It’s a good feeling to return to a city which you know well. Having lived off and on in Hong Kong since 1973 it’s like returning home. An awful lot has changed since then but it’s not as if I’ve come back here after 32 years. That would indeed be a shock. I’ve lived through the changes as they happened and Hong Kong has become a great place to visit. All they need do is solve the air and water pollution and I reckon it’d be as good as a town can get.
Back in 1973 Hong Kong was a dense Chinese city fueled by Shanghainese money and Guangchou labour, but still with the air of a colonial backwater, albeit starting to stir. The city was about to get its very first dose of concentrated culture in the form of the Hongkong Arts Festival. The stock and property markets had gone through their first boom/bust cycle, the Cross Harbour tunnel, the Ocean Terminal and Connaught Centre had recently opened. Young City moneymen of all stripes thronged the watering holes of core Central. Grizzled, big-eared roseaceous traders nursed their drinks in the confectionery that was the then Hong Kong Club, overlooking the Cricket Club located improbably slap bang in the middle of town in the shadow of the old deco Hong Kong Bank and Bank of China buildings.
Any disquiet at the thought of 1997 and the end of it all was dismissed as if it were a million miles away. Glib phrases were trotted out and parroted to visitors posing as deep insights. “Hong Kong is governed by Jardines, The Jockey Club, the Bank and the Governor, in that order....”, was a classic. “China doesn’t want Hong Kong back. Why would it? The Governor runs it for them”, was another. The acronym FILTH for Failed in London Try Hongkong was cheerfully applied to newcomers, especially City merchant bankers, by old hands and established Hong Kong belongers (merchant gangsters or wankers by others). My favourite of the genre came from a chubby, jovial but essentially nasty Swiss trader nursing a pink gin in the Hong Kong Club in the company of his pale and bullied English wife. “Vot”, he demanded of me, “is the definition of a Hong Kong homosexual?
It is a man......who prefers his wife to business”, he answered chortling happily. His wife smiled faintly.
As it turned out they all got it badly wrong and didn’t have to wait for 1997 and the Chinese to shatter their world, the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank did the job for them and sank the lot of them long before 1997. Quite clearly The Bank, as it was commonly referred to, had a much more realistic view of things, since only they remain of the ruling quaternity (the Jockey Club lingers on, a shadow of its former self). Before the 70’s were out the HSBC had shafted the first of the Anglo Scottish taipans and delivered Hutchison Whampoa on a platter to the awaiting maw of Li Ka Shing. The next two decades saw the eclipse of the box wallah princes like Wheelock Marden and even Jardines and the Keswicks. The self-styled Noble House was sent packing back to London tail between their legs, no longer daring to list in Hong Kong. Don’t weep for Jardines though, that is if you ever had a mind to, through the most convoluted cross holdings they still retain most of core Central through control of Hong Kong Land. And that, as they say, is a fair piece of change. Today the only Hong remaining in good repair in Hong Kong is the London-based Swire Group. The big winner, apart from Beijing and the new Chinese taipans, was of course The Bank itself. Having sold out their Anglo Scottish compatriots HSBC not only sails on from strength to strength in Hong Kong but managed to get out from under China, re-register in UK and is now one of the top ten international banks in the world. Not bad going in just three decades for a small colonial bank, especially when you consider what they’ve achieved compared to their elder and uglier colonial sister, the historically odious and ever-unpleasant Standard Chartered Bank.
There was one other little known class of men worthy of note who played a big part in running Hong Kong right up until 1997 before disappearing into the mists as if they had never been, their day and time forever done. These were the scions of the missionary China Coast aristocracy, prominent up and down China for the past 150 years. They loved China, spoke Chinese like natives, were English and did not miscegenate remaining curious hybrids of no country, liberal and Christian yet self-serving, able and still morally driven, they stuck together, inter-married and held a lock on the senior echelons of the Hong Kong government right up to the end of British rule. Hong Kong was their ‘Last Hurrah’ and as a class they are no more. I remember being surprised at the extent and cohesiveness of this elite and discreet group when the daughter of one of these prominent officials shared with me the intense pressure she came under in the 1970’s to marry “one of her own kind”, that is to say from another missionary family, a very limited number of families. Not something likely to work with the post 60’s generation, she ran off to marry an art teacher in England and only came back to Hong Kong to be reconciled with the family when the marriage failed.
By the mid-1980’s Hong Kong had thankfully become a much more international city altogether. By now business and finance had developed to such an extent that many other service and more creative types were attracted to the city in big numbers, which blossomed to cater for them. Unlike a short-sighted Singapore, wives or foreign businessmen and executives were allowed to work and got stuck into business and all sort of other activities on their own account. Most of all, the Chinese Hong Kong kids sent overseas to get a college education by their parents couldn’t wait to get back to Hong Kong to enjoy the buzz. Add to that an infusion of kids from the Yookay who worked as secretaries, barmen or even delivered lunch sandwiches just to enjoy the scene for a couple of years, all made for a vibrant and go-go city. Politically too Hong Kong marked it’s coming-of-age when over a million of its people peacefully took to the streets to protest the killings and repression after Tien An Men Square.
So 1997 when it came was a bit of a non-event. A minor piece of theatre, an insignificant postscript to the Retreat from Empire, long concluded a good 30 years before. The popular Pattons departed blubbing along with Prince Charles on the royal yacht Britannia, performing a last colonial chore on its way to the scrap heap. The people of Hong Kong who felt British rule to be an historical and racial anomaly now righted with the return to China were nonetheless grateful to the last Governor for sticking up for them. Too polite perhaps to ask why it was that only now in the last remaining years of an 150-year rule that an English Governor had spared a thought for their rights. The British had provided the rule of law and were largely tolerant of what people said and wrote because most of the time they didn’t pay a blind bit of notice to what anyone might had to say, concerned only to keep Westminster and Beijing off their backs.
Eight years on into Chinese rule things look pretty good in Hong Kong. Beijing has exercised a fairly light hand and probably interfered no less than Westminster did in the days of British raj. They appear to have accepted their error in foisting the luckless C.H. Chung as the city’s first Chinese appointed Governor, and it looks like one of Hong Kong’s own British-trained civil servants will soon get the top job. Why, even real trees are appearing in public places.
The genie now appears out the bottle. The people of Hong Kong have enjoyed a de facto sense of liberty and rule of law under the British for sufficiently long that they are prepared to stand up for themselves in a way that is special to Hong Kong and does not challenge Beijing’s authority in the rest of China so they feel compelled to stamp it out.
For the next 42 years at least, and in all probability a lot longer, Hongkongites are free to prosper, eat, shop and live as they please. Shanghai may be where the action and the excitement is and may well reclaim its title as China’s foremost commercial city, but until such time as China applies the rule of law across the board Hong Kong, given the nature of its citizens will always be special, retaining its vibrancy and international appeal. I’m just thankful I put in the time so I can still say I’m a Hong Kong belonger, coming and going as I please.
