Kristen Aanstoos is an educator, researcher, and practitioner of International Relations. Currently, she is a Political Science and International Relations Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on the role of women and gender in peace processes and post-conflict reconstruction. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Irvine. Previously, she served as a Foreign Service Officer in Hong Kong, Doha, and Washington, D.C. Aanastoos shares her unique perspective on Hong Kong as a foreign service officer stationed there from 2010 to 2012.
Could you briefly describe your role as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer in Hong Kong from 2010 to 2012? What were your primary responsibilities?
That was my first tour in the Foreign Service; I was a consulate officer. The first year I was there as a fraud prevention manager, so I was responsible for finding trends or organizations that were trying to commit visa or passport fraud in Hong Kong. I worked closely with other consulates from our ally nations that see similar trends and applicants and fraud patterns, as well as the Hong Kong customs and immigration officials, to identify where there are increases in fraudulent passports or visas being seen. A lot of it was following up on businesses that claimed to be employing people in Hong Kong, which were fake businesses. So, figuring out these kinds of broader patterns of fraud in these applications and password services. And then, of course, following up on fake marriages for immigration to the U.S. Then, in the second year, I was a non-immigrant visa officer, so I just processed all the non-immigrant visas.
How did your day-to-day work intersect with U.S.-China or U.S.-Hong Kong relations? What were your initial impressions upon arriving in Hong Kong?
The consulate line is actually a really interesting place to be if you want to see those kinds of mundane people-to-people trends in how these kinds of relationships are developing. One interesting thing was that I was assigned to Hong Kong as a Mandarin speaker. I came into the Foreign Service with Mandarin. I studied it in college and studied abroad in Taiwan. They taught me a little bit of Cantonese, but basically just how to get a taxi and order Dim Sum. Therefore, I was sent to Hong Kong with only Mandarin, which already implies a shift in the relationship between Hong Kong and China as a result of the language education changes that had taken place after the handover. However, I really didn’t use my Mandarin very much in Hong Kong.
When I used my Mandarin, it was usually visa applicants who came to Hong Kong to apply for a U.S. visa at the consulate in Hong Kong instead of the one that they should have been applying at in China, because there were longer wait times, or they had been denied at the consulate in China. All of the mainland Chinese who lived in Hong Kong spoke English, and all of the Hong Kongers spoke English. So, I had to call upon my local Hong Kong colleagues more often to translate for me from Cantonese for visa applicants who didn’t speak English, and that was mostly for either older Hong Kongers or really young Hong Kongers who hadn’t had a whole lot of English education yet. But, I was starting to notice as I was there that the English abilities of younger Hong Kongers were deteriorating, and this is kind of as a result of that language education change in 1997, where they started learning more Mandarin and less English and I’ve heard from people who live there now in the continuing 16 years, that has continued to shift a little bit, that more people are speaking Mandarin, and less people are speaking English. There’s also a greater influx of Mandarin speakers in Hong Kong than there used to be. So you can see those trends kind of slowly, slowly shifting over time, where the Cantonese language is kind of losing a little bit of importance, and this is particularly true in the neighboring regions of mainland China.
I did a short, temporary duty assignment in Guangzhou, where Cantonese originated, for two or three weeks when I was there, just to get some cross-border experience. In those two or three weeks of doing 200-plus interviews per day, I only had one person for whom I needed a translator for Cantonese. Everybody else spoke Mandarin. So, really limited use of Cantonese now, even in the areas that are bordering Hong Kong, and then as the mainland kind of increases its grip on Hong Kong, you see the Cantonese diminishing and diminishing and diminishing. That’s a really sad trend as languages kind of start to die out, as we’re seeing all over the world, those smaller languages dying out.
While I was in Hong Kong, this was before the pro-democracy protests really exploded, but we were already seeing simmering tensions between mainlanders and Hong Kongers. In fact, it wasn’t even under the surface; it was very much on the surface. You would see constantly in the news, there were these conflicts happening, just everyday interactions between Hong Kongers and mainlanders on public transportation or in shopping malls. Where they would have these cultural clashes and angry name-calling episodes. For example, when mainlanders refuse to queue up in lines. Hong Kong used to be a British territory, so they love their lines. However, mainlanders really don’t have that culture of queuing up for things, so they just kind of bunch up in masses and try to push to the front of places, and this makes Hong Kongers very, very angry. Or just little things like spitting in the street, that Hong Kongers just culturally do not do because of their long experience with the British, which is perfectly normal in mainland China. These would all bring about clashes between people every single day, and you could see it really just kind of simmering, like it was going to blow up as the umbrella protest did at some point.
How would you characterize the political atmosphere in Hong Kong during your time there? Do you think there were any key events or turning points during your posting that you think signaled future changes?
There had been a series of anti-democratic crackdowns, arrests of pro-democracy activists and protesters, and they were progressively shutting down or getting rid of books from bookstores that were selling pro-democracy material. It was happening slowly over time, so every time one of these things happened and showed up in the news, you would feel the Hong Kongers getting more and more frustrated about it. It was this mounting tension that eventually led to those pro-democracy protests, and it was very much, in the traditional way of Chinese policy, salami tactics of we’re just gonna slowly encroach into your democratic space and just take little nibbles out of it over time, and they were hoping that if they did it subtly enough and slowly enough, people wouldn’t suddenly react badly. But all of those little bites mount up, and all of those frustrations build up, and that’s why we eventually saw it explode in the way that it did, so colorfully, so violently. The people of Hong Kong noticed, and they remembered all of these incidents, and it just built up and built up until it was too much weight to bear.
Looking back, what are the most significant changes you’ve observed in Hong Kong’s political and social landscape since your posting? Do you see Hong Kong still playing a distinct role in U.S.-China engagement, or has that role diminished?
There’s a very clear difference in the way that the political leadership of Hong Kong talks about its own role and Hong Kong’s relationship to China, and inevitably, that involves a change in the way they talk to and about the U.S. and their relationship with the U.S. It used to be, when I was there, that we had a very, very close relationship with the Hong Kong government. They were trusted allies. We trusted them to tell us when there was visa fraud related to American visas or American passports, and we had very cordial relationships and a very free kind of exchange of information. Even though it was already technically returned to China at that point, the Hong Kong government was very distinct from the Chinese government. That has changed significantly since then. Now, we don’t see them as separate; we see them as very much connected, as Beijing is pulling a lot more strings in the Hong Kong government than they used to.
Statements that are being put out lately and changes to the national security law have all been straight out of the Beijing talking points and are just clearly Beijing propaganda. So, that significantly alters the relationship that the U.S. can have with Hong Kong, because now we have to see them as just an arm of Beijing, and that is a completely different category of diplomatic relations. We put China in that category of diplomatic relations where we don’t trust them with anything, where we always see them as a national security concern, as an intelligence concern, and we cannot really share anything with them openly, and that’s a complete change from where it was 10 years ago, before the pro-democracy protests. If you look at, for instance, the South China Morning Post newspaper, which is the main newspaper in Hong Kong. It was always the more mainland-oriented newspaper in Hong Kong. It was always kind of the more conservative line, but it used to be a normal newspaper in Hong Kong. It used to give pretty neutral news, now it is literally just chock-full of OP-eds from mainlanders who are just saying this national security law is the top of the world standard in national security, and it’s exactly in line with the things that the U.S. and the U.K. and Australia are doing, and there’s absolutely no change to what it was before, and it’s not any threat to democracy. It’s just nonsense propaganda statements. It’s completely changed its position as a newspaper because of mainland interference. The voice and autonomy of Hong Kong have been eroded very quickly over the past 10 to 15 years.
What surprised you most about living and working in Hong Kong?
One thing that surprised me was how rapidly Hong Kong changes. I had visited Hong Kong when I was in undergrad, this was back in like 2005 or 2006, and from that time to when I arrived in 2010, it felt like a completely different city. All of the buildings had changed, and the smell of the city was different because they outlawed stinky tofu from being made in the common central areas. Just the vibe of the city felt very different. There were so many more mainlanders. The kind of older Cantonese buildings had largely been demolished in favor of these big, shiny skyscrapers with HSBC and things like that. There were so many designer stores all over the place that were just full of mainlanders, because that’s where they go to shop, which is at the designer stores in Hong Kong. It just felt like a very different place, even in those five years.
I went back to Hong Kong again a couple of years ago when I was on my way to do field work in Nepal. And it didn’t feel like it had changed as much in those 10 years as it had in the five years between 2005 and 2010. The buildings all looked the same; it was still those giant skyscrapers, there were still a few little, local farmers’ markets still being run in the alleyways, and things like that. There’s always rapid change in cities like that, stores turn over, and they get replaced, but it wasn’t as stark a change, I felt, as it had been between 2005 and 2010. I feel like there was a very large kind of economic and visitor-based and resident-based influx right after the handover, and that change kind of slowed after 2010, and it’s just the same level of mainlanders buying up the buildings and replacing the businesses that are there. I think that because I was based on Hong Kong Island, that’s why I got that perception. I think they started with the island, and they kind of replaced all of the old, traditional Cantonese businesses, and they just kept buying out and outpricing all of the locals from these businesses in the downtown, central area. I think they began working on Kowloon after that. I didn’t go to Kowloon as much while I was posted there, but what I expect is that now Kowloon has had the same trend happen to it. They started with the central area, and they’re just spreading throughout the city to Chineseify it.
For students interested in careers in diplomacy or China-related fields, what lessons from your time there stand out?
I would say the thing that I learned from working there is that people never mean what they say in China. There are very unique, distinct cultural phenomena about how people say one thing and mean another thing, and it takes a lifetime to learn what those are, like nobody who is not by birth, by being raised and educated, as a Chinese person, will be able to understand these little elements of culture fully.
It’s not just linguistic, it’s Confucian, and it’s really rooted in mythology and stories, and just the way that people speak. You will never fully understand what they’re saying. Just don’t take any of it at face value. I mean, understand that you are always going to be an outsider in that conversation. You’re only hearing, like, one level of the conversation, and without being Chinese and being rooted in that history and that mythology and that ridiculously complex language that you will never be able to fully learn, you can’t understand all of the layers of the conversation that are happening.
I think that’s the one thing that trips up a lot of diplomats in China, is that they don’t realize that there are multiple layers of conversations going on, and they’re only privy to one of them, and they believe the things that they’re being told, and don’t understand the underlying implications of what’s being said and not being said. It’s like Chinese opera, right? There’s a face painted on, and there’s a fake voice on top of a voice. There are so many layers happening in that performance, and every conversation that you have, you just can’t have a conversation and think the words that were said were all those that happened in that conversation, because it’s never the case.
About the author:
Alexa is a freshman double-majoring in Intelligence and Cyber Operations and East Asian Languages and Cultures. Her focus is on the interactions between cultures, especially Chinese, Latin-American, and US cultures.
