hong-kong

"Hong Kong has no tariffs or other restraints on international trade. It has no government direction of economic activity, no minimum wage laws, no fixing of prices. The residents are free to buy from whom they want, sell to whom they want, to invest however they want, to hire whom they want, to work for whom they want."

"Nevertheless, it is true that on 1 July 1997 Hong Kong became the only example of decolonization deliberately accompanied by less democracy and a weaker protection of civil liberties. This was a cause for profound regret, especially for the departing colonial power. But it was China's doing and China's decision. I am pleased that Britain narrowly avoided complicity in the dishonourable act of denying the citizens of free Hong Kong what they had been promised in 1984."

"As governor, I experienced the vitality of life in a booming and free Asian city, saw routinely the best and worst aspects of human nature, and was made to revisit some of the principles in which I have always believed but to which I had rarely given much thought previously. In the darker hours of occasionally fretful nights I found myself face to face with the moral dimensions of political action to a greater extent than ever before."

"[M]ake everything from nothing. ... [T]he British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing."

"We got used to dividing the world into industrialized countries and developing countries – rich and poor. However, four East Asian tigers would soon disrupt our worldview. The British colony of Hong Kong and the city-state of Singapore did the opposite of all other countries, and opened their economies wide, without trade barriers. The experts claimed that free trade would knock out the small manufacturing sectors they had, but, on the contrary, they industrialized at a record pace and shocked the outside world by becoming even richer than the old colonial master, Britain. Taiwan and South Korea learned from this and began to liberalize their economies with amazing results. Their rapid growth took them from being some of the poorest countries in the world to some of the richest in a few generations. It was a global wake-up call because it was so easy to compare what the Chinese in Taiwan achieved compared to the Chinese in Mao’s China, and what the Koreans in the capitalist south created compared to the Koreans in the communist north. In the mid-1950s, Taiwan was only marginally richer than China. In 1980, it was four times richer. In 1955, North Korea was richer than South Korea. (The north was, after all, where mineral resources and power generation were located when the country was partitioned.) Today, South Korea is twenty times richer than North Korea."

"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."

"This relative lack of external pressure, together with the rise of laissez-faire liberalism at home, caused many a commentator to argue that colonial acquisitions were unnecessary, being merely a set of “millstones” around the neck of the overburdened British taxpayer. Yet whatever the rhetoric of anti-imperialism within Britain, the fact was that the empire continued to grow, expanding (according to one calculation) at an average annual pace of about 100,000 square miles between 1815 and 1865.28 Some were strategical/commercial acquisitions, like Singapore, Aden, the Falkland Islands, Hong Kong, Lagos; others were the consequence of land-hungry white settlers, moving across the South African veldt, the Canadian prairies, and the Australian outback—whose expansion usually provoked a native resistance that often had to be suppressed by troops from Britain or British India. And even when formal annexations were resisted by a home government perturbed at this growing list of new responsibilities, the “informal influence” of an expanding British society was felt from Uruguay to the Levant and from the Congo to the Yangtze. Compared with the sporadic colonizing efforts of the French and the more localized internal colonization by the Americans and the Russians, the British as imperialists were in a class of their own for most of the nineteenth century."

"Hong Kong, like Taiwan, has always been an example of what a free China might look like. As Chinese were starving and stumbling from one bloody five-year tragedy to the next during the latter half of the 20th century, Hong Kong was thriving under a system that can only be described as the anthesis of the mainland’s."

"Hong Kong authorities shouldn’t use unlawful force to suppress peaceful protests."

"We appreciate the effort made by the Hong Kong police."

"Ask your Jesus to come to see me!"

"It is ridiculous for those who maintain the laws to apologize."

"I will make the Tiananmen square massacre to happen again!"

"If you keep crying I will grab you back to the police station to rape."

"The people of Hong Kong are bravely standing up to the Chinese Communist Party as Beijing tries to encroach on their autonomy and freedom. Any violent crackdown would be completely unacceptable. As I have said on the Senate floor: The world is watching."

"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."

"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”."

"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."

"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."

"…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."

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

"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."

"知己一聲拜拜遠去這都市，要靠偉大同志搞搞新意思"

"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."

"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."