{"id":9342,"date":"2017-10-01T01:52:25","date_gmt":"2017-09-30T15:52:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinaheritage.net\/?page_id=9342"},"modified":"2025-03-11T09:01:16","modified_gmt":"2025-03-10T22:01:16","slug":"hong-kong-apostasy","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/chinaheritage.net\/hong-kong-apostasy\/","title":{"rendered":"Hong Kong Apostasy"},"content":{"rendered":"

For many people in Hong Kong, that alienated Chinese territory, the double commemoration\u00a0of 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<\/em>\u00a0titled ‘Hong Kong, The Best China’ \u9999\u6e2f, \u6700\u597d\u7684\u4e2d\u570b. The title of the series was suggested by a remark made by John Minford in an interview<\/a>\u00a0given to the Hong Kong Economic Journal<\/em> \u4fe1\u5831 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.<\/p>\n

Our Hong Kong-related Heritage Journal<\/em> entries presented below\u00a0incorporate previously published materials \u2014 essays, satires, poems, translations and commentaries \u2014 that have appeared from 1 July 2017, the twentieth anniversary of Beijing’s take over of\u00a0the former British crown territory.<\/p>\n

From October 2018, ‘The Best China’ also includes essays, translations and interviews related to ‘The Other China’, that is the China of hearts and minds not dominated by the Communist party-state.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In the first instalment of\u00a0‘Hong Kong, The Best China’, we introduced readers to recent commentaries by the veteran journalist\u00a0Lee Yee \u674e\u6021<\/a>\u00a0(\u674e\u79c9\u582f). Founding editor of\u00a0The Seventies Monthly <\/em>\u4e03\u5341\u5e74\u4ee3\u6708\u520a<\/a>\u00a0(later renamed\u00a0The Nineties Monthly<\/em>) Lee Yee has been\u00a0a prominent\u00a0commentator 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\u00a0with the People’s Republic in the late 1970s to that of outspoken rebel and man of conscience from the early\u00a01980s. For decades Lee has analysed\u00a0Hong 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\u00a0‘Ways of the World’ \u4e16\u9053\u4eba\u751f<\/a>, the regular column Lee Yee wrote for Apple Daily<\/em> \u860b\u679c\u65e5\u5831<\/a>\u00a0until its demise under the National Security Law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong from 1 July 2020.<\/p>\n