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Hong Kong has ‘strategic ambiguities’ to navigate US-China rivalry: Singapore’s Kishore Mahbubani
- At a Hong Kong forum, the retired Singaporean diplomat addressed issues such as the prospect of ‘de-dollarisation’ of global trade to tensions in the Taiwan Strait
- Hong Kong ‘enjoys the status’ of ‘one country, two systems’, but has to ‘work very hard’ to convince the US that it remains autonomous, Mahbubani says
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Hong Kong’s special status grants it “strategic ambiguities” to navigate the US-China rivalry, but it needs to do more to convince Washington’s power brokers that it retains autonomy in critical areas, the prominent China watcher Kishore Mahbubani has said.
Speaking at a forum in Hong Kong, the retired Singaporean top diplomat addressed a wide range of issues, from the prospect of “de-dollarisation” of global trade to the tensions in the Taiwan Strait.
Asked on how Hong Kong could best navigate the escalating rivalry between Beijing and Washington, Kishore noted during the question-and-answer session that the city – as part of China – was obliged to abide by national security “red lines”.
“Yet at the same time, you also enjoy the status of ‘one country, two systems’, [and] you have a lot of autonomy in some areas. How you exercise your autonomy requires a lot of political judgments,” Kishore said at the event organised by the Hong Kong Policy Research Institute. “And I would say equally importantly, you have to work very hard at convincing [the US] that you remain autonomous.”
Kishore, the founding dean of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, said he discovered during a recent visit to the US that many in the country believed that Hong Kong had “lost all its autonomy [and] it’s no different from China”.
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