{"id":1177,"date":"2023-12-13T11:30:30","date_gmt":"2023-12-13T19:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/?page_id=1177"},"modified":"2025-07-21T01:21:39","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T08:21:39","slug":"hong-kong-1993-2023","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/hong-kong-1993-2023\/","title":{"rendered":"Hong Kong (1993, 2023)"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Here are two articles I wrote about Hong Kong, almost 30 years apart to the day. The first is from 1993, shortly after I returned with my wife and son to Seattle from four years in Hong Kong. The second was written in 2023, after the political crackdown on Hong Kong by China.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0Here is what I wrote for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It was published in the P-I Focus section of the Sunday Times-P-I on November 21, 1993.<\/i><\/p>

A few days after Hong Kong\u2019s first election for the legislature, I got my man-in-the street reading from a taxi driver. He proudly told me he hadn\u2019t voted, and didn\u2019t intend ever to vote. He had no say under Britain and expected none from China after 1997. He would keep his head down and do his job.<\/p>

All around the world, people in new democracies have been voting with enthusiasm. Not in Hong Kong.<\/p>

There, the party that won the 1991 election couldn\u2019t take power, because only 30 percent of the seats were subject to public vote. Most of the power is held by the governor, who is appointed by Britain. In 1997 the governor will be appointed by China.<\/p>

I lived in Hong Kong from 1989 to 1993. During that time, I saw the political half-awakening of the Hong Kong Chinese, and an eleventh-hour attempt to expand democracy. All the while, people around me said, \u201cNone of this political stuff matters.\u201d It was too little and too late.<\/p>

What matters is money. Hong Kong is booming. People are moving up. Ambitious bankers expect to make vice president by age 30, and have a mobile phone and a Mercedes-Benz. If their employer won\u2019t provide, they\u2019ll walk out and find one who will.<\/p>

More jobs open up because so many people are emigrating. More than 1,000 a week, about 1 percent of the population per year, are leaving. In some companies, all senior managers have a foreign passport or a scheme underway to get one. I knew of one legislator, no enemy of China, who secretly had all his money sent to the United States.[1]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>

Canada is the favorite destination because foreigners can legally buy their way in as investor-immigrants. Australia is No. 2. But there are few jobs these days in Canada, Australia or the United States. About 15 percent of the emigrants have been returning to work in Hong Kong.<\/p>

The \u201creverse emigrants\u201d I knew, however, did not intend to stay beyond 1997. Some left their wives and children abroad, and were dubbed \u201castronauts.\u201d In local parlance, they were back only to \u201cmilk the cow.\u201d These days, all Hong Kong is milking the cow: The British, Americans, Filipinos\u2014everyone.<\/p>

A scrap of land three times the area of Seattle, Hong Kong has grown rich as the tollgate to China. The policy of the British rulers is\u00a0laissez-faire<\/i>\u2014unregulated business, no welfare checks, and a top tax rate of 15 percent.<\/p>

Life is intensely competitive. Hong Kong\u2019s 5.8 million people now have a gross domestic product per capita of about $16,500, fast rising toward the $23,500 of the United States, and far above the $325 per person in China.<\/p>

Hong Kong\u2019s people also have the protection of British common law. Their freedom of speech and press is matched in Asia only by the Philippines and Japan. They are, in fact, quite free\u2014except that they can\u2019t vote to change their government. And their liberty has not been won by any struggle of their own, but has been a gift of Britain.<\/p>

That gift ends June 30, 1997.<\/p>

The terms of the give-back were sealed in 1984, in a deal between Britain and China. The Hong Kong people were not allowed at the table, being regarded by both governments as subjects.<\/p>

In that deal, China promised to preserve Hong Kong\u2019s system for 50 years. It promised to respect private property, a convertible currency, religious freedom, a free press, and all manner of things not available in China.<\/p>

I met only one person in Hong Kong who believed all those promises\u2014and he was an Australian.[2]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>\u00a0Hong Kong Chinese assume that China will run the place as it likes. They disagree on how much to worry about it.<\/p>

Often it seemed to me that Hong Kong people were politically neutered. The good things about British rule they got without struggle, and the bad things they accepted without protest. Nowhere else on the planet do 5.8 million people tolerate British imperialism. In Asia the British were ejected from Singapore, Malaysia, Burma, India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. Surely, I argued, Hong Kong could have at least had democracy if people had demanded it.<\/p>

Filipinos and Indians tended to agree with me; Hong Kong Chinese told me I did not understand. Chinese are trained not to stick their necks out, challenge authority, or show negative emotion in public. Children are told to obey, honor the family, and mind their own business.<\/p>

Britain does not teach its subjects the political ideas that underlie the Parliament and common law. Students are not trained to analyze and think about history. They memorize facts, so they can pass the crucial exams to squeeze into the colony\u2019s one university. A student I know was forbidden to write about 1997 in a high school newspaper.<\/p>

Hong Kong people have not traditionally organized political parties or unions. The one big strike while I was there, by Cathay Pacific flight attendants, was led by Filipinos.<\/p>

Hong Kongers are proud Chinese, but often confused about nationality. I met few who were willing to embrace Communist China as their country\u2014and none who accepted Taiwan. Yet Hong Kong is not a country. It does have a flag, but you have to hunt to find it, and I never met a Chinese who displayed it. The official anthem is still \u201cGod Save the Queen.\u201d<\/p>

The territory\u2019s 80,000 Filipino maids have a much stronger sense of national identity than their Chinese employers. Some had been in the demonstrations that toppled Ferdinand Marcos.<\/p>

The event that began the political awakening of the Hong Kong people was China\u2019s crushing of the democracy movement of 1989. Outraged at the slaughter of fellow Chinese, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people poured onto the streets. Hong Kong had never seen anything like it.<\/p>

The protests petered out, as most people gave up on the idea of democracy in China. But some shifted their efforts to democracy in Hong Kong. Two years later, when 18 of the 60 seats in the Legislative Council came up for public election for the first time, the protest leaders of 1989 formed Hong Kong\u2019s first political party, the United Democrats.<\/p>

These were the liberals, led by lawyers, teachers and the foreign-educated. They argued that Hong Kong needed to protect its freedoms after 1997 by setting up its own supreme court, bill of rights and directly elected legislature. The conservatives, mostly businessmen in the China trade, argued that Hong Kong has grown rich without democracy, isn\u2019t ready for it, and that China won\u2019t accept it. China will accept capitalism, and that\u2019s enough.<\/p>

The liberals won the election, but the conservatives still had most of the seats. China insisted that no more than one-third of the seats would ever be elected by a general vote.<\/p>

In came Christopher Patten, the new British governor. He promised to reopen that issue with China for the 1995 elections, the last under British rule. Hong Kong people were amazed; they had never had a governor that championed their political interests. But the short time before 1997 gave Patten little bargaining power.<\/p>

Patten proposed a plan that preserved the undemocratic structure that China liked, but subverted it with public votes. China flatly rejected his plan, and threatened to dump the entire legislature in 1997 if Patten went ahead with it.<\/p>

There the matter has been deadlocked for a year. Patten appealed for the strong backing of the Hong Kong people, and didn\u2019t get it. People might vote for the liberals, but polls showed that they had no stomach for a test of wills with China.<\/p>

\u201cThe British should have offered us democracy years ago,\u201d people say\u2014\u201cmany<\/i>\u00a0years ago. But why stick your neck out for them now? In four years they\u2019re gone.\u201d To stick up for Patten is to defy China. Do that, and after 1997 you might be blacklisted.[4]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>

Even today, freedom to oppose China is for people with foreign passports.<\/p>

The optimists, whose views dominate the television and newspapers in Hong Kong, argue that China\u2019s roaring economic boom is making China more like Hong Kong every day. Why worry about 1997? \u201cBy then, they\u2019ll be just like us.\u201d<\/p>

No, they won\u2019t. The convergence theory is plausible if you look only at the part of China right across the border, and only at the economy. But elsewhere in China the economic, political and cultural gap is far too great.<\/p>

China\u2019s progress of the past 15 years has been led by Deng Xiaoping, now 89 years old. The best bet is that Deng\u2019s supporters will win the coming struggle for power. But it\u2019s only a bet, and the Chinese people have learned not to wager too much on such things.<\/p>

Deng and his supporters seemingly do intend to honor China\u2019s promises about capitalism in Hong Kong. China has tens of billions of dollars invested there, and it needs Hong Kong\u2019s entrepreneurs and money. But Hong Kong is far from Beijing, and how this is carried out will depend on local officials.<\/p>

For a hint of the future, look across the border. Yes, business is rip-roaring\u2014but so is crime. In 1992 gangs from China started robbing Hong Kong shops that specialize in 24-karat gold jewelry. The hit squads shocked the gun-free territory by using pistols and grenades from the People\u2019s Liberation Army. After the British raised the issue with China, the robberies stopped.<\/p>

Thieves continue to target Mercedes and BMWs, running them in 70-knot boats to China. There the stolen cars are obvious, because they have the steering wheels on the wrong side. These cars are often owned by government officials.<\/p>

A 1990 survey by a Hong Kong consulting firm ranked Hong Kong as one of the cleanest governments in Asia, along with Japan and Singapore. China was far and away the most corrupt.<\/p>

Hong Kong\u2019s most immediate fear of 1997 is a horde of politically connected carpetbaggers. Customs and immigration, the police, stock market, utility franchises and the auction of government land all provide rich opportunities for graft.<\/p>

I left Hong Kong admiring Chris Patten, and disagreeing with cynics who said he was just there to make Britain look good. But his democracy plan is not bold enough, and anyway, China won\u2019t accept it. The liberals will lose their battle for democracy and individual rights in Hong Kong. Most of them will probably emigrate.<\/p>

Foreign business will stay. The community of foreign-passport holders, who can leave at any time, should be big enough to have bargaining power with China. Locals will be under more pressure to conform.<\/p>

The businessmen will have a revealing test of their creed, which is that economics moves the world, and politics does not matter: \u201cHe who has the gold makes the rules.\u201d They could find out after 1997 that it is very often the other way around: He who makes the rules gets the gold.<\/p>

That would be no surprise to my taxi driver, whose life probably will not change that much.<\/p>

In Hong Kong, readers would have reacted to this column. In Seattle, there was nary a peep.<\/i><\/p>

\u00a0<\/i><\/p>

[1]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>One of my wife’s banking clients. I never knew his name.<\/p><\/div>

[2]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>And assistant managing editor of Asiaweek. This fellow, Robert Woodrow, told me he\u2019d be happy to sell his Australian passport, and take a Hong Kong passport in exchange. He was baiting me. He baited Western liberals by arguing in Asiaweek editorials that Asia would beat the West because it hadn\u2019t corrupted itself with the welfare state, disrespect for family and a sentimental environmentalism. He lost his job in 1994 when Time-Warner booted out the co-founder and editor-in-chief, Michael O\u2019Neill.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/i><\/p>

The next piece started out as a review of a book about China’s crackdown on Hong Kong, but became more of an essay. The Seattle web page Post Alley posted it on November 24, 2023.<\/i><\/p>

\u00a0<\/i><\/p><\/div><\/div>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>When they met recently in the Bay Area, Joe Biden and Xi Jinping had nothing to say about Hong Kong. Four years ago, China\u2019s suppression of Hong Kong would have been at the top of the agenda when they met. But the Hong Kong story is out of the news. Already people are forgetting it.<\/span><\/p>

Hong Kong\u2019s political struggle is a David-and-two-Goliaths story in which Goliaths won. A new book\u00a0<\/span>Among the Braves<\/span><\/em><\/a>, tells the story from the protesters\u2019 point of view. The book\u2019s authors, Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin, are a couple who lived in Hong Kong. She\u2019s a\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0<\/i>correspondent who was stationed there. He\u2019s a writer for\u00a0TheAtlantic<\/em>. Their book gives a 30-year background to the protests, then follows four activists through the struggles of 2019 and 2020. The \u201cbraves\u201d of the title are the radicals who fought with police \u2014 and lost.<\/span><\/p>

The story speaks to me because I once lived in Hong Kong. From 1989 to 1993, my wife Anne and I worked there. She was a private banker. I was a journalist at\u00a0Asiaweek<\/em>, an English-language newsmagazine \u2014 long dead now \u2014 then owned by Time-Warner.<\/span><\/p>

Some 50,000 American expatriates lived there. Hong Kong was a British colony, but in 1984 Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping (both now dead) had struck a deal, without asking the people of Hong Kong, to return it to China in 1997. Under their agreement, China promised to keep Hong Kong\u2019s British laws for 50 years under Deng\u2019s formula of \u201cone country, two systems.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

The Hong Kong people I knew had little faith in that promise. The establishment pronounced it good. My employer,\u00a0Asiaweek<\/em>, thought so, too. A few years after I left,\u00a0Asiaweek<\/em>\u00a0put Deng on its cover and proclaimed him Man of the Century. China was changing, my editors believed, and in another 50 years it would be a capitalist country much like Taiwan. That was the\u00a0Asiaweek<\/em>\u00a0company line. The end of \u201cone country, two systems\u201d would be one system \u2014 a system more like Hong Kong\u2019s than China\u2019s.<\/span><\/p>

As Mahtani and McLaughlin outline in their book, China\u2019s leaders had a different idea. Their version was that the end of the 50 years there would be one system \u2014 China\u2019s. By 2047, the old generations would have died off, the Western pollution would been cleansed, and the new generation would be loyal to the People\u2019s Republic of China. I remember thinking, \u201cThis isn\u2019t going to work.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

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Hong Kong business leaders, who publicly supported \u201cone country, two systems,\u201d were privately moving their money out. Many of the upper-middle-class Hong Kong Chinese I knew had plans to leave for Canada or other English-speaking countries. They remembered Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. They remembered the tanks in Tiananmen Square. The Hong Kong people had gone into their streets to protest those Tiananmen tanks, which were more than a thousand miles away. But they had not gone into the streets to protest the plans for their own city.<\/span><\/p>

I asked some of them, \u201cWhy not?\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u201cThere was nothing we can do,\u201d they said.<\/span><\/p>

\u201cThe Hong Kong people could shut down this city in one day,\u201d I said.<\/span><\/p>

\u201cYou don\u2019t understand,\u201d they said.<\/span><\/p>

Partly I did. To me, the ultimate problem was China. China could send in the army any time. Even that, people said, wouldn\u2019t be necessary. Really all China had to do to bring Hong Kong to its knees was shut off the water supply. I heard this many times. I thought, maybe you should dare them to do that \u2014 now, while the British are here. It might be worth it.<\/span><\/p>

There was another reason I hadn\u2019t perceived. What a people are prepared do politically depends on what they\u2019ve done. Protest was unheard-of in Hong Kong until 1966, when a lone man held a hunger strike at the Star Ferry terminal to protest a 5-cent increase in the fare. To Hong Kong, his act was odd, a new thing. In contrast, I came from a nation soaked in the lore of protest, from the abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor movement, the civil-rights movement, and the antiwar movement. All the rights Americans had they\u2019d had to fight for. It was a heritage I\u2019d grown up with. As subjects of a colonial power, the Hong Kong people didn\u2019t have that heritage.<\/span><\/p>

They have it now \u2014 in spades. They did not have it then.<\/span><\/p>

The Hong Kong people I knew were proud Chinese, but the pride was historic and familial, not political. Allegiance to a flag was something the people in China had. The Hong Kong people\u2019s Filipino servants had it. But Hong Kong\u2019s flag had the Union Jack in the corner like Australia\u2019s flag, and I never saw a Hong Kong Chinese display it or any other flag. The Hong Kong people had a British-issued passport that allowed them to travel but tied them to no country.<\/span><\/p>

Hong Kong was not a country. It was not even a city-state like Singapore, because Hong Kong was not a state. At <\/span>Asiaweek<\/em>, we used the politically correct word, \u201cterritory.\u201d Hong Kong\u2019s territory was less than half the size of King County, with an urban part crammed with as many people as the state of Washington.<\/span><\/p>

Under the British the Hong Kong people had a large amount of civil and economic liberty but no political rights. They had not had to fight for their liberty. They did not celebrate it on the Fourth of July or at any other time. Their liberty had been given to them by the colonial power \u2014 and in 1984 that power agreed to hand them over to Communist China. The Hong Kong people were not asked for their opinions on it.<\/span><\/p>

As an American, I didn\u2019t have to worry about all this. For <\/span>gweilos<\/span><\/em><\/a> <\/span>like me, Hong Kong was a place to have an overseas adventure and earn more than I could at home. It was a place, authors Mahtani and McLaughlin write, with shopping malls that \u201cdisplayed the latest Cartier collection and elevators led to trendy <\/span>izakayas<\/em>, hot-pot restaurants serving <\/span>wagyu<\/em> <\/span>beef, and bars that stocked more than 300 varieties of whiskey.\u201d Hong Kong, they write, was \u201ca city that was meant to be placated and subdued by wealth, so seduced by the trappings of modernity to never rock the boat.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

Compared with Seattle, Hong Kong was much more cosmopolitan. The Hongkong Bank had a Chinese menu of currencies to choose for your savings account: British pounds, Japanese yen, Swiss francs, and U.S., Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and Hong Kong dollars \u2014 each with separate interest rates.<\/span><\/p>

But when I arrived in 1989, the territory had no political parties. There was no use for them. In more than 100 years of their rule, the British had never given the Hong Kong people the right to vote for anyone with actual authority. Only after the colonial power announced that in 1991, 18 of the 60 seats in the legislature would be up for a popular vote, did parties form. Later the universal-suffrage seats were increased to half, and China promised to have all of them, including the chief executive, popularly elected in the future.<\/span><\/p>

That was another worthless promise. The British gave Hong Kong a crippled democracy. They did, however, build Hong Kong a fabulous, world-class, $20-billion <\/span><\/span>airport<\/span><\/a>, done by leveling an island and filling in the sea. The Hong Kong government paid for it, and British contractors built it. China objected; in its view, the British were cutting themselves a fat hog. They had done this before by putting up the most expensive office building in the world \u2014 the <\/span><\/span>HSBC building<\/span><\/a>, a showpiece designed by British architect <\/span><\/span>Norman Foster<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>

The British left on July 1, 1997. Prince Charles handed over the colony to China and sailed away on his yacht, having done his royal duty. The handover went smoothly. For quite a while China stuck to its promise of \u201cone country, two systems,\u201d and it seemed that the skeptics, myself included, were wrong. Hong Kong retained its British law, with its freedoms of speech, press, association, and religious worship. The pro-democracy political parties never had control of the legislature, but they were at least represented, and their friends in the media gave them a platform. Among the journalists was grumbling about self-censorship. Still, there was a pro-democracy press \u2014 especially Jimmy Lai\u2019s <\/span>Apple Daily<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>

There were some tensions. In 2003, thousands of Hong Kong people protested an internal-security bill. In 2012, thousands of Hong Kong people protested a plan to introduce a social-studies curriculum in the public schools to \u201ccultivate students\u2019 Chinese identity.\u201d In 2014, thousands of Hong Kong people protested a plan to ban \u201cunpatriotic\u201d candidates from election ballots. After each of these protests, the government backed down. Public opinion was keeping the government in check.<\/span><\/p>

By the end of the century\u2019s second decade, Hong Kong was approaching the halfway point of \u201cone country, two systems,\u201d and its people were not becoming more loyal to China. In 2019 came the finale \u2014 protests in which one million, and then <\/span>two<\/em> <\/span>million Hong Kong people \u2014 one out of every four residents \u2014 poured into the streets. The protests began over a proposed extradition law, but that issue was soon eclipsed. The protesters demanded full universal suffrage \u2014 a real democracy, and not the damaged democracy they had been bequeathed by the British. And China was not going to allow that.<\/span><\/p>

And China won. It never had to send in the army or shut off the water supply. For the most part the job was done by the Hong Kong police using tear gas and rubber bullets \u2014 tactics used the world over, including in the United States.<\/span><\/p>

In China\u2019s eyes, its rule in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region had been remarkably tolerant. It had put up with disloyalty for more than 20 years, and cracked down only when protesters had clearly rejected the People\u2019s Republic. That was one way to look at it. Another was that Hong Kong had followed the same strategy with the protesters as Mao Zedong had with political opponents in the 1950s: \u201cLet a hundred flowers bloom\u201d and cut them off. Wait until you have identified all your opponents and then arrest them.<\/span><\/p>

By the end of 2020, most of Hong Kong\u2019s protest leaders had either fled or were in custody. Hong Kong\u2019s most prominent pro-democracy leader, <\/span><\/span>Martin Lee Chu-ming<\/span><\/a>, was arrested, convicted of holding an unlawful assembly, and given a suspended sentence. Lee, now 85, remains in Hong Kong but has withdrawn from politics.<\/span><\/p>

To explain its suppression in Hong Kong, China had a cover story. Hong Kong\u2019s protests, it said, had been fomented by the United States. The culprit was the National Endowment for Democracy, a nominally private organization funded by the U.S. Congress. The NED makes grants to promote democracy around the world. From 2016 to 2020, it made 22 grants to private organizations <\/span><\/span>in Hong Kong<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>

Was the NED interfering in Hong Kong\u2019s politics? Yes, it was. How much difference that made may be argued. From 2016 to 2020, the NED reports giving out $3.7 million, which is about enough to buy four average-sized condos (484 square feet) on Hong Kong Island. Consider how the grants are described on NED\u2019s web page (assuming the descriptions are honest). In 2019, the two largest grants, $325,000 each, were \u201cto create pathways for constructive dialogue on key political issues\u201d and to assist \u201celection monitoring, get-out-the-vote efforts and local capacity building to improve all stages of the electoral process.\u201d It\u2019s hard to believe that such amounts could prod 2 million people to take to the streets to defy their government.<\/span><\/p>

 Mahtani and McLaughlin assert that the protests \u201cwere locally driven, planned and organized.\u201d But they don\u2019t address China\u2019s accusation against the NED. They should have, even only to refute it.<\/span><\/p>

The greater story is that the Hong Kong people put up a hell of a fight. Betrayed by the British and subjected to compulsory loyalty by China, their defeat was probably inevitable. The result is a city that has been politically damaged, but whose economy is still free. Ranked in <\/span>Economic Freedom in the World 2023<\/em>, published by the pro-capitalist <\/span><\/span>Cato and Fraser institutes<\/span><\/a>, Hong Kong ranks 8.55\/10, second-highest in the world after Singapore (8.56\/10, and freer than the United States (8.14\/10). These scores are not exactly scientific, but they are the best available.<\/span><\/p>

Business freedom and high wages are not nothing. Hong Kong is one of the wealthiest cities in Asia, with a gross domestic product per person of $68,000 \u2014 almost as high as the United States. Some 70,000 Americans live in the territory, many of them working for the 1,250 U.S. companies based there.<\/span><\/p>

Political rights and civil liberties around the world are the subject of a report produced every year by the U.S. group Freedom House. On those counts, its most recent report gives <\/span><\/span>Hong Kong<\/span><\/a> <\/span><\/span>a score of 42 out of 100 \u2014 half the score of the <\/span><\/span>United States<\/span><\/a>(83\/100), but much higher than <\/span><\/span>China<\/span><\/a> <\/span><\/span>(9\/100). Hong Kong\u2019s ranking is about the same as Nicaragua\u2019s. (Again, these scores contain a good deal of judgment, but they are probably the best we have.)<\/span><\/p>

In Hong Kong my old trade, journalism, is down but not entirely out. Jimmy Lai\u2019s <\/span>Apple Daily<\/em> <\/span>is <\/span><\/span>shut down<\/span><\/a>, and Lai is <\/span><\/span>in prison<\/span><\/a>, convicted of violating the new national-security law. Foreign correspondents, who are less of a threat than the local press and are protected by their offshore passports, are still there. Hong Kong\u2019s Foreign Correspondents Club \u2014 an eatery and watering hole I remember fondly \u2014 is still open.<\/span><\/p>

\u201cWe do not plan to give up,\u201d says the Club president Keith Richburg, in a statement on its web page. \u201cIt is still better, indeed imperative, that we continue to speak up as forcefully as we can when we can.\u201d<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are two articles I wrote about Hong Kong, almost 30 years apart to the day. The first is from 1993, shortly after I returned with my wife and son to Seattle from four years in Hong Kong. The second was written in 2023, after the political crackdown on Hong Kong by China. \u00a0Here is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1177","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1177"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1619,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1177\/revisions\/1619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}