Hong Kong (48 page)

‘So you liked the Schumann best?’ said my host, a young Chinese entrepreneur of almost legendary enterprise and success. ‘Well, that’s hardly surprising. You may not be aware of it, but actually Schumann is much the most
pianistic
of composers …’

So far, I thought – it was only my third evening back in Hong Kong – so good. But do you know the feeling when you find that at the bottom of a bath of hot water the bath itself is still cold? Hong Kong in 1996 struck me as rather like that: for the truth was, in the last year before the day of the takeover, the gloves were off, and the British in Hong Kong were, for the first time in many years, openly defying the Chinese.

Christopher Patten, a subtle and unostentatious man, had proved a startlingly radical Governor. Almost from the start he had let it be known that he would not be governed by tact or precedent: and as a senior member of the Conservative Party he had direct access to the centres of British power, in a way none of his predecessors had. He seemed to bear himself like a plenipotentiary. He launched an expensive new programme of social welfare, which did not please the more reactionary of the Hong Kong establishment. He largely ignored the rituals of the imperial way, which upset the last of the Empire nostalgics. He
advocated easier access to Britain for Hong Kong citizens, which outraged the right wing of his own party at home. He treated the Beijing leaders like fellow-politicians, no more, no less, which shocked respectful Sinologists of the Foreign Office tradition. Most important of all, almost by decree he transformed the constitutional arrangements of the territory, making it very nearly a true democracy, which affronted many of the Hong Kong tycoons and infuriated the Chinese Communists. When I asked
him
what he saw as his gubernatorial duty, he said it was to bring British rule in Hong Kong to an honourable conclusion.

This was in the nick of time. Even before Patten’s arrival Jeremiahs were saying that in effect the Chinese Communists already governed the place, the British now being impotent in their own territory. Certainly by 1996 the influence of Beijing was everywhere. The Basic Law, the future constitution of the Special Autonomous Region, had been accepted without much dismay.
³
The New China News Agency had become in effect a Chinese High Commission, and in almost every aspect of life Chinafication was happening. The Press, especially the Chinese-language Press, was ever more careful about what it printed. Business people thought very carefully before they spoke to reporters. Martin Lee, the Jefferson of Hong Kong democracy, was refused a visa to go to a legal conference in China, and senior Chinese visitors sometimes pointedly declined to call upon the Governor. Hong Kong delegates already sat in the People’s Congress in Beijing. Most of the great people of Hong Kong, the business chieftains, the social swells, were Chinese now, and Chinese names, faces and jewellery dominated the partying pictures in the Hong Kong
Tatler
. The Queen’s head was fast disappearing from the coinage, to be replaced by the sterile bauhinia blossom. The Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club was Royal no more. Virtually the whole civil service was Hong Kong Chinese; Mandarin was taught in all schools; at last the judiciary was moving towards the use of Chinese in all courts. It was fashionable to say that nothing much would happen when the Chinese arrived – it had all happened already.

But it was not so. The Chinese had set up a panel of Hong Kong worthies, nearly all well-known Beijing sympathizers, to confer with mainland officials and ‘advise’ the Beijing Government about the future of the territory: and it was generally assumed that these people, when
the time came, would provide a docile Legislative Council for the Special Administrative Region. The British, on the other hand, claimed that under the terms of the 1984 Agreement, whatever Legco was in office in 1997 should be left in office, and under Patten’s inspiration they proceeded with electoral reforms that carried the democratic process a decisive stage further. By the end of 1995 there were no officially nominated members of Legco – all its sixty members were elected. The elections in October 1995, the last under British rule, produced a Legco that was, for the first time in Hong Kong’s history, entirely elected by popular vote: twenty members by the direct vote of everyone over eighteen, thirty members by the vote of members of trades and professions, ten members by the vote of members of district boards, themselves popularly elected. It was not full democracy – Hong Kong still did not elect its Governor or its Executive Council – but it was at least quasi-democracy; and the vote that autumn was overwhelmingly for the democratic parties, in obvious and pointed refutation of everything that Beijing wanted for Hong Kong.

The chips were thus down, in a way inconceivable even in the 1980s. Now the Chinese Communists frankly reviled and denigrated the British administration of Hong Kong. The last Governor, they said, was a has-been, a lame duck, an irrelevance. The last Governor, on the other hand, did not even pretend to waste his time worrying about that old preoccupation of the Sinologists, Chinese ‘face’. The Chinese made it perfectly clear that when they came to Hong Kong they would immediately sweep away the elected legislature, and set up one of their own. The British view was that this would break the terms of the 1984 Agreement. When the Chinese declared that members of the Hong Kong civil service would be required to declare loyalty to their puppet Legco, the Chief Secretary of the Hong Kong Government, Mrs Anson Chan Fang on-San, bravely opposed the idea, thus doubtless forfeiting her own chances of high office in 1997.

This was rocking the boat with a vengeance. There was no pussyfooting now, on either side. Even the nature of the hand-over ceremony, on July 1 1997, was now doubtful – would there be fireworks and balls that midnight, would Prince Charles fraternize with the old men of Beijing, would Governor Patten sail away resplendent into the dark on the
Lady Maurine
, or would he rudely be banned from the occasion? My guess was that most of the ordinary Chinese of Hong Kong would still feel a frisson of pride that day, if only involuntary pride – it would symbolize, after all, the end of a record of injustices. Nevertheless,
during a couple of days in 1996 more than 50,000 of them queued for application forms for British Overseas National citizenship, which would at least give them a chance of going somewhere else if the worst came to the worst. There could be no hiding the fact now that the people of Hong Kong profoundly distrusted the nature and the intentions of the Chinese Government towards their territory: and no masking the disillusionment of the British either.

Perhaps it will all make no difference anyway. As I write there are some months to go, before the grand denouement, and anything may still happen. The Chinese regime may yet move towards a more liberal system of Government – or it may become more horribly militaristic. It may attend more to the opinion of the world outside – or it may go on regarding itself as the new Middle Kingdom, impervious to the views or attitudes of anyone else. Financiers and entrepreneurs may continue to believe that Hong Kong will be a profitable place for investment and activity – or they may find that capitalism and Communism do not prove easy bedfellows after all, and shift their favours to Taiwan or Singapore. The international community may turn a blind eye to China’s awful record of human rights – or it may adopt Hong Kong as a test case, and dare to intervene if things go wrong. Future British Governments may recognize their responsibilities towards Hong Kong, and their duty until the year 2047 to see that the 1984 Agreement is honoured – or they may find it more expedient to let the matter drop. The people of Hong Kong may be true to themselves – or they may knuckle under.

Nobody knows. Hong Kong’s worst historical scenario can still be enacted: its happiest can yet be realized. The worst is that it becomes, however rich, a downtrodden, disciplined, sullen Communist city of the Chinese provinces. The best is that it develops into a model for a newly democratic China, a lodestar of Chinese progress, a happy example and an inspiration for its motherland. Nobody knows, even in 1996, but I write as a remembrancer of the British Empire, and however things go after 1997, I dare to claim this: that the British are bringing their rule in Hong Kong, and with it the record of their Empire as a whole, to a conclusion that is not ignoble. Late in the day – possibly too late – they have at last lived up to their best ideals in this, the most prodigious of all their colonial possessions. They have arranged to leave behind them a society not only stable, educated, prosperous, free, and
administered by its own indigenous civil service, but also represented by a publicly elected legislature of fellow-citizens. History, I prophesy, will look back at their 150 years on this distant rock with astonishment and admiration. What a story! What an adventure! What messages! And however stiff or muffled the ceremony on July 1 1997, however sad its aftermath may prove, a sufficiently stylish ending after all.

READING LIST

H
ONG KONG HAS BEEN THOROUGHLY WRITTEN ABOUT IN
the detail, with books on everything from the currency to the trams, but not so definitively in the general. The books listed here are mostly contemporary, are easily available at least in Hong Kong, and include the ones I have most used myself; others are mentioned in the footnotes to my text.

The most complete histories are Frank Welsh’s
A History of Hong Kong
, London 1993, G. B. Endacott’s
A History of Hong Kong
, London 1958, and Nigel Cameron’s
An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
, London 1991. Alan Birch’s
Hong Kong: The Colony That Never Was
, Hong Kong 1991, is a scholarly pictorial commentary. Two earlier histories, still available and rich in detail, are E. J. Eitel’s
Europe in China
, Hong Kong 1895, and the two volumes of G. R. Sayer’s
Hong Kong
, published separately in Hong in 1937 and 1975. Nigel Cameron’s
Hong Kong: The Cultured Pearl
, Hong Kong 1978, is a general study of the colony and its past.

For the historical origins of Hong Kong there is Maurice Collis’
Foreign Mud
, London 1946; for the acquisition of the New Territories, Peter Wesley-Smith’s
Unequal Treaty
, Hong Kong 1980; for the period between the world wars, Paul Gillingham’s illustrated album
At The Peak
, Hong Kong 1983. The best books about Hong Kong during the Second World War are perhaps
Hong Kong Eclipse
, Hong Kong 1978,
by G. B. Endacott with additional material by Alan Birch, and
The Lasting Honour
, by Oliver Lindsay, London 1978.
The Royal Navy in Hong Kong
, by Kathleen Harland, Liskeard 1985, records the naval connection since 1841.

Invaluable on the Chinese background are two books by James Hayes,
The Hong Kong Region 1850–1911
, Hong Kong 1977, and
The Rural Communities of Hong Kong
, Hong Kong 1983. Also instructive and entertaining are the three volumes of the series
Ancestral Images
, by Hugh Baker, published in Hong Kong between 1979 and 1981 and
In Search of The Past
, a guide to Hong Kong’s antiquities by Solomon Bard, Hong Kong 1988.

I have learnt much from two sociological studies by H.J. Lethbridge, a collection of essays called
Hong Kong: Stability and Change
, Hong Kong 1978, and
Hard Graft in Hong Kong
, a book about corruption published in Hong Kong in 1985. An academic study of administrative systems is Norman Miners’
The Government and Policies of Hong Kong
, Hong Kong 1975. Austin Coates’ much-loved
Myself a Mandarin
, London 1968, is an administrator’s personal memoir.

The origins of the business community are traced in
The Taipans
, by Colin N. Crisswell, Hong Kong 1981. The story of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation has been told in four volumes by Frank H. H. King, Cambridge 1991, and in one volume by Maurice Collis, in
Wayfoong
, London 1965. Jardine, Matheson’s story is sumptuously presented in
The Thistle and the Jade
, edited by Maggie Keswick, London 1982.
Taikoo
, by Charles Drage, London 1970, tells the story of Swire’s, and
Power
, by Nigel Cameron, Hong Kong 1982, is about the Kadoories and the China Light and Power Company. Gavin Young’s
Beyond Lion Rock
is a history of Cathay Pacific Airways.