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Flying Sand | Are Hong Kong’s Edward Snowden chickens finally coming home to roost?
As China and the US square up on almost every front in the fight to shape a new global order, Niall Fraser argues that the day Hong Kong turned David to Washington’s Goliath has never been forgotten
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Why you can trust SCMP
Despite not realising it at the time – it was more than 30 years ago – the most important piece of professional advice I ever received came from a giant of a man in every sense of the word, my first mentor, Donald MacDonald.
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Donald, who was a physically imposing and impossibly likeable American of Scottish descent who earned his journalistic stripes covering the violent turmoil of the civil rights movement in the United States’ Deep South almost 70 years ago, told me: “Never, ever, be afraid to ask a stupid question.”
His golden tip, which requires vast reserves of low self-esteem and hellish moments of deep embarrassment and ridicule, has been proved correct countless times, and Hong Kong’s recent involvement in the cloak-and-dagger world of espionage got me thinking about its value again.
CIA files reveal anxiety over Hong Kong’s future under Chinese rule
Not too long ago, I asked a hard-boiled operative of international law enforcement not unaccustomed to the murky world of spooks and stooges one of my many stupid questions. I inquired if perhaps he had forgotten about a criminal target of considerable vintage he had yet to apprehend.
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