The sun may have set on Britain’s last major colony two decades ago, but today it is largely business as usual in the Chinese SAR of Hong Kong
F or a moment in history preceded by epic anticipation and morbid speculation – by a giant clock display in Tiananmen Square counting down the days, hours and minutes to Hong Kong’s return and Fortune magazine’s The Death of Hong Kong cover story two years earlier – the night of June 30,1997 could not have been more uneventful. Within days of the People’s Liberation Army soldiers moving into barracks vacated by the British, there were complaints from nearby shopkeepers that business had plummeted. The protests by the Democratic Party on the night of the handover did not end, as many had predicted, in the arrest of its leader, Martin Lee Chu-ming. Even Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor found little to complain about on that night of civilised protests and civilised policing: “In general, the police were very well organised and sensitive. The main blemish was… the police set up a sound system and played Beethoven’s 5th from it. This … is an unacceptable and unlawful curtailment of [demonstrators’ ] right to freedom of expression.”
I had moved from New York to Hong Kong the previous year with Time magazine, so seduced by the prospect that I accepted the job as the magazine’s regional business writer without even asking on what terms. My first assignment on June 30 was interviewing Jan Morris, the author of the finest book on Hong Kong in the run-up to 1997 because she sought to capture its energy and resilience in a series of snapshots and steered clear of apocalyptic predictions. When we met, Morris likened Governor Chris Patten, about to take a break in France to write a book, to the great orator Cicero biding his time in exile from Rome a couple of millennia earlier. It seemed only a matter of months before the Conservative Party, then as now short of leaders with Lord Patten’s charisma, would summon him to greater things. I would see Patten twice that day, first as his car drove by in the morning to loud cheers from the crowds and then at the departure of the Royal Yacht Britannia.
On the night of June 30 and in the days after, the city witnessed downpours like something out of a myth. It rained non-stop through the handover ceremonies. The soldiers were drenched, the grandees attending had to have umbrellas hoisted above them. As Prince Charles mingled with guests invited to the departure of the Britannia a couple of hours later, he made light of it: “I have never given a speech before completely under water.” Conscious the occasion was also a public-private farewell for Patten and his family, Prince Charles kept a low profile.
Even the relentless rain could not hide that Patten and his daughters were weeping as the Britannia pulled away from the docks on its last journey home before it was decommissioned. Two curious coincidences marked the event: The handover that night of this gleaming jewel-box of a city was 100 years since Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee on June 22,1897. And, the first royal passengers on the Britannia in 1954 had been Prince Charles, then 5, and his sister Anne.
Inevitably, given the ambivalence and anxiety about Communist China taking over this outpost of entrepreneurial energy, many saw the deluge as an omen. The genial security guard at my building remarked: “The heavens are crying for us.”
Shortly before the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984, the colonial government set up an ”assessment office” to survey how the population felt about it, headed by a distinguished Oxford academic and the respected Hong Kong judge, Simon Li. As ever with colonial Hong Kong, whose bizarre functional constituencies in the legislature complicate decision-making to this day, professional associations and unions were among those whose opinions were recorded. There ought to have been a referendum, opined the Cotton Bleaching and Dyeing Free Workers’ Union. The report noted “neither positive enthusiasm nor passive acquiescence” but a bedrock of “realism”. The people of Hong Kong had not been consulted, but remained instinctively businesslike; those who could were hedging their bets, noted Morris.
In the mid-1990s, Li Ruihuan, a liberal opponent of former president Jiang Zemin who stepped down from China’s Standing Committee in 2002, said of Beijing’s relationship with Hong Kong: “If you don’ t understand something, you are unaware of what makes it valuable, and it will be difficult to keep it intact.” He likened the world’s most futuristic metropolis to an antique teapot that shouldn’ t be scraped too hard. It was a curious analogy, except in relation to the city’s common law system. The principal challenge for China in administering Hong Kong was always going to be understanding the fierce independence of the judiciary and, even more counter-intuitively, allowing elections of the city’s chief executive and legislature in which it could not control the outcome.
