Determined

EVERY year on June 4th, thousands of people gather in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park to commemorate the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. The former British colony is the only place in China where large-scale mourning of the bloodshed is tolerated. This year crowds will gather as usual. But a growing number of people now criticise the event, arguing that Hong Kong should fight for its own causes, rather than marking the mainland’s struggles. The splintering of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong is a product of growing antipathy towards China. Other protest movements increasingly stress a separate identity in the territory too. The governments of Hong Kong and China are watching with alarm.

When Hong Kong reverted to Chinese rule in 1997, Chinese officials hoped that a gradual narrowing of the wealth gap between it and the mainland would help to overcome the misgivings of many Hong Kongers. There has been much evidence since then of the mainland’s growing success: millions of rich tourists have been pouring into Hong Kong to shop, China’s brightest students have been flocking to local universities and mainland professionals have been taking high-flying jobs in Hong Kong offices. Parts of the mainland increasingly resemble the territory at its southern tip that once glittered alone. Yet the more similar they become, the more that China and Hong Kong are growing apart—culturally, temperamentally and politically.