Two weeks ago, when pupils were raising the national flag to mark National Security Education Day at schools across Hong Kong, the mainstream media in the West fit the snapshot of the moment into the prevailing rhetoric of “the demise of liberalism” in the city. Some media shed their crocodile tears to mourn the “end of democracy”, while others grumbled that “Beijing is shackling Hong Kong.” Chinese media, in response, debunked the hypocrisy of their Western counterparts, while the latter uses “whataboutism” to sidetrack the blame. Narrative confrontation about the affairs in Hong Kong is tense, but the zenith is yet to come.
Over the past decades, the nihilists and naysayers have been exploiting the loopholes in the city’s political and electoral system to advance their political agenda of undermining the rise of China. Despite the interference of Western politicians, the majority of the residents in Hong Kong are too sober-minded to be blind followers of the West. When the naysayers were peddling their theories of nihilism in communities, the “eager beavers” in Hong Kong are sparing no effort to keep themselves afloat in the economic recession and embrace the new opportunities that will pop up in the post-pandemic age. This is the reality in Hong Kong — it is not about the so-called brutal “political crackdown”; it is about securing a promising future with wit and grit.
Modern history portrays a Hong Kong of narrow, hustle-bustle streets engulfed between lines of glittering skyscrapers, where people with a can-do spirit won the most. History has proved that Hong Kong is too busy to be nostalgic — it is a city striving for a bright future, not a place resting on the past glory.
For nearly three years, Nury Vittachi, a veteran journalist and a brilliant writer in Hong Kong, has been running around to tell The Other Side of the Story: A Secret War in Hong Kong. The media campaign in Hong Kong has played a crucial role in shaping the historic narrative during the civil unrest in 2019. Thanks to the efforts of wise minds like Vittachi, the city is winning the bitter battle of facts over fiction. A local survey shows that around 70 percent of citizens welcome the electoral reform of 2021. It can be estimated that in Hong Kong today, only a limited portion of its population would be talked into the West’s misinformation that portrays the special administrative region like a spoiled melancholy girl grumbling about her “dog’s life” in the arms of her motherland.
Compared with people in Hong Kong, the audiences in the West are more likely to fall easy prey for the mainstream narrative on the affairs in Hong Kong, which dominates the public domain. The ongoing electoral reform, for example, has been rendered into political oppression aiming to squash liberty in the territory, once and for all. Even if such rhetoric were true, which it is not, media in the “Five Eyes” would still have to admit the solid fact that “the death of liberalism” in Hong Kong, which hosts $10 trillion of cross-border investment, did not trigger panic, capital flight or a business exodus. The fact is that Hong Kong is enjoying a financial market boom, with share offerings soaring when China’s leading companies listed in the city’s exuberant stock market. In short, Western firms are in the thick of it: Among the top underwriters are Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. It is recorded that the value of US dollar payments cleared in the financial hub hit a record $11 trillion in 2020.
What makes so-called political oppression and commercial effervescence coexist side by side in a city proud of its free market economy like Hong Kong? The logic reasoning can be either the allegation of a political squash is unfounded, or the economic vitality is illusionary because of fake data. Since the IPOs of the big names in the Hong Kong stock market were real and the transactions did happen, the conspiracy theory of “political oppression” in Hong Kong is anything but fact.
There was a time that Hong Kong was held to a standstill by waves of civil unrest; there was a period of controversies when the elites of the city were bent on plugging the loopholes in the legislation and political systems. Whatever has happened in Hong Kong, the city of vitality will never slow its pace in the pursuit of success and prosperity. Hong Kong did not, and certainly will not, indulge itself in endless political or ideological disputes.
In Hong Kong, excessive politicizing must give way to commercial success, and the ideological dispute can go nowhere if it sours the relationship between a company and its customers. After all, it is the commercial success that makes Hong Kong what it is now, and the city is bound to pursue future triumphs to secure its stance in the highly commercialized world.
The author is a Hong Kong-based journalist.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.