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Hong Kong’s Chinese and Western influences must coexist if ‘one country, two systems’ is to work
- Regina Ip says Hong Kong’s old balance of Chinese cultural traditions and Western values, like the rule of law, is coming apart due to anti-China zealots
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Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee is convenor of the Executive Council and chairwoman of the New People’s Party.
On the eve of Hong Kong’s reunification with China in 1997, the slogan “Tomorrow will be better” was writ large on placards hoisted on prominent buildings across the city. Many were hopeful that, free of the shackles of colonialism, Hong Kong would reach new heights as a highly treasured special administrative region of China.
Twenty years later, Hong Kong lags in innovation but remains one of the world’s leading financial centres. Hong Kong has set world records in home prices, and is one of the developed economies with the highest Gini coefficients.
It has also become a deeply divided society wrestling with an undercurrent of anxiety, as manifested in the highly polarising debate currently raging on reclamation.
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Some blame the rising schisms on the wealth gap, the lack of upward mobility for young people, and the global wave of anti-immigration mania. Few are aware that an ideological war has been quietly tearing Hong Kong apart in the past few decades.
In the colonial era, when Hong Kong was a far more harmonious enclave, Hong Kong’s society was informed by three sources of values: the Confucian values of filial piety, respect for education and hard work, order and self-discipline, as in Singapore; the values of western Christianity – the belief in Jesus as the Son of God and the concomitant values of love, hope and faith; and the values of Western civilisation, characterised by the concept of the centrality of the rule of law, representative bodies, individualism and freedom.
Watch: Hong Kong raises flags to mark 21st anniversary of handover
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