A Look at Territory a Year After Return to Chinese Sovereignty

As Hong Kong’s hand-over to China neared in 1997, The Times visited with some residents to learn of their hopes--and fears--about life under Beijing’s rule. A year later, their lives have taken some unexpected turns.

ZHANG JING / Dissident

Dissident Zhang Jing knows firsthand about Chinese repression, and she didn’t want to stay in Hong Kong long enough to see what would happen after Chinese rule took effect.

Now safely in the U.S., she says that when it comes to human rights, Hong Kong hasn’t changed much more for the worse--but that China hasn’t changed much for the better. Mainland relatives who visited her in Hong Kong are still paying the price.

First imprisoned in 1980 for her role in the 1978-79 Democracy Wall movement in China, she was released and re-jailed several times during the 1980s for her persistent political activism. Zhang was finally freed in 1995, but without her “political rights,” which took away her freedom to travel or even marry. She wed anyway and became pregnant, but officials demanded that she abort the “unrecognized” child. Instead, she fled to Hong Kong.

She changed her name and eventually divorced her husband after he insisted that she stop participating in political rallies.

A month before last July’s hand-over, at a rally to protect the right to protest, she brought her daughter along to learn. “This is part of her civic education,” she said, as Shan-Shan, then 4, sat on a friend’s shoulders and chanted human rights slogans with the crowd. “I don’t care what she chooses. I just want to her to have the right to choose.”

As part of a political asylum program, Zhang left Hong Kong a few weeks before the hand-over and settled in New York. She has remarried and has a job at a Chinese newspaper.

“For the first time, I feel safe,” she said by telephone. “I can express myself without any restrictions. I have normal worries now, not about being sent to prison, but about how busy my job is.”

Zhang said she is encouraged by Hong Kong’s relative freedom but wonders whether China’s noninterference is a matter of discretion or distraction.

TSANG YOK-SING / Pro-China Politician

As the leader of the most prominent pro-China political party, Tsang Yok-sing has long spoken for Beijing in Hong Kong.

But in the past year, the former school principal has edged away from the party line to join the most unlikely of allies--the opposition Democrats--to press for action on the economy, and even democracy.

Under Hong Kong’s Constitution, the government will decide after 2007 when the territory will be ready for an elected leader and fully elected legislature.

“Some of my colleagues will express very strong objections to speeding up democracy,” Tsang said. “But if there is consensus among Hong Kong people that we should speed up the process, then my party should support it.”

The two flanks of the political spectrum were brought even closer by the unsparing impact of the ailing economy; the coalition’s pressure helped push the government to announce an unprecedented $4.1-billion rescue package.

“Before the hand-over, people expected any doom to come from the political situation,” Tsang said. “But it came from the economic situation. No one expected that.”

With such pragmatic moves, Tsang may emerge to represent the reality of Hong Kong--a balance between the fire-breathing idealism of the Democrats and the conservatism of Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa.

But it’s a surprising shift from the man once regarded as the democratic camp’s main antagonist.

After his party was aced out of most races by the Democrats in 1995 elections, Tsang led the charge to change the system to end the Democrats’ domination.

The result was a new electoral system that gave his party 10 seats compared to the democratic bloc’s 20.

Despite the economic doldrums, Tsang senses a kind of post-colonial relief in Hong Kong. “The biggest change is that the British are no longer our masters,” he said.

NORMAN QUAN / Businessman

Financial controller Norman Quan has always been careful about his projections, especially when the investment is a personal stake in the success of Hong Kong, where he grew up. But a year after the hand-over, he thinks that he overestimated Hong Kong.

In 1994, he left Los Angeles for Hong Kong to ride its booming economy and to be part of its historic return to the motherland. “My parents thought I was crazy,” he said last year. “But I told them, ‘I love the States, but my heart is still in Hong Kong and China.’ ”

Two weeks before the one-year anniversary, he was preparing to go back to Los Angeles, disappointed by a deep downturn in the economy and disillusioned by the corruption he sees seeping into the territory from China.

“I thought I would give myself a few years to settle down and succeed in Hong Kong. I think I failed. Maybe I’m not strong enough,” he said after quitting his job at a trading firm that does business in the mainland. “To succeed here, you have to bend a lot. But I don’t want to compromise in order to do business.”

As his firm’s financial controller, he said he “discovered a lot of crazy things: smuggling, bribes to Chinese officials to the tune of millions of U.S. dollars, paying officials’ living expenses. . . .”

“I always thought that if you’re good at business, you don’t need to buy your clients,” he said. “But . . . the managers here just want results. They don’t care how you do it.”

“Hong Kong used to be a pretty good place to do business,” he said. “But now, . . . it’s gotten a little dirty.”

CHENG LAI-SHEUNG / Chiropractor

A year ago, chiropractor Cheng Lai-sheung thought that the beginning of Chinese rule would mean an end to the newly won rights of village women. But in the last 12 months, she has learned that, when it comes to equality, local leaders are way behind Beijing.

First thing in the morning, Cheng teaches martial arts, and then she spends the day setting bones, dispensing herbs and fighting for her home. Cheng lives in the outlying New Territories--a rural area where women are expected to stay in the home but until recently were not allowed to own one. Until 1996--when a law was passed giving village women the right to inherit property--land and houses were handed from male to male, lest a female heir marry and put the village property in an outsider’s hands. The village elders, who disliked the law, vowed that it would be repealed once China took control of Hong Kong.

Cheng’s mission was to make sure that the law would stand--and be obeyed. Her father, she said, wanted her to have the top floor of the family’s three-story ancestral home when he died because she didn’t have a husband to take care of her. But her brothers exerted their patrilineal rights and sold the house out from under her, she said.

“If a sister is single, she must rely on a brother’s mercy to take care of her,” she said last year.

Bolstered by the new law, she took the case to court and won the right to stay on the top floor. But this year, the government will demolish the house to make way for a road, so she is back in court, trying to win the deed and the compensation that should come with it.

Her success inspired other women to try exercising property rights, which caused a backlash by village men and even some of the older women. Now, she said, she is the only woman left trying to win her own property. “Most women have given up already,” she said, mixing herbs with callused hands.