Opinion | Hongkongers blind to the changing realities beyond our shores
Alice Wu says the city's pivotal role in the Asian success story means we have to expand our horizons and see beyond local issues
Once upon a time, before the turn of the century, while studying under and working for my university professor and life mentor Tom Plate, I learned that my world view is skewed. Those of us who were brought up in the Western world are, for one, too eurocentric, and two, too self-absorbed.
Washington looks at Asia not from across the Pacific, but across the Atlantic, through Europe. And, of course, there to share the blame is the Western media, which as former Straits Times chief editor Cheong Yip Seng (now an editorial adviser to SCMP Publishers) wrote in a review of Plate's latest book, In the Middle of the Future, is "so pervasive, it shapes the Asian view of Asia".
Plate is a pioneer of writing about Asia from the American-Pacific perspective and had the audacity to call Samuel Huntington's "clashing civilisations" world views "misguided" and "abhorrent". Plate taught his students (and readers) to compensate for their blind spots by correcting their observational position; then, the parallax becomes glaringly apparent.
That basically sums up his most important work of the past two decades - he taught and practised what he preached. That, and the fact that although it took almost two decades for Washington to "pivot" to Asia, Plate has been calling for it since 1996.
At a breakfast meeting with some of Hong Kong's finest intellectual and international business leaders three weeks ago, Plate blurted out: "So, what do you all think about the Japan situation?"
"No one is worried about Japan," one said. "It's just the usual stuff," another remarked. "Why do you ask?" asked one thoughtful woman. I was stumped, thinking: "Uh-oh. I'm definitely missing something here."