Stephen Roach, the 80-year-old former Morgan Stanley Asia chairman who is now living in the United States, has returned once more to a familiar refrain. In his recent article, Yes, the Hong Kong of Old is Over, he declared that the Hong Kong he once knew is “over”. It has become, in his telling, “just another big Chinese city”, better called by its Mandarin name “Xianggang”.

In one way, Roach is right. In likening Hong Kong to other Chinese cities, he has highlighted the phenomenal development of cities across the Chinese mainland over the past two decades. In 1997, Hong Kong stood out as an ultra-modern, wealthy, successful city, in sharp contrast to most mainland cities which were still grappling with congestion, pollution, lagging infrastructure, and lower living standards. Rather arrogantly, there was talk in Hong Kong of a “reverse takeover”, with its more Western political character predicted to influence the rest of the country. Such hubris was unrealistic, but using certain criteria there is indeed evidence of what may look like a “reverse takeover”. In cities across the mainland, the spectacular changes in architecture, transport infrastructure, living standards, education, housing, and capitalist business enterprises have created buzzing metropolises mirroring Hong Kong’s dynamism. I don’t think, however, that this was the positive point Roach was trying to make. His whole thrust was to portray Hong Kong in a negative light.

Roach lived and worked in Hong Kong earlier in his career and has written affectionately about the city in the past. Yet he no longer lives in the city. His perspective now is that of an occasional visitor and distant observer who measures today’s Hong Kong against a fixed memory of an earlier version, one shaped by a particular historical window of Western expatriate influence and a different balance of global and mainland links. However, cities do not freeze over. Like New York after successive waves of immigration and financial transformation, like London after deindustrialization and Brexit, or like Singapore through deliberate reinvention, Hong Kong has evolved. Treating that evolution as “death”, rather than adaptation, is the core weakness of Roach’s narrative.

Over time, every major global city changes under political, economic, and demographic pressure. Hong Kong’s post-2019 trajectory — deeper integration with the mainland, a recalibrated security and legal framework, and a shift in the composition of its professional class — is real. So is the fact that its recent initial public offering leadership has been heavily driven by mainland issuers. These are observable developments. However, the leap from “changed” to “over” rests on a selective, static, and blinkered yardstick. It gives privileged status to a particular pre-2019 snapshot as the authentic Hong Kong and treats subsequent adaptation and evolution as a retrograde loss. That is nothing more than nostalgia dressed up as analysis. Roach himself has acknowledged the city’s surface resilience, its efficient infrastructure, dining culture, and market activity. Yet he insists the underlying character has been hollowed out. From his home in the US, it’s much easier to lament what has been lost than to engage fully with what remains, what is being built, and what is better.

Pontificating from afar may have a role in political rhetoric; but living in the place supplies a deeper and more reliable form of knowledge

It’s instructive to contrast Roach’s nostalgic perspective with the views of those who stayed in Hong Kong. Adam Clermont, an American-born lawyer who has lived and practiced in Hong Kong for more than a decade, is one of them. Married to a local, dual-qualified in the US and Hong Kong legal systems, and still working in the city, Clermont has written about Hong Kong as home rather than as a lost ideal. In his response to Roach and in his broader body of work, including the book Hong Kong Belongs to Hongkongers, he emphasizes complexity over simplistic binary narratives. Cities change; Hong Kong is no exception. Its status as part of China is comparable to New York’s place within the US or London’s within Great Britain. The people who remain, unlike Roach, experience the city’s rhythms, constraints, opportunities and daily life directly rather than through the filter of a vanished, idealized past.

Clermont’s perspective is grounded in continuity of residence and professional engagement. He sees a functioning legal system still operating under common-law traditions, a city that continues to attract capital and talent, and a thriving population that has not simply vanished. His writings reject both uncritical boosterism and the simplistic pro-democracy morality play that dominates much Western coverage. He treats Hong Kong as a living place — dynamic, resilient, cosmopolitan, messy, adaptive, and claimed by those who actually inhabit it — rather than as a symbol of a bygone age to be mourned from a distance. That stance aligns with the views of those residents who chose to stay through turbulence, pandemic restrictions, and political realignment. Their view is not that nothing has changed; it is that change does not equal extinction, and that judgment from afar often mistakes change for terminal decline.

Roach’s critique carries the weight of a former insider and an economist. It identifies shifts in Hong Kong’s political, institutional, and economic environment. Its weakness lies in its Western perspective with a fixed expatriate reference point. Criticizing a city for evolving is, in effect, criticizing it for not standing still. Every major financial center has undergone analogous pressures — regulatory tightening, demographic turnover, geopolitical realignment, political turmoil, and the rise of new economic engines. Declaring the “old” version “over” is easy when one is no longer required to navigate the new one daily. For those who still live and work in Hong Kong, the more relevant questions are practical: Does the city still function as a commercial and professional hub? Can people build lives and careers here? Is it still distinct from the mainland in measurable ways — currency, legal system, international connectivity? The answer to all these questions is a resounding “yes”.

Hong Kong has never been static. It has adapted to waves of refugees, an unelected British Hong Kong administration, the spectacular rise of manufacturing, its growth as a financial powerhouse, and successive political transitions. The current chapter is different in important respects from the 1997-2019 period, just as that period differed from earlier ones. Treating any single era as the definitive “Hong Kong of old” and measuring all subsequent reality against it produces a permanent verdict of “decline”. The more grounded assessment, offered by residents such as Clermont, is that the city continues — altered, constrained in some dimensions, resilient and dynamic in others — and that those who remain are better positioned to describe it as it actually is, rather than those judging it from afar against some nostalgic, idealized memory. Pontificating from afar may have a role in political rhetoric; but living in the place supplies a deeper and more reliable form of knowledge.

The author is a British historian and former principal of Sha Tin College, an international secondary school in Hong Kong.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.