Why Hong Kong wants to stay 'British'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20450184

Virtually all of the "British past" has disappeared, long ago.

I say, that tape is a little biased, what? Transparent economy? Hardly. Only now we're finding out how much murkiness has been going on.

While I by no means think that Hong Kong should submit to Beijing, I don't think the Brits can pat themselves on the back. Hong Kong has changed, and continues to change. If they were so concerned about freedom why didn't they introduce democracy when they could? They left Hongkongers powerless.

nope. no idea

from the BBC ? Yes - huge left wing bias which is likely to be pro china & anti UK which kind of undermines your argument. Now had it been printed in the Daily Mail...

Hong Kong looks back nostalgically to pre-1997 because it was special then. It was not the same as the other cities in the Pearl River. Not the same as cities in China. It was unique. Now it is just another South China city. With the HK Government disinterested in educating local kids to speak English, the future does not look very promising either.

spot on Jim its more a matter of saying we are Hong Kongers and we are different from other Chinese cities

Without the legacy of the British legal system, Hong Kong would be nothing.

A lot of things have come together to make HK what it is... including the British legal system...


Keep in mind, until China turned communist, HK was a meaningless backwater... only after the great chairman (or dear leader?) shut down the foreign trading ports did HK become important...


All of the big China trading families fled Shanghai in particular and headed to to HK with their bucks and set up shop here....

Joined by millions of their countrymen, who clearly preferred being in a colony ruled by the hated British (as an earlier poster so laughably asserted) rather than in their birthplace.


I am not British. However, to assert that the British were insular, as an earlier posted did, is laughable. They were the opposite of insular, they were a world superpower for centuries, with an empire that made the Roman empire look like a Sunday School picnic.


As for the Brits being "deeply disliked" - maybe by some other, jealous, expats. Hong Kong people have many faults (don't we all) but wasting precious time and energy on "deeply disliking" other people is not one of them.

I think the HK people need to look at what THEY have turned the place into over the past 15 years - take a look out of the window.


Your grandchildren will be very proud of you. Well done.

When I first came to Hong Kong in the seventies, on a full expatriate package, one of my direct reports was an Englishman. He was a few years older than me, married to a local lady, could speak Cantonese passably well, and had lived and worked in Hong Kong for quite a few years. He had apparently chosen to live there after leaving the Merchant Navy, and had actually worked as a supervisor on the Star Ferry for a few years.

He was solid, dependable, but certainly no rising star. He was on a local package.


At that time very few of the local staff had tertiary qualifications, they were pretty much all a lot younger than us, in fact it was the corporation's intention to develop its own people, and that is what happened. One of my local direct reports ended up senior to me, and he just missed out on being appointed to the top job, quite a few years later, not all that long ago, actually.


There were a lot of people like the English chap in supervisory positions in the Colony over the years, the numbers of course gradually died away.


And yes, some of them were only in the positions they held because they were Brits. The local staff's attitude towards them, in my experience, ranged from amused tolerance, to outright frustration. But, again, from my experience, none of the local staff suffered in terms of personal development and promotion opportunities because of the presence of these old stalwarts.

Every single local staff that I ever managed was extremely ambitious, and quite often their ambition outran their abilities/experience by quite some margin. So, of course from time to time, resentment was expressed at how well we expats were treated, compared to them. And we were, no doubt about it.


However, paradoxically, I would guess that most, of not all, of my local staff are now much better off in material terms than some of us old expats, not least because being on local terms meant that they were able to buy their own homes. We were not allowed to do this.


At the end of the day, Hong Kong is the way it is because of the contribution of a whole range of people, and some of them were British timeservers, no doubt about it. However, even these FILTH (failed in London, try Hong Kong) brought something important to the organisations for which they worked, otherwise, in fiercely capitalistic society like Hong Kong, they would not have been there.


Simple as that.