Blindsided: why does Beijing keep getting Hong Kong wrong?
- In a series of in-depth articles on the unrest rocking Hong Kong, the Post goes behind the headlines to look at the underlying issues, current state of affairs and where it is all heading
- Here, we look at how Beijing fails to grasp the sentiment of the city
Hong Kong businessman Sam Tsang does not like to talk politics. As a senior business consultant who travels frequently to mainland China and Taiwan, he knows silence is often golden.
He was in for a shock when, one night in mid-July, his boss introduced him to two “mainland researchers” who were visiting Hong Kong. That evening, all they talked about was politics.
“They asked a lot of questions about the anti-extradition bill protests,” Tsang said. “They wanted to know why Hong Kong people were so angry. Why did we hate Carrie Lam and the police so much, etc? I told them I’m an apolitical person and cannot represent anyone. Still, they were interested.”
Tsang said the two mainlanders – who only told him vaguely that they “worked for the central government” – even showed him some excerpts from their previous reports to Beijing.
“In the end, I could not bite my tongue and asked them ‘how could you have got things so wrong?’”
