Comment by harshreality | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harshreality | Hacker News Reader

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Hong Kong's entire value, as far as I can see [and I'm referring to the value of Hong Kong as a community including people and businesses, not just their geographic value], either as a place to live or to do business or to visit, comes from it being a SAR with its own government, culture, historical legacy, and lack of interference from its mother country. If it becomes a homogenized satellite of Shenzhen with sky high real estate, which seems to be what China wants, what's left of Hong Kong?

I thought China was smarter than this. I thought they would realize the value of Hong Kong. Apparently China doesn't want Hong Kong. They want to remove the perennial thorn in their side, that democratic city-state of Chinese heritage right on their border. They want to grind it into dust, slowly if possible, but immediately if Hong Kong makes too much fuss about the pestle. They want to remove the painful reminder of [their losses during] the Opium Wars and British influence in the Sinosphere. They want to do that at any cost, including destroying Hong Kong's culture and attractiveness as a business location.

This is the height of tragedy. There will never be another place like it, and China is destroying it out of spite and ideological inflexibility.

What proportion of China's economy is HK? I don't know a good source but I recall seeing it's a low single digit percentage of China as a whole. They definitely punch above their weight per capita but I feel like China is more than willing and able to take the loss.

After all, with Western governments changing every few years, who will even remember in a decade?

I think the usual argument is that Hong Kong is much more attractive as a meeting place for foreign and domestic businesses than other cities (in no small part due to the Great Firewall getting in the way of corporate communications). It might represent a small fraction of China's GDP (or whatever other measure we're using for economic significance, since IIRC attempting to calculate China's GDP is a pretty wonky affair), but if it stops being that place where domestic and foreign businesses meet (and other cities fail to take up the slack), it could make things a lot harder for operations in other cities to continue.

That is: HK's value is less about its own numbers and more about the numbers it enables other Chinese cities to achieve.

not very convincing. The lack of CCP-imposed restrictions is hardly an inimitable differentiator. The unfortunate truth is that HK's cultural and economic importance is so diminished that the government is not that afraid of the current situation.

Never said it was convincing. Just the usual argument here on HN.

It sounds reasonable to me, though. If I'm gonna go to China to meet up with some manufacturer, then I'd rather do it in a place where I can send/receive emails without having to figure out which VPN providers the Party hasn't blocked yet. If I'm gonna stick around there as a full-time job, I'd definitely rather do so in a place where I'm not restricted in what I do online.

Measuring Hong Kong's importance for China by its GDP is as useful as measuring your eyes' importance to you by their weight.

>Measuring Hong Kong's importance for China by its GDP is as useful as measuring your eyes' importance to you by their weight.

Interesting. How does Hong Kong function as China's "eyes" in your analogy?

From news reports, HK was around 27% of China's GDP in 1993 prior to handover back to China in 1997. Today, HK is less than 3% of China's GDP.

>Hong Kong's entire value, as far as I can see [...]

Keep in mind that that's the perspective you've been conditioned to see by the media you've consumed.

>If it becomes a homogenized satellite of Shenzhen with sky high real estate, which seems to be what China wants, what's left of Hong Kong?

Well, for one thing, the unstable political condition is likely to change the "sky high real estate" bit.

>I thought China was smarter than this. I thought they would realize the value of Hong Kong. Apparently China doesn't want Hong Kong.

Oh, please. They do want Hong Kong. They just want Hong Kong in a different way from how the rest of the world thinks Hong Kong is valuable to China.

>They want to remove the painful reminder of the Opium Wars and British influence in the Sinosphere.

The Anglosphere wants to remove the painful reminder of the Opium Wars. You seem to. China doesn't.

As for foreign influence in their own backyard, ever heard of NIMBY ("not in my back yard")?

>There will never be another place like it, and China is destroying it out of spite and ideological inflexibility.

Not quite. For one thing, Hong Kong has lost its lustre as "a place to live or to do business or to visit". Recent IMF data show that its GDP per capita is almost half that of Macau SAR:

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/hong-kong-economy/articl...

It's also fallen far behind as one of the world's busiest ports: Shenzhen now outranks it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_port...

It's not a matter of whether Hong Kong becomes "a homogenized satellite of Shenzhen", but when, because Hong Kong is already heading down that road.

What you, and other commentators, seem to fail to understand is that China absolutely wants Hong Kong, but not for it being an SAR. No. Reread Carrie Lam's leaked comments again:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-protests-carriel...

>Lam noted, however, that she had few options once an issue had been elevated “to a national level,” a reference to the leadership in Beijing, “to a sort of sovereignty and security level, let alone in the midst of this sort of unprecedented tension between the two big economies in the world.”

This has now been elevated to an issue of national security for China. Do you know why?

Because the Hong Kong activists are now demanding independence.

Set aside the issue of self-determination for a minute. Suppose you are playing as China in this game of Civilization and a city that you've got back is doing this. How would you react?

Would you fold to the demands of Washington and Elizabeth?

Or would you look at South Korea? At Taiwan? At how Mongolia got away with the help of Catherine?

Notwithstanding the rhetoric around the Opium Wars, Hong Kong is strategically valuable -- and not simply economically valuable -- to China because it's located on the other side of the mouth of the Pearl River from Macau. It's literally a physical gatekeeper to Guangzhou. Have a look at the geographic reality:

https://www.google.com/maps/@22.4267643,113.6415031,9z

(China does have detailed economic plans for the region: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta_Economic_Zon...)

Which is why China would hold on to Hong Kong tightly, as tightly as it'd hold on to Tibet or Xinjiang. For strategic reasons.

Independence is not one of the demands of the protestors. Please provide a source for that claim.

>Independence is not one of the demands of the protestors. Please provide a source for that claim.

Point taken. But it was one of the demands of some protesters in the past[0], so I must have got that confused with the current demands of the 2019 protesters.

Be that as it may be, the comment I was replying to was echoing points made by the pro-independence movement in justifying their stance, in particular by highlighting Hong Kong's allegedly distinct cultural identity.[1]

I'd think, for instance, that Macau has a more distinctive cultural identity than HK, and in any case, harshreality's argument sought to portray China as a cultural monolith.

The reality is that there are at least as many cultural identities as there are provinces, and in Guangdong province alone, there are three separate dialect groups -- Yue (Cantonese)[2], Hakka[3], Southern Min (Teochew[4], Leizhou[5]) -- each with their own distinct culture.

You may see why, from a certain perspective, the cultural identity argument of the pro-independence movement is rather specious. But harshreality isn't the only commentator I've seen who's brought up HK's cultural identity as an argument.

Finally, perhaps I should let a Hongkonger speak for himself. Lewis Lau Yiu-man is a commentator based in Hong Kong, who writes for Stand News[6], a pro-democracy online news website, and contributed this piece[7] to the New York Times last month. After a historical preamble, he made this claim:

>That’s because — want it or not, know it or not — the Umbrella Movement planted the seed of separatism in the city. I don’t mean that the idea was entirely new: There had been some proponents of localism, at the margins. And I don’t mean that separatism is now the order of the day[...] I mean that the Umbrella Movement was, in fact, an independence movement — but an independence movement that didn’t know itself.

He even analyses Beijing's perspective:

>And so from Beijing’s perspective, when pro-democracy protesters and their supporters reject what it perceives as its right to intervene here, they are challenging its very sovereignty. In this, at least, Beijing is correct. It knows what many Hong Kongers don’t seem to have fully appreciated: Admit it or not, we are actually rejecting Chinese sovereignty — we are already an independence movement in disguise. And it all started with the Umbrella Movement.

So there's your source.

[0] https://time.com/4440708/hong-kong-independence-china-locali...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_independence#Reasons

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yue_Chinese

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakka_Chinese

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teochew_dialect

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leizhou_Min

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_News

[7] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/opinion/hong-kong-umbrell...

Thanks for your comment. I don’t see why Macau would have a stronger cultural identity than Hong Kong, but I haven’t been there, only to Hong Kong a few times.

It seems to me that there certainly is a distinct cultural identity in Hong Kong. Children are raised with less indoctrination in school, they have more access to Western media, and they have different values and manners. It’s obvious the minute you get to Hong Kong. Ask the mainlanders who complain about pretentious, condescending Hong Kongers whether there’s a distinct culture there.

I do think I see your point - there are many distinct cultures all over China and it’s certainly not a monolith. But I still have the impression that in certain ways the values of Hong Kong people are, on average, different. They certainly don’t seem to want to give ground on some of their individual freedoms.

Anyways, it seems hypocritical for Beijing to characterize this as a sovereignty issue, if your analyst is correct about their view. They agreed to one country two systems (for now), and the whole sovereignty argument seems more like a distraction to me.

It seems like they just don’t want to admit mistakes - easier to blame Western influence than admit that they’ve pushed too hard and made the people too angry.

Anyways, I really appreciate the discussion. I’m kind of starved for people to talk to about it.

>I don’t see why Macau would have a stronger cultural identity than Hong Kong

They actually have their own language, Macanese Patois[0], which is a Portuguese-based creole, in addition to Cantonese, English and maybe Portuguese. Their cuisine is also a blend of Cantonese and Portuguese cuisines.[1] They don't really have a film industry, but my impression is that neither does Hong Kong these days.

It's interesting to compare and contrast the two SARs. You hardly ever hear about Macau, and Beijing didn't seem to have been as compelled to spell out what it thinks "one country two systems" should mean for Macau, as it did for Hong Kong in 2014.[2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macanese_Patois

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macanese_cuisine

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20140618000943/http://mobile.nyt...

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