Fresh Air Fiend (40 page)

Into the volatile and fraught atmosphere that surrounded the publication of the Basic Law came the new and ultimate governor, Christopher Patten. He saw his role as Hong Kong's last British proconsul as that of rectifying many of the old inequities and introducing reforms. He was opposed by the mainland Chinese, who saw him as a sanctimonious opportunist. Patten, undeterred, managed to raise people's awareness of the more sensitive political issues. This infuriated China, and though it won many to his side, Patten has been largely unsuccessful in introducing any far-reaching reforms.

The most important questions remain unresolved, in particular, the Court of Final Appeal. As a colony, Hong Kong's version of the U.S. Supreme Court is the Privy Council in London, but it was to be left to China to appoint judges to the Court of Final Appeal.

This court has yet to be constituted. Patten had said he would form it before midnight of June 30, but he has not done so. Some people think it is a good thing that he has left it, because by appointing judges himself, he would effectively be marking them out as targets for the Chinese.

"The Court of Final Appeal will be implemented," Patten said when I asked him about this matter. "I hope that my successor will appoint good open-minded judges."

He spoke in such a considered and thoughtful way that I was sure the answer was well rehearsed and that he had given it many times. When he found himself slightly on the defensive, he tended to sound like a history professor.

"Secondly," he said in that studied manner, "I hope that the Court of Final Appeal is able to deal satisfactorily with the inevitable tensions over the Basic Law. The definitions of 'acts of state' will be potentially awkward. If Hong Kong appears to be losing—if the rule of law is undermined—it will have an effect on the way of life and on business confidence.

"Where do they come from?" people say when a powerful figure emerges in China. When I asked some Hong Kongers to speculate on Deng's successor, the most intelligent ones said that only fools speculated on Chinese leadership struggles. The only certainties were that the leader would in the long run probably not be Jiang Zemin—anointed leaders in China have a habit of falling by the wayside—and that he would emerge from nowhere and take control.

This has become the case in Hong Kong. On December 11, 1996, the Chinese-appointed Selection Committee chose Chris Patten's successor, C. H. Tung, to be chief executive designate of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. "Now we are finally masters of our own house," Tung said when he was chosen. Yet a day later, sounding anything but masterly, he indicated that he supported China's hard-line policies, which included scrapping all levels of elected government. A month after that, he said he was in favor of repealing laws protecting various freedoms, using Chinese anti-demonstration logic, that "social order" took precedence over "individual rights."

Tung is another example of how, in the Chinese orbit, a person can flourish in obscurity. A billionaire, he seemingly emerged from the shadows. He was born in Shanghai in 1937; his family were typical escapees, but with strong links to Taiwan. Tung studied in England, worked in the United States (he lists "American sports" as his pastimes), and joined the family shipping business in 1969. Ten years ago, a well-documented two-part article in the
Asian Wall Street Journal
described how in 1985, when Tung's company was insolvent, with debts of HK $2.5 billion, he borrowed U.S. $120 million from the PRC's state-owned China Ocean Shipping Company. To avoid upsetting the Taiwanese, the Chinese passed this loan secretly through an intermediary, one Henry Y. T. Fok, a Hong Kong businessman with ties to China. Tung became viable once again, but of course ever since he has been deeply indebted to the People's Republic.

Tung was the personal choice of Deng Xiaoping. He is said to have approved of Deng's actions in Tiananmen Square—certainly he has been entirely uncritical of the Chinese, and more and more testy, even abusive, toward journalists and pro-democracy advocates.

Tung's role model is Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore. If he has his wish, Tung will turn Hong Kong into another Singapore: orderly, repressive, "Disneyland with the death penalty," in the words of a BBC correspondent. In Hong Kong everyone mentions Tung's fascination with Lee Kwan Yew, and people wonder what he is really like. As a former member of the University of Singapore English department (1968–71), I can perhaps help here. Lee loathed our department and singled out our department head, the poet and critic D. J. Enright, for his corrosive scorn. He believed we were subversive. He thought the teaching of English literature was a waste of time.

I witnessed at first hand Lee's intolerance of students and strikers in the late 1960s. A paranoid and manipulative man, whose career oddly parallels that of North Korea's Kim Il Sung, even to his dynastic ambitions (his own son Lee Hsien-loong is his successor), Lee Kwan Yew was one of the stoutest defenders of Deng's massacre in Tiananmen. On Deng's death he wrote in the
South China Morning Post,
"Deng has regularly been criticized by the western media as the man who ordered the killings at Tiananmen Square in 1989. But if he had not dispersed them, and the demonstrators had their way, China would be in a worse mess than the Soviet Union."

I like that word "dispersed." Singapore's time-honored traditions of hanging and flogging are as stoutly maintained by Lee Kwan Yew as they had been by Stamford Raffles in the 1820s. Apart from this monstrous barbarism, Lee Kwan Yew also has robustly stated beliefs about men's haircuts and gum chewing. Its gagged and pusillanimous press has kept Singapore a paranoid and barren place, without any debate, without one word of dissent. If this is to be Hong Kong's fate, God help it.

Soon after Tung was nominated as Patten's successor, he was asked to speak at the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce. It was his first post-nomination speech.

"It wasn't much," a Hong Kong businessman told me. "It was lengthy and long-winded, and it was empty." But something took place there, he said, something that had never before happened on such an occasion in Hong Kong. During the question-and-answer session after the speech, each time Tung responded, there was applause. In fact, clapping followed each of Tung's replies. "That is just the sort of thing that happens on the mainland. It is totally alien to Hong Kong."

The last question was, "Mr. Tung, you have an important audience gathered here, and many of us are journalists. What would you advise the press regarding press freedom?"

Tung said, "All of you should be fair and accurate, especially the foreign press."

And there was more applause.

That answer ("definitely a premeditated reply," my informant said) has become typical of Tung. When the British foreign secretary expressed fears about the future of the judiciary in Hong Kong, Tung took it as a personal slight, and said, "I have a set of values and beliefs which I hold on to very much."

I was not put out that Tung refused to see me: he has never given an interview to any journalist. But his reclusiveness encourages hearsay. One friend of mine reported Tung saying to her, "If there had been democracy in Hong Kong, the MTR [the rapid transit system] would never have been built." Another person quoted Tung saying, "No one ever lost money betting on Hong Kong."

"Tung wants to be a patriarch," Martin Lee has said. "He would make a good village elder. I am not so sure he is the man to lead Hong Kong."

What Hong Kong needed was not a spokesman for China—"Hong Kong has enough of those already," Lee wrote in a newspaper piece. "We need a leader who will defend Hong Kong when Chinese leaders insist on meddling."

In a revealing moment, when Tung was moving to a new office, he retaliated to the remarks of Martin Lee by accusing the campaigner for democracy of "badmouthing Hong Kong." In speaking engagements on a recent European trip, Lee had raised concerns about civil rights.

"This proves that the Chinese are controlling everything that Tung says," a Hong Kong writer told me. "Tung believes in
feng shui.
He won't move a chair without consulting his
kenyu
[geomancer]. Even the seating arrangement of his council is determined by
feng shui.
"

Amazing that the man chosen to lead Hong Kong should be obsessive in the matter of cosmic forces and the apportionment of the Five Elements, but it happens to be true. We have Tung's own word on it. "
Feng shui
is something you cannot refuse to believe in," he has said.

"Normally, he would never have spoken against Martin Lee," the Hong Kong writer said, "because it was the day Tung moved to a new office, and when you move to a new place—house or office —
feng shui
determines that you must be very peaceful. He would never have spoken those words willingly."

Tung believes that Government House has bad
feng shui
because so many geomancers have said so. The fact that it has been the residence of
gweilo
governors for 142 years might also have contributed to its malevolent aspect. One geomancer said that the problem was its being "surrounded by tall buildings which blocked its spirit." It is the wrong shape, it is wrongly placed, and the new buildings have cursed it. "Look at the side of the Bank of China. It is sharp like an ax, and it seems to be cutting it," a
feng shui
enthusiast told me. Ten years ago, the then governor was urged to plant a willow tree to improve the flow of
ch'i.
Yet Government House is still seen as a place of ill omen, and it is said that the governor's very appointment came about as a result of bad
feng shui.

One morning, early in 1986, Governor Edward Youde, a healthy man on a diplomatic visit to Beijing, was found dead in his room at the British residence there, the victim of an apparent heart attack. But the death also had a dimension relating to Hong Kong. "There was a feeling at Government House that the bad
feng shui
was the reason," a British civil servant told me.

He was on my list. Certain people seemed to form a chorus for the Hand-over: a civil servant, a party hack, a local journalist, a China watcher, a shop assistant, a Hong Kong University lecturer, and the ubiquitous Martin Lee. The civil servant, Richard Hoare, O.B.E., who would be resigning on the day of the Hand-over, was someone I had made a point of seeing. Hoare, who looks younger than his age, which is forty-eight, is about to retire and be pensioned off from Her Majesty's Overseas Civil Service. He was twenty-three when he joined as a junior civil servant in 1972. And now,
go gor gweilo zhao la,
"the ghost man is leaving"—and he is not the only one.

Of the 539 members of the Overseas Civil Service, just about half (255) are leaving by June 30. They include members of the judiciary and administrative officers. One hundred and fifty
gweilo
police officers are leaving, 126 are staying on—and it will be interesting for them, for Deng has insisted that in addition to the police, he will station four thousand members of the People's Liberation Army in Hong Kong, and these soldiers will function as a security force.

But Richard Hoare was telling me about the
feng shui:
"The previous summer a fountain had been put in—it was felt that a water feature was needed. For some reason it was built rectangular. It was supposed to have been circular. The rectangle was seen—after the fact—as coffin-shaped. A very bad omen. It was dug up and made circular."

An assistant to Governor Youde, Hoare had accompanied him to Beijing and had found the governor's corpse the morning they were to fly back to Hong Kong. As director of administration ("a meaningless title," he told me), Hoare was in every sense a mandarin—bureaucrat, go-between, underboss.

"I'm boss of the guy who runs the records office," he said, explaining his title. "I mainly do jobs that no one else wants to do. Supervise legal aid. Supervise the ombudsman. I'm boss of the director of protocol. Deal with natural disasters."

We were sitting in Hoare's tidy, austere office in the government secretariat. "My decision to leave is purely personal. I could stay if I wanted. Under the Joint Declaration all senior civil servants can stay. But it would mean that I could never get promoted. I'm at director level. I would stagnate." He reflected a moment: retirement at such a young age is inevitably a leap in the dark. "I would feel a little out of things."

So instead of retiring in the year 2004 at the age of fifty-five, he is making a traditionally English move, from an office job to a village in the South Downs, near Chichester. "I have shelves of books I want to read. I'd like to educate myself in art, music, and wine. I'd like to get some exercise, lose some weight."

I asked him what his fears were for the future of Hong Kong, and he gave me a nice mandarinesque response. "What is written in the sacred texts is all good," he said, referring to the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law. "People are imagining the worst. But I think that it will be easier to have the Hong Kong equivalent of a family discussion after the first of July. Then, no one can be accused of being pro-British."

It was Richard Hoare who told me, as Patten had done, of the fears the Chinese had about the British making off with the reserves before July 1. "We have tremendous financial reserves," Hoare said. They are estimated at $60 billion. "But no, we haven't removed any. We've gone on building and maintaining Hong Kong. We are building the airport without any British help. Apart from a percentage of the defense budget, the British taxpayer has never had to pay for anything in Hong Kong."

And, he said, in his twenty-five years of looking at accounts, Hong Kong had never once received the sort of foreign aid that was habitual in countries throughout the world.

There was a poignancy about his departure. But he modestly insisted that he had to go, and he made it seem like a symbolic act, even an act of sacrifice, in which his future, with a substantial pay cut, was far from clear.

"I feel the colonial era is over," he said. "I'm in the wrong place at the wrong time."