It has been a joy to be back in Hong Kong again, even if only for a week!
I owe a lot to Hong Kong and have always felt a special duty to try to speak for it in the House of Commons. On this visit, thanks to Sir Michael Sandberg and many others, I have met a very wide cross section of this community. This is the only occasion on which I am able to say a public thank you to all those who have so generously given their time to talk to me.
But this time returning to Hong Kong is somehow more dislocating than I recall.
I left a Europe wracked by self doubt about what we would do with a future which lies in our own hands - and arrived in a Hong Kong bulging with self confidence about a future that lies in the hands of others.
It is said that after the Sung dynasty, China stayed still, while Europe overtook it. I cannot help feeling the tide has now begun to flow the other way.
Of course the old cliches come to mind. Hong Kong thrives on uncertainty; Hong Kong can always turn adversity into advantage; Hong Kong defies the natural laws which apply to everyone else.
But I have a feeling that there is something more profound at work
now.
That Hong Kong is changing from being a paradox to becoming a paradigm.
-
If only we in Europe were less obsessed with our own narrow condition, we might observe what we are experiencing as part of a much larger drift which ought to terrify and amaze us the shift away from the old powers of the Atlantic shore to the new emerging forces of the Pacific rim and that Hong Kong's unreasonable self confidence in the face of all the odds is merely a reflection of its understanding that, whatever the inconveniences of the next few years, it lies in the middle of the tide and is running strongly with it.
-
I could be truly European and let my cynicism show by saying that the South East Asian region ( now growing so fast it appears immune even from world recessions), will eventually have its problems too. That economic power leads to political influence, that political influence leads to conflict and that this immutable law of history will not be suspended for the Pacific nations any more than it was for the Atlantic ones.
But this is all for the future and anyway highly theoretical. And Hong Kong has never been much interested in theories - it has been too occupied making the present work - and especially making it work for Hong Kong.
Nevertheless, as a one time resident and many times happy visitor, I am going to indulge myself in two more observations.
!