Hong Kong has a strong economy and healthy public finances, but there is uncertainty about its future within China. As preparations begin for crucial elections, a new film provides a metaphor for the angst currently being felt

In The Midnight After, a film currently topping the box office charts in Hong Kong, a group of strangers on a local bus find themselves in a post-apocalyptic nightmare world as they emerge from the Lion Rock tunnel into a deserted Tai Po neighbourhood, in the New Territories north of Kowloon. The streets are empty, except for fleeting glimpses of strange figures in gas masks and nuclear protection suits.

The film is a metaphor for the disorientation and angst currently being felt in Hong Kong as it approaches critical negotiations with Beijing on its future democratic structures. Elections for the city’s chief executive are due to be held on the basis of universal suffrage in 2017, and for its legislative council in 2020, but exactly what that means is unclear. The options that different camps are pushing, derived from the city’s founding post-colonial Basic Law, are byzantine in their complexity. Ultimately, the decision rests with Beijing.

The current chief executive, Lueng Chun-ying, is widely unpopular. He is obliquely parodied in The Midnight After in the figure of a cowardly, inept loser who tries and fails to lead the motley band of bus passengers. In the film, the characters eventually achieve a kind of collective strength, but they are not led to it. The message is that the city is leaderless and its citizens must look to their own resources.

It is not simply democratic angst and a sense of political powerlessness that is troubling Hong Kongers. The rapid economic development of the Pearl River delta – exemplified by the glittering skyscrapers of Guangzhou as much as by the island’s own stellar skyline – has accelerated the integration of Hong Kong with the mainland. Forty million people from mainland China visit Hong Kong to shop, sightsee and use its health services every year. The city teems with them.

It is causing huge friction. Intolerance against their Cantonese cousins is widespread in Hong Kong, a city that has a long history of racism and discrimination. There are demonstrations and protests, and calls to limit the number of tourists who can enter. The issue has become symbolic of a wider sense of a loss of control over the city’s destiny, as the mainland’s overweening economic power begins to exert itself.

Yet this is also a city with enormous strengths. It has very low unemployment, a strong economy and healthy public finances. Its streets are safe. It regularly comes out near the top of the PISA education rankings. Its taxes are low but this is no free market nirvana, as enthusiastic right wing American think-tanks often claim.

It has a superb and cheap public transport system, necessitated by the impossibility of transporting seven million people around a small, congested space by car. Its infrastructure investment is stunning, with new metro lines, and bridges and high-speed train links to Macau and the mainland currently being built.

By many accounts it has the biggest public housing stock in Asia, with the cheap flats built to clear its post-war slums added to every year. The government owns all the land, which – although it can produce unhealthy relationships with developers – allows a strategic approach to land-use planning. Housing is still very expensive, but the city’s investment in its housing stock puts Britain’s to shame.

Hong Kong also proves something about the potential of cities in the global economy. Its special status means it has vastly more power than any comparable Western city: it issues its own currency, controls its borders, levies its own taxes, and runs all its public services. It does everything short of defence and foreign affairs, even if it must negotiate its constitutional and democratic future with Beijing and does much of its politics outside formal political processes.

These powers make the Mayor of London look like a parish councillor. But it works admirably. It shows the vitality and success than can be achieved when cities have the right kinds of powers at their disposal. It puts the fretting about devolution in the UK into context.

As the former colonial power, Britain’s views on Hong Kong’s democratic debates are not exactly welcome. Nor is there any residual nostalgia for colonial rule, save in limited pockets of the population. This is indisputably a Chinese city and proud of it.

But it is also a city with its own distinct identity, history and economic and political structures, exemplified by the ‘one country, two systems’ doctrine. It is fiercely conscious of that, which is why its citizens are so animated by debate on its democracy, laws and freedoms as they approach the 20th anniversary of their transfer back to Chinese sovereignty.

The Midnight After ends on an indeterminate but vaguely optimistic note, and this registers the current mood of Hong Kong well. It is anxious and concerned, but its energy and resourcefulness are far from exhausted.

Nick Pearce, the director of the UK's Institute for Public Policy Research, has been visiting Hong Kong as a fellow in the Department of Public Policy at City University Hong Kong. This post first appeared on Nick’s Blog