September 5, 2024 · 《Ming Pao》
For more than 20 years after Hong Kong’s return, the ’50 Years of No Change’ pledge was treated as an iron-clad law. Society embraced the values behind ’50 Years of No Change’, and the social elite and public opinion tended to measure new developments against the standards of the past ‘unchanging’ order. The social elite were accustomed to looking backwards rather than forwards; the golden age was always in the past, never the future. As a result, society as a whole lacked a vision for the future and struggled to shape it. Hong Kong’s development gradually lost momentum — even stagnated — and the city’s competitiveness was overtaken by neighbouring major cities.
Today, under Beijing’s urging, the refrain of ‘recognising change, responding to change, and pursuing change, and achieving better development through reform’ is being sung from the rooftops. If ’50 Years of No Change’ was the hallmark of the ‘First Return’, then the reform driven by ‘recognising, responding, and pursuing change’ is likely to become the main theme of the ‘Second Return’.
Given the limits of space, this article is divided into two parts: the first part examines the impact of the ’50 Years of No Change’ pledge on Hong Kong’s development; the second part will analyse the difficulties and resistance that the reform required by ‘recognising, responding, and pursuing change’ will face, and will discuss ways to overcome those difficulties.
1. The Merits and Demerits of the ’50 Years of No Change’ Promise
’50 Years of No Change’, taken at face value, is a rather strange pledge. Modern society is in constant flux — how can ’50 years of no change’ make sense? Moreover, from the perspective of the materialist dialectics upheld by communists, the constant change of things is the very core of dialectics; ’50 years of no change’ is therefore not only contrary to common sense, but also runs against the principles of dialectics.
Perhaps we should not understand the intent of ’50 Years of No Change’ literally, but rather explore its meaning in the light of the historical context of Hong Kong’s return at the time. Back then, Hong Kong’s level of development was far higher than that of mainland China; most Hong Kong people had long lived under a capitalist system and harboured deep-seated fears about coming under the rule of a socialist regime. Against this historical backdrop, the pledge to keep Hong Kong’s unique way of life unchanged over the long term played a very important role in steadying people’s hearts.
At bottom, Hong Kong’s return involved a change of sovereignty — a ‘change of dynasty’ of momentous proportions. A ‘change of dynasty’ without anyone ‘losing their head’ is extremely rare in history, which shows that the ’50 Years of No Change’ pledge deserves considerable credit. To borrow a famous saying from Deng Xiaoping, the ‘chief architect of reform and opening up’: whatever one makes of the ’50 Years of No Change’ pledge, a cat that catches mice is a good cat.
That said, the ’50 Years of No Change’ pledge also brought considerable drawbacks — for instance, it made it easy for the social elite and the general public to romanticise the old British Hong Kong era, and it encouraged extreme nostalgia. The inertia of ‘no change’ became a further obstacle to social development and reform: when the social elite and public opinion ceaselessly evaluate today’s changes against the standards of the past, they lack any imagination for the future, and find it hard to shape that future through reform.
2. Nostalgia, Colonial Nostalgia, and Localism
After the return, many Hong Kong people came to regard the old British Hong Kong era as a golden age. With ’50 Years of No Change’ as the yardstick for what was good or bad in society, this was a natural outcome. The present writer entered university in the late 1960s and took part in social movements while a student, experiencing first-hand the heavy-handed interventions of the Hong Kong government’s Political Department on multiple occasions — so I am under no illusion about the ‘freedom of speech’ of that era. Younger people, however, who have no first-hand experience of British Hong Kong (that is, the generation that grew up after the return), easily fall into wishful romanticisation of the colonial era, and this has in some cases further developed into a colonial-nostalgia complex.
If the golden age is in the past and not the future, the rise of nostalgia after the return is entirely understandable. Nostalgia is neither unique to Hong Kong nor something that only emerged after the return. Yet Hong Kong’s nostalgia wave not only swelled rapidly after the return, but also burst out in the form of large-scale social movements — for example, the 2006–2007 movement and clashes over the conservation of the Queen’s Pier. The movement even gave rise to a number of unrealistic, extreme demands, such as calls to ‘rebuild the Queen’s Pier on its original site’.
I do not deny that the Queen’s Pier is part of Hong Kong people’s collective memory. The Pier, the City Hall and Edinburgh Place form an integrated architectural ensemble and have a certain heritage value. But given that the Central reclamation was unavoidable, in my view the ideal conservation plan would have been to preserve as many of the Pier’s components as possible during dismantling and to rebuild it at a suitable waterfront location after the reclamation. This was also the government’s response at the time to the public’s conservation demands.
At the time, however, many people demanded that the Queen’s Pier be ‘rebuilt on its original site’ on the reclaimed land. This demand was frankly baffling, because after the reclamation the Pier’s original site would become a road and dry land, no longer at the water’s edge. The result of ‘rebuilding the Queen’s Pier on its original site’ would have been a pavilion beside a road — entirely lacking the character of a pier. Some movement participants therefore went further and proposed building an artificial lake beside the ‘pier’ after the ‘rebuild’, conjuring up images of ‘sailing on dry land’. In sum, the various proposals to ‘rebuild the Queen’s Pier on its original site’ were not only technically unworkable, but also failed to preserve the maritime character of the original structure.
The Queen’s Pier conservation movement was not the largest popular movement after Hong Kong’s return, and how to conserve a single pier would not, in itself, affect ordinary people’s daily lives. I examine the movement in depth because the debate over conservation vividly reflected how society views its own past and future — for example, whether it is mired in the past and blind to the future. Moreover, those who took part in the movement were not only the more militant environmental groups, but also included many well-known figures from the professional and cultural sectors.
Why did so many groups, social elites and Legislative Council members at the time insist on these absurd ‘sailing-on-dry-land’ proposals? Was it because, under the principle of ’50 Years of No Change’, they felt it necessary to rebuild the dismantled structure on an ‘original site’ that had been completely transformed by the reclamation, in order to satisfy the requirement of ‘no change’?
The movement to conserve local heritage also nurtured a sense of local rootedness. Affection for one’s home soil could, in itself, have been channelled into a constructive force for building society. Regrettably, however, Hong Kong’s localism of that era drifted in an extreme direction, degenerating into an exclusionary populist movement and, in time, even into separatism and ‘Hong Kong independence’.
In 2016, when the then-Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, Zhang Dejiang, visited Hong Kong, he spoke specifically about the ‘local’ question. He said: ‘The moon shines brighter on one’s home town. Feelings for one’s native soil are common to all. I am from the Northeast, and I love my hometown; I am Chinese, and I love my motherland. The Hong Kong compatriots’ cherishing of their own way of life and values deserves respect. In fact, a key element of “One Country, Two Systems” is keeping Hong Kong’s original social and economic systems and way of life unchanged. “Hong Kong people governing Hong Kong” and a high degree of autonomy are, in themselves, the best way of catering to the actual conditions of Hong Kong’s “local” situation. Today, a very small number of people reject the country, resist the central authorities, and even fly the banner of “Hong Kong independence” — this is not a question of “localism” but of using “localism” as a cover for “separatism”. Does this go against the original intent of “One Country, Two Systems”? Is it a blessing or a curse for Hong Kong? I believe the great majority of Hong Kong compatriots know the answer in their hearts.’
Zhang Dejiang’s words were both advice and warning: once localism degenerates into separatism, it will shake the very foundations of One Country, Two Systems and is extremely dangerous for Hong Kong. Unfortunately, the speaker was earnest but the audience paid no heed. The young pan-democratic leaders nurtured by the Queen’s Pier conservation movement and by localism completely ignored Zhang Dejiang’s warning. The colonial-nostalgia complex of the time combined with populist localism to become fuel for Hong Kong’s radicalisation; coupled with the SAR government’s failure in 2019 to respond appropriately to public concerns and fears over the proposed amendments to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance, this eventually erupted into a social storm.
The 2019 social storm drew huge numbers of participants, including many young people with no political background. Their main reason for taking to the streets was resentment at the authorities’ handling of public protests — not necessarily anything to do with separatism. But mass movements cannot avoid the ‘radicalising’ dynamics of the ‘square’. The direction of the movement was gradually hijacked by a small number of radicals; the older generation of pan-democratic leaders came to be seen as out of touch, and the movement morphed into an uncontrollable monster. In the end, it fell to the central authorities to stabilise the situation, ushering in the ‘Second Return’ marked by the slogan ‘recognising change, responding to change, and pursuing change, and achieving better development through reform’.
3. From Governance to Prosperity Cannot Rely Solely on Beijing’s ‘Orders’
From the perspective of the One Country, Two Systems framework, Hong Kong’s move ‘from chaos to governance’ is primarily the central government’s constitutional responsibility — the central authorities achieved this objective by enacting the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and by altering the political arrangements. However, the move ‘from governance to prosperity’ cannot rely solely on Beijing ‘placing orders’; it also requires the active and engaged participation of the Hong Kong SAR Government and the social elite.
The central authorities have already ‘placed their order’ calling for reform; whether reform succeeds, however, will depend on the courage, insight, judgement, perseverance, drive and leadership of the Hong Kong SAR Government’s officials and the social elite. Reformers need to discern existing ills, set accurate reform goals and a feasible roadmap, design appropriate reform proposals, build a societal consensus, unite the reform forces across all sectors of society, and overcome the opposition and obstruction of vested interests — only then can reform be carried through to success.
Given the limits of space, this first half of the article ends here. The second half will discuss why reform invariably meets powerful resistance — for example, most reformers in Chinese history (including Shang Yang, Wang Anshi, and Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao and the ‘Six Gentlemen’ of the Hundred Days’ Reform) met bad ends because of opposition from vested interests. It will conclude by drawing on reform experience from ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign history to summarise the various methods by which opposition can be overcome and reform successfully carried out.
(Translation supported by AI)
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