Hong Kong

"I had believed that spiriting myself to Hong Kong would mean that I wouldn’t have to face racial discrimination anymore. Bewitched by the possibility of transcending the racial totem pole, I only later realized that I had merely relocated to the top, and the view wasn’t what I expected. Being brought up in the United States meant my standards for racial equality were forged in a culture built around the dissent, dialogue, and disruption that the First Amendment vouchsafes. It was only after six years in Hong Kong that I began to understand why people leave their countries to come to the United States."

"In Hong Kong, "locust" is a derogatory term for immigrants and tourists from China... In turn, mainlanders view Hong Kongers as overly superior and patronising."

"I have a confession to make. I am a “locust”. I qualify because I was born in the mainland, and I am now living in Hong Kong... Hong Kong people think they are superior to their mainland brothers and sisters, and some politicians perpetuate this myth by frequently repeating the slogan: “We don’t want to be another Chinese city.” I think their superiority complex is wholly unjustified... I am not a fan of the young people of today’s Hong Kong. They have poor language skills. Never mind English; many are unable to speak clearly even in Cantonese. And they are arrogant and self-centered... In the near future there will be millions of talented, Western-educated people swarming all over the major cities on the mainland. Many of them will come to Hong Kong, not to shop but to work, and Hong Kong youngsters will be no match for them. Hong Kong was promised 50 years of autonomy. I predict at the end of that period most of the business and academic leaders in Hong Kong will be mainland-born Chinese, and no one will even notice they were not Hong Kong people originally. Things change in 50 years. It has been that long since I left Diamond Hill. Nowadays, no one would guess I used to be a “locust”."

"It is reasonable to expect, for example, that one of the better-known “global trends” of today, the rise of the Pacific region, is likely to continue, simply because that development is so broad-based. It includes not only the economic powerhouse of Japan, but also that swiftly changing giant the People’s Republic of China; not only the prosperous and established industrial states of Australia and New Zealand, but also the immensely successful Asian newly industrializing countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore—as well as the larger Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) lands of Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines; by extension, it also includes the Pacific states of the United States and provinces of Canada. Economic growth in this vast area has been stimulated by a happy combination of factors: a spectacular rise in industrial productivity by export-oriented societies, in turn leading to great increases in foreign trade, shipping, and financial services; a marked move into the newer technologies as well as into cheaper, labor-intensive manufactures; and an immensely successful effort to increase agricultural output (especially grains and livestock) faster than total population growth. Each success has beneficially interacted with the others, to produce a rate of economic expansion which has far eclipsed that of the traditional western powers—as well as that of Comecon—in recent years."

"The tension between these conflicting aims is perhaps particularly acute in the late twentieth century because of the publicity given to the existence of various alternative “models” for emulation. On the one hand, there are the extremely successful “trading states”—chiefly in Asia, like Japan and Hong Kong, but also including Switzerland, Sweden, and Austria—which have taken advantage of the great growth in world production and in commercial interdependence since 1945, and whose external policy emphasizes peaceful, trading relations with other societies. In consequence, they have all sought to keep defense spending as low as is compatible with the preservation of national sovereignty, thereby freeing resources for high domestic consumption and capital investment. On the other hand, there are the various “militarized” economies—Vietnam in Southeast Asia, Iran and Iraq as they engage in their lengthy war, Israel and its jealous neighbors in the Near East, and the USSR itself—all of which allocate more (in some cases, much more) than 10 percent of their GNP to defense expenditures each year and, while firmly believing that such levels of spending are necessary to guarantee military security, manifestly suffer from that diversion of resources from productive, peaceful ends. Between the two poles of the merchant and the warrior states, so to speak, there lie most of the rest of the nations of this planet, not convinced that the world is a safe enough place to allow them to reduce arms expenditure to Japan’s unusually low level, but also generally uneasy at the high economic and social costs of large-scale spending upon armaments, and aware that there is a certain trade-off between short-term military security and long-term economic security."

"知己一聲拜拜遠去這都市，要靠偉大同志搞搞新意思"

"Are they not Chinese themselves? I heard that Hong Kong people were educated and civilized. It seems I was wrong."

"…a man in Australia is carrying on an original and tireless campaign of solidarity in a world that, apart from a few dedicated and hardcore defenders of justice, seems not to care about [Jimmy] Lai, cynically considering Hong Kong another dead issue not to bother about anymore. …Yes, we all know that curiosity killed the cat, but indifference kills people, both physically and metaphorically, every single day, when it surrenders to despots, aggressors, and villains."

"Hong Kong was reincorporated in the People’s Republic in 1997 when the British ceded their colony to Beijing. The immediate effect was a restriction on liberties on the island. But the Chinese regime needed to reassure global entrepreneurs of its commitment to some degree of social freedom, and a political witch-hunt in Hong Kong would have damaged this objective. Expatriate Chinese colonies in North America and Europe also required reassurance since they acted as important intermediaries for China’s entry into the world economy. Ties of commerce between the People’s Republic and the USA were strengthened and the global markets teemed with Chinese exports. Chinese rulers huffed and puffed about desiring to reincorporate Taiwan but military action was avoided. Trade was preferred to conquest."

"We start from scratch, every generation. History does not bend inevitably toward justice, or freedom, or decency, or even stability. History doesn’t do that in Hong Kong, or in Moscow, or in Washington or New York City or Los Angeles. History goes where we push it. And if we don’t push, someone else will."

"[Students with learning disabilities] don't even know what a country is, let alone [talk] about national security. It's pretty fanciful and unrealistic."