China suspects plot as Britons depart Hong Kong

In the fourth of his series on Hong Kong's transition from British to Chinese sovereignty, our Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin takes a look at the first few days after the handover. Most British colonial governors, both in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia, were stiff and starchy in their plumed colonial cockades. But there was one who was not -- and he is likely to be remembered for it.

HONG KONG (JP): In the end, the appalling weather -- with record rainfall and landslides -- severely dampened Hong Kong's embrace of the motherland.

It's difficult to be joyous about anything when you have to battle the tropical elements -- and Hongkongites already had plenty of reservations about being too joyous, well before the tropical depression hit the coast of China's Guangdong province which surrounds Hong Kong. Opinion was divided between those who saw the endless rain as a good or a bad omen. In the first week of Chinese sovereignty, the sun only broke briefly through the clouds on several occasions.

In one way, the weather was a blessing. Amid the awful climatic conditions, Hong Kong's excessively reactive media could hardly concentrate on asking people to comment on the transfer of sovereignty. The TV news bulletins simply could not start with colonial introspection and a backward fixation on June 30, 1997. Instead, the reports concentrated on endless traffic jams, badly flooded rural and urban areas, the rescue of isolated residents, large landslides, collapsed houses and disrupted railroads.

The weather was also a curse for this correspondent. I had carefully planned a tour of the territory to savor the reactions to the historical moment in various parts of Hong Kong. The population of the territory may be only 6.3 million, but the perspectives vary depending on where people reside.

Perhaps because the New Territories was always on a 99-year lease, residents of the New Territories area which lies between the Kowloon peninsula and the (still existing) border with China have been emigrating to the UK for years, long before retrocession in 1997 seemed certain. As a result, people in places like Yuen Long and Tun Mun have always appeared more worldly wise and affable, and less xenophobic than elsewhere.

On the other hand, residents of other parts of the New Territories, the more than 200 outlying islands, have always seemed -- like islanders everywhere -- more remote, self- contained and withdrawn. On some of the islands, there are residents who still regard a visit to Hong Kong Island's skyscrapers as a great adventure.

My planned pursuit to revisit diversity had to be canceled because of the weather. But in the few areas I was able to travel, one reaction frequently emerged -- a reality confirmed by several other local and foreign observers. The British were being missed much more, more widely and more quickly, than anyone dreamed possible, before the handover. One common Hong Kong- Chinese reaction after the handover has been that they were sorry the British had gone.

Many awoke to the fact, too late perhaps, that there was no British-provided political insulation to shelter Hong Kong from the vicissitudes of China's always uncertain politics.

But there may have been another more personal reason for the instant nostalgia. Many in Hong Kong are missing the fact they have lost the only professional politician Britain ever sent to these shores as a top official -- former Governor Chris Patten.

Patten was, of course, a classic example of too little, too late. In 1984, when the Sino-British Joint Declaration was agreed, Hong Kong gained a greater political maturity and there was no longer any need for Foreign Office bureaucrats to be sent to run a basically authoritarian colonial government. But London went on sending them.

It was also the time for firmly insisting on a pre-1989 reformist leadership in China that modest political change within Hong Kong would also serve the interests of China's modernization. If the so-called "China specialists", on whom the British government relied heavily for setting Hong Kong and China policy, ever saw this point -- they certainly never acted as if they did.

So by the time professional politician Patten finally arrived in 1992, the Foreign Office had done so much appeasing of China over Hong Kong's promised progress toward democracy, that Beijing had already decided there would be no such progress. The tragic events of 1989, culminating in the Beijing massacre, also firmly implanted a dogmatic resistance to any change in the Chinese leadership's political outlook.

Nevertheless Patten gave his all as Governor for five years. I suspect that, in essence, he will be remembered here mainly for his display of professional political technique throughout his governorship, starting with his rejection of the plumed colonial cockades worn by all his predecessors.

The tours to localities, the walks to every nook and cranny, the endless photo opportunities and interviews, the broadcasts, the energetic activity, the cheery waves and the constant smiles -- this was a great and widely appreciated departure from China's, and also from British colonial and political traditions. Patten will be remembered for it.

The TV cameras caught one small scene as Patten concluded his last speech at the separate British farewell ceremony on June 30. Despite the rain and being huddled under umbrellas, the audience kept on applauding. Patten tried to wave the applause away -- he was sitting next to British Prime Minister Tony Blair (who, sadly and inexplicably, made no speech during his brief 14-hour stopover in Hong Kong). Patten was obviously anxious not to hog the spotlight in the PM's presence. Blair turned to him and said, "Go on, take another bow" or words to that effect. The last British colonial Governor took one final bow in response to the sustained applause.

Patten was linguistically handicapped -- he only spoke English in a colony where English is not widely spoken. Patten did not use the advantage that some of the best instantaneous translators from Cantonese and Mandarin to English work for the Hong Kong government.

Patten's successor, Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa, by contrast, speaks Cantonese, Mandarin and Shanghainese and is fluent in English. But whether businessman Tung will have as much impact upon Hong Kong as Patten did remains to be seen. It's a tough act to follow.

It would be nice to report that there were a few unscripted spontaneous gestures from the new Chinese overlords of Hong Kong as they took over the territory. Predictably, whether it was the People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers waving in perfect unison as they arrived in open lorries on July 1, or President Jiang Zemin carefully sticking to his prepared scripts in both Hong Kong and Beijing on what was supposed to be a joyous occasion, there were no impulsive or impromptu gestures observable from the representatives of China.

The two top leaders, Jiang and Prime Minister Li Peng, could hardly wait to get home again after they attended the handover at midnight on June 30. You would have thought they would want to stick around and see something of China's new autonomous special administrative region. But not a bit.

Prime Minister Li Peng was back in Beijing in time for a luncheon in the Great Hall of the People on July 1. President Jiang was back in the capital by late afternoon on the same day in time for the reunification rally at the Worker's Stadium. While briefly in Hong Kong, the two leaders scarcely went out of their hotel, except to attend ceremonies at the Convention Center.

But in this lies a tale. Of course I cannot prove it, but it was almost certainly a display of the conspiratorial nature of Chinese politics. The Chinese just could not believe that all would go as smoothly as it did. They suspected a last-minute British plot to upset things -- hence their insistence on the quick arrival of the PLA garrison, and their speedy departure. All this was indicated by the dark mutterings in the pro-Beijing section of the Hong Kong press. In Beijing itself there were hard-line editorials warning of the time bombs the British would be sure to leave behind, set to explode once China took over.

Of course, there is at least one time bomb -- the Hong Kong memory of Patten's cheery expansiveness. China's politicians could easily avail themselves of the same "bomb" and explode it to their advantage. But in the Chinese leadership compound at Zhongnanhai in Beijing that is a heresy. Instead, they prefer to dislike Patten and any move toward political openness, let alone political populism.