Opinion | Why the Hong Kong district council election results are a win for Chinese people everywhere

What Beijing has failed to grasp is that the West doesn’t need to interfere in Hong Kong for its cultural influence to be felt. While Hong Kong’s importance to China may have waned, it will always have a special place in the world

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Published: 3:00am, 2 Dec 2019Updated: 3:00am, 2 Dec 2019

Hong Kong has long held a special place in my heart, and in the hearts of millions of other Chinese and Chinese-Americans. I spent the formative years of my youth in Hong Kong in the 1930s and 1940s. After moving to the United States in 1949, Hong Kong became the only point of contact between my adopted home and the country of my birth, as relations between the US and the People’s Republic of China did not thaw before then US president Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.

I returned to Hong Kong in the late 1960s to help establish the Chinese University of Hong Kong. It was then that I received an invitation to return to mainland China.

In June 1972, just months after Nixon’s trip, I travelled from Hong Kong to the mainland, where I helped establish subsequent book, cultural and people-to-people exchanges between China and the US.

It was fortuitous that such a venture began in Hong Kong. The city and its people have always occupied a special place between East and West, between China and the world.

The Hong Kong of today is hardly recognisable as the one I remember from my youth. I have watched the protests unfolding over the last six months and, like many, have been struck by the youth of the protesters involved.

I do not blame them for their dissatisfaction with the status quo in Hong Kong, as Beijing has steadily sought to exert its authority over the city and export authoritarianism in defiance of the “one country, two systems” framework. Who are these young protesters to look up to, as their government fails to take heed of their concerns, and as the most powerful in the city remain motivated by greed and self-interest?