"Welcome officers and men of the USS Kittyhawk, USS Blue Ridge, USS Henderson, USS Sea Dragon. Enjoy your three days in Hong Kong."
Freedom of information had prevailed once again.
The decline of press freedom in Hong Kong is not happening in a vacuum but is part of a steady Sinicization (not bad in itself) but also a one-way ticket to Communization of the society as well as the press. Hong Kong's glittering facade distracts us all from what is really going on.
The best-known skeptics, as I have noted, are Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten, who details his doubts outspokenly in his book East and West.
Friedman predicts that within two years of taking control, Beijing will impose capital controls and replace Hong Kong' independent currency pegged to the U.S. dollar with the Chinese Renminbi. Explains Friedman, who discounts Beijing's assurances that this will never happen: "I cannot conceive of a proud sovereign country like China entertaining the prospect of having two currencies at the same time." The slightest hint of such actions, he notes, will cause "drastic loss of confidence in one aspect of Hong Kong namely as a place to store money."
"One country, two systems" is a sham and Hong Kong's lifestyle is changing in less than 50 months after the handover, let alone the "50 years" that Beijing promised.
Two important themes were summed up at a speech to the International Federation of Journalists, meeting in Hong Kong in 1995, where Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten said, "The argument about free speech is part and parcel of a wider argument about so-called Asian values, which are depicted by their proponents as offering an alternative to decadent, free-wheeling Western liberalism. The stress is on allegedly Confucian values--hard work, the family, education, home ownership (I say 'allegedly' because these values are all at the core of all those old Victorian hymns, and hardly qualify as uniquely Asian)".
Patten continued through his speech to ask why China is routinely considered a parallel universe, exempt from moral and other standards. And why does even framing that question sound "anti-China?" Patten said for the same non-reason that historians have mostly overlooked such details as the holocausts of the '50s and '60s in which millions died on the whim of 'the old pervert' Mao - because China is, well, "different."
