Hong Kong: 10 years later

Hong Kong’s decade under China’s flag

BBC’s Samanthi Dissanayake looks at how Hong Kong has changed, 10 years after it was handed back to China by the British.

ANNIVERSARY: The skies opened and poured with rain when China finally regained possession of Britain’s last great imperial outpost at midnight on June 30, 1997

“I was unsure, not scared, unsure,” said 87-year-old Tang from his small village in Hong Kong’s New Territories, close to the border with China.

Uncertainty about the future was only natural when a socialist state one billion-strong took on what was arguably the world’s most successful experiment in capitalism.

In the decade since the handover, Hong Kong has weathered the slump of the Asian financial crisis, the premature resignation of an unpopular chief executive and the Sars outbreak.

But what is striking when talking to people across the territory is how little they believe has fundamentally changed.

“No difference, no difference,” said Tang, who tends the ancestral hall of his family clan.

“I don’t feel it has changed,” said Tse Lin Kwai, a taxi driver.

This is largely because Hong Kong is governed by the principle of “one country, two systems”, whereby China has agreed to preserve its way of life for 50 years after the handover.

Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law, provides for the protection of citizens’ rights and the development of democracy.

Hong Kong still ranks as the freest economy in the world, according to the Index for Economic Freedom, and has done for the past 13 years. Personal freedoms remain uncompromised.

Moreover, integration with China has allowed some to express an enhanced Chinese identity.

“Before, we were a colony governed by others. Now I can say I love my mother country, my homeland,” Ms Tse said.

Her words belie the complex relationship that has evolved between China and the people of Hong Kong. Key to understanding change in Hong Kong is understanding the change across the border.

In the last decade, China has developed at breakneck speed. Indeed, as Hong Kong suffered during the downturn of 2003, China came to its assistance with a scheme giving Hong Kong goods free access to China’s markets.

Growth in tourism from the mainland has been exponential, and cross-border traffic has made Lo Wu, Hong Kong’s main border control point with China, the busiest in the world.

On the train to Lo Wu, passengers’ growing identification with China is twinned with a fear of the rising economic might of China, which some believe could marginalise Hong Kong.

“I don’t feel the difference between Hong Kong and China,” said Cheng, a tour bus driver who was visiting family in China.

“But I feel the threat from Shanghai which has flown up so high so quickly,” he added.

The relationship between China and Hong Kong is misunderstood, according to Tuan Chyau, an economist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. As the two economies integrate, certain shifts are inevitable, he says.

“Hong Kong has become the service provider as its manufacturing has moved to China. Shenzhen will catch up with Hong Kong in terms of container shipments. But all these cities are growing. Ranking is unimportant as long as Hong Kong can keep good growth.”

Nevertheless, the comparison will hit home hard after a decade in which wages in Hong Kong fell and the gap between rich and poor increased.

This gap is now one of the widest in the world.

Every day before the news, Hong Kong television broadcasts Chinese national songs. Many people mentioned this to me with some bemusement.

A vibrant sense of local identity has remained.

People talk about their love of Cantonese opera, their pride in Hong Kong’s home-grown film industry and their fears for the fate of the Cantonese language in Hong Kong when Mandarin is of increasing significance.

Surveys show that people tend to identify more strongly with Hong Kong than with China, although the gap has narrowed in recent years.

One defining moment was July 2003, when hundreds of thousands protested against a controversial anti-subversion law.

Hong Kong - and to a lesser extent Macau, which was handed back from Portuguese rule to China in 1999 - hosts a visible political opposition, in contrast to much of the rest of Chinese soil.

“The challenge to China is how the central government manages a growing and assertive political culture in Hong Kong and increasingly in Macau,” said political analyst Sonny Lo.

“This will have important implications for China’s political reform in the coming decade.”

Law Yuk Kai of the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor acknowledges that peoples’ rights have largely remained in place, but points to a number of instances when the Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress has weighed in and interpreted the Basic Law.

“As soon as Hong Kong was handed over, there was a rolling back of civil liberties legislation,” he said.

In 2004, universal suffrage for the 2007 chief executive election was ruled out. And while Hong Kong enjoys relatively high levels of press freedom, there are disturbing signs. In a recent survey for the Hong Kong Journalists Association, 30% of the 506 journalists questioned admitted they practiced self-censorship.

Many point out that the change in Hong Kong is less significant than the change in China - a country that only opened up to the world 30 years ago. China knows that Hong Kong’s success depends on its rule of law and open markets.

“When we asked people if they expected China to become more like Hong Kong 10 years ago, there were people who said it would. They turned out to be right. Many expected it to go the other way,” said Professor Michael de Golyer, of the Hong Kong Baptist University.

“Hong Kong was the tiny flickering light of internationalism on the south coast. Now the whole country is lit.”

- BBC

Last British governor of Hong Kong

Penny SPILLER

EMOTIONAL MOMENT: Ten years ago this weekend, Chris Patten’s job as governor of Hong Kong came to an end - and with it 150 years of British rule.

Amid a tropical downpour, Mr Patten, along with the Prince of Wales, new Prime Minister Tony Blair and other dignitaries, saw the British flag lowered in the territory for the last time on 30 June 1997.

It was an emotional moment, says the former governor who was made a Lord in 2004. Both he and his family had come to love Hong Kong during their five years there. He still calls it the best job he ever had.

Lord Patten had insisted upon a ceremony of some pomp, rather than a more functional handover in the city hall that had initially been favoured by the Chinese.

In his farewell speech, he not only alluded to the previous century and events that led to British rule of Hong Kong - the Opium Wars that “none of us would wish or seek to condone” - but also to China’s human rights record.

“We might note that most of those who live in Hong Kong now do so because of events in our own century which would today have few defenders,” he said.

Lord Patten says today that his fears then, that Hong Kong would simply be subsumed by China, have proved largely unfounded.

“My worst fear about Hong Kong was that it would become China’s richest city. But I think it’s managed to remain a Chinese city that encompasses the best attributes of the West. It’s retained its character,” he said.

Lord Patten jokes that the last governor of Hong Kong was “slightly improbably” chosen by the citizens of Bath - who voted him out as their MP in the 1992 general election. Until that point he had been a rising star in the British Conservative government, holding the position of party chairman until he lost his seat.

The newly-re-elected prime minister, John Major, decided to break with tradition by offering the last governorship of Hong Kong to a politician rather than a diplomat.

Lord Patten quickly proved to be a very different type of governor - carrying out tours of the territory, holding regular question and answer sessions, and opening up Government House for concerts and charity events.

His main aim when he arrived in 1992 was to further democracy in the territory - as, he says, was promised when the handover agreement known as the Joint Declaration was signed with China in 1984. “By the time I came, there were still a lot of issues of democratic development that needed to be resolved,” he said.

He set about making government more open and accountable, and changed the electoral process to allow more people to vote in the 1995 elections for the legislative council, the last such elections before handover.

Lord Patten said he “tried to work within the grounds of the 1984 agreement”, but his reforms angered China, and some in Britain, who felt it was rather late in the day to start introducing democracy when little attempt had been made in the past.

Tensions with China remained until handover day, and some of his reforms were in effect reversed after 1997.

But Lord Patten has no regrets. “I believe the reforms we introduced ensured that the Chinese were on their best behaviour after 1997, and also helped to develop a strong sense of citizenship in Hong Kong. So I think they were a help.

“If I have any regrets, it’s that we spent so long negotiating with one or two Chinese officials who were never going to give any ground. We wasted a year or so on that.”

His relations with the Chinese government have improved since then, and Lord Patten speaks positively about the role China has to play in the world.

“I always believed China’s success was useful for the rest of us, and I do not think it poses the threat some think it does,” he said.

As for Hong Kong, the man who was affectionately known as “Fatty Pang” (Pang being the Chinese transliteration of Patten) says he has returned several times in the past 10 years and gets a reception “rather like an ageing rock star”.

He says he would like to see Beijing introduce universal suffrage in Hong Kong, allowing people the right to choose their own government.

“Hong Kong has many of the institutions and attributes of a liberal society, all except for the ability to vote”.

BBC

How does Hong Kong’s “One Country, Two Systems” work?

TWO SYSTEMS : Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping created the current “One country, two systems” formula to safeguard Hong Kong’s capitalist system and lifestyle for fifty years after the territory was handed back to communist-ruled China in 1997.

Here is an overview of the system and how it works:

“ONE COUNTRY”:

— The 1,095 square kilometre territory nestled between the South China Sea and China’s Guangdong Province became part of China again on July 1, 1997, after 156 years of British rule.

“TWO SYSTEMS”:

— The mainland’s more than one billion people have lived under the socialist system since Mao Zedong’s communists swept to power in 1949.

Hong Kong’s seven million people continue to operate under the laissez-faire capitalism that flourished during its time as a British colony.

DENG’S THEORY:

— Deng theorised that letting some foreign capital into China would “supplement to the socialist economy and help promote the growth of the socialist productive forces”.

— The formula also had a political aim — to “solve the Hong Kong and Taiwan problems by allowing two systems to coexist in one country”, Deng wrote.

CHINESE CONTROLS:

— Beijing appoints Hong Kong’s chief executive and principal officials, and China takes responsibility for its defence and foreign affairs. It stations troops in the territory and has barred figures it disapproves of politically, like the Pope, from visiting the territory.

LEADERSHIP:

— The chief executive is picked by an elite, 800 member, mostly pro-Beijing Election Committee. The Central People’s Government then formally appoints them to their 5-year term.

LAW-MAKERS:

— Half of the sixty Legislative Council, or Legco, lawmakers are democratically elected by geographical constituencies; half are elected by “functional constituencies” representing business and other sectors like law, tourism and education.

CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS:

— Approved by Beijing in April 1990, the nine chapter mini-constitution, the Basic Law, lets Hong Kong handle its domestic affairs with a “high degree of autonomy” and lets the independent judiciary continue under British Common Law.

— In just two differences from mainland China’s 1982 constitution, it enshrines freedom of speech and property rights.

CONSTITUTIONAL CONSTRAINTS:

— The Basic Law prohibits the legislature from initiating bills on public expenditure, political structure or government, and requires the chief executive’s approval of any legislation affecting government policy.

— Hong Kong’s courts have no jurisdiction over acts of state such as defence and foreign affairs.

— Interpretation and amendment of the Basic Law rests with Beijing’s Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress.

SUFFRAGE CONTROVERSY:

— Article 45 of the Basic Law states the chief executive will ultimately be elected by universal suffrage.

— Beijing has stalled debate on the timeframe but current Chief Executive Donald Tsang has promised to “resolve” the universal suffrage issue by 2012.

Reuters

The who, what, when and why of the Hong Kong handover

HANDOVER : At midnight on June 30, 1997, Hong Kong was handed back to China, ending 156 years of British rule.

Here are some facts on the history of the handover:

BRITAIN’S 99-YEAR LEASE:

— Hong Kong was wrested from China by Britain in three phases, starting with the mid-19th century “opium wars”.

— Hong Kong Island went first, under the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The Kowloon Peninsula followed, in the 1860 Convention of Peking. The rural New Territories, a mainland area adjacent to Kowloon and 235 islands, was added under a 99-year lease in 1898.

— Under these treaties, the New Territories, which comprise 70 percent of the colony’s area, would revert to China in 1997.

TERMS FOR THE HAND-OVER:

— After two years of negotiations the leaders of Britain, Margaret Thatcher, and China, Zhao Ziyang, signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration on Dec. 19, 1984.

— It agreed all of Hong Kong would be returned to China at midnight on June 30, 1997; it guaranteed a 50-year extension of Hong Kong’s capitalist system and relative autonomy until 2047 under the “one country, two systems” formula.

THE CEREMONY:

— Britain held a “sunset ceremony” in torrential rain at what had been its naval base, before fireworks exploded over Victoria Harbour at 8 p.m. local time, and British and Chinese leaders attended a final ceremony at the Convention Centre.

— At 9 p.m. 4,000 guests took part in an elaborate banquet at the Convention Centre, as an advance guard of 509 Chinese troops crossed the land border into Hong Kong. Another 4,000 troops arrived early in the morning of July 1.

— At 11:30 p.m. the Hong Kong flag was lowered. At midnight the British flag came down and the Chinese and new Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) flags were raised together.

THE LAST BRITISH GOVERNOR:

— Diplomat Chris Patten was Hong Kong’s 28th and last Governor, serving five years from 1992.

— The conservative former member of Parliament for Bath, nicknamed “the last imperialist” for overseeing the end of the British Empire, cried along with his wife and three daughters as the Union flag was lowered during heavy rain.

PRINCE CHARLES’ GAFFE:

— Britian’s Prince Charles and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook represented the Queen and government at the handover.

— In November 2005 a British tabloid newspaper embarrassed the Prince by quoting his description of Chinese officials at the ceremony as “appalling old waxworks”, in published excerpts from the 1997 diary of the event that he had titled “The Handover of Hong Kong” or “The Great Chinese Takeaway”.

FIRST “POST-COLONIAL” LEADER:

— Tung Chee-Hwa, a conservative 59-year old pro-China businessman, was hand-picked by the China-controlled 400-member Selection Committee to head the territory in December 1996.

— The son of a shipping tycoon, Tung was a member of Chris Patten’s Executive Council for four years and an adviser to the Chinese government prior to his appointment, but stepped down in March 2005, after massive pro-democracy protests.

HISTORIC CHINESE VISIT:

— China’s President Jiang Zemin and Prime Minister Li Peng were the first Chinese leaders to set foot on Hong Kong soil for 156 years when they came for the ceremony. Neither attended the evening’s official banquet.

DEMOCRACY PROTESTORS:

— Half an hour after the handover ceremony Hong Kong Democratic Party leader Martin Lee, founder of the first opposition political party, called for democracy and freedom in his “July 1 Declaration” speech, made in front of supporters outside the Legislative Council building.

Reuters