Is Fortune magazine finally right about Hong Kong’s demise? In June 1995, the fabled business publication raised this most provocative of questions with a “Death of Hong Kong” cover story. It explored how the city’s return to Communist Chinese rule two years later, in July 1997, might wreck the “world’s most aggressively pro-business economy.” Since then, the Hong Kong elite and expat bankers have reveled in Fortune’s spectacular misfire. Yet the events of recent days highlight troubling dynamics that the magazine – and others, surely – feared two decades ago.
