Eye on China: Hong Kong's buzz moving to mainland

Going to Hong Kong from Beijing recently on an extended business trip, I had the familiar feeling of going to a different country rather than simply a different city.

The flight went smoothly and customs clearance at the huge new airport on Hong Kong's Lantau Island was far more efficient and pleasant than that offered by any other Chinese city. I sorted out a local mobile phone chip and an all-network mass transport card within 15 minutes of landing.

The downside of Hong Kong presented itself as soon as I opened the door to my serviced apartment close to the business district. The biggest cockroach I've seen in years was there to greet me. By the looks of things he wanted to share a cup of tea, but I was out of there before our relationship could develop.

My replacement studio was all of 230 square feet, without windows or satellite television, and cost US$1500 a month. I couldn't help ponder the luxurious accommodation the same amount could have got me in Beijing.

In some ways, the city doesn't seem Chinese at all. Hong Kong civil servants have immaculate and sober uniforms and generally provide excellent service. Mainland officials wear either slovenly uniforms or gaudy full-dress uniforms dripping with decorations and badges. In either case, the service they provide is almost guaranteed to be awful.

There is a mature feel about the city, an air of middle-class prosperity. But there is also an air of intensity, and not a joyful one, perhaps as a result of the financial and living pressures people have to deal with.

Saturday evening, eating in a Japanese restaurant, I was struck at how restrained people seemed. Families (real ones, with more than just one obese kid, as you get so often in Chinese cities as a result of the one-child policy) took up most of the tables, eating and talking with extraordinary discipline and quiet.

Family meals on the mainland often include friends and relatives (after all two parents and one child don't make up much of a party), and a restaurant can give off a wall of crunching and spitting, shouting and laughter at peak times.

I would say that there is a meekness about Hong Kong. Caucasians get treated above average but without the demonstrative fanfare you get on the mainland. There is little sign of the sly arrogance that even the lowliest mainlander doing the most menial job exhibits with whites.

It's that cheekiness that means that however pleased you are with your performance during a transaction with a local mainlander, there is often a sting in the tail that only becomes apparent later.

But, in Hong Kong, it's almost as if the locals don't begrudge a genuine measure of respect for what the British achieved in the city in the past and what international investors and expertise have done since.

The idea has been floated by liberal academics on the mainland that just as foreign managers have performed well in business ventures in China, foreign administrators could perhaps be entrusted with running the country. This was clearly an experimental concept, more an extreme response to the chronic dysfunction within the country's governing apparatus than a serious suggestion.

Of course, the idea would never fly with even the most victimised of Chinese. A rugged sense of their own worth as a nation is too strong and getting stronger all the time.

One aspect of British colonialism that is disappearing audibly are English-language skills. In contrast, Mandarin is flourishing. I'm sure I heard as much Mandarin in Hong Kong as Cantonese. Mandarin was either being spoken with a nasty Cantonese accent by businessmen or it came from Chinese tourists.

The mainland tourists hunt in packs for the cheap luxury goods Hong Kong has to offer, many of the girls looking slightly trashy. A mixture of arrogance and insecurity means they try a little too hard to avoid being labelled country bumpkins by the supposedly sophisticated Hong Kongers.

Despite its dynamism, I feel that Hong Kong has lost some of the buzz and freshness it had 10 years ago. The torch has been taken up by Shanghai and Beijing. Both cities are full of young people from all over the world giving their dreams a shot.

They come with a few hundred dollars, they learn Chinese, supported by a local population that responds almost lovingly to the sight of a young foreigner mangling their language, and they get stuck into all kinds of different ventures.

It could be opening a bar, a school, a consultancy, writing for a magazine or even the true sign of a China hand, working in the head-spinning environment of a local Chinese company.

But imagine coming over to Hong Kong. High rent and other living costs would quickly burn up your savings. There is a much smaller variety of commercial activity. The local monopolies, the powerful families, have sewn everything up. The idea that Hong Kong is one of the world's freest and most open economies, as the right-wing Heritage Foundation claims every year, is a real stretch.

There is no explosion of mini-businesses, which make the streets of so many Chinese cities so dynamic. Locals get impatient if you practise your Cantonese.

Finally, and most damningly, the city has become infested by bankers and fund managers looking for investments in China - and we know how dull they are.

In fact, it's naive to be surprised by China's diversity. Ethnic Chinese have many of the same physical features, but it's a country with many rooms under the same roof.

What the similarities should not blind us to is a salient element of China's cultural genius, namely its political unity. Unlike any other continental landmass of its size and population density, the Chinese sorted out the basic rules of political unification 2000 years ago. That is an important underpinning of China's drive to superpower status.

In contrast, think of Europe, where a half-dozen of the richest and most powerful countries in the world have lurched between genocidal wars and clumsy pretences at unification. Perennially undermined by a bellicose little island off the northern coast, it's not surprising that Europe is doomed to play second fiddle on the world stage. I would suggest that's not a vacuum China intends to leave unfilled.

* The writer remains anonymous to protect his position in China.