Outside In | Why Hong Kong is a long way off being ‘Asia’s World City’

Exactly 20 years ago I and co-authors Mike Enright and Edith Scott walked into Government House to unveil our book The Hong Kong Advantage to Chris Patten, the soon-to-depart final British colonial governor of Hong Kong.

For several years, the book was Hong Kong’s best-selling English language book – which perhaps says more about how thin the English-language reading audience is in Hong Kong than about the book’s irresistible readability.

Even today, its depiction of the Hong Kong economy of the day, how and why it had bounded so strongly through the previous two decades, and how it would develop – and remain competitive through into the uncharted waters of reversion to mainland rule – was accurate and has stood the test of time.

But gosh, in some areas we were wrong, and it is sobering to revisit the many presentations I gave through those transition years, to be reminded of the things I missed, and the things I misjudged. I emphasise “I” because I can’t speak for Mike or Edith, who may well have been more prescient than me.

We were right to dismiss the dire predictions of the journalistic and academic voices of the time that Beijing would quickly strangle the goose that had laid so many golden eggs through Hong Kong’s colonial history. That was always journalistic hyperventilation motivated by prejudice and ignorance, and for anyone living in Hong Kong at the time, and watching the mainland develop at first hand, easy to dismiss.