What ‘Hong Kong is not China’ really means

For all the heroic and moralistic rhetoric about the Hong Kong protest movement, there is a deep-seated reason that everyone in the movement knows, in their heart of hearts, lurks behind the anger and hate at Beijing. It has nothing to do with democracy.

Well, now that someone else has written it, I will merely quote him here. Actually, he is also quoting from another book, but quite appropriately, has applied the same psychology or rather psychopathology, to many Hong Kong people. This is taken from the blog of Jim Walker, chief economist at Aletheia Capital, who is without doubt far more knowledgeable about the city than many a bleeding-heart expatriate liberal.

“The anger in Hong Kong runs deeper than that. The first chapter of Fintan O’Toole’s book on Brexit, Heroic Failure, might yield some insight into the mind of a nation [or a city] that is willing to do itself incalculable damage for no apparently advantageous reason (after all, there was no universal suffrage under British rule either but that did not stop Hong Kong becoming successful). Hong Kong, like the UK, suffers from a psychosis.

“‘The more highly we think of ourselves, the sorrier we feel for ourselves when we do not get what we know we deserve … Self-pity thus combines two things that may seem incompatible: a deep sense of grievance and a high sense of superiority.’ [Heroic Failure]

“As a long-term resident of Hong Kong, I was dismayed by the city’s descent into anarchy in 2019 … But most dismaying of all was the absence of understanding that the other side may have a case and that some of its frustrations were understandable.”

During both the 2014 yellow umbrella protests and those of last year, you often heard participants shouting about the “high quality” people in Hong Kong.

That of course was just another way of saying mainland Chinese were “low quality” individuals and that the rest of China was therefore a “low quality” nation. Why else would we call mainlanders “locusts”?