My Take | Old Hong Kong has no future? Good, merge it with Shenzhen
- The status of the city as an outpost of the imperial West, and as a wedge against mainland China after 1997, has come to an end. Its bright future is to be another Chinese city, but not just
Someone please hand them more tissues, please. The amount of hypocritical lamentation and crocodile tears flowing for the death of Hong Kong lately is so overwhelming.
My Google News is automatically set to Hong Kong, and just now, voila, “Hong Kong Is Self-Destructing”, from the ever objective American news citadel, The Atlantic, and another from the Financial Times, “It pains me to say Hong Kong is over”.
I wonder how it actually hurt the author. Was it a heartache akin to a potentially fatal heart attack or more like a migraine because things aren’t going the way bleeding-heart Westerners think the city ought to be working?
And self-destructing? Was it like the more than six months of constant citywide riots, arson, beatings, killings, attempted murders, public vandalism (against two transport arteries, the MTR railway system and the international airport)? Or some other kind of self-destruction?
Whatever the latter, give me that rather than the 2019 mayhem. Many foreigners still fantasise, fetishise and propagandise that what happened then was a perfectly peaceful great liberation movement ruthlessly crushed by totalitarian communists. Well, they can smoke whatever they like, but I don’t do that kind of stuff, not any more.
Someone remind our dear critics how the US and Canadian governments, respectively, dealt with the one-day January 6, 2021 “insurrection” on Capitol Hill and the weeks-long truckers’ protest, which really was peaceful.