Ever since Hong Kong's reversion to China in 1997, it has been dragged into other people's fights with Beijing. Sometimes, it is Hong Kong's own fight, as it was a decade ago when Beijing put pressure on us to make the Falun Gong an illegal organisation. While it cannot be said that Hong Kong emerged completely untainted, our basic rights and freedoms have been maintained and Falun Gong practitioners are still allowed to stage protests openly.
Often, however, we are dragged into something that really isn't our fight. Just the other day, a noted US economist, C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told the House Ways and Means Committee that Hong Kong, like Beijing, was manipulating its currency and should be labelled a currency manipulator (along with Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore).
Bergsten said that Hong Kong manipulated its exchange rate to 'maintain a close relationship' with the Chinese currency. It is mind-boggling that someone in Bergsten's position should be so ignorant and not know that our currency is pegged to the US dollar, not the yuan, and has been since 1983.
Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah called Bergsten's charges 'odd', which was putting it mildly. While Bergsten might mislead some lawmakers in Washington, he isn't really putting Hong Kong's fundamental freedoms at risk.
Google's actions were potentially in a different category. The internet company announced it had decided to withdraw from the mainland and was rerouting search requests to its uncensored Hong Kong facilities.
In a way, this action was a compliment to China, since it shows that, 13 years after the handover, rights and freedoms here have been respected. On the other hand, however, it was an attempt to make use of Hong Kong's special status under 'one country, two systems' to undermine the mainland government, something that Beijing is unlikely to tolerate.
The outside reaction to Google's action was interesting. On the one hand, right-wing politician John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the UN, called it 'historic'. 'Google has shown itself unwilling simply to be on the receiving end of whatever Beijing dishes out,' he said.