Barbed-Wire Fences Make Good Neighbors : Despite Unity Hoopla, China and Hong Kong to Keep Their Distance

For the best dim sum around, Li Sing-kee has to walk from Hong Kong to China. Fortunately, it’s just across the road.

Three generations of Li’s family live in Sha Tau Kok, where the Hong Kong-China border runs right down the middle of the main street. When British soldiers tried to push the villagers across the somewhat randomly laid borderline in 1899 after winning Hong Kong from China, one history has it, the people “resisted vigorously” with shovels and hoes.

Today, the town has become an island between two countries. But the 11,000 people who live there are separated only by eight stone boundary markers.

“We feel like we’re more a part of Hong Kong than China, but we live like it’s one big village,” said Li, who lives above his clothing shop. Chinese soldiers are posted on one side; Hong Kong police stroll the line of gold shops on the other. “But people are always to-ing and fro-ing across the borderline to this restaurant or that gold shop,” Li said. “We just treat each other as neighbors.”

While the integrated town could have been a model for Hong Kong and China’s impending merger, the two territories are expected to remain as distant as ever. On July 1, when Hong Kong returns to China, the barbed-wire double fence marking much of the boundary won’t be dismantled as the Berlin Wall was; rather, the border authorities on both sides have been quietly strengthening it.

And in doing so, they emphasize the central irony of the much-celebrated “glorious reunification”: that after July 1, Hong Kong and China will not be fully one. The gash of razor fence along the area’s rolling hills distinctly underlines the separation.

The decision to keep Hong Kong walled off from China is partly political: Beijing leaders want to keep Hong Kong’s freewheeling ways and ideas from seeping into the mainland and undermining the government’s carefully crafted control. Many Hong Kong magazines and newspapers--to say nothing of political activists--are banned in China.

But bolstering the border is mostly practical. “The Chinese authorities are well aware that if you made it any easier to get into Hong Kong, Hong Kong would quickly sink under the weight of the people,” said John Ashton, the leader of the British team that negotiated the boundary.

For nine years, the British and Chinese teams discussed where to draw the imaginary line to separate the two lands without ever calling it a “border.” That term, the Chinese fear, would imply that Hong Kong was a British territory, and not simply “borrowed land under British administration,” as the Chinese side insisted.

In January, the teams finally ended their drawn-out discussions with a map that clearly marks the boundary. And though the new line involves some land-swapping, it does not bisect any more farms or villages, as Sha Tau Kok was divided almost 100 years ago.

To walk the border is to see the result of a map maker’s random hand. When the lines were first drawn in 1898, a handful of people ended up on the other side of the border from their traditional family farm plots or ancestral graves. And so every day, a few of these “tolerated border crossers” can be seen, barefoot and straw-hatted, cultivating the no man’s land between Hong Kong and China, cursing the illegal immigrants who trample their tender shoots and steal their vegetables as they search for a way to get through the border fence.

Along the double fence is evidence of creativity and desperation in the attempts of “non-tolerated” crossers to reach Hong Kong. Homemade ladders of bamboo or branches lashed together with vines are leaned against the fence poles. Behind ragged holes cut in the wire are nests of trampled bamboo, carefully folded newspapers, Styrofoam bowls of instant noodles and many cigarette stubs.

“We watch them sitting and waiting for hours for their chance to cross,” said Chief Inspector John Holmes, who has been supervising border patrol for three years. The Royal Hong Kong Police share patrol duties with the army, and they are properly equipped to detect an invasion. The fences are lined with motion-triggered sensors, which sound a silent alarm when shaken. In a control room, officers can see the huddled bodies of waiting crossers on a heat-detecting infrared scope. “The cigarettes look really bright on the infrared,” he said. “Dead giveaway.”

For both the crossers and the catchers, it’s a bit of a game. “Sometimes we take down a section of fence or turn out the lights to lure them across in that section,” said Holmes, a burly officer who left behind a job in a frozen pizza factory in England to begin his 18-year career in Hong Kong’s police force. “They come over the hill thinking they’ve made it--and there we are.”

The Hong Kong police repatriate about 80 illegal immigrants a day. Many more make it across, though a few don’t make it that far. At the Man Kam To vehicle crossing, while guards peer at ground-level mirrors to see underneath delivery trucks, officers nearby give chase to a one-legged man hobbling through a banana plantation. He had stowed away with his crutch in a truck’s undercarriage and clambered out just 400 yards beyond the border.

“It’s his third time across this year,” said a police officer. “He’ll be back.”

Though the border is an obstacle for some, for others it is an opportunity. Gau, 27, is a “snakehead,” whose business is getting people into Hong Kong--or even the United States--illegally. He charges about $1,200 for a speedboat trip into Hong Kong from China, and specializes in ferrying pregnant women who want to have their babies on Hong Kong soil. He unloads them, then restocks his boat with cigarettes or electronic equipment to smuggle into China.

“It’s easiest to go by sea, not land,” he said, peering through sunglasses that he wears even indoors at night. “There are so many ways to go, and I’m so fast they can never catch me.”

From the air, the boundary markers, fences and walls that divide Hong Kong from China nearly disappear, but the yin and yang of the two lands are clear all the same. The Hong Kong side is a wildlife preserve, where lush wetlands abruptly abut the smoking factories and industrial buildings that make up China’s Shenzhen special economic zone.

To Chinese developer Tony Ng, this is a matter of pride. “Take a look,” he said, gesturing to Shenzhen’s cranes, neon lights and shining skyscrapers contrasting with the stone graves, chicken coops and patched-up farmhouses a few hundred feet away in Hong Kong. “Which is the First World country? Which is the Third World?”

The economic osmosis is the kind of assimilation that China wants more of, but ironically, it’s also the greatest argument for keeping Hong Kong apart. Hong Kong investors have put $80 billion in China and created 3 million jobs in Guangdong, the province adjoining Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s business leaders, many of whom were selected by China to advise on handling the territory after the changeover, insist to Beijing that the only way to keep that kind of money coming in is to not interfere in Hong Kong’s business. “Our new motto should be, ‘Just Leave Us Alone,’ ” joked one.

Despite the increasing economic integration, the two places remain divided in other ways, still struggling to knit over the ruptures of recent history.

One Hong Kong officer remembers border duty during China’s 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, when Chinese guards blasted Maoist propaganda through loudspeakers at all hours. The Hong Kong guards retaliated with the Beatles.

Now, both sides are talking about a different kind of revolution, an economic integration and a peaceful takeover that Beijing hopes will also arouse feelings of pride in the motherland. But it’s one that sparks ambivalence in Hong Kong hearts as well.

“China is still a divided country,” said Lisa Wong, a student at Hong Kong University, referring to Hong Kong and Taiwan’s reluctance to be reclaimed by the motherland. “We Chinese are still a divided people.”