Hong Kong is an anomaly, along with Macao the last of the foreign enclaves that once dotted China's coasts. It is also an anachronism, the last important colonial possession of a British Empire over which the sun has long since set. Time has run out on British rule, for in 1997 the territory of Hong Kong will revert to China. What kind of government will replace the light and even-handed administration of the Brits is uncertain.
Were Hong Kong still the "barren rock with hardly a house upon it" scoffed at by Lord Palmerston 150 years ago, the question of governance would be of little moment; however, the coastal island and adjacent peninsula that the Ching court ceded to Great Britain so long ago have grown into one of the world's great cities, a metropolis of about six million people who enjoy a standard of living comparable to that of Europe.
The linchpin of Hong Kong's success has been the character of its people. For the most part Cantonese immigrants from the adjacent province of Kwangtung, they brought with them a love of education and strong families, plus good business sense and a Confucian work ethic. The British, for their part, provided two essential preconditions for growth: The level playing field of English common law, and a noninterventionist administration under which laissez-faire capitalism, the greatest engine of economic growth known to man, flourished. The fiercely irredentist Chinese Communist Party contributed nothing - and everything - to Hong Kong's growth by simply leaving it alone. Though mightily tempted after 1949 to "liberate" Hong Kong from the clutches of imperialism and capitalism, it stayed its hand.
The result has been a tale of two systems. While socialist China became mired down in central planning and ever more destructive political movements culminating in the disastrous Cultural Revolution, capitalist Hong Kong set to work raising its GNP. By the mid-1980s, after 30 years of sustained growth, per capita income in Hong Kong climbed to U.S. $6,000, or nearly 20 times that of the Mainland, which stood at a meager U.S. $300. Modern consumer goods, from VCRs and stereos to air conditioners and automobiles, have become common in Hong Kong while remaining scarce luxuries in China. The onetime "barren rock" has joined the ranks of the First World, while China still languishes in Third World poverty.
Hong Kong's long period of British rule and rapid modernization have weakened the cultural ties that once bound it tightly to China. Everyone in Hong Kong has ancestors who are buried in China, but in their dress, their ideas, and their popular culture they look to the West. The majority of the residents of Hong Kong speak as their first language Cantonese, a dialect of Chinese whose use is discouraged on the Mainland, and English, not Mandarin, as their second language. Each year tens of thousands of students and businessmen go to the West, never to return. The Great Wall and the Forbidden City are popular tourist destinations, but no one stays in China to live or study.
Geopolitical constraints
In a just world, Hong Kong would rule itself, like the city-state of Singapore. Whatever moral claims can be made on behalf of the colony's residents, the geopolitical reality is something else. Bound as it is by a narrow isthmus of land to the mainland, Hong Kong cannot be
...
Read Full Article
|
