This time I came in from Germany via Beijing, not over the North Pole from Toronto. The timing was deliberate, not just in a professional context. I always try to arrive when the Bauhinia starts to blossom. Bauhinia × blakeana is a sterile hybrid, found on the shore near Pok Fu Lam in the 1880s and propagated ever since by cuttings. Every tree in the city is a clone of that one find. It is the flower on the flag, and it opens in the weeks after National Day, which is as good a calendar as anything astronomical.
I stayed at The Helena May on Garden Road, which is a declared monument now, and still a women’s club, founded in 1916, that tolerates a few male associates in the annex, as long as they are gentlemen and receive a reference from one of the ladies in the front building. There is no lobby music, no key card, no “guest experience”. There is a library, a reading room, a garden and a function room, also used for ballet exercise. It is off the beaten track in the only way that still counts in Hong Kong: nobody is trying to sell you anything.
The mood in the city is good. I want to say this first, because it is not what you read in Europe. The economic woes after Covid are still visible if you look: shutters in Causeway Bay, office towers with floors for lease, restaurants that changed hands twice since my last visit. But people are not gloomy about it. First of all, Hong Kongers know how to succeed against all odds. And the positive effects of the integration into Guangdong is proceeding, and you can feel it on the ground. The Northern Metropolis is no longer a brochure, cross-border traffic is back to where it was and beyond, and half my former colleagues now spend their weekends in Shenzhen because it is cheaper and, frankly, more fun. The Greater Bay Area was for years a slogan. It is becoming a commute.
And Hong Kong now has a plan. For the first time in its history the SAR has drafted its own Five-Year Plan (2026–2030), aligned with the national 15th Five-Year Plan. The consultation ran over the summer and drew more than 16,000 submissions; the plan itself arrived this autumn alongside the Policy Address. Europeans tend to flinch at the words “five-year plan”. They forget that every large corporation has one. At Volkswagen we called it the Planungsrunde, and it was no less political. Frankly, Germany, France and others would also need a plan – not to mention the US. Perhaps they should come over and learn how to do it. What strikes me about Hong Kong’s version is not the ambition for the city itself, which is considerable, but that it defines Hong Kong’s contribution to the rest of China. It says what the city is for. Try to find that out in Berlin.
I taught again at the HKU MBA, and I enjoyed the students enormously. The job market is tough at the moment, for graduates here as everywhere, and I tailored the lectures accordingly: more application and while fully immersing in Artificial Intelligence, also build on and develop human strengths. But employability was only half of it. I wanted them to see that in a tough market the better option is not just to find a job, but to create them, in China and the world.
I also went back to Lamma Island, my previous home. My South China Sea indicator: the number of ships anchored and in maintenance behind the cover of the outer islands tells you more about the world economy than most quarterly reports. The instrument still works. There is a lot of steel sitting idle out there, waiting for cargo that is not coming yet. I take that as a reading, not a verdict.
I saw a lot of friends. Not all, unfortunately. Time flew, the weeks were full, and some people you only realise you missed when you are already at the airport. That is Hong Kong: the city is small and compact, with an amazing infrastructure. You can make up to 6 meetings a day. But still hard to fit all into a few weeks of calendar.
From here I fly on to the Middle East. I am watching the results of the elections in Israel, held yesterday, and of the US midterms next week, and I hope, against experience, that they might induce some impulses for peace in the region and elsewhere. But even more carefully I watch where and when military assets are moving towards the region, as far as that is public information (you can’t hide an aircraft carrier). Deeds are a better guide than words. The current US president is either trying to confuse everybody or is confused himself. I honestly cannot tell, and I am not sure it matters. Of course we need to take him, his cartoonish cabinet and aides, as well has some of his fellow autocrats rather serious. Like “a monkey playing with a hand grenade” (обезьяна, играющая с ручной гранатой) as they say in Russian.
