by Paul Theroux
The crisis occurred in the late 1830s, when the imperial commissioner in Canton confiscated twenty thousand chests of British opium and banned its importation and sale. The British exploded, howling that it was a violation of free trade (a new doctrine at the time), and sent gunboats to Canton to carry out a short, vicious war. The idea was not only to force the opium down Chinese throats, and get money for it, but also to humble imperial China and forcibly open its ports, allowing foreigners to sell goods to the enormous Chinese market. This has great resonance today. Britain's victory in the First Opium War meant the creation of treaty ports for trade, but it also allowed Britain to demand a large cash indemnity from China, as well as a trophy, the island of Hong Kong "in perpetuity." A strip of the mainland Kowloon coast was ceded in 1860.
Although the Chinese ceaselessly protested, the British opium trade remained unregulated until 1905, and opium production and sale continued in British colonies until World War Two. It is the most emotive single subject where Anglo-Chinese relations are concerned. China felt ganged up on by the industrial world at the time. There was an American connection, too, because Americans benefited by the creation of treaty ports. More recently, it was with great glee that China observed the drug taking by American soldiers during the Vietnam War; these addicts were seen and spoken about as a just retribution, gweilos brought low at last by Asian poppies. The humiliations by the British, the blockades, the siege and capture of Chinese, the forced sale of opium, have never been forgotten. Don't ask what's wrong with the Chinese; instead, ask American southerners why they still grizzle about the Civil War and fly the Confederate flag. Both defeats happened just as long ago.
But there is more to Hong Kong than the island. Most of what we know as Hong Kong, the greater part of it, inland Kowloon and the large expanses of the New Territories—a whole notch of Chinese mainland—was gotten on a ninety-nine-year lease in 1898. Britain simply wanted more space, and China was too weak to resist. However, the land had a use-by date stamped on it, and from the moment the lease was signed, the clock has been ticking. The People's Republic never recognized any of the treaties and never ceases to repeat that they were "unequal" and "signed under duress" by the mandarin, Li Hung-chang. One of Deng Xiaoping's sayings was that in dealing with the British he would never behave like this despicable mandarin, who had handed over a part of the motherland. Instead of snatching Hong Kong, China has let the clock run down.
The class system, the unsubtle sense of racial superiority that underpins the fear and resentment in all colonialism, was present in Hong Kong from the beginning. The injustice became law when in 1918 the British decreed that no Chinese could live on the Peak or at Repulse Bay, the two most salubrious parts of Hong Kong Island. This law creating "white areas" stayed on the books until World War Two. Hong Kong was "a mini–South Africa," Chan Ming, a professor of history at Hong Kong University, wrote recently. It was not until the 1960s that the Chinese were emboldened to build residences in any number on the Peak, and relations between the British and the Chinese, though outwardly cordial, are fairly frosty. An Englishman who came to Hong Kong in the early 1970s told me, "If a British civil servant married a local woman, it was very unlikely that he would ever get a promotion." The period he was speaking of was less than twenty years ago.
Hong Kong, always anomalous—Britain's colony, China's exit route—was a sweatshop into the seventies, and it was politically backward, too. Free elections did not exist, the vote was unknown, the governor was like a sultan, and his divan was the Executive Council. Composed of comprador-like Chinese and the mostly Scottish taipans of the great British-owned companies like Jardine's or the Swire Group, the Executive Council was an advisory body penetrated by conflicts of interest. The Hong Kong government has always been in the land business: real estate, the issuing of commercial leases, is one of its greatest sources of revenue. The Legislative Council was appointed. Democracy was an utterly foreign concept. It has been a foreign concept until just a few years ago.
Yet Hong Kong remained quintessentially, even self-consciously, colonial. The word "colony" is savored by the sort of backward-looking twit I heard a few months ago braying across a bar in the Hong Kong Club, greeting a florid-faced man with the line "Ah, jolly good! So you decided to bring some joy to the colony!" That is of course fatuous. And technically it stopped being called a colony in 1976. Though anyone can see that the Territory of Hong Kong is an anthill of scramblers, hustlers, refugees, exiles, dissidents, white-collar criminals, and overachievers, in a narrow sense it is in an imperial time warp. It is the site of the Noon Day Gun of Noël Coward's "Mad Dogs and Englishmen," the setting of Maugham's The Painted Veil, the sleazy port of fleshpots in The World of Suzie Wong. Hong Kong has been jeered at for its class consciousness and its money grubbing. W. H. Auden had anticipated much of this jeering in 1939, in his poem "Hong Kong," part of which goes, "Here in the East the bankers have erected / A worthy temple to the Comic muse."
Gateway to Red China, Hong Kong was inevitably a vantage point for China watchers and often in the news. The rioting inspired by the Red Guards in 1967 frightened businessmen and created a panic in the stock market. China merely watched impassively, and even at the height of the Cultural Revolution did not demand the return of the colony. At some point in every discussion of the Hong Kong character, the words "refugee" and "refugee mentality" come up, and no one disputes them. Temporariness seems to be the human condition here, but it is an illusion, for the longer you stay, the less Chinese and the more a "vivid, sterile hybrid" it seems.
As a British colony, Hong Kong could have faced a far different future. After all, Kenya, Malaya, India, and even little Nyasaland were granted their independence. What prevented this from happening? A little-noted event—indeed, it was secret at the time—took place in 1972 when, under pressure from China, which had just joined the United Nations, Britain quietly dropped Hong Kong from a UN list of places scheduled for decolonization. "Independence for Hong Kong is not practical politics," a British official told me. "It could only have been effected with the cooperation of the Chinese."
"No, no," a Hong Kong lawyer told me, referring to the independence question. "China objected, Britain caved in."
"What should have happened?" I asked.
"The Hong Kong people should have been consulted," he said.
After Edward Heath became Britain's prime minister in 1970, he set up a clandestine committee to examine the status of Hong Kong. "The existence of the committee has never before been revealed, and its findings are still secret," writes Mark Roberti in The Fall of Hong Kong, which anatomizes the events that have led to the Hand-over.
"The British delayed giving us democratic institutions," a distinguished Hong Kong journalist told me. He was at school when Heath was prime minister. "When I was a schoolboy we argued for the free election of people to municipal councils, district boards, urban councils. It wasn't asking for much. But the government made excuses."
Prime Minister Heath, or any of his predecessors, could have put Hong Kong on the road to democracy years ago, could have held free elections, could have established a truly representative Legislative Council and made universal suffrage a fact. But there was no talk of democracy until Hong Kong was a goner and it was clear that China was definitely asserting its sovereignty.
"Look at the past here," Jonathan Grant, a history lecturer at Hong Kong University, said to me one day in the faculty lounge in Pok Fu Lam. "In 1948 they put in a new code—the Hong Kong government could fire or deregister any teacher who was too pro-China or nationalistic." The British also had a policy of discouraging democratic ideas. "There was a Special Branch in education that was linked to the police Special Branch. It eliminated from the textbooks the terms 'democracy,' 'representative government,' and 'civic responsibility.' The attitude was, 'We don't want you to know about your own government.' It was only in 1986 that 'civics' was rewritten. Instead of the Confucianism that had been there before, it was stress
ed that people had rights and obligations."
Until about ten years ago the British did not consider a democratic solution in Hong Kong but only versions of imperialism, and they wanted it both ways. They regretted the terms of the ninety-nine-year lease; they wanted to stay on. Since democracy was not an option, the expressed aim from early on was to fudge the dates—to obtain China's permission to continue administering Hong Kong while still acknowledging China's sovereignty. This unworkable idea, which was meant to give comfort to the business community and to extend commercial leases beyond 1997, took little note of China's sense of shame and fury over the Hong Kong treaties, or of China's repeated demands for "unification"—a Chinese motherland that would include Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, as well as Taiwan and the Spratly Islands, and perhaps bits of India, too.
Governor Murray MacLehose sprang the idea of an extended British administration on Deng Xiaoping in 1978, and Deng instantly rebuffed him. At the same time Deng tried to reassure Hong Kong businessmen by telling them, "Put your hearts at ease," and he repeated this to the next governor, Edward Youde. He also contrived, in a famous phrase, the "Hong Kong solution," which was to be "One country, two systems." This was his formula for China's continuing to be a socialist paradise while Hong Kong was maintained as a capitalist tool; and it was also a promise (eventually broken) not to meddle in Hong Kong's affairs.
Some time later, after more uncertainty, Britain's panicky response was to hurry a nationality bill through Parliament, which was meant to exclude the three million Hong Kong people who qualified from becoming resident in Britain. Another rebuff came when Margaret Thatcher, who had succeeded Heath as prime minister, visited Beijing for discussions in September 1982. She was still preening herself on having seen off the Argentines in the Falklands War. But Hong Kong was quite a different sort of island. As Hugo Young wrote in his Thatcher biography, One of Us, "'Our people' in Hong Kong were perforce to be treated rather differently from 'our people' in the South Atlantic."
Throughout her "abrasive" exchange with Deng, the Chinese leader chain-smoked and hoicked into a spittoon at his feet, a lifelong habit. Thatcher raised the question of Hong Kong's continuing to be administered by the British after 1997. Spitting at intervals, Deng lectured her on Chinese sovereignty and repeated that it was not negotiable. Looking ahead fifteen years, Deng specified a date for the Hand-over: July 1, 1997. Subsequently he never wavered. The recovery of Hong Kong he saw as his personal mission, and in the end it remains one of his principal victories.
You would have to have a heart of stone not to find comedy in what happened next. On leaving the Great Hall of the People and this audience with the intransigent Deng, Mrs. Thatcher lost her footing on the stairs and fell clattering to her hands and knees. Bobbling her handbag, her pearls swinging, and with her arse in the air and her face flushed with fear, the prime minister of Great Britain appeared to be kowtowing to Mao in his nearby mausoleum. From this moment on, the climate of negotiation became frostier, even glacial.
After a period of deadlock in which China gloated over its having all the cards, Thatcher conceded the sovereignty issue and the Hong Kong stock market dropped further. It was soon on the brink of collapse. When Britain began talks to discuss details of the Hand-over, the word "treaty" was avoided, since China did not recognize any of the treaties. The term for the agreement would be "the Joint Declaration." Thatcher said she was demanding "guarantees" in it, but in the Asiatic complexity of British politics, that was little more than face-saving.
The fate of the colony was argued over for almost two years in twenty-two rounds of talks. At last, the Joint Declaration was signed by Mrs. Thatcher in December 1984. In it she agreed to hand over the six million people in Hong Kong to one of the most repressive governments in the world, with a long history of political wickedness and social injustice. This was the Hand-over agreement. What would replace the British legal system, the judges in wigs, the Privy Council?
In order to eliminate the uncertainty over legal provisions in a China-governed Hong Kong, it was further agreed that a legal code known as the Basic Law, derived from clauses in the Joint Declaration, would be written. The Basic Law was to be a guarantee that the rights and freedoms of people in Hong Kong would be protected, and to contain the more practical details of the new Special Administrative Region. For example, it would even specify what the SAR flag would look like ("a red flag with a bauhinia highlighted by five star-tipped stamens" would be prescribed in Article 10 of the Basic Law; the bauhinia, "a vivid, sterile hybrid," is Hong Kong's flower). Many people saw hope in the drafting of this document, but in the course of discussions deep divisions arose among the various drafters—some wanting democratic elections, others opting for limited elections, and a pro-China faction seeing no pressing need for any free elections.
All this time, Britain was at pains not to upset the Chinese by introducing reforms, and in April 1987 Deng warned that democracy was not a good idea in Hong Kong. "The people who will rule Hong Kong [after 1997] must love the motherland and love Hong Kong. Can universal suffrage definitely produce such persons?"
Riding the Iron Rooster all over China for my book, I spent a great deal of time in Hong Kong refueling, and I thought the answer to Deng's question, though it was rhetorical, was yes. In China in the winter of 1986–87 there were many student demonstrations demanding greater reforms.
It was acknowledged that China would be taking over Hong Kong. People, gweilos and locals alike, asked me what I thought the Chinese would do when they took power.
"Kick ass," I remember saying. It was what I had seen them doing all over China.
At one of those mid-eighties Hong Kong dinner parties an American businessman said with memorable succinctness, summing up six thousand years of Chinese culture, "The Chinese are pretty much giving you the finger the whole time."
There was still, even then, quite a lot of innocence in Hong Kong regarding its future. Only a small number of people spoke up in favor of free elections, and those who did were accused of "stirring up fear."
The events in Tiananmen Square changed everything. Deng's orders to shoot the demonstrators made pro-democracy activists seem prescient and gave them some moral authority. In the aftermath of the killings, Hong Kongers had a new perspective on the British, the Chinese, and their own fate, and there was more unity among the worriers. The speeches and demonstrations of sympathy in Hong Kong gave way to large-scale emigration to Canada, Australia, and the United States. There was also a brisk trade in foreign passports—for those who could afford them—from such places as Tonga, Belize, Panama, and Gambia.
In that Tiananmen year of 1989, Hong Kong's Basic Law was published. Some of its articles seemed to guarantee important freedoms of thought and assembly, while other articles were vague, and still others contradictory. Article 23 forbade "subversion," and it was apparent that the application of these ambiguous strictures would mean that a Hong Kong citizen would have to tread very carefully. Anyone who wonders how strictly Hong Kong will be governed in the future ought to read the terms of Article 23 of the Basic Law:
The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People's Government, or theft of state secrets, to prohibit foreign political organizations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organizations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organizations or bodies.
The implications of this paragraph became ominous when in Beijing Wang Dan was sentenced to eleven years for treason after he wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times. And recently, when Xi Yang, a reporter in Beijing for the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao, scooped other papers by quoting a leaked speech of Jiang Zemin, he was convicted of "theft of state secrets" and given twelve years in prison.
Into the volatile and fraught atmosphere that surrounded the publication of the Basic Law came t
he new and ultimate governor, Christopher Patten. He saw his role as Hong Kong's last British proconsul as that of rectifying many of the old inequities and introducing reforms. He was opposed by the mainland Chinese, who saw him as a sanctimonious opportunist. Patten, undeterred, managed to raise people's awareness of the more sensitive political issues. This infuriated China, and though it won many to his side, Patten has been largely unsuccessful in introducing any far-reaching reforms.
The most important questions remain unresolved, in particular, the Court of Final Appeal. As a colony, Hong Kong's version of the U.S. Supreme Court is the Privy Council in London, but it was to be left to China to appoint judges to the Court of Final Appeal.
This court has yet to be constituted. Patten had said he would form it before midnight of June 30, but he has not done so. Some people think it is a good thing that he has left it, because by appointing judges himself, he would effectively be marking them out as targets for the Chinese.
"The Court of Final Appeal will be implemented," Patten said when I asked him about this matter. "I hope that my successor will appoint good open-minded judges."
He spoke in such a considered and thoughtful way that I was sure the answer was well rehearsed and that he had given it many times. When he found himself slightly on the defensive, he tended to sound like a history professor.
"Secondly," he said in that studied manner, "I hope that the Court of Final Appeal is able to deal satisfactorily with the inevitable tensions over the Basic Law. The definitions of 'acts of state' will be potentially awkward. If Hong Kong appears to be losing—if the rule of law is undermined—it will have an effect on the way of life and on business confidence.