Speak to the government in Hong Kong, the territory’s business leaders or British officials and you will hear the same story – nothing has changed since the handover to China 10 years ago.
Beijing, they will add, has respected the provisions of the Sino-British accords guaranteeing the preservation of the Hong Kong way of life for 50 years. So there is nothing to regret, nothing to worry about. If there are more mainlanders in the Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China, that is a good thing because their spending has boosted retail consumption and the property market.
In one sense, all this is perfectly correct. The people of the SAR enjoy a degree of liberty still not known on the mainland under the "one country, two systems" formulation - though one should never forget that the first part counts for more than the second, in the leadership compound by the Forbidden City.
The rule of law has been maintained. The civil service is clean and effective. People travel freely. No official censorship has been imposed. The currency is pegged to the US dollar, and the People's Liberation Army (PLA) keeps to itself.
That was what the British regarded as the best they could get when they worked out the deal with Beijing. Under Deng Xiaoping, the People's Republic was set on regaining the lost territory at the mouth of the Pearl River. The PLA commander in neighbouring Guangdong appears to have nurtured plans to march across the border during the Cultural Revolution. But force was not necessary. Nor was Britain going to send the Royal Navy into Kowloon Bay.
Even if it had done so, China could simply have cut off the water supply to Hong Kong Island. If the deal was a diplomatic way for Britain to hand over sovereignty and claim that it had got the best possible outcome for the people of Hong Kong, it also suited Beijing pretty well. Deng's economic reforms needed a benign international climate that would foster the export trade; a confrontation over Hong Kong would not have been in the broader interests of the PRC. And gaining such a rich and globally connected city could only be to its benefit; the cliches about geese and golden eggs that floated around 10 years ago were quite apposite, to the point that the head of Beijing's Hong Kong and Macau office now acknowledges that the PRC may have put rather too much emphasis on reassuring the tycoons.
The outcome in 1997, and most of what has happened since, had been so carefully choreographed and was seen by both sides as being in their fundamental interests that, when the time came, it steamrollered Chris Patten's democratisation. If there were to be colonies, Hong Kong was just about the best in breed.
That was due in part to the British administrators but, above all, to the Chinese inhabitants who had made the place work since at least the defeat of the British by the Japanese at the end of 1941. The Hong Kong Chinese became famous for their business success, but they also nurtured a strong middle class, with a lot of intelligent values that CP Scott would have relished.  The handover did not turn them into "slaves of Beijing", but it left the obvious question. As a colleague at the South China Morning Post newspaper mused, why were Indonesians and Filipinos able to pick their rulers, while she and her fellow Hong Kongers could not? In the ongoing debate about whether China will ever evolve into a western-style democracy, it seems to be accepted that this cannot happen without the rule of law, official accountability and the emergence of a political class outside the one-party system. In 1997, Hong Kong had all three. It was the ideal setting in which to add the last storey to the edifice - a legislative assembly with real powers and a popularly elected chief executive.
Instead, the deal that enabled the handover to take place so smoothly and enables all concerned to rejoice in “business as usual” prevents any such development because of Beijing's fear of the “Hong Kong virus” affecting the mainland. Myself, I do not see democracy coming to China any time soon, for a whole array of reasons. But the tragedy of Hong Kong is that this was where it could have happened. And the fall-out from that for Beijing is that the greater prize of Taiwan is even further from its grasp as the island's people rally behind its status as the only territory claimed by China in which real democracy operates.
Instead of being able to build something new on the basis of what had already been achieved, the SAR was, therefore, crammed into a time warp in which big votes for pro-democracy parties did not translate into real political clout.