Thousands of high school students had forsaken the afternoon to demonstrate outside the Hong Kong government’s headquarters against a jingoistic national education course briefly added to the school’s curriculum last month. Amid the roars from the crowd, a member of a parents’ group that opposed the course, which potentially included evaluating the emotional responses of children to the Chinese flag, was making the argument that ethnicity – and indeed patriotism – was a silly basis for citizenship.

Hong Kong is part of China, but metaphysically a different place altogether. The dissimilarity is not that one is capitalist and the other Communist because China practises a form of robber baron capitalism, but rather that one is a 21st-century liberal enclave tolerated by a powerful dictatorship in Beijing. When more than 100,000 people surrounded the government headquarters to protest against patriotic education a few weekends ago, the local government had no option but to concede defeat to the mass movement, one of whose leaders was a 15-year-old student who reads Haruki Murakami.

I moved here two years ago from London because I find the factories across the border fascinating and Hong Kong’s postcard-perfect views uplifting. The factories make just about everything we use in our daily lives from iPhones to undergarments and yet we know little about them or their workers. At the other end of the spectrum are Hong Kong’s eccentric tycoons. The stories range from a battle over the assets of an octogenarian casino tycoon by the families of his three “wives” last year to last month’s gem – the offer of a US$64m dowry by a property baron to the man who can win the heart of his beautiful daughter, who is lesbian.