A hong kong diary
FREEMAN, NEAL B.
A Hong Kqng Diary by Neal B. Freeman Saturday. I have been coming to Hong Kong for more than 25 years, sometimes to do business, sometimes to prepare for trips to Taipei or Beijing. Other times, I...
...They despised the old PRC enough to risk everything in a mad dash for the border...
...In each case, it was a difficult passage, no stroll across the border from Tijuana...
...How does the leader of the world's only superpower make himself irrelevant to the biggest geopolitical story of the decade...
...Indeed, they are rolling out the inevitably red carpet...
...Didn't I understand, he pressed, that Hong Kong would instantaneously transship to China any U.S...
...But after a decent market-clearing interval— say, a year or two—what's left...
...Wednesday...
...The South China Morning Post has a poll this weekend...
...But even as the exiles left, their places were taken by new arrivals, many of them PRCers looking to beat the post-handover rush...
...he harrumphed...
...market, fueled by fresh money in so-called red chip stocks—securities in companies with mainland connections...
...Monday...
...So in raw numbers, the population has remained at approximately 6 million, but it's a different 6 million: Almost everybody wants to be here, wants to be a part of greater China...
...China is the most nubile market in the global economy, and the greed instinct, never well modulated here, is throbbing loudly...
...As did a big piece of Hong Kong Telecom, the world-class telephone system...
...Hong Kongers have been British subjects for 99 years and expect to be Chinese subjects for at least as long...
...One sees it even among Western-educated, Chardonnay-sipping upper-crusters...
...What's up...
...In four long days of talk, interview, and harangue, the name Bill Clinton has never come up...
...position as best I could discern it...
...He had a nasty habit of saying what was on his mind...
...Why the move...
...Friends here offer three explanations...
...There are exceptions, of course...
...He drops a phrase into conversation that comes back to me hours later as I ride the last Star Ferry back to Kowloon...
...Mainland businessmen as well as multinational corporations stocking up on executive housing...
...Tuesday...
...In odd moments, though, one calibrates the cumulative distance traveled...
...Most of the Hong Kong elite hold foreign passports (500,000 of them at a guesstimate), stuff cash in foreign bank accounts, and position close relatives in London, San Francisco, Sydney, or elsewhere...
...Even into the '80s, they dashed past the attack dogs or tried to float past the sharks at Mirs Bay...
...When they speak to their constituents, the democrats are shouting into a stiff breeze of confusion laced with indifference...
...We check into the Peninsula Hotel, where high tea is preceded immediately by lunch and followed immediately by dinner...
...You may have read more about them than the average Hong Konger...
...Other times, I come just to catch a glimpse of what comes next in the global economy...
...Third, the colony is filled with cockeyed optimists...
...By the early '90s, 70,000 Hong Kongers a year were moving abroad, most of them to Canada or Australia, some to the U.K...
...In 1984, it was made clear that the game would change—and exactly when...
...The PRC will be obliged, it is presumed, to "support" the deal in the aftermarket by propping up prices for stocks and real property...
...Owned until recently by Swire, one of the great British trading houses, the Cathay Pacific airline is now controlled by Citic, a mainland conglomerate closely associated with the People's Liberation Army...
...Didn't I understand that Japan and other sophisticated nations were tightening controls even as we were relaxing them...
...You've read about the democracy movement here, Martin Lee and company...
...After the usual death-defying plunge to the tarmac at Hong Kong's outmoded Kai Tak airport, we taxi to a stop next to a Cathay Pacific jumbo jet...
...They have little experience with democracy and, truth be told, not much interest in politics...
...And just who was it that packed up and shipped out...
...Here there are no barriers to success...
...In the so-called Joint Declaration of that year, Margaret Thatcher pledged that the British garrison would sail out of Victoria Harbor on June 30, 1997...
...When he speaks of the final takeover of the mainland by Mao Zedong five decades ago, he calls it the "liberation of '49...
...My new friend Lo Fu made a place for himself on one of those lists in Beijing...
...The locals came here in waves, most of them fleeing terror—the Taiping rebellion more than a century ago, the warlords in the '20s, Japan's invading army in the '30s, Mao in the '40s, and the cultural revolution in the '60s and '70s...
...I recited the U.S...
...Does he tremble at the prospect of the Big Red Machine rolling down Salisbury Road...
...Most of the rest think the future will be about as good as the recent past...
...But at the official level, the Chinese government is advancing in small, barely perceptible increments, none of them so discretely shocking as to cause the frog to jump from the hot water...
...An item in the paper caught my eye: "Indian socialites are packing their most dazzling jewelry into travel bags and heading for Singapore as the handover approaches...
...The democrats are hyperactive, skilled at media relations, and indisputably on the side of the angels...
...I may be witness to the birth of a new lifestyle option—moving to New York for the quiet life...
...But at one level they are running a theme park for the amusement of Western journalists...
...Hong Kong is not a settled community caught flatfooted by a Red revolution, after all...
...As did a chunk of China Light & Power, the big public utility...
...For all their booster rallies, these All-Star capitalists could be in business in some third country by next week...
...At the tony Regent Hotel, under a Union Jack snapping smartly in the harbor breeze, a countdown clock ticks off the seconds...
...It was the greatest migration of wealth and talent in the second half of the century, and cities that recruited effective-ly—Vancouver, Sydney, and the rest—propelled themselves into the front ranks of the world economy...
...Even in America, perhaps the only country in the world where change is routinely equated with progress, euphoria has never run this high...
...At last I meet somebody who is hightailing it out of here...
...and the west coast of the United States...
...One hears reports of beeper messages intercepted, newspaper columnists self-censored, political conversations hushed...
...Neal B. Freeman is chairman of the Blackwell Corporation, a television-production company...
...Parties, concerts, light shows, parades, mass dancing in the parks, a "Reunification Spectacular at Happy Valley"— events are scheduled hour by hour until the moment of the handover...
...He is an American employed by a fancy New York firm, a veteran mid-level appointee of the Reagan administration...
...Think of June 30 as a giant initial public offering and you've got a sense of the deal...
...Why wait around and take the risk...
...Then there are the refugees from the Chinese mainland now well settled here...
...A friend at First Boston—a mainland-born, U.S.-passport-holding, Mandarin-speaking banker—tells me that real-estate prices are doing even better...
...Everywhere one sees evidence of Chinese pride, the sense that Beijing is reversing an ugly historical injustice...
...First, the poll has been conducted ineptly, and possibly on purpose...
...A neat trick...
...But his question lingered, reminding me later of the dog that did not bark in the strange case of Hong Kong...
...And the politically radioactive...
...It reports that 72 percent of all residents are positive about the future of Hong Kong...
...Now they look forward to the "Special Administrative Region" of the PRC that Hong Kong will soon become...
...To be sure, a little pressure from the heel of a boot could excite the democratic instinct, but as of now the message just does not resonate...
...They reckoned that their names had been inscribed on special lists in Beijing...
...A boutique dealmaker, he has done fabulously well in Hong Kong but is planning to move to the New York area, to a "place with good schools, probably Greenwich, Connecticut...
...To me it looks like a classic bubble market...
...The Cathay stock passed to the PLA at a remarkably low price...
...The Hang Seng Index, the equivalent of the Dow Jones Industrial average, continues to outperform even the U.S...
...Some of the best and brightest, to be sure...
...The really smart money is, as always, carefully hedged...
...Hong Kong is not so much a country or a colony as a running convention of go-getters, people beating a path to your door with better mousetraps...
...They thus want to give every appearance of believing that Beijing has changed...
...Sounds like an infrastructure play, like Beijing is making offers that can't be refused...
...I find it hard to believe that Ronald Reagan would have looked on quietly as the "handover" became the coda to the American century...
...Given that kind of lead time, Hong Kong's highly mobile residents mobilized again...
...A house he bought on Victoria Peak in 1986 has appreciated "eight or nine times...
...Hong Kongers want a piece of that action...
...Tonight at the China Club, where the politically correct gather in retro-chic, faux-Shanghai surroundings to prolong the business day, I have a drink with a local lawyer...
...Sunday...
...Second, those being polled suspect their views may be transmitted to the PLA and thus they have the smiley faces painted on...
...The new real-estate buyers...
...When Bill Gates talks about the "frictionless economy" in cyberspace, he's really talking about a digital version of Hong Kong...
...Why, he wanted to know, is the United States allowing Hong Kong favored status on export controls...
...Hardly...
...By the thousands and then by the tens of thousands they airmailed themselves into exile...
...Interesting conversation with a military attache from a European country...
...What better place to watch the sun rise for the last time on the British empire...
...technology with military application...
...They do not appear to be organically connected to the people they represent...
...Or failure...
...I think it's #3...
...More than half of the companies listed on the Hang Seng are now domiciled abroad, up from fewer than 10 percent in the mid '80s...
...Think of a young Jose making his way across the straits from Havana only to read in his Miami Herald that Lawton Chiles had just ceded South Florida to Fidel...
...What I used to think of as excitement now looks to me like hassle...
...How could we be so naive...
...At the current pace, stock-market activity for the first six months of the year will exceed that for all of 1996, which was itself the most active year on record...
...So the PRC came after him, and he escaped the mainland, making his way to Hong Kong—and now this...
...A second theme is the palpable fact of ethnic nationalism...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 41
