by Ian Buruma
I was waiting in the Mandarin lobby for Emily Lau, who had been a directly elected member of the legislature until midnight of June 30, when the elected LegCo was abolished in favor of the “provisional legislature,” appointed by Beijing. The last bill to be passed by the elected legislature was to limit the right of the police to tap people’s phones. One of the first measures of the new, unelected LegCo would be to repeal it.
While waiting for Emily, I recalled a conversation the night before with a distinguished British newspaper columnist, Simon Jenkins, who had arrived in Hong Kong for the occasion. He did not know the place but had gotten around a bit, talked to a few people, had lunch with some old chums, and after a day or so in the territory decided that people in Hong Kong did not really want democracy. The last British governer, Chris Patten, had done everything he could to expand their democratic rights, it is true, but Jenkins was skeptical about all that: No point annoying Beijing unnecessarily; this wasn’t Europe or America, you know. “I really wonder,” he said in his pleasantly polished voice, redolent of comfortable leather chairs and good cigars. “I really wonder if these people understand politics. It’s awfully hard to know what they think, really.”
Emily walked in from the soft rain, dressed in blue jeans and a red T-shirt, pale and drawn, still tired perhaps from the last all-night session of the elected LegCo, which had ended in tearful embraces. I thought of all the years I had known her, first as a colleague at the Far Eastern Economic Review, for which she had covered Hong Kong. It was then, in the mid-1980s that she became politically active, arguing for more democracy in Hong Kong. Educated partly in Britain and the United States, she shared the humiliation of those who knew the West well enough to see through the hypocrisies of colonial rule. She made speeches and wrote passionate articles and had daily conversations on the phone with Martin Lee and other democrats. Her nickname in the office was Basic Lau, for banging on so much about Hong Kong’s constitution. In those days there was a shrillness in her tone, an edge of hysteria almost, in her denunciations of British policies and British grandees, who would come to Hong Kong for twenty-four-hour visits to say that everything would be fine. But shrillness is a minor vice in a just cause. When Margaret Thatcher visited Hong Kong after the deal with China had been done, it was Emily who stood up at a press conference to ask her how she felt about handing over a free city to a Communist dictatorship. Mrs. Thatcher stared at her with almost pitying disdain and drawled that the young lady was surely the only person in Hong Kong to feel this way. Emily Lau went on to become the most popular politician in Hong Kong.
We sat down at the Mandarin bar, to be out of sight of the fancy-dress revelers. I asked Emily how she felt now that British rule, which she had resented so much, was finally over. She shrugged her shoulders and said she was worried about the future. The opposition did not have enough money to keep going. Hong Kong, unlike Taiwan, lacked a culture of democratic opposition. The Chinese government, the new masters, would surely crack down anyway. Perhaps she would go on vacation with her husband, a successful lawyer. She would go to Italy. And after that? After that, she would just have to keep going, wouldn’t she? I looked through the door, toward the sound of Chinese music. And Emily said: “I’m glad it rained. At least it spoiled China’s party.”
China’s party, in both Hong Kong and Beijing, had been drenched in official patriotism. But for a Communist government, which sees itself as the proud heir of the May Fourth spirit of Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy, or at least of scientific socialism “with Chinese characteristics,” it was a peculiarly touchy, sentimental kind of patriotism, in which imagined “Chinese characteristics” overwhelmed anything that might have been described as either scientific or democratic. The kind of patriotism promoted in Hong Kong—and in China—that week goes back a little further in time than Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy. It, too, was largely imported from the West. The term for it, a character combination coined by the Japanese, is minzu zhuyi, literally “racialism,” or “Volkism,” a romantic notion of national or racial destiny, determined by history and culture. Some of its symbols are ancient, but it is firmly rooted in the nineteenth century, when national consciousness was forged out of a double sense of humiliation: imperial government by corrupt Manchus and military defeat at the hands of superior Western powers.
Song-and-dance troupes, performing on the night of June 30 in Beijing, set the tone. The humiliations of modern Chinese history were rehearsed with an almost masochistic zeal: the Opium War, the unequal treaties, the Boxer War, and the sacking by foreign troops of the Summer Palace in Beijing. The Great Wall, that great symbol of ancient oppression and modern national pride, was assembled out of thousands of half-naked bodies moving in unison to the beat of martial drums. Never again would barbarians assail China. In seconds, the human wall changed into a massive red flag: Under the leadership of the Communist Party the Chinese people had risen!
A new film, apparently the most expensive ever made in China, opened in Hong Kong for the occasion. Chief Executive Tung attended the premiere, as did Chinese officials from the New China News Agency. The Opium War had all the stock images and characters of modern Chinese Volkism: treacherous Manchu officials, venal Cantonese traders, villainous British capitalists, and heroic Chinese patriots. The story is repeated in textbooks, popular comics, patriotic museums, and political speeches all over China: Western capitalists sold opium to the Chinese to weaken the Chinese people and rob them of their wealth. The Manchus were too effete to resist. A patriotic official named Lin Zexu tried to resist by destroying opium and arresting the traders but was thwarted by a combination of superior British military power and the corrupt Manchu government. An ignoble compromise was reached. Treaties were signed by traitors to the Chinese race. Hong Kong was given away, and the imperialists ravaged China.
Sex and politics are invariably linked in such tales of national humiliation: a pure and beautiful Chinese girl is sacrificed by Manchu officials to a loathsome, hairy barbarian, who rapes her in the night. Her screams express the agony of the Chinese race. The message is made explicit at the end of the movie: Only a powerful, unified nation under the leadership of the Communist Party will wipe out China’s shame.
What is remarkable is not the message but the sense of wounded cultural, as well as racial, pride. An extraordinary gesture by one of the barbarians was needed to help restore it. In a scene set in the House of Commons, a British member of Parliament compares British efforts to force their way into China to the destruction of a priceless Ming-dynasty vase. The same man then extolls to his astonished barbarian audience the five thousand years of glorious Chinese civilization. He points out that Chinese philosophy is so profound that it would take several generations of the greatest European thinkers to realize just how profound it is.
This is odd propaganda to come from a Communist government, which not long ago did its best to smash all vestiges of traditional Chinese civilization in the name of scientific-socialist progress and the thoughts of Mao Zedong. During the Cultural Revolution, simply owning a Ming vase was enough to get one into very serious trouble.
And yet the romance of a glorious history, of ancient philosophers “far more profound than Aristotle,” of a national family united in shared memories of greatness, was all that an oppressive and ideologically bankrupt Chinese government had to offer the citizens of a territory that was richer and freer than China. A sense of patriotism built on enlightened political institutions would have been an absurdity. Racial pride, based on a sense of past grievances, was all that was left.
The Opium War had some success in China but was a flop in Hong Kong, as were other celebrations of official “Chineseness.” The propaganda was crude, confusing, and insulting. That Chinese girl in the movie, sacrificed after the Opium War to the hairy barbarian, stood for Hong Kong. The awkward thing is that Hong Kong thrived as a result. Without the Opium War, Hong Kong would not have existed in its present form but remained a modest Cantonese town, sp
ared the indignity of colonial rule but not the ravages of civil war and dictatorship. As a result of the Opium War, countless refugees from various catastrophes in China achieved prosperity and a high degree of freedom in Hong Kong. The insult to Hong Kong, born of ignorance and ideology, as much as from northern prejudice against the Cantonese, is that only the prosperity is acknowledged. Official celebrations in Beijing always include the “minorities,” dancing and singing, dressed in exotic costumes, and beaming with pleasure at the privilege of being a happy part of the Chinese empire. On the night of June 30, 1997, the people of Hong Kong were represented, too, by dancers jumping up and down to the beat of patriotic pop songs. They were dressed up as dollar signs and credit cards.
In the end, however, not long after the stroke of midnight on July 1, it was the defenders of political institutions who staged the most passionate and moving demonstration of where their loyalties lay. It was still hot and humid, but the rain had changed from a torrent to a steady drizzle. The fireworks had fizzled out in the low, wet clouds. The last governor, Chris Patten, had shed his tears and pulled out of the harbor with the Prince of Wales, who retired for the night to watch British comedy films. Martin Lee and his fellow democrats had asked for permission to wish their voters well from the balcony of the LegCo building. Permission had been refused. They defied the ban and sneaked in anyway—Lee, Szeto Wah, and the others. They came out on the balcony to face a crowd of several thousand people.
It was a sentimental moment; the ex-legislators, a mixture of lawyers, activists, and trade union leaders, held hands, cried, and made the V sign. Lee pointed out that the same building had been used once by the Japanese to torture “our people who refused to surrender.” In the same spirit, he said, the Hong Kong people would refuse to surrender their freedoms. “We know,” he went on in his typical fashion, “that without a democratically constituted legislature, there is no way for our people to be assured that good laws will be passed to protect our freedom.” The elected legislators would come back the following year, he promised, and retake their seats after an election.
Was this just an Anglicized laywer speaking wishfully, making a last stand for a system of government that would end because it was not suited to the Chinese? Was it the rhetoric of a regime, set up by a British governor in a fit of last-minute imperial guilt, a regime, moreover, that had lasted only a few years and was already over? Was Lee an alien body in the celebration of “Chineseness,” as his opponents would say? In fact, other demonstrations were taking place elsewhere in Hong Kong. Emily Lau had marched with members of her Frontier Party and vowed to fight for democracy. And there, outside the new Convention Center, where the final ceremony of the handover was taking place, where Li Peng and Jiang Zemin were shaking hands with Prince Charles, was the April 5 Action Group.
I saw a photograph of their demonstration in the South China Morning Post the next day. One man was holding up a picture of a dead student in Beijing covered in blood. The text said, in English: “Who killed this guy in 1989? Li Peng. I am a Chinese dissident. I think Li Peng is a murderer.” And next to that man was the unmistakable figure of Lau San-ching, his face a picture of rage, his glasses askew, a megaphone in his hand. He was being pushed away by a burly policeman. And his shouts against the Chinese government were being drowned out by police loudspeakers, which had been strategically placed for just such an event and which, in a final piece of Hong Kong irony, were blaring Beethoven’s great ode to freedom, the Ninth Symphony.
The first LegCo election in the Special Administrative Region (SAR) of Hong Kong, held in May 1998, came at an interesting time. General Suharto had just been forced to step down as the strongman of Indonesia. Student demonstrations against corruption and lack of civil liberties—the very things that had galvanized the students in Beijing a decade before—had finally cracked the dictatorship.
I happened to be in China on the day it happened, on Hainan, an island in the South China Sea. The Chinese newspapers had given a very one-sided version of the news from Jakarta; they barely mentioned the students but played up every instance of violence and disorder, especially when the victims were of Chinese descent, as was often the case. Suharto’s resignation speech, broadcast live on CNN, was suddenly cut off in China, even though the only people who were able to watch it were guests at international hotels. But most Chinese know how to read between the lines, and people understood perfectly well what had happened.
“This is very important news for all Asian people,” said the keen young reporter for a local newspaper in Hainan. He was greatly excited, unusual in China when it comes to foreign news. We were sitting at the editorial office of a literary magazine. Most of the editors were there, as were some of the main writers. A young secretary passed around paper plates containing bananas and grapes. I was asked for my “foreign” view.
I could only repeat what I had read in the papers in Hong Kong. I said the Indonesian students had been inspired by the example of Tiananmen. This was received with nervous looks and polite laughter. One or two people scraped the floor with their feet. What did I think of the possibility of democratic change in China? It was not a question I relished, for I did not like to hold forth, in my imperfect Chinese, to people who knew the problems of their country better than I ever would. Still, I had to say something. So I said I saw no reason why Chinese could not handle a democracy if the Koreans, the Filipinos, the Taiwanese, the Japanese, and now, one hoped, the Indonesians could.
The usual discussion—usual among Chinese intellectuals, that is—about the peculiarities of Chinese culture ensued. It would take a long time for democracy to develop in China. China was too big. China was too poor. China was too complicated. Chinese history was too long. Chinese people needed to be more educated. They had little idea of democratic rights. If democracy came too suddenly, there might be chaos. And so on. The keen young reporter then asked me whether I could comment on a particularly “sensitive topic.” What about June 4, 1989, the Beijing Massacre? But one of the editors, the most senior person in the room, swiftly intervened, pointing out that I was a “distinguished foreign guest,” who had traveled far, so perhaps I could offer them some insights into the wider world outside China.
Later that same day, I went out on my own for a snack. Opposite my hotel was a half-finished concrete shell of a building. Much of Haikou, the main city on Hainan, was like that. The building boom of the early 1990s had come to a sudden halt, victim of the Asian financial crisis. Parts of Haikou looked as though they had been bombed. A kitchen had been improvised in one of the rooms of the half-finished building. Next door a jerry-built “beauty parlor” was a front for a brothel. A young man, his shirtless back shiny with sweat, was tossing noodles about in a large pot. After some diffidence, he wiped his hands on his trousers and came over for a chat. We were joined by two of his friends and a girl in a filmy evening gown, who worked at another “beauty parlor.” They stared at me and said nothing.
The cook had come down from a village in Sichuan with his sister, who was helping him run the food stall. But he was in debt to the businessman who paid his wages. That was the trouble with the economic reforms, he said: The rich bosses now controlled everything. I nodded, and slowly ate my noodles with garlic and squid. The chef then shifted in his seat and emptied his nose, by first blocking one nostril and snorting in a short, sharp burst, then repeating the procedure with the other nostril. His manners were far from elegant. But he was no fool. “You know,” he suddenly said, “in your country the individual has the right to control his own life. Not here in China. Everything is controlled from above. The Communist Party has complete power. That is why we have no rights here.”
The intellectuals at the literary magazine might well have shared the cook’s view. In fact, some almost certainly did. But one of the oddities in contemporary China is that it often takes a lack of education to be able to express things clearly. Or, to put it differently, it is those who live near the bottom of society who feel
the lack of individual rights most keenly. That is why they generally get to the point more quickly.
Few people had high hopes for the legislative elections in Hong Kong. The weather was terrible and the election rules were rigged. Of sixty seats, only twenty would go to people being directly elected. This made it impossible for directly elected candidates to gain a majority in LegCo. The rest of the seats, mostly occupied by patriotic businessmen, would be given by appointment or would go to people chosen by their professional peers. In other words, even if every democrat was elected, they could neither initiate nor block any laws. Hong Kong in 1998, with its highly educated population and a higher per capita income than Britain’s, was less democratic than India before independence. And yet Tung Chee-hwa, the chief executive, still spoke of the need for a lengthy process of political education, and warned of the grave risk of instability and chaos if people should have too much political freedom too soon.
In the week of the election, I ran into Lau San-ching at a meeting for overseas Chinese dissidents in Macau. This was the occasion when his former jailmate Wang Xizhe stood up and proposed a cheer for the students in Jakarta. Lau said he was in favor of boycotting the coming elections. To take part in a rigged exercise was to support a humiliating charade. Yet that was not the prevailing sentiment among the overseas dissidents who had gathered at the Diocesan Catholic Center for Youth in Macau. There was much optimistic talk that day of Hong Kong “liberating” China. Democracy would come from the south, said one of the speakers. After all, Sun Yat-sen had started his republican revolution in the south. The same kind of thing would happen again. Yan Jiaqi, the bespectacled former adviser to Communist Party secretary-general Zhao Ziyang, said that Hong Kong’s freedoms would serve as an example to China. Unfortunately, Yan was unable to express this view in Hong Kong, where he was refused an entry permit. That is why we were in Macau, at the time still a Portuguese colony.
