AN " UNDISTINGUISHED" BUSINESS COMMUNITY
The business community of Hong Kong has played an undistinguished role in guarding the freedoms within which it has operated. The attitude of the majority traders and industrialists seems to have been that they do not wish relations with China, and thus their theoretical access to the market (by now grown to over 1.2 billion; it was 600 million when I arrived in 1962) to be complicated by such matters as freedom of speech, democracy, the free press. Human rights are mere froth, as Sir Percy Cradock once memorably said, to John Major's fury, which is why he was retired with a knighthood and was denied the job he wanted, the governorship of Hong Kong (how ironic that he should have ended up on the board of the South China Morning Post!).
At first I admired the business community here, for its great flexibility and pragmatism. I enjoyed the ruses it used to circumvent the ridiculous American Trading with the Enemy Act, when Chinese oranges were stamped "Sunkist" and canning factories, inspected regularly by men from the Consulate-General in Garden Road, were split down the middle, one side for whole and one for headless shrimps, one being nasty Communist shrimps fished from China's territorial waters and one for good capitalist shrimps. In the same way I admire David Tang today for providing a market for Cuban cigars, but abominate businessmen who sell mines to Cambodia or riot control gear to Burma.
For an admirable pragmatism can become an unprincipled cynicism. In the 1970s, reforms in housing, medical services and welfare were dismissed by the business community as the "free lunch" approach. As the bargaining about Hong Kong's future went on, the businessmen myopically dismissed efforts to guarantee human rights, free speech, a free press and other basic guarantees as unnecessary obstacles to their getting on with their business with China. Little publicity was given, for obvious reasons, when they were swindled, over-charged by corrupt officials or involved in a trade dispute without recourse to arbitration.
I believe they are still affected by myopia and tunnel vision, that they do not accept the implications of China's intentions to profit from Hong Kong, not the other way about and they are still, like their predecessors, dazzled by the mirage of the 1.2 billion-people market, which has yet to emerge. Slowly, I believe, they have still to learn and appreciate the value of the rule of law, of the framework within which they have been operating so far and of those who have "held the ring" within which they have operated. And, although they pay lip-service to the free flow of information, they do not appreciate the value of a free press, of free comment. They like market information, but dislike investigative reports on the part they play in it.
Another, very impalpable benefit I believe accrues as a side-product of a colonial relationship is a sense of identity. Of course, this is most noticeable after a conflict, a war or violent campaign for independence. In a very real sense, the British presence defined the identity of India, making a united Subcontinent (united against the British, this is) out of a miasma of disparate states and kingdoms. The British poltroons threw this great achievement away when the Viceroy Lord Mountbatten, anxious to get himself back to London and his wife out of Nehru's bed, bowed to the deadline and to the demands of Jinnah and Nehru and agreed to partition, leading to the massacre of millions and years of conflict between India and Pakistan. Here was one case for sticking on, and not leaving until the Subcontinent agreed to live together.
THE POST COLONIAL WORLD
But once the imperial will is lost, the concomitant sense of responsibility dissipates. It was just such a loss of will and the resulting irresponsibility which led to London's cynical betrayal of over three million holders of British passports in Hong Kong, a disgusting episode which weighs heavily on the debit side of the UK's Hong Kong account.
The colonials created a Malaysian and a Singaporean sense of identity in the same way, if only by creating a common cause among the sultanates (the overseas Chinese took a more extreme view). Such a sense of identity was counted by the early developmental economists as being an important ingredient in the recipe for growth and certainly subsequent leaders of those countries have striven to build that feeling of community among their constituent peoples, using an obedient press as one of their main tools. I believe such a sense of community, of belonging, of identity, exists in Hong Kong today, which has developed with no help from a subservient press. It is a natural amalgam of its people's unique experience, their triumphant survival and pride in past achievements. Such a Hong Kong feeling of being special, of even being somewhat separate, may not be totally welcome in Peking.
The juxtaposition of civilisations, however brutally history may have brought them together, does generate creative frictions. There is a rich harvest of colonialism in literature as writers and poets examine the complex of emotions such relationships throw up -- Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, Graham Greene, E.M. Forster and their like have enriched English literature; Naipaul, Sen, Salman Rushdie, Hong Kong's Timothy Mo and dozens more, writing in English, have recounted the colonial story from the other side of the colonial fence. On the journalistic level, the high degree of freedom of the press allowed within what was once the Empire led to the foundation of some great newspapers, the emergence of some great journalists and the establishment of proud journalistic traditions, sometimes tragically squashed after independence. Local journalists began staffing local newspapers, and became distinguished spokesmen for their countries in the pages of such publications as The Times of India, Burma's The Patriot, the Straits Times and many others.
The creative energies of Hong Kong have not only found expression in building businesses and factories, but in music, cinema, theatre, dance, design, painting, sculpture and the rest of the arts. Compare the verve and richness of Hong Kong with another largely Chinese community, Singapore, where the press is suppressed, opposition politicians harassed or driven into exile, where ideas don't flow, where theatre groups are closed down for satirising the authorities. The result is not one name -- not one writer or dramatist, not even an artist or composer -- comes to mind as a flower growing amid the sterility imposed from above. Peking rather likes the way Singapore is run, and Lee Kuan Yew has recently shared his wisdom with our Chief Executive-to-be. Is the colour and life to be leeched out of this fantastic city?
I'd like to go on listing some of the marginally good things about the colonial past -- to list for example the colonial explorers who drew the first maps of China's deserts, the Silk Road and the Himalayan passes; the colonial officials who fell in love with their patch and fought with London for its interests; the district officers who studied its languages, compiling the first dictionaries of dozens of dialects, and so on. Hong Kong had its share. I remember a crotchety fellow out in the New Territories, Ken Barnett, a great linguist, who was more wedded to his Chinese neighbours than to Queen and Country and who on retirement went to serve with the UN in Bangla Desh and West Africa. Such men must be entered into the credit column of colonialism.
Several times during my early visits to India, a gentlemen would get into conversation and confess that India was better governed under the Raj than since Independence. I discounted such ingratiating compliments. In drawing up the balance sheet of Colonialism one must record and remember the cruelties, the oppression, the snobberies, the harsh divisions. But while mindful of the past, I would prefer simply to point to the Hong Kong skyline of today. This is a 98% Chinese city, and so 98% of the credit must go to the Chinese. But the British did provide the framework and the freedoms while one of the world's five greatest cities was being built. It was Hong Kong, followed some years later by Singapore and Taiwan, which showed how the Chinese, far from being strangled by Confucian inhibitions as some once thought, could prosper and lead the way in the modern world.
One cannot claim that democracy has played a part, but freedom certainly has. The colonial power at least knew enough to follow laissez-faire policies with freedom of speech and of the press as much as with the economy. That is Colonialism's greatest achievement. I only hope and trust that the colonial past is never looked back on as an epoch of comparative freedom, and that Hong Kong is due to experience a period of true colonialism. I only hope and trust that a local Chinese will never draw a future British visitor aside and whisper to him that Hong Kong was better ruled by the foreign devils.