An ode to Hong Kong's unparalleled resilience
Updated: 2014-12-23 09:17
By Kerry Brown(HK Edition)
|
|||||||
In 1991, on my way from Japan - where I had been teaching for a year - on to Australia, where I was intending to stay for a few months, I remember stopping for a few days in Hong Kong. It was high summer and unbearably hot, and I was staying with a friend in the infamous Chungking Mansions in Kowloon in a room where a rickety fan served as air conditioning.
One evening we took refuge in a cool bar. The barman was a British student working for the summer. I remember the sense of gloom that he, and customers at the bar, exuded. For them, the handover coming up in 1997 was for all intents and purposes the end of Hong Kong, and we were experiencing its twilight years before darkness fell. But in the end, 1997 came and went, with no visible impact on the life of the city - not, at least, anything like the apocalyptic images I had heard painted in that bar in 1991.
I next came to Hong Kong eight years later, during the winter, just after the Asian financial crisis. Hong Kong was eerily quiet, the business district looking like it was in shock, and the streets quiet. Pundits then said that the city was facing challenges it would never recover from. Unemployment had risen, gross domestic product slumped, and it seemed the business lifeblood of the city had ebbed away.
But by the time I revisited in 2000, all this was a distant memory, and the business sentiment of the place was back to pre-crisis levels.
There were challenges, of course. The resignation in 2005 of the first chief executive Tung Chee-hwa gave the predictors of doom both inside and outside the city plenty to work on. All their nightmares for Hong Kong's fortunes were being proved right, it seemed. But then years of growth and dynamism followed, with Hong Kong asserting itself by 2007 as one of the world's greatest finance and services hubs.
Then 2008 came, and with it the global financial crisis. It seemed doom was on its way back again. In the autumn of that year I attended as a speaker a conference in Hong Kong put on by a major international finance company. It had the atmosphere of a final banquet held at the moment when the world is about to fall apart. A major American singing star was flown out at huge cost to serenade the bankers and their clients attending the event, but even their expensive music could not shift the sense of shock.
Someone I spoke to at the conference predicted gloomily that these huge expensive festivals would soon be a thing of the past. In this, they were proved right. Excessive displays of wealth became taboo as the region and the world entered a recession, and exports from the mainland tumbled. By 2010, however, the city was back on track, growth returned, the stock exchange was healthy once more, and the world fixated more on the chaos in the eurozone than any problem in the Asian region.
Those who have been pessimistic about the events in the city over the last few months would do well to remember some of this history before they start to write off Hong Kong's resilience. Whatever their views about the protests in the city, they have to bear in mind that business sentiment has remained good throughout, the city has continued to function well, and order has prevailed. Whatever differences there might have been amongst people, there has been no widespread unrest or anything remotely resembling a breakdown of law and order.
Coming to Hong Kong in December, after reading for two months reports about the atmosphere in the city, I was half-prepared to find myself in a semi-war zone occupied by disgruntled violent political opposition groups, unable to leave the hotel through security fears. Instead, utter normality reigned, the only sign of anything different being the slightly longer taxi route I had to take from the airport to my hotel to avoid some of the closed-off streets.
Hong Kong's resilience, as a community and a business hub, is often forgotten. People seem to like worrying about the place, and predicting dire things about its fate as though it were living on shadows. But its history has proved it can survive very serious challenges and changes, and go on to prosper. This is one of the great but unspoken attributes of the place. It is not something that was ever planted there in the colonial period by its British rulers, but something which has grown from within its people. Their openness, pragmatism, tolerance and patience are huge qualities.
The author is executive director of China Studies Center and professor of Chinese Politics at University of Sydney; team leader of the Europe China Research and Advice Network (ECRAN) funded by the European Union; and associate fellow at Chatham House, London.
(HK Edition 12/23/2014 page1)