China makes US$9.6 million movie to educate its citizens
China, Hong Kong and Britain, in their different ways, are increasing widely-held doubts over the city-state's future within China after July 1 1997. But, in East Asia, uncertainty and prosperity have often gone hand-in-hand. The Jakarta Post Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin continues with the third in his series on Hong Kong's transition from British to Chinese sovereignty.
HONG KONG (JP): On July 1 1997, as Hong Kong returns to the embrace of the motherland, one certainty is that China will release an epic movie throughout the nation. Rumor has it that it will be released even earlier in Hong Kong itself.
At a cost of US$9.6 million -- a very large budget for a Chinese film -- and with the proverbial cast of thousands, including many foreigners, the stirring tale will detail the course of The Opium Wars. The first Opium War, 1840-1842, so- called because Britain attached the sale of opium to its demand that China accept the cause of free trade, led to Britain's annexation of Hong Kong island in perpetuity. The second Opium War in 1860 -- it is not wholly clear whether the movie includes this episode,too -- led to the annexation of a small part of Kowloon peninsula, also in perpetuity.
There is much speculation as to what precise tale the film will tell. The director, Xie Jin, both suffered personally during the Cultural Revolution and, subsequently, produced propaganda films for Mao's infamous wife, Jiang Qing. Xie says that Spielberg's movie Schindler's List has been an inspiration for him, implicitly equating what the Germans did to the Jews to what the British did to the Chinese. A one-sided denunciation of the wicked British imperialists appears in the offing.
Alternatively, the film could, of course, remind Chinese audiences of the foolishness of the later Qing Dynasty Emperors in first rejecting, and then trying to keep at bay, the world outside the Middle Kingdom. The movie could make the propaganda point that the 19th century episodes prove the wisdom of the recently deceased Emperor of the current dynasty, Deng Xiaoping, in requiring China, of its own volition, to "open up to the outside world".
This is probably asking too much of Chinese propaganda. So while many insiders assume that The Opium Wars will wallow in China's deep-seated sense of being a victim of historical injustice, some outsiders fear the other side of the same coin: that the film will be chiefly remarkable for accentuating China's longstanding inferiority complex and its xenophobia.
Whatever its content, the making and release of the film at this time symbolizes a grave flaw in the Chinese approach to Hong Kong's reversion. Right from the start of the transition from British to Chinese rule, way back in 1984, it was obvious that things would go better if China could forget its distant historical travail, and deal with future reality: Beijing was not getting a "colony" back from wicked British imperialists, but rather was accepting the return of a highly complex fast-changing international city from skilled administrators who had succeeded because they took near-complete autonomy for granted, under residual British sovereignty. The ensuing 13 years have enhanced this prognosis, as Hong Kong became ever more complex and international.
Tragically but predictably, as it has turned out, China revealed itself to be still a prisoner of its past. Too often, it has preferred to fall back upon an old-style anti-colonial campaign vis-a-vis Hong Kong rather than to perceive the need for new and imaginative approaches. It was understandable why this was so. If the Chinese communist rulers had admitted in any way, or at any stage, that the British just may have succeeded in providing a pattern of autonomy and development in Hong Kong, worthy of China's emulation, then they would have only drawn attention to the ways in which Chinese communism abjectly failed within China 1949-1979, thereby providing both the influx of people and the spur for Hong Kong's growth and success in that period.
Easier by far to treat the foreigners with suspicion, as if the British were going to walk away with Hong Kong's financial reserves, and to assail Governor Chris Patten with the kind of vitriolic rhetoric which comes easily to those who learned their politics amidst the fanaticism of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Of course, China's anti-colonial campaign did raise the question -- if the British were so reprehensible, why didn't China take back Hong Kong with the same speed with which India reclaimed Goa from the Portuguese? In this regard, control of the media and an absence of freedom of expression come in useful -- no one within China dares to openly ask such awkward questions.
But China's controlled media, and its numerous spokesmen within Hong Kong, have been careful to use the anti-colonialism party line in such a way as to provide China with an alibi in case Beijing mishandles Hong Kong's return. Citing events like the partition of India in 1947, and other less-than-orderly British departures from its former colonies, one constant Chinese propaganda theme in the last few years has been to stress the disasters which British imperialism creates, thereby hinting that another may be just around the corner.
On the whole, the way in which the Chinese have conducted themselves during the transition, while understandable, has not reflected well upon those who dwell in (the Beijing leadership compound at) Zhongnanhai. To dwell upon what Hong Kong had become may have been the most relevant political approach, but it risked undermining the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party dynasty, for one thing. To wallow in distant history, however understandable, hardly suggested the Chinese Communist Party's political self-confidence, for another. More important, the tendency to see Hong Kong through narrowly anti-colonial eyes has greatly increased the uncertainties facing Hong Kong at this crucial moment.
Yet, ironically and paradoxically, any increase in uncertainty may have helped as well as hindered Hong Kong.
Everyone has their own way of explaining Hong Kong's rise from being a small entrepot to being the Manhattan of East Asia. The British officially tend to overstress the role of their administration and their importation of the rule of law into a China which has known mostly the arbitrary "law" of authoritarian rulers. Since Chinese communist officials cannot possibly say anything good about the British in Hong Kong, they overstress the role of Chinese entrepreneurial talent, leaving unanswered why that talent has only begun to flourish very recently within China itself.
Leading economist Milton Friedman extols the virtue of Hong Kong's free markets -- but that view ignores the obvious imperfections of the Hong Kong marketplace, such as the role of cartels in Hong Kong banking, and the role of monopoly in its ferry services. Media persons overemphasize the role of Hong Kong's allegedly free press, ignoring the fact that Hong Kong journalists, in their approach, are so excessively prone to react to "news" that they end up undermining the very freedom they ostensibly cherish.
Obviously, there is no single answer to the question -- what makes Hong Kong tick? But one explanation that is too often missed out is the crucial role played by uncertainty, anxiety, insecurity in making Hong Kong, and East Asia as well, what it has become today.
As they set about creating the so-called East Asian "miracle", the Japanese had to overcome the uncertainties of defeat and occupation for the first time in their history; a devastated South Korea had to respond to the uncertainties aroused by the never-ending bellicosity of North Korea; Taiwan's deepest anxiety was the constant threat of being reconquered by the mainland, and Hong Kong, geographically attached to a China wracked by political tumult, was simply and flatly uncertain about its future. In each case, the stark choice was to survive and flounder, or to survive and flourish. East Asians forever buried the racist myth of the fatalistic Oriental by deciding, emphatically, to strive and to prosper.
It was only in 1984 that the inhabitants of Hong Kong knew for sure that China would wait until the end of the 99-year lease which Britain obtained in 1898 on the New Territories before reclaiming its own. But the end of one state of uncertainty with the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, produced the beginning of another even greater anxiety -- the sure knowledge, for the majority of Hong Kong Chinese, that they would once again become citizens of the country from which, as refugees seeking sanctuary, they had once fled.
The British sometimes talk as if the tremendous growth in the Hong Kong economy since 1984 has been an unexpected as well as a commendable achievement. For many with a Western outlook, faced with certain absorption into one of the world's great tyrannies, the inclination might have been to give up and get out. Some Hong Kong people have shared that disposition, hence the sustained high level of emigration since 1984. But the majority haven't.
1984 ushered in the ultimate uncertainty -- and also the greatest economic expansion in Hong Kong's history, culminating in Hong Kong this year being accorded advanced economy status by the International Monetary Fund. The fact that the era of maximum uncertainty has been accompanied by maximum growth is hardly a coincidence. The fact that Hong Kong seems to flourish amidst uncertainty makes one both wary of simple dire predictions for Hong Kong's political future -- and also cautious of slick assertions that economic growth will definitely be sustained and enhanced.
Window A: Tragically but predictably, as it has turned out, China revealed itself to be still a prisoner of its past.
Window B: On the whole, the way in which the Chinese have conducted themselves during the transition, while understandable, has not reflected well upon those who dwell in (the Beijing leadership compound at) Zhongnanhai.