Wong Kar-wai’s people are forever just missing one another. Chow and Su in the sublet rooms of 1962, rehearsing a confession neither will finally make. They are held apart not by distance but by  loyalty to a marriage that went hollow years before anyone admitted it. Watch enough of these films and the whole of East Asia assembles itself in that narrow corridor: two neighbours who belong together, still far from each other.

The neighbours are Tokyo and Seoul. The marriage is with Washington. And the figure at the far end of the corridor is Beijing. Japan has paid his rent for the longest time. In 1985 the Plaza Accord obliged Tokyo to let the yen soar. Sovereignty was the deeper charge. Article 9 and the bases at Okinawa fixed Japan as an unsinkable carrier for another navy, its foreign policy a footnote to Washington’s, and the 2022 defence build-up under Kishida only signed the lease for another generation. Korea learned this more recently. When Seoul accepted the THAAD battery in 2016, Beijing answered not with missiles, not with diplomacy, and neither with soft power, but with the market: Lotte Corporation’s mainland stores shuttered, the tour groups cancelled, the singers barred, billions gone before the radar was switched on. Then came the export controls, such as Samsung and SK Hynix, whose most advanced fabs sit inside China, told from Washington which customers they may keep. The lesson was never that China is gentle. It is that alignment with America arrives with consequences in the East, and China is the one who mails it. Consequences are not cheap.

Hong Kong was always the hinge for WKW, the room where Chinese civilisation and global money learned each other’s manners. WKW filmed it as the one place fluent in both languages. It stood there to show what an Asia oriented toward China rather than through America might feel like: cosmopolitan and Confucian at once, modern, futuristic and visionary without being a client. Behind the hinge stood the machine. Jiang Zemin took a country still bleeding from 1989 and walked it into the World Trade Organization in 2001, binding the West to Chinese growth by the West’s own rules. Hu Jintao inherited the job, named it “peaceful rise,” and staged its coming-out in the Beijing sky in 2008 with the Olympics games.

The strange part is that everyone already knows. China is the largest trading partner of both Japan and Korea, has been for years and will be for long. In 2020 all three signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the largest trade bloc on earth. And still the strategic heart faces the wrong way: bases renewed, chips walled off on American instruction, the natural relationship rehearsed and never consummated, exactly like Chow drafting confessions he will never deliver. The clock in the title is not decoration. Hong Kong’s fifty years of promised autonomy expire in 2047, and the room Wong made immortal is already half gone. Perhaps the appointment will be kept late, after the moment has cooled and the participants have aged past wanting it. Or perhaps Tokyo and Seoul will do what his lovers do: carry the unspoken thing to the end, faithful to a room in Washington where no one really lives anymore. Or who really lives and control is not visible to the public. The train keeps leaving. Someone is always on the platform, watch in hand, and the hour it shows is getting late.