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In praise of the SCMP’s ‘Around the Nation’

This blog post can also be read at SCMP.COM –

http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1851487/good-bad-wacky-china-praise-posts-around-nation-news

A woman destroys an ATM machine in a fit of rage. Another wins a hair-growing competition. A man, drunk, drowns in a manure pit. I know I am far from alone in finding the South China Morning Post’s Around the Nation page one of its most compelling sections. Countless conversations with editorial staff and SCMP loyalists assure me of this. Often, however, there is a tone of slight hesitation in their admissions – a wavering, I think, lest too pronounced an enthusiasm be taken to intimate a lack of seriousness about news.

Anyone familiar with this blog will acknowledge that if it does not always provide the final word in serious-minded comment, then it will at least include one or two from somewhere nearing that end of things. More generally, the SCMP is considered a serious organ – the sub-editors may quibble at the word, but its news and analysis tends more towards the intellectual than what used to be called “human interest”, even when it was about pets. With ATN, this order is subverted. Reader, a word here in its praise.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m referring to, buy the paper and you’ll see it: Around the Nation is a round-up of stories that have been making the headlines in sundry corners of the mainland. Some are routine – a new infrastructure project here, a government denial about something over there. Others are anecdotal but still marginally un-extraordinary: a man cracks a window during a quarrel on a bus with his girlfriend; a woman has to receive medical help after playing mahjong for three days solid. The most memorable can usually be filed under bizarre, gruesome, heartwarming, comical or downright appalling, although none of these categories is exclusive.

You would probably be right to identify this as tabloid journalism. A fine tradition, and one in which I’ve dabbled, and frequently defend, but make no mistake – it’s often voyeuristic, mawkish and vulgar. The snobs have a point. Doubtless, too, it serves as an instrument of distraction, particularly in a country such as China where “proper” journalism gets throttled. And this is all before one considers how things have evolved online, where it seems the only way for media organisations to thrive is to deploy armies of clickbait wallahs to churn out titillating content, and to hell with its veracity.

There is, I think, a case to be made that our appetite for the weird and wonderful, the salacious and the shocking, is such that a journalism that caters to it offers a valve – one that’s not inimical to but rather part of life in a civilised society. This applies, moreover, regardless of how far that society may or may not be shaped by the principles of Athenian democracy. In its way, though, ATN offers both less and more than this valve function.

For one, ATN is mediated, a digest from other sources, for English readers in Hong Kong and elsewhere. There’s therefore an element of revelling in the wacky things that seem to happen in the mainland, puzzlement at the jarring effects created by awkwardly-translated phrases or sketchily-explained cultural mores, uncertainty at the degree of comic intentions. (What are we to make, for example, of this detail, included in a story about a pig which surprised visitors to a Buddhist temple in Wenzhou province by prostrating itself as if in prayer? “Photos posted online amazed some internet users, while others claimed the animal was suffering from a vitamin E deficiency.”)

At the same time, details omitted leave us wanting to know more, or attempting to piece things together in our imaginations, as we skip from the fantastical to the mundane to the brutal, mind-mapping the country, wondering what’s fact, what’s hearsay and what’s been embellished by eager hacks. The stories about mahjong casualties and failed blackmail attempts on local officials have an ageless quality, like folktales. Earlier this year it seems there was a spate of burglars breaking into homes then falling asleep.

Meanwhile, the outbreaks of violence or cruelty, the crazy people doing crazy things, the health scares, the exam stress – all contribute to a sense of modern China, even if they don’t tell us what modern China is. In Henan, a grave-visiting business opens for people who don’t have time to visit their own deceased relatives. In Chongqing, a farmer sells his ox to go looking for his runaway son.

ATN may be tabloid journalism by numbers on the one hand; on the other it offers a dispassionate window on a diverse country enduring the pangs of development. All human life is there. Animal life too.


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How the positivity industry prefers us to worry

This blog post can also be read at SCMP.COM –

http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1830575/zero-sum-game-how-positivity-industry-prefers-us-worry

I’ve been receiving a torrent of communications from the positive thinking brigade lately. I don’t know what prompted it. Maybe it was something I googled. Or something I wrote on here: maybe I create such an impression of charlatanry that I’ve been fingered for susceptibility to charlatanry in general. Reader, how should I know?

At any rate, the email invites have been coming thick and fast: from mind coaches and self-belief gurus, character educators and positivity activators. They wish to show me the way, they say, to unbridled confidence, success, happiness. Some merely offer to help me build my “personal brand”.

As described in The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-being, a recent book by a chap named William Davies, this is all very lucrative stuff. Vast operations are at work nowadays to benefit from making us worry – about how optimally engaged we are in our jobs; how fulfilled and confident we are in ourselves; in short, how brilliantly we’re doing. I doubt very much if the sum of human happiness is increased at all.

According to Davies some occupational psychologists are keen on companies sacking workers who do not show the proper enthusiasm for their advances. The Maoist tenor of that approach might sound a little extreme, but it does seem to chime with my experience on the handful of occasions when I have been forced by employers to attend motivational workshops and the like.

What I have noticed, see, is that for everyone in these situations who instinctively gets it, for everyone who has his or her self-belief calibrated the way the psychologists might desire, others are there out of fear: fear of not getting ahead; worse, of being left behind. Often they appear to have been ambushed by the notion that being bumptious and insufferable is the only way to get where they want to be.

Perhaps the idea that most frightens such people, then, is this: that self-belief and self-promotion may not in fact be enough, on their own, to guarantee making it to the top, that no matter how good your personal brand or your CV, unfortunately other factors, such as ability and, yes, connections, also come into play.

As an aside, a couple of years ago the veteran Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten published a memorable, if somewhat canting, riposte to a young journalist who had asked him how he’d built his personal brand. The main lesson was never to intimate that a columnist might be a self-publicist. However, Weingarten also railed, righteously, against the internet generation’s preoccupation with “eyeballs” and against that weasel thing “content” (which, lexicography being satire’s carousel, must – I submit – be ripe for replacement by the equally nebulous “ingredients”).

The point, sort of, is that brands are essentially shallow constructs – no matter how they’re dressed up in marketing’s “Vision, Mission, Values” b***cks. Online, though, everyone’s at it: the imperative is to demonstrate how fascinating and fabulous you are. Problem is, a world full of shiny, happy, self-confident people doesn’t ring all that true. No matter what the “science” of positive thinking says, and no matter how much we fake it, we can’t all be winners all of the time, can we?

Maybe it’s partly a question of upbringing: I was always taught not to bang on about myself, not to brag. If nothing else, socially it’s a killer – nobody’s really interested in people who are full of themselves; it’s the listeners and the empathisers who tend to make the best friends. And the same must go, I suppose, for the super-engaged and the super-motivated – the grown teacher’s pets who spend every waking moment composing work emails. How do they have lives?

We ought to worry, I think, for the future mental health of those toddlers we keep hearing about who have four-page CVs and are being put through kindergarten interviews. For most people, I imagine, the knowledge that the world does not revolve around oneself arrives as a blessed relief. Unfortunately, the plainest truths often run against the cultural grain.


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Overheard at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club

This blog post can also be read at SCMP.COM –

http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1823084/overheard-foreign-correspondents-club-handful-vignettes-hong

“Now George, I’ve said I’ll take care of this so behave yourself.” It’s late and two elderly English couples are trying to settle their bill. The women perch squiffily on their stools, looking about ready to drop off. George is putting up a valiant effort but it’s clear he’s losing ground. “This is my club, George, and when we go to your club you always pay for us.” And then comes the clincher: “It’s just Christian values, George. They might be unfashionable but that’s how I was brought up.” A reverential lull is allowed to fall on the conversation. “Christian bloody values.”

“I think we have to be wary of making FGM an issue about ‘us’ and ‘them’, you know,” says an Australian woman, loudly. “The whole attitude is very neo-colonial, don’t you think? I mean, who gets to decide that western ideas about sexual freedom are superior? Colonialism was all about male phallic dominance – we mustn’t encourage a colonialism of the clitoris.”

“It sounds just like the old days,” says the local Chinese journalist, referring to a recent flashpoint: the incident of the Swedish diplomat throwing a tantrum at staff after being denied a table for 12 guests. “In fact, some things haven’t moved on at all,” she tells her companions, three suited western males. “White people have always felt superior in this club, but foreign journalists are still paid more in Hong Kong, so what’s changed there?” The men sip their drinks and give the matter some thought. “Of course, the Vikings had a decent-sized empire,” offers one. “But they never made it this far east.”

A Scotsman is telling a story. “I’ve just come out my building and I’m walking down the hill,” he says. “And you know where those posh flats across the road are? Right, well I’m going past and something catches my eye, like something going down really quick. And I look over behind this skip on the road and there’s a guy lying there. His legs are all mangled and he’s not moving, and he’s, well he’s f***ing dead – there’s no point even checking for a pulse. What the f*** can you do? So, anyway, I call for an ambulance and – no kidding – the guy says they’re too busy and can I call back. Eventually I persuade him to take a note of where I’m calling from and hang up. Meanwhile, there’s a crowd of people gathered around the dead guy and they’re all out with their phones taking pictures. Seriously, I have no words.”

Something dabs the right corner of my vision like a damp cloth. I look across the bar and a couple are crying together; sotto voce, yet somehow unguardedly. Look away, instinct says – but these don’t seem like normal, private tears. He’s mid-40s, with an intent face, Western; she’s younger, Asian, but with a CNN accent gone slurry from wine. It’s 4pm. They’re insensibly sloshed, holding hands and, I realise, praying to the Almighty Lord. Through a cloud of ecstasy, I hear her call: “Help me, Jesus, to be my better self.” The bartender, on his rounds, sets a bowl of peanuts before them. “More drinks?” he asks.

“Well, y’see, when y’leave the place you can get lifetime membership,” says Jack. “That’s what I got – this here card. Just a piece of cardboard back in those days, with your number on it and the photograph. That’s me there. Yeah, well, I was considerably younger then. It’s been 20 years since we went home to America. Always wanted to come visit again, my wife and I, but we never did, God rest her soul. I’m here now, though. Yessir, I’m doing it like we said. Changes? Oh, you bet. Hey, but you know what? It’s like old Marcus Aurelius said – the universe is change. I’m just taking it all in. And y’know, the FCC is still standing. That’s something.”


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The gospel according to Mr Magic Miracles

You can also read this blog post at SCMP.COM –

http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1802903/more-life-money-gospel-according-famous-mr-magic-miracles-mover-and

Mr Magic Miracles is explaining to me how the interests of business and health are inimical. “You charge a lot of money, you decide you don’t want to make the patient better,” he says. “You just want him to come back and pay you more money. Me, I cure people instead. Too much money, I don’t need.”

It occurs to me to that “Miracles” as he most frequently refers to himself, might be on the cusp of some kind of revelation – an outlier’s indictment of social good being thrown over for cartel interests, or some such. But he’s driving, and I don’t wish to distract his attention from the large scrapbook of testimonials he is now excitedly leafing through at the wheel for my benefit.

In an excellent column in the newspaper last week, Peter Guy pondered whether predatory capitalism must always prevail over the common interest in Hong Kong. The city, he wrote, “is obsessed with wealth and its symbols. There isn’t much more to the Hong Kong psyche besides making money.”

I won’t venture to gainsay Peter’s pessimism. There is a spirit of well-reasoned wisdom about it. But still – here I am in Miracles’ van and he is preaching rather a different gospel.

According to his card, Miracles, aka Patrick Yan Kin Lam, is a “mover and healer”. I’ve been helping a friend to move house; the job’s a good ‘un and Miracles is dropping me off. That’s the moving part. Now he’s telling me about his magic powers.

“Everything is connected,” he says. “My technique is like a massage. Something is blocked in the body, it causes pain – I find the blockage and re-open it. No medicines, no herbs, nothing. I learned this by myself. By experience I can find the blockage. ”

A spry 63, Miracles’ story begins 30 years ago, with a friend who was suffering from chronic back ache. “Many times, doctors treat him, but none of them can help. Common sense tells me I must be able to help my friend. He trusted me – and so I tried to use my own way. And it works! After a few times practising on him, no pain.”

In the early days, it took Miracles 10-12 minutes to send his patients into remission. Nowadays, two minutes is usually long enough. “Two minutes!” he yelps. He can hardly believe it himself.

The scrapbook is a catalogue of satisfaction. Miracles’ clients are Chinese, Western, Japanese, Russian, Filipino. Their ailments range from back injuries and sciatica to bad sinuses, colds, high fever and insomnia. There is a woman who had been told she’d soon be in a wheelchair – cured. A man plagued by sporting injuries has been able to extend his footballing career. He signs off “Marlon Brando”, but the entries appear genuine and all include phone numbers.

The medical establishment is not, as a rule, interested in the likes of Miracles, but that hasn’t stopped doctors coming to him with their own complaints. “One was a chiropractor,” he says. “He couldn’t touch his toes. After Miracles – perfect. I found some dead air inside his spine and I used my finger to force it out, to get rid of the dead air. I don’t expect professional doctors to understand this – they do not research dead air.”

I ask him about the removals business. Wouldn’t he better off phasing it out and focusing on his healing work?

“Moving business is OK,” he says. “I can support myself, support my family. I don’t want to retire. What are you doing with your life, retired? Playing mahjong? From time to time I hurt my back, but providing I can reach, I can fix myself. Miracles is word-of-mouth – any treatment is HK$300. But it’s no use for business, because my patients only come once. To me, it’s against my conscience anyway – human beings should help one another.”

My stop is up ahead, but Miracles pulls the van over at a 7/11, jumps out and returns moments later with a can of Blue Girl. “For you,” he says. “My VIP customer, ah! Tell your friends about Magic Miracles.” I find myself quite disheartened at having no medical infirmities to be cured.

 


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Undone by fake Lafite

You can read this post at SCMP.COM –

http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1694736/fake-chinese-wine-common-now-hong-kongs-amusing-vanity-licence-plates

Becoming inured to conspicuous wealth is a quirk of life in Hong Kong. Stirred into distraction near my office in Central by a revving Lamborghini or Porsche, I might well remark to myself “there goes an expensive sports car”. Having heard tell of a VIAGRA and a SATAN, I might even scan its personalised plates for some momentary amusement. But, pace their owners’ intentions, after a while these thoroughbreds of our gridlocked precincts come to seem, well, commonplace.

A Sheung Wan sidewalk stacked with cases of fine Bordeaux, long the turbo-consumer’s tipple of choice in these parts, might therefore be calculated to induce a similarly world-weary reaction. Something less passive reared in me, however, as, on a mid-day saunter, I was forced to circumnavigate easily HK$2million worth of Lafites and Latours, resting on the journey from loading van to some out-of-sight restaurant holding cell. Mingled with my excitement – at the thought of liberating a case and working a crowbar on it for a lunchtime straightener since you ask, yes – was the nagging reminder that I have some Lafite-Rothschild 1996 doing absolutely nothing for me in a cellar in London.

I don’t make up the rules; I’m just gullible enough to have invested, modestly, in fine wine when I was told it would outperform everything else in sight. If European aristocrats, the uber-charlatans who rate wine growths and multitudes of newly-minted Asians conspire to create a big fat money market in the stuff, then carpe diem, no?

Well, that was a while back now. Of late, prices at auction, for Château Lafite in particular, have sunk to at least a ten-year low on the back of President Xi Jinping turning the screw on corruption, guanxi and extravagance – his trapping of tigers and quashing of flies. Now even the tigers daren’t drink Lafite, even if it’s mixed with Coca-Cola (terribly infra dig – who’s to say the whole campaign wasn’t motivated by embarrassment, besides Xi’s thirst for power?). Or at least that’s what’s reported; I do wonder what they’re drinking at Zhongnanhai these days. And the wolves – are they to be spared?

In truth, the bottom had been falling out of the whole business for some time, owing to another facet of capitalism with Chinese characteristics: fakery. In its upward march, the country has excelled itself in many spheres, but in the standard of its fakes it is in a league of its own. Sure, the Ferraris and Lamborghinis have been easy enough to detect, but the best of the wine fakers have been so successful that they’ve fooled serious investors, auctioneers, even oenologists. It’s set some people back, myself included, but what can you do? In the purity of the deception and in the denuding of European exceptionalism, it almost merits awe.

Nobody really complains about the mass-produced but largely convincing knock-offs of Western oil paintings you can buy from Shenzhen’s Dafen Village. But then faking it, or at least repetition, is by and large the name of the game in the art racket anyway. Fear of cliché begets cliché in a world in which artists and critics collude to take themselves in – convincing themselves that they are, respectively, purveyors and arbiters of originality. It’s all so much intellectual evasion, but so long as the price tag convinces the purchaser he’s buying Art, it ticks along. And so it goes with the Lamborghini and the Bordeaux – their prestige depends on faith in the power of money itself.

By the way, marked up in a restaurant a bottle of that Lafite will still cost you HK$9,500, easy.


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Trivial hirsute

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post’s Post Magazine as a Rant column

Jesus Christ, famously a December birthday boy, declares in Matthew 6:3: “Let not the left hand know what the right hand doeth”. In other words, give alms for the sake of it, not so you can tell yourself, and everyone else, that you’re an alms-giver. In humility, there is beauty and grace.

If male facial hair is any guide, it cannot be said that November is a month for such things. The wisdom anchoring “Movember” – now a fixture on global calendars, with its mandate on men to grow a “mo”, or mo-ustache (clever, eh?) for 30 days – seems to be: “Let the left whisker, and by extension the world, know exactly what the right whisker doeth.”

Look chaps, I know you’re doing it for a cause – raising awareness of men’s health issues and suchlike – and if you’ve badgered me for money you’ll get it. And I know that, y’ know, you care about stuff. But what’s to stop us all doing charity, thoughtfulness and all the rest of it without the circus – and the endless selfies?

Movember, now in its tenth year, was just the start of it, unfortunately. Singposting that you’re good / moral / give a stuff – whether via self-defacement (an off-putting Movember tache here, an Ice Bucket Challenge video there) or some small act of self-empowerment (giving up the fags for “Stoptober”: that’s a real thing in the UK) is where charity is at now. It’s like social media has made little celebrities of us and we’re all running our own PR – you only care if you care conspicuously.

Narcissism is at large, unshaven and wearing philanthropy’s trousers.


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Somewhat Occupied in Hong Kong

This article appeared in Scotland’s Sunday Herald

The Chinese government hasn’t had a great deal to say publicly about events in Hong Kong over the past week or so, but it was inevitable that it would warn of the financial costs. According to business associations cited on Wednesday by state media, the loss to Hong Kong’s economy from a week of protests that has put life as we know it in the city somewhat on hold, will be at least HK$40 billion (£3.2 billion).

One operation that has certainly prospered is the 24-hour McDonald’s restaurant in the Admiralty Centre, an ugly shopping arcade that yields access to the Admiralty Mass Transit Rail (MTR) station, formerly the site of the city’s naval dockyards and right now the epicentre of Occupy Hong Kong. ‘Pure capitalism’ is often said to rule here, and Hongkongers do enjoy a visit to McDonald’s (the city has 234 outlets, serving a city of 7 million people). With tens of thousands having reclaimed the streets outside, its convenience foods seem never to have been more appreciated.

The “umbrella revolution” has been a unique sort of revolution. So-labelled by someone on Twitter – in New York – after images of protesters using upturned umbrellas to defend themselves against pepper spray went global last weekend, it is self-evidently no revolution at all. It has at times felt like one, though.

“It’s like a utopian state around here,” one protester, a 48-year-old salesman, told the Sunday Herald on Wednesday night, gesturing at Connaught Road, an eight-lane artery taken over by a mass of humanity. Along this vast demo site – and at smaller sit-ins in Causeway Bay, to the east, and Mong Kok, across the harbour in Kowloon – a new order had been established. Occupy Hong Kong is nothing if not well-run. There are First Aid points and makeshift Democracy Class Rooms, where activists with megaphones attempt to raise their fellow citizens’ political consciousness. Volunteers wander around with black bin bags, ensuring not so much as a cigarette butt is allowed to litter the scene; others crush plastic water bottles for recycling; some hand out cooling patches and crackers. On Tuesday a string quintet struck up a version of Do You Hear the People Sing? from Les Miserables, on an occupied stretch of road outside one of the city’s biggest department stores.

“No cars have been vandalised, no shops looted, nobody is throwing anything at the police,” another protester observed, with some pride, as we lingered by the window – no shutters – of the Admiralty Centre’s Audi showroom. His pride was widely shared; equally, the sheer numbers of Hongkongers who had come out to support anti-government sentiment were a source of surprise. “We all thought that the Hong Kong people were selfish and only interested in money,” is how one young journalist puts it.

What brought them out, then? The short answer is the heavy-handed tactics used by police against student protesters. There are several longer answers, but the first requires some technical explaining. Hong Kong has never chosen its leaders. However, written into the Sino-British Declaration of 1984 – under which the British and Chinese governments agreed the colony would revert back to Chinese sovereignty in July 1997 – and subsequently reiterated in Hong Kong’s Basic Law, its mini-constitution, is a commitment to eventual universal suffrage in elections for the city’s Chief Executive. Article 45 of the Basic Law states: “The ultimate aim is the selection of the chief executive by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures.”

Various pledges were given, down the years, by the Chinese Communist Party, that Hong Kong would be allowed to determine its own democratic path under the “one country, two systems” arrangement. But ultimately they settled on a conservative interpretation of Article 45: this year, both the Chinese State Council and the Hong Kong government have reiterated that candidates for the chief executive election of 2017 must be nominated by a 1200-member committee roughly similar to that which directly chose current leader Leung Chun-ying in 2012. In other words, people will get to choose between two, possibly three, candidates, approved by Beijing loyalists; civil or political party nominations are off the table. In June, a State Council white paper claimed “comprehensive jurisdiction” over Hong Kong, leading many to fear the city’s much-cherished rule of law was under threat.

The campaign group Occupy Central, led by Benny Tai, a law professor, had planned to bring only the city’s Central district – its financial heart – to a standstill, from October 1, National Day across China. Things changed, however, after a week-long class boycott organised by the Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS) and Scholarism – an activist group formed two years ago by secondary school students – took an unexpected turn. After young demonstrators stormed a public square in front of the government headquarters in Admiralty which had been zoned off, they were held there overnight by police and subsequently set upon with pepper spray. Several arrests were made, including that of Scholarism’s skinny 17-year-old leader Joshua Wong, although all were later released. Occupy Central announced its civil disobedience campaign would begin immediately and thousands rallied to the protest site.

Last Sunday, as the swelling crowds attempted to block off major routes across the north of Hong Kong Island, another stand-off developed. This time, police attempted to clear the streets with batons, pepper spray, tear gas and threats of opening fire with rubber bullets. Again, the streets filled up. Having botched their response from the first, by Monday the police were standing off and Occupy Hong Kong had taken on a momentum of its own. “Mr Tai and the other leaders never expected so many people to join, or so many spots in the city to be occupied,” a young office worker told The Sunday Herald. “We’re angry because we were provoked.”

Angry or not, by midweek the atmosphere was almost euphoric: hundreds of thousands had discovered a commonality of purpose; the public square belonged, squarely, to the public; yellow ribbons fluttered like a thousand flowers blooming. But still, there was a nervousness. On Thursday, the Chinese Communist Party warned, via state media, of “unimaginable consequences” if demonstrations continued, and called on Hong Kong to “deploy police enforcement decisively”.

At a press conference late that evening, Leung rejected calls for him to stand down but announced chief secretary Carrie Lam would hold talks with protest leaders. The authorities had appeared to hope the protests might just fizzle out, but enough have expressed a determination to stay until they see evidence that the government means to address their concerns. Others, in a city where tens of thousands mark the anniversary of 1989’s Tiananmen Square massacre every year with a candlelit vigil, can’t help but feel apprehensive.

INA BRIEFING note prepared by a political risk analyst on Wednesday and shared with the Sunday Herald, he laments that the protesters had “no exit strategy”, and that their calls for Leung’s resignation had closed a window of opportunity for Beijing to grant a concession without losing face. “Even if… numbers dwindle to even 10% of current estimates, the continued disruption would require security forces to intervene… creating the conditions for a long burning fuse and ongoing confrontation and disruption,” he wrote, adding that: “If agent provocateurs from whatever side are successful… in fermenting confrontation the situation could spiral quickly downward to chaos.”

Since Friday, that prospect has reared its ugly head. With the overall police presence escalating once more, and scuffles breaking out between protesters and police near Leung’s office, there have also been skirmishes of a new sort in Mong Kok and Causeway Bay as some pro-Beijing elements have made their presence violently felt. According to reports, eight of the 19 men arrested following clashes in Mong Kok on Friday, when a group wearing masks attacked protesters, injuring several (including journalists), have triad backgrounds. Amnesty International said the police had failed in their duty to protect peaceful protesters from being attacked, while Occupy Central co-founder Chan Kin-man said the violence had been organised and planned and accused the government of being behind it in an effort to clear protest areas.

Whether or not that accusation holds truth, what’s clear is that the Hong Kong government’s failure to either quell or diffuse the protests will not please Beijing. And at present there are too many domestic and international issues that the Chinese Communist Party sees as threatening its survival – unrest in Xinjiang and Tibet; territorial disputes in the South China and East China Seas; internal party divisions – for it to be in any mood for compromise or retreat.

Awareness of this and of the fragility of Hong Kong’s semi-autonomous status has provided a wellspring of anger which has clearly fed into the current dissent. But there are other factors, too. For some decades, Hong Kong has benefited from being a “gateway to China” for multinational companies. With China’s economic rise and the gradual opening up of its economy, that gateway access to its markets via Hong Kong has become less paramount. No longer, then, quite so much the privileged middle man, Hong Kong has also had to contend with an influx of mainland Chinese with money. Inevitably, they have been blamed for overcrowding and rising prices – Hong Kong is now the second most expensive city in the world, behind London – and friction between Hongkongers and mainland visitors is rife.

Such concerns cannot easily be dismissed, particularly when they seem to affect all but the wealthiest. As one middle-aged, middle-class protester puts it: “We’re pessimistic about Hong Kong but a lot of it is about the economy. How can I have a good job? How can I support my family. The housing situation is crazy. But the government is not helping people at all. It’s corrupt – nobody trusts the people running things. We see no way out of this without new leaders.”

Tragically perhaps for the young idealists who have forged an inspired and at times inspiring grass-roots movement over the last week, it is reasonable to wonder whether the wider world truly cares about any of this. Certainly, many see the British government’s meek response – “I feel for the people of Hong Kong” is about as much as David Cameron could muster on Tuesday – as a betrayal of its obligations stemming from the Sino-British declaration. Trade with China trumps all, it seems.

In Hong Kong, though, regardless of the outcome, these events will shape a generation. Whatever lies in wait, student activists and the young have done more to focus minds on democracy than scores of pro-democracy politicians since the 1997 handover. Notwithstanding the possibility of an escalation of violence, it may be that they in themselves will be Occupy Hong Kong’s profoundest legacy.