The sovereignty of Hong Kong - 4 July 1997

The trumpets blared, the rockets glared, the kilts flared, the governor’s daughter piped anigh.Two weeks of an exotic television travelogue were over and a thousand headlines wrote the epitaph, "End of an Empire".

Not quite. On this side of the Atlantic, there was dancing in the streets and the rollicking sounds of islands' music in the largest remaining piece of precious empire real estate, Bermuda.

Bermudians may have shared a ritual tear by way of minding their manners, but as the bell 8,000 miles away tolled midnight, Bermuda seemed to be celebrating a coronation or independence day. As somebody said, “This is the most golden setting sun I ever saw.”

A waiter serving a festive lunch said, “Thank you very much Hong Kong. Here come the insurance companies and the pension funds.” A house repairman in his 20s, “We have the best of both worlds. We pretty much run the country ourselves and we have no income taxes.”

A young American reporter, one Larry Rohter who picked up these titbits, reported a ceremony which he suggested was under the circumstances “a touch unseemly.” It was a lunch celebrating the transfer of Hong Kong, put on by the mercantile company – quote – “whose opium trade led to the war that allowed Britain to seize Hong Kong.”

Mr Rohter also discovered an astonishing fact not, I think, widely reported till now. Nearly half of all the companies listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange from ship owners to real-estate dealers have established some sort of legal presence here, as have some of the Chinese government’s own holding companies. You suppose China has Bermuda in mind for a later annexation? In any case, I feel we shall be hearing a good deal more of Bermuda from now on.

Until now, it’s been a featured travel supplement in the fall and winter Sunday papers, to which I must say Americans and Canadians have responded in large and lavish spending numbers in the past 30, 40 years. It couldn’t happen to a nicer island. I wonder if, in their coming tidal wave of new prosperity, they’ll be tough enough to maintain their admirable stance, policy: no automobiles allowed on this island?

The fate of Hong Kong has been of course on the lips of every anchor person, at the fingertips of every laptop commentator.

In my experience of telly-gazing in the past few weeks, I find the best service, the best programmes performed, was to jab their microphones at random in front of businessmen, janitors, politicians, waiters, rock singers, taxi drivers, students, seamstresses; span the gamut of jobs and human types.

What came out of it was nothing that dare call itself a statistical sample, but it appeared to me that the great majority of the people of Hong Kong felt with a small shopkeeper, a woman who said, “Well the fireworks and the parades are very good, but it will be nice when it’s over and we can get back to normal.”

If there was any glaring assurance that getting back to normal is going to happen, of course all the pundits and commentators would have to go out of business or perhaps decamp to Bermuda.

The burden of the song of the scores of pieces I’ve read or listened to has been either vast prosperity is just around the corner and it will outweigh any inclination of the Chinese to hurt the goose that laid the golden age; or watch out men, Hong Kong has been delivered into slavery and is at one with pitiable Cuba.

This latter note has been the gloom and doom theme of America’s most serious and influential papers. I mean influential in Washington. It is a belief that has become in the American media practically a slogan: Hong Kong has had to abolish an elected legislature and accept one chosen and imposed on it by Beijing.

A very powerful rebuttal to this simple thesis came out more than a month ago in the serious American quarterly, Foreign Affairs. It’s by an Asian expert, Mr Frank Ching, the senior editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review. His piece is called "Misreading Hong Kong", and he meets his victims head-on, wasting no time on preliminary feints or minuets.

He begins by reminding us that Beijing’s choice of a new chief executive for Hong Kong was a shipping magnate who’d fled Communist rule in Shanghai almost five decades ago; that he was chosen from a field of three. The event, Mr Ching says, was “epochal” because in the past Hong Kong governors had been appointed in London without any consultation with Hong Kong’s populous.

This time all the candidates were questioned on every sort of issue, including the handling of dissidents. The three candidates campaigned hard and long, and Mr Tung was eventually chosen by a selection committee of Hong Kong’s elite, meaning doctors, lawyers, business people, union leaders, educators.

In order to compete, the two failed candidates gave up their careers -– one as chief justice, the other the chairmanship of two major companies. Hardly, Mr Ching thinks, a rigged election.

As for the new legislature, hand-picked (as we’ve so often read) by Beijing, it too was chosen by the selection committee, the 400 from Hong Kong. Of the council’s 60 members, 33 are former members of the council that was disbanded. “Not the slightest accommodation to democracy,” moaned one great American newspaper. So, Mr Ching retorts, all previous governors were chosen with even less accommodation to democracy.

Mr Ching, who lives in Hong Kong, is very well aware of the suppression of dissent, aware that labour camps and political imprisonment are systemic in China. Yet he believes that the Western media have gone too far in assuming Hong Kong is in grave danger, if not already beyond salvation.

Against the almost wishful pessimism of the double-dome press, Mr Ching notes that in a recent island survey the incoming Mr Tung was more popular than the outgoing governor, and that 80% of the people have confidence in the future (political as well as economic) of the island.

More to his point that Beijing is unlikely to do something rash or brutal about dissidents, for instance, is his reminder that China spent five years drafting the basic law and two years negotiating the joint declaration. "Besides," he adds, in a sentence written a couple of months ago, "China’s ultimate goal is the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland, and its leaders know that if things go badly with Hong Kong after 1997, Taiwan will have no interest in accepting one country, two systems."

Well, until last Wednesday that sentence sounded like an interesting opinion from an academic expert.

On Wednesday morning, it was given the weight of a thunderbolt prophecy when American headlines, if not European, blared, "Taiwan’s turn next, Chinese leaders say". A positive defiant speech of President Jiang to the massed applause of 50,000 party members – the sort of public theatre that on the tube reminded me of Hitler at a Nuremberg rally – Mr Jiang said it loud and clear, “The success of the Hong Kong transition will set an example for the final resolution of Taiwan.”

I’m pretty sure that this declaration and the theatricality of its making is something Washington was not prepared for. It will guarantee, among other changes, that Hong Kong will fade from the media obsession as rapidly as anxiety about Taiwan will soar.

It’s only two or three months ago since everybody breathed again when the Chinese fleet’s rowdy flaunting of its naval power offshore Taiwan was met by American air and naval observation, and the withdrawal of both forces and the firm word from the Clinton administration that any Chinese attempt to take Taiwan by force would be “seriously regarded.” That is, met by American force.

I suppose, I know there’s a generation or two which never knew that Taiwan is the new or rather the old name for Formosa, the island where Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist forces sought refuge when the Communists took over the mainland.

From then on, 1949, Taiwan claimed to be the only true Chinese government. All its world war allies agreed. Taiwan sat in the United Nations as one of the only five permanent powers of the Security Council for the UN’s first 26 years. “Never,” said the American Secretary of State, Acheson, at one time, “never will Communist China or any other aggressor nation shoot its way into the United Nations.”

Alas, Mao Tse-tung’s was the realistic government of the vast territory of mainland China, and in 1971 Taiwan was expelled from the UN with the consolation prize of a promise of permanent protection from the US Seventh Fleet.

Today the American claim to superpowerdom in the Pacific rests on its loyalty to Taiwan. Beijing’s hopes for soon absorbing Taiwan peacefully rest on showing the successful independence of Hong Kong. “Perhaps,” Mr Ching ended, “in spite of the elaborate promises of autonomy, protection of free opinion, generous interpretation of the clauses about sedition, treason, so on, perhaps China will break its promises to let Hong Kong ruin itself. But it’s much too early to say so.”

It seems to me that on the whole both optimism and pessimism have the weakness of prepared positions. That is, they are the sound of a closed mind. It’s as meaningless to predict now Hong Kong’s fate as it is to predict next week’s winner of the British Open Golf Championship – which of course journalists, who must earn their perks, have to keep on doing.

Far better to wait and see.

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