Outside, on my hotel-room balcony, the floodlit convention center was all too visible on the harbor front, looking like somebody sat on the Sydney Opera House. Directly below the balcony, a couple thousand not very noisy protesters stood in the rain in Statue Square, looking like somebody was about to sit on them. They were listening to democracy advocate Martin Lee. Mr. Lee was a member of the first freely elected legislature in the history of Hong Kong. And the last. It was unelected at midnight. Mr. Lee was speaking without a police permit. And speaking. And speaking. Every now and then a disconsolate chant of agreement rose from the crowd. Mr. Lee kept speaking. No one bothered to stop him.
Back inside, on the TV, president of China Jiang Zemin was speaking, too—introducing himself to his instant, involuntary fellow countrymen with a poker-faced hollering of banalities in Mandarin. “We owe all our achievements most fundamentally!!! To the road of building socialism!!! With Chinese characteristics!!! Which we have taken!!!” he said, interrupting his speech with episodes of self-applause, done in the official politburo manner by holding the hands sideways and moving the fingers and palms as if to make quacky-ducky shadow puppets.
The big men on the convention-center podium—Jiang, Prime Minister Li Peng, and Foreign Minister Qian Qichen—seemed to have made their own suit jackets at home.
Tung Chee-hwa, the Beijing-appointed chief executive of the new Hong Kong Special Administration Region, came to the microphone next, making pronouncements that combined a political-reeducation-camp lecture (“Our thoughts and remembrance go, with great reverence, to the late Deng Xiaoping”) with a Dick Gephardt speech (“We respect minority views but also shoulder collective responsibility…. We valueplurality but discourage open confrontation. We strive for liberty but not at the expense of blah, blah, blah.”).
This also was said in Mandarin, which is not the native tongue in Hong Kong. In fact, no one uses it there, and having the HK chief executive lipping away in an alien lingo was like hearing an American politician speak meaningless, bizarre…it was like hearing an American politician speak.
Outside on the balcony again (covering the Hong Kong handover required a journalist to give his utmost—what with AC-chilled binocs fogging in the tropical heat and a minibar running low on ice) I watched the HMS Britannia pull away from the convention-center dock. A nondescript, freighter-shaped vessel painted white, Britannia looked to be more an unfortunate cruise-ship choice than a royal yacht. It steamed through Victoria Harbor, hauling butt from now foreign waters. On board were the last British governor of Hong Kong, the aristocrat currently known as Prince of Wales, any number of other dignitaries, and, I hope, a large cargo of guilt.
Would the limeys have skipped town if Hong Kong was full of 6.5 million big, pink, freckled, hay-haired, kipper-tucking, pint-sloshing, work-shy, layabout, Labour-voting…Well, in that case…
Maybe Hong Kong just wasn’t one of those vital, strategic places worth fighting for—like the Falklands. Maybe the Poms only intervene militarily where there’s enough sheep to keep the troops entertained.
Why didn’t the British give some other island to China. Britain, for instance. This would get the U.K. back on a capitalist course—Beijing being more interested in moneymaking than Tony Blair. Plus, the Chinese have extensive experience settling royal-family problems.
Or why didn’t Britain sell England to Hong Kong? Hong Kong can afford it, and that way anyone who was worried about the fate of democracy in the Special Administrative Region could go live in Sloane Square, and the rest of England could be turned into a theme park. There’s quaint scenery, lots of amusements for the kiddies (“Changing of the Wives” at Buckingham Palace is good), and plenty of souvenirs, such as, if you donate enough money to the right political party, a knighthood.
But this didn’t happen. And the people of Hong Kong (unless they were very rich) were stuck in Hong Kong. Sure, they had British passports. But these were “starter passports”—good for travel to…Macao. Of course, they could have gotten passport upgrades. For a million Hong Kong dollars, they could have gone to Toronto. Very fun.
Oh, let’s give the limeys a break. It’s not as if we Americans gave a damn, either. We could have threatened to stealth-bomber the Red Chinese or, for that matter, Margaret Thatcher when she started gift-wrapping Hong Kong for Deng Xiaoping. We could have told China to go kiss Boris Yeltsin’s ass if it wanted to be a most-favored nation. And we could have handed out 6.5 million green cards.
Imagine 6.5 million savvy, hardworking citizens-to-be with a great cuisine. What a blessing for America. And how we would hate them. Pat Buchanan would hate their race. The AFL-CIO would hate their wage rate. The NAACP would hate their failure to fail as a minority. And Al Gore would hate 6.5 million campaign contributors who didn’t have to sneak pro-free-trade money to the Democratic National Committee anymore but could go right into polling booths and vote Republican.
The surrender of Hong Kong was a shameful moment. But if you missed Martin Lee’s soggy peroration in Statue Square, you might never have known it. The stock market was still on a swell, up 30 percent from a year before, with bulging, steroidal gains in the so-called red chips, the mainland holding companies promoted by the ChiComs. Trade and foreign investment were at unexampled heights. No one was running from the real-estate market. Tiny condominiums in unglamorous districts were going for $500,000.
A five-day weekend was declared, though no one closed shop. Retail sales were 30 percent to 40 percent above the usual. Important people had flown in from all over the globe. I saw the back of Margaret Thatcher’s head in my hotel lobby.
On July 1 (“Dependence Day,” I guess) people who should have known better sent messages of cheer, fulsomely printed in the South China Morning Post:
China has made important commitments to maintain Hong Kong’s freedom and autonomy.
—Bill Clinton
Hong Kong can be an even better place in which to live and work.
—Madeleine Albright
I feel pretty relaxed about it.
—George Bush
Skyrockets splattered in the evening skies. The British Farewell Ceremony for 10,000 invited guests had featured not only bands from the Scots Guards, Black Watch, and various other men without pants, but also the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra and (I saw this) a dance troupe with performers dressed as giant deutsche marks, enormous circuit boards, and huge powdered wigs. At the other end of the lifestyle continuum, there was a One Nation Under a Groove 11 P.M. to 9 A.M. rave.
In between were thousands of parties, from impromptu expat booze-ups in the Wan Chai lap-dancing district to dinners with courses incalculable by abacus at Hong Kong mogul David Tang’s China Club. Here the whole food chain was ravaged, from depth of sea slug to bird’s-nest height.
The China Club is decorated colonial style in big-wallah mahogany, except the walls are covered with Mao-era socialist-realism art, and the waiters and waitresses are dressed as Red Guards. Meaning? I have no idea.
I also have no idea why my hotel kept giving me handover gifts: a bottle of champagne, a coffee-table book about Hong Kong titled Return to the Heart of the Dragon (less ominous-sounding in Chinese, I gather), and a silver mug bearing crossed British and Chinese flags, and inscribed:
Resumption of Sovereignty
to
China
1 July 1997
Hong Kong
To which I intend to have added:
Bowling Tournament
2nd Place
Whimsical handover T-shirts, many making hangover puns, were for sale around the city, as were such humorous novelties as “Canned Colonial Air—Sealed Before June 30th.” I suppose the same sort of things were being marketed in Vienna in 1938: “Last Yarmulke Before Anschluss,” and so on. Maybe in occupied France, too: “Vichy Water,” ha-ha.
There were grumbles in Hong Kong, of course, such as dissidentish shows by artists objecting to censorship, in case there was going to be any. Martin Lee an
d his fellow Democratic Party members gave a glum press conference, at which they promised to keep representing their electoral districts, even if they didn’t anymore. And a certain amount of fretting in the press was seen, but mostly of the affectless editorial page kind that mixes AFTER GENOCIDE—WHITHER RWANDA? with AFTER GRETZKY—WHITHER HOCKEY? Hong Kong, on the whole, was awfully darn cheerful.
Why weren’t 6.5 million people more upset about being palmed off to an ideology-impaired dictatorship that has the H-bomb? Even one of Taiwan’s top representatives in Hong Kong was quoted saying, “As a Chinese person, I think it is a good thing that Hong Kong is coming back to China.” Chiang Kai-shek, please.
There is the colonialism issue. How did the Chinese of Hong Kong really feel about being ruled by England? It’s a complex question. Or, as a number of Chinese people said to me, “No, it isn’t.” Being an American, and an Irish-American to boot, I was, maybe, told certain things that the English didn’t hear. “We hate the English,” for instance.
When a Chinese friend said that, I said, “Wait a minute, I was in Vietnam not long ago, and nobody seemed to hate Americans. If the Vietnamese can forgive Americans for napalm, carpet bombing, Agent Orange, and what-all, surely you can forgive the English for the odd opium war and some ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ karaoke.”
“It’s a different thing,” said my friend. “You just killed the Vietnamese; you never snubbed them.”
Hong Kong’s people are also realists. Calling in to complain on the Larry King Show wasn’t going to do much. Thus the tepid response to the handover’s endless television and newspaper “streeters,” the interviews with random locals: “Excuse me, I understand you’re about to get secret police in your neighborhood. Would you care to tell the world how much you hate Jiang Zemin?”
There are real reasons for Hong Kong’s realism. In 1945 the population of the territory was only 1.2 million. Today, the whole city is filled with refugees and children of refugees. Until 1980, Hong Kong had a “touch base” asylum policy where, basically, anyone from the mainland who made it to downtown could stay. The Chinese who fled the civil war, the communist takeover on the mainland, and the lunatic deprivations and slaughters that followed know that there’s only one real safe haven: money.
And they’re serious about making it. The hours posted on the door of the fashion-forward department store Joyce are, MONDAY-SATURDAY 10 A.M.–7 P.M., SUNDAY AND PUBLIC HOLIDAYS 11 A.M.–6 P.M. Take two hours off for Christmas. And the in-case-of typhoon notice in my hotel room read:
Signal Number 9 and 10:
When these signals are hoisted, extreme
weather conditions will prevail, meaning
that the typhoon is centered over Hong
Kong. May we suggest that while you
are confined indoors, you enjoy the
facilities of our restaurants and bars.
Finally, the residents of Hong Kong were putting a good face on things because…what the hell else were they going to do? There’s a joke they tell in Shanghai about the Hong Kong handover. Mao asks Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, “How do you get a cat to bite a hot pepper?”
Zhou says, “You hold him down, pry his jaws open, and shove the pepper into his mouth.”
Mao says, “No, that’s force. We want the cat to bite the pepper of his own free will.”
Deng says, “You take the pepper, wrap it in a delicious piece of fish, and, before he knows it, the cat has bitten the pepper.”
Mao says, “No, that’s trickery. We want the cat to know he’s biting the pepper.”
Zhou and Deng say, “We give up. How do you make a cat bite a hot pepper?”
“It’s easy,” Mao says. “Stick the pepper up the cat’s ass. He’ll be glad to bite it.”
10
HOW TO HAVE THE WORST OF BOTH WORLDS
SHANGHAI
There may be an even better way of getting a cat to eat a hot pepper. Make the cat a senior vice president for sales at a global hot-pepper conglomerate and promise to open mainland China to hot-pepper imports.
I went to Shanghai to see what was taking over Hong Kong, and to Hong Kong to see what was being taken. And in the month I spent visiting these two parts of China, every employee of an international corporation I met said that the “reunification” would be good for business.
The corporations are seduced by the idea of 1.2 billion mainland customers. It has become a mantra for marketing departments around the world. “Om, one point two billion.” Management is mesmerized. Right now the board of directors at Boeing is sitting around going, “One point two billion…boy, if just one half of one percent of those people bought a 777…”
Not that the corporate executives aren’t worried about communist abuse of human rights. They’ve been deeply concerned about this for years. Here is the chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia Ltd., quoted in The Washington Post business section, agonizing about the events of Tiananmen Square: “The border was closed. JCPenney stock went down because their entire fall supply of shoes had to come across the border.”
But on July 1, 1997, the day after the Hong Kong handover, Lehman Brothers, Samsung Electronics, Chase Bank, Singapore Airlines, Canadian Airlines, AT&T, Credit Lyonnais, Maxell Tapes, Louis Vuitton, and that White House favorite, the Lippo Group, had congratulatory ads in the former colony’s English language papers. And Toshiba had decorated the top floors of its Hong Kong headquarters so that its logo was visible in almost every outdoor TV shot or still photo of the handover ceremonies.
No offense to businesspeople, of course, especially if they happen to own publishing companies or chains of bookstores. I’m just wondering if multinational executives have thought this through. There are some strange players in the Chinese communist economy. For instance, the People’s Liberation Army is a major investor. Consider putting PLA officers into positions of corporate responsibility. “Sir, the merger strategy is a minefield, sir. Literally, sir.” And now I’ve offended the People’s Liberation Army. There go my 1.2 billion hardcover sales.
I don’t want to disparage private enterprise. The world has political, religious, and intellectual leaders for that. But when a totalitarian government gets cozy with large financial and manufacturing concerns, it rings a twentieth-century historical bell. I’m thinking how a certain “people’s car”—ein Volkswagen—got its start. I’m thinking, “Made the trains run on time.” I’m thinking, “Greater Asian Coprosperity Sphere.” There’s a technical name for this political ideology.
Shanghai, on first impression, seems fine—that is, it seems to be in the dire, hideous, and enjoyable state of confusion that market freedoms always produce. I can’t even tell you what Shanghai looks like, because, look again, and it looks different. Other cities have construction sites; Shanghai is one—a 220-square-kilometer cellar hole where the full business of urban existence is scrambled with the building trades. Tan yourself during lunch hour in the arc-welding glare. What fortieth-story I-beam girder do I inch down to get to McDonald’s? Don’t call a cab; flag a crane and get hoisted back into your office window.
Everything in Shanghai seems to be going up or coming down. Maybe at the same time. Maybe, between customers, store clerks tear bricks off the shop’s back wall while the saleswomen run up front to lay cinder blocks. On my first morning in town, I saw a whole platoon of the People’s Liberation Army going down a manhole with plumbing tools. Which is a good place to put communist military, as far as I’m concerned. But it’s beyond telling if all the activity in Shanghai makes as much sense as that did.
THIS SITE WILL DEVELOP A SUPER HIGH BUILDING, read a sign on a narrow side-street lot. Buildings were being built everywhere—on top of other buildings, smack in the middle of the street, and smack under it, too. People’s Square, Shanghai’s Tiananmen equivalent, the place for mass rallies and such, was torn up so that a multilevel shopping center could be installed below it. That way, if any more of those 1989-style democracy protests happen in Shanghai, the kids w
ill be able to stand in People’s Square and guess whether tanks will squash them and also run downstairs and buy a pair of Guess? jeans so they’ll be dressed for the occasion.
There was so much scaffolding in Shanghai that when I saw a framework of bamboo poles holding nets over a sapling, I thought, “Christ, they’re building trees.” Actually not. Miles of once-shady streets have been timbered to make way for steel and glass. Although new trees were being planted. I counted a dozen. And at least two parks hadn’t been completely paved. Not that Shanghai has turned its back on nature. The downtown freeway overpasses, stacked four deep, had little flowering window boxes hanging from their guardrails.
Like Hong Kong, Shanghai began as an enclave of market freedom—albeit market freedom imposed by military force (the way we’ve tried to impose it in Cuba several times). Both Hong Kong and Shanghai were “concession ports” granted by the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 after the first opium war. Hong Kong belonged to Britain, but Shanghai belonged to practically everybody. A slew of foreigners threw together the Shanghai city administration, described thus in a 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica entry: “As there are now fourteen treaty powers represented at Shanghai, there are consequently fourteen district courts sitting side by side, each administering the law for its own nationality.” Recipe, if ever there was, for a failed civic soufflé—which rose anyhow. China was experiencing one of its 4,200 consecutive years of bad government. Imagine a ruling elite so lousy that fourteen Western political systems all operating at the same time wouldn’t be worse—fourteen Jesse Helmses curling your hair in the Senate, twenty-eight Bills and Hillarys bloviating at the White House, and seventy people yelling at each other on the McLaughlin Group.
Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics Page 26