by Jan Morris
Sir Patrick and Mr Justice Li found that the response conveyed ‘an overwhelming message of acceptance’, but they knew better than that really. They knew that people were hedging their bets, and wisely hedged theirs too. ‘The verdict of acceptance,’ they added in the final paragraph of their report, ‘implies neither positive enthusiasm nor passive acquiescence. The response to the Assessment Office has demonstrated the realism of the people of Hong Kong.’
Quite so. As it had been at the start, so it was now that the history of this extraordinary outpost was approaching its conclusion. Warily the two Empires had regarded each other down the decades, as the sign of the one rose, of the other fell, and for 150 years the colony had lived by making the best of the confrontation. Realism was its stock-in-trade.
11
It is a Thursday morning as I write, in my air-conditioned hotel bedroom in Central. Outside my windows, as in a silent film, I can see but not hear all the mid-week activity of the City-State.
The inevitable jack-hammer is soundlessly punching a hole towards a new underpass. A crane is swinging, three bulldozers are trundling about a building yard and a number of men in hardhats and business suits are poring over a map. The usual crowd is swarming into the Star Ferry terminal. The usual interminable traffic crawls down Connaught Road, police bikes with flashing blue lights now and then weaving a way among the cars.
In each neon-lit window of the office block across the road I can see a separate cameo: a shirt-sleeved young broker at his desk, a secretary telephoning, three or four people bent intently over something on a table, a solitary executive staring out across the city. On the promenade beyond the City Hall people are sitting in twos and threes in the sunshine. Pedestrians in their thousands hasten over the road-bridge, into the subway, along the sidewalk, in and out of McDonald’s, all down the walkway to the outlying island ferry station. I count thirty-five freighters moored within my field of vision, some of them so engulfed in lighters that they seem to be in floating docks. A white cruise ship lies at the Ocean Terminal, with a fruit carrier astern of her, and the inevitable armada of launches, barges, tugs and sampans moves as in pageant through the harbour.
Over the water I fancy a shimmer of heat, or perhaps exhaust fumes, above the mass of Kowloon, and through it the Nine Hills loom a bluish grey. A Boeing 747 vanishes behind the buildings to reappear a moment later on the runway at Kai Tak. There are flashes of sun on distant windows. I leave my typewriter for a moment, open the sliding glass doors and walk out to the balcony; and away from the hotel’s insulated stillness, instantly like the blast of history itself the frantic noise of Hong Kong hits me, the roar of that traffic, the thumping of that jack-hammer, the chatter of a million voices across the city below; and once again the smell of greasy duck and gasoline reaches me headily out of China.
1 Some 4,500 of the residents submitted false demands for compensation: many moved into the Walled City for that very purpose.
2 Its villagers beseeching the British Government, so The Times reported at the time, ‘to postpone the return of the territory till better times’.
3 And one of which, the Arrow, Chinese-owned but Hong Kong-registered, appositely became the cause of the 1856 war which finally took the armies of the west into the Forbidden City itself.
4 In Fragrant Harbour, London 1962.
5 A letter from the would-be assassin’s landlady, intercepted by the police, mentioned only in passing that her lodger had tried to murder the Governor, ‘and most unfortunately missed’.
6 And his father had been the Bank of China’s first manager in Hong Kong, back in the 1930s.
7 Though it was pointedly a flag of silk which the British originally raised over the New Territories in 1898.
8 Which employs a thousand hostesses, is decorated with 200 images of female nudes, and is fervently disclaimed by the Volvo Car Company of Sweden.
THE FINAL EDITION
SO, 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 pro
spect 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.