by Paul Theroux
III
"Where do they come from?" people say when a powerful figure emerges in China. When I asked some Hong Kongers to speculate on Deng's successor, the most intelligent ones said that only fools speculated on Chinese leadership struggles. The only certainties were that the leader would in the long run probably not be Jiang Zemin—anointed leaders in China have a habit of falling by the wayside—and that he would emerge from nowhere and take control.
This has become the case in Hong Kong. On December 11, 1996, the Chinese-appointed Selection Committee chose Chris Patten's successor, C. H. Tung, to be chief executive designate of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. "Now we are finally masters of our own house," Tung said when he was chosen. Yet a day later, sounding anything but masterly, he indicated that he supported China's hard-line policies, which included scrapping all levels of elected government. A month after that, he said he was in favor of repealing laws protecting various freedoms, using Chinese anti-demonstration logic, that "social order" took precedence over "individual rights."
Tung is another example of how, in the Chinese orbit, a person can flourish in obscurity. A billionaire, he seemingly emerged from the shadows. He was born in Shanghai in 1937; his family were typical escapees, but with strong links to Taiwan. Tung studied in England, worked in the United States (he lists "American sports" as his pastimes), and joined the family shipping business in 1969. Ten years ago, a well-documented two-part article in the Asian Wall Street Journal described how in 1985, when Tung's company was insolvent, with debts of HK $2.5 billion, he borrowed U.S. $120 million from the PRC's state-owned China Ocean Shipping Company. To avoid upsetting the Taiwanese, the Chinese passed this loan secretly through an intermediary, one Henry Y. T. Fok, a Hong Kong businessman with ties to China. Tung became viable once again, but of course ever since he has been deeply indebted to the People's Republic.
Tung was the personal choice of Deng Xiaoping. He is said to have approved of Deng's actions in Tiananmen Square—certainly he has been entirely uncritical of the Chinese, and more and more testy, even abusive, toward journalists and pro-democracy advocates.
Tung's role model is Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore. If he has his wish, Tung will turn Hong Kong into another Singapore: orderly, repressive, "Disneyland with the death penalty," in the words of a BBC correspondent. In Hong Kong everyone mentions Tung's fascination with Lee Kwan Yew, and people wonder what he is really like. As a former member of the University of Singapore English department (1968–71), I can perhaps help here. Lee loathed our department and singled out our department head, the poet and critic D. J. Enright, for his corrosive scorn. He believed we were subversive. He thought the teaching of English literature was a waste of time.
I witnessed at first hand Lee's intolerance of students and strikers in the late 1960s. A paranoid and manipulative man, whose career oddly parallels that of North Korea's Kim Il Sung, even to his dynastic ambitions (his own son Lee Hsien-loong is his successor), Lee Kwan Yew was one of the stoutest defenders of Deng's massacre in Tiananmen. On Deng's death he wrote in the South China Morning Post, "Deng has regularly been criticized by the western media as the man who ordered the killings at Tiananmen Square in 1989. But if he had not dispersed them, and the demonstrators had their way, China would be in a worse mess than the Soviet Union."
I like that word "dispersed." Singapore's time-honored traditions of hanging and flogging are as stoutly maintained by Lee Kwan Yew as they had been by Stamford Raffles in the 1820s. Apart from this monstrous barbarism, Lee Kwan Yew also has robustly stated beliefs about men's haircuts and gum chewing. Its gagged and pusillanimous press has kept Singapore a paranoid and barren place, without any debate, without one word of dissent. If this is to be Hong Kong's fate, God help it.
Soon after Tung was nominated as Patten's successor, he was asked to speak at the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce. It was his first post-nomination speech.
"It wasn't much," a Hong Kong businessman told me. "It was lengthy and long-winded, and it was empty." But something took place there, he said, something that had never before happened on such an occasion in Hong Kong. During the question-and-answer session after the speech, each time Tung responded, there was applause. In fact, clapping followed each of Tung's replies. "That is just the sort of thing that happens on the mainland. It is totally alien to Hong Kong."
The last question was, "Mr. Tung, you have an important audience gathered here, and many of us are journalists. What would you advise the press regarding press freedom?"
Tung said, "All of you should be fair and accurate, especially the foreign press."
And there was more applause.
That answer ("definitely a premeditated reply," my informant said) has become typical of Tung. When the British foreign secretary expressed fears about the future of the judiciary in Hong Kong, Tung took it as a personal slight, and said, "I have a set of values and beliefs which I hold on to very much."
I was not put out that Tung refused to see me: he has never given an interview to any journalist. But his reclusiveness encourages hearsay. One friend of mine reported Tung saying to her, "If there had been democracy in Hong Kong, the MTR [the rapid transit system] would never have been built." Another person quoted Tung saying, "No one ever lost money betting on Hong Kong."
"Tung wants to be a patriarch," Martin Lee has said. "He would make a good village elder. I am not so sure he is the man to lead Hong Kong."
What Hong Kong needed was not a spokesman for China—"Hong Kong has enough of those already," Lee wrote in a newspaper piece. "We need a leader who will defend Hong Kong when Chinese leaders insist on meddling."
In a revealing moment, when Tung was moving to a new office, he retaliated to the remarks of Martin Lee by accusing the campaigner for democracy of "badmouthing Hong Kong." In speaking engagements on a recent European trip, Lee had raised concerns about civil rights.
"This proves that the Chinese are controlling everything that Tung says," a Hong Kong writer told me. "Tung believes in feng shui. He won't move a chair without consulting his kenyu [geomancer]. Even the seating arrangement of his council is determined by feng shui."
Amazing that the man chosen to lead Hong Kong should be obsessive in the matter of cosmic forces and the apportionment of the Five Elements, but it happens to be true. We have Tung's own word on it. "Feng shui is something you cannot refuse to believe in," he has said.
"Normally, he would never have spoken against Martin Lee," the Hong Kong writer said, "because it was the day Tung moved to a new office, and when you move to a new place—house or office — feng shui determines that you must be very peaceful. He would never have spoken those words willingly."
Tung believes that Government House has bad feng shui because so many geomancers have said so. The fact that it has been the residence of gweilo governors for 142 years might also have contributed to its malevolent aspect. One geomancer said that the problem was its being "surrounded by tall buildings which blocked its spirit." It is the wrong shape, it is wrongly placed, and the new buildings have cursed it. "Look at the side of the Bank of China. It is sharp like an ax, and it seems to be cutting it," a feng shui enthusiast told me. Ten years ago, the then governor was urged to plant a willow tree to improve the flow of ch'i. Yet Government House is still seen as a place of ill omen, and it is said that the governor's very appointment came about as a result of bad feng shui.
One morning, early in 1986, Governor Edward Youde, a healthy man on a diplomatic visit to Beijing, was found dead in his room at the British residence there, the victim of an apparent heart attack. But the death also had a dimension relating to Hong Kong. "There was a feeling at Government House that the bad feng shui was the reason," a British civil servant told me.
He was on my list. Certain people seemed to form a chorus for the Hand-over: a civil servant, a party hack, a local journalist, a China watcher, a shop assistant, a Hong Kong University lecturer, and the ubiquitous Martin Lee. The civil ser
vant, Richard Hoare, O.B.E., who would be resigning on the day of the Hand-over, was someone I had made a point of seeing. Hoare, who looks younger than his age, which is forty-eight, is about to retire and be pensioned off from Her Majesty's Overseas Civil Service. He was twenty-three when he joined as a junior civil servant in 1972. And now, go gor gweilo zhao la, "the ghost man is leaving"—and he is not the only one.
Of the 539 members of the Overseas Civil Service, just about half (255) are leaving by June 30. They include members of the judiciary and administrative officers. One hundred and fifty gweilo police officers are leaving, 126 are staying on—and it will be interesting for them, for Deng has insisted that in addition to the police, he will station four thousand members of the People's Liberation Army in Hong Kong, and these soldiers will function as a security force.
But Richard Hoare was telling me about the feng shui: "The previous summer a fountain had been put in—it was felt that a water feature was needed. For some reason it was built rectangular. It was supposed to have been circular. The rectangle was seen—after the fact—as coffin-shaped. A very bad omen. It was dug up and made circular."
An assistant to Governor Youde, Hoare had accompanied him to Beijing and had found the governor's corpse the morning they were to fly back to Hong Kong. As director of administration ("a meaningless title," he told me), Hoare was in every sense a mandarin—bureaucrat, go-between, underboss.
"I'm boss of the guy who runs the records office," he said, explaining his title. "I mainly do jobs that no one else wants to do. Supervise legal aid. Supervise the ombudsman. I'm boss of the director of protocol. Deal with natural disasters."
We were sitting in Hoare's tidy, austere office in the government secretariat. "My decision to leave is purely personal. I could stay if I wanted. Under the Joint Declaration all senior civil servants can stay. But it would mean that I could never get promoted. I'm at director level. I would stagnate." He reflected a moment: retirement at such a young age is inevitably a leap in the dark. "I would feel a little out of things."
So instead of retiring in the year 2004 at the age of fifty-five, he is making a traditionally English move, from an office job to a village in the South Downs, near Chichester. "I have shelves of books I want to read. I'd like to educate myself in art, music, and wine. I'd like to get some exercise, lose some weight."
I asked him what his fears were for the future of Hong Kong, and he gave me a nice mandarinesque response. "What is written in the sacred texts is all good," he said, referring to the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law. "People are imagining the worst. But I think that it will be easier to have the Hong Kong equivalent of a family discussion after the first of July. Then, no one can be accused of being pro-British."
It was Richard Hoare who told me, as Patten had done, of the fears the Chinese had about the British making off with the reserves before July 1. "We have tremendous financial reserves," Hoare said. They are estimated at $60 billion. "But no, we haven't removed any. We've gone on building and maintaining Hong Kong. We are building the airport without any British help. Apart from a percentage of the defense budget, the British taxpayer has never had to pay for anything in Hong Kong."
And, he said, in his twenty-five years of looking at accounts, Hong Kong had never once received the sort of foreign aid that was habitual in countries throughout the world.
There was a poignancy about his departure. But he modestly insisted that he had to go, and he made it seem like a symbolic act, even an act of sacrifice, in which his future, with a substantial pay cut, was far from clear.
"I feel the colonial era is over," he said. "I'm in the wrong place at the wrong time."
The next person on my list was the party man, not so much a capitalist roader as a consummate opportunist. As hardly-middle-aged Richard Hoare was ending his career, David Chu Yulin was beginning to soar.
"You are talking with the most colorful and physical person in Hong Kong," he told me on the forty-ninth floor of Exchange Square Tower Two, all of Kowloon spread out before us across the harbor. "I do amazing things." One of the things this Shanghai-born, naturalized American citizen had done was flamboyantly renounce his U.S. nationality, and he placed his discarded and voided American passport in a time capsule that was publicly buried.
He had driven to see me on his motorcycle, he told me. He owned three Harleys and had just ordered a Honda Blackbird 1100, which could do 180 miles an hour. It was very expensive. Mr. Chu was very rich. He had paraglided from Hong Kong to the Great Wall of China. He held three paragliding records. He was a spelunker, but his exploits took him beyond mere spelunking to cave diving. He made a solo descent in Silver Fox Cave in Fung San, down 650 feet, then into the water and down another 70. He almost died. "I was trapped! The ultimate challenge! Stuck in a conical hole! Under water!"
"Sounds like a nightmare, Mr. Chu."
"Nightmare!" Then he smiled. "Fortunately I have a tendency to go around in circles. I have an uneven kick—that is my normal swimming tendency. I go in widening circles, and that is how I saved myself."
On another occasion, in the Wu Yu Mountains Chu had gone down a river of rapids, alone, wearing a helmet, a wet suit, and a snorkel, flippers, and mask. Just tumbled from top to bottom, a vertical drop of sixty-five hundred feet. It had taken eight hours. He had been bruised but otherwise unscathed, and it was worth it: "I was the first man in the history of China to do it. My picture was in magazines!"
He was a marksman. He had a custom-made .45, made in Texas. He had shot grizzly bears, elk, mule deer, a red stag in Scotland, a moose.
"But a moose is a lovely, trusting thing as big as a house," I said. "Why is that such a trophy?"
"A moose is hard to find!" Chu said, and continued to tell me of his exploits. Now he was in Montana, then riding with the Harley Club down Nathan Road in Kowloon, and then up the Zambezi.
The Hand-over was his opportunity for political advancement. In the time I spent in Hong Kong, I was to meet many people who cursed the British and hailed the coming of the Chinese, but none wagged their tails so briskly as David Chu. Except for his cowboy boots, to which he called my attention, he did not look like Action Man. He was pudgy and pale and middle-aged, an unlikely member of the Hong Kong Harley Club.
I would have thought that Sweetwater Avenue in Bedford, Massachusetts, in the 1950s could aptly be described as the wrong place and the wrong time for a Chinese boy from Shanghai. That was David Chu's neighborhood after his parents emigrated. But David was ambitious. He went to Cambridge Latin High School, graduated in 1960, went on to Northeastern University, got a job, and then his company sent him to Hong Kong in 1977. He had stayed and prospered. He had been elected a member of the Legislative Council, and later selected by the Chinese to be a member of the Preparatory Committee. He had been chosen to be a member of the Provisional Legislature, the parliament that China had contrived to enact legislation after June 30.
He was said to be one of the most pro-China legislators. I tested him by asking about the recent death of Deng Xiaoping.
Chu gave me the Deng-inspired eulogy he had written. The three-page piece compared the departed Chinese leader to Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Peter the Great, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Zhou Enlai.
I asked him whether he had any anxieties about the Hand-over.
"The Hand-over of Hong Kong is the beginning of the new China and the renaissance of Chinese civilization."
What about the subversion clause and press freedom?
"Our freedom is appropriate to our culture and current stage of development."
What about Chris Patten's attempt at reforms?
"Ha! It's easy to be a nice guy when you're leaving—when you're giving away the future."
Surely, I said, people in Hong Kong came here to get away from the Chinese.
"Yes, but things have changed, and in reality now China is not Communist. It is modified socialism."
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br /> I wondered whether he had any feelings about the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
"Demonstrations have a special meaning in China," he said. "China is having a difficult time controlling minority groups. And we don't want the U.S. rocking the boat. Current U.S. policy is wrong. U.S. interference put Wang Dan in jail. They promoted him to a hero."
What about the right of assembly?
"The average education in China is low. A man can wave a banner and start trouble."
Just one man is no more than a pest, surely?
"The pest is a threat to stability. Listen, I can start a riot in China very easily. If the government didn't stop me, I could take over China."
It was interesting to talk to a hack who, having no hesitation in speaking his mind, perhaps said more than he meant to. It had seemed to me one of the oddest aspects of the Hand-over that, despite the slogan of "One country, two systems," a Chinese political structure and ethic was being imposed. For one thing, Chu himself was in a legislature that had not been freely elected.
"I was elected by a four-hundred-man committee."
But the committee was hand picked by the Chinese And they had said nothing was going to change for fifty years.
"'No change for fifty years' means capitalism—not law, not government, not politics." And the marksman, biker, diver, paraglider, spelunker, and traveler smiled and added, "They are evolving."
Almost everything he said was a crock And I had been warned "David Chu is a stuntsman," a pro-democracy activist told me, and said that I should not take him seriously. But really, he seemed to be just the sort of person the Chinese would need in Hong Kong if they were to get their way. He was loony and self-promoting, of course, but he also seemed to me as perhaps he seemed to himself: a Hong Kong man of the future. Still, there were annoyances, outside his control, and no sign that they would go away. Chu complained to me that he had applied to join the prestigious Hong Kong Club, and after seven years he had yet to be admitted. I told him that he should consider himself lucky to be able to apply—women could not join, women could not eat in the main dining room, indeed they could only show their faces in selected rooms. He took no comfort from this.
