New | The dragon has two eyes
Are Hong Kong and Shanghai rivals? Enemies? Partners?
The history of modern China has seen these two port cities intertwined.
After the Revolution, entrepreneurs from Shanghai escaped to the then-British colony of Hong Kong to both make their fortune and make its own. Decades passed, and as China revolutionized into socialism with Chinese characteristics, first Hong Kong became the outward-looking port for China and Shanghai, bringing investment in and goods out. Then it became the deal-making home for foreign-bound Shanghainese companies, giving their contracts a legal domicile, then their IPOs a securities listing.
Shanghai, too was good to Hong Kongers, giving its factories land, its entrepreneurs real estate holdings, its businesses a market, its children a training ground in rebuilding a great world capital.
Each city is a proud speaker of a distinct patois, a proud wearer of a distinct fashion, a proud creator of a distinct style, thinking itself a part of, yet apart, from the ordinary.
Hong Kong has a population of seven million, but a place on the world stage many times that large because of its status as a financial centre, a legal centre and a trading centre. Shanghai is a massive 24 million people, but its importance is hugely greater as it claims its rightful position as the financial capital of the world’s second largest economy.
Rivals? Enemies? Partners?
Each time I asked this question as a journalist, I was assured “The dragon has two eyes” – both cities are surely vital to a vibrant China.
But keeping both eyes clear and looking forward is by no means assured, and what happens to those eyes is important to each city, to China and to the world.
Will Shanghai’s rise eclipse Hong Kong’s importance? Will Hong Kong maintain its status as a legal centre where the law is independent and corruption is rooted out ruthlessly? Will a “through train” of financial listings bring joint prosperity, or will it change the balance completely?
The best person to chronicle these changes is someone who loves both cities equally, someone who has the eyes of a journalist but the heart of a romantic.
George Chen has written his “Tale of Two Cities” from the perspective of someone who was born in Shanghai, worked much of his adult life in Hong Kong, and has great passion for each – and a desire to see each succeed.
This is not a book of conclusions. We do not know how the story ends. This is a book of essays, of pen-pics, of incidents and personalities.
History is composed of moments, and by reading this collection of moments captured by someone who loves his pen as much as his camera, we know more of how the great dragon is bringing its two eyes into focus – and what this might mean for us.
David Schlesinger is the founder and Managing Director of Tripod Advisors, a media and China consulting service based in Hong Kong. He is the former global Editor-in-Chief of Reuters and the former Chairman of Thomson Reuters China. This is a foreword written for George Chen's new book "This is Hong Kong I Know".
