by Ian Buruma
In 1982, Lee visited Beijing as chairman of the bar association. The question of future sovereignty came up—this was two years before the British agreed formally to the handover in 1997. Speaking to his Chinese hosts, Lee used a gardening metaphor10. He said: “If you see a lovely rose growing in your neighbor’s garden, and you pluck it and put it in a vase, it will die in a few days.” It was not an especially subtle reference to the precarious status of Hong Kong. Nor was the answer it provoked: China would have to resume full control over its territories.
That is when Lee decided to become a politician—not to save the British empire, but to safeguard some of its institutions. First he was elected to the Legislative Council by his colleagues as their representative of the legal profession. Later, in 1991, when some seats were contested in direct elections for the first time, he was elected by popular vote.
I knew that Lee was a devout Catholic, educated by the Jesuits: another Chinese activist with Christianity in his background. So I asked him one day, in his office, whether religion had influenced his politics. He thought for a bit, and said: “I often think that if you are a member of the Chinese Communist Party, it would be perfectly logical to be corrupt. Why not? Everybody is doing it. Christianity is good, because it gives you a reason to be good and not corrupt. I always believe that somebody up there is in charge.” And then, as though unwilling to dwell on such personal matters, he quickly changed the subject: “The most important thing is the rule of law. . . . But if you want to keep the rule of law, you can’t just depend on the judges. You need an elected government.” This was vintage Lee: dogged, precise, a bit plodding, yet wholly admirable.
It would be easy to describe Martin Lee, with his faith in God and the rule of law, as a typically Anglicized Chinaman (to use Lee Kuan Yew’s phrase), born in the dusk of the British empire, a pinstriped anachronism, out of touch with the culture of his race. This is more or less how his political opponents choose to see him, those “patriotic” businessmen and politicians who travel back and forth to Beijing (where Lee is barred from going), promoting a Singapore-style paternalistic authoritarianism in the name of stability, economic development, and Chinese values. Most of these people were as westernized as Lee. Many of them proudly bore their British titles and attended every function at the Governor’s Mansion, or, indeed, Buckingham Palace. Some of them pleaded with the British to continue their colonial rule. But when they saw the British game was up, they became instant Chinese patriots, dropped their titles, spoke of Chinese values, and attended every function at the New China News Agency, or at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. The one thing they did not have to change was their conviction that democracy was unsuited to Hong Kong.
Northern Chinese in general and Communist mandarins in particular regard the Cantonese, and especially the Cantonese in Hong Kong, as crass, loudmouthed merchants, people without culture, who will eat anything that flies, walks, or swims and have but one talent, which is to make money. The Chinese government has no intention of crushing the despised Hong Kong merchants in the way the Shanghainese were crushed in the 1950s. On the contrary, Hong Kong is supposed to remain a “commercial city,” managed like a giant business, unhampered, so far as possible, by politics, which is why a shipping tycoon was put in charge.
One of the oddest, most ironic accusations lodged from Beijing against the British in their last years of rule was that a proposal to improve the welfare of poor pensioners would “undermine capitalism” in Hong Kong. And not only that: The pro-Beijing trade unions are set against the right to collective bargaining, while the much weaker and poorer independent unions are in favor. No wonder, then, that Hong Kong tycoons find it congenial to be “patriots,” for their kind of patriotism comes with fat profits. All this gives a new meaning to the distinction between right and left: The right is largely on the side of the Communist government in Beijing; the left is the common enemy of Party cadres and patriotic tycoons.
There is in fact a history of leftist patriotism in Hong Kong, much of it organized from Beijing, part of the united front, which tacks to every wind blowing from China. But there is also a genuine leftism, rooted in Hong Kong’s anti-colonial Chinese schools, student unions, and independent labor unions. During the Cultural Revolution anti-colonial rage threatened to roll over Hong Kong. Most of this was highly orchestrated: employees of mainland-owned stores waving Mao’s Little Red Book, pro-Beijing newspapers fanning anti-British sentiment, and so on. But it all began with a protest against deplorable labor conditions in a plastics factory. Left-wing patriotism, though still marginal, became more interesting in the latter half of the 1970s, when democratic activists began to stir in China. And it came to a climax in the spring of 1989, when a million people hit the streets in solidarity with the students in Beijing. Szeto Wah comes from this tradition, and so does an extraordinary man named Lau San-ching.
I came across Lau several times after 1997, sometimes in person, sometimes in press reports. Small, bespectacled, and rather shabbily dressed in a cheap cotton shirt and sandals, Lau looked like one of those boys who attract the attention of school bullies, get beaten up, and come back for more, bleeding from the mouth, glasses cracked. You would see pictures of him in the papers, his face contorted with anger or pain as the police tried to stop him from protesting against this or that. Lau makes a modest living helping mental patients and has organized a union of social workers. When I met him for the first time in the late 1990s, he was exercised about the negative effects of “privatization” in China: Tens of millions of laid-off workers were roaming the cities in search of survival. All the Communist Party cared about was money, he said. And the so-called liberals in Hong Kong, including Martin Lee, were supporting privatization, too. In the transition from Maoism to raw capitalism, he warned, the workers were being crushed.
A do-gooder, then, an old-fashioned lefty, harmless, noble, an oddball in relentlessly capitalist Hong Kong. Nevertheless, Lau San-ching is a rather heroic figure. For he is one of the very few people in Hong Kong who actively tried to promote democracy in China long before 1989. He told me parts of his story on various occasions, once at an expensive coffee shop at the Mandarin Hotel in Central Hong Kong, once outside a conference hall in Macau, then again at the Mandarin. Looking a little incongruous in the midst of blue-suited businessmen and obsequious waiters at the Mandarin, Lau always spoke softly, in a Cantonese accent. There were details he left out, but he pointed me to a website that carried an account of his life, written by a human-rights activist, Kate Saunders. Gradually, I was able to piece his extraordinary story together11.
Lau was born in Hong Kong, the son of poor immigrants from Guangzhou. His father worked in a factory. Chinese patriotism was not something Lau encountered at home or at school. School was solidly colonial in sentiment. And his parents, having once had patriotic hopes for the Chinese Communist Party, felt that their patriotism had been betrayed and wanted nothing more to do with either China or politics. To them, as to most first-generation immigrants, colonial Hong Kong was a safe haven from Chinese politics.
It was only at university, where he studied physics and mathematics, that Lau took an interest in politics. He was an active member of the student union. Some of Lau’s fellow students were official patriots, who supported everything the Beijing government said or did. Since this was in the early 1970s, when Mao and the Gang of Four still ruled, these patriots were ardent Maoists. Most ended up doing very well in Hong Kong. Several ex-Maoists would go on to become senior figures in the government after 1997, advising the former shipping tycoon how to run Hong Kong as a “commercial city.” Lau thinks they had been groomed for this task all along.
Lau was not a Maoist but a Trotskyite, a “romantic revolutionary” in his own words, a member of the Revolutionary Marxist League. He wanted real socialism in Hong Kong, a quixotic aim. But in a mixture of patriotism and religious zeal, he also wanted to promote socialism in China. And he thought he saw a glimmer of hope in 1974,
the year when the famous Li Yi Zhe wall poster went up in Guangzhou criticizing Mao’s Cultural Revolution for being anti-democratic. Two years later, masses of students demonstrated in Beijing, honoring the memory of Zhou Enlai. The armed militia cleared the square with water cannon and truncheons. Lau named his group of activists in Hong Kong after the date of that crackdown: the April 5 Action Group. In 1979, hope was rekindled by the Democracy Wall and the little magazines and underground pamphlets and manifestos published by the likes of Wei Jingsheng, Xu Wenli, and Wang Xizhe, one of the original authors of the Li Yi Zhe poster.
Lau decided he had to go to China. He doesn’t like to be called a patriot, because he sees himself as an internationalist; patriotism smacks too much of being a government toady. Nonetheless, he was fired by the same spirit that drove a million Hong Kong people into the streets in 1989. He took the train to China, not, as he puts it, “as a Hong Kong person, but as a Chinese.” He felt that if he did not go, mainland activists “would say we had no guts.” His was a typically Hong Kong brand of unofficial Chinese patriotism, born of a sense of colonial inferiority.
In Guangzhou, Lau established contact with Wang Xizhe and his friends. He smuggled overseas publications to China and mainland activist publications to Hong Kong. Back and forth he went, in an increasingly risky enterprise. As a kind of corollary to his economic reforms, Deng Xiaoping decided he had to stamp out the democracy movement. Both Wei Jingsheng and Wang Xizhe were thrown in jail. The underground magazines were more or less killed. When Lau set off once again for Guangzhou on Christmas Day, 1981, his girlfriend, Christina Tang, feared the worst. She told him not to go. Lau didn’t listen. (He now admits he was guilty of “adventurism.”) Winters are cold even in southern China. Lau wanted to give Wang Xizhe’s wife a sweater to pass on to her husband in jail. She looked shifty when she saw Lau, told him to wait, left the house for twenty minutes or so, and came back in tears. That night Lau was arrested.
Lau was given a choice: He could confess to his “counterrevolutionary” crimes against “socialism” or risk having his mind and body broken in jail. He spent the next year and a half locked up in a dark cell, the size of a toilet stall, freezing in winter and stifling hot in summer. He had nothing to read, no one to talk to, and barely enough food to stay alive. It was the first of the three extended periods he would spend in solitary darkness. The second time, which lasted two years, he was shackled in a dark and filthy cell with blood on the walls and cockroaches scooting around a hole in the concrete floor that served as his toilet. Swarms of mosquitoes made sleep almost impossible. Criminal inmates were ordered to watch his every move day and night and report on what they saw. They are known as ermu, “ears and eyes.” The only escape from this torment was to “confess.” Lau refused, and gradually lost his capacity to tell day from night. He still didn’t confess, but admitted to having been “uncooperative.” Finally, he was released from his dungeon and put in a marginally better cell.
Things could have been even worse. Lau recalls a mentally retarded man who was too feeble-minded to “confess” to anything. He was locked up alone in a dark cell, his hands and feet in shackles, and never let out. He could not wash. For years he was in there, howling to himself in the dark like a caged beast. One day, he found the desperate strength to break the door with his bare hands. He was beaten up, put in chains, and thrown into an even more isolated cell, where his cries could no longer be heard. When the prison authorities, after ten years, wanted to hand this human wreck back to his family, they refused to have him, so he was left to rot in his dark cage.
Lau spent his last period of solitary confinement in a labor camp. Wang Xizhe was in the cell next door. They managed to communicate by talking, or “telephoning,” through the wall. Or sometimes they would climb to a tiny window at the top of their cells and catch a glimpse of each other. This was called “faxing.” Despite this relief, Lau and his fellow inmates had a hard time surviving. Wang would often let out a piercing howl that went on an on, like a police siren. Another former activist started babbling about an invasion by space aliens. Lau was tortured by terrifying nightmares. He tried to remain sane by concentrating his mind on the moment only: Never think back, never think of the future, for that would provoke longing. Once you did that, you were done for.
I tried to imagine what Lau had gone through. It was of course beyond the scope of my imagination. I watched him drink his cappuccino and eat his Danish pastry at the Mandarin Hotel coffee shop. A large silver Rolls-Royce glided by outside. People around us were setting up lunch appointments, talking on their cell phones. A waiter came over to ask us discreetly whether we would like anything else. There were many things I wanted to ask Lau. I wanted to know what it meant to go through hell. But I knew he couldn’t answer that question. He could only describe it, in his soft Cantonese voice, and smile.
Instead, I asked him about his relations with the mainland dissidents. He said they had always been difficult, for the activists of the 1970s were from a “lost generation.” They were damaged by the Cultural Revolution. Lau picked his words with tact. He said: “This may be difficult for Westerners to understand. But, you know, the way they grew up, they cannot have nice personalities. They have strong characters, but in some sense they are not so honest.”
Lau was finally released on the day after Christmas, 1991. He still had not confessed to his “counterrevolutionary” crimes. When he arrived at the Hung Hom railway station in Hong Kong, he was greeted as a hero. It is extraordinary that he had survived at all.
The last time I spoke to Lau, in the summer of 2000, once again at the Mandarin coffee shop, he was better dressed. He looked less out of place this time, wearing a gray cotton jacket and chatting on his own cell phone. Lau had joined the Democratic Party now. I was a bit surprised to hear this, for he had often spoken of the “liberals” with disdain. He said he was still a Marxist, though not an orthodox one. He believes in “science and objectivity,” but agrees with “Marxist theory about economics and capitalism.”
I am not a Marxist and have little sympathy for Trotskyites, yet when I think of Lau San-ching, who spent ten years in prison and still cannot visit China because of his “crimes against socialism” and then think of his old fellow students, the Maoist patriots who now advise the former shipping magnate on how to keep Hong Kong safe for bankers and property tycoons, it is hard not to feel enraged by the sheer hypocrisy and mendaciousness of Communist Party rule in China—and of their proxies in Hong Kong.
Looking up from his cup of coffee, blinking through his glasses in that curious mixture of good nature and hard resolve, the unsettling look of the total idealist, he said something that bordered on desperation about China and its history. And yet despair is the one thing a total idealist can never afford to give in to. Lau said history always goes in cycles: His parents liked the Communist Party but felt betrayed by it. His own generation tried to accept the Party but felt betrayed by the Gang of Four. And now, the young generation was trying to follow the Party once more, all in the name of patriotism. Patriotism, Lau said, with the sweetest of smiles, is the nightmare for each new generation of Chinese.
The Mandarin Hotel lobby on the morning after the handover of Hong Kong, on July 1, 1997, was a ghostly place. There, hovering around the reception desk, making quiet small talk or, in some cases, carefully looking away when political opponents threatened to come into view, were the British players of the last twenty years or so in Hong Kong’s colonial drama. Two former foreign secretaries were there guarding their suitcases, waiting for attendants to whisk them away. A former governor of Hong Kong was studying the morning’s paper, waiting for his wife and children. Media stars and press moguls stood about, looking lost. Former colonial secretaries, Legislative Council (LegCo) members, Special Branch officers, Government House employees, and press spokesmen hung around waiting for transport to the airport. There was nothing more to do. The party was over. This place was no longer theirs. They looked oddly diminish
ed on that gray, drizzly morning.
The occasion was made even more macabre by a pumped-up jollity, a contrived festiveness, going on at the same time. Middle-aged men and women, many of them Europeans, some Chinese, dressed in Chinese fancy dress, complete with silk hats and false pigtails, danced in the lobby to an orchestra playing jazzy versions of Chinese folk songs. The orchestra members, too, were decked out in red, blue, and yellow silk robes. The dancers were mostly businessmen and their wives, the kind of people who kept on telling reporters that Hong Kong was a “commercial city” and would be absolutely fine.
I had seen other people celebrate the night before: beefy young “expats,” wearing Union Jack hats, vomiting in the streets in Lan Kwai Fong, and Hong Kong tycoons, in evening clothes, toasting Communist officials in broken Mandarin at lavish and largely untouched banquets. Like the new buildings in China, everything was on an outsize scale. On the day of the handover, there was an auction of an enormous painting of little girls in tutus handing flowers to the Chinese leaders Li Peng, Jiang Zemin, and Deng Xiaoping while Hong Kong’s patriotic worthies, including the former shipping tycoon, looked up at the Chinese leaders with smiles of almost hysterical delight. It went for almost U.S.$300,000 to a Hong Kong company whose founder had just been convicted of insider trading. A Shanghai millionaire was devastated to see his bid for “the best painting in the world” topped. All this celebration made for a curious and melancholy contrast with the passive, even apprehensive attitudes of most ordinary citizens of Hong Kong. “It’s nothing to do with us,” taxi drivers said with depressing predictability whenever I asked them. “We are just ordinary people.”
