Escalating uncertainty ahead of Hong Kong's handover

The Jakarta Post's Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin will contribute a series of articles over the next few weeks to mark the forthcoming handover of Hong Kong from British to Chinese sovereignty on July 1. In this first article, Stockwin, who has been based in Hong Kong since 1976, analyses why the reversion to China today presents a far greater dilemma than it would have 50 years ago.

HONG KONG (JP): Hong Kong has always been an uncertain place. A place where people are constantly coming and going -- one is never sure which. A place where businesses are usually either up or down but seldom stagnant, under the iron rule -- "profit today or gone tomorrow."

One of the distinctive sounds of Hong Kong is of pneumatic drills breaking up concrete structures before yet more concrete is put in its place. Hong Kong is a place where the skyline changes all the time as buildings, which would endure for decades anywhere else, are frequently replaced. A place where people habitually worry about the future even as they resignedly feel there is not much now they can do about it -- except to make as much money as they can, as quickly as they can.

Now, at long last, the ultimate Hong Kong uncertainty -- midnight on June 30, 1997 -- is at hand. The Union Jack will come down. The Red Flag with yellow stars will go up. After 156 years, the fairly detached British overlord departs. For a promised further 50 years, China has pledged to be a new detached overlord, rather than an intrusive boss. Not everyone believes that promise, basically because they do not think the powers-that-be in Beijing can make a distinction between the two roles. So more uncertainties loom.

Much will be made of that midnight moment. By the Hong Kong government's estimate, around seven thousand media folk will be descending upon Hong Kong to record (and exaggerate) the moment as a "big event". It will be argued that symbolically the moment marks the final end of an era and the beginning of another. It will be, for media simplifiers, an "historic moment".

Yet, in many ways, the ceremonies are likely to be an anti- climax. They are, after all, the final period in a long paragraph which began in 1982, when Britain took the fateful step of raising the question of Hong Kong's future, and in 1984 when the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed in Beijing, spelling out what that future would be.

The real "big event" will actually come afterwards, when most of those 7,000 media representatives will have long departed, and when China ultimately keeps, or fails to keep, its promises made in that Joint Declaration. This is the biggest uncertainty of all -- whether China, as a detached overlord, sustains Hong Kong as a separate, dynamic entity and international city within One China. Or whether China, as an intrusive boss, fully and relatively quickly integrates Hong Kong as part of the People's Republic.

In other words, the crucial question from July 1, 1997 onwards will be how does Hong Kong develop as a part of China? One great mistake which will be made by the world's media on July 1 will be to report that Hong Kong is again part of China.

The truth is that Hong Kong -- always a very Chinese city -- has been rapidly becoming more and more part of China for the last 12 years. That is why the handover is the period at the end of a long sentence. The initial process of absorption, though not of integration, is already nearly complete.

Of course, it can be argued that Hong Kong has always remained part of China in a substantive, and not merely a geographical, sense. At one level, the English language has never been pushed very hard by the colonial power. The Cantonese dialect has always been dominant, except in administrative and legal matters. Today, Chinese in Beijing and other Chinese cities often appear more anxious than do Hong Kong's Cantonese to improve their command of the international language, English.

At another level, the British never tried to democratize politics to the same extent as they usually did elsewhere in their Empire. They made one post-World War Two attempt which was rejected by the Hong Kong Chinese elite. Thereafter the British were too concerned with the likely reactions of communist China or nationalist Taiwan to give the matter a second thought, prior to the signing of the Joint Declaration.

This lack of British democratic effort applies even to the record of the last governor, Chris Patten, despite China's personally abusive protestations to the contrary. Patten's introduction of a modest degree of consultative democracy, allied to a less limited franchise, did not fundamentally disturb the essential Hong Kong system of bureaucratic authoritarianism.

He even made that system stronger by removing all Legislative Councilors from the Executive Council, the Cabinet-like body which really rules Hong Kong. China's communist leaders, worried over where any democratic habits whatsoever might lead, have refused to acknowledge that Patten, in a very real sense, made things easier for them in their efforts to establish authoritarian control.

Moreover, had a less-developed Hong Kong been "returned" to China at any time during the first 106 or 107 years of British rule (up to 1947 or 1948), the reversion would have caused few of the traumas and anxieties prevalent today. Hong Kong, before the Communist revolution in China, was a small matter, half the size of Singapore even though it had double the land area. The population was less than a million. The colony's development was not particularly impressive.

Hong Kong could have again become part of Guangdong Province without too much difficulty, if, for example, President Harry Truman had insisted that President Chiang Kai-shek, rather than the Royal Navy, should accept the Japanese surrender in Hong Kong -- as President Franklin Roosevelt would almost certainly have done, had he lived.

Problems

The huge problems now posed by Hong Kong, the great and dynamic international city, as it reverts to the embrace of the communist motherland, arise from two basic realities and three fundamental conditions. One was that Winston Churchill all along firmly resisted pressure from Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek to set in motion the reversion of Hong Kong to China during World War Two.

The second reality was that Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai resisted the temptation to quickly end the colonial remnants of Hong Kong and Macau, in large part because they saw the reversion of Taiwan and the successful completion of the Chinese civil war as the greater prize and priority.

So Hong Kong endured. When Kim IL Sung made the Cold War hot in Asia by launching the Korean conflict in 1950, Taiwan endured too.

The fact that Churchill's and Mao's inclinations came together for Hong Kong's medium-term benefit was coincidence enough. But more coincidences followed which became the fundamental conditions amidst which Hong Kong grew and prospered.

First, until the issue of the New Territories' lease came to the fore in the early 1980s, there was the condition of benign British neglect. The New Territories, comprising the bulk of Hong Kong's land area, were obtained on 99-year lease in 1898, after the earlier annexations of Hong Kong island in 1841 and Kowloon in 1860.

Churchill was probably the only British politician to have some really strong and heartfelt opinions on Hong Kong until Paddy Ashdown became the present leader of Britain's Liberal Party, and until Chris Patten was forced to develop a few when he was appointed as the final governor. London, in the meantime, appointed Colonial, and then Foreign, Office bureaucrats to govern the colony as best as they could. Those so appointed ran Hong Kong with a degree of autonomy which future Chief Executives of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China will regard with nostalgia.

Second, until the British confronted the Chinese with the need to think about Hong Kong from 1979 onwards, there was the condition of relatively benign Chinese neglect, coupled with the tragic fact of Chinese Communist failures. Had Mao straightaway adopted in 1949 the open door and economic reform policies which Deng Xiaoping initiated from 1978 onwards, it might have been a very different story. There would have been no massive inflow of refugees into Hong Kong to make it grow and prosper, for one thing. Instead, as Mao put politics in command in the anti- Rightist campaign, in the Great Leap Forward, and finally in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, he made certain that those refugees would appreciate the political insulation from Communist economic folly provided by the British colonial administration.

Third, coupled with the broad neglect of their present and future sovereign power, Hong Kong used that insulation to develop itself separately from the mainland. Much is made these days of the British provision of a system of law and a relatively uncorrupt system of administration. But Hong Kong also succeeded, prior to 1978, in getting a long lead in the economic development stakes because it was separate from China, hence forced to open up to the outside world long before China considered adopting such a process.

It's a fascinating historical speculation; did Mao ever realize that his political folly would ultimately give China a priceless gift -- an international city capable of becoming the New York of China, and of East Asia generally? Ironically, had Hong Kong been influenced, in the 1950s and 1960s, by a moderate semi-capitalist China, it might have looked inward instead of outward. Then it would not have developed the expertise, the markets, the regional functions and knowledge, the financial services and the overall skill which now could make its reversion potentially so beneficial to China.

This perspective on the past is essential background to understanding the likely prospects for Hong Kong, now that it is already part of China in two critical ways -- economically and politically.