What keeps Hong Kong successful?

The American has an interesting analysis of Hong Kong, and what has kept it successful in the nearly ten years since the UK/PRC handover. The author, John Fund, identifies two main factors -- namely, bureaucracy-free capitalism, and rule of law. He also delves into the mid-1990s predictions of some Western naysayers, who predicted that China couldn't resist meddling once they took over in the summer of 1997.

Of course, such predictions were totally at odds with the history of the People's Republic of China's treatment of Hong Kong since 1949. Senior Communist/pseudo-Communist leaders in Beijing clearly recognized the importance of the British colony as a gateway to the rest of the world, a capitalist outpost that could benefit China, and a bargaining chip/point of leverage with the West. If they wanted to meddle, they would have done so in 1949-1950, when they were clearning out the last knots of Nationalist troops from China's southern coast and Hainan, or in the 1960s, when the Cultural Revolution and Vietnam War were raging. They didn't meddle then, and they sensibly didn't meddle in Hong Kong post-1997, with the exception of rejecting many of the democratic reforms that were implemented under British Governor of Hong Kong Christopher Patten in the mid-1990s (something that Fund did not address, incidentally).