Hong Kong has changed since the turmoil of 2019-20. Few people would dispute this. The more important question is what kind of city it is becoming.
It is evolving into a more nationally integrated yet still distinctive city. The emerging model seeks to combine market dynamism and international connectivity with clearer alignment to national development. This is not decline. It is a search for a viable identity and role.
Critics such as Stephen Roach have argued that the Hong Kong of old is finished and that the city has become little more than another large Chinese city. The conclusion rests on a particular assumption: that sharp political and institutional change, especially when it compresses earlier expectations of autonomy, amounts to the end of the place itself. This assumption is selective.
Political systems everywhere have experienced sharp institutional shifts. Brexit permanently altered Britain’s relationship with Europe. In the United States, the Trump administration has moved to dissolve the United States Agency for International Development, sharply downsize the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and remove or attempt to remove leaders of other independent bodies.
The US Supreme Court has expanded presidential authority to dismiss heads of such agencies without cause. Few observers would conclude from these changes that America is therefore “over”. The same restraint should apply when assessing Hong Kong.
The claim that Beijing cut in half its promised 50-year high degree of autonomy also needs precision. Article 5 of the Basic Law protects the capitalist system and way of life for 50 years. This high degree of autonomy is an authorisation under China’s Constitution and the Basic Law.