I feel for the well-read foreigner who happens to cross my path. If you come from a country or culture I’m curious about, within five minutes of our first conversation my mic will be in your face, the interrogation will begin and I’ll be fishing for the perfect angle for my next piece. It’s exhausting for everyone, but it has to be done.
Last week I had the pleasure to chat with Keith, a Hong Konger now working as a management consultant (helping firms improve their performance by increasing revenue or cutting costs) in Manhattan. I’m hoping by considering Keith’s perspective on East Asian history, economics, politics and culture, we can form a more nuanced grasp of this region, enriching our conversations on these topics in the future. I weave in recent articles and special reports from my weekly issue of The Economist with the stunning imagery of Chinese photographer Fan Ho.
Tall, lean and soft-spoken, Keith looks sharp. On this spring day he wears a crisp navy polo and fresh Nike VaporMaxes. I’m not as into sneakers as I used to be (I’m no longer 18 years old—loafer me, baby!), but these are cool: I dig the pink and purple colorway. Now that I’ve finished checking him out, I can begin to, you know, talk.
The past
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Keith attended local schools—as opposed to international ones—and mostly speaks Cantonese with his family and friends. I’m curious how China was first introduced to him as a pupil.
K: I would say even back in the ‘90s, 20 or 30 years ago, China in Hong Kong was seen pretty negatively: poor, not developed, might not have clean water. I think starting from ten years ago China is becoming rich, so that narrative has changed significantly in ten, twenty years. Since Hong Kong was handed back to China, there’s more integration, so they are allowing Chinese tourists to go to Hong Kong; Hong Kong people are increasingly more open to traveling to China. I think that kind of connection facilitates this change in our understanding of China.
L: What do you find interesting about Hong Kong’s history?
K: So before the 1840s, Hong Kong was a fishing village. So what changed is the Opium War. China signed a treaty and gave most of Hong Kong to the UK, who started using it as a trading port. Since then you start having these capitalist economic developments.
Keith tells me this treaty and subsequent ones had a time limit, stating the UK would return Hong Kong back to China in 1997. I ask how life changed when that happened.
K: So in the late 1990s, there was this wave of migration. A lot of people moved to Canada, the US. If you see people from Hong Kong in other places, a big part of them have been during that phase. China did a lot of PR to say things are going to remain the same: you will still have a capitalist economy, limited democracy, it will be the same for at least 50 years, until 2047.
L: You said limited democracy. Why did you use that word?
K: Now and even back then, when we were a UK colony, the head of the government was not elected by the people. There was a small group of elites—mostly businessmen, financial people, some China representatives—who came together to decide who is going to head the government. In the legislation, part of the council is elected by everyone, but half of it is decided by elites. So we have these institutions, but the people in these institutions are not elected through popular vote.
L: How do you feel about this system?
K: I think it worked back then, because, number one, when there was no Internet, information was not spread at such a fast speed. In my parents’ generation, people were still kind of poor, so they were more focused on economic development, to make more money—they didn’t care as much about politics. But now, people are having these awakenings because of the Internet, and everyone is relatively well-off, so we start thinking whether this system still represents what people want.
Though his parents were born in Hong Kong, his grandparents moved there when the Communist Party took over China in the 1950s. I find it fascinating to hear about the difference in attitude between these generations.
K: I think the view my parents represent is they are very supportive of China getting international recognition. To me, I think China is doing it in ways that have not been seen before. An example is how in the United Nations now you see two separate camps. Developing countries in Africa and the Middle East are aligned with China in terms of voting patterns, and you see Europe and America on the other side.
“Twenty years ago,” writes Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean diplomat and academic, “no Chinese national ran any UN organization. Today they oversee four.” Mahbubani argues the pandemic is cementing a new world order, citing the lower death rates suffered by East Asian countries compared to western ones: “They reflect not just medical capabilities, but also the quality of governance and the cultural confidence of their societies.”
L: Tell me about your dad’s pro-China views. Why is he that way?
K: I think it has to do with people who grew up in the colonial times—they are still very proud of their Chinese ethnicity and culture. Even when the UK was governing Hong Kong, people still learned Chinese literature, history—and they are proud of it. It is kind of similar to an anti-colonial sentiment. They are like, ‘We are Chinese people, we respect our Chinese identity, we want China to rule Hong Kong, not the UK.’ So everything becomes nationalistic.
Through a brilliant special report in The Economist I learned how since taking power in 2012 Xi Jinping (See JIN-ping) has reformed the education system to emphasize patriotism to a greater degree than any leader since Chairman Mao, who established the Communist Party in 1949. Through required courses on Marxism, nationalism, and the philosophies of Mao and Jinping, students internalize that the communists rescued China from a “century of humiliation” at the hands of foreign powers, starting with the Opium War of 1839. Only by standing up to the west, the message goes, can China rise again. I ask Keith what he makes of this framing.
K: This sentiment to protect China—‘we’ve been bullied by other countries’—I think this narrative resonates very easily because it doesn’t require a lot of critical thinking. There was a revolution in China in the 60s and 70s, started by Chairman Mao to overturn the politicians. It has this sentiment of ‘we don’t want educated elites, we want peasants to rise to power.’ Because of that, people in the 80s and 90s are not as educated. If you’re not a very educated person, I think the nationalist ideas work, and they are a topic that many TV shows and movies in China are created on—about Japan invading China during World War II, of Chinese soldiers fighting with foreign powers. So it’s very present in popular culture even now.
The present
I ask Keith if there is anything he wishes more westerners knew about from his point of view.
K: When Hong Kong was handed to China, it was in the Sino-British Joint Declaration that Hong Kong would remain highly autonomous, that Hong Kong should be passing its own legislation—all this was promised. The protests in recent years are more about asking China to respect these promises. But many times in the media it became twisted as Hong Kong asking for independence. I think a very small group of people is protesting for independence. We just want China to respect the promise: to continue to let Hong Kong people run Hong Kong in its own way.
Sipping his coffee, Keith cites last year’s national security law as an example.
K: In the past, it would have been something passed through Hong Kong’s legislation. What happened is China just passed it from China and implemented it in Hong Kong, bypassing the Hong Kong legislation process, which destroys the legal foundation of Hong Kong.
L: What’s your best guess on the relationship between Hong Kong and China in the coming years?
K: I think we are going down the path of very fast integration. I would predict that in five, ten years, Hong Kong will become like any other city in China. You basically won’t elect anyone in legislation to represent the people. People will start speaking Mandarin more; they will teach Mandarin instead of Cantonese in schools to eradicate the Hong Kong identity—wipe away the colonial legacy.
I don’t think Keith’s predictions are far-fetched. They remind me of a brilliant but tragic video essay by Vox’s Johnny Harris about the cohort of North Koreans who reside in Japan and whose culture and identity are being systematically oppressed by the Japanese government and society.
This sentiment to protect China— ‘we’ve been bullied by other countries’—I think this narrative resonates very easily because it doesn’t require a lot of critical thinking.
I ask Keith if Hong Kong needs China, and he sheds light on why China has a financial incentive in maintaining its grasp on the enclave. Because China has such strict currency regulation, it’s not easy to get money out of the country, so Hong Kong plays a unique function in bringing money from China to other markets in the world. China introduced capitalism without a fully thought-out legal system to enable it, Keith explains, so western companies, turned off by the opaque Chinese legal system, have headquarters in Hong Kong, whose legal system protects their property rights—both physical and intellectual.
L: So then who is to say Taiwan or Tokyo can’t just substitute Hong Kong in the next five years?
K: I think Hong Kong still has its edge. Most people in the labor force speak English pretty fluently—not the case in Japan, Korea or Taiwan. That’s a very big reason. So if you take that out, make people not learn English, only learn Mandarin, ten years later—there are already companies moving to Singapore.
In China, the jiulinghou, or those born between 1990 and 1999, number 188m—more than the combined populations of Australia, Britain and Germany. The thinking was that these students and young professionals, who will be the next generation of Chinese leaders in business, media and government, would eventually embrace Western values through their experiences abroad. Turns out: not so much. There is a saying popular among Chinese students overseas: “Pretty mountains, pretty lakes, pretty boring”, expressing their longing for China’s efficient, clean and fast-paced cities.
Proud that their country is respected—whether out of admiration or fear—young Chinese wonder if Western values, including constitutional democracy, are all they are cracked up to be, especially given how America and much of the rich world fumbled their COVID responses. I wonder what Keith makes of the increasingly self-assured jiulinghou.
K: The interesting thing is many of the students who are studying abroad—there are many Chinese student associations, and there is a theory that these organizations work very closely with the Chinese consulate. They work with government officials: they network, have dinner, collaborate. These organizations in turn are allegedly monitoring the speech of other Chinese students. So if you’re a poli sci student, and a professor is saying something bad about China, if you don’t stand up and disagree with the professor, this might be monitored and recorded to government officials. It’s a theory.
A theory with evidence backed by the BBC, as it turns out. I tell Keith I might reassess some of my references with a degree of skepticism. Nonetheless, I mention the growing youth movements—even protests—for women’s reproductive health, the LGBTQ community, and Me-Too, demonstrating glimpses of freer expression in China.
K: Some of these concepts get introduced to China in a good way—through the people with the goal of creating social change. But sometimes it’s interesting. An example is the Chinese soccer dream that was introduced by Xi Jinping. He tells everyone he has a dream that one day China can win the World Cup. Soccer is technically a western idea, so he promotes it and people just start trying out soccer. It’s just interesting how the country selectively introduces western ideas and uses them in specific ways.
L: What would be a measured American response to growing Chinese assertions?
K: In Taiwan, Hong Kong and even Japan, there is a pretty big portion of people who support Donald Trump, and there’s a significant anti-China sentiment in Hong Kong, Taiwan and sometimes Japan. They believe in Trump’s unconventional way to battle China, versus the Democrats believing in international rules, the United Nations or other institutions. Trump tried to use sanctions or something more direct—he didn’t believe in organizations like the UN to balance out China. I think the new admin should think about whether these conventional policies or international rules are still valid, because as I said, China is lending a lot of money to these developing countries, who then adhere to a consistent voting pattern. We may need to rethink whether these things are still effective.
The future
I circle back to the argument of Singaporean scholar Mahbubani that the pandemic has cemented the power shift from west to east.
K: I don't think so. I took a class in college focused on the Great Diversion: why the west ascended right around the Industrial Revolution. Before that, if you look at economic performance, the East Asian countries were doing almost as well as the west. It was the Industrial Revolution that changed the game. And one thing we looked at is the role of western values such as individual liberty, trust for science in paving the way for the Industrial Revolution and Great Diversion—I think these are fundamental values that led to why the west is so different from the east.
Keith contrasts the eastern and western responses to COVID.
K: I don’t think it’s about democracy being ineffective in handling a crisis like COVID. It’s about core values—whether you think individual liberty and freedom are more important, or the greater benefit in terms of the public health of the society is more important. In some of these Asian countries, it’s a tradeoff where the public health concern is prioritized over your individual freedom. In America, liberty is still the number one thing, and public health comes second. I think that's the real reason why you see two very different outcomes in handling the crisis.
L: You have the rise in Alibaba and Tencent and other explosive Chinese firms. To what degree will the lack of individual freedom become problematic to China’s rise?
K: I think because of that lack in freedom of speech, it limits creativity and the country’s soft power. In China for any movie to be shown in Chinese theaters, it has to have the morality of bad guys having bad endings and good guys having good endings. You can do well in terms of having big businesses influencing the world. But you will never have the cultural influence of Hollywood because of the censorship, so your influence is mostly in terms of money and power, but not in terms of culture.
L: It will play an increasing role in my life as an American in terms of power and prestige, but maybe not in terms of culture, in the way that South Korea might? In 2018 the country exported more “cultural products” (think music, such as boyband BTS, and films, such as Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite) than home appliances (such as televisions) for the first time. Is that an accurate distinction?
K: Cultural influence is part of what makes the west prevalent. Avatar was recently brought back to the Chinese theatre and it became the highest grossing movie ever in China. So, yes, they have their own Chinese culture, but people still like Disney, Marvel—this kind of influence is what sets the west apart.
L: In a word, can you tell me how you feel about China’s rise?
K: Overwhelmed.
L: Interesting—I myself would probably say intrigued. And about Hong Kong’s future?
Keith pauses, sipping his americano.
K: Gloomy.
What an interesting topic... We should pay more attention to this side of the world. Great job!
Great ending