A global hub retires

Hong Kong at present is a place in suspense. Gone are the days where the city was the gateway to China and Asia’s financial hub. It’s still a global city and has its very own special feel, but nobody really knows how much longer, and you get the sense of a place that has lived through its golden times. Many young people are moving abroad or to the mainland to look for work because the immense cost of housing makes Hong Kong unattractive to all but the highest-earning. The central Chinese government doesn’t seem to see any benefit in continuing to give Hong Kong its special status and thus squeezes its space with a mixture of competition from the neighboring cities, (regressive) reform and infrastructure projects to further connect it with the mainland (background info: Hongkong was returned to China from the British in 1997 under the “one country, two systems” premise, presumably until 2047. Currently the Chinese government gives the impression that it’s not willing to wait another 28 years until full reintegration). A new high-speed railway links it to Shenzhen and Guangzhou now, the two biggest cities in the so-called pearl river delta area. The world’s longest sea bridge was also opened last year, connecting Macao, Zhuhai and Hongkong over a distance of about 40km. A new set of policies made clear that the times when Hong Kong was one of the freest places on earth are over. Advocating independence can get you into jail now and “disrespecting” the Chinese national anthem will soon be punishable too. A foreign correspondent’s visa got cancelled last year on grounds of hosting an event with an independence activist. A mixture of strategic buy ups by mainland investors and self-censorship lets the media appear increasingly toothless. For instance, nobody in the allegedly free press would dare to propagate independence or expose high-level corruption within the communist party for fear of retaliation. On top of all that, tourism is a boon for the local economy but threatens to suffocate the city. In one year, Hong Kong has an influx of 65 million people, that’s nearly 10 times its population. Most of them are on short trips from the mainland, the improved connections help funneling through more people than ever before. Me, being there during Chinese New Year, could witness what that means. Streets in shopping areas and around tourist sights were barely walkable because of the sheer amount of people pushing, standing and queuing. I stopped going to any places that were mentioned on travel guides or blogs because it was safe to assume that coaches with hundreds of tourists would already be there. The good thing about Chinese tourists though is that they usually stick to the top spots and don’t bother exploring too much, which means if you go off-track just a bit you can still get a hassle-free experience.

Just a normal crowd in central Macao waiting to for their turn
to take a picture with the cities landmark

Why not building a mall that looks like Venice, put a channel in it
and then hire Italians as gondolieris, including the opera-singing?

So altogether Hong Kong gives a fairly sad impression and I sympathize with every local who is mourning the days when their city was rightfully admired as the (capitalist) pearl of the East. Those days won’t return, but it’s not like everything is going down the tube either. In fact, I enjoyed Hong Kong so much that I stayed seven nights in total, with a three-day break in Guangzhou for the Chinese New Year celebrations. It still has its very own character, this mixture of extreme wealth and poverty, incredible efficiency even when things look chaotic on the surface, big South- and South-East-Asian minorities and beautiful nature just a few footsteps from the center. 

Just a few kilometres away from Kowloon...

Old villages in rural Hongkong, most of the buildings are abondoned
and slowly decay

Talking about efficiency, Hong Kongs infrastructure is jaw-dropping. This might sound like a nerdy city planner thing to marvel at, but everybody who’s been to Hong Kong would agree. Combining the metro and the minibuses that go virtually everywhere where there are roads, cars are completely obsolete and not even faster. With its many, hilly islands separated by the ocean, the topography is not really conducive to creating a megacity, which makes the neatness and elegance with which highways, skyscrapers and railway lines are laid upon one another all the more impressive.

Kowloon, the island opposite to Central Hongkong with its famous glistening skyline is the grubby, lively part of the city where my hostel was. It looks like a steampunk fantasy at night, with neon lights, claustrophobically narrow lanes and house alleys, hookers and every inch of public space occupied by street vendors, food stalls and people. You can’t get more urban than this. There’s a portion of Indians and Pakistanis significant enough to give the place this peculiar smell of spices that I otherwise only know from India. The lack of space might sabotage the housing market, but it also helps create a buzzy atmosphere that I often miss in the vast, newly built cities of China. I also enjoy the shabbier sides that come with so many people living together on little space - if pretty and clean was my thing, I wouldn’t have spent the last 4 years in Berlin.

What happens when you have no space, but many people who want to buy
apartments.

Of course, places are just as good as the people you meet there, and Hong Kong had the best people I met on this trip so far (part of the reason is certainly that I was by myself for the first time). The city might not be Asia’s global hotspot as in the past, but the people are still very international and have a global mindset. I met a French guy who’s built and run clubs all over East Asia, a Chinese working for a pro-mainland propaganda channel in Hong Kong to get the citizenship (sometimes biographies can really be contradictory) and my lovely hostel reception lady is a local multilinguist who’s doing Chinese-Spanish translation as a profession during the day and for some reason enjoys nightshifts at a reception desk, going back to Spain to finish her master in interpretation in a year or so.

I came to Hong Kong not expecting much, for once because I constantly read about how integration into China is killing its vibe and also because I often heard it is a soulless finance hub. The latter is certainly not true, the former can be felt and might get worse, so it’s recommendable to see this bustling place rather soon than late.

Now for a quick excursion: As a welcome interruption to my personal travel plans, I got invited by my co-scholar Karin to join her and her family for Chinese New Year. With her in China and most of the family living there anyways, her parents flew in from Germany for holidays and new year celebration. New year celebration can be read as – you guessed it – eating. Several days in a row, with friends and relatives, someone was always keen to invite us to his favorite restaurant, from morning to evening, interrupted by brief sightseeing sessions. Since we were in Guangzhou (one hour by train from Hong Kong), the food consisted of Dim Sum mostly, which is not only steamed stuff, but actually more of a classifier for all sorts of small plates of food. Typical Cantonese cuisine stands out for its focus on seafood, the fact that it has sweet dishes (desserts in the European sense have no tradition in China) and that, if you wanted, you could eat everything, whether that be monkey brain or ox penis. The Cantonese will know a way to make it consumable. I stuck to more common dishes, which didn’t prevent me from a minor food poisoning. The funny thing about that episode is that not only me and a few other DAAD friends who were invited felt sick, but also Karin’s family. I couldn’t really enjoy seafood dim sum since then.

Besides eating, hongbaos (= 红包 / red envelope) are the most essential part of every Chinese New Year. They’re given from the old (working) generation to the young and contain, unsurprisingly, money. It’s not that easy to determine the right hongbao rate for someone, since it depends on a range of factors (how close is the blood relationship, how old, already earning some money, has a partner or not and sadly often also whether it’s a boy or a girl). We were told by Karin that first of all a scholarship doesn’t count as income so we can still count ourselves on the receiving side and second as foreigners the rules of Chinese courtesy don’t apply to us in a strict sense, meaning we neither had to bring hongbaos nor presents for her family. We all received some though, making me feel a little guilty towards Karin’s family, who was incredibly hospitable to all of us.

It's a bit tacky, but seriously one of the most elegant structures
I've ever seen - Canton Tower

Not Hongkong but Guangzhou (wins the dick comparison for the higher buildings)

Fuck, more food?!?

Being with a Chinese family, I was consciously watching Chinese TV for the first time in my life. That has nothing to do with the program being Chinese really, I haven’t watched TV the last years in Germany either. Watching CCTV1’s new year show gave me an idea of what historians call “modern Chinese nationalism”. There’s still some reverence for Mao and dutiful, ritual affirmations of communism, but the most important message these days is how beautiful, powerful and bigger than life the PRC is. There’s virtually no reasoning, just pure grandeur and emotions (which really triggers me, but then again, I’m German). People in traditional costumes dance together while video projectors show huge pictures of either pristine nature or symbols of national strength. A few people will sing something along the lines of “I love my China, my fatherland, we all work together for a better China, go China blabla”. While Beijing undertook some serious efforts to project this kind of stuff on an international stage in the past, it is becoming increasingly savvy in more subtle approaches that work better with a foreign audience. It’s a shame, some of the funniest propaganda videos were the fruits of former attempts. It seems the Party decided the two things that are supposed to hold China together are consumerism and nationalism, let’s see how that goes.

Now before I indulge too much in the little details of the last week and half, let’s call it a day. One more blog entry and I’m back in Beijing, which has kind of become a symbol for my normal life here in China. Until then, I’m gonna try to keep the °C as high as possible, preferably in some place in Guangxi that has access to the sea.