“Young Hong Kongers want nothing to do with China. They have no more interest in subverting China than they do in subverting Zimbabwe,” said Liu Kin-ming, a veteran Hong Kong journalist who now works as a consultant, advising companies on political and business affairs in China.

This is a dramatic turn for a city that, under British rule, sheltered and supported Sun Yat-sen, the leader of a 1911 revolution that brought down’s China’s last imperial dynasty. Hong Kong also gave refuge and sustenance to prominent revolutionaries working to overthrow the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek in the 1930s and 40s.

Hong Kong played such an important role in shaping China’s history in the 20th century that, ahead of its handover to Chinese rule in 1997, many in the city seriously believed that the big question was not so much how China would change Hong Kong once it regained sovereignty but how tiny Hong Kong would change China.

Nobody believes that now.

Instead, despair has set in over China’s direction. And with it is a growing rejection of the country to which most people in Hong Kong are bound by ethnicity but that many now shun as an alien power.

Jin Zhong, the longtime editor of Kaifang, another China-focused magazine that has shut down its print version in recent years, though it still appears online, said hope and expectation about China had, despite its stunning economic success, curdled into bitter repudiation.