Hong Kong (45 page)

A drive along this peculiar thoroughfare, hemmed in on either side by its tangle of metal, is one of the oddest of Hong Kong outings. Even in the 1990s, with the colony pledged to the Return, the whole frontier zone is sealed off to visitors, and this particular road, following the actual line of the border, is even more strictly prohibited. As your Land Rover weaves its way down the corridor you are unlikely to meet much other traffic within the wire, and through the mesh the gorge of the Sham Chun River still looks like an archetypal frontier.

Along the road on the other, Chinese side of the river you sometimes see cars and drab brown trucks; in the no man’s land that lies beside the stream farmers in wide straw hats are at work, and a couple of women sit languidly on a small bridge, perhaps, to watch you go by. In general, though, it is an empty place. You pass down your caged thoroughfare as you might pass through a safari park without any animals, or perhaps a landscape emptied of life by some catastrophe. Here and there concrete Chinese watch-posts are embedded in the earth, sometimes just outside the wire; always you feel the presence of the British sentries, out of sight in their dug-outs on the hills above.

Well you may, for there are men perpetually in ‘ambush position’ on this border, and they are linked by an electronic listening system called Vindicator, which records every sound along that corridor, the merest snip of the wire, the most cautious shuffling of feet. At the crossing posts all the paraphernalia of a frontier is still maintained, the police guards, the customs posts, on one side a silken Chinese flag flying elegantly in the breeze, on the other a Union Jack of bunting limply hanging.
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If the frontier at large seems deserted, the crossing-places feel as though half China is squeezing incessantly through the barriers, one way or the other. At Lo Wu the railway line to Guangzhou crosses on a steel bridge. The fastest trains go straight through, but passengers on the slower ones have to change here, and stream in their thousands through a cluster of buildings that feel, at least when you are being shunted through them yourself, remarkably like cattle-sheds. At Man Kam To endless convoys of lorries pass over the road bridge. At the village of Sha Tau Kok China-England Street demarcates the frontier as it has since 1898. It is like a little Berlin, before the Wall came down. A row of stone posts, down the centre of the street, marks the exact line between British and Chinese territory. Only residents of the village may cross it, but a constant flow of foreign journalists, visiting MPs and Congressmen, miscellaneous bigwigs of all nationalities, peer across it from neighbouring rooftops, courtesy of the Government Information Service, and are briefed about the situation by crisp police inspectors in well-ironed trousers.

All this is anachronism. There have been times when this border has stood to its arms against foreign attack, and when it really did possess the baleful allure of an Iron Curtain. Such times are long gone. Those strongpoints could not withstand a military attack for more than an hour or two, and a modern army could cut through the wire wall in a trice. The only point of the barricade now is to keep illegal immigrants out of Hong Kong. The ambush patrols are certainly not out to fall upon advance guards of the People’s Liberation Army, and Vindicator merely tells the police when another few poor Chinese from Guangdong Province, in search of higher wages or better opportunities, have cut a hole in the wire.

But the British border guards cling rather touchingly, I think, to former attitudes, as though nothing has changed. Even now very few of them have ever crossed into China themselves, and they pine for yesterday’s dangerous mysteries. There was glamour to Sha Tau Kok in the old days, when one never knew what was happening over there, when mad revolutionaries were liable to snipe at police posts, or half-starved multitudes might appear all of a sudden out of the homeland. But the need for a frontier, its very existence indeed, is fading now, as the two sides prepare for 1997, and the whole apparatus of wires, police posts, security zones, briefings, Buchanesque forts and Vindicator has a quaint and dated air. Except for Gibraltar, whose frontier is only a street wide, and Northern Ireland, whose frontier is
abstractional, this is the very last land frontier of the British Empire, and those indefensible posts on the former Mendip Hills, looking down to the ex-Ganges, really are the last descendants of Attock and Gilgit.

Only once, in all the 150 years of Hong Kong’s history, did it seem possible that the Chinese might be about to take it back by force. In 1945, at the end of the Second World War, two Chinese Kuomintang armies passed through Kowloon to embark in American ships for Manchuria, recently liberated from the Japanese. Column after column, day after day they marched through the streets to the quayside and the waiting troopships, and the colony watched them with bated breath, just as it had watched the arrival of the Japanese five years before. The British Government had agreed to their passage through Hong Kong, but even so there was always the possibility, at least in the minds of ordinary people, that they would never leave.

It must surely have crossed the mind of Chiang Kai-shek, too, but the times were against the notion. It might arouse, the Generalissimo admitted, ‘allied misunderstanding’. There has never in fact been any serious threat of a forcible seizure. In the nineteenth century the Chinese were incapable of it, in the twentieth they have presumably felt it unnecessary. At any time since the Communist Revolution they could certainly have taken Hong Kong if they wished, not only by force of arms, but by cutting off its water supplies or by starving it out; for many years the British have regularly imported a proportion of Hong Kong’s rice from Thailand, partly in case of Chinese famine, but partly in case of Chinese blockade. In 1949 the British garrison was reinforced against a possible invasion, to a level higher than ever before – 30,000 men, double the force that had resisted the Japanese; but the worst never happened, gradually the garrison was reduced to its usual level, and the interminable hunt for illegal immigrants remained the nearest thing to active service its soldiers and sailors ever saw.

They would not seriously have resisted, anyway. Whatever the generals thought, political opinion at home would never have allowed it. Even the most fervently Churchillian Conservative Government would not have gone to war for Hong Kong as Mrs Thatcher’s Government
went to war for the remote and useless Falklands. For one thing there would have been no possibility of success, and for another the principles at stake were less than absolute. Not only the Chinese considered those treaties unequal; many of the British themselves could not contemplate the existence of Hong Kong, however dazzlingly it spoke of British enterprise and even of British benevolence, without some tremor of vicarious shame. Most of them knew very little about Hong Kong, but they did know there was something disreputable about its possession. Wasn’t it something to do with opium? Weren’t the police supposed to be bent? Hadn’t they read something in the
Guardian
about a disgraceful lack of democratic rights?

Indeed throughout Hong Kong’s history there have been Britons to suggest its return to China, sometimes on moral, sometimes on purely practical grounds. Gladstonian Liberals of course believed it should never have been taken in the first place, and later in the nineteenth century people sometimes argued that its possession was not worth the trouble of it. In 1918 the British Minister in Beijing, Sir John Jordan, thought it might be wise at least to return the New Territories to China (‘altruistic speculation’, minuted Curzon, by then Foreign Secretary – ‘out of the question’). In the 1920s a body of opinion in the Foreign Office advocated joint Anglo-Chinese control of the colony. During the Second World War the Colonial Office suggested, in its best Whitehall idiom, that His Majesty’s Government ought to be ready to consider with the Government of China the future position of Hong Kong, and ‘should not for their part regard the maintenance of British sovereignty of the Colony as a matter beyond the scope of such discussions’.

In the post-war years British socialists repeatedly urged the voluntary return of the colony to the Chinese, notably the Welsh Parliamentarian Emrys Hughes, who wanted it exchanged for trading privileges in China, and whose ideas inspired a characteristic flight of verse in the
South China Morning Post:

The Chinese, for their part, made no direct demands for the return of Hong Kong. That its possession by the British smarted we need
not doubt – it had smarted ever since 1842. As we know the Emperor had signed it away, with his vermilion signature, only with incredulous sadness. The statesman Zuo Zong-tang had written four poems of grief about its loss to China, and was indeed so distressed by the event that he seriously thought of withdrawing to a mountain hermitage for the rest of his life – such was the sense of disgrace in a patriot mind.

But over subsequent generations the rulers of China realized that Hong Kong could be recovered only by guile and patience. Their pathos meant nothing to the iron-fisted West, and their wrath was not very terrible to it. They learnt to deal cautiously with the British Empire. Under the Treaty of Nanking they undertook no longer to refer to the British as ‘barbarians’ in official documents, and their general attitude developed from affronted arrogance through sullen acquiescence to watchful calculation – as Qi-ying had confided to his Emperor in 1843, ‘with this type of people from outside the bounds of civilization one has to be diplomatic in the essential business of subduing and conciliating them’.

The Chinese made it clear enough that Hong Kong was theirs. As late as the 1930s they were still claiming mineral rights in the New Territories, while in 1967 a spokesman described Hong Kong as ‘an inalienable part of Chinese territory’, and in 1972 another announced that its future lay ‘entirely within China’s sovereign right’. However they protested no more forcibly about the status of Hong Kong than they had about the existence of the Treaty Ports, and in time established amiable enough relations with the British; unless you count the Korean War of 1950, when British troops fought against Chinese as part of a United Nations army, there have been no hostilities between Great Britain and China since the Boxer rebellion of 1900.

So even the advent of a Communist Government in Beijing, which seemed so ominous to people in Hong Kong, did not spell out the end of the colony. The Chinese did not demand it, the British did not offer it, and with its usual pendulum shifts from confidence to panic, disconsolance to hope, Hong Kong proceeded through the 1960s and 1970s putting the future as far as possible out of mind. It was not the narrow hostility of Chairman Mao’s regime, nor the lunacy of the Cultural Revolution, but the emergence of the pragmatic and apparently benevolent Deng Xiaoping, at the start of the 1980s, that brought the destiny of Hong Kong into an exact and final focus.

By then the deadline for the expiry of the New Territories lease was less than twenty years off, and without the New Territories, as all but a few cranks or diehards recognized, the island of Hong Kong could not be maintained as a British colony. The Chinese were being no more than usually aggressive about its future, but the minds of the local capitalists were wonderfully concentrated, and the matter was brought to a head by the difficulties that now arose over the renewal of land leases; so that it was on British initiative that negotiations were opened between Margaret Thatcher’s Government in London and Deng Xiaoping’s in Beijing. They dragged on semi-secretly for a couple of years, now in Britain, now in China. Wild rumours periodically seized the colony, financial confidence alternately soared and slumped, Jardine’s alarmed everyone by precipitately moving their headquarters to Bermuda, half the population tried to forget the matter while the other half talked of nothing else.

Never were talks more entangled in historical nicety. Since Hong Kong itself was not represented, they were in effect talks between the very same Empires which had first clashed over the very same issue a century and a half before. Since then the whole Scramble for China had come and gone. The French, the Russians, the Japanese, the Germans had all abandoned their footholds on the coast. The entire paraphernalia of Treaty Ports, Spheres of Influence, International Settlements and Extra-Territorial Privileges had been disbanded. Only the two old Empires, which had here come face to face so long before, confronted each other still over the negotiating table – the one infinitely more formidable than it had been in 1841, the other infinitely weaker.

The Chinese refused to recognize the validity of any of the three Hong Kong treaties, so that they could hardly solve the problem by simply extending the New Territories lease – in their eyes there
was
no lease. The British on the other hand maintained that all three treaties were perfectly legal, not Unequal at all; they had a right to keep Hong Kong Island for as long as they pleased, and Mrs Thatcher pointedly remarked in public that people who did not honour one treaty were unlikely to honour another. The talks were almost conspiratorially confidential, and with reason; the slightest whisper of disagreement was likely to lower stock values in Hong Kong, something equally distasteful to both sides, and any suggestion of deadlock might send capital fleeing
to more predictable investment markets elsewhere. British and Chinese alike were treading very carefully, smiling grimly whenever they emerged to have their photographs taken by the waiting Press.

Their aims were self-evident. The British, while they can never seriously have hoped to prolong their sovereignty in Hong Kong, wanted to secure the survival of its capitalist system and maintain profitable relations with China. The Chinese, while they wanted Hong Kong back, did not want to kill the capitalist goose which was laying them so many golden eggs, and perhaps also hoped that by a generous agreement they might lure the recalcitrant governors of Taiwan, too, back into the fold.