Anyone who knows Hong Kong, and who has been observing our progress over the past year or so, will be aware that the scene has changed dramatically.

Twelve months ago we were still recovering from the prolonged after-eff ects of a severe economic depression that had brought our vital stock and property markets to a virtual standstill.

We were just beginning to breathe a sigh of relief as we emerged from the shadows of the H1N1 crisis that had left us greatly demoralized and crippled our tourism industry.

But today, just twelve months down the road, we almost have moved into another landscape - exchanging gloom and depression for blue skies and sunshine. To anyone who knows Hong Kong really well, this news will

come as no surprise. For with us it was ever thus; down one moment, up the next, we fall flat on our faces, pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and carry on running. Even in our darkest moments,

when we seem to have taken a wrong turn somewhere, we have the knack of fi nding and striking the right match. We see our way forward and we press on again. For us the track was never even, the route never clearly defi ned. All through our history it has been one long obstacle course, and how could it have been otherwise? For most of that history we were a tiny outpost, wrested from our parent sub-continent by the unequal treaties resulting from incursions by a predatory colonial power. It may have seemed a mere hairline on the map, but the political divide was immense. The mainland went one way, and we another.

The Korean War brought our trade with the mainland to a standstill and forced us, virtually overnight, to change from a trading entrepot to an exporter of our own manufactured goods. We survived the spillover

of the cultural revolution, the repercussions of the Vietnam War, and we took the brunt of the exodus of fl eeing Vietnamese

refugees, fought tough trade sanctions imposed by some of our prime markets and struggled to make the world aware that we could not only make our own

products but make them well, under a label we could wear with pride. We weathered drought and flood, torrent and typhoon, disease

and epidemic and all the extremes and vagaries of a volatile stock market. Cynics may ask, "can it keep up its tireless momentum when its historic purpose is lost, and it is no longer a marvellous anomaly but just another city of China?" It is a question others have been asking - and answering it - ever since they watched Hong Kong return to the motherland at midnight on June 30, 1997. They will doubtless go on asking and answering it, with their same jaundiced conclusions, every time we celebrate another anniversary of that historic landmark. For it somehow irks many of them to accept that we have not only survived the transition but have found a new way forward.

Hard as it may seem to recall, we are now approaching the thirteenth commemoration of our new beginning as a Special Administrative Region of China, and it is surely time we were left to

answer the question for ourselves. The author is former secretary for home affairs of the Hong Kong

SAR government.

(HK Edition 04/28/2010 page1)