by Jan Morris
Like the British, down the years Chinese Governments viewed the Walled City ambivalently. On the one hand they never abandoned their claim to authority within it, and from time to time made a minor issue of it. On the other they felt that to make too much fuss about the Walled City in particular might imply recognition of British rights over the territory as a whole. The slums accordingly remained a strange reminder of China’s stage in Hong Kong, and of the subtle, patient, cat-and-mouse way in which the Chinese viewed the progress of the colony.
In 1993 the Walled City of Kowloon was demolished at last, the British and the Chinese no longer being at odds about it,1 and on its site is now an agreeable Chinese garden, with the old yamen, heavily touched up, left museum-like in the middle. With it disappeared from Hong Kong an ancient thrill. Although in my own experience everyone within the Walled City was kindness itself, and although in later years Hong Kong policemen patrolled it, still to the very end tourists were warned against entering the place, for safety’s sake, and were sometimes to be seen enjoying an anachronistic frisson, a last shiver of the Mysterious Orient or the Inscrutable Chinese, as they peered past the preserved abscesses into its unenticing purlieus.
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I say a last shiver of the inscrutable, because in theory at least the 1984 agreement brought frankness for the first time to Anglo-Chinese relationships on Hong Kong. Until then nothing had been straightforward, and the hazy difference of views about the status of the Walled City could be taken as a paradigm for attitudes about the colony itself.
At least since the fall of the Manchu dynasty the Chinese have denied any British right to be in Hong Kong. They have maintained that both the cession of Hong Kong and Kowloon, and the lease of the New Territories, fall into the category of Unequal Treaties: that is, treaties unfairly forced upon a temporarily debilitated China by the ruthless military power of foreigners. The Unequal Treaty reached its apogee at the end of the nineteenth century, when Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Portugal and Japan all had their territorial concessions on the coast of China, and together with the United States enjoyed all manner of privileges in Treaty Ports and Spheres of Influence.
It was impossible to deny, though the British consistently did, that the treaties were unequal. The Chinese really had been obliged to make these concessions by force majeure, and they were given nothing in return. As China revived, one by one the foreign rights were abrogated. Most of the settlements were wound up between the two world wars – the British left Wei-hai-wei in 19302 – and in 1944 foreign rights in all the Treaty Ports were formally relinquished. The great international settlement at Shanghai came to an end in 1945. By the second half of the twentieth century there remained upon the coast of China only the two foreign enclaves that had started it all: Portugal’s Macao, which had been there for 400 years and was so small as to be almost meaningless, and Britain’s Hong Kong.
It seems slightly comical even to talk of relations between Hong Kong (population 6.4 million) and the People’s Republic of China (population 1.2 billion) – rather like the captive Gimson’s foreign relations with the Empire of Japan. But the relationship is not just between a minute colony and a colossus, but between two immense historical forces – between cultures and traditions, systems, races and values. It was the irresistible energy of the modernist West, approaching the climax of its supremacy, that placed the colony of Hong Kong upon the edge of China; it was the impotence of the traditional Chinese civilization at its nadir that allowed this to happen; it is the gradual equalizing of the two, and the spread of technology absorbing them both, that is now bringing the association to its climactic denouement.
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One-nine-thousandth the size of its gigantic host, Hong Kong has often been likened to a parasite upon the skin of China. Sometimes looking across to the mainland from the top of the Peak, sensing the almost infinite landscapes of China which start beyond the Kowloon hills and stretch inconceivably away towards Tibet or Mongolia, it does occur to me that Hong Kong must seem to the leaders of China no more than an irritating itch on the skin. The simile, though, is false. Hong Kong’s role has never been passive, or merely extractive. The colony has been the agency of far greater powers, and in its dealings with China has given as much as it has got.
For much of its history it was far more threatening than threatened. From the start it defied the laws and the traditions of China, whether they eoncerned the divinity of the Emperor or the ban on the export of Chinese technology to foreigners. It repeatedly served as a base for attacks on the Chinese mainland, culminating in Lord Elgin’s humiliation of the Manchus in 1860, and the destruction of the Summer Palace in Beijing. Throughout the nineteenth century indeed the colony treated China with general contempt. ‘I do not know,’ observed Keswick of Jardine’s in 1895, at the end of China’s most miserable and humiliating century, ‘that it can be good for China to be treated generously; for then the lessons of adversity and of supreme misfortune might be forgotten.’
From Hong Kong, in good times and in bad, the West has kept a monitory eye upon China. The colony has always been a base for intelligence and propaganda activities on the mainland. Today some of those great electronic aerials and dishes probing the sky above the territory are outposts of the Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham in England, part of the Anglo-American system of eavesdrop which spans the world, and others beam the Chinese services of the BBC to the remotest corners of the People’s Republic. Even now the most thorough reportage of Chinese affairs is that in the Hong Kong press, in Chinese as in English: many pages are devoted to sessions of the People’s National Congress in Beijing, and innumerable items are recorded that never see the light of day within the People’s Republic.
Here too the opponents of authority in Beijing or Guangzhou have habitually prepared their subversions under cover of the British flag; republicans against Manchus, Communists against Kuomintang, Kuomintang against Communists. Zhou Enlai took refuge in Hong Kong in 1927, early in his rise to ultimate power in China, and the Kuomintang authorities in Taiwan, still dreaming of a return to the mainland, have always used it as a base for mischief-making in southern China. Many a vanquished war-lord has retreated to Hong Kong to plan his come-back – the well-known ‘General’ Pipe Lee, for example, who for years held flamboyant court, together with his nine wives, in a fiercely fortified mansion in the New Territories.
But western imperialism was always an engine of development as well as of exploitation, and Hong Kong constantly projected new vitality, too, into the moribund mass of China. For better or for worse, its constant pressure for access to China’s business gradually opened up the country to modern realities. Even the trade in opium at least instructed Chinese financiers in modern methods of exchange, demonstrated the advantages of contemporary ships and armaments, and helped to open the eyes of the mandarins to the fact that foreigners might be barbaric, but were not invariably fools. The middlemen who dealt with the Hong Kong hongs, and later the Chinese compradors who served them, were among the first truly cosmopolitan Chinese, and acted as agents of enlightenment as well as of greed. Western techniques were usefully grafted on to oriental bases: a first symbol of an awakening China was the design of the hybrid junks called lorchas, which had a Chinese hull with a western rigging.3
Later the merchants and bankers of Hong Kong played leading parts in China’s own Industrial Revolution, such as it was. They envisaged gigantic new markets opening there to western exports, and immense opportunities for investment. Groping as they always were through miasmas of Chinese corruption, obstruction, ignorance and misunderstanding, they were constantly urging the purblind Manchu authorities towards progress, and Hong Kong became less like an itchy parasite than like a wasp, buzzing and stinging the lethargic giant into awareness.
It was largely through the agency of Hong Kong that steam, the prime instrument of nineteenth-century change, reached China. The sturdy river steamboats of Russell’s, Dent’s, Jardine’s and
Swire’s became the chief means of transport into the interior, and Hong Kong steamers dominated the coastal trade. The first of all China’s railways was built by Jardine’s. A quaint narrow-gauge line between Shanghai and Wusung, opened in 1876, it did not last long, the Manchu Government being unsympathetic to the initiative, but it was the beginning of the immense railway explosion which was to transform China in the last part of the nineteenth century. It was only proper that in the end a consortium between Jardine’s and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank should finance and develop the greater part of the system.
Money poured in from the colony to the sub-continent. Quite apart from investment money, repeated loans were made to Chinese Governments, and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank became one of the most powerful forces in Beijing. For some years it was the one Bank into which all Chinese customs dues were paid, and when China went off the silver standard in 1935 all the silver surrendered to the Government was stored in the Bank’s vaults. War-lords also came to Hong Kong for the wherewithal to fight their campaigns, and in the 1930s some 70 per cent of China’s war needs, in its fight against Japan, reached it by way of the colony.
Engineers from Hong Kong helped to curb the perennial floods of the Yellow River. The first elevator in China was installed by Jardine’s. Hong Kong contributed power to China’s electricity grid. There were even times when the minuscule colony helped to alleviate China’s food shortages. F. D. Ommanney, who lived in Hong Kong in the 1950s, when China’s agriculture was in chaos, reported 4 that when his amah visited Guangzhou she took with her, for her hungry relatives over the border, two chickens, a duck, packages of fruit, sausages, eggs, tea and sweetmeats, large quantities of dried bread and three sacks crammed with burnt rice, scraped from the bottoms of cooking-pans.
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‘A celestial palace in a fairyland,’ is how the nineteenth-century Chinese scholar Wei Yuan described Hong Kong. They have often expressed themselves in poetical hyperbole and politesse, but there is no doubt that the Chinese have always been astonished by Hong Kong, by its technical virtuosity and its speed of change. As early as 1845 a senior Guangzhou official wrote an ode to the colony describing it as a royal white city built on a rock, its buildings glittering in the morning sun – ‘yet on this spot ere-while were only to be seen the hovels of the roving fishermen. Where are they? – gone like the swallows of departed autumn!’ The poet Wang Zuaxian, in 1870, said the colony was ‘embroiled in a sea of music and song, its mountains overflowing with meat and wine’. The politician Wang Dao likened it to a row of flying geese, and the political reformer Kang You-wei, who much admired the ruling strategy of the colony, wrote about ‘the splendour of the buildings, the orderly array of the roads, the solemn appearance of the police …’
Hong Kong has been a potent example to the Chinese across the frontier and up the coast. They see the colony as they might see an exhibition of modernity, and the mere contrast of material achievement, between the little colony and the immense republic, can only be stimulation of a kind – one car for every twenty-two people in Hong Kong, one for every 10,220 in China! China looks to Hong Kong for models managerial, constructional, architectural, financial. The computer age is reaching the People’s Republic very largely through the medium of Hong Kong, and the concept of company law, unknown in Communist China but essential to satisfactory contracts with the outside world, is seeping into China by way of Hong Kong’s legal community.
When Lugard founded the University of Hong Kong, he saw it specifically as an intellectual example for China – a British lighthouse whose beams would illuminate all around it. Hong Kong was always a base of Christian evangelicalism, too, and even in Mao Zedong’s time Christianity was projected into China via this not very Christian colony: couriers of New Life Literature, a proselytizing organization, took Bibles into the mainland, and the Chinese Research Centre expressed itself concerned, like so many missionary groups before it, by the fact that ‘many Chinese hearts are empty’.
Above all the whole ideology of capitalism, now fitfully reviving within the People’s Republic, finds its nearest exemplar in Hong Kong. It could hardly be disregarded. Millions of Chinese comrades have relatives in the colony, many more have seen the place for themselves, and anyway history has proved that the patterns of Hong Kong can never be excluded from China. It was from here that Sun Yat-sen, a medical student in the colony, took home the ideas that were to overthrow the monarchy and impel the Celestial Kingdom at last towards the status of a contemporary Great Power. He was banished from Hong Kong for a time as being dangerous to its peace and good order, but twenty-five years later he told an audience at Hong Kong University that the source of his revolutionary inspiration had been Hong Kong itself – he had been deeply affected by the orderly calm and security of the colony, compared with the disorder and insecurity of his home in Guangdong Province, only fifty miles away. ‘The difference of Governments impressed me very much …’
Except I suppose for the simplest or remotest peasants, all Chinese know about Hong Kong. It is a metropolis of the Greater China which extends in communities large and small all around the world. Every corner of that vast informal empire maintains family or economic connections with the colony. Its remissions of money to the homeland are channelled through Hong Kong, and so often are its citizens, so that the territory has become an ante-room, or perhaps a pressure-chamber, through which a perpetual flow of Greater Chinese, Overseas Chinese as the People’s Republic classifies them, passes on its way to the mainland.
I once took passage in a Chinese ship from Hong Kong to Shanghai, and found the vessel itself a microcosm of the Chinese world. It was like a reunion, as we passed from the threshold that was Hong Kong into the grand presence of the mainland. The crew were citizens of the People’s Republic, cheerful, able, always ready to serve you a scraggy leg of duck wrapped in grease-paper from the snack bar, and obligingly disposed to turn a blind eye when you passed through a gate marked CREW ONLY. The passengers were of all Chinese kinds. They included elderly people returning from visits to relatives abroad, and rich Overseas Chinese from Taiwan and the Philippines, and Hong Kong students, and Chinese-American businessmen on trade missions, and a couple of academics returning from studies in Europe.
For three days we sailed through the South China Sea. We were never alone in it, for there were always fishing-boats about, and we were seldom out of sight of the shore whose landmarks the passengers excitedly pointed out to each other. By the time we entered the estuary of the Yangtze and steamed up-river to Shanghai, the experience had become doubly allegorical to me. I felt myself to be among a company of wanderers returning to their family; but I also felt I had been sailing in the wakes of all the ships that ever sailed up the China coast from Hong Kong, all the opium smugglers, tea clippers, Swire’s and Jardine’s steamers, all the multitudes of junks and sampans which have linked colony with mainland through all the pages of this book. Even as I write these words, looking out from my window across the harbour of Hong Kong, there I see the very same vessel, the Shanghai, flying the red flag at her stern and loading her attendant lighters for the next voyage home.
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Still, if the 400-odd square miles of Hong Kong cast a surprisingly long shadow over China, the presence of the People’s Republic’s 3.7 million square miles looms decidedly larger over Hong Kong. Physically there is no escaping it, anywhere in the colony, or ignoring the fact that Hong Kong is geographically and geologically part of China, dependent upon its vast neighbour for most of its water and nearly all its food. When I survey that view from the Peak I find it hard to work out, contemplating its jumbled panorama of land and sea, which islands or hills are British, which Chinese.
To the Chinese Hong Kong has never been anything but part of China. China is China to them, traditionally every Chinese can only be a citizen of China, and the mere occupation by foreigners of a patch of Chinese territory does nothing to alienate it from the motherland. From start to finish the Chinese o
f all regimes have acted upon the assumption that in the fullness of time the foreigners would lose control of Hong Kong. Their attitude has generally been evasively temporizing. They have seldom lost their tempers over Hong Kong, but have allowed the last of the Unequal Treaties to wither away organically – it was the British, not the Chinese, who initiated the 1984 negotiations.
When Hong Kong was taken from them in 1842 their firm and crazed conviction was that China was in all ways the centre of the world. The very ideogram for ‘Centre’ stood for China too, and the title of Middle Kingdom was a reminder that everything else revolved around the heartland that was China. Western envoys were treated like menials or juveniles. Queen Victoria herself was severely reprimanded by Lin Ze-xu, Imperial High Commissioner in Guangzhou, for allowing the opium trade to continue – ‘on receipt of this letter’, the mandarin counselled her, ‘let your reply be speedy, advising us of the measures you propose to adopt. Do not by false embellishments evade or procrastinate …’
Reading the history of Hong Kong, I sometimes get the feeling that the colony was ceded to Britain rather as a toy might be handed over to a recalcitrant child, merely to keep him quiet. Certainly for long periods the Chinese simply let things lie, without it seems much worrying about the status of Hong Kong. Often they were physically incapable of doing anything else, but at other times they seem to have exercised indifference as a matter of policy. When they did interfere in the affairs of the colony, they generally did so obliquely, but not always ineffectively. It happened first in the 1860s, with the so-called Blockade of Hong Kong. This was mounted because the Chinese resented the vast amount of contraband conveyed into China from the colony – as the British Minister in Beijing admitted at the time, Hong Kong had become ‘little more than an immense smuggling depot’.