My Empire

...M.I.B...

...M.I.B...

...Indeed, not least of the surprises the British found after Captain Elliott declared Hong Kong a free and open port in 1841 was the number of Chinese who elected to come live there: from a few thousand in 1841 it leapt to 2,0,338 in 1848, to 121,825 in 1865...

...I have to think that the Magna Carta, however tenuous, had some effect here, as did a much-maligned nineteenth-century concept of the freedom to trade...

...The exceptions are the members of Hong Kong's old business and political establishment, for the entirely understandable reason that now they expect to be the new establishment...

...For in the end the affront represented by Hong Kong was not the humiliation of the Opium War but the humiliation of knowing, felt most keenly by the Chinese Communist Party, that the British ran Hong Kong better than it ever could, in the process showing the world what a Chinese people might accomplish if given a taste of freedom...

...Yeung Wai Hong is with me on this one...

...awarded by Her Britannic Majesty was until recently conspicuously attached to his name...

...For another, Hong Kong people are decidedly ambivalent about their colonial legacy, not—as left-wing critics would have it— because they have been cut off from their Chinese roots but because the China they havecreated over the past 15o years is an altogether superior China to the one to whose embrace they have just been returned...

...When Patten speaks of dirty deals, it is this he has in mind, because the nods and winks given to Peking in the 1980's meant that the game was nearly up by the time Patten arrived in mid-199z...

...Nor do I see any contradiction...

...I have finished the race...

...Hong is the other man who comes to mind when I think of Britain's legacy, a civil servant and academic who turned publisher of Jimmy Lai's Next magazine, where he writes a column as well as the magazine's editorials...

...Hong says he still remembers his first meal in freedom...

...My two-year-old daughter, Grace, watched the Governor leave from atop my shoulders, waving her hands with the rest of the crowd...

...Back when Patten was seeking out what he called "elbow room" for more reform, this crowd was fond of citing the inviolability of the Basic Law as a reason to oppose it...

...If I had let them keep them they could only misuse them," Sir John responded, barely looking up from his plate...

...In 1923 he returned to deliver the commencement address at the University of Hong Kong, where he asked the students "how it was that foreigners, the Englishmen, could do so much as they had done with the barren rock of Hong Kong within seventy or eighty years while in 4,000 years China had no place like Hong Kong...

...There were no bowls, so they ate out of old tin cans...

...There was a brief period in the middle of that decade when the Communists were giving outexit visas, and Hong's father used that window of opportunity to get out on the pretext of meeting Hong's older brother, who was ostensibly coming back from Milwaukee...

...Hmm, as Ben Stein would say...

...Yet Patten did succeed in two more fundamental things: First, in demonstrating to the world that China was never serious about the promise of "one country, two systems," not, at least, in the political sense...

...Everyone present felt it: the awful consonance between the man and the words...

...You mean like denouncing Chris's political reform and then showing up at the back door to inquire about a British passport...

...He was a curious beast, this new Governor, shunning the imperial trappings and appearing on subways, mar42 September 1997 • The American Spectator kets, etc., to sell his program...

...While Patten and Prince Charles moved easily among the crowd, Li Peng and Jiang Zemin looked like mafia dons at an FBI picnic...

...Yes, that would do it...

...John and I have a lot of arguments about this, because John assumes that it is a failing of British colonialism whereas I see it as more or less a reflection of the natural order of things...

...I asked Yeung Wai Hong what he thought of all this and he told me: "The British gave me my life...

...It was all here, and yet though part of the story it is only part—and not the most important part at that...

...Many of the revelers came festooned with Union Jacks, including a stunning blonde whose photograph stared out at me from almost every front page of every paper I saw dated the following day...

...The studio re-shot it, and the new photograph was then sent to the Chinese authorities to back up the claim that the eldest son now had a job in Hong Kong and desired to see his mother...

...The American Spectator • September 1997 investiture back at Government House, where the Prince of Wales was to bestow the last honors on Her Majesty's good servants in the territory...

...It was meant as a gesture of respect, and I was irritated when some of the Americans responded with graceless remarks about the British...

...I have kept the faith...

...Tung...

...The images of Empire I carry from Hong Kong are more benign, even worthy of respect...

...It is interesting to compare these folks to Martin Lee and his fellow democrats, who are always attacked as Western lackeys but have not even a lousy Justice of the Peace among the lot of them...

...Today, among Hong Kong's comfortable establishment—white as much as yellow—Patten is widely considered to have stirred up all this trouble for nothing...

...To me the magnificence of Hong Kong was what it managed to do in spite of these many prejudices and shortcomings, most of which was reciprocated by the local Chinese...

...N of that Empire did not have its ugly face...

...To appreciate what his appointment has meant for Hong Kong you had to have been here before, when the cohort that immediately preceded him—Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, Foreign Affairs Advisor Percy Cradock, and Gov...

...John will tell you that praise for the British system is overdone, that the salient point in Hong Kong's success was not that it was British but that it was not Chinese, Communist Chinese in particular...

...Though it was the same selection from Paul's second letter to Timothy read out in Catholic churches all over the world, it will not be hard to see why it had a particular resonance within those walls that day...

...And what a decline in the stock market will do to your stocks, mutual funds and retirement accounts...

...But the old order changeth, yielding to the new...

...I have fought the good fight...

...It was at an outdoor amusement park in Macau, where his father bought some noodles from one of the food stalls...

...The same might be said of Rita Fan, the head of the new, China-appointed Provisional Legislature, who called Patten Hong Kong's "last emperor...

...The light that Patten threw on what went on before him helps explain why he is reviled as much by the Lord Howes and Sir Percys as the Lu Pings and Jiang Zemins...

...A week that was supposed to be marked by pageants and festivals was washed out...

...to find the ancient black Rolls that came with his office already parked out front, the one with the Crown in place of the normal license plate...

...everyone in Hong Kong has some relative like him...

...Though Sun exhorted the students to "carry this English example of good government to all parts of China," Chairman Mao reversed the injunction by driving hundreds of thousands of refugees into Hong Kong...

...Yet among the new government's very first acts was a law that will keep out the mainland-born children of Hong Kong parents, even though Article 24 of the Basic Law unambiguously grants them the right to live here...

...Khrushchev liked to taunt Mao about the "stinking rose" of colonialism on his doorstep...

...Kerry McGlynn, Patten's press spokesman, and chatted with Nancy and Jim Cox, the former of Business Week and the latter of USA Today...

...The Yeung family ultimately settled in Sai Kung, one of the poorest parts of the colony...

...Financial, 1-800-575-1566 Maturity dates may vary The American Spectator • September 19 9 7 43...

...One of the former, a Hong Kong businesswoman, was saying how nasty the Peking leadership looked in comparison with Patten and the Prince of Wales, and it was true...

...As it turned out we would have some time to wait, because the first few days of Chinese rule saw the most rainfall in Hong Kong since records first began to be kept in 1884...

...In a Washington Post piece just a few days after the resumption of Chinese sovereignty here, Keith Richburg quoted two Hong Kong eminentoes going on about how much discrimination they had borne under British rule, one the head of a top Chinese bank and the other a high court judge...

...In the papers the pro-Peking crowd were quick to dig up an old proverb about how a good storm is supposed to herald an auspicious beginning, but my suspicion is that most would have felt much easier had the sun smiled on them those very big days...

...A democratic government facing the same circumstances could make a good case for such a policy, but in the context of Hong Kong, where the Hong Kong government was dealing with the future of six million people to whom Britain had already shut its door, it meant British collaboration with China against the clear desires of the Hong Kong people...

...Yet it was just these people who built Hong Kong, in the process transforming it into the greatest Chinese city in the world ("a Chinese success story with British characteristics," as Patten likes to say...

...Until then I hadn't known that Hong had been born in China and came to Hong Kong during the 1950's...

...Both my grandfathers were young men in an America whose windows were filled with signs reading NINA—No Irish Need Apply—yet both thought they lived in the greatest country in the world...

...In early June, officials in neighboring Guangdong Province burnt 1,190 pounds of heroin and methamphetamine, in memory of Commissioner Lin Zexu, who set off the Opium War in 1839 when he destroyed three million pounds of foreign-owned opium by mixing it with lime and salt and washing it off into the sea...

...The Opium War was also the title of a patriotic film extravaganza also timed for the handover, the most expensive Chinese movie ever made...

...nor was the Philippines or Korea, and Hong Kong is far above them all...

...But the reality, at least in Hong Kong, is more complicated, notwithstanding its unwholesome origins...

...The lead chapter for the 1957 Hong Kong government yearbook, in fact, was called "A Problem of People...

...Macau was not run by Chinese...

...In the very last days when he was packing up, I happened to find myself at a lunch with Edward Llewellyn, Patten's political adviser...

...What would you say to: *12% fixed returns on a 12 month program *21% fixed returns on an 18 month program...

...June 29 happened to be the Feast of Sts...

...We don't agree on much," she said...

...Upon arrival John found that the shining example of enlightened Empire was in fact a racially divided and prejudiced Small Town...

...David Wilson—concluded that Hong Kong's only hope was to let Peking have its way whenever it bellowed loud enough...

...Walking inside we could see Patten and his family in their usual spot in the front left pew...

...Until but a few years ago a Hong Kong Bank man who married a local girl would soon find his future very much in doubt...

...Hong and I knew we would become friends when we each learned the other shared a passion for the architect of Hong Kong's development, the unsung hero of the Asian miracle, Sir John Cowperthwaite, a brilliant financial secretary who during his long tenure in office refused to allow 41 Hong Kong bureaucrats even to keep figures for GDP...

...Mind you, I say this as the author of a book on Hong Kong called Perfidious Albion, which chronicled the complicity of Mrs...

...This would be Hong's ticket out, though the family had to go first to Macau...

...Even when the rains let up, the humidity continued to hang over the territory like a damp and dirty rag...

...If you had done that," said Hong, "I would have been a Red Guard or dead...

...We lingered for a bit with friends: Amelia and Martin Lee, the tireless pro-democracy legislator who patiently answered for the umpteenth time all the questions the reporters asked him...

...These are the caricatures, and in truth they are easily found for anyone looking for them...

...Or the gin-soaked summer evenings...

...Financial Are you like most people, nervous about the stock market...

...We talked about the incongruities involved, how it was the departing imperial tyranny arguing that Hong Kong people should be given more democracy and the glorious motherland insisting on clawing some of these freedoms back...

...To the generation coming of age today the fifties is ancient history, but at the time it was thought that Hong Kong might go under...

...But Hong's family, like so many others, considered themselves fortunate...

...It was a bright day, and as we waited with Amelia Lee for Martin to finish with the press I remember looking up at the sky and thinking, "How strange it will be to wake up in China two days from now and find the sun still shining...

...It is considerably worse in Chinese, having to do with the fact that turtles do not know who their mothers are...

...qualified...

...And so while some part of most every Hong Kong Chinese welcomes the end of foreign rule, few really expect their new masters to be as benevolent as the old...

...At moments like these, I understand whence comes much of the sympathy for "Asian values...

...A few nights later it surfaced again, this time at a dinner party, when another American, a good friend in this case, turned to a well-known Communist publisher, Tsang Tak Sing, and tried to find common ground...

...At his swearing-in he refused the ostrich-plumed pith helmet and uniform in favor of a sober gray business suit, and he also declined the customary knighthood that came with the governorship on the grounds that he oughtn't be given any honors until he'd done something to earn them...

...Within the first few hours of the birth of the new Special Administration, the elected Legislative Council he worked so hard to see was thrown out in favor of one selected by China's hand-picked delegates...

...This was the Hong Kong of Suzie Wong days, of desperate tin shacks carpeting the hillsides, where survival was a day-to-day question and neighborhoods were marked by battles between the Communists and Nationalists...

...In the weeks leading up to the handover, the battles of i5o years ago were all refought, this time with the British vanquished and the Chinese triumphant...

...I t was fortunate for Empire that it was left to Patten to write the last chapter...

...The high court judge's anti-colonial soul emerged only when he found himself bypassed by his boss for the knighthood that traditionally came with his office...

...Your principle is fully secured...

...Now that the British standard has come down for the last time their true colors are flying, and these colors are not those of Communism but opportunism...

...I asked him, without betraying names, to tell me the most despicable actions he's seen...

...It may also explain why Hong Kong public opinion polls consistently rank him well ahead of his successor, Mr...

...The objections in my book, however, were political, and confined to a particular time and particular events...

...Patten walked up to the altar and read in a soft, clear voice: The time of my departure is near...

...Primarily I think of the impressive people I've met who are in some ways products of this system...

...Fortunately the mobs of cameramen and reporters dogging the last governor's last steps had been corralled into a sort of makeshift pen outside the front entrance, where they staked out their positions and waited for the governor to emerge...

...second, in ending Britain's shabby collaboration with China in the process of ensuring that these promises would not be realized...

...Just before he died in 1988, the veteran newsman Tsang Ki-fan put it this way: "This is the only Chinese society that, for a brief span of loo years, lived through an ideal never realized at any time in the history of Chinese societies —a time when no man had to live in fear of the midnight knock on the door...

...It was never Camelot, and even in the best of all possible worlds was destined someday to yield, lest one good custom corrupt the whole of China...

...For what do we now have in Patten's place...

...The same day the South China Morning Post reported that the first arrest of the new order was for indecent exposure, the culprit a visiting 24-year-old American named Kendall McKibben, who spat on Hong Kong's finest and shouted "F—ing Chinese" as they moved in to arrest him...

...the pride which certain British affected in never having set foot in China proper, and the rule by puffed-up second-rankers that colonialism so often meant...

...Call 1-800-575-1566 to find out what your stock broker doesn't want you to know...

...I'm not so sure...

...Peter and Paul, an extraordinary coincidence in light of the second reading that morning...

...A few years back, we had lunch with the great man at the Mandarin Hotel, where I put the question to him directly: Why had he not allowed people to keep these figures...

...For most of Hong Kong's history, too, Chinese were excluded from the best British clubs and residential areas...

...Yes, stock market returns without stock market risks...

...We said hello to...

...Did you know that if your funds are in the stock market, your principle is at risk...

...The bowling alley at the Hong Kong Club, the bastion of Old Britain, where the pins on its one lane are still set by Chinese hand rather than by machine...

...Many years later, when Hong came to know Sir John, the latter told him that the British in the 195os had once considered closing the door to Hong Kong...

...Teresa and Jimmy Lai, the clothing magnate-cum-newspaper publisher whose media group—the most popular Chinese media group in Hong Kong—has been unable to find an underwriter ever since his column two years back calling Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng a "turtle's egg...

...And during the 1960's and 70's, the Hong Kong government engaged in dirty tricks against perfectly legitimate local critics of the system who wanted more representative government...

...Later one of the networks aired a clip from the Wanchai bar district at dawn, where a number of my fellow gweilohs (foreign devils, or white people) lay passed out on the sidewalk like beached whales, some in remnants of black tie...

...We were a mixed bunch there that night, mostly Hong Kong Chinese and Americans...

...Peking, of course, tried very hard to capitalize on just those feelings...

...But Hong Kong's cousins to the north have some serious circles to square here...

...The low point of this process came in 1987 when the British put off the introduction of direct elections on the basis of a rigged public survey designed to show, contrary to all other polls at the time, that the people of Hong Kong did not want elections...

...The ending was almost anticlimactic, though there were some moist eyes in the room...

...When the Union Jack came down for the last time and the red flag went up, I offered a toast: "God Bless Hong Kong, and God Save the Queen...

...The example proved irresistible even to revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen, who had been booted out of Hong Kong as a student...

...That was also the British Empire, but you hear a lot more about opium these days...

...And it is also I.R.A...

...But we both hate the British...

...With NO market risk...

...The first is John Walden, a retired colonial officer who held just about every job except governor since coming out here after World War II full of enthusiasm for what he now calls "the mother of all lost causes...

...The British, Jimmy said, brought Hong Kong the rule of law, good government and freedom of the press, perhaps taken for granted back in England but revolutionary for a Chinese city, explaining why people like him would sacrifice everything to get here...

...S.E.P...

...As Hong points out, his case is not unique...

...A Peking that insists Hong Kong people should put behind them the events of just eight years ago on Tiananmen Square is not in a strong position to play the opium card of a century and a half back...

...In the memorial built to commemorate that action, I am reliably told, visitors today can shoot little cannon at crude paintings of nineteenth-century British warships...

...But it is a curious kind of imperialism indeed when residents of the colony boast a higher average income than do the people in Mother England...

...When at last Patten ducked into his car and waved a final good-bye, a whole world seemed to slip away with him...

...Parties quickly acquired a fin-desiècle aura, not least the $300-a-head do at the Regent where 39 guests were supposed to change from Western to Chinese dress at the stroke of midnight...

...As a full service, asset growth and protection company, we have something with stock market returns without stock market risks...

...Given the moment, the anti-British asides that night struck me as just as thoughtless as the mindless anti-Americanism we so resent in some of the British...

...The expatriate Brit who refers to his 6o-year-old servant as his "houseboy...

...The effect of the final days on those of us who make our homes here was surreal...

...About 45 minutes later, the Pattens walked down the aisle, out the door and into their waiting car, on their way to an 11 o'clock WILLIAM MCGURN is senior editor at the Far Eastern Economic Review...

...When the appointed moment came, Mrs...

...But mostly when I think of Empire I think of two people who saw it from two different sides...

...Thatcher's team in the Chinese attempt to deprive Hong Kong people of the democratically based administration they had been promised in 1984...

...There's Jimmy Lai, as self-confident a man as you'd ever meet, who told Patten just before he left that though it is a shame to The American Spectator • September 1997 have your country colonized he, Jimmy, had "never had this sense of shame because I have been a free man living in this city...

...As it happened, Hong and I were both at Jimmy's to watch the final lowering of the British flag on TV...

...We have a Provisional Legislature more colonial than any of its recent predecessors, including seats for legislators who had been repudiated by the people of Hong Kong...

...And so it was the last Sunday in June, the last Sunday of British Hong Kong...

...It is hard to take these born-again Chinese patriots seriously if only because virtually all of them are also decorated knights, commanders, and officers of the British Empire—when they are not carrying American passports, like Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa and his family...

...In the Western press, to be sure, colonialism has become what it is for the Communist Chinese: a synonym for racism and exploitation...

...Once he got to Hong Kong, the father had a photo studio cut his son out of a photograph taken in Wisconsin and pasted onto the foreground of a photograph of the Bank of China in Hong Kong...

...Only a few feet away, the Governor listened with head bowed, biting hard on his lower lip...

...Yet most of what contact I did have had less to do with our respective jobs than that the governor was a fellow parishioner at Immaculate Conception Cathedral on Caine Road, and when he wasn't abroad or at his weekend retreat in Fanling, we would invariably arrive at 9:3o a.m...

...BY WILLIAM McGURN I Hong Kong can't claim Chris Patten as a friend, though I did interview him once or twice and took the writer's immoderate pride in hearing him quote approvingly from my editorials in the Far Eastern Economic Review...

...as for the former, like so many others who have backed China so publicly in recent years, the O.B.E...

...And my guess is that it owes much to a system whose minimalism was designed not to depend on the virtue of its better officers but to mitigate the failings of its lousy ones...

...Leaving aside issues of racial equality—which might mean having to deal with the attitudes of the Hong Kong Chinese themselves, to Filipina maids or Vietnamese refugees as much as the white devils who ruled them—the fact is that Hong Kong's chief virtue has been as a refuge for generations 40 September 1997 • The American Spectator of Chinese who have escaped one or more of the social, economic or political typhoons that regularly wreak such havoc on the mainland...

...Yet the style was deceptive, for the resolution with which he held to his one idea—that Britain should do its best, however late in the game, to live up to the terms of the Joint Declaration—the same courage that lent such poignancy to the second reading from Paul that last Sunday, this was Victorian in the most honorable sense of the word...

...For one thing, as a Chinese scholar from the mainland who has examined the state archives pointed out, the British version of the war is much more accurate than the Chinese one, which he argues is colored by lies written by local officials attempting to flatter the emperor or cover up their own mistakes...