Then & Now | It’s surely time to drop the sailing junk as a symbol of Hong Kong – but who knows? Desperate tourism chiefs may have them sail the seas again
- Chinese junk fleets left Hong Kong decades ago, their sails made redundant by engines and their purpose gone with the demise of inshore fishing
- The Hong Kong Tourism Board successfully used its red junk symbol to promote the city, but it long ago ceased representing reality
Much that formerly defined Hong Kong’s public life, civil society, educational discourse, media landscape and overall international image has been deliberately and resolutely retrograded within the space of a few years.
So perhaps it is only a matter of time before yet more obsolete design imagery that – once upon a time – was successfully deployed to promote, represent and epitomise everything Hong Kong had to offer is dragged out of retirement, subjected to revitalisation initiatives, and then forced to attempt another weary, futile innings.
Before much longer, one can confidently predict, the world will once again see sailing junks redeployed for tourist marketing campaigns and other rebranding exercises.
This particular revitalisation initiative would be unsurprising – after all, when every other worn-out, time-expired Hong Kong trope has been attempted without success, why not take another stale packet of ready-mix ingredients down from the larder shelf, blow off the dust, shoo away the weevils, add warm water and hope for the best?
The definition of true madness, it has been rightly said, is a continuous repetition of the same process, in the same way, with the confident expectation that – somehow – a different outcome will result the next time.