Opinion | Hong Kong bookseller’s disappearance provides more fuel for the conspiracy theorists

Since Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, two competing, mutually exclusive discourses on the city’s position and future have emerged.

One celebrates the reunion and recognises it as a great opportunity. Now that tiny Hong Kong has become a part of the world’s second largest economy, it is guaranteed an almost endless supply of profit opportunities in the future. Its people will have everything to gain from the motherland’s sustained economic growth, unrivalled market size and consumption power.

And they will have nothing to lose since their most cherished values, freedoms and ways of life are all safeguarded by the Basic Law in accordance with the “one country, two systems” principle. Proponents of this discourse want us to believe that we can’t lose for we are given the best of both worlds.

If this sounds a little too good to be true, the other discourse is conspiracy theory par excellence. It paints a very different picture of Hong Kong losing its identity and languishing under a corrupt and oppressive Beijing bent on turning Hong Kong into just another Chinese city. According to this discourse, the Hong Kong government is a puppet government set up by Beijing and the chief executive an errand boy for the ruling elites of the Chinese Communist Party.

As for the principle of “one country, two systems”, it’s a Trojan horse that Beijing used to trick Hong Kong people to achieve the secret purpose of putting them under communist rule. Proponents of this discourse believe that Hongkongers should be up in arms fighting now. If not, the wholesale mainlandisation of Hong Kong will be a disaster waiting to happen.

If you want to make sense of today’s Hong Kong, you could do a lot worse than trace the process by which the first discourse, which is all about profit, came to be challenged, discredited and finally superseded by the second discourse, which is all about fear. Indeed, the great untold story about Hong Kong after 1997 is how, in the short space of 15 years or so, the city has gone from being a success story about the power of the profit motive to a cautionary tale about the paralysing effect of fear.

Why the usually profit-driven, self-interested Hong Kong people have chosen to believe in a discourse that practically bans the use of the word profit is a question that Beijing and the Hong Kong government must seriously ponder. It’s a complicated issue, but the recent case of a Hong Kong bookseller’s disappearance provides some useful clues.