A question from a reader of this blog:
What will happen to Hong Kong after 2047? Do you think it will still retain its capitalist system and unique way of life? What about the common law legal system which is arguably much more sound than the legal system in the mainland? I am hoping that China will just give Hong Kong another 50 year extension on the SAR. I guess the main reason why I am concerned is that I’ll be alive after 2047. I guess time will tell.
I can’t see the current arrangements being extended for another 50 years – the PRC government would regard that as a sign of failure.
Perhaps the biggest unknown here is what will happen to China. Andres Gentry has been arguing that it will fragment. I don’t agree, but it’s an interesting thought – if it did happen then it seems fair to assume that Hong Kong would most likely continue as it is today. I’ll come back to that in a minute.
My feeling is that by 2047 China will have progressed so far that no-one will worry about Hong Kong retaining its capitalist system. The ‘unique way of life” is difficult to define, but perhaps Hong Kong will be different in the same way that, say, San Franciso or Los Angeles (or perhaps the whole of California) are different from the rest of the United States.
The legal system is a bigger problem. The British tradition gives Hong Kong a legal system that is respected throughout the world, and it would be difficult to give that up. Here the most relevant comparison may be with the European Union, where different legal systems do create problems but they have largely been solved. I am not an expert on legal matters, but it seems conceivable that ways could be found for the two systems to exist side-by-side, perhaps with greater effort made to consolidate commercial law.
Even though I don’t believe that China is going to fragment, the trend is towards giving more autonomy to the regions, and it is conceivable that either this will lead to the creation of a federal structure (as per the United States) or even something more akin to the European Union – or perhaps a bit of both. If you look at the Franco-German concept of how power should be split between the EU and the individual countries something similar could make sense for Hong Kong and China.
Thinking slightly more radically, the growth of free-trade areas and the interest in currency unions may change the whole concept of a nation state, and again allow Hong Kong to exist as a separate entity alongside the rest of China, within a larger grouping.
Democracy is another potentially difficult issue, but I expect China to continue making (slow) progress, and given that Hong Kong is already a special case it shouldn’t be a problem to allow that to continue after 2047.
The key point as far as I am concerned is that as China continues to develop, we will increasingly start to think of Hong Kong as a Chinese city, better in some respect and worse in others, but the physical and psychological barriers will disappear. If in thirty years time we are still worried about what will happen in 2047 (beyond the legal technicalities) it will indicate that there is something wrong, and China has not made the progress we expected. I think that’s unlikely, and we’ll probably be wondering why on earth anyone ever worried about it.
Personally, given that I never planned to come to Hong Kong in the first place, still less had any thoughts of living here permanently, I have taken the view that it’s fairly pointess to worry too much about what will happen in the future. Good people can thrive anywhere, and in the unlikely event that life in Hong Kong became intolerable there are plenty of other places to live!
Ordinary Gweilo 
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