Let me explain why Hong Kong no longer serves either China or Westerners. Marco Lupis speaks
Conversation with Marco Lupis, author of the freshly printed book "Hong Kong – Tale of a suspended city" (Il Mulino)
“Today Hong Kong is no longer needed. It is of no use to popular China, it is of no use to Westerners ”. This is, after an accurate anamnesis, the surgical, melancholy judgment of Marco Lupis . In his fresh off the press Hong Kong – Tale of a suspended city , published by il Mulino, the Calabrian journalist pours out all his love for the fragrant Port. City he has known as an envoy for a quarter of a century. Where he lived for a long time. Where it often returns. Because there, in an archipelago city-state of hundreds of islands, as a nomadic traveler he finally found his “island”. Destiny of those who would always like to be elsewhere, but in the end – as another great restless traveler like Tiziano Terzani said – risks getting involved definitively, seriously falling in love with a place that becomes homeland. For Lupis , this homeland is Hong Kong.
Hinge between the Far East and the West.
But the zip between the two worlds is jammed.
Hong Kong's fortune seems to have started along an inclined plane in the considerations of the world economic and political chessboard. From the third financial center after London and New York, the Manhattan of Asia, made up of very high skyscrapers, where a garage costs more than Rolls-Royce and Ferrari to park, where the verticality smooths out towards unexpected green parks and the sea – lots of sea -, where the ladies in Chanel and the international brokers live daily with poor and filthy people who push shaky carts dressed as in Mao's time. Heirs of those who fled from Mao . And maybe he made his money starting from a Hong Kong dream, which in certain times allowed even a shoe shine to leap to the heights of millionaire entrepreneurship; but where the social elevator actually no longer exists.
The Chinese return which regained its territory in 1997 after the British colonial season; the riots of recent years; the pandemics that – first Sars, then Covid – have created an army of poor among seven and a half million inhabitants.
Poor surrounded by money. There, in Hog Kong, where you can get a room in a hotel so luxurious that many of those in the Western and Arab capitals fall the stars. And where even the most sordid brothels can be approached. The same city where in the shops you can buy meat of the most dangerous and indecipherable for our palates; where an entire neighborhood dedicated to the funeral home displays the merchandise of coffins on the public street, intended for the dead who will be buried standing, in cemeteries built vertically due to the chronic lack of space. Where there was opium, and still is, then the dollars fell. Where international spies crossed, the affairs of the mafia; of the Chinese who in the name of communism could not do unspeakable business with Westerners a few kilometers away, but here, yes.
While blatant they were and are superstition and superstition. Would you move an entire village because according to the rules of feng shui it is built in a place not blessed by the gods? It happened in Hong Kong. CEO of a multinational would you ask for the advice of an expert geomancer before building a skyscraper? It still happens. How do you hang octagonal mirrors outside your houses to ward off evil spirits or even pay a million dollars to put number 8 on your car's license plate. Lupis reminds us that an anonymous businessman did it, " only because for the Cantonese the number eight is the symbol of luck and money ”.
This is also China. This is Hong Kong too. A world that Lupis describes as a chronicler and passionate lover. With timely historical inserts. Because – to steal a definition of youth from Calvino – journalism is many things, “also a particular sharpness of the gaze that grasps and records an enormous number of details and nuances; an insatiability of the eyes that drink the spectacle of the world ".
This is Lupis' being a journalist. Even in capturing and reminding ourselves of the liquid essence of Hong Kong. For the geography – 263 islands make up it – for the character of Hong Kong.
“Be water my friend! – Be water my friend! " , said Bruce Lee .
Lupis note: "The inhabitants of Hong Kong have always had the same adaptability to the epochal events that hit it – from devastating typhoons, to political and economic changes, to the most terrible epidemics – the same adaptability that water has in a cup, or any other container of which it takes the form ". The movement of young people in revolt in 2019 adopted this historical slogan, "because, like water, the movement adapted almost instantly to changing situations, to attempts at police repression, to the recurrent arrests of its leaders". Kids in love with democracy or, at least, its flavor. And that together, analyzes Lupis , they accuse a sense of "abandonment on the part of China – which in any case remains the motherland for all".
In this volume that reports like thousands of notes from an endless Moleskine notebook annotated for a quarter of a century, there is no lack of reading that is almost like a cultured tour guide, to really meet the soul of the city. To pack when you return to travel together with a Lonely Planet practice, perhaps to read on a seat of a Cathay Pacific Boeing, to deepen the reasons for London toponymy, all made up of Central, Street, Square. Clubs where diplomats, businessmen and journalists meet; of double-decker trams and ferries to reach the most remote islands – from where the journey begins, liquid, contrary to the book compared to the guides who point to the center. Ferries and trams whose runs Lupis tells exactly. Such that there is only a lack of bus timetables and prices and menus of the rest of the restaurants available elsewhere.
Lupis looks carefully at the details. By capturing the details of a neighborhood – the walled city, for example, now razed to the ground – where endless theories of who knows how to make dentures on display were sold along with drugs and sex for little money. With courageous disregard for hygiene. Or where the western eye catches the late afternoon of gathering of silent elderly people who, without making an appointment, find themselves in front of the window of a modern sex shop. Dumb old men, but with the same naturalness of their Italian peers who give themselves a vociferous meeting in front of road construction sites.
Today, however, Hong Kong is no longer needed.
It is now almost a hindrance to the exchange of business between Western capitalism and the communist one of Beijing. And what the heck, how much annoyance on the one hand, for what Xi Jinping's China hates the most – individual rights, freedom of the press, guaranteed courts. Hatred (and repression) to which an ill-concealed Western distraction for young people who since 2014 has repeatedly demonstrated for the protection of democratic guarantees cannibalized by the regime does not respond firmly.
In spite of the agreements.
Those that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth's government had snatched from the regime. After the colonial lease expired, Hong Kong returned to China on July 1, 1997. For fifty years, however, the judicial and democratic guarantees were to remain unchanged. We have seen how much, thirty years in advance, the word was not respected. The "one country two systems" principle has failed. Not least, in the gag law passed off as national security law. Or the most recent electoral law that will wipe out democratic opposition, and the imposition of a "patriotic" oath on China. That is to the Communist Party.
Also for this book of Lupis it is necessary. Currently needed. Because perhaps the end of Hong Kong's long history is yet to be written. Because, above all, even to the most cynical of international businessmen and politicians as well as to the not too distracted observer, that bridge city, its history, its relations with Beijing, serve to understand what China we are dealing with.
If only for convenience. Moreover, it does not recite the saying "if you dine with the devil is it better to bring along a long spoon?". A little knowledge, if not cunning, is needed. In fact, it is not certain that the West is always aware, sitting at the table with Beijing, that it is itself on the menu.
“Today Hong Kong is no longer needed. It is of no use to popular China, it is of no use to Westerners ”.
Investments have shifted. Beijing aims to make the archipelago metropolis any Chinese city. Nor the most important. Too annoying for its democratic claim. As China – apparently – becomes less and less communist and more and more oriented towards money and wealth, Hong Kong is suspended. CCP bureaucrats prefer other exponentially growing Chinese metropolises, first of all Shanghai, and even neighboring Shenzhen. Lupis analyzes: in order not to invest in the fragrant port, China has invested heavily in the former fishing village just behind the border, precisely that Shenzhen which today rivals, in terms of skyscrapers, industry and technology, with the city on Victoria Bay . And Westerners should look to those new metropolises. The corporations working in Hong Kong, moreover, are now aiming to hire staff from mainland China, if only because they speak better the Mandarin used by the regime's boyars.
Even those who were not that distracted gweilo , a pale devil, as they called in the Cantonese of the former colony a Westerner with contemptuous consideration of Westerners, or an interest in the tourist in search of the exotic and with a swollen wallet to squeeze. Even for a gweilo, knowing Hong Kong means knowing the Beijing method. Method that emerges from the volume of Lupis .
Method that must be taken into account before sitting at the table and not end up in the menu of the inviting.
It is a Beijing method that Lupis at StartMagazine summarizes as the Borg method, the inhabitants of the Star Trek science fiction universe. The method of assimilation towards other worlds, to the point of forcing them to obey the needs of the community. Rectius: of the regime. Method that Beijing is exercising with breadth on the recalcitrant young people of the Hong Kong protests. In the name of the higher interest: money. Same method for the rest of the world?
Absolute assimilation. Plasticly represented by the bridge that allows you to cross the canal and connect Hong Kong and Macau.
Fifty-five kilometers inaugurated in 2018.
"In the project wanted by life president Xi Jinping , there is a clear desire to create a gigantic economic region around the great bay of the Pearl River, capable of equaling and surpassing the agglomerations of New York, San Francisco and Tokyo". Lupis recalls: "Put together, the GDP of Hong Kong, with its power as a financial center, of Macao, the world capital of gambling, of Zhuhai, of Shenzhen, with its high technology and its factories, and of Guangzhou, the manufacturing capital of the world, are worth the staggering figure of 1.5 trillion US dollars ”.
With the deterioration of fundamental freedoms in Hong Kong, that bridge is now seen as the image of the longa manus stretched out over the former colony from Beijing: “More than a bridge, a chain 55 kilometers long”.
A deadly embrace. A sign of the cannibalization set up by the communist regime. In between, young people torn between being Chinese and their Western feeling who have tasted the flavor of democracy.
“Today Hong Kong is no longer needed”.
As a young Chinese career and lucid with alcoholic intoxication confided to Lupis at aperitif time in the prestigious Captain's Bar: Hong Kong was once the navel of Asia. Today it is China's asshole.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/vi-spiego-perche-oggi-hong-kong-non-serve-piu-ne-alla-cina-ne-agli-occidentali-parla-marco-lupis/ on Sun, 28 Feb 2021 07:32:04 +0000.