Hong Kong is probably the one place in the world where I felt closest to a sense of home.
That was more than twenty years ago. It was the mid-1990s, just as the curtain was coming down on more than a hundred and fifty years of British colonial rule. It was a time of tension, uncertainty, and fears for the future – which two decades on have surged back to the surface, raw and unresolved.
The British and Chinese governments had negotiated the Joint Declaration – an international treaty to return Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) while guaranteeing it a high degree of autonomy. Its political, economic and legal systems and way of life were to remain unchanged for at least fifty years – ‘one country, two systems’, as proposed by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. The Hong Kong Basic Law would come into effect as its new constitution at the moment of the Handover on 1st July 1997. I arrived with four years left to go, just as the last British governor, Chris Patten, was shovelling in dramatic last-minute reforms aimed at making the electoral system more democratic – antagonising the Chinese and earning a battery of vicious epithets of which the politest was ‘sinner condemned for a thousand generations’ (千古罪人).
At seven years old it would be some time yet before I absorbed all this. That may be why Hong Kong retains so special a place in my memory. It is the last place where I remember an existence at least partly free of the alienation and conflicts with human society that have defined my journeys since. After the handover I would arrive in England as a teenager and it would all go horribly wrong. Hong Kong – the last place the world seemed to make some sense.
| The Hong Kong handover ceremony, 30th June - 1st July 1997 (from South China Morning Post). |
An innocence? Of sorts. Though it was beyond my consciousness at the time, I lived in an extremely privileged position in Hong Kong’s colonially-defined social geography. I was the son of a British diplomat installed in a comfortable apartment in Mid-Levels, halfway up the slopes of the Peak on Hong Kong Island and largely the preserve of white people with means or in government service. The windows that made up all of the north-facing wall commanded a panoramic view across iconic Victoria Harbour – the skyscrapers of Central, the museums of Tsim Sha Tsui at the tip of Kowloon, and of course, at the centre of the view with its fluttering Blue Ensign, the white palatial Government House where my dad’s boss Chris lived.
Of Hong Kong’s history, socio-economic problems and broader international context I gleaned little. I had a basic awareness of course that Britain had got the territory off the Chinese a long time ago in dodgy circumstances and was now due to give it back. On a certain level this felt like justice, but it also gave people real anxieties in the wake of the 1989 Tiananamen massacre. My dad’s work occasionally brought me in contact with Chinese political dissidents and survivors of the crackdown, major characters in the struggle for a freer and more humane PRC who would leave on me a deep and lasting personal impression. Beyond that, most of it passed over my head – and in colonial bourgeois surroundings, attending an English-speaking international school in Pok Fu Lam (regularly butchered upon English tongues into ‘Pok Fulham’), it was not as though I would receive an impartial assessment of Hong Kong’s complex story, least of all the more notorious British behaviours therein.
It was not as carefree as it sounds. Indeed, I would hesitate to call it happy. I remember the seeds of alienations that foreshadowed the horrors to come – at the differing treatment of boys and girls at school, for instance, but most significantly towards the dictatorial conduct of adults towards children. By nature it incensed me, and still does, when adults dare make any collective claim to maturity, or insist they have the right to control children on coercive terms (not least while claiming belief in democracy for themselves).
Some of these experiences were traumatic. Because my perceived difference from the “normal” children perturbed the adults I was referred to a child psychologist – an English lady of what in hindsight was obvious colonial deportment, tutting down her nose at my objections to adult despotism in sessions at her villa on the Peak, where lorded the highest tier of the British settler elite no doubt casting a gaze of much the same arrogance upon the native Chinese population below. Similar condescension barred me from attending the handover ceremony itself, something I have never found it in me to forgive. To be clear, this is less a denunciation of specific individuals – least of all my parents – as it is of toxic structures and cultures, which are not incidental in a week when Chief Executive Carrie Lam has characterised police firing rubber bullets and tear gas at democracy protesters with patronising analogies about mothers disciplining their spoiled children.
Innocence, then? Only of sorts. Resentment at adult authoritarianism was my political awakening. Was there something distinctly Hongkongese about that? Something not so much cultural as spiritual, maybe – some genius loci or feng shui alive in the place, that touched my soul through all the imaginary concrete of oppressive social norms and infused me with the knowledge that all people are equal before it, and that all who have will have rights? If so, then judging by the resolve of Hong Kong’s young people at the helm and heart of its anti-authoritarian resistance, I am far from the only one it has so enthused.
Beneath the struggles, enough space was left for me to build fonder memories. Hong Kong is a place crammed with innumerable little worlds of their own, whose names may be perplexing to foreigners but will conjure imagery instantly familiar to those who spent their childhoods exploring them. Beautiful mountains and country parks, which birthed my appreciation for long walks in the wilds – Mount Parker, Mount Butler, Ma On Shan, Tai Mo Shan (though I never got round to doing the one with the Buddha on Lantau Island). Sai Kung. Ocean Park, with its cable car. The science museum with that wonderful sculpture with the rolling bowling balls that went up four levels. Boat trips – Lamma Island, Cheng Chau, Discovery Bay. The Star Ferry. Tiger Balm Gardens. The Mid-Levels escalator; the Peak Tram. The Hilton Hotel, where I was “stuck” for a couple of months before our flat was ready (and got really upset when it was later demolished by Li Ka-shing). The jaguars and orangutans in the Botanical Gardens. Tiananmen commemorations in Victoria Park. “Freddy”on the TVB weather forecast. The typhoon season whose rains assailed us through that wall of windows, necessitating a defensive line of towels and buckets. Riding the Kowloon-Canton Railway (as it was then) to the border at Lo Wu, with an insistent curiosity to cross into China and see Shenzhen because it was there. I loved maps and remember charting every corner of the Hong Kong road system for myself and yearning to explore their more perplexing limits in person, like Jat’s Incline, or driving up the peak not by Peak Road but the narrow and precarious Coombe Road which my dad attempted once, hated all the way and swore never to do again.
| From a walk in Hong Kong between 1993 and 1997, probably at the Tai Po Kau nature reserve in the New Territories |
In 2004 I returned to Hong Kong for an internship with a civil society think tank. Seven years had passed since I was last there, but Hong Kong, now the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, had changed. More skyscrapers. More Mandarin Chinese in the air, contesting the hitherto dominant Cantonese. Where once flapped the Blue Ensign with its Union Jack now flew the white bauhinia in its field of red, and everywhere in the landscape was the mark of the ubiquitous (and ubiquitously dubious) new viceroy, Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa (a.k.a. ‘C. H. Tung’). Much of my time on this occasion was spent on nostalgic revisitings of old and familiar ground, including the calf-destroying trek up Old Peak Road, from Mid-Levels up the north face of the Peak, which I barely survived and wondered how on earth I had used to scamper up regularly with barely a sweat.
This time however Mid-Levels was a world away. I was based in noisy, crowded working-class Kowloon, in a tiny apartment that was nonetheless vast in comparison to the cages, shoeboxes, coffins or other nicknames that have well described the cubicles in which thousands of Hong Kong’s working people are forced to dwell. Here were the dark secrets Hong Kong had so long kept from me: that this was no free and equal paradise on the underbelly of authoritarian East Asia but one of the most inequitable societies in the world. Granted, it may have resisted the coagulation of a rigid class hierarchy, but there was no escaping the in-your-face wealth that towered into the clouds, peering down at abysmal deprivation round its base.
My internship brought me in contact with criticisms of this inequity. The standard retort from the territory’s business class, I found, was that Hong Kong was an ‘economic city’ – some status which for all I could tell they had pulled out of their orifices to pass off these miserable poverties and housing crises as acceptable, because Hong Kong was somehow special and should not be judged by the usual rules on human rights and socio-economic welfare. This was deeply discomforting. It was a perfect echo of the language about irrelevant and foreign human rights standards the PRC deploys to brush off critiques of its own abuses. Hong Kong left people behind; did not boast a socio-economic freedom to match its political freedom. This complicated the easy narrative of a good-versus-evil tussle, of British-inspired democratic legacies versus Chinese authoritarian encroachment.
The truth, as should always have been clear, was far more complicated than that. It is necessary in the first instance to never forget how the British came to take control of Hong Kong to begin with: through the brutal violence of the First Opium War of 1839-42 and the Treaty of Nanjing, first among a cascade of unequal treaties and naked foreign aggressions that brought the Chinese to the depths of humiliation in the nineteenth century. This was a war the British waged to protect their ability to export opium into China, and they seized Hong Kong Island to serve as a staging point for both this catastrophic drug trade and their ongoing military conquests.
This is not the past but the present. Though the PRC government has of late been behaving with indefensible villainy towards Hong Kong as in countless other matters, any resolution and journey to a worthwhile future requires empathy with the Chinese sense of time. Recovery from those epic injustices and the restoration of China to its rightful prestige underpins the entire cosmic narrative of China’s rise as a global superpower – and it is cosmic, echoing deep Confucian worldviews which place five thousand years of Chinese civilisation at the centre of the world as an anchoring principle of the universe, by which reading what the British did to them was an offence not only against China but against the very stability of the cosmos. The CCP’s supposed rectification of that, its return of balance to the universe, is the crux of its political legitimacy and for many Chinese (not least those who have got rich off it) the vindication of all the horrific crimes and sacrifices it has demanded of them since.
One does not have to agree with this – may even find much of it nuts – to acknowledge that somewhere in there they do have some pretty damn valid points, especially the points born in opium-drenched suffering on a scale unimaginable to the little populations of Europe. Any constructive engagement with the Chinese, especially for a culpable and now Brexit-hapless ex-empire whose loss of Hong Kong in 1997 was for many the conclusive symbol of its fall, relies on this comprehension. And in the meantime, no British conversation on drugs, including that of the present carousel of Tory gangsters who boast about taking them in their youths and getting away with it because of their middle-class whiteness, should pass without a reminder that it was they, the British, who pioneered the model of the bloodthirsty narco-state that enriches itself on the poisoning of countless lives.
But we digress. After 1842 the British developed Hong Kong in all the paranoia of a fortified outpost deep in the armpit of a hostile and volatile mega-continent. This was the sense of insecurity that drove them to grab the Kowloon peninsula as a buffer zone after the Second Opium War in 1860, followed by a further 99-year lease of the New Territories in 1898. The latter ended up with most of the installations on which the Island and Kowloon came to depend, in particular ports and reservoirs, making the original conquests insupportable without them – hence when the lease’s expiry in 1997 approached, they were barrelled together into the Joint Declaration and transferred back to China as a whole.
| Simplified map of Hong Kong from www.hong-kong-traveller.com, showing clearly its three divisions which descend from this history: Hong Kong Island in red, Kowloon in grey, and the New Territories in yellow. Hong Kong also includes over 250 outlying islands, of which the largest, Lantau, is at left in green. |
For most of this period it was the British (and for a few wretched years in the 1940s, the Japanese) whose
