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  • Hong Kong the Super Paradox: Life after Return to China
  • Ho-fung Hung (bio)
James C. Hsiung , editor. Hong Kong the Super Paradox: Life after Return to China. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. x, 358 pp. Hardcover $55.00, ISBN 0-312-22293-9.

In the few years leading up to Great Britain's handing over of Hong Kong's sovereignty to the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong was the focus of international attention. Would the "one country, two systems" policy—Deng Xiaoping's invention that was designed to nullify Hong Kong's opposition to the handover—work, or was it just a wonderful promise that the Chinese government was not going to keep? Before 1997, the doomsday prophecy overwhelmed the optimistic predictions that Hong Kong would continue enjoying a liberal and tolerant political environment. It was widely supposed, both in the international community and among many Hong Kong residents, that Hong Kong would lose its freedom and become another Chinese city under Communist dictatorship after the handover.

After 1997, however, Hong Kong faded rapidly from the spotlight of international attention. There were few serious efforts to evaluate whether the prevalent "doomsday" predictions about Hong Kong were proving correct. Hong Kong the Super Paradox: Life after Return to China, edited by James C. Hsiung, is among the few works that seek to provide a comprehensive overview of the political, social, and economic changes in Hong Kong since ..... Besides Hsiung, the contributors include leading Hong Kong economists, political scientists, and sociologists, as well as journalists and legal experts. They are well qualified to provide an authoritative account of life in postcolonial Hong Kong.

Based on the findings of the contributors, Hsiung concludes that post-handover Hong Kong is a "super paradox" or "giant paradox." By paradox, he means "a discrepancy, or complex of discrepancies, between expectations and outcome" (p. 4). First, contrary to the doomsday prophecy, in the years immediately following the handover, the Chinese government exercised restraint from [End Page 136] interfering in Hong Kong's domestic affairs. The autonomy of Hong Kong's legal institutions, its freedom of the press, and its liberal political environment were protected. Even the Democratic Party, which took a high-profile stance critical of both the Hong Kong and Chinese governments, remained free to operate and participate in elections. Hence, "[o]n the domestic political scene, Hong Kong has disappointed the prophets of doom for not having turned out nearly as woefully as it was supposed to" (p. 307).

However, this does not mean that life in Hong Kong after 1997 has improved. The most serious problems facing this Special Administrative Region (SAR) were rooted in a regional financial crisis that rocked the economy of Hong Kong and much of Southeast Asia a few months after the handover. Before 1997, most observers of Hong Kong focused on the politics of the territory and rarely doubted that the prosperity of Hong Kong, resting on its openness to the world economy and its free-market system, would end after 1997. But it was precisely this openness that made Hong Kong vulnerable to the region-wide financial turmoil. This surprise discrepancy between the expectation of continuing economic prosperity and the reality of a sudden economic downturn was the second major post-handover paradox.

Alongside these two major paradoxes are a number of minor but not insignificant ones. One example is the "unintended landmines" set by the departing British. In the final years of British rule, Governor Chris Patten initiated a number of political reforms that shifted the center of gravity of government from the executive to the legislative branch. Diverging from Beijing's view that Patten's reform was a conspiracy designed to cripple the authority of the incoming SAR government, Hsiung believes that the reform had the good intention of strengthening the institution of representative government in Hong Kong. According to this view, a more democratized Legislative Council would guarantee the autonomy of Hong Kong from Beijing and hence guarantee the continuing prosperity of the territory. Many Hong Kong residents and Hong Kong watchers believed so. Although the SAR government tried to reverse Patten's reform immediately after the handover...

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