Dealing with the Dragon - A Year in the New Hong Kong Book

Jonathan Fenby, a journalist with a high-profile track-record as a former editor of the South China Morning Post, monitored the metamorphosis of Hong Kong, globalisation's Far Eastern cash point, from British colony to Beijing constituency. The transformation was beset with inevitable traumas and in his book he chronicles, with his customary flair for the crisply tailored pen-portrait and the telling anecdote, the events of the year 1999. It is a diary about diplomacy and discord, the filthy rich and the filthy conditions of the less fortunate. Cash collides with a cultural past as those in power jockey for position and those without it jostle for survival. In Fenby's revealing account the motivation of material advancement triumphed over what he sees as missed opportunities. Hong Kong heads into the new millennium leaving behind what he describes as challenges that have been ducked, corners that have been cut, bulwarks demolished and coherence abandoned. Why this is so, Fenby sets out in descriptive and factual detail, penetrating the power politics, the legal wrangles and corruption. His monthly journal takes him from the Peoples' Palace in the former Peking down to the Crazy Horse Saloon in Hong Kong. In the process he produces an exhilarating portrait of a vibrant city having to invest itself in new beginnings whose outcome will be as relevant to the Occidental West as to the Orient.--Michael Hatfield.Read More