What is it about Christianity that makes the Chinese government so nervous?
This article is part of a series documenting travels around the world. Read the previous entry here.
Hong Kong. The name is derived from Cantonese meaning “fragrant harbor.” Perhaps Hong Kong smelled like potpourri when, in 1841, the English first amputated this city of more than 230 islands from China’s Manchu Dynasty. But not now. The fragrance is that of a locker room full of big sweaty men who’ve spent their afternoon doing Kung Fu. Entering our hotel lobby, you are greeted with an overpowering Old Spice-like aroma that is meant to counter the smell of the city just outside the doors. It is the same everywhere in Hong Kong. Going in and out of buildings is to alternate between the warring scents of air fresheners and the inside of a dumpster, or, as P. J. O’Rourke puts it, between “Sh*t and Chanel.”
This is all very much in keeping with the city that is Hong Kong. Alternately rich and poor, free and increasingly undemocratic, British and Chinese, Hong Kong is full of contradictions—and it’s more than a little chaotic. A local told me Hong Kong has much in common with Singapore. Having just come from Singapore, I had to disagree. Both are capitalistic, but, so far as I can see, the comparisons end there. Singapore is beautiful, clean, and orderly. Same with Japan. (Only they do it without Singapore’s draconian laws.) Hong Kong is none of these things. The air pollution alone is enough to kill you. Do a quick Google Image search of Hong Kong. Got it? Now, here’s how you can tell the real from the fake photos: any that show a crisp, clear skyline are as phony as Pamela Anderson’s, uh, lips. You never get a crisp, clear skyline in Hong Kong due to the thick air pollution that hangs over the city as if it were the permanent host to Grateful Dead concerts.
“We will be lucky to get out of this city without getting sick,” Zachary observed with a note of resignation. He’s onto something. So many of this city’s residents wear surgical masks that you’d think it’s full of surgeons. The cab driver, receptionist, waiter—they are all wearing them. You start to feel left out.
The sidewalks serve as a nice metaphor for the chaotic nature of this extraordinary place. Seemingly designed like a malicious Chinese puzzle, they often twist and turn pointlessly or, worse, take you nowhere. Anyone who has walked them knows what I am talking about. Add to them the people, and Hong Kong has a lot of people. This city is 12 times more densely populated than New York, so walking on these sidewalks is a close approximation to running with the bulls in Pamplona, but with old ladies and their pushcarts playing the role of the bulls. Not only are you dodging the veritable human avalanche, this time of year you are also dodging the water dumped indiscriminately onto pedestrians from the air conditioner condensation tubes that seem to pour and drip from every window of this city—and that’s a lot of windows since Hong Kong has twice the number of skyscrapers as New York. A travel guide says: “Women in Hong Kong carry umbrellas even on sunny days. This is to protect their skin.” Nonsense, I say. Five minutes on these sidewalks and you know precisely why they carry them.
And yet, somehow it all works. The warring cultures, sights and sounds, and even the chaos. Hong Kong is the New York of the East.
Zachary’s dislike of this city was almost immediate. I get it. It is, as I say, chaotic. But I like it. No, wrong word. I respect it. I mean, I would never want to live here. I am used to hills, trees, clear skies, wide open spaces, and, well, I prefer to speak to people who don’t look like they are about to remove my liver. It is also my nature to avoid crowds. The noise of a Manhattan, much more that of a Hong Kong, wears on me. I go to such places only when I must. Even so, I recognize that in this I am expressing a preference, not making a moral judgment. My preferences aside, Hong Kong is a remarkable city of industry, prosperity, and, for much of its history, freedom. Were we scoring Hong Kong as an independent country, I think we would have to give it a 7 out of 10.
But it isn’t an independent country.
In 1997, the British government officially transferred the sovereignty of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China. Uh, oh. According to the terms of that treaty, the life and economy of Hong Kong were to remain essentially unchanged for fifty years. There was to be “One Country, Two Systems.” Twenty years on, there is “One Country and an effort to impose One System.” This means that any evaluation of Hong Kong must include an evaluation of China, and how am I supposed to do that since the Chinese blocked my visa, and thus my entry, to the Chinese mainland?
Fortunately, I have already been to China. In 2010, I went to both Beijing and Shanghai as part of a US business delegation. To say that I was impressed is an understatement. Shanghai, as I have said, makes any US city look Third World. The service and work ethic are models of efficiency. The common people I met were friendly, hospitable, and generally proud of their country. As for communism, you soon realize that China is no more communist than Singapore. The Chinese dumped faith in Marx and Lenin a long time ago because they know socialism doesn’t work. The people who believe in that naïve, unworkable, utopian ideology no longer live in Beijing, Moscow, or Hanoi. On the contrary, socialism’s modern advocates reside in such places as London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, and, increasingly, Washington. (And Pyongyang, of course.) No, China isn’t communist; it’s fascist, combining a hyper-capitalistic economy with a dictatorial regime, proving false the idea that free markets mean free societies.
And like Singapore, it seems to work.
Take, for example, a perpetual problem in my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, where there is an ongoing debate about the rush hour congestion of Highway 280, a central artery running through the heart of the city. I cannot recall a time when there wasn’t some debate or plan to fix the problem. Politicians have campaigned on it. Town Hall events have been held to discuss it. Decades have gone by and only very little has been done. That’s because democracy is slow and messy.
By contrast, the Chinese would solve the problem inside of six months. They would throw thousands of workers at the project, double the number of lanes, and annihilate everything that stood in the way—houses, businesses, trees, historic properties— everything. Now, if you are one of those people who are regularly stuck in 280 traffic, this is good news. But if your house or business is in the way, too bad. This is the way life is in modern China. There are no civil rights and, surprisingly, little sense of the past if that past gets in the way of progress. I’m as capitalistic as Donald Trump, but it was with horror that I watched from the 30 th floor of my Shanghai hotel as an entire city block of historic homes were demolished to make way for a new high rise. BOOM! Gone. No doubt the Great Wall will receive similar treatment if it’s in the way. This is what the Federalist Papers would call the “tyranny of the majority.” But it’s really the tyranny of the Communist—which is actually fascist—Party. Civil rights just aren’t a thing in China.
China isn’t a free society, even if it is a freer society than it was, say, 50—or even 25—years ago. In a moment that is the stuff of a dramatic movie, I grossly misjudged the degree of this new freedom. Attending a lecture given by a Chinese economist at the University of Beijing, I was pleasantly surprised when he was somewhat critical of the policies of Chairman Mao. This was, I thought, an indication that we were speaking freely, honestly, about the past. As the lecture continued, he said something like: “Critics of Mao’s reforms point out that his measures for implementation were excessive.”
This irritated me. Genocide is more than an “excessive measure,” and Mao was unquestionably a bloodthirsty, genocidal maniac. Over the years, I have heard similar statements regarding the Holocaust, minimizing it subtly, as if it wasn’t so bad after all. I couldn’t let this go.
“‘Excessive?’” I said, so that the full room of students and business executives could hear me. “I’ll say! Let’s be clear, Mao killed between 40 and 70 million of his own people.”
Silence. Total silence. I felt like Ann Coulter at Berkeley. One Chinese student sitting next to me, a fellow who had been quite friendly while touring me around the campus, literally backed away from me. The economist paused, looked around the room and at the doors, and then continued nervously. No one argued the point. It was as if I had said nothing. They were afraid. This is what societies with a history of violence and repression look like even after they’ve liberalized a bit.
