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Vol. 41 No. 24 · 19 December 2019
pages 36-37 | 4279 words
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Diary larger | smaller
John Lanchester
John Lanchester’s
novel The Wall came
out earlier this year.
His most recent non-
fiction book is How to
Speak Money.
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Chaohua Wang
Hong Kong heats up
2 OCTOBER 1997
Oscar Wilde once said that ‘Royal Irish Academy’ was a ‘triple oxymoron’. I have
Sandy Steele recycled this joke quite a few times, in respect of the Hong Kong Literary Festival –
Diary which, even while I was doing it, felt slightly unfair. Or rather, no longer fair. The Hong
Kong of my childhood was, at least in expat circles, a definitively unliterary place. You
25 JULY 2002 could tell this in the simplest possible way: nobody talked about, owned or read books.
Thomas Jones There was one tiny English-language bookshop in the basement of a commercial block
John Lanchester in Central, but that was it. The most literary thing I ever came across in childhood was
the dog who belonged to our neighbour the Israeli consul, who was said to double as
27 NOVEMBER 1997 the local representative of Mossad and who was the first person I ever saw jogging – he
Murray Sayle would go for long shirtless runs in the midsummer heat. The literary aspect was that he
Last Exit had an English sheepdog called Portnoy. I could tell that the adults thought that was
funny, but nobody would explain why. ‘It’s a very silly name’ was all my mother would
3 JULY 1997 say.
Fintan O’Toole
Chinese Hong Kong was a different and much more intellectually active place, a hotbed
A Singular Territory
of writing, journalism, publishing and free speech. But Chinese Hong Kong was a
faraway country of which expat Hong Kong knew little. About that word: an ‘expatriate’
19 AUGUST 1993
is a relatively affluent economic migrant, usually of Caucasian ethnicity, who is
Mark Elvin temporarily resident in a foreign country, who intends to return ‘home’, and who has
Watch the waste paper little or no engagement with the place in which he currently lives. Most of the people I
grew up around were like that, though my father wasn’t. His parents had emigrated to
27 OCTOBER 1988
Hong Kong in the mid-1930s. He was evacuated to Australia in the summer of 1940,
Alasdair St John when war with Japan seemed imminent, but his parents stayed and were interned by
Bitter End the Japanese after Hong Kong’s surrender on Christmas Day 1941. They spent three
years and nine months in Stanley prison. After the war my father got a job with a Hong
Kong-based bank and spent most of his working life there; he spoke Cantonese and
RELATED CATEGORIES Japanese and read both languages too. (Written Chinese and written Japanese share a
script.) He was British, according to his passport, but not English – he was born in
Biography and memoirs,
Africa and had never lived in England. In sporting matters he supported Australia. All
Autobiography, Current
of this was untypical – and I don’t think it helped him, professionally or personally,
Affairs, Asia, East Asia,
being caught between worlds to quite that extent.
Hong Kong
He took early retirement in 1979, after working for the same employer for thirty years,
and died suddenly in 1983. He was the age I am now. Most of my memories of him are
from Hong Kong and that emotional complication is one of the reasons I don’t like
going back. ‘Back’: that’s one of those deceptively sneaky prepositions which do so
much work in English and about which non-native speakers complain. It implies
return, which in turn implies that the thing to which you are returning still exists. But I
Upcoming Events
don’t feel that’s the case for Hong Kong. The place where I grew up doesn’t exist any
more. It is a different place now, and good luck to it. But for me there is no ‘back’. My
Christmas Late parents are long dead, our friends, including our Chinese friends, have long since left,
Shopping Evening and the place is no longer the same place. Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I can’t go
#4 - with Kate ‘back’.
Young
11 December There is, however, a complication. Nothing has changed more in Hong Kong than the
at 6 p.m. built environment. I can stand somewhere I stood hundreds of times in childhood and
not recognise a single building. This is especially true in Central, the middle of town,
BOOK TICKETS where my father’s office used to be and where I went to school. (About that name,
Central: names are very on-the-nose in Hong Kong. The peak of the island is called the
Peak. The bit halfway up it is called Mid-Levels. The middle is called Central. The mass
Christmas Late transit railway is called the Mass Transit Railway. The basic set of laws governing the
Shopping Evening territory is called the Basic Law. The person who runs the territory is called the chief
#5 executive.) Near our old block of flats, I can stand in a place which once looked down
19 December over shanties and look up at skyscrapers rising higher than my vantage point. In the
at 6 p.m. 1970s, a regular outing for visitors to Hong Kong involved taking them to the border
with China. You’d go there and say: ‘Behold!’ The spectacle consisted of two bored
BOOK TICKETS Gurkhas in a machine-gun nest, a roll of barbed wire demarcating the frontier, and
then paddy fields stretching to the horizon, with nobody to be seen except a few Hakka
View all Upcoming Events peasants tending their rice. Now you go to the same spot and look out at the 12-million-
person megalopolis of Shenzhen.
All this, however, isn’t what breaks my brain. The thing that breaks my brain is that
combined with all this irrefutable evidence of change, the place still smells the same;
and smell, as any neuroscientist will tell you, trumps the other senses as a trigger of
memory. The main thing that Hong Kong smells of is the harbour: fish, oil, fish oil, live
things and dead things; a humid, tropical, unmistakeable smell. So part of your head is
telling you that you haven’t the faintest idea where you are, and the other part of your
head is telling you this is a place you know so well it is part of your DNA. That – the
vertiginous combination of complete strangeness and complete familiarity – is what
breaks my brain.
I was apprehensive about going to this year’s Hong Kong International Literary
Festival, but it was for these personal reasons, not because of the protests – about
them, I was curious as much as anything. I was keen to see the situation first hand, and
to hear what the locals were saying. Hong Kong’s politics are not always transparent to
outsiders. Expat Hong Kong likes to think of itself as an apolitical place; Chinese Hong
Kong is passionately political. The irony is that this is one of the reasons Hong Kong
has never been permitted to be a full democracy. One of the under-acknowledged
scandals of Britain’s colonial history is that Hong Kong was handed over to China as
late as 1997 without democracy in place.
That is in considerable part because of the last time Hong Kong experienced extensive
civil disorder, in 1967 – an episode always referred to simply as ‘the riots’. The riots
were, in effect, the spillover to Hong Kong of the Cultural Revolution then raging in
mainland China. They were civil disturbances whose origin lay in complaints about
misgovernance, or ungovernance, on the part of the colonial authorities; at the same
time they were systematically fomented by Hong Kong agents of the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP). Beijing’s various institutions in Hong Kong, such as the
Xinhua News Agency and the Bank of China, played a prominent role in the riots, as
did the unions with the strongest links to the CCP. The riots went on for months. They
were violent and frightening; 51 people died. The British colonial authority activated
emergency powers, which had themselves first been introduced in 1922 to crack down
on a seamen’s strike, and sent the army out on patrol with the police. I’m not sure if it
was an urban legend, but a story from my childhood was that when the Gurkhas were
on patrol and saw a mob starting to form they would draw their kukris – the long,
curved, alarming traditional knife that all Gurkhas carry. A kukri cannot be sheathed
unblooded. Once it’s been drawn, it has to cut something. The mob would see the
Gurkhas, note the kukris, and find a reason to go somewhere else. The Gurkhas would
walk down the street to the end, nick their thumbs with the tip of the kukri to draw
blood, and put away the knife.
I don’t know if that story is true, but it is certainly the case that the militarisation of the
police response in Hong Kong had a role in staunching the riots. It also seems that
whichever faction in Beijing had thought the Cultural Revolution spillover was a good
idea changed its mind or was superseded by a different faction who disagreed. The tap
of CCP support was turned off and the riots, which began in May 1967, abated by the
end of the year.
The riots gave people a sense that Hong Kong, a place that could seem pragmatic and
business-minded to a fault, was on the edge of an abyss. The potential for violent
ungovernable disorder was right below the surface of the apparently placid colony. Two
consequences ensued. The first was that the British colonial administration began a
programme of public works, especially house-building. Those shanties which featured
in my childhood started to disappear and were replaced by the residential tower blocks
which are omnipresent in contemporary Hong Kong. The administration began a plan
to build a cheap transport system, the MTR or Mass Transit Railway, which has played
a prominent role in the current protests. The government launched a series of
initiatives to protect the environment and preserve the nature and wildlife of Hong
Kong – one of the features which strikes visitors in Hong Kong is just how much nature
the territory still has intact. A large part of the credit for that goes to Governor
MacLehose, Hong Kong’s longest serving governor, in post from 1971 to 1982 and, in
his benign-paternalist way, an early advocate of ecological and natural preservation. By
far the worst thing about Hong Kong’s environment today is the pollution which drifts
over from Shenzhen when the wind is in the wrong direction. Schools close; the young,
the elderly and the asthmatic are advised not to go out of doors. It makes a pretty good
New York Times op-ed Style Metaphor™: a huge problem caused by mainland China,
impossible for Hong Kong to ignore, but which it can do nothing to prevent.
The switch from government by neglect to benign paternalism was one legacy of the
riots; the other concerned the administration’s attitude to democracy. The British were
no keener on democracy in Hong Kong than in their other colonies but the riots made
them realise that the territory needed a safety valve of some sort. At the same time, the
riots added to already existing anxieties about what would happen if the various
tensions in Hong Kong were allowed to become too open. Some Hong Kongers came
from backgrounds that were explicitly Nationalist, i.e. on the side that lost China’s civil
war in 1949; others had fled communist China at the risk of their lives. These groups
would be difficult to reconcile with the factions which were for various reasons and to
varying degrees aligned with the CCP in Beijing. The CCP did not want a thrivingly
democratic Hong Kong sitting on its border; the British did not want a fissiparously
democratic Hong Kong loudly demanding complete independence from China or
complete subservience to it or both at the same time. China and the UK had a shared
interest in keeping Hong Kong’s democracy to a homeopathic dose.
MacLehose responded by founding a public body to discuss Hong Kong’s laws, the
Legislative Council or LegCo. LegCo existed in the first instance wholly by
appointment, but over subsequent years acquired a tentative patina of democracy
through direct election to geographical constituencies in parallel with overtly rigged
‘functional constituencies’ to nominate council members. Later, when the handover to
China was imminent, Chris Patten, who was then the governor, brought in a new body
whose role was to appoint the aforementioned chief executive – a partially democratic
1200-member committee. The composition of this committee is designed to ensure
that the chief executive is a Beijing stooge. That chief executive’s job, not an especially
easy or admirable one, is to fake concern for the needs of Hong Kong’s citizens while
devoting most of their energies to managing upwards, in the direction of the real bosses
in Beijing. The detail of how a sequence of chief executives failed to implement the
progress towards full democracy spelled out in the Basic Law was given in the LRB of
15 August by Chaohua Wang.
The tensions arising from Hong Kong’s pseudo-democratic arrangements have fed the
current crisis in Hong Kong. The chief executive, currently the hapless Carrie Lam, is
not a politician and does not behave like one, and as a result has failed to address the
concerns of Hong Kongers. Some of these concerns are economic: a housing crisis and
rising inequality are not exclusive to Hong Kong but they are as acute there as
anywhere on earth. (Hong Kong property is three times more expensive than London
property.) The more profound worries, though, are existential, and are felt most keenly
by young Hong Kongers. President Xi Jinping has systematically eroded the territory’s
independence. The ‘one country, two systems’ arrangement left behind at the end of the
colonial era in 1997 was supposed to last fifty years. That deadline seemed a long way
off in 1997, but much less so now; Xi has made it clear that Hong Kong will lose all
independence long before that. The protesters in Hong Kong today all have one thing in
common: they will be around to see 2047. If current trends continue, the place where
they live now will effectively cease to exist.
This is one of the points which hits you most forcefully when you’re in Hong Kong, as
opposed to following the story from a distance. From abroad, you can get the gist about
the protests, but you don’t see how completely inter-generational the divide is. It is one
of those increasingly common issues – common globally, I mean – where you have a
good chance of knowing what a person thinks if you know their age. Families are split;
the accomodationist grown-ups miss few chances to harangue the protesting
youngsters, and the youngsters miss few chances to resent it furiously. You get told,
repeatedly, that the protesters are ‘children’, as young as 14 or 15 or even younger. This
is supposed to suggest that the protests are in some sense trivial, though of course it’s
possible to take it in the opposite sense, as a sign of how desperately fractured Hong
Kong has become: a society in which only children can tell the truth, and only children
feel they have any political agency.
Another thing that stands out at close range is the behaviour of the police. I knew this
was a hot topic – one of the protesters’ five demands is for an inquiry into police
brutality. However, I hadn’t realised quite how out-of-control police behaviour has
been. The protests were happening mainly at the weekends, for the incredibly Hong
Kongish reason that during the week the protesters have jobs and/or studies that they
don’t want to interrupt – ‘people call us part-time protesters,’ one of them said to me,
ruefully. My wife and I were in Hong Kong over one of the protest weekends, and it
wasn’t long before we started to catch the smell – the faint smell, luckily for us – of tear
gas. People began running past – running from the police. Peaceful demonstrations
linked to the upcoming district council elections were ruled unlawful by the police five
minutes before they were due to start. The police had then tear-gassed the
demonstrators. It was impossible not to wonder why. There was absolutely no need to
ban the assemblies and even less need to tear-gas them. The actions of the police could
only be seen as deliberate provocation and escalation. Two days later, on 8 November,
a protester, injured as he was trying to get away from tear gas, died. Three days after
that, a policeman shot an unarmed protester: the protester, who is still critically ill, was
arrested and charged; the policeman wasn’t even suspended. The authorities’ hope was
that the escalation of violence would lead to a public rejection of the protesters in the
district elections of 24 November. The opposite happened: pro-democracy parties won
17 out of the 18 constituencies being contested. In 2015 they had won none.
I always trip momentarily over that very Hong Kong term ‘pro-democracy parties’. If
you have pro-democracy parties, then that must mean you have anti-democracy parties
… but if a party is anti-democracy, and an election comes around, then surely … About
those five demands. If Hong Kong were run by an actual politician whose primary
concern was the needs of its population, well, obviously, we would never have arrived
at this point in the first place. But after that, if a real politician was in charge, four and a
bit of the five demands could be granted immediately and with little real controversy.
Those are to withdraw the extradition bill that triggered the protests; to investigate
police brutality and misconduct during the protests; to release arrested protesters; to
stop characterising the protesters as rioters; and for Carrie Lam to resign, which is the
first part of the problematic fifth demand. (Lam has already said in a leaked tape of a
private meeting that she wants to resign but Beijing won’t let her.) The much more
difficult part of that final demand is for the institution of universal suffrage in elections
for both LegCo and for the chief executive.
As Chaohua Wang explained, this was once an uncontroversial demand: ‘The main
political parties, pro-Beijing and pro-democracy, all agreed that universal suffrage
should be used in the election of the CE in 2007 and the legislature in 2008.’ It would
be impossible today to find anyone with any knowledge of Hong Kong or China who
thinks universal suffrage is possible; that is a measure of how far the ground has
shifted. The person who brought about this change was President Xi, through a
grandmother’s-footsteps incremental erosion of Hong Kong’s liberty and rule of law.
The most spectacular example of the new normal was the abduction of Hong Kong
booksellers by mainland authorities from 2015 onwards; as far as anybody knows, one
of the booksellers, the Swedish citizen Gui Minhai, is still in custody somewhere in
mainland China. Xi has unilaterally rewritten the rules for Hong Kong, and his actions
have brought the territory to a dangerous impasse. Nobody thinks China will make
concessions over universal suffrage. But the young people of Hong Kong are sure that
they have nothing to lose. I asked a protester if a permanent guarantee of ‘one country,
two systems’ would be enough. He instantly said no: it was full democracy or nothing.
Why not keep going with the 1997 fudge? I asked. ‘We have no future,’ he said,
instantly. That is an article of deep faith among the protesters. The fact that their
demands have been made to seem impossible gives them a desperate and nihilistic
edge. A popular protest graffito comes from The Hunger Games: ‘if we burn you burn
with us.’
This is a dangerous situation. But the dangers are not exclusively Hong Kong’s. Xi has
made himself solely responsiblefor everything that happens in China; he has ticked the
maximum publicity box. It might be that in the process he has given himself a job that
nobody can do. Daniel Elam, a scholar of post and anti-colonialism at the University of
Hong Kong, talked about ‘impossiblism’, about demands which at the time they are
made seem impossible to meet. The examples he gave were the suffragettes and
Gandhi. The Hong Kong protesters’ demands seem, here and now, in that same
category. What made those other impossible demands into realities was a change in
what seemed possible. Part of that process depends on the response of the
counterparty, the person who began by saying ‘no, never’. The counterparty to the
Hong Kong protesters is currently implacable. But there is a non-zero chance that the
CCP will no longer be running China by 2047.
When you look at the internet, it seems that mainlanders universally regard the
protesters as spoiled, ungrateful children, manipulated by foreign actors. But the locals
cut me off when I mentioned that. ‘You can’t tell what mainlanders think from the
internet’ is the consensus in Hong Kong. The Communist Party has taken over the
internet, and everybody knows you can’t tell the truth from the trolls. Since the CCP is
relying on the net to tell it what people think, that means the internet, from the CCP’s
point of view, is no longer working. But the internet as a guide to popular opinion is the
CCP’s main safety valve.
The protests made getting around town difficult. The protesters have targeted the MTR
– ‘because they have betrayed Hong Kong,’ I was told – and the protests take advice
from Bruce Lee, Hong Kong’s most famous son, and move ‘like water’. They are fluid
and decentralised and unpredictable. That made it hard to make plans. We didn’t have
much free time and in the end I only had half an afternoon clear to revisit some old –
the word felt less of a cliché than usual – haunts. I thought about going to Stanley,
where my grandparents were interned, on the south side of Hong Kong island. My
grandmother would always go there when she came to stay at Christmas, to visit the
graves of her friends in the military cemetery. I felt that if we went there we might not
be back in time for duties later that day, so instead we went to visit the place where I
grew up, a two-storey block of flats in the romantically named Mid-Levels.
On the way up the hill I was feeling sad, as you do when you visit a place where you
lived with people you loved who are now dead. When we arrived, I found that our old
home had been knocked down. Not only knocked down, but replaced by a hideous
piece of white-box modernism, with a poser’s narrow swimming pool and a triple-
height atrium overlooking where the garden used to be. The punchline was that this
new development was empty and abandoned too. I felt, of all unexpected things, a wave
of relief. The only thing left of the place where I grew up are my memories of it.
Walking down the hill, I felt physically lighter. My host that evening explained the
mystery of the empty building: property prices have been going up so fast that
landlords can leave buildings vacant, to avoid the hassle of renting, and still capture all
the capital growth they want.
In the morning we headed for the airport. I hate the new airport, because I dislike
Norman Foster’s buildings, and because although Kai Tak was the most frightening
airport in the world, at least it was a place, not a generic postmodernist international
non-place. Still, there’s no denying that the new airport is a lot more efficient; lots more
shops. Some things they’ll sell you and some things they won’t. In the departures area,
you are confronted by signs saying you aren’t allowed to take more than 1.8 kg of baby
milk powder out of the territory. The ban is addressed to mainland Chinese, who have
reacted to a series of scandals about contaminated milk powder at home by stocking up
on capitalist milk powder to ensure their children’s safety. Without a restriction on
exports, Hong Kong would run out of milk powder.
I found myself thinking about that, as we wandered and drifted around the shiny
nowhere of the airport: about a Communist authoritarian state which dreams about
instituting a system of technocratic totalitarian control, but which can’t keep baby-food
safe. In recent months I’ve spent a lot of time reading and thinking gloomy thoughts
about the CCP’s dream of a new AI-driven authoritarian-technocratic state (I wrote
about it in the LRB of 10 October). But the airport was a corrective. If the party is
omniscient and in charge of everything, who takes the blame for the contaminated milk
powder? If you can’t make milk powder safe, what are the odds of your controlling what
everybody thinks and does, in a country with 1.4 billion people, and no functioning
mechanisms for voicing discontent?
I was thinking about that as the plane took off, and thinking too about the feeling I’d
had all the time I’d been in Hong Kong, the sense that something was missing, that I’d
been expecting to have some encounter, some revelation, that hadn’t happened. I’d
been braced for an impact I hadn’t felt. And then I realised what it was: in five days I
hadn’t smelled the harbour, not once. Funny, sad, funny-sad. Lots of postcolonial
mixed feelings. And on the plus side, in the expat anecdote column, at least I can now
recognise the smell of tear gas.
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