There was less than total surprise, then—though there was great dismay—when Mrs Thatcher proceeded to make a diplomatic blunder. She arrived in Hong Kong to tell the citizenry something of the talks she had had in the Chinese capital. She was in a tough mood—possibly she was still flushed by the great military victory in another colony, the Falkland Islands—when she made two declarations: the treaties that had given Britain dominion over these few square miles of China were in her view ‘valid in international law’, and China’s honour would be impugned if it thought otherwise since ‘if a country will not stand by one treaty, it will not stand by another’. Britain, she said, ‘keeps her treaties’. Moreover, Britain had a responsibility to the people of Hong Kong; and she was proud of what had been achieved by Hong Kong under British administration.
Peking was outraged. As David Bonavia,
The Times
man in China, was to write: ‘Seldom in British colonial history was so much damage done to the interests of so many people in such a short space of time by a single person.’ The Hong Kong dollar slumped, and the stock market—and its index, the regionally notorious Hang Seng—went berserk. People began to wonder if the People’s Liberation Army would march in there and then, and end what Hsinhua, the New China News Agency, was to call ‘British Imperialism’s plunder of Chinese territory’.
In the event it was the professional, often maligned diplomats who saved the Prime Minister’s reputation. For the next two years a team of Foreign Office men, all speakers of
putonghua
(Mandarin) including a romantic scholar-athlete figure of the old Lawrence school, a man named David Wilson who had climbed in some of China’s highest mountains, shuttled back and forth between Whitehall, Upper Albert Road, and the Fishing Platform Guest House in the centre of Peking. Their mission was formidable: they had to accept China’s firm belief that the three treaties ceding Hong Kong and the New Territories were ‘unequal’—signed when the Chinese were in a position of temporary weakness, and were not balanced by the offer of a
quid pro quo
from Britain; they had to accept that the end of the lease on the New Territories meant, essentially, an end to British rule in all Hong Kong (notwithstanding the terms of the Treaty of Nanking, which gave Hong Kong Island to Britain ‘in perpetuity’); and they had to construct a system for Hong Kong that would discharge Britain’s responsibilities to the five million people who lived there. Most, after all, had fled from Communist China; they had to be given a firm assurance, internationally respected and underwritten, that their freedoms and their remarkable ways of life would be preserved, at least for some generations.
The result was a document signed in Peking shortly before Christmas 1984, by Mrs Thatcher. Hong Kong would, indeed, become a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic. There would be an elected legislature (something the colony had not enjoyed under British rule) and perhaps an elected Governor. The legal system would remain precisely as it is. All the freedoms commonly accepted by Hong Kongers—the rights to free speech, a free press, freedom of association and religion and choice of employment—would be guaranteed. Capitalism would remain the economic dogma of the region, provided that was what the local people wanted. The Hong Kong dollar would remain in circulation, and would be convertible. All land leases would be honoured. The citizenry would be able to carry British passports (though of the less-than-entirely-worthwhile kind—they would not enable their
holders to settle in Britain, and would to all intents and purposes be regarded by British immigration officers as alien travel documents) and would enjoy some degree of British consular protection, long after Peking took control of the territory.
All these provisions would be preserved until at least 30th June 2047. A Joint Liaison Group, made up of officials from both London and Peking, would supervise the arrangements for the transition; the group would begin work in 1985, and would cease to exist in the year 2000, once Peking was firmly established as ruler once again.
The document was welcomed as a diplomatic triumph. Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Foreign Secretary, a man with a reputation for weakness (being attacked by Sir Geoffrey in the House of Commons was like ‘being savaged by a dead sheep’, a member of the Labour Opposition Denis Healey once said), was the hero of the hour. At least, he was in London. The people of Hong Kong were told their objections would be noted, if they had any (and a team was set up to note them, and the Whitehall mandarin Sir Patrick Nairne, now an Oxford college principal and head of the Italic Handwriting Society, was sent to monitor the monitors), but that the agreement was not about to be changed. A few did object. Some, who had good cause to appreciate the mercurial nature of the Chinese leadership, said they were deeply sceptical—how, they asked, could the British, in all good faith, negotiate with the heirs to the Cultural Revolution, the practitioners of dogmatic madness? How could anyone be trusted? Others were angry about their own status—why had the Falkland Islanders and the Gibraltarians been admitted to the cosy club of full British nationality, and the Cantonese of Hong Kong specifically excluded, and rendered into some national half-caste status, neither properly British, nor properly Chinese, nor even properly of an entity called Hong Kong?
A few leader writers in the British newspapers agreed with them, and so did a clutch of Members of Parliament, and some in the Upper House, too. Sir Patrick Nairne, with the utmost courtesy and care, took note of all the objections, agreed that they had been considered most fairly by the monitoring team, and wrote a report
for Parliament. A Bill was presented, a vote was taken, an Act was passed, the Treaty of Nanking and the Convention of Peking 1860 were each effectively rescinded, and Hong Kong began its inexorable progress out of the British Empire, and into the fathomless mysteries of Special Communist Administration.
The rest of the Empire, and a gaggle of Commonwealth brother-nations, smelled fortune in the air. People would never stay in Hong Kong, they reasoned; companies would bail out, would place their funds in countries that had a guaranteed future (guaranteed non-Communist, that is), send their personnel to more stable outposts under Imperial control or influence. And so, like vultures (or like lifeboat crews, depending on the viewpoint) they flew in to Kai Tak—the Caymanian bankers, the tax-shelter aficionados from Grand Turk, officials offering passports from Fiji or citizenship in Canada or resident status in Bermuda and the Bahamas. There were uncountable billions of dollars in Hong Kong that could well be looking for new homes: everyone seemed, reasonably enough, to want to help find them.
In December 1938, W. H. Auden wrote of Hong Kong:
The leading characters are wise and witty
Substantial men of birth and education
With wide experience of administration
They know the manners of a modern city
Only the servants enter unexpected
Their silence has a fresh dramatic use
Here in the East the bankers have erected
A worthy temple to the Comic Muse
The servants, and the bankers. Always the servants triumph in the end. They are on the verge of doing so now, though the Europeans—the bankers, the dealers, the merchants, the taipans—seem to do so for the moment.
It was not so long ago that the taipans, the great men of the
Oriental Empire, really did rule Hong Kong. Their names—Jardine, Swire, Hutchison, Gilman, Dodwell, Marden, Kadoorie—really did cause the colony to tremble and obey. Power did once rest with the Jockey Club, Jardine’s, the HongKong and Shanghai Bank, and the Governor—in that order. Hong Kong Land, China Light and Power, the Hong Kong Club, the
South China Morning Post
—these were the pillars of established order, and woe betide any who dared forget.
But behind all these grand panjandrums of the Western Empire there was always—though not always heard, or recognised—the dull, thunderous murmur of the Eastern, mightier Empire of the Chinese. This may have been a British enclave, run by Sherwood Foresters and Grenadiers, flown over by the Royal Air Force, sailed around by the Royal Navy (though only in twenty-five-year-old Ton class minesweepers today), and policed by officers from Glasgow and Bristol and West Hartlepool; this may have long been run under the stern authority of the Union flag, all blanco, brass and tropical whites, goose-feathers and the Anthem and the Queen’s birthday party; this may have been the base for a hundred thousand temporary merchants with their gin-and-tonics, their cricket matches, their yachts and their bored wives; but this was also, irrevocably, unmistakably and magnificently, no other place than China.
Hong Kong was never separate from China. It succeeded because the vision and investment of the immigrant round-eyes was able to marry with the energies, the acumen and ambition of the refugee Chinese. It was not another Gibraltar, able to hold itself aloof from its population; nor was it a St Helena or a Caribbean island, where a small élite kept the native peoples in subjection, and wondered why there was no progress, and little hope. In Hong Kong the British were past-masters at ordering and directing the irrepressible energies of the mighty crush of Chinese humanity, until the point was reached where the stream became too strong, burst over its banks, and carried the British along in its exuberant fury.
And so today the rulers of Hong Kong—the new rulers—are the Chinese. The drivers of the 600 Rolls-Royces registered in the
colony are, invariably, wealthy men from Canton or Shanghai. (There are only fourteen registered rickshaws, also driven by Chinese, but for tourists coming off the Star Ferry.) The big names, the new taipans, are the Run Run Shaws and the Y. K. Paos and the Woo Hon Fais—hard-working, shrewd, ruthless, merchant venturers. And in the background, the Triads—the Chinese version of the Mafia, controlling and manipulating and directing the seamier side of the colony, with all its curious needs and desires. It was a supreme irony, a policeman said to me one evening over a drink in a Wanchai bar, that the British gained Hong Kong as the result of a war that stemmed from British attempts to force opium on the Chinese market; the Triads were now the principal target of the Royal Hong Kong police for trafficking in derivatives of the very same substance, and trying to ship it, and sell it, back to the British.
A few days after the excitements of the signing ceremonies, and once the colony appeared to have accustomed herself to the harsh fact that the British were no longer going to rule and the Han Chinese would be taking over in the Year of the Rat, 5,000 days hence—once all was settled, and the arguments were stilled, I took a morning ferry ride to Lantau Island, on the western perimeter of the colony.
I went with a friend, a beautiful young Chinese girl. We sat together on the prow of the ferry, the early sun warming our backs, and watched the wall of great skyscrapers slip past, and the junks dip through the waves, and the great ocean freighters flying their flags from Panama and Liberia, Greece and India. This was indeed the engine of Eastern commerce, a key to the lock of the world! Sir John Fisher had been right; Lord Curzon was correct in assuming that all foreigners would bow in mute respect at the sight of Hong Kong, this perpetual exhibition of British might and main.
But then the skyscrapers were behind us, and the green hills of Lantau rose ahead, and my friend was chatting to a neighbour in the shrill singsong of her old Canton, and the waters were busy with small fishing boats, and a sort of peace had settled all around. We took a car to the very western tip of the island, and up among the
hills and the tea plantations to the Po Lin monastery, where the Buddhists pray and teach and find their sanctuary. I had come because an English friend had a son there. He was learning to be a priest, and I had come to give him his mother’s love.
We walked through a different world. The monks, silent and shuffling in their deep brown robes, went about their holy business in a rich silence. The air was heavy with incense, and thin blue eddies of smoke rose from the incense sticks before an effigy of the Lord Buddha. Offerings of oranges and figs, bananas and papayas and freshly gathered tea lay on the altars. Old women would approach the statue, bow, kneel, make wordless prayers and offer silent supplication.
I found my Englishman, shaven-headed and serene, learning to fold a robe made of red silk. He was on a three-day vow of silence; but my friend asked the abbot if he might speak to me for a few moments, and permission was given, with a smile. ‘Come to see the real Hong Kong?’ was his first question. He said he loved the island, its feeling of one-ness with China, its timelessness, its immemorial qualities. He did not know where the abbot would send him, and he was naturally content to do as he was bidden; but he would love to stay here, among the clouds and the fragrance of the tea bushes, and on the edge of China. And my friend nodded happily, and she was silent on the ferry boat back to Hong Kong Island, and when we said goodbye—for I had to fly on to another country, and another island, even more remote—she said she hoped the Hong Kong that arose after the British left was more like Lantau, less like Wanchai, Central, and the streaming shops of Tsim Sha Tsui.
This is the only British colony of whose constitutional future we can now be sure. It is the only colony that, on being freed from British rule, becomes subsumed into a neighbour nation (Northern Ireland is the single remaining possession that awaits a similar fate). At one second after midnight on 1st July 1997 the Crown colony of Hong Kong will be retitled the Special Administrative Region of Xianggang—Hong Kong, China.
A few moments before there will have been a sorry little ceremony. A small detachment of British troops, all in Number One dress and gleaming brass, will have wheeled, clattered and saluted, and a blare of trumpets will have sounded the familiar anthem. The Governor, all in white, with the plumes of his hat fluttering white and scarlet in the night-time breeze, will have stepped forward to the dais. Drums will have rolled; the distant chimes from the cathedral church of St John will sound the midnight hour; a marine will have lowered, with infinite slowness, the Union flag from the white jackstaff.