FIFTY THOUSAND MEN IN A BOAT

Murray Sayle on democracy in

Hong Kong and the exodus of the middle classes

Hong Kong UNDERWHELMED by the offer of 50,000 British passports that passed its first reading in the Commons last week, the people of Hong Kong nevertheless made their first, tentative move in their own interest with the launch on Monday of the United Democrats, the first political party ever to be legally set up in the territory (we don't say 'colony', much less 'British Crown Colony' any more).

The new United Democrats are not exactly exuding optimism, to be sure. The founder, a 52-year-old lawyer named Mar- tin Lee Chu-Ming, said on being elected their first leader, 'I would be naïve, if not mad to expect to be Chief Executive' [after China resumes sovereignty over Hong Kong in 19971. 'I know there can be no future for me after 1997, politically.' This is, at least realistic: Lee was angrily branded as a subversive by Peking last year after his prominence as vice-chairman of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of the Democratic Movement in China, dur- ing which he publicly burnt a copy of the Basic Law which will supposedly regulate Hong Kong affairs after the communist takeover. 'Of course', Mr Lee, a lawyer, added wistfully, 'things in China might change.'

The United Democrats say they intend to contest at least some of the 18 seats which will be opened for the first time to direct elections to the Legislative Council one year from now. As the rest of the 57 seats will still be either held ex officio or by appointees of either the government or local interest groups, Hong Kong will still be, politically speaking, about where Bri- tain was before the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Still, everyone has to start some- where, and as of this week Hong Kong is about to see for the first time the flat ephemeral pamphlet and boring meeting which, whatever the romantic lefty Auden said, are still a great improvement on the conscious acceptance of guilt in the neces- sary murder and other Philbyish forms of politics. Even at this late hour, then, it is still a fair question to ask why democratic politics were so long in coming to Hong Kong, and sad to recall that HMG, aware that 1997 was then only half a century away, fully intended to start the democratic ball rolling right after the second world war. On 1 May 1946 Sir Mark Young, a splendid anachronism in gold-braided white with sword and plumed fore-and-aft hat re- sumed his governorship (interrupted by the pushy Japanese on Boxing Day 1941) with a speech, quiet in tone but revolutionary in content, beginning:

His Majesty's Government has under consid- eration the means by which in Hong Kong, as elsewhere in the Colonial Empire, the inhabitants of the Territory can be given a fuller and more responsible share in the management of their own affairs.

'Wow!' murmured the then million or so 'And what cricket team do you support?' Chinese residents, or its Cantonese equiva- lent, when Sir Mark faultlessly repeated his speech in their own language from the steps of the Cenotaph. 'Inhabitants! That's us! Old Feather-Head is giving us the vote!' This, indeed, was his intention, as the governor confirmed in a radio broad- cast in both languages four months later. After consultations with the 'general pub- lic', including a good cross-section of local Chinese, the Young plan as announced in October 1946 called for an elected Urban Council covering all Hong Kong and Kow- loon with only the rural (and leased) New Territories to remain under direct colonial rule.

With an expanded legislative council on which Chinese and Europeans were to be equally represented, Hong Kong was to manage its own finances and be, in effect, somewhere between a big municipality (Hong Kong and Kowloon are, after all, pretty much one city) and a kind of mini-dominion, like Canada or New Zea- land, progressing towards self-rule in the not too distant future (long before 1990, for instance).

While not exactly the storming of the Bastille, and still hedged around with literacy (in both English and Chinese) and property qualifications, the idea of meaningful votes and council seats for Chinese was still a radical advance on the rigidly race- and class-divided British col- ony the Japanese invaded in 1941. A lot of water had, however, flowed down the Pearl River since the surrender ceremony in the lounge bar of the Peninsular Hotel. Governor Young himself had had nearly four years to consider the future in an internment camp in China. His old Colo- nial Secretary, Franklin Gimson, on his own initiative had started drafting a reform plan while locked up in Stanley Prison. In London a former Hong Kong bureaucrat named MacDougall was working on his own plan.

Even the future Sir John Keswick, taipan ('big boss') of the still flourishing, one-time opium-smuggling firm Jardine Matheson & Co., urged that post-war Hong Kong should be transformed into a 'free port and municipality' with an elected legislature and that the governor, sword, plumes and all, should be replaced by a British com- missioner as in other parts of the Common- wealth. All of them saw that without some form of democratic participation by the Chinese majority in its government British Hong Kong had no hope of reaching any kind of amicable arrangement with China, and thus no future.

What went wrong? Apathy, for one thing. Local people interested in the sub- ject liked his ideas, Sir Mark reported to London, but they were 'insignificant' in number, and could not be said to represent 'even the strongly expressed desire of any large section of the community'. Returning old hands, both officials and traders, were even more sceptical. Elective politics in Hong Kong would of necessity mean poli- tical parties. But civil war was raging in China, and both sides, the Chinese Com- munist Party and the nationalist Kuomin- tang, were active underground in Hong Kong, and would inevitably infiltrate the new parties. Besides, 97 per cent of Hong Kong's population were Chinese and would inevitably have divided loyalties, while the big British trading companies with their pharmaceutical pasts were 'birds of passage'.

Reform talk went on in desultory fashion until 1949 when the communist victory in the civil war brought some half a million refugees flooding into the colony. Most of them were from Canton and neighbouring Guangdong Province, although the entire staffs of some Shanghai factories, led by their owners, walked all the way down the coast. The urgent task was to feed and house them (no forced repatriation to communist countries in those far-off, sen- timental days). By 1953 the population, 2.2 million and rising fast, was engrossed in Climbing the familiar technological ladder from sweatshop textiles to consumer elec- tronics, one of the more spectacular feats of timely industrialisation in all history. Hong Kong had survived pro tem, but the Various plans to democratise Hong Kong were dead, not to be revived until the last minute, our own anxious 1990s.

This is all ancient history, the pathos of what might have been, but it has contem- porary relevance. In 1956 anti-European riots in Kowloon presaged a decade of mob violence, always the backwash of events in China proper which, after a wire fence was built the same year to insulate the colony from its giant neighbour, people illogically took to calling `the mainland'. The re- sponse of HMG to the disorders was, at least in the short term, intelligent: the governor-in-council set out to create a stabilising Chinese middle class, expanding the schools and the two universities, open- ing technical colleges and speeding the promotion of Chinese officials to all but the top half-dozen jobs in the administra- tion. It is these people and their families who are at the heart of the present omi- nous situation in Hong Kong and, all too possibly, the victims of an imminent tragedy. How many are there? 'Middle class' is a concept easy to recognise but harder to nail down. Nearly a million and a half credit cards have been issued in Hong Kong to local residents, but many high-flyers have more than one, and the banks say the details are `commercial secrets'. In 1988, 365,330 students were enrolled in 343 Anglo-Chinese grammar schools where the medium of instruction is English with Chinese as the second language (mostly the Cantonese they speak at home), while a further 44,997 were in 'bought places' (paid for by the government) in Chinese middle schools, where English is the second language, 22,086 were in technical high schools and 32,973 in private Chinese secondary schools (mostly run by the clan- destine Chinese Communist Party). A total of 23 new secondary schools are due to open by 1993. Projecting these figures over a couple of decades, we arrive at a figure of at least a million Hong Kong Chinese with education at least as good as the average in Britain, mostly with technical qualifica- tions of some sort, all fluent in English with bilingualism in Chinese as an added advan- tage. These people are the product of well- meant, if short-sighted British policies about which they were not consulted. They are doctors, dentists, lawyers, teachers, journalists, nurses, surveyors, architects, solicitors, designers, managers, clerks all the trades and professions without which a big modern city cannot operate. Many countries (including Britain) could derive great benefit from these people. The place that cannot get along without them, however, is Hong Kong.

The idea that everyone in Hong Kong is either a coolie or filthy rich is an error which is contributing greatly to the present uncertainty. There are four million plus Chinese who were not educated in English, or in many cases scarcely educated at all. Included in the latter group are some of the wealthiest people in the territory. Your typical Hong Kong moneybags, in fact, is a rice trader, cotton merchant or sweatshop owner who bought a little plot of land, resold, resold again and punted his win- nings on the Stock Exchange — like, for instance, Li Ka-Shing, currently the richest man in Hong Kong, who has a US $1.7 billion property development under way in Vancouver to add to his $2.7 billion holdings in Canadian oil and gas. These well-heeled people, and indeed anyone in Hong Kong who can put his hand on say £250,000, can choose their own futures, with the richest now being courted simultaneously by Britain as 'key entrep- reneurs', eligible for 500 passports, and by China as the type of native son the mother- land wants to see home, in both cases with safe-deposit key in hand. They need no help from us, or anyone. As to the poor and poorly educated people of Hong Kong — in a better world they, too, could choose where and under what system to live, but in this one China's promise that they can practise capitalism at least until 2047 in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region is, thin as it is, the best offer they have in prospect.

A functioning democratic system run by local Chinese might conceivably have some bargaining power against Peking after 1997, and this possibility depends on keep- ing most of the million middle-class people there and working on it — the only politics worth having will need unAudenesque discussion groups, flat-to-flat canvasses and so on. Mrs Thatcher's 50,000 passports are not expected to cover, even with families, more than 225,000 people, far short of the minimum needed to keep Hong Kong afloat, even if the 61 per cent assigned to `business' does not include a big proportion of not specially democrati- cally inclined merchants and traders.

At the moment, well-qualified middle- class people are leaving Hong Kong at the rate of 1,000 a week. Nurses are leaving the hospitals, social workers regretfully abandoning their clients. Next will be the lower-down bureaucrats, the production men and the managers. Australia, for instance, has snapped up 100 mechanics from Hong Kong airport, and talent scouts from that country are stalking school- teachers who probably speak English at least as well as they do and can start work immediately in outback schools. Many of these people may qualify for a foreign passport and then, with a line of retreat secure return to Hong Kong. Quite a few have come back already. Canada in its generous tradition allows those who have qualified by work or study in Canada to return to Hong Kong and nominate both parents and unmarried siblings for pass- ports as well, without the family having to leave Hong Kong. Some already hold British passports and more will now get them, enabling them to hang on and see how things go in relative safety.

Zhou Nan, China's chief delegate in Hong Kong, has already declared (in Man- darin, a language few people here under- stand) that those who hold foreign pass- ports will be considered 'disloyal to the motherland' and so ineligible to be among the 'Hong Kong people' who will sup- posedly run Hong Kong after 1997. This might be one excellent reason for helping them to do so, by giving Hong Kong a basis for negotiation and involving as many countries as possible in its future.

The urgent matter, however, is to keep Hong Kong a going concern now, or, as a British official here privately put it, `to delay the collapse of the administration as long as possible', now that the maximum British offer is on the table and people have to decide 'about their futures. The genuinely key people are leaving in droves and it is hard to blame them, even if they intend to return with a passport in their pockets. The wisest policy may indeed be to encourage them, but who will keep Hong Kong going in the meantime?

A modest proposal: many non- bureaucratic jobs in Hong Kong could be performed by non-Chinese with suitable qualifications. A young person could gather valuable experience by coming out here for a few years, and might at the same time give a Hong Kong family a chance to make timely preparations against an uncer- tain future. This may, or may not be a British responsibility, but it would certain- ly be the Lord's work. We don't want history saying Alas to the defeated again, if we can do anything about it.