Rummaging around for something at home, I came across an envelope with a few ancient floppy disks in it. Each bore a handwritten label: The Great Red Hope.
This was a book I wrote while living in Hong Kong in the 1990s, but the publisher to whom I was contracted closed its Asian operations in late 1997, buying me and half a dozen others out of our contracts. So The Great Red Hope remained just that, gathering dust in a loft, and now I don’t even own a computer that can read 3.5-inch disks.
That’s a shame, because I’d be curious to read what the 25-year-old me made of the takeover of Hong Kong’s capital markets by a strange new breed of company, the “red chip”. These are controlled by various branches of the Chinese state.