Editorial | Superficial Hong Kong anniversary hides seismic changes
- For better or worse, the city’s future success or failure is now wholly Beijing’s responsibility. Do you want to bet for or against China?
Like the blue and yellow camps in Hong Kong, media reporting of the 25th anniversary of the city’s return to Chinese sovereignty has been almost evenly divided into its domestic and international coverage.
If there is room to heave a sigh of relief, it is that the more nuanced coverage is still mostly found in the local press. Of course, to the anti-China crowd, that’s called self-censorship.
Here is a small sample of headlines. You can guess which side they are from:
“Xi Jinping brought Hong Kong to heel. Now he’s back in a city transformed”; “Xi Jinping begins ‘victory lap’ in Hong Kong, as locals look on warily”; “Hong Kong in limbo 25 years after British handover to China”; and this one is my favourite, “Farewell to Hong Kong and its Big Lie: Falsehoods, gaslighting, and endless fabrications in the city are equalled only by the cowardice of the people partaking in the insulting ruse that it is still free.”
The last one is from The Atlantic, one of America’s major literary and news publications. At least the author makes no bones about where he stands. Frankly, as an outsider, I wouldn’t be able to muster so much outrage even if I were covering Donald Trump’s America.