UNEXPECTEDLY:  Once a Model City, Hong Kong Is in Trouble, the New York Times reports.

Funny how that always seems to happen whenever a region moves further and further to the left. It’s just bad luck, I guess. And note this quote:

“More and more, there is a sense of futility,” said Anson Chan, the second-highest official in the Hong Kong government in the years before and after the handover to Chinese rule. She blames Beijing’s interference for the city’s woes. “We have this enormous giant at our doorstep,” she said, “and the rest of the world does not seem to question whatever the enormous giant does.”

Not least of which, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who in 2009 praised the “great advantages” of one-party autocracy, “led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today.”