TikTok Hong Kong

Tik-Tok Hong Kong

Some places in the world just can’t ever seem to avoid being on a schedule and always racing against the clock. Hong Kong seems to have caught this disease in extremis. The Nineteenth Century was a time of great fascination by the world in China. Since the days of Marco Polo in the late Thirteenth Century, Europe has been drawn to China and its exotic goods. The tales brought back by Marco of his flirtations with Kublai Khan and Xanidu, the summer home of the Great Khan’s of the Mongol Empire, immortalized by Samuel Taylor Coleridge five hundred years after Marco’s epic voyage, may have added to that dream. Throughout the 1800’s, perhaps as a reaction to losing its closer colonies in the Americas, England spent a great deal of time focused on China. Strangely enough, the issue that brought them to blows with the Qing Dynasty during both the First and Second Opium Wars was the seemingly righteous attempt by the Chinese to restrict the opium trade. That was not considered fair play by the British. First destroying tea in Boston and next destroying chests of opium in Canton. As I have noted previously, the British Empire was beginning to fail and all it had was its global merchants and apparently they needed the drug trade to make ends meet. It’s hard to think of that as a justification for slaughtering hordes of unarmed and backward Chinese who’s weapons were one hundred years or more out of date, but it was harder and harder for the British to find people who they could push around as they had been used to doing for centuries.

So, Hong Kong Island became a British Territory in 1841, but my 1856 that was simply not good enough and they fought the Second Opium War, in concept for the same free trade ideals, but more likely because they were feeling a bit cramped in their new trading center in Hong Kong. The Taipan of Jardine Matheson was apparently one of those “enough is never enough” businessmen (more open ports, take over Kowloon and grant free access to the navigable Yangtzes) so he further twisted the tail of the British government to cut a deal with the Qing Dynasty to lease the New Territories around Hong Kong for an indefinite time. They settled on 99 years, which the British knew from their own real estate conventions was the economic equivalent to an outright purchase. Both the British and the Chinese had a solid appreciation for the time value of money concepts that made that 99-year lease convention so clear. That all happened in 1898 and Hong Kong spent the next century prospering like no other place in Asia and becoming the commercial hub for the region. There was that little respite between 1941-1945 when those pesky Japanese took the city (I always thought the Brits should have asked for a four year lease extension to cover that on some Force Majeur clause or other). But otherwise, life in the commercial heart of Asia carried on while Mao and his Cultural Revolution were busy killing twenty million of his countrymen in the name of the proletariat. Hong Kong was a consistent thorn in Mao’s side for sure during those years.

What became clear some ten or more years ahead of the end of the British lease term was that despite Mao’s demise and the Gang of Four’s ouster (the kindest expression of that cleansing) the Chinese government was immovable on the issue of extending the lease. They wanted the British out of Hong Kong, but more so they wanted Hong Kong and the dominance of the great trading center for their own ambitions to conquer the world through overt Capitalism. This meant that Hong Kong and its very Westernized residents started looking for hedges to their Hong Kong bet. It is a testament to the power of Hong Kong commerce that these people would not just leave with all their worldly possessions. To get while the getting was good. But instead, they used every citizenship for money program (especially the Canadian version) that they could find to make sure that they had a Get Out of Jail Free card up their sleeves. The effects of this affluent migration can still be seen on the Canadian horizon, particularly in the cost of Vancouver real estate, but also in the number of cash businesses in Toronto. I lived in Toronto from 1990-1992 as this migration was underway and the number of Chinese donut and pizza shops there was astounding.

Since the handover in 1997, the Chinese government in Beijing has been playing it very coyly. The rise of Shanghai and other industrial cities in China, including both Shenzhen and Guangzhou, Hong Kong’s next door neighbors, obviated the need for China to use a strong arm on Hong Kong. We in the West all assume that China is a buttoned-up totalitarian state, but the economic prosperity of the last forty years and the opening of the eyes of millions of prospering Chinese makes the Chinese state very appropriately cautious as to how they are perceived by their own people. The biggest and most obvious threat to China is the growing internet incursion into Chinese life. The government has fought the Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter social media revolution (notably NOT Apple and Microsoft who spend a LOT of money using China as their production source). And now, the biggest trend in social media is TikTok, a Chinese social media company.

My youngest son, Thomas has always been a social media kid. He grew up at the right time for that. Luckily after the video game boom, but right in the teeth of Facebook, Instagram et al. He studied performing arts and has always exhibited a penchant for creative endeavors. In seeking his career with an Ivy League degree, he was still drawn to the popular arts. He worked his way through the Improv world and stand-up comedy world, first by working as Jim Gaffigan’s personal assistant and then taking every course offered at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade (UCB), which has been the testing ground for many a prominent comedian. Along the way he decided to get a real corporate job and joined a publicly-traded restaurant chain that is both hip and very much on fire. He got a job doing marketing production work (mostly photographic). From day one, he advocated above his pay grade for the use of video on social media. In fact, when COVID hit he was put on furlough and then brought back gradually and finally with the revised job mandate to produce TikTok videos for the company. Such is the very recent and trending power of that little Chinese mini-clip platform.

Now this is the Opium Wars all over again, only this time it’s the Social Media Wars and the empire is not the British, but the American Silicon Valley Empire. Where the Chinese were at first against opium, they were initially against social media. It all rots the brain, right? And the U.S. fought as hard as the British for their merchants, in this case Google, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Might is right, right? But now, with Huawei looking to take over the wireless telecomm world and it being a Trojan Horse to the U.S. Intelligence and Defense Services, our esteemed Secretary of State has seen clear to suggest that TikTok is the devil and needs to be seriously considered a superspreader of the social media equivalent of COVID-19.

So, TikTok, TikTok Hong Kong, its 1995 all over again and Mike Pompeo has your number and is likely to keep my son from earning his creative chops and living if Donald needs something between now and November to distract and attack.