Spectator's Journal/Swan Song for Hong Kong
Brookhiser, Richard
"Spectator's Journal/Swan Song for Hong Kong" Britain's 99-year lease to Hong Kong expires in 1997, at which time the Crown Colony will become part of Communist China. I can now face the prospect with equanimity— for I have a tailor, Ascot...
...before the ComRichard Brookhiser, managing editor of National Review, is the author of The Outside Story (Doubleday...
...The papers were filled with ecclesiastical greetings, about as jolly as telegrams to the Alamo...
...Peking will not levy taxes...
...It is only an accident that the British have been able to run a free market economy in Hong Kong...
...Others seem to share this analysis...
...They make us look like Carmelite nuns...
...it had only to close its fingers...
...so can British judges...
...In itself, this corruption will represent only a small tax on doing business in the Special Administrative Region...
...It is very encouraging to hear from you that guarantees are promised for the religious freedom of the people of Hong Kong...
...they certainly can't do it at home...
...But for a place like Hong Kong, the slightest imposition of controls is a step backwards...
...The calculations, it seems, are changing...
...The glass, in other words, is half full...
...It conducts a vast amount of China's business...
...What the Mainland most wants, in this view, is not Hong Kong, but Taiwan...
...But it will make for some very fortunate Mainlanders...
...Those who are not so fortunate will see that the system leaves them out...
...What the Chinese did there—or did not do—after 1966, the argument runs, they will do again, playing for bigger stakes, in Hong Kong after 1997...
...The Brit civil servants who have run the place with such a light hand may stay on...
...The last time I was there, by some unimaginable failure, even the Chinese food was bad...
...There is a second, political reason...
...The benefits to China will be enormous, for when a totalitarian society relaxes any controls to any extent, the concrete sprouts with grass...
...So London and Peking began to talk...
...on the Future of Hong Kong—on paper, an impressive agreement indeed...
...The reason most commonly cited for continued Chinese forbearance is the economic value of Hong Kong...
...Taking account of the history of Hong Kong and its reahties," the Chinese pledge to run it as a Special Administrative Region (SAR), maintaining both the present economic system and "the lifestyle...
...Why should the Draft Agreement be any more valuable...
...May the Lord grant you wisdom and courage," wrote another Indian cleric, "to go ahead and lead your people as Moses once led his people out of the desert...
...But the freedom to be our potty little selves certainly includes the freedom to do all this...
...Hong Kong now is probably the most libertarian place on earth...
...Unlike many conservatives, particularly those of the Church of the Free Market, I am not a rabid Hongkongophile...
...But when they shut down, it alone remained open...
...Well, we can't do anything in this matter, except to pray for the grace of God...
...It may be, as Tom Bethell and all the rest of my friends recently returned from the World Media Association's trip to Peking assure me, that things have truly changed there, and that the Chinese government sees that its best interests lie in the direction of freedom...
...the crowds at sales that are like rush-hour on a Grand Central subway platform, or a feeding frenzy of sharks...
...For years...
...just as it includes the freedom to order custom-made shirts, which, sub specie eternitatis, is not so different...
...John Paul II declared this July a month for the entire Roman Catholic Church to pray for the future of the diocese of Hong Kong...
...On a more mundane level, in 1985 for the first time in decades more capital flowed out of Hong Kong than flowed in...
...There follows a long list of rights, including freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, travel, strike, demonstration, and religious belief...
...the thousands of boutiques in the dozens of shopping malls, all, except for the odd Italian or Japanese store, filled with wares that are utterly without style...
...Why then am I so sure that Hong Kong is dead meat...
...For China to de-capitalize it—to change its unsocialist "lifestyle's— would be an act of selfamputation...
...the incessant, relentless getting and spending— finally gets you down...
...more important, it is the handiest source of people who can conduct business...
...munist takeover...
...The ranks of new buildings, all of them hideous...
...I am not referring to everyone's favorite hypothetical—a Maoist reaction following the death of Deng Xiaoping...
...Anyone who thinks Americans are crass or materialistic should go there...
...But realism soon set in...
...Hong Kong is China's outlet to world trade—a First World city on the edge of a vast Third World hinterland...
...There are Uttle shops on Stanley Street on Hong Kong Island which sell ten-million-dollar bills—payable to the Bank of Hell...
...I foresee two likely ways in which Hong Kong could die, one slow and one fast...
...Peking held Macao in its palm...
...for which it deserves our respect, and the hope, forlorn as the Indian bishop's, that it may continue to do so...
...Hong Kong dies quickly...
...A recent governor general, with the wonderful name of Cowperthwaite, refused even to collect population statistics, on the grounds that such data provided statists and other meddlers the figures with which to flesh out their plans, and he was not going to be a party to that...
...Hong Kong was a sleepy place, deep in the shade of more bustling Chinese cities...
...Hong Kong itself will provoke a reaction when members of the Chinese Communist Party see that other members, those who are in charge of Hong Kong affairs, are becoming billionaires— which, through rake-offs, pay-offs, and plain old seein' their opportunities and takin' 'em, they surely will...
...from which they will conclude that it is wrong...
...And so, ten years later, when all the rest of Portugal's 400-year-old empire was put on the block, only Auden's "weed of Catholic Europe," with its crumbling cathedrals and hectic casinos, remained under the Portuguese flag...
...Envy masked as Puritanism will demand change, and Hong Kong will be forced to muddle along at China's pace—much more rapidly, to be sure, than China ten years ago, but hardly the hive of Queen's Road Central today...
...I can now face the prospect with equanimity— for I have a tailor, Ascot Chang of the Peninsula Hotel who, if he finds it prudent to move to Singapore or Taipei or Los Angeles, can carry along my measurements and continue to send me Egyptian cotton shirts...
...They worked out an arrangement whereby the colony became "Chinese territory under Portuguese administration...
...For now...
...The SAR will keep its gold and stock markets, its status as a free port, and its own currency (minus the Queen's face...
...Hong Kong will die slowly because the Communists, with the best will in the world, will not know how to run it...
...During the Cultural Revolution of the mid-sixties, the decrepit Portuguese colony across the estuary of the Pearl River fell under the effective control of Red Guard mobs...
...We are not at all happy," wrote one Indian bishop, "to hear that Hong Kong will come under the Chinese in 1997...
...The scenario I have in mind is much more specific...
...Why should the Chinese be any better...
...But the Communists, with their eyes on Hong Kong, held off...
...Thatcher sounded as if she would defend the Crown Colony, with Gurkhas and captured Exocet missiles if necessary...
...There are those who deny that any moving will be necessary—most persuasively, the British who are giving Hong Kong up...
...Hong Kong residents themselves—those who are able to do so—are taking off several years to live long enough in places like Canada so as to be able to claim residence when the crunch comes...
...It was not always so...
...The cheeriest note of all was struck by the cardinal archbishop of Toronto...
...The result, two years ago, was A Draft Agreement...
...In order to have any chance of regaining Taiwan down the road, Peking must behave well in Hong Kong first...
...Britain can still have its way with a fourth-rate power, but not with a peer of the second rank...
...If the Chinese show less than the best will in the world...
...There was a moment, post-Falklands, when Mrs...
...Hong Kong was the place overseas Chinese sent their money, a current more than balancing the investments Hong Kong businessmen made abroad...
...The precedent is supposed to be Macao...
...The Hong Kong government points out that they are not remaining abroad, merely doing the necessary time before coming back...
...For almost forty years...
...Hong Kong, without quite intending to, has offered these freedoms to millions of people...
...It is necessary for me to point out that similar guarantees exist in some constitutions under Communist regimes, which are not respected...
...as it includes the freedom to think, pray, raise a family...
Vol. 19 • December 1986 • No. 12
