THE FINAL EDITION THE FINAL EDITIONSO, 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!1
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.
‘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.
1 Except for misgivings among lawyers about the Final Court of Appeal which would replace the Privy Council as Hong Kong’s final tribunal – a court crucial to the maintenance of financial confidence, let alone of justice.
2 So many, so the story went, that there was a rush of Chinese to join that old stronghold of the imperialists, the Hong Kong Club – to get away from the Europeans.
3 Except for misgivings among lawyers about the Final Court of Appeal which would replace the Privy Council as Hong Kong’s final tribunal – a court crucial to the maintenance of financial confidence, let alone of justice.