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| China-Japan-Koreas |
| Hong Kong |
| 2005-03-03 |
| There's a great post at Bros. Judd you might find informative. Since this is a topic that is probably relatively little known, please allow me to present some background on Hong Kong and its current tricky relationship with China. Hong Kong is a tiger being ridden by China's rulers, and they are praying that choosing the right leader for Hong Kong will help them to avoid being eaten by the tiger. Yes, for China, Hong Kong is a major source of investment and business expertise. And, yes, Beijing, in a political alliance with Hong Kong's big business interests, is trying to reshape the city in its own image. Things, however, also go the other way. While China is subverting Hong Kong's freedoms, Hong Kong's economic clout, although now slowly declining, is also subverting Beijing's political authority. For instance, while the rest of China's provinces adopted daylight-savings time when the regime decided to do so in the mid-80s, Guangdong province, just north of Hong Kong, did not. Why? Because Guangdong, which is physically as large as France and today has more than 100 million inhabitants, preferred to be in sync with Hong Kong, which did not have daylight-savings time. For centuries, the cultural heart of Guangdong was its provincial capitol, Guangzhou. Anyone who wanted to be someone in the province learned to speak the version of the Cantonese language spoken in Guangzhou. (Spoken Cantonese, by the way, is as different from Mandarin Chinese as French is from Italian.) Today, the province is overflowing with millions of illegal satellite dishes that are tuned to Hong Kong's television stations, and Guangdong's people, who increasingly look at a chic Hong Kong as the new center of Cantonese culture, are all learning the modern English-influenced Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong. Here, the flow of ideas goes from Hong Kong to Guangdong and from Guangdong to the rest of China, not the other way.... |
| Posted by:anonymous2u |
| #1 Very encouraging for this Pollyanna. ;-) |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-03-03 11:17:52 PM |