ABSTRACT
In history, the term “cosmopolitan” has often been turned into the epithet “rootless cosmopolitan” – not least by state apparatuses wishing to render suspect the loyalties of one group or other. In Hong Kong, the foreign correspondent community was obviously much larger, although after the crown colony had been handed over to the People’s Republic, it was possibly no longer so clear why, or on what, correspondents should report from there in the future. Foreign correspondents are perhaps among the most celebrated transnational migrants of our times, sometime heroes and heroines in print and on the screen, present as witnesses whenever something dramatic happens in the world; ready, as some of them like to say, to offer “the first draft of history.” Foreign correspondents are like anthropologists: they report from one part of the world to another, often over great geographical as well as cultural distances.
