Hong Kong is not China. It is hard to disagree. Truck driver Li and a visiting journalist are at a small restaurant in Shenzhen, southern China, a few hundred metres from the Hong Kong border.
Customers watch pornographic movies while they eat.
Outside, a pimp hassles a foreign pedestrian and a Chinese woman with a baby is begging. Across the street is Shenzhen's tallest office building, where Hong Kong executives will tell you about China's very different way of doing business. In the basement of this building is the K.K. Disco, where Hong Kong teenagers are swallowing ecstasy pills and celebrating China's very different nightlife. It's all a far cry from the predictions that after its return to Chinese rule, Hong Kong would merge with nearby cities on the mainland, creating one huge metropolitan area. Officials in Shenzhen and the nearby city of Guangzhou have often invited Hong Kong to coordinate development policies.