, has changed. No one would ever want to leave their home but people did throughout history. Years later when we look back, it would be a lot more clearer than it is now.
I commend you Franco for your decision. Ultimately, time is the overriding variable that guides us. It’s almost unfathomably hard to leave a place and culture in which one’s very attitudes towards life and values were shaped. Much of one’s identity isn’t clear until there’s a chance to look back, to consider one’s home culture in retrospective, to a place and time that’s long gone. As an emigrant, you carry the seeds of your childhood culture, the memories of your parents and all your extended family, the spirit of a time and place. A bit like the Olympic torch I suppose. Keep the light and spread the good.
Appreciate it Will for your beautiful words and goodwill, I am sure we will all find our place in time. Take care of yourself as well and the people you love!
Intense and kept my attention right till the end. Well-written!
My tear-gassed in Hong Kong story took place in 1967. The protesters were all carrying Mao's little red book. I got too close to the action and tasted the same acrid fumes that Noah describes here.
This was followed by a long harangue on a bus close to the Chinese border. I was the only Westerner on the bus, when an elderly Chinese man singled me out for an angry, finger pointing lecture on, as best as I could understand, the evils of imperialism.
Politics aside, my most enduring memory of Hong Kong during my visit (I was a 22-year-old, hitchhiking around the world) is one that can never be reprised. I took a ferry to Lan Tau island, walked footpaths to one of its summits, passed old women carrying buckets hung from yokes across their shoulders, stayed at a Trappist monastery for the night, and hiked to a shimmering sandy beach to catch a boat back to the mainland the next morning.
The beach I hiked to is now a resort (Discovery Bay) not far from Hong Kong Disneyland.
The ending to this article is my favorite. Rather like the analogy that ideas spread like a virus, via culture. Oppression doesn’t work long-term, and even genocide still leaves witnesses, who remember how it was. Memory is very hard to kill, and transmutes society.
Human civilization has been around for 10-15,000 years and so far oppression seems to work.
Hong Kong was a real estate oligarchy long before the PRC took over. That's why Dan Wang calls it the least dynamic place in Greater China.
When I lived there in the nineties I didn't really understand how public finances worked, but I gather the city got most of its revenues from selling land development rights, not from taxation. (So the Heritage Foundation's claim that HK is a low-tax paradise is mostly phony. Instead of taxes, people pay ridiculous rents.)
Sorry if this is a distraction from Noah's theme, but someone really needs to analyze the city's economy from a YIMBY perspective.
That also explains the expansion of Kowloon and the New Territories as new lands were needed to sell for housing to fund government budgets. It likely also explains the PRC's development of Shenzen Zone as a way to curb that expansion.
My sense is that HK has always been a place that sucked up to rich people and the west, and that's why it has a special place in the hearts of people like the Heritage Foundation. Still at least it could claim freedoms denied to the likes of Singapore, but sadly not anymore.
I visited HK during the protests a few years prior (in addition to many other times) and was struck by the civility of it all. Even though the financial district was occupied for weeks, the protesters and police still treated each other respectfully, streets were cleaned daily and there was no violence. You could walk through the protest site as if it were a jovial urban camping ground.
I fell in love with the HK spirit back then, the optimism against the odds.. and it broke my heart to see it being crushed just a few years later..
Gripping!
Thank you for bumping it.
My god. Has it been THREE YEARS already? I swear that I remember when the original post came through as if it were from last year.
I was lucky to see a bit of the real Hong Kong, maybe 15 years ago now. This is so well written, if so sad. I hope for a better outcome in Ukraine . . .
Great piece. I love the HK people and culture. Some of it has seeped into Guangdong over the years (given language and cultural affinity and frequent travel) and even young professionals and cadres from Shanghai and Beijing living in HK (or who were frequent visitors pre-Covid) recognize how special HK is.
Xi recognized it, too. After the lab leak he realized he couldn’t risk having HK, with free speech and a free press, being part of China in its “basic agreement” form. He probably worried there would be western repercussions and needed to circle the wagons and assert control over HK as well as Chinese citizens generally through Covid policies. It seems Xi had little to worry about, not realizing how completely western corporations and government bureaucracies had been bought off by the Chinese.
Beijing’s new idea seems to be to turn HK into a honeypot for Western interests - happy for the mainland to have primacy and for mainland cities to be promoted over HK, whilst using HK to keep a toehold into Western financial markets.
"After the lab leak?" The encroachments on the Basic Agreement were far along well before 2019, whether there was a lab leak or not.
What year was it effectively abrogated in? Correlation is not causation, obviously. I admit it is very possible China simply chose to be opportunistic during a crisis with the rest of the world distracted (much like Russia/Georgia in 2008) rather than making a Covid-based calculation that they couldn’t afford free press or assembly or speech in HK and wanted to circle the wagons before western repercussions.
But comparing what China did in 2020 to 2019 is not a good argument. The basic law has been eroded continuously since 1997. It was cancelled in 2020, whether coincidentally, opportunistically or strategically.
So far as I'm aware, Treeamigo, the Basic Law has not been cancelled. The new laws passed in 2020, like previous statutory modifications, were passed under the color of the Basic Law. As has occurred before, many HK citizens, members of the remnant independent HK press, and foreign governments saw the new laws as violations of the Basic Law that deeply undermined it--and they were right to see them in this way in 2020, as they had been before. The steps taken prior to 2020 were not prompted by the pandemic, and while the specific dynamics of 2020 were embedded in the tensions created by the pandemic, I see no argument that the pandemic showed to the CCP that the Basic Law was inconsistent with incorporating HK into the PRC. I think that became clear to the CCP years ago, and the Party determined then that the best approach was to gaslight via gradual processes, rather than to renege on the 1997 treaty directly.
As for the "lab leak," while it's plausible that Covid-19 was released as a result of a lab leak, it is also plausible that it spread through contamination in the Wuhan markets. I think the early attempts to deny the possibility of a lab leak were a very misguided way to respond to the manner in which "lab leak" was initially treated in the press as either an intentional government action or as the unintended outcome of biological weapons research. The latter of those two is not impossible (I believe the first is), but it is an entirely separate issue from the lab leak theory per se and was, in my view, a gratuitous speculation meant to express and inflame anti-PRC sentiment and deflect attention away from the poor initial US response to the pandemic. If the press and some scientists who tried to dismiss the lab leak idea had labeled the weapons research claim in that way at the outset, while acknowledging the plausibility of an unintentional lab leak, I think they would not have suffered the loss of trust that they legitimately encountered. In my view, no one should be stipulating that there was or wasn't a lab leak since we do not now know, and may never know, whether there was one.
Nobody familiar with HK thinks that 2020 was just a small incremental change of the type going on for the past 20 years. It was the year that Beijing chose to kill off the old HK.
https://thediplomat.com/2022/06/hong-kong-is-unrecognizable-after-2-years-under-the-national-security-law/
And at the time, CNN and others mentioned Covid (opportunistically) as a basis for the timing.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/22/asia/hong-kong-china-national-security-law-intl-hnk/index.html
As for your views on who should be allowed to think or say what re: Covid, they are self-refuting.
I am very happy with my Covid origin hypothesis and am in good company, but if a more likely intermediate evolutionary vector (other than humanized mice in a lab) emerges, I will change my view. As each day passes, the probability of that degrades.
I certainly don't think the 2020 changes were small, Treeamigo, but as the CNN article you cite notes (thanks for a good link), the law was implemented "on the back of more than six months of often violent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong last year . . ." The article does suggest that the Party may have hoped the pandemic would reduce international pushback, but the trigger for the law was the scale of the protests, not the occasion of pandemic.
My view of who should be allowed to say what is that people can say whatever they like, but the justification for what they say will vary. Deciding that it's valid to treat the lab leak theory as established fact has no justification, in my view. And as for your final statement, I think the logic runs that we are far more likely to be able to find definitive evidence of a lab leak than definitive evidence of market spread, so that as each day passes without definitive evidence, the lab leak theory's likelihood declines. However, I think that exercise is misguided: unless definitive evidence (or something near it) emerges, we simply do not know what actually happened. Anyone's allowed to say that they do, but they don't.
i also was radicalized by the Hong Kong protests. 加油！
Wow, what an adventure! Thanks for writing about a place I will probably never visit and in such a personal way. I could picture you and BB eluding the police behind your new-found friend.
I was intrigued by your comment "...global Islam can’t even be bothered to stand up for the Uighurs". What could or should the two billion or so Muslims do for the Uighurs?
Unfortunately the protests became increasingly violent as time went on, playing into the hands of the PRC, helping China to legitimise the crackdowns and paving the way for the institutional anti-democratic changes that ultimately suppressed them.
Young HK's were not well served by the western press that tended to uncritically lionise the protesters, rather than stepping back and assessing where things were likely to lead.
It would be unsurprising if some of the most violent protesters were not Chinese security agent provocateurs: that is how things tend to fan out in these sort of situations.
None of the above is to deny police brutality and Chinese oppression.
We do, however, to be beware of our own double standards and hypocrisies: Chicago 1968; Bloody Sunday 1972, before getting too culturally self righteous.
At the the end of the day, the Chinese state combined tactics and strategy; the protesters largely behaved as students with an outcome that was quite predictable at the time.
That is the real lesson that should be borne in mind in the future, even though it requires reason to be elevated over emotion.
MAGA is a political movement toward authoritarianism, driven by fear. It’s a case study in how reason has failed to check the power of emotion. Elevating reason over emotion typically involves a time delay. One’s initial emotional reaction is held in check in order to give the mind time to reason. The ability to check oneself, is a definition of maturity. If a person always succumbs to the fear response that originates in the amygdala, their reasoning powers are, by definition, stunted, and their reactions can be classed as “immature.”
That's probably true, but I wouldn't write it as if the protester had better alternatives. It was highly unlikely to succeed, I'm sure the protesters mostly knew it, and that they also knew that the outcome of not protesting was even more certain. Don't think they had any smarter move there, it's kind of what ruthless power is good at - not leaving other option to freedom than desperate moves.
Agree. Trashing the Legislative Council chamber, for example, which happened quite early on, was a bad mistake. However, the protesters were faced with an utterly intransigent local government and chief executive who absolutely refused to engage - also a disastrous mistake. But Hong Kong's chief executives and government secretaries, or ministers, have been, or are, almost exclusively drawn from business or the civil service. None have a political bone in their bodies.
If it was a peaceful protest, I'll agree with you Noah but it's not. It's a riot and an organized crime. Attacked of police stations, destroyed government buildings, burning subway stations, burning the University campuses, blocked numerous streets and beat up other residents. How can you support that kind of rude and destructive activities? Many Hong Kong residents couldn't even go to hospitals because the rioters blocked all the major streets and subways. If you don't support the DC capital riot, why are you supporting the Hong Kong riot? I don't get it. Hong Kong was a very peaceful city with ultra low crime rate. The anti-government riot totally destroyed that.