Great Britain bids farewell to Hong Kong in style

Following is the second of three articles by The Jakarta Post's Asia correspondent, Harvey Stockwin, dealing with the return of Hong Kong to China on June 27th. The first in the series appeared on Saturday.

HONG KONG (JP): So, precisely at midnight on June 30, 1997, Hong Kong returned to China after being under British sovereignty for 156 years.

The handover ceremony brought to a close a complex day in which the British said goodbye to its last colony in Asia in style and with pageantry, despite inclement weather.

Late Monday afternoon (June 30) President Jiang and Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng arrived at Hong Kong's Kaitak Airport in a Boeing 747 of the national flag carrier Air China. Security was tight as Jiang and Li were quickly whisked away to a Kowloon hotel owned by one of Hong Kong wealthiest billionaires, Li Ka Shing.

The first event of the day had been when the three remaining Hong Kong-based patrol ships of the Royal Navy, HMS Starling, HMS Plover and HMS Peacock did a farewell patrol around the coast of Hong Kong island.

It had been the British Navy which first landed troops on Hong Kong island in 1841, a day before the island officially became a colony. The three ships have been hard at work, until June 30th, assisting the much larger fleet of Hong Kong's maritime police patrol boats, trying to suppress illegal Chinese immigration into Hong Kong. That task continues after the creation of the HKSAR. On the Hong Kong side of the border the future patrols will be done by the Hong Kong police while the PLA patrol boats are due to try and prevent illegal emigration from China on the other side of the sea border.

After the handover, these three Navy patrol boats accompanied the royal yacht Britannia, together with the frigate HMS Chatham, to Manila, where they have been sold to the Philippine Navy -- wherein their duty is likely to be preventing what Filipinos see as illegal Chinese encroachments into their offshore islands.

Soon after the farewell Royal Navy patrol, at roughly the same time in the morning, in the Chinese capital Beijing, around 20,000 police peacefully cleared Tiananmen Square of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens who had packed it during the previous 36 hours, amidst the aroused patriotic fervor over the return of Hong Kong to the motherland.

The huge crowds, the largest to gather there since the demonstrations of May and June 1989, must have worried the communist party leadership. But there were no visible untoward incidents. However the police cleared the crowd away because, on the night of June 30, the Square was only open to 100,000 guests carefully selected by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). They were the only ones allowed to see the Hong Kong clock, which for the last twelve months, has been ticking off the seconds until Hong Kong returned to the embrace of the motherland, finally reach the number zero.

Early in the afternoon on June 30, back in Hong Kong, outgoing Governor Chris Patten and British Prime Minister Tony Blair gave Hong Kong residents one final display of the kind of populist politics which CCP leaders always avoid. A huge crowd quickly gathered in one of Hong Kong's best shopping malls, Pacific Place, when word leaked out that Patten and Blair and their wives were ostensibly shopping inside.

As the Prime Minister and the former Conservative leader enthusiastically worked the crowd of Chinese and foreign residents, shaking hands with as many people as they could, they were warmly applauded and cheered. Patten, the political professional, brought a completely new style to a colonial Governorship -- I doubt if any of his predecessors anywhere in the Empire ever behaved like this -- and he simply could not resist having one final walkabout. The Blair-Patten politicking contained a probably unintended message for those very few with the eyes to see it: had Chinese leaders been able to mix as freely and as happily with the crowds in Tiananmen Square in 1989, that whole episode need never have ended in tragedy.

Patten then returned to Government House, the longtime home of British Governors of Hong Kong, for a solemn farewell ceremony which concluded with the first of three formal descents of the Union Jack amidst the playing of the Last Post. There was some picture-perfect, completely synchronized ceremonial marching by an honor guard of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, which was to lose its title "Royal" in just over seven hours time.

Many of Patten's staff, high or lowly, both Chinese and British, were in tears, or close to it. So was Patten. The ceremony concluded with Patten and his wife circling the front of the house three times in the Governor's Rolls Royce -- a sign in Chinese of an intention to return.

Government House will not be used by the incoming Chief Executive of Hong Kong Tung Chee Hwa, as he says the building has "bad fengshui" (adverse spirits), and he in any case prefers his own home. But it will be used for government guests and formal HKSAR functions.

Next on the agenda was the arrival at the airport of the top Chinese leaders, quickly followed by Britain's unilateral farewell ceremony. It was very different and far more extravagant than the sister ceremony held almost 50 years ago in New Delhi, when the Empire in Asia first began to dissolve.

This was because it was, in part at least, an extravaganza produced for television -- and was just like similar productions for, say, recent Olympic Games opening ceremonies. The farewell began with Chinese lion dances singing and dancing by Hong Kong school children and it ended with massed children spelling out "Hong Kong" in English and Chinese on the parade ground.

In between there were moving goodbye speeches by both Governor Patten and Prince Charles. The prince read a message from his mother, Queen Elizabeth, notable for the fact that she pointedly mentioned that 3.5 million Hong Kong residents who were still "British nationals". Most of the 3.5 million do not now possess full British passports granting residence in the UK, but the Queen's remark did convey a sense of continuing obligation, probable intentional on her part.

The most stirring part of the farewell was inevitably the five British military bands and the drill by small contingents from the army, navy and air force. Part of the naval detachment was from the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious -- but Illustrious has not paid a call at Hong Kong during its current deployment in East and Southeast Asia. This is mainly because the British did not want to further deteriorate Sino-British relations with anything that smacked of gunboat diplomacy in 1997.

The last part of the British farewell ceremony took place amidst a tropical downpour but the ceremony continued as both soldiers and Hong Kong children, Governor Patten and Prime Minister Blair all got soaking wet. As the Union Jack came down for the second time at the end of that ceremony it was impossible to see who was just wet and who was crying -- but that there was a good deal of sadness at the British departure in many Hong Kong Chinese hearts today, there can be no doubt.

But -- in complete contradiction -- there is also great joy that China is making a major move towards reunification. The joy would be greater if China was also moving along the path of political reform but of course, under the current CCP leadership, it is not.

After getting drenched, Blair quickly crossed the harbor to meet Jiang and Li in their Kowloon hotel.

At 9 p.m. 509 members of the Chinese navy, army, and air force, many of them sitting stiffly in open lorries, crossed the land border from China into Hongkong so that they could take up their garrison duties immediately upon the actual start of Chinese sovereignty at midnight. The last British troops flew out of Hong Kong at 3.30 a.m. on special charter flights.

Meanwhile in both Beijing and Hong Kong there were galas celebrating the handover. There was a pop concert of Hong Kong racecourse. A massive half hour British-sponsored fireworks display in the harbor followed their farewell ceremony. Prior to the handover at midnight, there was the banquet for 4,000 dignitaries at the new Convention Center. The highest ranking Chinese official at the banquet was the Foreign Minister Qian Qichen.

The midnight ceremony transferring power from Britain to China was austere and brief -- and unlike any of its predecessors in other parts of Britain's Asian Empire. The two languages used were Mandarin and English, much to the distaste of the Cantonese majority in Hong Kong. Surprisingly, the three PLA flag carriers goose-stepped their way to the dais in the company of the three British flag carriers marching in the normal manner. It was just one more failure of the Chinese to be either conciliatory or shrewdly political -- goose-stepping by troops forcibly reminds spectators of communist or dictatorial regimes.

There was a little silent Hong Kong input into the ceremony, however. Three Hong Kong Police guards, strikingly dressed in immaculate white uniforms, took down the Hong Kong British flag, while another three put up the new Hong Kong flag under China. As earlier reported, for the purposes of the midnight ceremony Tung Chee Hwa was only a member of the Chinese delegation.

As anticipated, the two brief speeches at the handover did not grace the midnight moment with any memorable phrases. Prince Charles did at least make some relatively pointed references on the need for the concept of "one country, two systems" to work, and be seen to work. President Jiang merely reiterated the commitments made by China in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration.

Naturally, after having been approved by the Standing Committee of the CCP politburo, Jiang's unexceptional speech contained no relevant or fresh words of reassurance for Hong Kong compatriots. It could hardly be otherwise since China's propaganda has endlessly stressed that Hong Kong people are patriotically yearning for the embrace of the motherland. From a CCP viewpoint, who needs reassurance?

Similarly it was probably the first time in the history of Britain's decolonization in Asia that the successor power could not say, at the all-important midnight moment when sovereignty returns to Asia, any friendly or appreciative words about some positive aspect of Britain's role. Again, this was understandable. China's government-controlled press, plays, films and ballets have all recently portrayed Britain as Hong Kong's evil oppressor. There has been absolutely no mention of the ways in which Britain has helped the Hong Kong dynamo to tick so productively.

This omission is the more noteworthy given that, in Hong Kong with its population of six million, British administration has presided over the creation of an economy one-fifth the size of China's. Outgoing Governor Chris Patten in his farewell speech called Hong Kong "a Chinese city with British characteristics". A spontaneous Chinese leader, aware of public moods, and with some awareness of populist politics, could have played with this phrase to send a signal to the Hong Kong compatriots.

But that, of course, is not the way politics are played in Beijing.