HK ... We hardly knew ye.

A candlelight vigil in Hong Kong in June, an annual tradition to commemorate victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

I have a close friend who's a native Hong Konger, a guy who loves his city beyond words and who now inwardly weeps as to what is happening to her as China begins to extinguish a truly international environment that benefitted the world in so many ways.

Hong Kong was born at the crossroad of empires, a hybrid of British and Chinese parentage. It may fade there, too.

This “barren rock,” as an envoy of Queen Victoria once called it, transformed into one of the world’s first truly global cities, a place where international finance has thrived as its people created a cultural identity all their own. Even the territory’s current political system is bound by a negotiated settlement, called “one country, two systems,” that, despite all odds and an inelegant moniker, seemed to work.

But this week, Hong Kong discovered the limits to the middle ground that it has carved out to nourish one of the most prosperous and dynamic cities on earth: between East and West, between rice and bread, between a liberal and an authoritarian order.

The Union Jack was lowered for the last time in Hong Kong in 1997, as Britain handed the territory back to China.Credit...Pool photo by Kimimasa Mayama

The territory’s fate is once again being decided in faraway halls of power, as Beijing moves forward with plans to strip some of the autonomy the territory was supposed to enjoy for 50 years after Britain returned it to China in 1997.

The death knell for Hong Kong has been sounded many times since that handover. But the proposed national security legislation could have crushing implications for a place so dedicated to the international language of commerce that the local form of English is stripped of embellishment. Can, no can?

Too often these days, the answer is no can.

Protesters in the Tsim Sha Tsui district on Christmas Eve, with Hong Kong’s distinct skyline in the background.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

Read the detailed NYTimes piece, it's the right thing to do.

HK ... we hardly knew ye ... indeed.