My Take | Hong Kong owes Jiang Zemin a debt of gratitude
- The late president contributed greatly to the success of the city’s transition to Chinese rule, its stability and prosperity. That deserves greater recognition and acknowledgement by locals and the international community
In retrospect, the era of Jiang Zemin, who has died at the age of 96, may well mark the most stable period of post-1997 handover Hong Kong. That might not be how most locals remember the time. After all, troubles came one after another, from financial crises to epidemics and a real estate collapse.
But those crises that confronted the city either came from an external source or were out of its control, and they all eventually passed as normality returned. In fact, the property market collapse triggered by the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) health crisis in 2003 turned out to be an extraordinary buying opportunity that turned the next decade and a half into a sustained bull run and made many families multimillionaires by simply owning a single flat.
That stability was, to a large extent, thanks to Jiang’s flexibility in dealing with Hong Kong.
Historical paradox
One of the great historical paradoxes has been how the city’s success or failure – or rather the unending debate about that – was turned upside down in the transition from British colonialism to Chinese rule.
Before the handover of sovereignty, for almost half a century, the city’s success was judged almost solely in economic terms, by both locals and foreigners alike. But thereafter, it has been considered mostly by political criteria and more specifically, by the pace of democratisation.
