I have hesitated a long time before writing or publishing this post. In fact, most of it is roughly two years old, and as old as four, dating back to when I had to go to Canton and Hong Kong on visa-related business to bring my family back here. But certain current events thrusting Hong Kong back into the international spotlight have pushed me to update and complete this piece. To start with, let’s analyse certain gæographical and œcological realities briefly.
Hong Kong imports over 90% of its food – and at that, the vast, vast bulk comes from the mainland, including 94% of the city’s fresh pork, 100% of its fresh beef, 92% of its fresh vegetables and 97% of its freshwater fish. It imports between 70% and 80% by volume of its fresh water from the East River in Guangdong. Hong Kong’s electricity grid is interconnected with that on the mainland, and 23% of its total electricity is supplied directly from the mainland, much of that through the nuclear power plant in Shenzhen. For the remainder of its electricity, Hong Kong relies on coal and natural gas (also significantly imported from the mainland, though also from Indonesia and Singapore), with only 2% of its total consumption originating with renewable sources. In addition, tourism remains a vital œconomic sector for Hong Kong and accounts for five per cent of its GDP and over seven per cent of its employment, and mainland visitors account for nearly 80% of this sector’s custom.
Hong Kong also produces a vast amount of solid waste (to the tune of 6.4 million tonnes a year), has been running out of landfill space for a long time, and outsources the bulk of its recycling to – you guessed it! – the mainland. Hong Kong is notorious for its e-waste production (and the big HK shipping concerns also trade in e-waste from other countries), and much of this e-waste ends up in Guangdong, in poor villages like Guiyu. This is a question I should know a thing or two about – analysing e-waste flows, including destinations for international shipment, was part of my group’s research project on the 2010 Covered Device Recycling Act for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
Suffice it to say, Hong Kong as a municipality has basically built itself up, since the late 1970’s, on a finance-led œconomic structure in ways which render it not only almost entirely dependent on the mainland for basic sustenance and support of a high-modern / high-tech / high-rise living standard. That said, Hong Kong happens to have one of the world’s highest urban income gaps, a legacy which significantly predates the 1997 handover (with 1971 being cited as the last year in which income disparity was this high).
So how did this financial-services led local œconomy play itself out? Hong Kong was flooded with wealth, but that wealth was largely in the hands of the same four families (Li, Ho, Hui and Lo). But instead of investing some of that wealth into, say, microchip or biotech or medical services development – all of which would have kept Hong Kong at the vanguard of the Chinese œconomy – instead they chose to sink that wealth back into real estate, fuelling speculation on an already-overpriced housing market. That was the quickest way to earn money, but not the wisest. Now, places like Shanghai and Chongqing are outstripping Hong Kong as preferred places of investment, and Hong Kong is no longer ‘top dog’ in China. That loss of internal status, along with the massive wealth gap, housing crisis and environmental crisis, seem to be what is driving a lot of the anxiety and anger that these middle and upper-middle class young people are experiencing now. It’s leading them to lash out at mainlanders as well as other foreign residents of the city. It strikes me that the defensiveness around the status of the Cantonese language (which is not dead and will never die so long as karaoke is a thing) stems from the same set of anxieties.
Some personal background here. I visited Hong Kong myself in 2005 on a seminar, and again went to the Delta in 2015 on visa-related business. During the first trip, I stayed at Hong Kong Baptist University during the week of 1 July, which coincided with the pro-democracy protests. Even though I was a visiting student, I did get the full tourist treatment. I got handed protest literature. I ate durian-flavoured ice cream. I visited the big malls, the schmancy restaurants (that’s the technical term) featuring dishes from any part of any animal you can think of, the Buddhist temples, the painfully-authentic British-style pubs.
But my strongest impressions of the place were Dickensian. You could see high-flyers driving Lamborghinis, Maseratis or Bentleys around in the nice mall districts, and then turn around to see old people of retirement age picking up litter for change, having no other way to supplement their meagre-to-non-existent pensions. You could go out to sea and visit the places where people rented out rooms on rusty decades-old boats floating on garbage-littered water because they couldn’t afford to live on land – and from the deck you might have a perfect view of the glittering glass-and-steel skyline. (The boat-dwelling practice is actually, in part, one remnant of a cruel Song-era ethnic caste system which was done away with by the Qing Dynasty’s heroic Yongzheng Emperor, only to be reintroduced informally by the British.) The sight of five-star hotels in spitting distance (figuratively speaking) from overcrowded public housing projects still remains somewhat disconcerting to me, and looms quite large in my memory of the place.
The point here, though, is not to bash Hong Kong as a place, or Hongkongers in general as people – the great majority of whom are victims, not perpetrators, of these circumstances. The point is to provide a certain degree of perspective. Hong Kong faces an unfavourable situation, and a broad array of thus-far intractable environmental, social and œconomic problems. The net effect of these problems is to reduce many of the island’s inhabitants to a state of path-dependence on the well-entrenched oligarchical system of rule which goes back over a century. It is this oligarchical system of native tycoons, and the colonial-legacy civil service system which supports it, which currently underwrites the vast majority of Hong Kong’s œconomic and political woes – not Beijing.
It is unclear to me how, if at all, the current protest movement in Hong Kong is liable to change anything for the better about this basic state-of-affairs, particularly when the movement itself tends to be pro-oligarch and pro-big business after the fashion of the Western liberal politics it emulates, or else ressentiment-filled, nativist and xenophobic after the fashion of those same Western countries’ current backlash politics. Does attacking government buildings with black paint and racist anti-Chinese slogans, harassing random old men in airports or kidnapping journalists, beating them up and denying them medical attention, get the great majority of Hongkongers any closer to a semblance of œconomic dignity, fair rents and land prices – or a better and more sustainable environmental model, which would seem to be a prerequisite for any meaningful sort of independence? It’s very telling that these protests, like the 2014 ones, are not driven by the working class, but by the relatively-privileged middle class. Poorer, more conservative neighbourhoods like Yuen Long and North Point have been decidedly unsympathetic to the protests.
It’s quite true that I used to be far more sympathetic to the Umbrella Movement than I am now. And I still hold to the view that Hongkongers – particularly working-class Hongkongers – have very good reason to be upset, about the income inequality and œcological problems in particular! But, at the risk of being one of those pesky Western types who refuses to fall in line behind Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, these current protesters haven’t learned anything from the Umbrella Movement’s failure, and they haven’t addressed the real agents of their island’s immiseration. More than that, much of their resentment against the mainland and mainlanders seems psychologically-driven by a loss of their uniquely-privileged status in the broader Chinese world. Hong Kong is still an island, but no longer uniquely wealthy or glamorous. That’s been a long time in coming. But because it’s not solely Beijing’s fault, it’s a lot harder to protest against.
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