Pao. By April 1973 World-Wide had in service or on order a fleet of about 135 ships aggregating nearly 14m. deadweight tons more than all the merchant shipping then sailing under the US flag.75 Pao is placed to be the world's no. 1 shipowner by 1975, if he is not already, far outdistancing Niarchos, Onassis, Ludwig, Tikkoo and Tung. Part of the basis for Pao's success has been the special conditions offered by Hong Kong as regards taxation, disclosure of assets and crews unprotected by international shipping regulations. But the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank connection did not hurt either. Quite apart from the Bank's weight in the City of London, Hongkong & Shanghai owns the biggest foreign bank in the oil-rich Middle East, the British Bank of the Middle East (the Char- tered Bank is also primarily a Hong Kong-Middle East-London operation).76 Pao's main activity has been chartering tankers. Another vital link in the chain here has been the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank's connections with Jardine Matheson. One of the two brothers who have had a virtually controlling interest in Jardines, Sir William Keswick, as well as being the senior non-executive director of the Bank of England, was until 1973, a director of BP; in addition, Jardine Matheson's main UK-based subsidiary is a tanker chartering and leasing company called Matheson. Hong Kong is thus not only tied into a global network, it provides the secure, controlle and privileged base for the banking, financing and chartering operations.
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Hong Kong is also an important base for companies active in the Southeast Asia area and Oceania. Many of the high-flying operations of the early 1970s were con- trolled by holding companies in the Colony, which did not have to publish the same kind of detailed reports as would companies in, say, Malaysia, Singapore, or Australia. Already in the first quarter of 1971 Hong Kong was the no. 3 foreign investor in Indonesia, behind only the USA and Japan. It is, of course, the special privileges fostered within the Colony which make it such an attractive base for operations elsewhere, but this type of activity is second only in appeal to the labour-intensive, high-profit operations in the Colony itself.
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A somewhat new situation has been created since Britain joined the Common Market. London failed to get Hong Kong into the EEC tariff preference schemes, although Hong Kong's main rivals in the textile, clothing and plastics industries in the Far East all were given preferential treatment. At the same time, under EEC pressure, London had to loosen its grip on the Hong Kong reserves as a step towards the goal of a common EEC currency. But too much should not be made of all this, since some in the UK, especially British textile interests, were only too glad to see Hong Kong shut out.
From a practical and theoretical point of view, the most unusual feature of Hong Kong's relationship to the UK in recent decades is that the Colony provided the ailing metropolis with a regular and far from negligible financial contribution Some in the City of London would be sorry to see their bolt-hole shut off — but most of them have presumably made use of it already. In the Korean War, too, it provided an extremely useful base for assisting in the attack on the Korean people. During the Indo-China War, it has also served as a useful, but not essential
support area for the US.
There is, too, of course, a certain inertia to imperialism, but this should not be overestimated. Particularly when angled round such militaristic and racist
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35 78
themes as the last campaign to keep a force of Nepalese mercenaries, there are undoubtedly many in Britian who will give their support to maintaining a colonial- ist position in Asia. But the haggling over withdrawing part of Hong Kong's assets m London showed as nothing has before that one must look carefully at the e of the white settler group in the Colony and at the "colonials" as a whole. It seems reasonable to assume that the ruling group in the Colony - by which is meant the (sometimes contradictory and not wholly integrated) alliance between the colonial administration and the capitalist class, both (British) quasi-expatriate and Chinese now enjoys a relative autonomy from London. As Arghiri Emmanuel has trenchantly described it, it has been the settler communities, not the metropolis which has tended to fight hardest to hang on to colonies qua colonies.79 This ten- dency may even be more aggravated than usual in the case of Hong Kong, since any "neo-colonial" adaptation is out of the question. Hong Kong is truly a last ditch.
The situation which prevails at the moment could perhaps fairly be summed up as one where there is an (uneven) balance between the general metropolitan move towards decolonization and the desire of the "colonials" as a whole (see note 78) to maintain the colonial set-up. This balance is still tilted well towards retention of the colony, since it is an economic (and political)80 asset to the UK Government. This could well continue to be the case even if all the Hong Kong money is with- drawn from London, since the Colony's other economic advantages are so consider- able. But it must also be recognised that retention is facilitated by political factors. One of these is the lack of anything which could be called a national liberation movement in the Colony (see below); in the past such movements, even where not defeating the imperialist power outright, have frequently altered the balance to the point where it was not "worthwhile" for the colonial régime to hang on. The other is the lack of any movement in the metropolis to pressure the British government to continue the general process of decolonization and apply its principles specifi- cally to its main colony, Hong Kong.
The Political Future
The British Government's position on the future of Hong Kong is that the less said about it the better (see Appendix I). The main ingredients of the position are inactivity and silence, though with subtle qualifications. On the one hand, the Government declines to give figures for the number of people in Hong Kong who qualify as British citizens and could therefore acquire British passports and, techni- cally, apply for entry to the UK.81 On the other hand, the Government, together with the Hong Kong administration, quietly backs the dissemination of selected information on the Colony, portraying it as a nice tourist spot, or a good place to invest, or a kind of welfare state. Apart from the rocky stretch during the Second World War, London has given no indication that it is prepared to discuss the return of Hong Kong to China, or that it is making any preparations to terminate its colonial rule. Nor does it recognise China's position, even in principle.
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