Opinion | Fifty years of Hong Kong history: one country, two systems, no regrets

There have been some dark times in my 50 years in Hong Kong – the 2019 protests and the Covid-19 pandemic, for example – but they are a small price to pay for having had a front-row seat to world-changing events

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The waterfront of Victoria Harbour in Tsim Sha Tsui decorated on July 25 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover from British control to that of China. Photo: Sam Tsang

Published: 1:30pm, 1 Jan 2023

Fifty years is a pretty good milestone in the life of a country, a city or an individual. It is a suitable time to reflect on the highs and lows of the previous half-century, long enough to provide some perspective.

Last week was the 50th anniversary of my arrival in Hong Kong, just one week after my 24th birthday, so the city and I have shared a common destiny for five eventful decades. The experience has changed us both.

In 1972, Hong Kong was the proverbial “borrowed place, borrowed time” of Richard Hughes’ famous book. It was a Chinese city, ethnically, culturally and in just about every other way you could think of a part of the giant country to the north. Yet technically it was a British colony, seized by force of arms in the previous century by a small country from the other side of the world, which now was in decline and busy disengaging from everything “East of Suez”.

Clearly the situation was unsustainable. There was no clear vision of how things would develop except perhaps in the mind of one man, Deng Xiaoping, but at the time he was still sidelined by the traumatic events of the Cultural Revolution.

It was not until 1976 that order began to be restored and China began its rise to be one of the world’s great nations once again.

Meanwhile, at the local level a relatively new British governor, Murray MacLehose, took a deep breath and began to clean up the mess he inherited from previous administrations. Chief among these was housing – millions of people still lived in ramshackle squatter huts – and corruption, which was widespread.

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