by Ian Buruma
Fifty thousand Hong Kong people a year know better. They are already boarding the planes, bound for Sydney, Vancouver, Singapore, New York. They have seen the future and they are moving somewhere else.
Opinions on the decor were as mixed as the drinks at last week’s opening party for Hong Kong’s newest nightclub. “Sort of 50s,” offered one reveller, “but with a bit of ’60s and ’90s as well,” she concluded.
South China Morning Post, January 1990
The first time I visited Hong Kong, in 1974, you could still see vestiges of the old colonial city. Portly Indians played cricket with British bankers and civil servants in the middle of the Central District, between the Hong Kong Club and the Supreme Court building. The highest buildings in Central were the Bank of China and the Hilton Hotel. The waterfront was a collection of ramshackle warehouses still redolent of opium dens and mysterious Oriental skulduggery. I remember walking up Queen’s Road Central and striking up a conversation with two beautifully dressed Asian girls who emerged from an expensive jewelry store. They spoke in exquisite French. They had come from Saigon on a shopping trip.
I have no idea where those girls are now, but I know that the Hong Kong Club, a charming Victorian building resembling a square Wedgwood bowl, is gone, the cricket ground is gone, the Bank of China stands in the shadow of a brand-new I. M. Pei building, and the Hilton Hotel is so dwarfed by new skyscrapers that you hardly notice it anymore. The physical change in Hong Kong has been so devastatingly fast that if you put two pictures side by side, one from 1974 and one from 1990, you would hardly believe they were of the same city. It is as if midtown Manhattan had been built in the last ten years, with nothing left to remind you of the 1950s, let alone the nineteenth century. Hong Kong looks like a city without a past.
“Cities,” wrote Lewis Mumford, “are a product of time.”
They are the molds in which men’s lifetimes have cooled and congealed, giving lasting shape, by way of art, to moments that would otherwise vanish with the living and leave no means of renewal or wider participation behind them.… By the diversity of its time-structures, the city in part escapes the tyranny of a single present, and the monotony of a future that consists in repeating only a single beat heard in the past.
Mumford’s convictions would have been shaken by Hong Kong, for little is left behind in this city of immigrants, so many of whom ended up moving somewhere else. There are hardly any museums in Hong Kong, precious few libraries, no great historical buildings, and no monuments to speak of. Well, perhaps there are two. One is the terrace of the Repulse Bay Hotel, rebuilt after the original hotel was pulled down some years ago. The other is a well-known tourist trap called the Tiger Balm Garden. This extraordinary piece of moralizing kitsch—plaster models of Chinese deities, folk heroes, wild animals, and torture scenes in a Buddhist hell—is a monument left behind by a rich Chinese businessman named Aw Boon Haw, the inventor of, among other things, Headache Cure Powder, Chinkawite Wince Mixture and, of course, Tiger Balm. Aw Boon Haw was born in Rangoon and died in Honolulu. His theme-park fantasy of Chinese folk culture is a monument to the enterprise of an overseas Chinese, a permanent drifter, the emigrant who made good.
There is, perhaps, another reason for the jangled sense of time in Hong Kong, the lack of any feeling of continuity besides the hurried mentality of the immigrant on the make, and that has to do with a more ancient Chinese approach to cities. The Chinese were never in the habit of building cities as monuments. There is no Chinese Rome, or London or Paris, a repository of centuries of civilization, to be handed on and added to from one generation to the next, cherished as a precious heirloom, meant to last forever. Mao Zedong may have been one of the great vandals of all time, but long before the Chairman was born, travelers in China remarked upon the nonchalance with which Chinese let the vestiges of the past rot away. Instead of preserving the old, people would rebuild in the same style. Hence a pagoda erected during the Tang Dynasty, but entirely rebuilt in, say, 1912, would still be regarded as ancient, for it is not so much the age of the bricks as the style or even the site that counts.
It is also true that Chinese connoisseurs tended to make a fetish of the ancient, which explains why China has the oldest industry in fake antiques in the world. But fake, to a Western ear, has a pejorative sound not entirely appropriate to the common Chinese view that a good imitation can be admired in its own right.
Instead of eternal cities, China had eternally shifting cities. With a new dynasty often came a new capital, whose layout was based on geomancy and other signs of auspiciousness. These seats of administrative power sometimes lasted about as long as the dynasties that built them were blessed with heaven’s mandate. Thus once great cities—Changan, Kaifeng, Hangzhou—are now provincial towns, with only a few monuments, frequently rebuilt through the ages, as reminders of past glory.
Most Chinese capitals were in the north or center of China, in the heartland of Chinese civilization. None was ever in the deep south, long considered a swampy region filled with ghosts and other undesirables. Trade is what made the southern coastal cities tick, not bureaucratic power. But commerce and cosmopolitanism were not highly valued by Chinese governments: on the contrary, merchants were strictly controlled, and contacts with outsiders were limited, if not forbidden. Mandarins, in the name of the Son of Heaven, ruled China, and they kept the businessmen firmly under their long-nailed thumbs. In its entire history, China had truly cosmopolitan cities only twice: between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, during the Tang and Song Dynasties, and again from the latter years of imperial China to the beginning of what is still called, without irony intended, Liberation.
Changan, the capital during the Tang Dynasty, was a center of trade with central Asia. Official control was relaxed, and business was good. Then, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the imperial government put the lid back on. As William Skinner observed in The City in Late Imperial China, the impact was especially severe on the southeastern coast, which is precisely where foreigners arrived in the nineteenth century to prize China open again. They were led in this enterprise by the English and Scottish opium pushers, who settled in a rocky little pirates’ lair called Hong Kong. Once more, Chinese merchants, stifled and disdained for centuries by the supercilious mandarins, were able to escape their official leash and, protected more or less by foreign laws, were free to make money in Amoy, Fuzhou, Tianjin, Shanghai and, of course, Hong Kong. It wasn’t long before Shanghai became the most cosmopolitan city in Chinese history.
Some Chinese were very rich as a result, many were better off than before, and many remained miserably poor. The pursuit of wealth and happiness led to the usual things—well-organized crime, well-stocked brothels and well-greased palms—but also to the richest cultural life the Chinese had seen for centuries and, despite wars, famines and terrorism, the freest marketplace for ideas Chinese had ever known. One of these ideas was Marxism.
Naturally, when a new breed of Chinese mandarins took upon themselves heaven’s mandate in 1949, all this had to go—except the Marxism, of course. Destruction is easier than one sometimes thinks. Whenever I enter the battleship-gray headquarters of the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank to cash a check, and watch in wonder the silent efficiency of this modern capitalist beehive, Hong Kong appears, for a moment, indestructible. But in Shanghai, once the government put its mind to it in 1952, it took exactly two months to turn the great metropolis into what one observer described as a dead city. (Pol Pot worked even faster, but then Phnom Penh is not Shanghai.) Businessmen were systematically humiliated, persecuted and above all squeezed of their assets, which, according to the correct line of the day, they had “stolen from the people.” One of the many curiosities of China after Mao is that you can still hear, in remote villages of the poor northwest, traces of the Shanghai dialect, spoken by the children and grandchildren of businessmen booted out of their city thirty-eight years ago.
Hong Kong might not be treated in quite the same way. But when
people speak blithely of China’s interest, they do well to remind themselves that China plucked its interest from a thriving business city before, by plunder. It is also useful to remember that however well-meaning or, to use a favorite word in this part of the world, sincere China’s mandarins may be, and however much they speak of Open Doors and Reforms, their understanding of commercial enterprise is more akin to that of the imperial mandarins than to the views of Milton Friedman, or even John Kenneth Galbraith. The traditional instinct is not to let the flowers of business bloom by encouraging the free pursuit of riches, but to control and to squeeze. Many Hong Kong businessmen are already paying their dues by donating vast sums to the motherland to curry favor with officialdom. The more they pay, the more will be demanded, for this only confirms to the mandarin mind that business is there to be fleeced.
Hong Kong and Shanghai are the products of peculiar historical events over which a feeble, decadent, insular China had little control, and the humiliation of being forced by foreigners to concede extraterritorial rights on Chinese soil is still keenly felt in Beijing. When Mrs. Thatcher, still flushed with her victories over the “Argies,” stumbled into Beijing in 1982 to convince Deng of the validity of the nineteenth-century treaties, Deng answered with expletives that were, I believe, deleted from the record but would have made even the Iron Lady blush. Hong Kong was promised autonomy nonetheless, which sounded very well on paper, but before reaching for their bottles of champagne, people might have paused to contemplate the fact that virtually throughout their history the rulers of China did everything in their power to deny their cities precisely what Hong Kong has been promised.
The freebooting, vice-ridden, cosmopolitan, mercenary, wonderful urban bitch goddesses—Berlin, New York, Shanghai, Hong Kong—are never much liked by those who live in the hinterlands, but the hatred, awe and envy inspired by Hong Kong are often extreme. Intellectuals in Beijing usually express a disdain for its empty materialism, its lack of culture and the rough-and-ready manners of its mainly Cantonese inhabitants. To most ordinary Chinese, Hong Kong is a wealthy Xanadu, so far away it hardly seems real. To millions of Southern Chinese it is the place they would rush to, if only they could. And, if they are lucky enough to live close by, they watch Hong Kong television and ask their friends and relatives who have made it to Xanadu for money, electronic gadgets, anything they can carry. To provincial communist cadres, Hong Kong is a place for freebies. You see them walking about in groups, in their badly cut suits and pudding-bowl haircuts, gawking with open mouths at the shops, the buildings, the restaurants, hoping perhaps that one day all this will be theirs. To the mandarins in Beijing, often men from China’s poor interior, Hong Kong represents everything they loathe: it is southern, urban, subversive, wicked, rich, relatively free and, above all, full of foreigners and their polluting foreign ways.
Of course it would be in Beijing’s interest to keep its hands off Hong Kong. But if the men who rule China today were to follow their instincts, they would stamp on the bitch goddess after having picked the last meat off her carcass. Few tears would be shed over Hong Kong’s demise, for it was never a Chinese heirloom to be cherished, but rather a monument to a past that still hurts. Why then, you might well ask, hasn’t China pounced before? What has kept the mandarins so long from booting the Brits out and grabbing what is theirs?
There is a possible answer to this, which sounds paradoxical, but isn’t. The reason for Deng’s decision to take back Hong Kong was, I believe, the result of his Open Door policy. Mao never wanted Hong Kong back, for the colonial city was hidden from sight, a Chinatown that was in China but not of it. The vice, the subversion, the spiritual pollution never penetrated China enough to be a threat. This began only once China’s door was ajar, and Deng realized that the only way to impose control was to turn Chinatown back into a Chinese town, subservient once again to the mandarins in Beijing. Yes, he wants Hong Kong to make money, but he also wants to suppress some of the very ideas and institutions that produce the wealth: Deng’s dilemma in a nutshell.
Alas—and after thousands of years of subservience, who can blame them?—most Chinese need little encouragement to fall into line with officialdom, particularly when the spirit of patriotism is invoked. And, with the unfailing accuracy of an experienced acupuncturist, Beijing has time and again managed to prick the one raw nerve in this hardbitten community of refugees and their offspring: patriotism—the need for a shared sense of the past, the need to feel Chinese.
Chinese authorities yesterday claimed that Mr Lee Cheukyan, the Hongkong pro-democracy lobbyist who was detained in Beijing, had confessed to supporting ‘counter-revolutionary organizations’. Mr Lee, a senior official in the Christian Industrial Committee, was allowed to return to Hongkong on Thursday after he was ‘educated’ by police in the mainland capital, Radio Beijing said.
South China Morning Post, June 1989
There are few more melancholy sights than Martin Lee, QC, standing on a platform in the rain, manfully singing “We Shall Overcome” with a crowd of 300 fellow crusaders for democracy in Hong Kong. His cause is just, his criticisms of London and Beijing are unfailingly correct, his methods are always peaceful and polite, which makes it all the sadder that he appears to be fighting for a lost cause. Hong Kong was promised direct elections by various representatives of the British government, who were, however, always carefully vague about the practicalities; Beijing doesn’t want direct elections to take place, or only to such a limited degree that they will be virtually meaningless. According to the 1990 Basic Law, less than half the legislature will be directly elected by as late as 1999. Although Beijing has made it clear that the Basic Law can no longer be changed, London still promises that something might be worked out. The people of Hong Kong, who have seen too many promises made and broken, maintain a sullen silence.
Martin Lee is not a professional politician: he is a highly successful barrister. And he showed little interest in politics until six years ago, when he realized that without elections Hong Kong would be bereft of an accountable local government, without which the future so-called Special Autonomous Region would have no protection against the whims of Beijing’s mandarins. He is, of course, absolutely right. And if you ask many Chinese in Hong Kong, they agree that he is right. Indeed, he is a very popular and much respected figure. And yet, there he is, with the long-suffering face of a sensitive camel, bravely singing songs to no more than a few hundred people.
The reasons for his failure are complex, but they are mostly to do with fear and a crippling sense of futility. The problem is not that the Chinese people are by their nature uninterested in politics. That is a self-serving myth propagated by mandarins in Beijing, in London and, indeed, in Hong Kong itself. But the myth has been sustained for so long in Hong Kong that it has become self-fulfilling; and it also accounts for an astonishing political naïveté, as well as a deep suspicion of politics among the worthies who still help to run Hong Kong today.
One of these worthies is the glamorous Dame Lydia Dunn, director of Swire’s, one of the oldest British trading houses, appointed member of the Legislative Council, campaigner for the right of Hong Kong people to live in Britain, wife of the former attorney general, winer and diner of every titled and famous face in town. She is, despite her anglicized name, completely Chinese, although one can hardly tell from her almost faultless Knightsbridge drawl. Perhaps to remind people of her Chineseness, she likes her official photographs to have Chinese screens in the background. She is, in short, a typical product of Empire, an honorary native member of the colonial club.*
Dame Lydia, like her fellow worthies, native or British, never believed in democracy for Hong Kong, but, again like many others, she was so shocked by the massacre in Beijing that now she at least pays lip service to the necessity for some democratic reforms. Her shock was in itself the result of naïveté, for, she admits, she had had no doubt that China was on the right track and that Hong Kong’s future was assured. What, then, I asked her,
about this democracy business?
“Well,” she purred, “you see, the problem with the Chinese people is that they are simply too individualistic for a democracy. They have no discipline, which is really most awkward if you have to work for the common good. The Japanese, of course, are quite, quite different. They are a disciplined race, and so they can have a democracy.”
I was too baffled to argue with her. But I should not have been surprised by this complete incomprehension of democratic principles, for, when it comes to politics, the tycoons and civil servants of capitalist Hong Kong are really not so different from the mandarins in communist Beijing. Thus, in Gerd Balke’s fascinating little book of interviews, Hongkong Voices, we hear Simon Li Fuk-sean, former High Court judge and drafter of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, expound the following theory: “As a society the people in Hongkong are politically immature. By not having universal suffrage we keep out a lot of people who make absolutely no contribution to society in Hongkong, are totally ignorant of any form of government, and are exploited by unscrupulous politicians.” Instead, says Li, only professional people with “interests to protect” should be elected by their peers to run Hong Kong, for “they, and not the parasites, deserve representation.”
