More than a temporary trip, a brief exchange semester or a tourist holiday, I decided to move to a place I had never physically been before, with the prospect of remaining there for over three years: The Special Administrative Region (SAR) of Hong Kong. In this ‚leap into the unknown,‘ my foremost mission was to pursue a PhD in Architecture. Besides this objective, and perhaps even more importantly so, I wanted to experience the lived reality of a totally different system. Accordingly, this article reports on the ‚Kultursprung‘ in multiple ways: On the one hand, the obvious ‚Sprung‘ from Europe to East Asia and my personal experience with it. On the other hand, the still prevalent consequences of Hong Kong’s and China’s own cultural and economic ‚Sprung nach vorn’—the Great Leap Forward (大跃进, Dà Yuè Jìn) around 1960, and the partially traumatizing and reactionary repercussions that followed towards what is called socialism with Chinese characteristics (中国特色社会主义制度).1 Currently, in the aftermath of one of the largest waves of protests in history in 2019, followed by the subsequent global pandemic, less overt and significantly more discreet ‚Hüpfer’—whether out of joy or constraint, depending on ones perspective—can be noticed. This is a situationist reflection at the outset of the final two decades of gradual shifts in preparation of the ultimately terminal, yet perhaps anti-climatic, ‚Sprung‘: the thorough unification of the SAR Hong Kong with Mainland China in 2047.2
Prior to the trip….
In (western) universities colonialism and imperialism, or rather post-imperialism, are classic subjects of critical thinking. It might come to suprise then, that despite all legitimate critique, many citizens in Hong Kong, identify the times under the british imperial colony as „the good old days“. Frequently, when wondering around the streets in Hong Kong, local citizens dressed in cloths with the three-lions-embleme pass by. Every other dinner place offers milktea, scones and english breakfast. Marks and Spencer . At times, british colonial architecture, schimmers through the dense urban landscape with the most skyscrapers world wide. The second most skyscrapers (as of today, 2025), however, are not located in New York (this is rank three), but in Hong Kongs neighbour city: Shenzhen in China.
Hong Kong is a special administrative region (SAR) controlled by the People’s Republic of China and enjoys limited autonomy. While most contemporary states feel a sense of uncertain futures, Hong Kong moves towards a certain determination.
The transcultural identity of Hong Kong is reflected in its official languages: Chinese and English, with Cantonese as the dominant spoken variety and Standard Written Chinese using Traditional Characters3, yet Mandarin is increasingly gaining influence, despite not being an official language.
I came to East Asia in perculiar times.
In the Little Red Book, chairman Mao Tse-tung is quoted on the dual nature of things: „not a single thing in the world [is] without a dual nature (this is the law of the unity of opposites), so imperialism and all reactionaries have a dual nature – they are real tigers and paper tigers at the same time.“4 When taking this, perhaps originally hegelarian adaption of dialectial double reading, seriously, many „things“ in the Special Administration Region Hong Kong appear more clear. At the same time, when applying this „law of the unity of opposites“, „things“ become more complex and contradictory. Correspondingly, the SAR can be descriped as ‚one country, two systems‘ and ‚one system, two countries‘ simultaniously. My first enounter with East Asia was not with the Peoples Republic of China in an immediate sense but with, what is called on paper, the Special Administration Region Hong Kong. Moreso, Hong Kong is commonly refered to as one of the „Four Asian Tigers“, alongside with Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea. These four Tigers, between the early 1950s and 1990s, underwent rapid industrialization and maintained exceptionally high GPD growth rates of more than 7 percent a year.5 What then can be considered a real tiger or a paper tiger? In Too Late to Awaken. What Lies Ahead When There is No Future?, Slavoj Žižek expresses an interesting hunch regarding the USA and Russia: „What if this conflict is so dangerous not because it reflects the growing strength of the two ex-superpowers but, on the contrary, proves that they are not able to accept the fact that they are no longer true global powers? When, at the hight of the Cold War, Mao Ze Dong said that the US was, despite all its weapons, a paper tiger, he forgot to add that paper tigers could be more dangerous than real ones.“6 Not just, then, is there a „dual nature“ of real and paper tigers, but paper tigers might be even more dangerous than real ones. The difference and identification of real and paper tigers has become increasingly obscure.
I came to East Asia in counter-cyclical times.
While China for many civilians of the ‚Free West‘ used to play a role as a classic antagonist, „things“ became less definite. This is to say the balance of global powers generally became less certain. Again, Chairman Mao Tse-tung observed 1966: „People all over the world are now discussing whether or not a third world war will break out. On this question, too, we must be mentally prepared and do some analysis. […] If the imperialists insist on launching a third world war, it is certain that several hundred million more will turn to socialism, and then there will not be much room left on earth for the imperialists; it is also likely that the whole structure of imperialism will utterly collaps.“ 2025, almost 60 years later, these discussions on „whether or not a third world war will break out“ have become evermore intense and real. The ex-superpowers, USA and Russia (formerly UDSSR), fuel desperate proxy-wars in order to maintain their global positions.7 And again Slavoj Žižek reminds us: „We should have no illusions here: in some basic sense the Third World War has already begun, although it has until now mostly been fought through proxies. The sooner we admit this, the better chances we have of preventing its full explosion.“ This concession has now been acted upon in the states of my derivation in yet another ‚Kultursprung‘ back home: About three months after my departure, and in reaction of Trumps opting out of support, Germany and Europe at broad, have agreed on spending 800 billion Euros on „military defense“. While discussions on how to mitigate gloable climate crisis have lost attention, ways of implementing military conscription reappeared in Germany after circa 15 years of halt. With such discussions, the youth, to speak with Ole Nymeon, besides having to navigate throughout several crisis, has to find reasons of why to giving up parcifism. Nymeaons objection: „The nation is glorified as a great community of solidarity, which everyone should happily serve. And this after decades of desolidarization, during which the impoverishment of large segments of the population was declared inevitable by neoliberal politicians.“8 While this is a reasonable dissent, and it is true that TINA (There Is No Alternative), has been … , absolute parcifism appears to be no coherent solution, not even from the ‚Left‘, as Žižek points out: „XYZ“. Whatever might be the „right“ solution, as stability has become evermore uncertain (Adam Curtis quote and maybe image), it is certainly a counter-cyclical time, to switch tigers. After spending weeks in obsessional neurotic sleepless nights of fear and loathing over potential academic restrictions in East Asisia, the US, is exessively damaging academic freedom in the West. As orientation to the US is irritated, interest in East Asia might rise soon and what appeared to be counter-cyclical might shift into sync.
I came to East Asia in unpresidented times – just as anybody else did.
In My First Trip to China: Scholars, Diplomats, and Journalists Reflect on Their First Encounters9 with China, Kin-Ming Liu collected a hotchpotch of initial experiences of westerners with China in the 20th century. It is a testament of different first encounters with China throught recent history, that all proclaim a similar sense of percularity. For example, X, reports on the 197X …. My first immediate glimpse of mainland China, however, happend on the 1st of March 2025. The contrast could not have been more extreme: while visiting the smallest inhabited island of SAR Hong Kong, Ap Chau, the ‚Real Tiger‘ Shenzhen loamed on the periphery. From this village outpost, a protected UNESCO Global Geopark of the size of 0.04 km², container roaring and machinary beeping noises of the worlds most utter production site were perforcely sensible. Ships overtrumping Ap Chau’s size, passed by. Ap Chau island, originally visited by the Tanka (boat dwellers) fishermen, an originally non-Chinese ethnic minority, came from various places to anchor their boats to the island, using the land for drying nets and boat repairs. In close proximity a new kind of harbour emerged in rapid speed, accellerating global exports in an unpresidented manner.
This, however, was merely a visual and auditory encounter with China.
The path of socialism with Chinese characteristics (中国特色社会主义道路)
Three and a half months after initially arriving in SAR Hong Kong, I first stepped foot on chinese mainland. Just last year, 2024, China has lifted any necessaty of Visas for German citizens, which allowes for a free entry of two weeks for touristic purposes. Hong Kong’s immediate neighbour city, Shenzhen, has a short but explosive past. Within X decades, . Crossing the border, became relatively convenient. This first day in mainland China was far less spectacular, as the scholars in Kin-Ming Liu’s collective volume had descriped it and did not resonate with their almost romantizised notions of unknown traditional or ancient spheres. Instead, perhaps expectable, I was offered a gigantic libarinth of malls, endless consumption sites of cheap technological products and silent high-ways exclusevly used by electric vehicles. According to the CPC’s (Communist Party of China) 14th Five-Year Plan10, covering the years 2021 to 2025, we are living through a time of comprehensive „informatization.“ The term „informatization“ (信息化, xìnxī huà) is frequently used in Chinese strategic documents and refers to the comprehensive digitization and networking of all societal and economic sectors through information technologies.
Delirious Hong Kong. An architectural perspective
In 1978 the nutorious dutch architect Rem Koolhaas published Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. In this study of fascination with Manhattan’s unconscious urbanism, Koolhaas points out that: “Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition—hypnotized by the machine, yet also contemptuous of it; propelled by profit, yet also disdainful of it; exploiting nature, yet also honoring it as an ultimate symbol.” (check quote) What then in that sense is the architectural delirium of Hong Kong and Shenzhen; what distringuishes Hongkongism or Shenzhenism from Manhattanism?
Image comparison of hongkong and cover of delirious new york
Notes von dem Text vor arrival einbringen
S. 25: „And we should have no illusions here: in some basic sense the Third World War has already begun, although it has until now mostly been fought through proxies. The sooner we admit this, the better chances we have of preventing its full explosion.“
S. 14-15: In Too Late to Awaken. What Lies Ahead When There is No Future?, Žižek, Slavoj expresses an interesting hunch: „What if this conflict is so dangerous not because it reflects the growing strength of the two ex-superpowers but, on the contrary, proves that they are not able to accept the fact that they are no longer true global powers? When, at the hight of the Cold War, Mao Ze Dong said that the US was, despite all its weapons, a paper tiger, he forgot to add that paper tigers could be more dangerous than real ones.“ Not just, then, are is there a „dual nature“ of real and paper tigers, but paper tigers might be even more dangerous than real tigers.
The grass is always browner on the other side
Durch Medienberichterstattung und ‚New Media‘ bekommen wir die Fehlverhalten und Abnormalitäten unserer Nachbar mit. Looking through such „pipe“ Germany and the USA seem horrible. Not because the pipe is broken (propaganda or censorship is not the problem in this case), but because all news are focussed on flaws.
S. 30: While war and human rights violations continue, „international commerce should continue; outside the Ukraine, normal life should go on – and does go on. So we are in a permanent global peace that is permanently sustained by ‚peacekeeping military intervention‘. No wonder that, since the Russian media are banned from using the term ‚war‘ to describe what the Russian army is doing in Ukraine, and have been ordered to refer to it as a ’special military operation‘, a joke is already circulation that there will be a new edition of Tolstoy’s classic novel with the title A Special Military Operation and Peace.“ Similarly Hong Kong’s soverigny SAR
5 Year Plan; „Informatization“
S. 72, VI. IMPERIALISM AND ALL REACTIONARIES ARE PAPER TIGERS:
„All reactionaries are paper tigers.“
„Just as there is not a single thing in the world without a dual nature (this is the law of the unity of opposites), so imperialism and all reactionaries have a dual nature – they are real tigers and paper tigers at the same time.
S. 67-68: People all over the world are now discussing whether or not a third world war will break out. On this question, too, we must be mentally prepared and do some analysis. We stand firmly for peace and against war. But if the imperialists insist on unleashing another war, we should not be afraid of it. Our attitude on this question is the same as our attitude towards any disturbance: first, we are against it; second, we are not afraid of it. The First World War was followed by the birth of the Soviet Union with a population of 200 million. The Second World War was followed by the emergence of the socialist camp with a combined population of 900 million. If the imperialists insist on launching a third world war, it is certain that several hundred million more will turn to socialism, and then there will not be much room left on earth for the imperialists; it is also likely that the whole structure of imperialism will utterly collaps.“
TBC…
Notes:
It might be an irony of history that real tigers became extinct in Hong Kong rual territories in the 1960s. Instead the three british paper lions maintained their quite real administrative rule and law up to 1996, the year I was born. Being born as a german-british citizen, this entanglement, unavoidably so poses post-colonial questions of guilt and responsibility.
This mixture of fear and desire would ultimately cause the south China tiger to be all but wiped out in the wild.
Then came Chairman Mao’s “anti-pest” campaigns, under which tigers were labeled a threat to the creation of a socialist countryside. People were encouraged to kill as many tigers as possible, with hunters reportedly offered a 30-yuan bounty per tiger pelt.
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1012313
“China was to catch up with Great Britain in industrial production within a matter of years, and anything standing in the way of agricultural production and rural livelihoods was targeted as an enemy of national progress.”
So while the wild being was targeted down out of both „fear and desire“, the real anthropological tiger, china, began to strive.
In America Against America (美国反对美国 měiguó fǎnduì měiguó), the book Wang wrote about his visit to the United States,
Since Wang Huning’s visit in 1988
ggf. quotes from gta Exhibition: Look at a Leopard Through a Pipe einfügen
ggf. Notizen aus dem „Wendepunkte“ Semester. TINA, Fisher und co.
Checken, dass ich einheitlich simplified oder traditional mandarin verwende
Verschiedene Bilder einfügen. Ggf. von Little Red Book und First Trip to China book vor gutem Hintergrund. Ggf. Schlafzimmer-Koolhaas Vgl.
Durch einen glücklichen Zufall, hatte ich den phantastischen Start in einer im 46. Stock gelegenen Wohnsituation.
https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/10233
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/62644
Wiederholt sich Geschichte? | 42 – Die Antwort auf fast alles Reupload | ARTE
MAS Wendepunkte + Geschichtsschreibung + Historiographie + TINA + No Future + Diese MAS-Lektüre über Hongkong im Intro
- And its further development as „Xi Jinping’s Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era“ (习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想) ↩︎
- There are 564 buildings in Hong Kong that are 150 meters or taller. This is by far the highest number of skyscrapers in any city. In second place is Shenzhen, China, with 443 skyscrapers over 150 meters. Third place goes to New York City, with 319 skyscrapers exceeding 150 meters in height. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_with_the_most_skyscrapers (accessed on: 15.03.2025). ↩︎
- Standard Written Chinese in Traditional Characters, used in Hong Kong, is based on Mandarin grammar and vocabulary but follows Cantonese pronunciation when read aloud. While essentially Mandarin in written form, it differs from spoken Mandarin. ↩︎
- Mao Tse-tung. Speech at the Wuchang Meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (December 1, 1958), quoted in the explanatory note to „Talk with the American Correspondent Anna Louise Strong“, Selected Works, Vol. IV, pp. 98-99. Quote in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung. Foreign Languages Press, Peking, first edition, 1966. ↩︎
- ↩︎
- Žižek, Slavoj. Too Late to Awaken. What Lies Ahead When There is No Future? London: Penguin Books, 2024, pp. 14-15. ↩︎
- Žižek, Slavoj. Too Late to Awaken. What Lies Ahead When There is No Future? London: Penguin Books, 2024. ↩︎
- https://www.rowohlt.de/buch/ole-nymoen-warum-ich-niemals-fuer-mein-land-kaempfen-wuerde-9783499017551 ↩︎
- Liu, Kin-ming. My First Trip to China: Scholars, Diplomats, and Journalists Reflect on Their First Encounters with China. 1st ed. Sheung Wan, Hong Kong: Muse, 2012. ↩︎
- https://digichina.stanford.edu/work/translation-14th-five-year-plan-for-national-informatization-dec-2021/ ↩︎