Multiculturalism, diversity and gender equality, as defined by the West, have evolved into something far different than originally intended. They have also become interlinked and often result in accusations of social toxicity for whoever questions any of their noble intentions. The West often professes utopian potential outcomes to its multicultural, diversity or gender equality policies; but it is China and its Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, however, which have quietly applied and consistently benefited from the unintended praxis of those same policies through the application of one vital concept — merit.
A successful local entrepreneur I recently spoke with revealed to me a profound truth about the HKSAR’s future. The entrepreneur, locally born from an ethnic minority community, emphatically asserted that Hong Kong was the perfect place to have started his business because of the socially pure form of merit-based multiculturalism that exists here. In essence, Hong Kong’s secret weapon, as the world faces an unknown future, will be our ability to remain diverse, multicultural and inclusive based on reason and merit.
The West’s form of multiculturalism’s praxis however, at best, comes at the cost of merit and at worst is objectively discriminatory to that country’s majority population. The West’s diversity policies have lost their noble intentions and today are often used as buzzwords announcing someone’s or some institution’s innate virtue.
The UK’s Royal Air Force’s landing page prominently includes three paragraphs about its commitment to diversity, multiculturalism and inclusion. Three paragraphs that make zero mention of merit, or the underlying danger when one looks at the numbers involved in implementing an immediate outcome to an abstract concept that needs decades of merit-based praxis to safely succeed.
In August, the head of RAF recruitment, an unnamed female captain, resigned over diversity targets she characterized as “impossible”, which stands to reason if the underlying logic of such a policy is tested for logical consistency, as all such policies should.
Leaving the racial or cultural component aside for a moment, if we simply comment on the reality that more men work in building construction than women and ask why; we find the answer is not any social barrier denying women entry, but simply that construction work is extremely taxing on the upper body, and biology has defined for women, in general, a lack of the same innate upper body strength as men. So, if it were to be decided that a 1-to-1 male-to-female ratio be implemented on construction sites and only the strongest of each be selected for employment, the 50 percent male pool of candidates would still be far larger than the 50 percent pool of female candidates. Meaning, to fulfill the noble intention of diversity, but more pragmatically, the number of employees needed would inadvertently demand that women who did not meet the basic requirements also be selected, which ultimately would lower the construction sites’ overall productivity.
I am not the first to point out this mathematical reality, nor are all women specifically unable to work in fields that demand upper body strength, nor people from certain racial groups inherently unsuited for certain tasks and jobs, but this is an example of the hidden danger in the West’s preference for instant equality of outcomes over merit-based equality of opportunities — a preference not seen in any of the HKSAR’s diversity or multicultural policies.
In fact, China, including the HKSAR and Asia in general, had a clear history of women in policymaking leadership positions long before the West decided it was socially fashionable to do so. Throughout the HKSAR’s history, multiculturalism, diversity and actual equality have shown themselves to be embedded into the very DNA of this unique city. And unlike the West, the HKSAR sees no reason to applaud itself for being so. Former HKSAR chief executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor was the first woman to hold the position, and Hong Kong people didn’t bat an eye at what the West would characterize as an achievement for gender equality. Which is indicative of the HKSAR’s ability to do naturally what the West has to enforce through specific policies, and it is not a lone example.
According to a recent BBC report, China has already headhunted 30 former RAF pilots to help train People’s Liberation Army pilots, and plans to recruit more — a move condemned by the British Ministry of Defense though completely consistent with the stated aims of most Western multicultural policies. It also happens to be a practice British soldiers have been doing for decades for smaller, oil-rich Middle Eastern states.
In 2021, the board of governors of a prestigious club in the HKSAR unanimously selected an African-American to take over as the club’s president. Detractors of multiculturalism will accuse the prestigious club of trying to appease “woke mobs” — a term applied to any post-2012 multicultural, diversity or gender-equality government policy where its very application is self-servingly displayed as a sign of innate virtue. The problem these real enemies of multiculturalism face is answering what “woke mob” that same prestigious club was trying to appease when it previously selected the same African-American as president from 1997-98.
What this should show us is that the HKSAR’s merit-based praxis of choosing the right person for the right position regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation is something the city has always gotten right and should further build upon.
Increasingly, and in the American media especially, “the first (insert ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation)” often precedes the name of a newly chosen or elected policymaker. Which, in the eyes of critical thinkers, is performative at best, and shields incompetence at worst. Hong Kong doesn’t promote its multiculturalism, but instead, simply gets on with the business of attracting foreign talent while equally nurturing its local talent, Chinese and otherwise, to compete in the global marketplace. Perhaps this is something the West could learn from Hong Kong.
The author is a writer, columnist and historian based in Hong Kong.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.