It is easy to define the Hong Kong spirit. On the positive side of the ledger are such attributes as hard work, self-reliance and flexibility. The negative list can be summed up as everyone for himself, or herself.

For many years, Hong Kong people harbored what was commonly known as the "refugee mentality". The majority of them were new immigrants from the mainland. They were willing to put up with very harsh living conditions because they never considered Hong Kong their permanent home.

The Hong Kong dream at that time was to make and save enough money to move on to somewhere else. There were opportunities aplenty in the 1960s, when Hong Kong was fast developing as a low-cost manufacturing base with the capital and expertise of the rich and powerful Shanghai industrialists who were also making the city their temporary home.

This combination catapulted Hong Kong to the forefront of Asian emerging economies in the 1970s. It provided a unique social and cultural environment that very effectively nurtured Hong Kong people's special identity. This was forcefully projected and exemplified in some of the popular television dramas and movies produced in the 1980s.

Now, many Hong Kong people who were born during the so-called "golden age" in the 1980s and 1990s do not share the "refugee mentality" of their parents. Their primary concern is to make Hong Kong a better home for them and their children.

To be sure, they continue to share the common values that their parents cherish so much. But they have become much less tolerant of economic inequalities, social discrepancies and cultural deficiencies than their forebears.

Much of the social tension we are seeing today arose from this search for a new identity. This is a process necessarily fraught with frustration. This can easily spark off the occasional violent demonstrations against mostly imagined threats to what some extremists consider to be the Hong Kong way of life.

These outbursts are nothing more than childish tantrums that can easily be dealt with by the police. They are the ugly aspects of the process to establish a new identity that all Hong Kong people can embrace with pride and dignity.

In criticizing Hong Kong, many social commentators have wrongly suggested that Hong Kong people have lost this sense of purpose. This suggestion is patently untrue when set against the high degree of efficiency of Hong Kong's public and private sectors, where the Hong Kong spirit continues to shine.

(HK Edition 07/08/2015 page7)