The 10th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping's death went virtually unnoticed this year amid the general festivities marking the Lunar New Year. There were no official commemorations in Hong Kong or the mainland to mark the patriarch's departure on February 19, 1997. He died before he could realise his long-held wish of stepping on the soil of a Hong Kong returned to China.
Yet Deng's thoughts underpinned the principles and guidelines of the city in the post-handover era. He was dubbed the architect of the 'one country, two systems' policy, designed in the 1980s to last until 2047.
His 'black cat, white cat' ideas on pragmatism were well known - it doesn't matter what colour a cat is, as long as it catches mice. In that vein, he once gave a no-nonsense account of how he had come up with the 'one country, two systems' concept to resolve the issue of Hong Kong and, in the longer term, Taiwan.
Speaking to a local delegation of business leaders in 1984, Deng said the solution arose from a wish 'not to be driven by emotion, nor do we want to play tricks'. The idea, he said, was 'all based on practical needs and full consideration of the history and reality of Hong Kong'.
Back then, Hong Kong and the mainland were so close, yet so far apart. Separated by the Shenzhen River, they practised sharply different systems, namely capitalism in the former British colony and socialism in the Communist Party-led country. Fears about communist rule had been prompting tens of thousands of people, mostly from Guangdong and Shanghai, to flee since 1949.
Confronted with the realities of 'borrowed land, borrowed time', Hongkongers performed miracles. Once a fishing village in the backwaters of Guangdong, the city rose to wealth and fame in the global league of cities. Meanwhile, the mainland economy and society as a whole were on a bumpy ride towards modernisation, after decades of political turmoil and economic malaise.
But Deng was confident that, in the 50 years after 1997, the mainland would catch up with Hong Kong. If that happened, differences between the two systems and two societies would become less of a problem. If Deng were alive today he would no doubt be pleased with the broad success of Hong Kong's 'one country, two systems' experiment. It wouldn't matter that there is only a slim chance of Taiwan acknowledging any inevitability of unification with the mainland under 'one country, two systems'.