My Hong Kong -- past, present and future

The handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China has finally been completed. Our Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin looks back on Hong Kong as he has known it, as it was and as it is now that it is again a part of China. He first visited Hong Kong in 1966, and made Hong Kong his East Asian base in 1976.

HONG KONG (JP): Hong Kong -- dramatically scenic harbor, massively horrendous pollution. They used to have a cross-harbor swimming race. They don't any longer.

Hong Kong -- enormous achievements in providing public housing, sky-high property prices in the private sector. Informed sources say the excessive gearing of banks to property loans is even higher than that it was in Japan when the "bubble economy" burst. Yet the Hong Kong "bubble" still expands.

Hong Kong -- largest per capita consumption in the world of French brandy and British Rolls Royce cars. At Hong Kong-Chinese get-togethers they drink brandy like others drink beer, yet you seldom see a Chinese drunk on the streets.

Hong Kong -- the best answer to all those (in India as well as China) who still believe in clogging up economic activity with state interference and state corporations.

Hong Kong -- international city populated by a frequently xenophobic people. But Cantonese xenophobia can as easily be directed at Mandarin-speaking northern Chinese as at white European or American barbarians.

Hong Kong -- a romantic setting for a place in which the pursuit of profit and greater wealth is the highest ethos.

Hong Kong -- William Holden and Jennifer Jones, Clark Gable and Susan Hayward, William Holden and Nancy Kwan; now, Jeremy Irons and Gong Li.

Before sitting down to write this article, I relived my first "visit" to Hong Kong way back in the early 1950 by going back to Barker Road Station on the Peak tram. I wasn't actually there -- I was supposed to be studying in Cambridge, but the cinematic lure of the rugged Mr. Gable and the exquisite Miss Hayward in Soldier of Fortune could not be resisted. In a way, the movie was more faithful to the facts than many others set in Hong Kong.

Swashbuckler Gable was gunrunning, an activity out of which many Hong Kong fortunes have been made, then and since. He perfectly conveyed the devil-may-care attitude with which many of Hong Kong's tycoons are still imbued.

Duty to her husband required Miss Hayward to leave Hong Kong, while love tempted her to stay. She departs for the airport in the days when you checked in at the Peninsular Hotel in Kowloon. Resigned to her loss, Mr. Gable observes her departure, returns to Hong Kong island, and boards the Peak tram which snakes up the hill behind the Central district of Hong Kong. He gets off at Barker Road Station, and gazes wistfully down at Hong Kong island, the harbor and Kowloon spread out below. Suddenly Miss Hayward's voice breaks into his thoughts, and there she is. Clinch. Fade-out. Happy ending.

The view from the station is far more enthralling now, though the tram company might trim the bamboos a bit so everyone can enjoy it to the full. A Swiss tram has replaced the old British model. Apartments blocks have been built ever higher up the hillside. Downtown skyscrapers are almost level with the Peak. But as Hong Kong's economy moves ever upward, politically the former colony is headed backward, back to the regulations and restrictions of the colonial past.

My next "visit" to Hong Kong was more substantial. Somewhere between Calcutta and Kuala Lumpur in 1957 I read Han Suyin's A Many Splendored Thing. The novel was set in 1949/1950, but even today it isn't dated. It remains, in my view, the best novel about Hong Kong. Many pot-boilers have been produced this year, most of them using the word "Tiger" in their titles. The only aspect of them which is truly Hong Kong is that they reflect the publishers' relentless pursuit of profit and to hell with quality. Even a novelist as renowned as Paul Theroux gets some basic facts wrong in his rush to produce the satirical novel Kowloon Tong.

A Many Splendored Thing brilliantly combined fact with fiction, as Ms. Suyin evoked the unease and anxiety that pervaded Hong Kong in the shadow of the communist takeover and the Korean War. Publishers anxious for quality as well as profit should re- issue it, now that Hong Kong itself is being taken over. Arguably it is also Han Suyin's best book, written before she turned her talents to justifying every twist and turn in the Chinese Communist Party's ideological line, even to the extent of making excuses for the Beijing Massacre in 1989. No doubt if Ms Suyin writes today, it will be to assert that all Hong Kong compatriots are happy to be reunited with the motherland. A Many Splendored Thing more accurately portrayed a Hong Kong forever trapped between colonialism and communism.

Yet it is important to recall that the Hong Kong which Ms Suyin portrayed was a relatively small place. The population only hit one million as the refugees from communism started to flood in. At the end of the brief period of Japanese colonialism in 1945, it was only half a million. Further back, while Hong Kong's surrender on Christmas Day in 1941 upset Winston Churchill, it had much less impact upon wider public opinion than did the fall of Singapore two months later. Singapore was the strategic pivot for the British role in what they saw as the Far East. Hong Kong was not. The surrender of Singapore caused profound trauma. The surrender of Hong Kong did not.

That situation never changed. Britain's still significant postwar strategic role in East Asia ended when the British Far East Command was closed down in 1972, amid the accelerated military withdrawal from Singapore and Malaysia. The retention of Hong Kong did not sustain that strategic role. The British garrison in Hong Kong was merely for maintaining security and showing the flag in and around Hong Kong itself.

Singapore and Hong Kong did not change places strategically, but Hong Kong's growth and economic/financial importance as a hub of Asian commerce quickly outstripped that of the Southeast Asian city-state. Many years ago, former Singapore prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, now senior minister, sneered at Hong Kong as the place where "anything goes". Yet the fact that the British managed to allow Hong Kong to exercise and enjoy greater freedom than has been permitted in pre and post-independent Singapore was only part of the story.