Cartoonists Depict Drawn-Out Drama of Hong Kong Fear, Desperation

Cartoonists have become the conscience of Hong Kong as they acidly etch the desperation felt by a people destined to live under the flag of Communist China in seven years.

With politicians bickering and editorial writers anxious not to irritate the leaders in Beijing, comic strips have become one of the few platforms where Hong Kong’s fears are expressed with often brutal clarity.

Just after the crackdown June 4 in Beijing on the democracy movement, cartoonist Juan Tze drew Premier Li Peng in a bathtub of blood.

“Is it hot enough?” asked a soldier holding a bucket of steaming “people’s blood.”

After Geoffrey Howe, then the British foreign secretary, told Hong Kong that Britain could not guarantee the territory’s future, Larry Feign, an American expatriate, summed up the feelings of many through one of his comic strip characters: “I don’t know who to hate more, Deng Xiaoping or Margaret Thatcher.”

After 149 years of British rule, Hong Kong returns to China in 1997. Although Beijing has promised to retain the territory’s freewheeling economic and social system for 50 years, many of Hong Kong’s 5.7 million people lost faith in that promise after the June 4 crackdown.

Many also have little confidence in faction-ridden local politicians, says Joseph Y.S. Cheng, a leading educator and writer in the colony. Newspapers also practice self-censorship in their criticism of Beijing, he said.

“People look to comic strips as an outlet for their frustrations,” Cheng said. “Their popularity demonstrates that we have a solid groundswell of anti-communist, anti-China feeling, especially after June 4.”

Added Feign: “Cartoons appeal to the Chinese because you can get your meaning across indirectly.”

Cheng said that only in the last few years have comic strips become an important political outlet in Hong Kong. A recent exhibition of cartoons at the Hong Kong Arts Centre drew 40,000 people over several weeks.

Feign and Juan are perhaps the two best known cartoonists in the colony.

Frenetic and balding, Feign, 34, is author of a comic strip for the English-language South China Morning Post called “The World of Lily Wong.”

For the five years since he moved to Hong Kong from Orange County, Calif., with his Chinese wife, Feign has charted the lives of Lily, a smart, sexy Hong Kong woman, and Stuart Wright, a bumbling but good-hearted American.

Stuart wants to marry Lily and give her the passport she covets, but Lily isn’t in love and so far has refused him. Through their relationship, Feign explores the often blatant racism inflicted on Chinese by Westerners. He also pokes fun at the ways the Chinese view Westerners, known as “devils” in Cantonese.

A tall man, with the comportment of a Mandarin official in old China’s imperial court, Juan is more self-consciously political than Feign.

He grew up during Hong Kong’s most turbulent times and remembers watching the bloody anti-British riots in 1967 from a rickety balcony on his tenement home. He began drawing comics as an art student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the 1970s.

He took a page from early 20th-Century Chinese history, during which cartoons were a popular form of political agitation, and decided to use comics to fight for Hong Kong’s common man. He went to work at the Chinese-language Ming Pao.

“My generation is different from my parents’,” said Juan, 33. “They came from China and are concerned with basic things like food and money. We are searching for other things, from the spirit.”

When China recently announced its opposition to a British plan to give passports to key Hong Kong professionals and officials, Juan drew a man sitting on his bed, his birth certificate, identity card and passport scattered beneath him. “Who am I? Who am I?” the man screamed as his wife snored beside him.

“We have an identity crisis in Hong Kong,” Juan said. “London and Beijing are deciding our fate and we can’t influence them. I wanted to describe our feeling of hopelessness.”

Following the crackdown in Beijing, Juan drew Li Peng explaining why tanks were used to put down the rebellion. “We ran out of cars,” Li tells a visitor.

Another strip shows an Englishman offering Hong Kong on a fork into the drooling mouth of a corrupt Chinese cadre. “Be a brave Chinaman,” the Englishman says.

Juan, who hopes to stay in Hong Kong after 1997, has recently published a book of his work, “Black Goods.”

“I guess the Chinese might call me a counterrevolutionary,” he said with a wry smile. “I’m just helping them gather proof.”

If Juan expresses the desperation of Hong Kong, Feign captures the absurdity of its life.

Living on the cusp of two worlds--Hong Kong Chinese and Western expatriate--Feign has a unique vantage point.

“In the beginning, my position gave me a chance to pull off a lot of good gags,” he said. “But now as things get serious I find it harder to draw. It’s becoming a tragedy.”