On Hong Kong

I suspect my readers would have to live in a cave to have never heard of the American Naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Land that was originally leased by the American Government at a time when Cuba was a model banana republic, the agreement was, as long as the United States makes the lease payments the US military can do with that land whatever they see fit. Well ever since Castro came to power in 1959, with one accidental exception, the Cubans have refused to cash the cheque, but every year the United States sends a new cheque which apparently to American authorities is sufficient to make the only American military presence on communist soil during the cold war something other than an act of war.

Hong Kong's history is a little more complicated but a significant event took place in 1898. Effective July 1 of that year the British Government entered into a 99 year lease with the old imperial government in Beijing for the lands surrounding an existing British colony on Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. Besides a hiatus of Japanese occupation during the war the British ran Hong Kong, and ran it with no regard to the notion of representative government. A governor was sent to the territory and answered to Westminister but the people of Hong Kong never voted for any member of parliament unless they packed their bags and moved to England.

Students of history might recognize the similarity between Hong Kong's situation through the last century and the situation in the Thirteen colonies in America prior to the American Revolution and to some extent Hong Kongers were rather unhappy with their situation. But just as the American colonists had certain "inalieable rights" so did Hong Kongers. I believe to people of Chinese ancestry the right to become fantastically wealthy is the most important of all the human rights and while the Cultural Revolution ravaged China's culture, professional and upper classes, Hong Kong was an Oasis of sanity, and wealth.

Now I should stress the first time I came to Hong Kong was July of 2004, just over seven years after the handover to Beijing, so in many respects I feel vaguely like an archaeologist, digging through upper layers of government propaganda and recent news to try to figure out a question I have often wondered about, is Hong Kong better off today than it was 11 years ago and more to the point who ran things better?

The obvious solution is just to ask anyone old enough, but people see the past through rose coloured glasses. The fact that at almost the same instant the British turned the keys over to the new owners the economies of East Asia smashed into a wall (through, to my knowledge, no fault of the Chinese) probably does not help render memories as objective as one would like.

There are a few observations I can make with respect to Hong Kong that seem blatantly obvious:

1. Hong Kongers are far wealthier than their fellow countrymen from anywhere else in the mainland. Whereas in the comparatively wealthy city of Shanghai a salary of $3,000 (US) a year would land you very comfortably into the upper crust of society, in Hong Kong $3,000 a month probably does not cover the mortgage payment, and yes I strongly suspect most Hong Kongers do own their home, even if it is mortgaged, much like in The West.
2. Driving and queuing habits are thoroughly sedated in Hong Kong. This may at first seem kind of off topic and petty, but, anyone who has ever seen a really bad driver, and then let's be honest here, how often have we noticed their ethnicity was Chinese? Well the problem on the mainland is people are pushy, horribly pushy and aggressive. If a line is supposed to form bet your knickers that someone will step out of line and jump the queue. Then before you can say "Cultural Revolution" the whole line is a big mob scene at the desk, subway, left turn lane, or whatever it was people were queued up for. (I suspect the cause is two fold, the vast population means you need to push if you want to get anywhere and during the cultural revolution it was said manners were the mark of the detested bourgeois, hence manners were wiped out at the point of a gun and are only very slowly returning.) Hong Kongers by comparison never endured the horror that was the cultural revolution, nor were there the food shortages during the so called "Great Leap Forward" that caused the starvation of tens of millions in the mainland. Near as I can tell the worst deprivation any resident of Hong Kong has ever endured is a shortage at the Louis Vitton store.
3. Hong Kongers have a fluency in English that is, or ought to be the envy of the rest of China. I don't need Lesley to translate basic transactions, the way I do in Shanghai. Chinglish is a much smaller problem in Hong Kong as well, granted everyone speaks English with a British accent, but most people can at least communicate the most critical things to me.
   

There are a few less obvious hints of problems under the surface.

1. Much of the coin money still has Queen Elizabeth the second on one side. Granted as a Canadian I don't really have a problem with that, after Her Majesty is on all our coins and even the $20. (Old enough readers might even remember the one and two dollar bill?) Except Hong Kong has been under Chinese rule for how many years and no one has bothered to mint enough $2 coins to allow for the decirculation of old pictures of Her Majesty?
2. The subway system has not really changed much since the new airport opened up and the new airport was itself almost completed before the hand over. There is a mind boggling stagnancy to Hong Kong, both the buildings and the infrastructure seem unchanged since 1997 or 98. Its like someone decided things were fine the way they were and there was no need to make additional improvements (besides building a one stop subway line that connects Hong Kong Disney World to everything.)
3. Maybe it is just the paper I picked up, but the South China Morning Post lacked the beat up on anyone in a position of power I would expect from a liberalized press. Truth was the South China Morning Post felt like an enlarged version of the China Daily, except with a focus on Hong Kong instead of all of China. Even a column by Frank Ching who has contributed to The Globe and Mail from time to time seemed wimpish. Sorry Frank but but an open society politicians should cower in fear of journalists. Politicians don't cower, not enough in the west - our journalists are push overs - but Hong Kong journalists are getting to be as bad as the Chinese reporters sent to interview Hu Jintao.

In short then, are Hong Kongers better off today then they were under British rule? I do not know, how can I know for sure? But it does seem to me that for a long time anyway it was the intention of Beijing to stick it to Hong Kong, in a bad way, most notably through the appointment of the thoroughly incompetent Tung Chee Hwa. I think it says something when you appoint a relative outsider to govern a city. It screams something when out of 7 million people, not exactly known for taking to the streets, a million protested, yes almost 15% of the entire population went and protested one of Tung's more odious propositions. (In an effort to curb the size of the protest, shortly after the protest was announced, it was decided that all museums and galleries in the city would be free to the public that day only to celebrate the end of SARS.)

I am not sure the British did a great job with Hong Kong, but I am sure that in the first several years of Chinese rule the people of Hong Kong were pretty unimpressed with what Beijing gave them. Still things do seem to be turning around, slowly, even in Beijing there seems to be an effort to open up the press and liberalize the judiciary, so I think there is grounds to hope.