Yesterday evening, Kylie and I met with Benny in JH170 to discuss some of the current happenings in Hong Kong. Benny is one of our leaders for our IACA ICR credit and is the one who took us to the IMA earlier this fall. Benny offered to meet with us this week as one of the final events for our ICR, and he came bearing a very interesting conversation regarding his recent trip to Hong Kong where there have been many riots and lots of civil unrest.
I really don’t know much about Hong Kong, aside from the fact it is one of the more modern cities of the east. Benny gave Kylie and I a nice history of the country and its geography to bring us up to speed. We learned about the British ties Hong Kong had/and still currently maintains to an extent. It was the last remaining British colony (words of Benny) and remained this way until the 1970’s. Hong Kong is located off of the southeast coast of China and poses a relatively rough landscape that made any sort of agriculture difficult. It was very rocky and relatively uninhabited besides a few fishing villages when it was first discovered to be used as a trade port.
Hong Kong has endured many conflicts prior to the one currently happening. Benny mentioned the Opium Wars (which was more tied to India and Europe as well as China) and the base of the conflict today which is essentially a struggle for independence, from a governing perspective, from China.
Elaborating on this ongoing struggle, Benny shared with us the experience he had while in Hong Kong just a few weeks ago. He was present for a district election, which was a bit confusing, but basically was just electing small governing bodies for Hong Kong. This created a massive turnout from the people of Hong Kong, as he said the streets were almost unusable from the masses of people. Hong Kong is currently battling the Communist ways of China taking influence in their country. Benny talked briefly about an imposed system by China where anyone accused of a crime in Hong Kong could be tried in China, which ultimately created rage from the people of Hong Kong as they would essentially just be thrown in jail for being from Hong Kong due to the Communist ways of the Chinese governing body.
It was really interesting to learn about Hong Kong. It is a very western society that battles with one of the worlds most powerful Communist nations. Its modernization competes with that of the U.S. as it has tunnels connecting it to the mainland which I thought was very fascinating from an engineering perspective. Benny talked about how it is a melting pot of cultures with anyone from the U.K. to the U.S. to Japan residing in Hong Kong. After learning about some of the history and the conflicts, I am definitely more interested in following Hong Kong’s political and economic climate over the next few years. In my opinion, it really does seem to be it’s own independent nation. Yet the constant Chinese presence makes this very difficult as I saw through Benny’s teaching. Overall, I learned a lot about this growing country and now hold new information and a new perspective on Hong Kong.