tEsSA's MeMOry aNd fUTurE

香港，從前的東方之珠，到英國的自由開放統治到擔心自由的消逝，令人可悲～台灣該以此為借鏡。文中還提到香港對64的紀念，恐怕以後將不復存在...

但我不認同文章中的認同危機，因為傳統上，香港人心中本來救沒有國家觀念，哪來的認同危機感呢？

詳全文：http://www.economist.com/world/asia/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=13788694

Hong Kong's identity crisis

Feeling special

Jun 4th 2009 | HONG KONG
From The Economist print edition

Annual soul-searching; secular decline

IT IS not easy being Hong Kong. Ever since the British decided to return it to China, the city has suffered from bouts of hand-wringing about its role. Proudly Chinese yet also steeped in Western ways, many Hong Kongers are never sure how they fit into the People’s Republic. Confusion is always acute around June 4th, the anniversary of the Beijing massacre of 1989.

Unlike then, Hong Kong is now legally an undeniable part of China. But its people are still mixed up about the motherland. As The Economist went to press, thousands of Hong Kongers were gathering in a park for the largest civic commemoration anywhere in China. In a recent public-opinion poll 69% replied that the Chinese government did the wrong thing on June 4th 1989.

But politics did not set off the latest bout of collective angst. The trigger was the news in late March that the Chinese government had approved a plan to turn Shanghai into a global financial and shipping centre by 2020. Hong Kong’s political and business leaders gasped at this frontal assault on the enclave’s cherished role as an international gateway to the mainland. With the clock ticking, they fear that their “special administrative region” will soon become less special. Some were already fretting that China’s chummier cross-strait relationship with Taiwan is reducing transit commerce through Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s economic woes are aggravating its sense of insecurity. The territory’s first-quarter GDP shrank by 7.8% year-on-year. Some economists warn that Hong Kong is heading for a record contraction this year. Its jobless rate could approach levels seen in 2003, during the outbreak of SARS, a respiratory disease. So the normally hands-off Hong Kong government has sprung into action. It has announced two rounds of tax cuts and various handouts to the poor and to businesses. Last autumn Donald Tsang, Hong Kong’s chief executive, set up a task force to map out the city’s long-term economic direction. In April it recommended that the government focus on developing six fields—including education, and environmental and medical industries—in which Hong Kong has an edge.

Yet Mr Tsang’s leadership inspires little confidence. A former civil servant under the British, Mr Tsang, like his only predecessor, was picked by Chinese leaders. He and other senior officials are often seen as bending to their patrons’ wishes, rather than standing up for Hong Kong. Mr Tsang unwittingly helped galvanise this year’s Tiananmen tributes by suggesting that most Hong Kongers no longer cared about June 4th. Marching through the city on May 31st, some of the 8,000 demonstrators chanted: “Tsang doesn’t represent me.”

The greatest frustration of post-handover Hong Kong is perhaps its blocked political aspirations. The richest place in China, it is also one where people can openly talk politics, rally against the government and choose a legislature in multiparty elections. This week it turned away at least one 1989-generation student leader, but let another enter the territory. In its bookshops the just-published memoirs of the late Zhao Ziyang, a former head of the Communist Party who opposed the Tiananmen crackdown, are flying off the shelves. In China the book is banned.

But Hong Kong’s elite remains staunchly pro-business and hence pro-China. As the Chinese government dithers over the democratic reforms promised in the city’s mini-constitution, they have remained passive. Bao Pu, a Hong Kong-based editor of Zhao’s book, sees this as dangerous, and fears that if Hong Kong people are not vigilant, their freedoms “will be gradually taken away”. The nagging fear at every June 4th commemoration in Hong Kong is that it may be the last.