Then & Now | Hong Kong’s diminishing global city status offers eerie echoes of Calcutta’s retreat from international importance, barely half a century ago

During Hong Kong’s 19th century urban infancy, Calcutta (renamed Kolkata in 2001) was the second city of the world; only London exceeded its commercial importance. Until the late 1960s, this economic powerhouse remained one of Asia’s most cosmopolitan cities; tellingly, more Europeans lived there after Indian independence in 1947 than before, along with many other long-domiciled ethnicities.

What happened to change all that?

In The Sun Also Rises (1926), American novelist Ernest Hemingway pithily referenced how bankruptcy happens – “gradually, then suddenly”. As many caught in Hong Kong’s “dynamic” fight-against-the-virus crosshairs know, being left with “zero” becomes an inevitability as months of pandemic restrictions trudge on, with few realistic exit ramps in sight.

As with people, so it is with places, when tipping points are reached. Historical analogies for Calcutta’s relative and rapid decline rhyme and chime with contemporary Hong Kong; geopolitical tilts away from the West – in particular India’s warming ties with the Soviet Union throughout the 1960s – accelerated the pace of change.

Inward-turning, politically motivated socio-economic policies, however broadly beneficial at national level, could be profoundly destructive when imposed on cities whose ultimate value for their own country was as an “international, cosmopolitan” window on the world, geographically anchored “in” their own motherland, yet not entirely “of” it.

Chip that aspect away – or create circumstances whereby those who made a city distinctive depart of their own accord – and permanent change becomes inevitable.