Hong Kong (47 page)

Still, in general most people seemed simply to hope for the best, and in 1988 a new Governor, Sir David Wilson, arrived to guide Hong Kong through its doubts and opportunities. He was one of the negotiators of the 1984 Agreement, and when I asked him once what he saw as his historical duty in the colony, he said it was to ensure that the territory was handed over to China in good working order. He was a distinguished Sinologist, a Foreign Office man, and perhaps he did instinctively see Hong Kong chiefly as a possible cause of conflict between Britain and China, to be kept from inflammation by caution and diplomacy, and quietly bequeathed.

Many people in Hong Kong, though, and many more outside, thought his duty to be more profound than that. Inspired in particular by a boldly outspoken barrister and Legco member, Martin Lee Chu-ming, there was a growing opinion that he owed it to the conscience of the British themselves to help bring into being a Hong Kong with a democratic legislature, directly elected by its own general public, which would be strong and experienced enough to stand up to the Chinese Communists when they formally arrived in 1997.

On the whole, with many lapses and exceptions, British Government in Hong Kong had been good government. It had risen, as the Empire itself had, from the opportunism of its origins, through the jingo pomp of its climax, to a level of general decency. It had ensured personal freedoms, it had given stability, it had even in its late years made a brave start with social welfare, and tried to live up to the British Empire’s truest morality, the morality of fair play. It had demonstrated that in certain circumstances imperialism need not be oppressive, but could be a species of partnership, or a technical service. A dispassionate foreign observer must surely concede that the barren rock had been lucky
to escape so many of the miseries and deprivations of the Chinese mainland, and the local population certainly seemed to think so: polled in 1982, 95 per cent wanted the political status quo to be maintained.

But in one great respect the British in Hong Kong had failed to honour their own highest values. They had consistently declined to give political power to the people, or even to keep them properly informed. Secretive, paternalistic, sometimes aloof and superior, often apparently more concerned with British interests than with the interests of Hong Kong, they had maintained even into the last quarter of the twentieth century the modes of benevolent imperialism. The oligarchy of old-school Crown Colony government was scarcely tempered by any popular representation at all.

This was not the imperial norm. Almost everywhere else in the world the British, when they withdrew from their dominions, left to the successor Governments the forms of parliamentary democracy. The most backward and illiterate tribal state was introduced to the sophistication of ‘One Man One Vote’, even if its electorate could only recognize emblems of frogs or crocodiles as emblems of the contesting parties. Feudal chieftains found themselves transformed into Speakers, wearing wigs and preceded by maces. Erskine May was learnedly quoted in the equatorial heat, and all the precedents of Westminster were honoured beneath the twirling fans. It did not often catch on, but it was a decent attempt by the departing British to leave their former subjects with the political rights they so cherished for themselves – a kind of peace offering, in a way, after much bullying and exploitation.

Away at the eastern end of their world, the British had created a community infinitely more sophisticated than those tropic colonies. Yet in this one possession, the most brilliant of them all, the old forms of autocratic Empire remained; and abruptly now, as the unknown loomed, the full meaning of this imperial archaism dawned upon Hong Kong. When the British withdrew the people would be left as political innocents, totally inexperienced in self-rule. For the first time Hong Kong was projected into a frenzy of political activity. Many people thought, as the British did, that any radical reform would be playing with fire. Not only might it antagonize Beijing, but the bitter give and take of adversarial politics would weaken confidence in Hong Kong and frighten money away – through all the colony’s history the chief argument for doing nothing. Others maintained that the mass of the Hong Kong populace was simply not interested in politics anyway.
Others again, though, both Chinese and expatriate, believed it was still not too late to institute properly representative Government in the colony.

So one saw something new in Hong Kong: general political argument. Scores of political groups came into being, caustic political cartoons appeared in the Press, real political debates began to happen in Legco. Martin Lee became one of the best-known figures in Hong Kong, and reluctantly the British prepared to allow, after so many generations of absolute rule, some meagre measure of popular representation – always taking account, of course, in their diplomatic way, of Chinese susceptibilities. They planned to let Hong Kong proceed towards 1997 under the principle of convergence, the gradual merging of British and Chinese intentions towards the place, so that the idea of making dramatic unilateral changes in Hong Kong, though perfectly legal under the terms of the Agreement, would probably have seemed to the British Foreign Office provocatively alien to the spirit of the accord. The concessions offered to democracy would be extremely cautious. Why rock the boat?

But then, in June 1989, Deng Xiaoping’s Government shifted almost everyone’s conceptions, and threw Hong Kong into an unprecedented turmoil of emotion, with the massacre of Tiananmen Square in Beijing. A prolonged student demonstration demanding more freedom and less corruption was brutally suppressed by the People’s Liberation Army – the very force which, under the terms of the Anglo-Chinese Agreement, would have the right to garrison Hong Kong in eight years’ time.

The demonstration itself had inspired hitherto unsuspected passions in Hong Kong. Hundreds of thousands of people had processed the streets in support, seeing perhaps in the students’ movement the hope of a genuinely new China at last – a China which could quite feasibly merge with a libertarian Hong Kong. The murderous sequel in Tiananmen Square threw the territory into despair. China, it seemed, was still the old China after all, the China from which so many Hong Kong citizens had fled as refugees, and the notion of converging with a system that slaughtered its own people in the streets must have seemed to even the most timid British negotiator a shameful prospect.

Theoretically Hong Kong’s situation was not much changed by the suppression of the Beijing student movement. Nobody should really have been surprised. China’s system of justice, its system of life itself,
was still governed by an esoteric mixture of Communist and traditional moralities; thousands of people were executed in China every year, often for crimes that would hardly be crimes at all elsewhere, and the cruel elimination of patriotic activity in Tibet was familiar everywhere. Everyone knew, too, that the 1984 Agreement was a gamble at best, and that if, when the time came, the Chinese thought it expedient to ignore its provisions, they would probably do what they pleased – world opinion meant little to them, and nobody pretended that it had been reached out of generosity or fellow-feeling.

Yet while the people of Hong Kong understood all this intellectually, emotionally they had just kept their fingers crossed. It was Tiananmen that changed everything. Now vast crowds demonstrated against the Chinese Government, something that had never happened before in all the history of the colony, and the whole territory mourned the young activists who had died in Beijing. Dissidents escaping out of China were sheltered, like Sun Yat-sen and Zhou Enlai before them. In Victoria Park an anonymous artist displayed four spittoons, representing the Four Cardinal Principles of Chinese Communism, and invited bystanders to spit, urinate or defecate in the receptacle of their choice; the Hong Kong branch of the venerable and strictly apolitical Royal Asiatic Society declared that Tiananmen had ‘removed all confidence in any guarantee that might come from the present Chinese Government’. Hong Kong had never exhibited itself like this before, allowed its pent-up fears and resentments to show so frankly, or declared itself so politically aware.

Even the Governor publicly allowed himself shocked and saddened by the killings in Beijing, and presently, to everyone’s surprise, the British discovered a new resolve. Nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of hanging in the morning, and after Tiananmen even those most resistant to political reform in Hong Kong came to accept the need for extra safeguards for liberty after 1997. A Bill of Rights was introduced, and at last the British Government conceded to its ordinary Hong Kong subjects some right to choose their own legislators. In 1991 Hong Kong saw its first direct elections, to choose eighteen of Legco’s sixty members, and the result was a triumph for all those who believed in the democratic advantages – fifteen of the eighteen were members of Martin Lee’s United Democratic Party and other liberals, all firm subscribers to the idea of representative Government in Hong Kong. For the first time Hong Kong acquired a semblance of proper Parliamentary system – no longer was Legco the comic parody of 1986. There was
still no elected Government, but at least there was a properly elected Opposition, and legislation was subject at last to properly hammered out approval in the chamber.

And so, to the bang of the jack-hammer and the odour of duck, we come to the brink, the last countdown until the British go and the commissars arrive. A new Governor – a new
kind
of Governor – arrived in 1992. In the footsteps of the hymn-writing Bowring, the irrepressible Pope-Hennessy, the majestic MacLehose, the scholarly Wilson – as successor to the mighty Viceroys, the gilded Governors, the biblical satraps of Empire, there came to Hong Kong Chris Patten, the very archetype of your English professional politician. As chairman of the Conservative Party he had presided over John Major’s victory in a recent general election in Britain, but he had humiliatingly lost his own seat at Bath, and so was sent to the East to preside instead over the lives and fortunes of six million Chinese. He knew very little about Hong Kong, and local democrats likened the appointment to the election of a Lord Mayor of London who had never been there: but Christopher Francis Patten was to prove an inspired and fateful choice for the twenty-eighth and last Governor of Hong Kong.

When I came back to Hong Kong in 1996 to prepare the final edition of this book it seemed to me at first that nothing much had changed. Hong Kong was unmistakably still Hong Kong – if anything, more so. Everything seemed to be in the usual condition of productive turmoil. Huge reclamation works were happening all around the harbour. Vast new skyscrapers had arisen. Out at Chep Lap Kok the stupendous new airport was nearing completion, together with the causeway for trains and motor vehicles, the enormous suspension bridge, the mesh of roads and railways and the two new harbour tunnels which would link it with the city. Three new container terminals were being built. Stonecutters Island was an island no more, and had a brand-new naval depot on it. After a couple of years away I hardly recognized parts of Central, and all over the New Territories complete new towns had appeared, thickets of white concrete filling every valley, overlooking every creek, and by now so nearly running into one another that virtually all the flat land was urbanized, leaving only the mountains, the marshes and the duck ponds in their natural state. The shops of Hong Kong were as dazzling as ever, the hotels as ostentatious, the ships still lay in their thousands in the roadstead.

Sir David Wilson’s declared purpose, I thought, had been handsomely fulfilled. By and large the business confidence of Hong Kong was intact. Few international companies had run away and the economic dynamic of the place was as thrilling as ever. The business community, whether British, Chinese or foreign, seemed largely reconciled to the fact of 1997, was busy making lots of money, and looked forward with assurance to making heaps more. The Chinese would be inheriting one of the great cities of the world, in magnificent working order, a superb financial engine now equipped too with modern universities, museums, concert halls and stadiums, run by a splendid bureaucracy, serviced by an educated and able, young middle class.

Hong Kong was already half-integrated, too, with the burgeoning economy of the motherland, now said to be the fastest-growing economy on earth. Shenzhen looked very nearly identical to Hong Kong now, and more Hong Kong companies were making things there than were making them in the colony itself – the wages were cheaper, the future seemed clearer, and Hong Kong was becoming less a manufacturing than a servicing economy. China itself appeared to be half-capitalist. Every sort of western influence was entering the country – Big Macs, of course, thousands of Joint Venture companies, western chain hotels, satellite television courtesy of Rupert Murdoch, new uniforms for the People’s Liberation Army designed by Pierre Cardin.

And in Hong Kong a new kind of bi-culturalism seemed to be easing the way towards 1997 – cultural convergence. Among the
jeunesse dorée
of the territory this was all the rage. Chinese fashions, make-up, furniture, even, I rather fancied, postures were being eagerly adapted by the trendier kind of European. Canto-pop, the Chinese variety of rock music, swept the local charts. On the other hand more than half the readers of the
South China Morning Post
, once almost entirely European, were now Chinese, most of them young: for the first time the newspaper printed the names of mainland Chinese in Chinese characters. The real trend-setter in Hong Kong, 1996, turned out to be the terribly sophisticated, immensely rich, western-educated, young Chinese man about town, fluent in both cultures, talking as easily about Chinese calligraphy as about the New York futures market. I was taken one evening to a piano recital at the China Club, on the top floor of the old Bank of China building in Statue Square. This very fashionable retreat was a most elegant reconciliation of east and west, decorated mostly in the Chinese mode, with Chinese furniture, modern Chinese pictures and lots of mahogany, but with a splendid library too, in the
Pall Mall manner. To me it seemed a decidedly glamorous declaration of convergence, and almost every self-respecting expatriate, I gathered, wanted to join it.
²
The soloist that evening was a charming and distinguished English pianist, who gave us a programme of Bach, Schumann, Chopin and Gershwin. We listened to her while drinking an excellent white wine at our dinner tables. I looked around me as the lovely music filled the room, and thought that with luck the scene might well represent the Hong Kong of the twenty-first century: still rich, still ineffably trendy, still cosmopolitan, but softened, made more kindly, by a closer blend of our separate ways, Chopin with chopsticks, Bach with bird’s-nest soup. All the faces around me, Chinese or European, were gently meditative under the influence of the music. If I was the only person who actually cried, during the most tender passages of the Schumann, even the steeliest, richest, most modish faces visibly relaxed during the Chopin.