The View | Time for Hong Kong to start spending nest egg ahead of 2047

I am a fire monkey, the most competitive, aggressive and directing of the simians. Monkeys are renowned for being smart and curious – peering ahead. But first I’m going to look back to Margaret Thatcher’s famous visit to Beijing in 1982.

At the time, I remember well, it did not seem extraordinary to hear her say (working off-script as usual) that Britain was seeking to extend the New Territories lease. Apparently Deng Xiaoping became incandescent with rage, largely because it had not first been discussed behind closed doors. He told Thatcher he could take the whole colony over tomorrow – after all, the Chinese had more soldiers than the British had bullets. Thatcher retorted that if that happened “everyone would see what the Chinese were really like”.

The next 17 years saw enormous energy expended by Hong Kong citizens to secure a future anywhere but here – as insurance against an unfriendly China. Hong Kong wore the risk burden – remaining a permanently cheap stock market for the best part of two decades. Despite the bickering, both sides negotiated a lasting settlement, the highly successful One Country, Two Systems policy, which has provided prosperity and stability beyond the wildest dreams of the wildest pessimists for the past 18 years.

The mysterious disappearance of bookseller and author Lee Po raises the spectre of the handover once again. If a British citizen living in Hong Kong can be spirited back to China, then maybe 2047 is closer than we think. If 17 years was long enough for us to worry about the last handover, then a period of 25 or even 30 years might not be too short to think about the next transfer of power. We have more time to worry because we have been here before. It looks like déjà vu all over again.

Then again how much and how fast could China change? In the past 35 years, China has changed dramatically as an economy and a society – we might even say become more like Hong Kong. So why are we still so uncomfortable at the thought of the ending of the Basic Law?