COMMENTARY DECEMBER 1990
Who Lost Hong Kong?
Ross H. Munro
It is better to keep Hong Kong the way it is.
–Chairman Mao Zedong, 1959
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HE early months of 1979 may have been Hong Kong's most glorious season. In addition to the unusually balmy pre- monsoon weather, the more than five million residents of this enclave on China's southern coast basked in the shared belief that their unique city- state had come of age. Hong Kong had survived the cataclysm of the Chinese Cultural Revolution a decade earlier, when pro-Communist mobs ram- paged through the streets in a failed attempt to paralyze the British colonial government. And Hong Kong's little-regulated, low-tax economy had sturdily prevailed through the worldwide re- cession of the mid-1970's and was now in the fourth year of its greatest boom ever.
Hong Kong then still seemed a place of great prospects and unlimited possibilities. Its workers, most of them refugees from the Communist main- land or their children, were leaving behind a life of scraping-by. To join them in 1979, an estimated 200,000 illegal immigrants from the People's Re- public of China (PRC) alone would successfully dodge security forces on both sides of the border. In Central, the main business district, where new- ly powerful Chinese tycoons were asserting them- selves, a burgeoning commercial sector was mak- ing Hong Kong a world city. Midway between Tokyo and Seoul to the northeast and Singapore and Jakarta to the southwest, it had become the financial hub and regional corporate headquarters for the East Asian miracle. Hong Kong's land prices in the spring of 1979 were the highest in the world-and for that moment they seemed to make sense, for with a golden future apparently assured, the drastically limited supply of habitable land would inevitably continue to increase in value.
Doing an impressive job in making one of the most congested places on earth livable was the colonial government-still headed by a few British
Ross H. Munro is resident scholar and the coordinator of the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. From 1978 until 1982. he lived in Hong Kong where he was a correspondent and then the bureau chief for Time magazine. His most recent visit to Hong Kong was this past summer.
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officials at the top but increasingly run by Chinese in positions both high and low. Belying Hong Kong's largely deserved reputation for laissez-faire, the government had built decent public housing for nearly half of the city's residents by 1979. This was also the year it opened the first line of a world- class mass-transit system, dramatically improving the quality of life for people who had often spent hours each day on buses that crawled through traffic-jammed streets.
With the underpinnings of economic prosper- ity, a unique popular culture was in full flower. Hong Kong's Cantonese-language television pro- grams, movies, and popular music were creating a huge market throughout Southeast Asia, and beyond. Hong Kong boasted the liveliest and most diverse press in Asia. It was, as always, a Chinese city (97.5 percent, according to the census), but one with an increasingly international flavor that distinguished it sharply from the mainland. Strains of British influence mixed with newer infusions from the United States and Japan. Dec- ades of limited government had also imparted a spirit of individualism and informality that creat- ed an atmosphere quite distinct from the Com- munist People's Republic of China. Hong Kong was not democratic, but it was free.
In short, if you were young, ambitious, and Chinese, as someone who fit that description said in that wonderful early spring of 1979, there was no better place in the world to be than Hong Kong.
TOD
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ODAY, that same man has sold his apartment, arranged for his child to be enrolled in a foreign school, and obtained enough travel documents so that he can, if nec- essary, flee Hong Kong at a moment's notice for no fewer than three Western countries. He savs that in any case he will not wait beyond 1993. That is four years before Hong Kong reverts to Communist control. For most Chinese residents. this chilling prospect has transformed their city into a tense and pessimistic place.
In 1984, the British ceded Hong Kong to China under an agreement that ends British rule at midnight, June 30, 1997. But Hong Kong is even now slipping under China's control, its freedoms
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