Hong Kong -- China's greatest success

HONG KONG (JP): Hong Kong's capitalist achievement has been the great unintended success story of communist China.

In other words, the policy failures and bitter faction- fighting pursued by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) within China from 1949 until the early 1980s provided Hong Kong with the stimulus, the population, the entrepreneurs, the wealth and the drive which it needed to expand and flourish. Hong Kong ceased to be merely a free port on the southern coast of China. It set about to become a regional and global financial and business center. It even started to become an international city, not merely a colonial outpost. It left Singapore -- and Shanghai -- lagging far behind.

But there was nothing preordained about this process. This was brought home vividly to me when I finally made my first actual visit to Hong Kong around Christmas 1966. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was underway across the face of China, creating conditions akin to civil war. Riots were spreading to Macau and Hong Kong.

When I visited the Portuguese colony across the Pearl River estuary, the British consulate had been sacked and covered with posters by Red Guard sympathizers denouncing the British for their "suppression" of the Chinese people in Hong Kong. In those days, there were no high rollers in the Macau casinos. They had all fled. A friend and I were welcomed even though we gambled a mere $200 each.

Today, those imprisoned by the British in Hong Kong for rioting and agitation at that time tend to talk about their imprisonment by the British much as do Congress Party veterans in India. Yet there is a world of difference. The civil disobedience of Congress paved the way for a new India. Those agitating against colonial oppression in 1966 could have ruined Hong Kong.

In Macau, the Portuguese gave way to the rioters' pressure and effectively ceded sovereignty back to China there and then. Macau actually returns to China in December 1999, but China has essentially been running the show since the Portuguese cave-in.

In Hong Kong, the British stood firm. The would-be rioters really were "a very small number of troublemakers", to borrow the phrase used by the CCP to describe the millions of Chinese who demonstrated for a better China in 1989. The millions of refugees who had come to Hong Kong to get away from China's political foolishness implicitly backed the British. Former Chinese Premier Chou En-lai deftly reminded procommunist elements in Hong Kong that China benefited from Hong Kong's prosperity, and needed to go on doing so.

I did not realize it then but it was a crucial turning point. Since 1984 the posturings on issues of sovereignty by China and Britain has often seemed unnecessary, even childish. In 1966/1967 the British assertion of sovereignty was a life-or-death matter for Hong Kong. First order was restored, then confidence returned. It then became possible for economic growth to resume. The man responsible for this tough-minded approach was the last governor of Hong Kong from the old Colonial Office -- Sir David Trench. (After Trench, Foreign Office types were appointed). Without him, China would not be inheriting a Hong Kong economy equal to one-fifth of China's. Without him, Britain would have long since retreated ignominiously from Hong Kong.

I was covering Southeast Asia in the 1966/1976 decade and frequently dropped in to Hong Kong as I moved from one country to next. The bounce in the colony's life and economy quickly returned after the 1966/1967 crisis. Hong Kong did not just grow -- it took off. It had already long since ceased to be a colonial backwater. But in the last three decades it has quickly progressed into a magnificent metropolis.

The sleazy red-light district of Wanchai which Richard Mason described as The World of Suzie Wong has moved elsewhere, as Wanchai has moved upmarket, along with other parts of Hong Kong island. The greenery, paddy fields and vegetable farms, that once dotted the New Territories landscape all the way to the China border -- these have all but disappeared. Several large new towns complete with their own high-rise buildings and skyscrapers have taken their place. Many know of the venerable double-deck trams that still meander through Hong Kong island. Few realize that a fast supermodern single-deck tram service now threads its way through what was, only 20 years ago, the northwestern fishing village of Tun Mun.

Since I made Hong Kong my East Asia base late in 1976, the growth has been phenomenal. First there was one, then two, and now three cross-harbor road and rail tunnels -- prefabricated onshore, sunk in the sea, joined and pumped out underwater, and all completed ahead of schedule. Then there was one, two, and then three subway lines, vastly increasing the speed with which you could move around Hong Kong. These lines too were finished both ahead of time and under budget. The old leisurely single- track diesel railway to the border, on which there was one train an hour, has been replaced by a fast electrified double-track railway with trains every three or four minutes.

The Hong Kong stores of yesteryear tended to pack as many as possible of the goods sold into store windows. They have been replaced by smart boutiques for world-famous brands and stylists, as nearly all Hong Kong residents have become better clothed, better fed and generally better off. Hong Kong hotels now set a standard of style and service which hotels in the West find difficult to match.

I realize I am stressing physical changes. But that is Hong Kong. There is little of the sheer political intensity of a New Delhi or a Washington D.C. There is none of the intellectual ferment of a Calcutta or a Paris. Singapore and Tokyo are cleaner and more orderly. Everyone smiles more in Jakarta or Manila, exuding a human warmth that so many conurbations lack.

If I had to cite two qualities in which Hong Kong abounds it would be change and bustle. Hong Kong is dynamism in the raw. Change creates bustle and bustle creates change. Compared to Hong Kong, I now find London and New York rather pedestrian places. Many Europeans find the pace of Hong Kong life simply too much. Perhaps it has been the ultimate irony of the British Empire -- many Britons cannot stand the frenetic pace of the colony which they created.

For journalists as well as businesspeople in search of a base, Hong Kong has some special advantages. There is a free flow of information to the nth degree -- with over 40 Internet providers at last count. To get a new phone installed in 24 hours, you do not need to pay a bribe or have connections. It's a routine occurrence. There are no forms to be filled in, no permission to be sought, and no other red tape to be hurdled for any foreign exchange transaction. Banks move any amount of any currency as often and as quickly as they can. The six million people of Hong Kong still have the fifth largest foreign exchange reserves in the world.

Needless to say, like many other Hong Kong residents I have been pondering whether or not to move base, sitting down and calculating where else I could go. So far only one conclusion presents itself: nowhere else in East or Southeast Asia comes close to providing the efficiency, speed, and services which a free-thinking correspondent requires.

Hong Kong may not inspire the deep affection aroused by other cities and places. But now that I know what Hong Kong has achieved by way of service and speed and the avoidance of red tape, I will always miss it if I don't have it.

So I can't help seeing the just-completed transfer of sovereignty in human terms. Hong Kong owns more than $60 billion in reserves -- but it will never enjoy the right of self- determination.

At midnight on June 30 in Hong Kong, there was the biggest handover of noncommunist citizens to a communist state since Britain and the United States handed back Russian prisoners of war to Stalin's tender mercies in Europe in 1945/1946. China's recent tough treatment of dissidents has hardly been encouraging, in this regard.

Out of Hong Kong's 6.2 million residents, around 3.5 million were born as British subjects. On the stroke of midnight June 30, they all became citizens of China, except for the few that have been granted first-class British passports.

Gravest of all, at that midnight hour, a city composed overwhelmingly of refugees, or children of refugees, was returned to the charge of the arbitrary and capricious government from which they once fled.

Hong Kong has unquestionably attained growth and momentum which it should be in China's interest to sustain. But in the last 20 years China has shown few, if any, signs that it recognizes the depth of the human problems which is about to inherit.

It would be tremendous feat of destructive statesmanship to bring Hong Kong to a halt, let alone to its knees. On the CCP's record so far, since 1949, such a feat is not impossible.

Hong Kong is an acid test for China's, and the CCP's, dreams of modernization.

So here I am, back at Barker Road Station on the Peak tram, looking down on this wonderful city, this splendid view, hoping, hoping -- a little desperately -- for another happy ending.