THE HONG KONG-CHINA PHENOMENON
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greater numbers and more Hong Kong people make an effort to learn Putonghua, in recognition of China's growing importance to the territory's future.
While influences from the north are growing, the converse is also true. The ties are clearly multiplying, with changes in the very social fabric on both sides of the border taking place as a result. Shanghai, as China's manufacturing, financial, and commercial centre, was long considered China's most cosmopolitan city, and the symbol of modernity and chic. While Shanghai is again on the rise, Hong Kong has taken its place as a model, particularly among youth on the mainland. The appeal of Hong Kong's food, music, fashion, and even dialect is influencing trends across China today. I have even been told the Cantonese accent, once considered vulgar and the object of derision, has grown in popularity in parts of the north.
Thus, after decades of separation, isolation, and distrust, the common culture shared by Hong Kong and China, with its history of 3 000 years, is again evolving in tandem on both sides of an increasingly symbolic border, despite still sizeable disparities in income. Television and other media, broadcast both locally and from Hong Kong, has brought a profusion of new ideas and material incentives to the counties of Guangdong and beyond. Mass media is greatly accelerating a process that is blurring the social and cultural differences separating Hong Kong from China.
These growing contacts have also encouraged a breakdown of the social and psy- chological barriers separating people. Materialism aside, these closer ties and a recogni- tion of shared values and heritage are helping to alleviate Hong Kong's concerns about the future on a very human level. While governments talk, people are getting on with things in true Hong Kong (and increasingly mainland) fashion. Hong Kong's relationship with China, which has often been a cause of great concern, is increasingly seen as the territory's greatest advantage. A better understanding of this relationship and its inherent opportunities is having a lubricating effect on the transition, despite the inevitable bumps in the road. At the same time, the overseas Chinese communities in countries elsewhere in the region keep a watchful eye, with Hong Kong such an indispensable link in their economic activity throughout Asia.
Greater access and exposure to new ideas means subtle changes in thinking, in what may be seen by some as not just a period of transition, but of some confusion as well. New lifestyle patterns are emerging, as people move into cities and large portions of society become less agrarian in nature. Most clearly in the south, but further north to a growing degree, as people are acquiring more materialistic tastes, Chinese have increasingly come to resemble their counterparts in the industrialised world. Hong Kong has provided (and continues to provide) a neutral meeting point for China and the world in business, the arts, and in a broad sense, education. It is a place for cultural exchanges of many kinds, and for a sharing of views on limitless subjects. A contrast and a model for China's planners, it endures with a unique combination of East and West, modern and traditional. Offering China the best in technology, expertise and world markets, it does so with the familiarity and shared ancestry no other country or territory can match. While still playing its traditional role, that of China's window on the world, Hong Kong has helped its mother country find its own windows to the world.
Burton Levin