5 ideas
Chan argues that Hong Kong's postwar baby boomers came of age just as the economy took off, when jobs, promotions and property gains were plentiful, so ordinary effort produced outsized rewards. Because they never had to separate structural luck from personal ability, they concluded their success proved their own competence and values.
An environment that rewarded quick switching between jobs, trends and speculative chances trained a generation to value nimbleness, pragmatism and fast money over depth. The same agility that made them good at seizing openings left them unwilling to commit to long-term skills, industrial upgrading, principles or institution-building. The result was short-term, opportunistic thinking, and it looked like a virtue only while conditions stayed favourable.
The essays treat a birth cohort, not a class or an individual, as the thing to diagnose: people who share formative conditions develop shared reflexes. Hong Kong's boomers grew up in the city rather than arriving as refugees. They absorbed mass media and consumer culture, had no colonial-era political participation, and became the first cohort to see Hong Kong as home. Their outlook and blind spots are read off that common upbringing.
Chan uses the term 'buntongfaan' (half-Chinese, half-foreign) for Hong Kong's mongrel culture, which is neither authentically Chinese nor properly Western. He argues it should be recognised as a legitimate aesthetic and not apologised for as a corrupted copy. He also criticises it where the mixing is lazy and superficial rather than creative.
By the late 1990s Chan's generation ran Hong Kong's government, business and media. Chan, a co-founder of City Magazine in 1976, wrote the essays in the aftermath and treated these failures as the test that exposed his generation's shallow, short-term habits.