Hong Kong (46 page)

As for the people of Hong Kong, probably very few of them knew what to want. The business community naturally feared its extinction under a Communist regime. The refugees from China possibly feared retribution, and certainly viewed with dismay a return to Communist ways of life. There were many supporters of the Kuomintang who would prefer Hong Kong to join Taiwan in an anti-Communist federation of islands, and there were some who dreamed of an independent City-State, like Singapore. Some demanded a plebiscite, or the establishment of full democratic institutions, but probably most, if the truth were told, simply wanted things to be left just as they were.

So the months passed. Now and again Hong Kong entered the world’s headlines, when another enigmatic progress report was published, or another rumour eddied through the exchanges. China threw open its doors ever more welcomingly to the world and its money. Deng spoke soothingly. Mrs Thatcher spoke Thatcherly. In London the House of Commons considered the future of the last great British colony for thirty minutes flat. The manager of Xinhua was frequently interviewed, and encouraged nearly everyone by turning up with half his staff to the opening of the new and very racy Volvo Club – ‘the largest Japanese-style night-club in the world’.
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The Governor of Hong Kong kept his mouth shut. The English-language papers of the colony raucously debated the issue. The Chinese-language papers, being mostly under Communist control, hardly debated it at all.

And finally, in 1984, just thirteen years before the expiry of the New Territories lease, agreement was reached, and everything was changed. Not only did Mrs Thatcher appear in the Great Hall of the People at
Beijing to sign the fourth and last Anglo-Chinese treaty on Hong Kong, but the Governor of Hong Kong himself, for so long a non-person in Communist China, stood by her side. All was smiles, banquets, compliments and simple diplomatic jokes. Pictures show most of the aides, on both sides, bowing and laughing convivially enough, but here and there one notices a Chinese even then aloof and poker-faced, and one remembers Qi-ying’s report to the Emperor about keeping the barbarians happy.

There has never been a treaty, in the whole history of diplomacy, quite like the Anglo-Chinese agreement on the future of Hong Kong. The Chinese held almost all the cards, politically and even perhaps morally. The British could only argue, in essence, that Hong Kong in its existing form had been extremely useful to China, and that to destroy it would benefit nobody. This argument unexpectedly prevailed. The British agreed to return the whole of Hong Kong territory to China in 1997, the Chinese agreed that it should retain its social and economic systems, and its ‘life-style’, for a further half-century after that, until the year 2047. Hong Kong would be incorporated into the People’s Republic, but as a semi-autonomous Special Administrative Region, to be called Hong Kong, China. Residents would revert to Chinese citizenship, the People’s Liberation Army would move in, but expatriate officials would be allowed to stay if required, and the structure of Hong Kong commerce and finance, the stock exchange, the banks, the insurance companies, the property development schemes – the whole teeming mass of it would be given another fifty years’ grace. ‘One Country, Two Systems’, Deng called this solution to an otherwise intractable problem.

For the Chinese it was almost as radical a concession as the original transfer of Hong Kong had been. There were already four Special Autonomous Regions within the People’s Republic, but none of them had acquired their autonomy by international negotiation, and one of them at least, Tibet, seemed far more autonomous in the theory than in the fact. Hong Kong had been given its special status by an agreement with a foreign Power, and the People’s Republic seemed to have bound itself for the first time to a particular course of conduct, ideological conduct at that, within its own frontiers. One cannot help feeling
that Mao Zedong, like Zuo Zong-tang before him, might have written a grief poem or two.

For the British too the agreement was something new. It is not quite true, as was often said at the time, that they had never before handed over a possession to a foreign Power; they had returned Minorca to the Spaniards, the Ionian Islands to the Greeks, Heligoland to the Germans. But they had never surrendered a territory which was in effect their own creation, and more significantly, perhaps, they had certainly never before denied to so advanced a colony the alternative of self-government. They had not consulted the 5,000 island fisherfolk when they took possession of Hong Kong, they did not consult the 5.6 million people of the City-State when they agreed to relinquish it.

Not until after the event, anyway. To make at least a show of popular consultation, after the conclusion of the agreement but before its signing, the Government of Hong Kong established an Assessment Office to determine what the mass of the people made of it. Sir Patrick Nairne, Master of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, went out to Hong Kong to monitor its work (staying at the Hilton Hotel, rather than the Mandarin, so as not to be thought in the pockets of the British), and he was joined by Simon Li Fook-sean, a Hong Kong judge. Among those institutions whose views were heard were the Hon Wah Middle School Old Pupils’ Association, the Vegetable Food and Grocery Hawkers’ Welfare and Fraternity Association, the New Territories Poems and Songs Club, the Sai Yee Junk Builders’ Association and the Shatin Sha Kok Estate Bean Goose House Mutual Aid Committee. Every kind of opinion was recorded, from that of the Legislative Council whose members predictably endorsed the agreement almost unanimously, to that of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Association which claimed that the negotiations ought not to have been with Beijing at all, but with the Kuomintang Government in Taiwan. There should have been a referendum, thought the Cotton Bleaching and Dyeing Free Workers’ Union. ‘My heart is not truly at ease,’ declared an unnamed individual.

Sir Patrick and Mr Justice Li found that the response conveyed ‘an overwhelming message of acceptance’, but they knew better than that really. They knew that people were hedging their bets, and wisely hedged theirs too. ‘The verdict of acceptance,’ they added in the final paragraph of their report, ‘implies neither positive enthusiasm nor passive acquiescence. The response to the Assessment Office has demonstrated the realism of the people of Hong Kong.’

Quite so. As it had been at the start, so it was now that the history of this extraordinary outpost was approaching its conclusion. Warily the two Empires had regarded each other down the decades, as the sign of the one rose, of the other fell, and for 150 years the colony had lived by making the best of the confrontation. Realism was its stock-in-trade.

It is a Thursday morning as I write, in my air-conditioned hotel bedroom in Central. Outside my windows, as in a silent film, I can see but not hear all the mid-week activity of the City-State.

The inevitable jack-hammer is soundlessly punching a hole towards a new underpass. A crane is swinging, three bulldozers are trundling about a building yard and a number of men in hardhats and business suits are poring over a map. The usual crowd is swarming into the Star Ferry terminal. The usual interminable traffic crawls down Connaught Road, police bikes with flashing blue lights now and then weaving a way among the cars.

In each neon-lit window of the office block across the road I can see a separate cameo: a shirt-sleeved young broker at his desk, a secretary telephoning, three or four people bent intently over something on a table, a solitary executive staring out across the city. On the promenade beyond the City Hall people are sitting in twos and threes in the sunshine. Pedestrians in their thousands hasten over the road-bridge, into the subway, along the sidewalk, in and out of McDonald’s, all down the walkway to the outlying island ferry station. I count thirty-five freighters moored within my field of vision, some of them so engulfed in lighters that they seem to be in floating docks. A white cruise ship lies at the Ocean Terminal, with a fruit carrier astern of her, and the inevitable armada of launches, barges, tugs and sampans moves as in pageant through the harbour.

Over the water I fancy a shimmer of heat, or perhaps exhaust fumes, above the mass of Kowloon, and through it the Nine Hills loom a bluish grey. A Boeing 747 vanishes behind the buildings to reappear a moment later on the runway at Kai Tak. There are flashes of sun on distant windows. I leave my typewriter for a moment, open the sliding glass doors and walk out to the balcony; and away from the hotel’s insulated stillness, instantly like the blast of history itself the frantic
noise of Hong Kong hits me, the roar of that traffic, the thumping of that jack-hammer, the chatter of a million voices across the city below; and once again the smell of greasy duck and gasoline reaches me headily out of China.

THE FINAL EDITION

S
O, TO THE BANG OF THE JACK-HAMMER AND THE ODOUR OF
duck, we stand at the threshold of 1997, and short of some cataclysm or epiphany, we see around us the definitive British Hong Kong – the final edition of the last great imperial colony. Long ago in
Chapter 9
we observed the constitutional arrangements of Hong Kong as they were when Britain still commanded the destinies of this place – the late 1980s saw Hong Kong democracy carried as far as the British themselves seemed ever willing to go. Perhaps they would really have preferred to leave it at that, and hand over Hong Kong to the Chinese as a political relic, a Crown Colony hardly changed since the heyday of the imperial idea. ‘Don’t rock the boat,’ the old hands had always said, and there was a general feeling that nothing must be done that might upset Communist China – not only a mighty neighbour, but potentially a vastly profitable field of commerce.

History was to decree otherwise, and in 1996 we find British Hong Kong preparing its own obsequies not with a whimper of regret, but with an unexpected bang of principle.

The 1984 Agreement had been registered with the United Nations, in both Chinese and English, giving it a veneer of international approval.
It was indeed generally regarded by the world as a triumph of peaceable diplomacy, especially for the British. Within Hong Kong, as those monitors discovered, it was probably seen by most citizens as about the best that could be extracted from an unpromising situation. Deng seemed honest and benevolent. His declared policy of ‘The Open Door’ sounded the very opposite of chauvinism, and China was apparently moving towards a free-market economy. The year 2047, when the Agreement would finally lose all force, seemed almost as distant as 1997 had seemed when the British signed the second Convention of Peking.

For the first few years things did go smoothly enough, by Hong Kong’s endemically bumpy standards. There was, after all, something massively organic about the flow of events, as though Hong Kong’s return to its motherland was ordained and inevitable. As we have seen, the colony had never really been detached from China, and had never lost its sense of unity with everything fundamentally Chinese. As the People’s Republic itself became more and more profit-motivated, so many of the great magnates of Hong Kong made their peace with it, and more and more Hong Kong money went into the Joint Ventures through which Beijing was adjusting to capitalist methods. Immediately across the Chinese frontier, where once the meadows and paddy-fields had seemed to be an earnest of innocence, there now arose one of China’s Special Economic Zones, Shenzhen, where foreign investment was encouraged, and this soon came to look very like Hong Kong itself. Some visionaries began to think that only now was the original promise of Hong Kong to be fulfilled, providing its traders with the enormous Chinese markets they had hoped for in the first place.

It was true that the fact of 1997 already haunted people, when they allowed themselves to think about it, and many of Hong Kong’s brightest citizens thought it best to leave the place while the going was good, creating vibrant new little Hong Kongs in Canada, Australia and the United States. Many more stacked money abroad, just in case, or procured themselves foreign passports. The sad thing was that Hong Kong had only then, as it neared the enigma of 1997, escaped from the shadow of 1949. Until lately it had been above all a city of refugees, working to establish themselves as refugees must. The census of 1981 recorded, for the first time, that more than half the citizens of Hong Kong had been born in Hong Kong, so that the City-State was achieving normality at last. It was developing into a truly established community, a community in the round. Socially it was becoming more humane and civilized, historically it was acquiring an identity of its own, even
architecturally it seemed to be past the worst, and there had come into being, only in the last few years, that well-educated, young middle class which was the true pride of the Crown Colony, and which would be a credit to any country. To think of all that energy, all that hope, subsumed in the gloom of Chinese Communism, or for that matter the hopeless rigidity of Chinese tradition!
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