Hong Kong (44 page)

Bombs were exploded then. Cars were burnt. Ominous messages, it was said, reached the Governor from the Politburo, and there came into being a famous and resilient legend of Hong Kong – namely that, as every visitor used to be told, Mao Zedong had only to lift a telephone in Beijing to get the British out of the colony. Nervous expatriates thought the end was near, and for a time it seemed probable that when the dry season arrived the Chinese would refuse their supplies of water to the colony, and so drive it into abdication. One of Hong Kong’s great moments of historical relief occurred when, punctually on 1 October as usual, the telephone rang from across the frontier and the usual calm engineer’s voice asked if the colony was ready for the turning of the stopcocks.

It was not the time. The Chinese had no desire to take over Hong Kong at that moment of their history, and their proxy intervention had been no more than a demonstration. Perhaps they hoped to force the Government of Hong Kong into some humiliating gesture of appeasement, as they did indeed force the Government of Macao, but if so they failed. Government House remained loftily immune to the goings-on outside its gates, and the crisis was ended largely by the stern and swift actions of the police, supported for once by a generally sympathetic public – it was no coincidence that after the events of 1967 the force joined the monarchical ranks of sportsmen and astronomers, and became the Royal Hong Kong Police Force.

Things returned to their peculiar normal. For another decade China remained forbidden to almost all foreigners, and one of the great excitements of travel was afforded by a visit to Lok Ma Chau, a hillock crowned by a police station which overlooked the flatlands of Guangdong to the north-west – utterly peaceful, placid, pastoral country it appeared in those days, and it made China seem a place of the Last Innocence, remote and forever unattainable. At souvenir stalls beside the nearby track hawkers sold not only the usual fans, straw grasshoppers and ceramic goddesses, but also copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book; and I remember vividly the queer and tantalizing unease the place left in me, the stall-holders one by one thrusting this text into my face, while behind their backs lay the vast silent compulsion of the homeland.

Along the road from the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank building rises one of the world’s tallest buildings, high above the old dome of the Legislature, monumentally dominating the view from Government House on the slope of the hill above and thus, one might surmise, finally spoiling its
feng shui
too. This is the Hong Kong headquarters of the Communist Bank of China, seventy storeys high as against the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank’s forty-seven, for even before the Communist revolution it was axiomatic that the Chinese bank must be symbolically taller than the British, and preferable that it should be the tallest building in Hong Kong. Its designer I. M. Pei was one of the first Chinese-American architects to accept commissions in Communist China;
⁶
he created it in a style which, while certainly not arrogant or overbearing, is nevertheless a declaration that Hong Kong is not only geographically, but functionally part of China.

In some ways Hong Kong is like an assistant Chinese capital – a financial capital perhaps to Beijing’s political capital, like Rotterdam to The Hague. Lord Kadoorie once likened it to a Free Zone of the People’s Republic, under British management, and certainly the Chinese Government itself has powerful financial stakes within Hong Kong, where it has long mastered the capitalist way of making money. The Bank of China, first established by the Kuomintang, is the People’s
Republic’s chief agency for foreign financial dealings, and is the richest and most worldly of all Chinese Government banks. Something like 35 per cent of all the Republic’s foreign currency passes through its hands, on its way to Beijing, and it also looks after the interests of hundreds of Hong Kong enterprises now owned or part-owned by Communist China.

These are sometimes hard to pin down, so ill-defined are China’s activities in Hong Kong, and so entangled not only in murky interchanges of politics and diplomacy, but also in the web of capitalism at its most dense. They are however undoubtedly immense. They are said to include at least thirteen banks, many real estate companies, airlines, hotels, stores, petrol stations, cinemas, warehouses, factories of several kinds and some say brothels. They are often indistinguishable from capitalist-owned concerns – so committed indeed to western management systems is China Resources Holdings Ltd, the vast State-owned hong which supervises all of China’s overseas economic activities, that in 1987 it appointed an Englishman to be its local managing director.

This economic coalition is nothing new. Whatever the public attitudes of the British during their days of supremacy, privately even they were always aware that the colony could never be detached from its origins – this was the one British possession where the Mother Country was not England. In effect Hong Kong was hardly more than the greatest of the Treaty Ports, happening to fly the British flag. Just as many of the most enterprising Chinese took their talents and their investments to Shanghai or Xiamen, where they could deal with entrepreneurs whose economic language they understood, and whose aims they generally shared, so many of them came one further, and crossed the frontier into Hong Kong. Until 1940 they could come and go as they liked – access from China was uncontrolled.

So the successive waves of immigrants who have peopled Hong Kong have in their own eyes hardly been immigrants at all, but merely migrants from one part of China to another. Hong Kong has been like a pressure-valve for China, and every convulsion there, every change of policy or regime, has brought another few thousand migrants over the Sham Chun River. The xenophobic Boxer troubles of 1900 sent a wave of prudent newcomers – it was dangerous in China then even to have associated with foreigners, and many Chinese who had worked for foreign firms thought it wiser to come and live under a foreign flag. Many more came in the aftermath of the 1911 revolution and during the Japanese wars of the 1930s, and vast numbers fled, as they are fleeing still, from the effects of Chinese
Communism: the main function of Hong Kong’s armed forces nowadays is keeping out illegal Chinese immigrants, which they do with helicopters, speedboats, electronic detectors and 65 million candle-power searchlights …

When the times demand it the migrants move back again – 80,000 went in the plague year of 1894, 60,000 in the First World War, and at the Chinese New Year of 1986 500,000 re-crossed the border just to visit their relatives in Guangdong. For they have not often come for purely ideological reasons – not out of principle, so to speak. Businessmen and industrialists came because they could make money better in Hong Kong. Landowners came in the wake of the capital they had habitually stashed away in the colony. Religious people came to escape the secularization of Chinese society, whether under the Kuomintang with its bias against superstition, or under the Communists with their preference for atheism; the Buddhist monasteries of Lantau were mostly founded by migrants from the mainland, and just as Hong Kong used be a Rest and Recreation Center for battle-weary American soldiers, so it was too for spiritually exhausted Christian missionaries.

Often politics brought them. There have always been Chinese political presences in the colony, the various factions of the day supporting their own agents and manipulators, and often extending to Hong Kong their complex mainland feuds. In our own time the chief competition has been between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang. The Communists see Hong Kong simply as their own, and are waiting to take it over; the Kuomintang leaders in Taiwan, while they consider the off-shore islands of Quemoy and Matsu their front-line military bases against Communist China, regard Hong Kong as their political frontier. Each side has many and fervent supporters in the colony, together with loyal newspapers and trade unions; for years local Communists have participated in the People’s Congress in Beijing, as delegates from Guangdong Province, while the seashore hamlet of Rennie’s Mill, in the New Territories, has been inhabited since 1950 entirely by pro-Kuomintang refugees. Even now the rivalry is fierce. On 1 October, the anniversary of the 1949 revolution, Hong Kong flutters with the red flags of Communism, everywhere from the Bank of China building to the offices of obscure labour unions or the high tenement windows of activists; nine days later is the Double Tenth, 10 October, the anniversary of the 1911 revolution, and out come the flags of the Kuomintang.

Straddling the ideologies, blurring the boundaries between politics
and crime but powerfully representing China in Hong Kong, have always been the Triads. In earlier times the British feared them not merely as criminal organizations, but as xenophobic agitators too, and in their time they have been active in many kinds of political action – economic boycott, strikes, riots, anti-Japanese activities during the Second World War. They are often said to be in cahoots with the Kuomintang, and are certainly no friends to the Communist Government in Beijing, which treats them with no mercy; in the 1960s they helped the Hong Kong police to control the spill-over of the Cultural Revolution, a liaison easy enough to arrange because they have always supplied the force with some of its best-placed informers.

But then many kinds of Chinese villains have found it convenient to come to Hong Kong, where the rules are less draconian than they are in China, and the arm of the law has traditionally been at least as easy to bend. As late as the early 1950s pirates from the mainland were still active in the colony’s waters, and Hong Kong fishermen were allowed to carry arms in self-defence against them. Nowadays anyone in China with a taste for smuggling, especially drug-smuggling, is likely to look ambitiously towards the Crown Colony. There are criminal groups specializing in illegal emigration from China, and the biggest of all Hong Kong robberies, the hold-up of a bank armoured car in 1975, was done by former Red Guards, bringing their talents to the colony after the collapse of the Cultural Revolution.

As for diplomatic representation of China in Hong Kong, formally there has never been any – no consul, no High Commission. Zhou Enlai once suggested that Beijing might open a diplomatic mission in Hong Kong, but the British declined the offer – there was no room in the colony, Sir Alexander Grantham is supposed to have said, for
two
Governors. In the 1940s there was, however, an official representative of the Kuomintang Government in the colourful person of Admiral Chank Chak, Chinese Navy. This engaging officer, very small and very entertaining, had lost a leg during an action against the Japanese on the Yangtze, and he bore himself with a Nelsonian style; when Hong Kong fell to the Japanese he escaped with great
élan
on a Royal Navy motor torpedo boat, and lived to become Mayor of Guangzhou and an honorary Knight of the British Empire.

He has had no successor in Hong Kong, but disguised in shadow-boxing and feinting for many years an official presence of the Communist Government has been tacitly recognized all the same. For long it was assumed to inhabit the Bank of China building, and during the long
estrangement from Beijing all sorts of sinister things were supposed to go on there – when one saw its night-lights burning, one rumoured them to be the lights of plotters, subversives or indoctrinators.

Later the unofficial chief representative of China in Hong Kong was the local manager of Xinhua, the New China News Agency, whose offices stood rather less prominently near the Happy Valley racecourse, and included dormitories for its staff. Over the years this functionary gradually came into the open. In the tense days of the 1960s he became the messenger by which Beijing’s warnings were conveyed to the colony, and by the 1980s he was making official pronouncements on behalf of the People’s Government, attending functions in a quasi-diplomatic role and generally behaving like an all-but-Commissioner.

When Beijing wished to drop a hint to the colony, it was likely to be dropped in the columns of
Mirror Monthly
, Xinhua’s Hong Kong magazine. When Beijing felt it necessary to make a half-veiled gesture of authority, it was Xinhua’s manager who was photographed edging a gingerly passage through the rat-infested corridors of the Walled City. And when, during the nervy months of the early 1980s when the whole future of Hong Kong was in doubt, and share prices showed a fragility as worrying to Beijing as to Jardine, Matheson, as often as not it was Xinhua’s manager who was delegated to make some soothing declaration about the prospects of peaceful agreement.

Communist China, then, is deeply entrenched in the mass of Hong Kong, and plays a sophisticated and sometimes decisive part in all its activities. Yet even now China sometimes shows itself, in this relentlessly modernist territory, curiously naïve and old-fashioned, and occasionally as I consider its presence I feel just these sensations of nostalgic yearning that I felt on the hillock of Lok Ma Chau in the days when the frontier was closed. If there is anywhere in Hong Kong where you may still find solid old-fashioned workmanship, peasant craft and homely tableware, it is in the department stores of the Chinese Products Company or the Chinese Merchandise Emporium, where prices are low, stock is slightly dusty, service is leisurely, and I am reminded paradoxically of country drapers’ shops in Britain long ago, or Middle Western hardware stores.

And sometimes a junk sails by from China, a real sailing junk without an engine, stealing noiseless among the freighters of the harbour. How infinitely old it looks! Its sails are like the very thin membranes of some ancient flying creature, and on its deck raggedy Chinese with bony elbows obliviously recline.

On hilltop outposts, camouflaged and sandbagged, looking not at all unlike lesser fortresses of the Khyber in the great days of the Indian Raj, forces of the British Empire are still on guard, even now, above the frontier between Hong Kong and China. They are paramilitary police forces, and before them the frontier is marked for the twenty-five miles of its length, between Mirs Bay at one end and Deep Bay at the other, by a thick double row of coiled barbed wire, nine or ten feet high. Through it, for much of its length, a narrow road uncomfortably runs.