The Escalator
What started as LinkedIn posts that kept getting longer, sharper, and harder to ignore, now lives here.
Why This Exists
I kept writing long-form commentary on LinkedIn, on Hong Kong, on corporate misconduct, on geopolitics, on immigration systems that don’t work, and it kept outgrowing the platform. Posts turned into essays. Essays got cited by Yale economists and picked up by editors. I published a book with a pan-democrat protest slogan in Hong Kong as its title; someone plugged it in the China Daily. People started asking where they could read more.
The Escalator is the answer. It’s where the writing goes when it’s too long for a feed, too pointed for someone else’s editorial line, and too sourced to dismiss.
It also covers daily life in Hong Kong, the frictions of cross-cultural living and marriage, and whatever else I feel like writing about on a given morning. Not everything here is an investigation. Some of it is just a guy on a minibus with an opinion.
I’M A HONG KONG-BASED WRITER WITH A LOW TOLERANCE FOR EUPHEMISM, A LONG MEMORY FOR INSTITUTIONAL NONSENSE, AND A HABIT OF FOLLOWING STORIES PAST THE POINT WHERE MOST PEOPLE GET BORED.
Who
Adam Clermont. American attorney, Hong Kong- and US-qualified, 25+ years in criminal and regulatory litigation. Background in corporate finance, cross-border disputes, logistics, immigration, and human rights advocacy. Instructing solicitor in Selina Cheng v. Dow Jones Publishing Co. (Asia) Inc., the case in which the Wall Street Journal’s publisher was convicted in Hong Kong of attempting to prevent a former reporter from taking up leadership of the Hong Kong Journalists Association. Author of Hong Kong Belongs to Hongkongers (Amazon #1 New Release), Profit Before People (Amazon #1 New Release), and The Wound That Never Closed: Taiwan, China and the End of Strategic Ambiguity (Amazon #1 New Release). Named “Author of the Month” by UK Talk Radio (January 2026) for Hong Kong Belongs to Hongkongers. Columnist at Loadstar Premium.
I married a Hongkonger. I chose this city. I write about it the way someone who lives here, not someone who parachutes in, actually sees it.
Why the Name
I moved to Hong Kong over a decade ago. I stayed. I married a woman from here. I learned how to order dim sum without pointing, how to stand on the correct side of the escalator, and how to read a city that reveals itself slowly, in layers, to people willing to pay attention.
The Central-Mid-Levels Escalator is not glamorous. It is not fast. It just moves, steadily, through every layer of the city, passing wet markets and luxury boutiques, dai pai dongs and wine bars, temples and construction sites. If you stand on it long enough, you see everything.
That is what I am trying to do here.