Tuesday 30 September 2014

Holy City

Justin Tse is invaluable on the roots of the democracy movement in Hong Kong, first under British and now under Chinese rule, among the interlocking worlds of the students, the Evangelical churches, the mainline Protestant clergy, and Catholic Social Teaching.

That just doesn't sound like China, does it? Hong Kong as very much at all, never mind as a world city with those among so many other forces at play in its life, is a creation of the British Empire, not of China.

A densely populated island with a huge financial services sector and with a very hight degree of economic dependence on a superpower with which it shares more or less the same language, a certain amount of common culture (but not as much as might at first appear), and some fairly distant common history and ethnic ties.

Such places ought to rise up and assert themselves more often.

6 comments:

  1. This from the man who believes reunification of Taiwan with the mainland is inevitable? Rather a peculiar stance to take.

    And being an independent or semi-independent city-state with a large financial services sector does not, on its own merits, particularly recommend a polity to me - nor should it to someone who takes Catholic social teaching seriously, particularly on the subject of usury.

    Hong Kong is indeed a very interesting place, for this reason amongst many others. But whether 'such places ought to rise up and assert themselves more often' would seem to depend highly on who is doing the rising up and asserting.

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    1. They want reunion in Taiwan. On there own terms, but they do want it. They may never get it, but that is a different matter.

      Whereas people from Hong Kong say frankly that they are not from China. Ethnically, culturally (up to a point), ancestrally Chinese. But not from China.

      This one is going to run and run. We should stay out of it if at all possible. But it is going to be big.

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  2. I love the fact that when the Hong Kong dockers protest, they wave the imperial flag.

    That must be awfully confusing to all the Leftwing anti-imperialists who think the British Empire was a monstrosity.

    The alternatives were and are far worse.

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    1. You believe that people like that exist, don't you? Only because someone or other in the Daily Mail once told you that they did.

      What a fascinating insight into no-books-in-the-house Toryland. Or no-books-in-the-house Ukipland, as I suppose that it now is.

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    2. Indeed. Why would we left-wingers think the British Empire was a monstrosity? It was largely responsible, in its late manifestation, for building a very enviable postwar settlement. A postwar settlement that is now being rapidly dismantled by the very post-Imperial Thatcherites.

      Canada - the Canada that produced John A. Macdonald, John Diefenbaker and George Parkin Grant - used to be a proud component of that Empire.

      I'm certainly of two minds or more about Hong Kong and the current Umbrella Movement. But in the final analysis, I'm not sure that British rule there was such a bad thing.

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    3. We took scarcely more interest in democratising the place than the Chinese have. But when they fly the old flag, then they are showing at least their aspiration to the post-War settlement and to the parliamentary system that made it possible on three continents.

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