Hong Kong (4 page)

Forty years on again, and they made further demands. By now it was the heyday of imperialism, and several other Powers were grabbing parts of China for themselves. The French leased Qinzhou Bay in the south. The Germans established a protectorate over Jiaozhou Bay, on the coast near Beijing. The Russians seized Lushun, in the north, renaming it Port Arthur. The Japanese acquired Taiwan. Professing to fear attacks from these rivals, in 1898 the British extracted two new concessions for themselves. Far to the north they got a lease on the territory of Wei-hai-wei, to be held as long as the Russians occupied Port Arthur; and at Hong Kong they acquired the rest of the Kowloon Peninsula and its immediate hinterland, together with all the rocks and islands of the archipelago which lay immediately around Hong Kong. These extensions to the colony they called at first the New Territory, later the New Territories.

This time they did not demand outright cession, and it was agreed that the New Territories should be leased by the Chinese Empire to the British for a period of ninety-nine years, beginning in 1898 and ending in 1997. So at a stroke the subsequent history of Hong Kong was decreed, for as the twentieth century proceeded, and the colony developed, it became clear that without the New Territories Hong Kong itself could not long survive. It thus became a finite possession – the only such thing in the British Empire – with a terminal date already fixed. Just as the last Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, counted off on his calendar the days that remained for the Raj, so in 1898 British Hong Kong, had it realized the truth, might have started ticking off the years to extinction.

For the time being the New Territories gave substance and security to the colony, increasing its total land area to 390 square miles – rather bigger than Madeira, considerably smaller than the Faeroe Islands – and adding all those Tangs, Pangs and Lius, all those clannish villagers and boat-people to its population. Even so, for many years Hong Kong never lived up to Pottinger’s prophecy, and
it sometimes seemed that Lord Palmerston had been right in the first place. The colony plodded along. Though great fortunes were made there by enterprising merchants, after the abolition of the opium trade China was never quite such a cornucopia again, and anyway the cosmopolitan treaty port of Shanghai, at the mouth of the Yangtze, developed into a far richer and livelier place than Hong Kong. Visitors in the 1920s and 1930s found the colony rather a bore, and the Japanese, who occupied it during the Second World War, never did much with it.

What finally brought Hong Kong into its own was the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. The revolution itself sent an influx of refugee industrialists into Hong Kong, and when in the following year the revolutionary Government went to war against the United Nations in Korea, the consequent interruption of all western trade with China transformed the colony’s functions. Until then the territory had seen itself, as its founders had always seen it, primarily as an entrepôt, through which commerce with China could conveniently and efficiently pass. The free port of Hong Kong was one of the world’s busiest, but the place produced very little itself, and though governed as a Crown Colony, and proudly listed in the imperial rosters (‘Our Easternmost Possession’), was essentially an economic appendage of China proper. In 1950 however the western boycott of all things Chinese temporarily put an end to the old purpose, and obliged Hong Kong to find other ways of earning a living.

It did so spectacularly, and turned itself over the next decades into the immense manufacturing and financial centre whose towers, ships and lights so astonished us when we arrived from Guangzhou a few pages back. An endless flow of refugees out of the Chinese mainland provided cheap and willing labour, and European, Chinese and American enterprise combined to create a new kind of Hong Kong: a staggeringly productive City-State, only just a British Colony at all, into whose banks and investment houses funds flowed from every corner of the capitalist world, and from whose harbour was dispatched an amazing flow of products manufactured within its own small, crowded and improbable confines. The colony’s population, estimated at 2.4 million in 1955, was 5.6 million by 1988 – 98 per cent of it Chinese, the rest a kaleidoscopic hodgepodge of races and languages. It was a phenomenon unique in history. In the twelfth century a magician-poet called Bai Yue-shan had mystically foreseen a Hong Kong ablaze ‘with a host of stars in the deep night, and ten thousand ships passing to and fro
within the harbour’; and as every morning voyager on the
Xinghu
knows, by the end of the 1980s it had all come true.

In 1898, the year Hong Kong signed away its future, the British Empire was at its apogee. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the year before, had been celebrated as a colossal celebration of her inter-continental sovereignty; another year was to pass before the calamities of the Anglo-Boer War cracked the imperial certainty. In 1898 the British ruled nearly a quarter of the land mass of the earth, governed a quarter of its population and commanded all its seas. It was the widest dominion the world had ever known, and its confidence was overweening.

No doubt, at such a time of insolent assurance, the British regarded the lease of the New Territories as tantamount to a cession. 1997 was so far away, the Chinese were so generally addled, and the British Empire was not in the habit, as Victoria trenchantly observed when Heligoland was ceded to the Germans, of ‘giving up what one has’. What the Empire had created in Hong Kong seemed impervious to Chinese
intentions: it was not a Briton, but the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen who presently wondered aloud at how much Englishmen could achieve in seventy-five years upon a bare ocean rock, when Chinese could not do so much in millennia!

Nor did the notion of self-government, soon to transform the nature of the Empire, ever attach itself to Hong Kong, which remained into our own times a colony of the most archaic kind, with no democratic institutions whatever. Nevertheless as the years passed, as China sporadically revivified itself with revolution and reform, and brooded over the injustices of foreign intervention, as the power of the British themselves weakened, so the approach of 1997 was to give an extra paradox and uncertainty to a place already uncertain and paradoxical enough. By the 1980s the British Empire was, in a generic sense, dead and gone. Hong Kong was a last posthumous prodigy, its population being some thirty-five times greater than the population of all the other remaining overseas possessions put together, and the run-down to its denouement came to assume a symbolic fascination. It was like a race against time – as though in some ill-defined way Hong Kong might prove something, accomplish some definitive act, before it passed out of the hands of the capitalist west into those of the always unpredictable Chinese. It might prove something about capitalism itself, or it might offer a valedictory testament to the meaning of the lost Empire.

Today, as I write, the moment has almost come. We have entered Hong Kong’s last year as a British possession, and we are already watching its metamorphosis, in identity as in spelling, into Xianggang. In 1984 a new agreement was reached between Great Britain and the People’s Republic of China, decreeing the return of the whole of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in the fateful year 1997:

The British agreed to withdraw not merely from the New Territories,
about which they had no choice, but from Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon Peninsula, which had theoretically been ceded them for ever. The Chinese agreed to give Xianggang a semi-autonomous status as a Special Administrative Region, allowing it to continue in its capitalist ways for another half-century after its return to the Chinese motherland – ‘One Country, Two Systems’, as they said with their fondness for symbolic numericals. In the meantime they would evolve a new constitution, the Basic Law, to come into force in 1997, and the two Powers would work together in regular consultation towards an amicable handover. It was an accord specifically between London and Beijing. The people of Hong Kong took no part in the negotiations, as they had taken no part in any of the previous compacts between the Empires that ruled their destinies.

So the end draws near, and Hong Kong awaits it nervously, not knowing what to expect. Everything it does now is subject to the overwhelming fact of 1997, and to the dominant scrutiny of the People’s Republic. Start to finish, the British colony of Hong Kong will have existed for 156 years. It was said of it long ago that by its acquisition the Victorians had cut a notch in the body of China, as a woodman cuts a notch in a great oak he is presently going to fell. But the oak has never fallen, and actually Hong Kong no longer feels an alien mark upon the coast of China: it has been notched there too long, it is too Chinese itself, its affairs have been too inextricably linked with those of China, and its return to the great presence, however ominous or bewildering the circumstances, seems only natural.

I have been writing about Hong Kong on and off for thirty years, and I come back to it now primarily as a student of British imperialism. Hong Kong is an astounding epilogue of Empire, and it is piquant to note that its return to China will occur almost exactly a century after that climactically imperial Jubilee celebration of 22 June 1897. In this book I set out to portray the last of the great British colonies as it approaches its end, and by alternating chapters of theme or analysis with chapters of historical description, I also try to make a whole of the imperial connection, to evoke something of Hong Kong’s past as well as its present, and to explore how such an imperial anomaly came to survive so long.

The symbolism of the place and the moment, however, goes beyond Pax Britannica – Hong Kong seldom was a very characteristic British
possession. In its affairs we see reflected not only the decline of a historical genre – it is the last great
European
colony, too – but the shifting aspirations of communism and capitalism, the resurgence of the new Asia, the rising power of technology. As it prepares to withdraw at last from the British imperium, it is like a mirror to the world, or perhaps a geomancer’s compass.

For whatever happens to Hong Kong, in its present incarnation it is about to come to an end, and like the departure of ancestors its passing poses some last, lingering, ambiguous questions. Is there more? Is anything proved? How was the wind and water? Is the image of those ships and stars all that British Hong Kong leaves to history, or are there other messages?

CHRONOLOGY