/kloc-changes in hong kong in the past 0/0 years

Article 5 of the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Constitution clearly stipulates: "The socialist system and policies will not be implemented in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and the original capitalist system and way of life in Hong Kong will remain unchanged for 50 years."

A special article in Asia Times pointed out that the lifestyle of Hong Kong and local residents seems to have not changed for ten years. However, people living here can feel the changes in the past ten years, some of which are tangible and some are even more intangible. These changes are caused by Hong Kong people themselves.

Tangible changes come more from the economic recession of the past decade than from the intervention of the Beijing government. Beijing's intervention has not changed significantly, at least not yet. But these intangible changes are creating a new Hong Kong, which is almost invisible to non-China residents and tourists. Hong Kong has become more docile and less confident than before. The innate superiority of Hong Kong people towards mainlanders has almost disappeared. Words such as "A Can" that despise mainlanders have disappeared from everyday language. "A Can" was originally a character in a TV series. Later, Hong Kong people called mainlanders this way, which means hillbilly.

Hong Kong people are becoming mainlanders. In fact, if Hong Kong people go to Shenzhen to spend money, if they are not generous, they will be humiliated and called "Hong Kong can".

In fact, this change began a few hours after the handover of sovereignty in the early morning of 1 July, 19971. Of course, neither Beijingers nor Hong Kong people expected or hoped to start changing so soon. In fact, some Hong Kong people never expected that there would be changes in this life or the next.

1In the summer of 1997, the Thai baht depreciated sharply, which triggered the financial turmoil sweeping Southeast Asia. It was this storm and a series of more deadly crises that broke out later, which seriously dealt a blow to the confidence and pride of Hong Kong people.

Faced with the financial crisis, avian flu, SARS, unprecedented high unemployment rate (8%) and negative assets, Hong Kong people have chosen an easy road-relying on Beijing. When they turned to Beijing for help, their face, self-esteem and natural superiority were all left behind.

The Beijing government has decisively thrown out one straw after another. Beijing is still doing this now, although it is sometimes reminded that these are not long-term solutions, and Hong Kong must solve its fundamental problems. But who cares? The good times are back, and Hong Kong is prosperous again. This is what foreign tourists and local expatriates see.

What they are seeing now are these real changes: as many as 500,000 Hong Kong people work in the Mainland, mainly the middle class with higher education. This figure is almost equivalent to that of wealthy middle-class professionals who immigrated to Canada, Australia and the United States in the last few years of British rule.

At the same time, the status of these 500,000 Hong Kong people in Hong Kong has been replaced by almost the same number of mainlanders (mainly the poor), who have permanently settled in Hong Kong. Most of the new immigrants living at a lower economic level are women who marry Hong Kong men. The craze for Hong Kong men to find less demanding mainland women as wives or mistresses is unlikely to fade soon, which has led to more and more single women in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is no longer the second busiest container terminal in Asia after Singapore. Shanghai has quickly replaced it, and Shenzhen will soon surpass it, so Hong Kong may continue to decline.