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Future growth
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The Institute for the Study of Con A
What justification is there for believing that the growth of Hong Kong will continue not just over the remaining years of this century but in the more distant future? Some of the reasons emerge from an appraisal of Hong Kong itself with particular focus on the phenomenal advances achieved in the 1970s (a period now known as the MacLehose Years). It can be argued convincingly that the scale of capital projects alone during these years-including, for example, the start made on building six large new towns in the New Territories for a projected population of over two million—carries implications stretching far beyond 1997.
Another factor is less tangible, but perhaps equally significant. Through social advance in a number of fields throughout the 1970s the people of Hong Kong have come to feel that it is their home and that (despite the continuing sparseness of elective institutions) they have some say in the present structure of that home-plus a right to a say in its future. One way of illustrating the change that has occurred is to examine how a historian summarised the situa- tion in 1973. He wrote: "A Hong Kong citizenship based on a loyalty to the local community and characterised by a fusion of European and Chinese traditions, which might have been expected, has entirely failed to materialise, and the population of Hong Kong has remained divided into a number of clans or communities, all of which have a degree of loyalty from their respective members." This passage, true enough at the time, now has a glaringly dated look to it.
As regards the region, the 1980s and 1990s have already been categor- ised--by bankers, industrialists and statesmen—as “the development era of South-East Asia." Many would argue that this is an excessively cautious and limited assessment. It is impossible to visualise this era as about to come to an abrupt end in the year 2,000. It is difficult even to conceive of its completion by the end of the 21st century.2
The conclusion, therefore, to which both history and contemporary evidence push us is that Hong Kong could well continue on a path of "unstoppable" progress in the long term, even if the short-term accommodations that have to be reached before 1997 proved to be inadequate or faulty in some respects and resulted in a temporarily reduced rate of growth, or even a period of decline, such as the territory has endured before.
Whatever is decided about sovereignty is obviously less important than ensuring a continuity or an ordered evolution of administration. Continuity, in fact, emerges clearly as the one basic requirement for Hong Kong's future prosperity; especially, there must be a continuance of the near-autonomy in internal affairs that Hong Kong has enjoyed for the last 30 years. What has sometimes been called the "Hong Kong miracle", the achievement of prodigi- ous economic and social advance despite the most formidable difficulties, has only come about because a self-managing Hong Kong has been free to devise its own response to successive challenges. This will be the case in the 21st century also; and it is at least a comforting omen that both parties to the negotiations that have begun in Peking do recognise the need for Hong Kong to continue to
Prospects for Hong Kong
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be largely self-managing, differ as they may on the formulae that would make this possible and the measure of autonomy that would be appropriate.
To draw historical parallels is notoriously hazardous. But there is one parallel that does suggest itself. The first few centuries of the city of Byzantium, founded by Megarian colonists from Greece in 658 BC, must have included several periods when speculation was rife that that harbour-city-whose features fore- shadowed many of Hong Kong's assets and limitations-should count its days as numbered. In fact, it endured and prospered, reaching the height of its glory a thousand years later, under Constantine, when the western world hailed it as a place that through the endeavours of its people had won the special favour of God; today's Istanbul-even if it represents urban old age in the context of history is still no mean city. The same could well apply to Hong Kong. The pointers are that if Hong Kong is allowed to remain true to its own character and to run true to form, the best is yet to come.
THE CHINESE PERSPECTIVE: PRINCIPLE AND PRACTICALITY
There is a strand of remarkable consistency running through China's attitudes towards Hong Kong, one that stretches from the reluctant Chinese signature on the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 right up to Deng Xiaoping's meeting with Mrs Thatcher in Peking on 23 September 1982. This strand is the Chinese convic- tion that Hong Kong is a part of China and that sooner or later the territory will revert to China in the fullest of senses.
In Chinese eyes, all three territorial agreements on Hong Kong (the treaties of 1842 and 1860 and the lease in 1898) are invalid because they were signed under duress and thus, on the Chinese side, with a major mental reservation: that when the inequalities of power no longer existed and "the time is ripe”—to use the phrase repeatedly favoured by Peking-they would be replaced by the formally recognised reality of Chinese ownership.
To illustrate their position, the Chinese would be entitled (however unlikely it is that they would do so) to point to the Roman Catholic doctrine on the sole reason that allows a Catholic marriage to be declared null—that there was no true consent between the two parties at the time. This is precisely the light in which China regards the “unequal" treaties: because the agreements were not between equals, there was no true consent and therefore no valid contract.
More than semantics are involved: for the Chinese it is a question of historic realities. If anyone is tempted to underestimate the depth of Chinese feelings on the question, he should remind himself that for China the treaties were not isolated inequalities in themselves; they were part of a calamitous and long- unfolding process of national decline that began with the overthrow of the Ming Dynasty and its replacement by the Ching in 1650 and led in the 19th century to the domination of China by the powerful western “barbarians”.
Given this background, no-one should have been surprised that throughout the summer of 1982 there were repeated indications from Peking that, if at this stage China was required to give its views on what should happen to Hong Kong when the New Territories lease ends in 1997, it could only reply that at about that time sovereignty should revert to China; nor is it at all surprising that Deng,
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