Basic values, rather than Basic Law, can make Hong Kong great again

The critic Matthew Arnold, writing in 1867, seems to have foreseen the future of cities in an industrialising China. His most famous essay, Culture and Anarchy, written as Britain's own world-leading Industrial Revolution unfolded, warned against attaching too much value to the material development of a society while disregarding the social fabric, cultural institutions and places of humane reflection that make up civic society: those that make cities truly great, genuinely rich. Today, London is home to some of the finest galleries, museums, theatres and universities in the world. Indeed, culture is often quoted as the top reason people want to visit or live and work in Britain's capital. They seem less keen to move to Beijing: how many tourists go back for a second visit?

According to Aristotle, it's only in cities that human beings can fully become themselves. For him, a "metro-polis" was a "mother city", the true home of a people, the place that nurtures most of us.

Of course, it's very hard to get the civic balance right. The Greeks didn't: the prosperity of Athens herself, the mother city of democracy, rested heavily on slave labour. Civic dysfunction has been with us ever since.

On the other hand, for all their pollution, crime and poverty, cities are where people prefer to live. As physicist Geoffrey West has shown, exponentially with their size, cities have ever higher levels of good things as well as bad. For a research centre like ours, how much we flourish in cities, the degree and quality of our civic well-being, is a values question. And that doesn't primarily mean money values. Instead, we want to ask how much is a city or society esteemed, how much is it "valued": especially by its own citizens?

According to Confucius, its values, the virtues of its citizens, are more important to a state than its laws.

Hong Kong, is not just a "world city"; according to the Basic Law, it has retained many of the attributes of a city state, a real polis: not sovereign, but to a great degree autonomous, self-legislating. The collaborative making of a rule of law and thus respect for law itself (not just "rules") has helped make Hong Kong what it is. The chief executive is not just a mayor. This heightened civic, not just civil, status brings with it real responsibility. There's no reason to think the Chinese government has any objection to Hong Kong's exercising of this responsibility, within the limits of its own mini-constitution.