Just off a plane from Dubai, Hong Kong’s nervous melancholy can be smelled in the air. Unfriended and wilfully misdefined by much of the Western world and its media, and unclear about how best to carve a future that might match its strong growth over so many decades, the contrast with boisterous Dubai, still humming from the tens of thousands that attended last month’s Cop28 climate summit, is palpable.
Attacked by the Western media for the national security law put in place after the street conflicts of 2019, with its democratic credentials – if it ever had any under Britain’s control – in shreds, and the integrity of its legal system being questioned, confidence in Hong Kong’s future is clearly at a record low.
The terrible recessionary impact of strict anti-pandemic measures for nearly three years, with its punishing impact on the stock and property markets, tourism and consumer sentiment, has also not helped.
The contrast with Dubai is surreal. It has never had pretensions of being a democracy, instead being an absolute monarchy. But the absence of democracy does not seem to matter. Dubai has a chequered interest in human rights, and tough restraints on press freedom, but the Western press that hounds Hong Kong does not seem to care.
While the Western media continues to emphasise people seeking to flee Hong Kong (true in the emotional months following the 2019 violence, but not true any more), when it comes to Dubai, the narrative is of people flocking to live there. It seems Dubai has borrowed some of those characteristics. It may not have been a colony, but around 90 per cent of its population comes from overseas, with only the right to work for as long as work visas last. They are there to work hard, save hard and interfere in no one else’s business, confident that no one will interfere with theirs. That has generated a “freebooting” community that is “devoid of self-pity, regrets or fear of the future”.
Above all else, the mood is “rambunctious” – not merely confident or optimistic, but positively boisterous. Dubai today has rambunctiousness, and Hong Kong has lost it.
These thoughts were augmented by a column in The New York Times in late December by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Friedman, who flew to Dubai for Cop28. Friedman first visited Dubai back in 1980, when traditional wooden fishing dhows bobbed in the harbour.
Apart from his obvious focus on the climate summit, he was interested in comparing Dubai not with Hong Kong but with Gaza. Both are tiny pockets of land. Both are Muslim. Both in 1980 were little more than “a convergence of sand and seawater”. But leaders since then have made different choices for different reasons, creating radically different outcomes.
In Dubai, Friedman sees “two generations of monarchs who had a powerful vision of how the UAE in general, and the entire Emirate of Dubai in particular, could choose to be Arab, modern, pluralistic, globalized and embracing of a moderate interpretation of Islam”.
He sees Muslim leaders that have chosen to be radically open to the world, to embrace free markets and aggressive economic diversification, to become “one of the world’s most prosperous cross-roads for trade, tourism, transport, innovation, shipping, and golf”.
As Dubai has prospered, its visionary monarchs have gradually persuaded Islamic neighbours to adopt a similarly moderate course. Their approach no doubt contributed to laying foundations for the 2020 Abraham Accords that for the first time in half a century created a real possibility of peace with Israel and its Arab neighbours.
