Will Hong Kong Swallow China? Not if Facts Count : Economics: The idea that the colony will take over the country is comforting to a lot of Westerners, but as the basis of a policy, it is dangerous.

George Simpkin, a New Zealander, is director of Hong Kong’s Rugby Union. In mid-June, he unveiled a scheme to introduce rugby to China’s peasant-based People’s Libera tion Army in hopes that its soldiers will be aficionados of the game when they march onto Hong Kong’s British military bases (three of which have rugby fields) roughly five years from now. “It is a long-term strategy,” he told a sportswriter for the Hong Kong Standard newspaper. “If we get the PLA to play rugby, we can widen the base of the game in China and also ensure the use of rugby pitches (in Hong Kong) after 1997.”

Simpkin’s plan embodies, in its most naive and comic form, a current delusion about the future relationship between Hong Kong and China. It goes like this: China will not take over Hong Kong; rather, Hong Kong will take over China.

Before the ‘80s, another delusion about China and Hong Kong prevailed, one subscribed to with equal confidence by American and British scholars and officials. China didn’t really want Hong Kong back, because China made too much money from Hong Kong’s role as a transit point for economic dealings between the West and the Middle Kingdom. Many, from then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on down, were thus shocked when Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping announced a decade ago that, in fact, China wanted Hong Kong back.

The delusion that Hong Kong will take over China serves similar psychological functions. It is comforting. It minimizes the need for public action or concern, because it suggest things will go on in Hong Kong much as they did before. It appeals to intellectuals, because it sounds like a nice irony. This delusion is, of course, much more prevalent in Western capitals and universities than among the 6 million people of Hong Kong, quite a few of whom still form long lines outside the visa sections of the U.S., Canadian and Australian consulates.

The idea that Hong Kong is taking over China is based on some superficial observations in a limited economic sense. Across Hong Kong’s border, South China is not only growing fast, it looks more capitalistic. In the special economic zone of Shenzhen, adjoining Hong Kong, crowds line up in mid-afternoon to watch a television screen carrying running quotes from the border town’s new stock exchange. The cellular phones so popular on the streets of Hong Kong are now showing up across the border. Throughout much of Guangdong province, Hong Kong dollars have been for several years the medium of exchange, and Hong Kong businessmen move back and forth, opening factories to profit from the low-cost labor now in desperately short supply inside Hong Kong.

Even in this narrow economic sphere, however, the idea that Hong Kong is taking over China is, at best, a glittering half-truth. The movement of economic power and influence is at least as great, and probably much greater, the other way, from China into Hong Kong. Chinese companies are ever more active in Hong Kong business affairs, either through outright ownership or by buying shares in leading Hong Kong companies. The children of China’s top leaders are Hong Kong’s new uncrowned royalty: They are wined, dined and courted for their access to Beijing’s money and power.

On a more ominous level, some Chinese officials or units seem to be quietly moving into Hong Kong and establishing links with Hong Kong’s Triads, the underground criminal organizations. Earlier this year, China’s Ministry of Public Security Tao Siju was quoted as suggesting that some of Hong Kong’s Triad organizations were “patriotic.”

When it comes to politics, the belief that Hong Kong is taking over China simply denies the reality on both sides of the border. In Shenzhen, eager and sincere young Chinese volunteer praise of “our great leader Deng Xiaoping,” in a style that seems as feudal as the similar paeans to Mao Tse-tung two decades ago. When visitors inquire about the role Communist Party leaders and organizations play in foreign joint ventures, Shenzhen officials say they are indeed there, to help ensure the “stability” of the work force. It is an answer more forthright than Chinese officials used to give in the 1980s, when they often denied the existence or downplayed the importance of Communist Party cells in companies foreign investors set up in China.

Most important, inside Hong Kong, China is making abundantly clear the extent to which it intends to wield power not only after 1997, but even before the formal takeover. Last month, Guo Fengmin, one of the top Chinese officials for Hong Kong, insisted the British government should clear its decisions with China not just on economic projects, such as a new airport, but on political matters, such as which officials it will appoint to the Executive Council, Hong Kong’s version of a Cabinet. In particular, China claims that members of a Hong Kong party favoring democracy should be barred from leadership positions in the colony. Guo said it was not in Hong Kong’s interest to appoint politicians to the Executive Council who advocate the subversion of the Hong Kong government--thus making the equation between “democracy” and “subversion” for Hong Kong, just as the communist regime has already done inside China.

The British government may yet make some half-hearted and belated attempts to resist China’s political incursions. But over the eight years since the 1984 agreement was signed, it has already caved in repeatedly to Chinese demands that it delay and water down proposed political changes that would move Hong Kong toward a functioning democracy before 1997. Britain’s top priority is demonstrated by the current issue of “Britain in Hong Kong,” the publication of the British Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong. It mentions Hong Kong barely at all, but dwells at length at the possibilities for British firms getting into the China market.

I was in Beijing in December, 1984, when Thatcher, backed by a bunch of sad-eyed British diplomats, signed the accord for the return of Hong Kong. In the agreement, China--using Deng’s formula of “one country, two systems”--guaranteed that it would leave Hong Kong with a high degree of autonomy and preserve the colony’s economic system for another 50 years after the 1997 takeover. It’s fair to say that few in Beijing back then could have imagined the extent to which British authority would have eroded and China would be wielding power in Hong Kong five years before the actual handover.

Ultimately, of course, what happens in Hong Kong after 1997 will depend on political developments inside China. Maybe, in either a show of good faith or a Leninist “united front” campaign, the PLA will open up its Hong Kong military bases once in a while for an occasional rugby day for the likes of Simpkin.

But with five years to go, there can be little doubt in which direction things are heading. China will take over Hong Kong, if it hasn’t already.