by Ian Buruma
Rigged or not, the LegCo election was an important test for the proposition that people in Hong Kong were not interested in politics. It would surely take considerable interest to brave the foul weather and vote for a minority of seats.
Emily Lau’s constituency is in the New Territories, where sprawling housing complexes rise like monstrous cliffs from land that was green and rural only a decade or so ago. Laundry flutters from bamboo poles that poke out of the windows. At street level amid cheap fast-food restaurants, old men play Chinese chess on concrete tables in the small spaces left between the housing blocks.
Residents of the New Territories came to see Emily to discuss their problems at her tiny campaign office on the ground floor of one of the housing complexes. In the afternoon, local housewives offered to help distribute leaflets and do other odd jobs. Almost none of the people who came to Emily’s office spoke English. A few spoke Mandarin. These were not westernized students of Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill. I spoke to a nurse, who worried that the poor were not represented in government. “The politicians are mostly rich men who have no idea how we live,” she said. A housewife was worried about the cost of public housing: “Our lives in Hong Kong are controlled by property tycoons.” A man, who had done business in China, was concerned about the effects of “patriotic” propaganda being introduced in Hong Kong schools by people “with connections in Beijing.” Emily Lau, he said, spoke about individual freedom and human rights, and that is why he wanted her to have a voice in the legislature.
But the most interesting person I spoke to was Emily’s driver. I had seen him before, a slim, quiet, smiling figure dressed in neatly pressed brown corduroy trousers. He said little but tried to be helpful in various ways. Someone told me he was a retired policeman. Yes, he confirmed, when I asked him, that was true, he had been in the Hong Kong police force for thirty years. His name was Cheng. I asked him how he had become Emily Lau’s driver. Let me tell you a story, he said.
One day, several years ago, when Cheng was still a policeman, his uncle, an elderly man, had gone for his daily cup of tea in a teahouse in Kowloon. The man was minding his own business when, suddenly, policemen rushed into the teahouse and arrested him as a suspected drug dealer. The charge was absurd, of course. But he was beaten at the police station. When the old man was pushed back into the street, he could barely walk. Cheng immediately realized what had happened. The police needed to make a certain number of arrests. To fill their quota, anybody would do. “That is why we need representation,” said Cheng. “To protect us from brute force.”
I made an appointment to see Cheng again the next day. He waited for me at a small office in another housing development. We sat down on plastic chairs. Children played outside. The gray and blue high-rise buildings blocked our view of the sky.
Cheng had been interested in politics before his uncle’s arrest. Born in China, he had moved to Hong Kong with his family in 1948, the year before the Communist takeover. When I used the conventional mainland phrase “liberation,” Mr. Cheng shook his head: “What do you mean, ‘liberation’? Nobody was liberated. The government never represented the people.”
Cheng had tried to keep in touch with his relatives in China. They would tell him how bad things were. You couldn’t criticize the government; indeed, you couldn’t tell the truth about anything. That is how the Cultural Revolution could happen, said Mr. Cheng. “The Chinese government in the 1960s was out of control because nobody had the right to correct it.”
Still, I said, Chinese were now able to voice their opinions more freely, weren’t they?
“Yes,” said Mr. Cheng, “but people’s opinions don’t count for much if they lack the right to vote. Without the right to vote, no government will listen to people’s opinions.”
Hong Kong, he continued, was free but not democratic. If you were rich, you could influence the government. But if you had no money, anything could happen to you. You could be arrested, like his uncle. “The police,” he said, “had connections with criminal bosses. They had far too much power. That is the problem in Hong Kong. Without democracy, a government can do anything it wants.”
Such views would not have gone down well with his former colleagues in the police force. Cheng was clear about that: “Policemen didn’t support democracy. They believed that the police should have absolute power, for otherwise Hong Kong would descend into chaos.” So Cheng joined a discussion group in the 1980s. Among friends, he was able to speak his mind. But it was only in 1989, with Tiananmen, that he decided to become more active. He saw the killings on television and heard Emily Lau speak about the need to protect free speech, to protect Hong Kong. He was nearing retirement age. So he supported Emily’s campaign in 1991, and drove her around for several weeks without pay in 1998. Rich people, he said, should not be allowed to monopolize power. He was afraid that the people in charge of Hong Kong would turn the place into something like Singapore, and then “we will be defenseless against arbitrary power.”
I was touched by the policeman’s words, but not because they were original. Like the noodle chef in Haikou, Cheng was stating the obvious. But the obvious is too often drowned in propaganda. Anyone who believes that Chinese people in Hong Kong (or indeed in Taiwan or China) have no interest in politics and do not really want democratic rights has to ignore Cheng and many others like him.
On May 25, 1998, 1.49 million people—more than half the voting population—turned out to vote, despite the driving rain, the mudslides, and the flooded roads. The democrats got 60 percent of the vote, enough for them to have formed a government if Hong Kong had been a democracy. Martin Lee, Szeto Wah, and Emily Lau all won back their seats. Though they would continue to dominate the legislature, the pro-Beijing businessmen and their allies won only a handful of seats through direct election.
This made the celebrations inside the Convention Center, where the vote counting took place, a colorful but also melancholy spectacle. Everything was scrupulously fair, more so perhaps than in any other election in Asia, or in much of the West for that matter. The ballot counters, wearing pink armbands, were surrounded by policemen in dark blue uniforms. Cheers went up as the results were announced. The democrats were delighted: Frontier Party members, in yellow shirts, gave three cheers to Emily Lau. Democratic Party members, in green shirts, surged forward as Szeto Wah and Martin Lee, dressed in a sober dark suit, entered the hall. It was all very civilized, without any of the sentimental raucousness of Taiwan or the childish pizzazz of America, more like a jolly cocktail party than an election-night celebration. A cynical journalist for one of the local financial dailies—a man who had often described himself to me as a “self-hating Chinaman,” a Hong Kong patriot who never wanted to set foot in China—told me how deeply moved he was by the election.
And yet a deep insult lay behind this happy occasion. In desperation, just before his downfall, Suharto had offered the Indonesians a system of indirect elections much like the one in Hong Kong but more generous. The Indonesians turned it down. They wanted more. But the people of Hong Kong had to make do with less. One of the legislators, who won his seat through a small appointed electoral committee, found the words to drive the insult home. Democracy, he said, was “like a fine wine. It needs many years to mature.” True, perhaps, as a general statement, but singularly inappropriate to the situation in Hong Kong. In politics, the people of Hong Kong were being treated like children, as colonial subjects always are. As well as their victory, the democrats were celebrating their own humiliation.
It used to be the case, until only a few years ago, that you could spot a mainlander in any Hong Kong crowd. The men wore ill-fitting suits and crude, pudding-bowl haircuts and the women wore dowdy skirts and flesh-colored stockings. You would see them walking around Central or Wanchai, gaping at the tall buildings, their brown country faces pictures of sheer wonder. Such mainlanders are few these days. Young people in Shanghai, Beijing, or Guangzhou follow the same fashion rules as their peers in Hong Kong.
Mainlanders have their own big buildings at home. They now blend into the crowd.
In fact, many mainlanders are more or less hidden in Hong Kong. PLA soldiers in grass-green uniforms are kept in their barracks, like chained dogs, lest they upset the citizens of Hong Kong. Mainland prostitutes and bar girls come out at night but have their own reasons for discretion. The legal status of mainlanders in Hong Kong is often precarious, and popular sentiment is so prejudiced against them that Tung Chee-hwa, the chief executive, scored political points by trying to stop children in China from joining their parents who are legal residents of Hong Kong. This hasty move was overturned by the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal, which ruled that the policy did not accord with Hong Kong’s constitution, the Basic Law. Tung then asked the National People’s Congress in Beijing to decide. The NPC overruled the Hong Kong court’s decision, whereupon the court reversed is earlier ruling; one more chip off Hong Kong’s promised autonomy. Martin Lee warned about undermining judicial independence. But there were few protests. The prospect of thousands of mainlanders coming in, even if they were only children, was more terrifying.
One reason that Hong Kong, though still relatively free, is not a bastion of mainlander dissidence is that not enough mainland dissidents can get in. And the few that do get in tend to be ignored. Jin Guantao, one of the writers of the mainland television series River Elegy, the polemical documentary that was blamed for inspiring the students’ revolt in 1989, is now a resident scholar at the Chinese University in Hong Kong. Together with his wife, Liu Qingfeng, he edits an excellent literary journal, 21st Century. I asked them one day why they preferred to be in Hong Kong rather than, say, the United States, with most of their old colleagues. Well, Jin said, the obvious advantage was the proximity of China. It was easier to stay in touch. Telephone calls were cheaper. You could almost look into China from his office window.
But then he began to complain in a stream of words, as if he had been starved of conversation. Hong Kong intellectuals, he said, really don’t understand mainland China. Liu Qingfeng chimed in: “After 1997, we assumed people here would be interested, but they have no idea.” And Jin said: “Even our colleagues at the university don’t understand China. They don’t know the history . . .” Liu again: “They know more about Japan. Especially young people. They like Japan. You know, people’s thinking here is still in the Qing dynasty. They have kept traditions alive. But they know nothing about modern China.”
They exaggerate. But Hong Kong, to be sure, is unlike Shanghai in the 1920s or Guangzhou in the 1910s. Revolution is not in the air. There are, nonetheless, two mainland dissidents who have somehow managed to slip through the net. One is Lu Siqing, a wiry Hunanese who operates out of one room in Kowloon, from where he tracks human-rights abuses in China and makes sure the world knows about them, via news services, human-rights organizations, and the Internet. The other is Han Dongfang, the man who tried to set up China’s first independent workers’ federation, in a small tent, in May 1989 in Tiananmen Square.
Han was a brave man. The Communist government fears rebellious workers far more than students or intellectuals. If the workers turned against the Party, whom could the Party still claim to represent? The students could still be described, sometimes, as innocent idealists led astray by bad elements, but the workers in Tiananmen were denounced as counterrevolutionary “hooligans.” None of the students was executed, but many workers were, with a shot in the neck, publicly, in football stadiums. When Han turned himself in at a police station in Beijing—not to confess to his “crimes” but to “clarify” his position—he was treated more brutally than any of the students.
He was thrown into a dark cell and kept in solitary confinement for months, refused medical treatment when he became seriously ill, had plastic tubes rammed down his nose when he went on a hunger strike, was locked up with murderers, and, worse, crammed into a small, damp, verminous cell for four months together with seventeen men suffering from contagious diseases and coughing their lungs out. When Han came out of prison, for medical treatment, after almost two years of torture and neglect, he was emaciated, barely conscious, and delirious with fever. He was coughing up what doctors call “green oysters.” The diagnosis was easy: tuberculosis. Han was hardly able to talk. But before his parole, he still managed to scrawl a few words on a piece of paper: “I refuse to cooperate.”
As soon as he was able to get up from his bed, Han rode his bicycle to the National People’s Congress, to hand in a petition for workers’ rights. Like Lau San-ching or Wei Jingsheng, his commitment to his cause was total. Principle, as he saw it, was absolute. He would never give up.
And now he was sitting opposite me at a French café in Hong Kong, minus one lung but neatly groomed in casual Hong Kong fashion. He took care of his good looks. Only his height and his hazelnut eyes, set in a long, handsome face, gave him away as a northerner. He spoke mostly in English, which he had learned in Hong Kong after 1993. His residence in Hong Kong was really a matter of chance. For fear of bad publicity should a famous activist die in custody, the Chinese had sent Han to the United States for medical treatment in 1992. But when he tried to return, he was stopped at the border. Memories of 1989 were still fresh. Chris Patten, the last governor, was sympathetic to democrats and granted Han asylum in Hong Kong, something that is no longer possible today. Han is now a Hong Kong citizen.
He keeps in touch with people in China through a talk show, broadcast three times a week on Radio Free Asia. Hong Kong, after all, still has press freedom. Listeners phone in from anywhere in China where RFA is not blocked. They ask him for advice on work-related problems: workers laid off without pay; bosses who pocket their workers’ wages; injuries resulting from faulty equipment or dangerous working conditions; workers who are sent to prison for complaining. Han, in short, deals with the dark side of capitalism with “Chinese characteristics,” the explosion of problems caused by economic reforms unsupported by political reforms.
But even Han does not violate the deal made with Hong Kong: He refuses to be drawn into revolutionary politics. All he can do is advise workers on how they might best solve practical problems. He cannot tell them to overthrow the Communist Party, even though some of his desperate listeners might welcome such radical advice.
Though Han spoke softly, in a polite monotone, like Lau San-ching and others who had suffered for their absolute principles, the frequent tightening of his lips showed a barely suppressed anger. I noticed it especially when he talked about his relations with intellectuals and students. The students in Tiananmen Square, he said, did not want workers to join them. This was their movement, they had said; rougher elements might disrupt things, provoke violence, give the government an excuse to crack down. Han went and talked to them, trying to forge an alliance. But they kept him waiting or fobbed him off like a noisome supplicant. He tried to convince them that labor would be the biggest issue in China for years to come. They didn’t care.
Later, when Han visited some of the prominent dissidents in New York and again stressed the importance of labor problems in China, they said that workers were “troublemakers” and “shouldn’t be involved in political reforms.”
“You know,” said Han, very quietly, “Chinese intellectuals despise workers. Either they want nothing to do with us or they talk about workers as political tools to bring down the Communist Party. People say China is doing well. But the workers are not. We are the losers, and we have no freedom to speak out. It’s no good relying on the intellectuals. The Communist Party was set up by intellectuals. We helped them come to power and look what happened. We are oppressed. No, we must organize ourselves.”
Listening to Han’s precise English and looking at his refined features and soft hands, I could understand why workers sometimes suspected him in 1989 of being an intellectual impostor posing as a working-class hero. Yet Han Dongfang was a worker, born in a dirt-poor village, in Shaanxi, one of the poorest provinces. His father had been a farmer and his mother a const
ruction worker in Beijing. Han barely finished high school in Beijing, and worked as a prison guard and later as an electrician at a depot for old locomotives. But he did have a curious mind and a rebellious streak. During a six-month job in a university library, he read everything from Greek myths to Hemingway. And in the militia, he caused outrage by protesting that the officers were feasting on their soldiers’ rations while the men went hungry.
This much about Han’s life I knew already, from newspaper profiles and a book, Black Hands of Beijing, by Robin Munro and George Black. But I wanted to have a better understanding of the source of his rebellion, apart from generalities about labor problems in China. What was it that hardened his resolve to the extent that he was prepared to die in misery rather than give in? Where did his absolute dedication come from?
We took the ferry to Lamma Island, where Han lived with his wife and two sons, Nathan and Jonathan. At night the skyscrapers of Hong Kong Island are lit up like giant Christmas trees on one side of the bay. On the other side is Kowloon, with gleaming ocean liners moored at the quay, and ahead, toward the outlying islands, as far as the eye can see, are ships of all sizes, like stars in a velvety sky. On a very clear night, you might even see a few lights on the horizon blinking all the way from China.
“I was always bullied at school,” Han said while staring into the distance. It was difficult to imagine this powerful man as a schoolyard victim. Then he told me how his parents got divorced and how he resented his father and felt uncomfortable when other children talked about their fathers. The children would bully him because he was poor. Even the teachers abused him at school. They said he was only fit to collect garbage. “Nobody liked us, because we were poor and from the provinces.” When he was beaten up by other children, the teachers blamed him. If you’re afraid of your teachers, he said, you’re afraid of everything. His lips tightened, and he said, still in that soft voice: “I still loathe teachers.”
