In the fall of 1989, the American consul-general in Hong Kong, Donald
Anderson, asked a retired local politician to imagine the future: What
might life be like after July 1, 1997, the day that Britain’s
century-old lease on Hong Kong would expire and socialist China would
assume sovereignty over the territory? It was possible to imagine at
least two distinct futures. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, the Chinese
Communist Party agreed to a treaty pledging not to interfere in Hong
Kong’s laissez-faire capitalism for fifty years after 1997. The
agreement, called “one country, two systems,” would allow Hong Kong to
retain its independent civil service, judiciary, financial authority,
border controls, and civil liberties. It promised a future with few
changes for Hong Hong, except the absence of the Crown insignia on
government buildings and stationery. Then, in June, 1989, Chinese
authorities sent tanks to put down pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen
Square, in Beijing. Hong Kongers watched the bloodbath on live
television. Here was an alternative vision of the future under Chinese
rule. Speaking just a few months after the crackdown, the retired
politician answered Anderson’s question by reciting a poem by Li
Shangyin, a ninth-century imagist who witnessed the bloody fracturing of
the Tang Dynasty. Anderson dutifully included the verse in a cable he
sent back to Washington:
In his cable, the diplomat added, “the Chinese often couch political
statements in poetic terms.” The former politician’s pessimism was pervasive in
Hong Kong at the time, even if it was usually expressed in plainer
language. “The common thread running through most discussions was the
crisis of confidence, exacerbated by the events of June in Beijing,”
Anderson wrote. “Even those who had been relatively confident about 1997
before the events of last spring found themselves fearful in the
aftermath of Tiananmen.”
On Saturday, Hong Kong will mark the twentieth anniversary of the
British handover of sovereignty. The trepidation that took hold after
Tiananmen has never fully dissipated. But the worst fears haven’t come
true, either. Shortly after midnight on July 1, 1997, after lowering the
Union Jack at a ceremony in Hong Kong Harbor, British colonial
administrators sailed away on the yacht Britannia, under a driving rain.
The Chinese Army crossed the colonial border, and Beijing’s new viceroy,
a Hong Kong tycoon handpicked by the Party, took over the colonial
governor’s mansion. Then life went on: gin, horse races, mah-jongg,
blazing neon over rain-slicked streets. For the first few years, Hong
Kongers bracing for the worst were surprised by Beijing’s light touch.
Hong Kong carried on as an Anglophone entrepôt, almost a city-state unto
itself, with a separate currency, visa-free entry for most Westerners,
three-pronged British electrical outlets, and an uncensored press and
Internet.
To this day, Hong Kong remains the sole place on Chinese soil where
citizens can march and speak and publish freely, and where discussions
of the Tiananmen massacre can be full-throated rather than furtive. This
past June 4th, protesters gathered in Victoria Park—still named for the
British Queen—as they do every year, to memorialize those killed at
Tiananmen. The authorities did not interfere with the demonstration. In
the past two decades, Beijing has allowed dissent in Hong Kong, and has
even let the territory’s citizens vote for several directly elected
seats on a local legislature otherwise stacked with appointed loyalists.
In 2014, when Beijing derailed a plan for local direct elections, it
sparked the biggest protests in China since Tiananmen. And yet, even
then, Beijing resisted an outright crackdown in Hong Kong, opting
instead for a policy of bu tuoxie, bu liuxue—no compromise, but no
bloodshed, either. This relative tolerance has always been aimed at
maintaining global markets’ trust.
In 1984, a U.S. government intelligence contractor predicted that by
1997, “or soon thereafter,” Hong Kong would begin to “resemble the
People’s Republic of China.” This prediction has been borne out, but the
process has been one of convergence rather than conversion. Mainland
Chinese cities have in the past three decades sprouted skyscrapers,
shopping malls, and metro lines that resemble Hong Kong’s; often, these
structures are built and managed by Hong Kong firms. Hong Kong’s
middle-class life styles, its manufacturing-driven export industries,
and its pop culture have all melded with the mainland’s. On their
gleaming surfaces, Hong Kong and Shanghai look ever more alike.
Yet, lately, interference and intimidation have become more common.
Phone calls from Beijing operatives to Hong Kong officials and
journalists are now routine. Chinese security agents have disappeared
dissidents from the city’s streets. In 2015, several men who published
salacious books about the Party leadership were kidnapped, and later
surfaced on the mainland’s state television, tearfully confessing to
subversion. This spring, a Chinese tycoon wanted by mainland authorities
vanished from a harbor-front hotel. Surveillance video showed him,
apparently sedated, in a wheelchair, being whisked away by unknown men.
Other changes have been more subtle. Local newspapers, many owned by
conglomerates with business interests in the mainland, have become less
probing. Hong Kong’s once edgy and adventurous movie industry now
produces blander films made for the Chinese market. And independent
local prosecutors have paid unusual attention to indicting local protest
leaders with vague charges of “conspiracy to commit public nuisance” and
“incitement.” The territory’s British-influenced legal system, with its
bewigged barristers, carries on, but judges have faced pressure to
pledge their patriotism.
These pressures have spurred the growth of a robust local independence
movement—something few could have predicted before the handover. Led by
indigenous activists known as buntou paai, the movement is a blend of
capitalist cosmopolitanism, local resentment, economic populism, and,
most surprising, nostalgia for the days of the British Empire. British
colonial flags, the ultimate insult to Beijing, now appear regularly at
rallies in Hong Kong. The movement’s biggest supporters are young
people, with no living memory of Tiananmen, who have lived their entire
lives under the sovereignty of the People’s Republic and yet identify as
“Hong Kongers” ahead of “Chinese.” On July 1st, while local grandees
mark the anniversary of the handover, young activists will be leading
what has become an annual protest march. For all the decades of effort
by Chinese commissars and Western diplomats to define a future for Hong
Kong, the place remains unnerved, uncertain.
On Monday, People’s Daily, a state newspaper in Beijing that is the
Party’s self-declared “throat and tongue,” printed a front-page article
announcing that President Xi Jinping would visit Hong Kong to mark the
anniversary. Such visits are rare from Chinese leaders, who typically
feign an arm’s length in administering the territory. The article
adopted state media’s signature tone toward Hong Kong: florid family
metaphors and condescension laced with menace. The writer gave a slight
nod to rising unrest in the former colony; “after a century and a half
adrift in the outside world under British rule, Hong Kong may, of
course, feel shy or awkward when first returning home,” the writer
allowed. Twenty years after its return to the People’s Republic, he
noted, the city has not yet achieved “a handover of the human heart.”