The Best China

For many people in Hong Kong, that alienated Chinese territory, the double commemoration of National Day and Mid Autumn Festival in 2017 was a sombre one. On the 1st of October, we acknowledged that disquiet by launching a new series in China Heritage titled ‘Hong Kong, The Best China’ 香港, 最好的中國. The title of the series was suggested by a remark made by John Minford in an interview given to the Hong Kong Economic Journal 信報 in April 2016: when John’s mother entertained guests, she would make a point of bringing out ‘the best China’. An effort was necessary, John went on to observe, to preserve ‘the best China’, much of which can be found in Hong Kong.

Our Hong Kong-related Heritage Journal entries presented below incorporate previously published materials — essays, satires, poems, translations and commentaries — that have appeared from 1 July 2017, the twentieth anniversary of Beijing’s take over of the former British crown territory.

From October 2018, ‘The Best China’ also includes essays, translations and interviews related to ‘The Other China’, that is the China of the heart and mind not dominated by the Communist party-state.

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In the first instalment of ‘Hong Kong, The Best China’, we introduced readers to recent commentaries by the veteran journalist Lee Yee 李怡 (李秉堯). Founding editor of The Seventies Monthly 七十年代月刊 (later renamed The Nineties Monthly) Lee Yee has been a prominent commentator on Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwan politics, as well as the global scene, for over forty-five years. His position has gone from that of being a sympathetic interlocutor with the People’s Republic in the late 1970s to that of outspoken rebel and man of conscience from the early 1980s. For decades Lee has analysed Hong Kong politics and society with a clarity of vision, and in a clarion voice, rare among the territory’s writers. The essays translated in The Best China are from ‘Ways of the World’ 世道人生, the regular column Lee Yee writes for Apple Daily 蘋果日報.

The Best China

The Ai Weiwei Interview