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Opinion
Stop mourning Hong Kong. It’s evolving, not dying
Nostalgia is understandable, but the city has reinvented itself numerous times before, and is doing so again
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Victor Kwok is deputy research director at Our Hong Kong Foundation and a member of the All-China Youth Federation.
Hong Kong has changed since the turmoil of 2019-20. Few people would dispute this. The more important question is what kind of city it is becoming.
It is evolving into a more nationally integrated yet still distinctive city. The emerging model seeks to combine market dynamism and international connectivity with clearer alignment to national development. This is not decline. It is a search for a viable identity and role.
Critics such as Stephen Roach have argued that the Hong Kong of old is finished and that the city has become little more than another large Chinese city. The conclusion rests on a particular assumption: that sharp political and institutional change, especially when it compresses earlier expectations of autonomy, amounts to the end of the place itself. This assumption is selective.
Political systems everywhere have experienced sharp institutional shifts. Brexit permanently altered Britain’s relationship with Europe. In the United States, the Trump administration has moved to dissolve the United States Agency for International Development, sharply downsize the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and remove or attempt to remove leaders of other independent bodies.
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