DATELINE: HONG KONG

I remember, shortly after we arrived in the early 1960s, London mounted a trade fair here, opened by Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. This modest attempt to boost British exports was solemnly denounced by the Ta Kung Pao and other pro-Peking media as "a Machiavellian colonialist/imperialist plot to create a Third China." Even a trade fair was then regarded as a move towards seperateness.

Of course, the then members of Legco and Exco were very happy with China's refusal, which threatened the appointees' monopoly of power, and all concerned happily put reform onto the back-burner. But it is untrue that no attempt at electoral reform was made and true that any meaningful reform was impossible as long as China disapproved -- indeed, until 1984 when Peking agreed in the Joint Declaration that Hong Kong should have an elected legislature. Three weeks later, in January 1985, reforms were proposed in a Legco White Paper presented by the Chief Secretary, Philip Haddon-Cave. Later of course, during the Governorship of David (now Lord) Wilson the clear findings of a local opinion poll in favour of democracy were falsified and the reforms dropped in response to pressure from the Foreign Office, itself bowing to pressure from China. But too many ignorant commentators go on repeating that no move was made until Chris Patten did so at the eleventh hour.

We were talking of the impalpable benefits of parliamentary democracy (of which there will be none), of the rule of law and the legal system (both already damaged) and the freedom of the press. What does the phrase "against China's national interest actually mean? We cannot tell, but I permit myself to wonder how many articles after June will be published in Hong Kong newspapers and magazines on political in-fighting in Peking, on ramps on the Hong Kong or Shanghai stock exchanges, on dissidents within China or overseas, on prison labour -- or on, to mention another colony, Tibet. Will China's leaders prove to be more self-confident than Lee Kuan Yew, or is the press of the SAR destined to become as sterile and sycophantic as Singapore's?

A RELATIVELY INCORRUPT CIVIL SERVICE

One of the assets which the British, unlike most other departing colonial powers, have usually handed over to the succeeding power -- at least in Asia -- has been a relatively efficient and relatively incorrupt civil service. The British make good civil servants (some say they make good servants) and train others well. They take enormous satisfaction in minutes, protocol, proper channels, precedents, even in the red tape that binds up their files inside the neat cubby holes within their registries. Curzon, when Viceroy of India, wrote to a friend of the ponderous pace of the bureaucracy there, "like the diurnal revolution of the earth went the files, steady, solemn, sure and slow." Computerisation has not changed the mentality. But this sealed world of the bureaucrat has its advantages, not least among them, a free press, surprisingly enough.

It must not be forgotten that, for many years, Hong Kong had the possibly the freest press in the whole region. Even the Japanese press went in for a curious process of self-censorship, eschewing news which did not fit Japan's self-image. It was impossible to read an even-handed analysis of a trade dispute, or an in-depth piece on Japan's untouchables, the eta or burakumin, or evidence that Japan's sun-god-emperor mythology came from Korea (even academics filled in archeological digs which revealed such unwelcome evidence). Elsewhere, the communist/socialist bloc regarded the press as an instrument of the Party; the military dictators regarded it as subversive and to be controlled or suppressed. Other newly-independent Third World governments regarded it as an instrument for nation-building, its journalists' patriotic duties requiring solidarity with the nation -- or more correctly, its government-- all of which spawned the appalling phenomenon of what was euphemistically known as "developmental journalism."

But during these years, when Indian diplomats (partly because they had little else to boast about) were lauding the country as the world's greatest democracy (except during the Emergency years, of course), Hong Kong officials boasting only of the trade figures, and little else. I cannot record one of them taking any satisfaction in the Hong Kong press, or in its freedom of speech. This was due to no official policy of tolerance, nor any extension of laissez-faire policies from the economic to the intellectual field. It was simply because the press was extraneous to their purposes and deeply irrelevant. How could anyone, the argument seemed to go, produce any rational and informed criticism of official policies if he or she had not read the files?

So they put up taxi licences and car registration fees and indirect taxes and made no restitution to the widows of the Hong Kong Volunteers who had died defending Hong Kong and passed no legislation to protect the investor from crooks. Caveat emptor, they said. There was feed-back, but it was ignored. Any criticism was by definition uninformed, because the critic had not seen the files. If any criticism did penetrate the official thick skin, it ran the risk of being damned with the worst condemnation a government spokesman could offer: it was described as being "unhelpful." Protestations that it was not a journalist's function to be helpful met with puzzlement. The only man who really reacted, with a frequent streams of four-letter words was a not a career bureaucrat, but a Financial Secretary brought in from the private sector, the bad-tempered Sir John Brembridge.

However, although there was a certain non-responsive arrogance about the hermetically-sealed bureaucracy, I would argue that at the same time the Hong Kong government was one of the region's most responsive government to its perceptions of the popular will. Precisely because they were aware of their own anachronism, the questionable legitimacy of an alien, non-elected government they strove not to alienate the population. Their nervousness made them sensitive. Occasionally, they got things wrong ---- the increases in Star Ferry fares, the attempt to bring taxi drivers under some control, the proposals to electronically monitor the cross-harbour tunnel ---- and unrest resulted. The authorities usually back-pedalled furiously when such misjudgment occurred.

The man who told buyers to beware was Philip Haddon-Cave, his predecessor as Foreign Secretary and the nearest thing Hong Kong ever had, apart perhaps from his predecessor, Sir John Cowpwerthwaite, to a government ideologue. He it was who encapsulated official policies in an immortal phrase, "positive non-interventionism." I have argued that Hong Kong enjoyed a free press largely because the bureaucrats ignored it and assumed that everyone, like them, paid the press and its opinions no attention. Journalists all over the region envied the contempt in which we were held.

FREEDOM OF THE PRESS

But the real reason for Hong Kong's freedom of the press and of speech was that, unlike every other regional regime, it possessed no ideology. It was neither left nor right wing. It had no tenets, no creeds to sell, or to impose on the people. Hong Kong, as an anachronistic colony was making its way towards prosperity in the midst of a region sharply split by Cold War ideologies, and had no wish to choose sides. It was a haven for refugee Chinese who themselves wished to avoid the choice required of most Chinese, between Chiang Kai Shek's Kuomintang and Mao's China, and who preferred to live under a foreign flag rather than accept that choice. The bureaucrats were neutral. There was no "line" to follow. The only litmus tests were "Does it work? Will it work? If it's working now, why change it?" The phrase, "Positive non-interventionism", with all its negative/positive, uncertain, passive, neutralist connotations, summed it up beautifully.

I did not fully appreciate the delights of such pragmatism until I returned to Europe, to read the newspapers, watch television and listen to radio wearily as all discussions of all current issues are couched in Party political terms, endless sniping to score points from left or right, and to hell with the real issue, or with what actually will work. Health, education, unemployment -- anything -- all used as boxing rings in which to mount endless, repetitive, infantile bouts of puerile political point scoring. The same is true of France, and Germany and the US. The Clinton nominee to head up the CIA has just renounced the job because he object to the political circus he had to endure to pass Congress. The pragmatism of the Hong Kong government stripped Hong Kong of all handicaps in the prosperity race, just as Deng Xiaoping's economic pragmatism ("Learn truth from facts and to hell with the colour of the cat") unburdened China of its ideologues and belatedly released its people's energies

Today, Hong Kong can hardly look forward to an a-political future. Even the past, by a revision of history textbooks, is to be repainted in politically correct colours. Colonialism will be judged, not by the standards of those days, but by the standards of today, when it is a dirty word. Is the history to be taught in Hong Kong schools to be pigeon-holed into the theoretic seven stages of history as defined by Karl Marx, and which still is enshrined in that sad building, the Museum of History on Tienanmen Square and where guides tell you that the Opium Wars are "blood debts that must be repaid in blood"? I prefer the wise perspective of a resident of Dalian in China talking of the Japanese occupation years, who was quoted in the Far Eastern Economic Review a couple of weeks ago. He said: "If we kept thinking about history, we would have no cooperation, no progress. In the end, we can't blame the grandson for the sins of the grandfather." Personally I adopt the same forgiving attitude towards Dow Jones. All great powers have been expansionist. China's empire once stretched to the Caspian Sea. What if the Vietnamese, who languished for 1,000 years under Chinese rule, demanded that blood debts must be repaid in blood? Even today I see many echoes in China's arguments justifying its claim to the Spratleys and Paracels in the arguments New Delhi uses about Kashmir or which Mrs. Thatcher once used about the Falklands. One cannot complain of the self-serving lies of Japanese history text-books if one's own offer a self-serving account of the past.

Of course, history a la Marx will colour China's verdict on Britain's colonial role in Hong Kong. According to this, the colonial power exploited its colonies, classically as a source of raw materials and a captive market for its industrial goods. Just the reverse has been true of Hong Kong. No British company here would have been mad enough to have repatriated its profits back to heavily-taxed, regularly-devaluing Britain which (especially after it had granted a textile quota to Hong Kong -- stupidly expressed in square yards rather than in value terms) provided a market for Hong Kong factories. Hong Kong may not have cost London very much -- apart from defence costs and the money which washed away via the colony from sterling area funds -- but the bigger flow was eastwards, and London hardly profited from the relationship. I had the temerity to write this during the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, and was told by the Ta Kung Pao that my bones would be ground to white powder by the righteous anger of the 800 million people of China -- which made me look very carefully for bombs planted under my scooter. I fear for a Hong Kong viewed through Marxist-tinted glasses.

DEREK DAVIES CONTINUED