Hong Kong (43 page)

Later the merchants and bankers of Hong Kong played leading parts in China’s own Industrial Revolution, such as it was. They envisaged gigantic new markets opening there to western exports, and immense opportunities for investment. Groping as they always were through miasmas of Chinese corruption, obstruction, ignorance and misunderstanding, they were constantly urging the purblind Manchu authorities towards progress, and Hong Kong became less like an itchy parasite than like a wasp, buzzing and stinging the lethargic giant into awareness.

It was largely through the agency of Hong Kong that steam, the prime instrument of nineteenth-century change, reached China. The sturdy river steamboats of Russell’s, Dent’s, Jardine’s and Swire’s became the chief means of transport into the interior, and Hong Kong
steamers dominated the coastal trade. The first of all China’s railways was built by Jardine’s. A quaint narrow-gauge line between Shanghai and Wusung, opened in 1876, it did not last long, the Manchu Government being unsympathetic to the initiative, but it was the beginning of the immense railway explosion which was to transform China in the last part of the nineteenth century. It was only proper that in the end a consortium between Jardine’s and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank should finance and develop the greater part of the system.

Money poured in from the colony to the sub-continent. Quite apart from investment money, repeated loans were made to Chinese Governments, and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank became one of the most powerful forces in Beijing. For some years it was the one Bank into which all Chinese customs dues were paid, and when China went off the silver standard in 1935 all the silver surrendered to the Government was stored in the Bank’s vaults. War-lords also came to Hong Kong for the wherewithal to fight their campaigns, and in the 1930s some 70 per cent of China’s war needs, in its fight against Japan, reached it by way of the colony.

Engineers from Hong Kong helped to curb the perennial floods of the Yellow River. The first elevator in China was installed by Jardine’s. Hong Kong contributed power to China’s electricity grid. There were even times when the minuscule colony helped to alleviate China’s food shortages. F. D. Ommanney, who lived in Hong Kong in the 1950s, when China’s agriculture was in chaos, reported
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that when his amah visited Guangzhou she took with her, for her hungry relatives over the border, two chickens, a duck, packages of fruit, sausages, eggs, tea and sweetmeats, large quantities of dried bread and three sacks crammed with burnt rice, scraped from the bottoms of cooking-pans.

‘A celestial palace in a fairyland,’ is how the nineteenth-century Chinese scholar Wei Yuan described Hong Kong. They have often expressed themselves in poetical hyperbole and politesse, but there is no doubt that the Chinese have always been astonished by Hong Kong, by its technical virtuosity and its speed of change. As early as 1845 a senior Guangzhou official wrote an ode to the colony describing it as a royal white city built on a rock, its buildings glittering in the morning
sun – ‘yet on this spot ere-while were only to be seen the hovels of the roving fishermen. Where are they? – gone like the swallows of departed autumn!’ The poet Wang Zuaxian, in 1870, said the colony was ‘embroiled in a sea of music and song, its mountains overflowing with meat and wine’. The politician Wang Dao likened it to a row of flying geese, and the political reformer Kang You-wei, who much admired the ruling strategy of the colony, wrote about ‘the splendour of the buildings, the orderly array of the roads, the solemn appearance of the police …’

Hong Kong has been a potent example to the Chinese across the frontier and up the coast. They see the colony as they might see an exhibition of modernity, and the mere contrast of material achievement, between the little colony and the immense republic, can only be stimulation of a kind – one car for every twenty-two people in Hong Kong, one for every 10,220 in China! China looks to Hong Kong for models managerial, constructional, architectural, financial. The computer age is reaching the People’s Republic very largely through the medium of Hong Kong, and the concept of company law, unknown in Communist China but essential to satisfactory contracts with the outside world, is seeping into China by way of Hong Kong’s legal community.

When Lugard founded the University of Hong Kong, he saw it specifically as an intellectual example for China – a British lighthouse whose beams would illuminate all around it. Hong Kong was always a base of Christian evangelicalism, too, and even in Mao Zedong’s time Christianity was projected into China via this not very Christian colony: couriers of New Life Literature, a proselytizing organization, took Bibles into the mainland, and the Chinese Research Centre expressed itself concerned, like so many missionary groups before it, by the fact that ‘many Chinese hearts are empty’.

Above all the whole ideology of capitalism, now fitfully reviving within the People’s Republic, finds its nearest exemplar in Hong Kong. It could hardly be disregarded. Millions of Chinese comrades have relatives in the colony, many more have seen the place for themselves, and anyway history has proved that the patterns of Hong Kong can never be excluded from China. It was from here that Sun Yat-sen, a medical student in the colony, took home the ideas that were to overthrow the monarchy and impel the Celestial Kingdom at last towards the status of a contemporary Great Power. He was banished from Hong Kong for a time as being dangerous to its peace and good order, but twenty-five years later he told an audience at Hong Kong University that the source of his revolutionary inspiration had been
Hong Kong itself – he had been deeply affected by the orderly calm and security of the colony, compared with the disorder and insecurity of his home in Guangdong Province, only fifty miles away. ‘The difference of Governments impressed me very much …’

Except I suppose for the simplest or remotest peasants, all Chinese know about Hong Kong. It is a metropolis of the Greater China which extends in communities large and small all around the world. Every corner of that vast informal empire maintains family or economic connections with the colony. Its remissions of money to the homeland are channelled through Hong Kong, and so often are its citizens, so that the territory has become an ante-room, or perhaps a pressure-chamber, through which a perpetual flow of Greater Chinese, Overseas Chinese as the People’s Republic classifies them, passes on its way to the mainland.

I once took passage in a Chinese ship from Hong Kong to Shanghai, and found the vessel itself a microcosm of the Chinese world. It was like a reunion, as we passed from the threshold that was Hong Kong into the grand presence of the mainland. The crew were citizens of the People’s Republic, cheerful, able, always ready to serve you a scraggy leg of duck wrapped in grease-paper from the snack bar, and obligingly disposed to turn a blind eye when you passed through a gate marked
CREW ONLY
. The passengers were of all Chinese kinds. They included elderly people returning from visits to relatives abroad, and rich Overseas Chinese from Taiwan and the Philippines, and Hong Kong students, and Chinese-American businessmen on trade missions, and a couple of academics returning from studies in Europe.

For three days we sailed through the South China Sea. We were never alone in it, for there were always fishing-boats about, and we were seldom out of sight of the shore whose landmarks the passengers excitedly pointed out to each other. By the time we entered the estuary of the Yangtze and steamed up-river to Shanghai, the experience had become doubly allegorical to me. I felt myself to be among a company of wanderers returning to their family; but I also felt I had been sailing in the wakes of all the ships that ever sailed up the China coast from Hong Kong, all the opium smugglers, tea clippers, Swire’s and Jardine’s steamers, all the multitudes of junks and sampans which have linked colony with mainland through all the pages of this book. Even as I write these words, looking out from my window across the harbour of Hong Kong, there I see the very same vessel, the
Shanghai
, flying the red flag at her stern and loading her attendant lighters for the next voyage home.

Still, if the 400-odd square miles of Hong Kong cast a surprisingly long shadow over China, the presence of the People’s Republic’s 3.7 million square miles looms decidedly larger over Hong Kong. Physically there is no escaping it, anywhere in the colony, or ignoring the fact that Hong Kong is geographically and geologically part of China, dependent upon its vast neighbour for most of its water and nearly all its food. When I survey that view from the Peak I find it hard to work out, contemplating its jumbled panorama of land and sea, which islands or hills are British, which Chinese.

To the Chinese Hong Kong has never been anything but part of China. China is China to them, traditionally every Chinese can only be a citizen of China, and the mere occupation by foreigners of a patch of Chinese territory does nothing to alienate it from the motherland. From start to finish the Chinese of all regimes have acted upon the assumption that in the fullness of time the foreigners would lose control of Hong Kong. Their attitude has generally been evasively temporizing. They have seldom lost their tempers over Hong Kong, but have allowed the last of the Unequal Treaties to wither away organically – it was the British, not the Chinese, who initiated the 1984 negotiations.

When Hong Kong was taken from them in 1842 their firm and crazed conviction was that China was in all ways the centre of the world. The very ideogram for ‘Centre’ stood for China too, and the title of Middle Kingdom was a reminder that everything else revolved around the heartland that was China. Western envoys were treated like menials or juveniles. Queen Victoria herself was severely reprimanded by Lin Ze-xu, Imperial High Commissioner in Guangzhou, for allowing the opium trade to continue – ‘on receipt of this letter’, the mandarin counselled her, ‘let your reply be speedy, advising us of the measures you propose to adopt. Do not by false embellishments evade or procrastinate …’

Reading the history of Hong Kong, I sometimes get the feeling that the colony was ceded to Britain rather as a toy might be handed over to a recalcitrant child, merely to keep him quiet. Certainly for long periods the Chinese simply let things lie, without it seems much worrying about the status of Hong Kong. Often they were physically incapable of doing anything else, but at other times they seem to have exercised indifference as a matter of policy. When they did interfere in the affairs of the colony, they generally did so obliquely, but not always ineffectively. It happened first in the 1860s, with the so-called Blockade
of Hong Kong. This was mounted because the Chinese resented the vast amount of contraband conveyed into China from the colony – as the British Minister in Beijing admitted at the time, Hong Kong had become ‘little more than an immense smuggling depot’.

The British maintained that, Hong Kong being a free port, it was up to the Chinese authorities themselves to stop illicit trading. The Chinese accordingly bought some new (British-built) gunboats, set up new customs posts in the islands all around (sometimes commanded by British officers of the Imperial Chinese Customs), and for nineteen years stopped and searched Chinese ships coming and going from Hong Kong. This protracted and sometimes lackadaisical action succeeded, and in 1886 the British officially admitted their responsibility for controlling contraband moving in and out of the harbour. Here and there in the archipelago one may still find the remains of the customs posts established during the blockade, and the name of Smuggler’s Ridge, where the Shing-mun redoubt stood, remembers the dispute too.

After the 1911 revolution, when the Manchus were overthrown and nationalism rode high in China, there was a spate of Chinese intrusion, official and unofficial, into Hong Kong’s affairs. The colony had tried hard to stay clear of the various subversive movements, which is why Sun Yat-sen had been expelled in 1896 – he expostulated that he had only been trying to ‘emancipate my miserable countrymen from the cruelty of the Tartar yoke’, but it cut no ice with the British. After the fall of the monarchy, though, Hong Kong found itself far more deeply embroiled. A large proportion of its Chinese population was enthusiastically on the side of the revolution, rather thinking indeed that it ought to be consummated by the overthrow of British colonial rule too, and the end of the Manchus sparked off Hong Kong’s first real political disturbances. Europeans were attacked in the streets, policemen were stoned, European shops were boycotted. Soldiers with fixed bayonets patrolled the towns, and reinforcements were brought in from India. It was then that Sir Henry May suffered his attempted assassination. The British were outraged by the event, one of the very few occasions on which one of their colonial governors had ever been physically assaulted, but the Chinese population of Hong Kong seems to have been less shocked, and the only Chinese-language newspaper of the day preferred not to report the incident at all.
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Then there was the damaging series of strikes and boycotts in the 1920s, and in 1949 the Communist Revolution in China altered the nature of the relationship once again, sent the cadres swarming into Hong Kong with their Little Red Books, and set the scene for the colony’s prolonged and confusing last act. Although the British Government was one of the first to recognize the new Communist regime, provocations of many kinds were practised upon the colony during the People’s Republic’s uneasy years of confrontation with the West. In May 1962, when things were particularly hard in China, 70,000 refugees were suddenly let loose across the border without warning, terrifyingly straining the colony’s resources of food and housing. And in 1967, when the British Embassy in Beijing was sacked by activists of the Cultural Revolution, the most violent riots Hong Kong had ever known were incited by events across the frontier. Mobs roamed the streets waving red flags, brandishing the Thoughts of Chairman Mao and massing in their thousands outside the gates of Government House, which were stuck all over with propaganda leaflets.