After All the Sound and Fury, Hong Kong Is Ho-Hum

It was just about three years ago that I met two unforgettably frightened women in the British crown colony of Hong Kong. Control of their homeland would soon be handed over to China, and these two wealthy widows were so terrified that they plunked down a small fortune to purchase “escape” homes in nearby Singapore.

Their fear was widely shared in Hong Kong, and indeed in the United States. No one knew for sure what would happen July 1, 1997. Elements of the Western media had so pumped up the anti-China volume that it was hard to think straight.

People were hit day after day with bloodcurdling scenarios. There were reports of People’s Liberation Army troops poised to storm across the border and flood Hong Kong streets the second after London handed the keys over. A column in the Washington Post spoke of the coming “Chinese crackdown on human rights.” The prestigious Economist painted a grim picture of “restrictions on political parties and demonstrations” that could lead to parties “being banned.”

Economic pessimists were all but advising Western investors to cash in and get out while they could. “The naked truth about Hong Kong’s future,” Fortune magazine intoned, “can be summed up in two words: It’s over.” Chinese officials were rarely if ever quoted in any of these stories. Yet almost any anti-Beijing group, no matter how obscure, would get its 15 minutes of Western media fame in dispatches that, hardly surprisingly, mirrored the biases of their sources. It was not the Western media’s best, much less most objective, day.

Almost three years later, it is obvious that none of the worst has come to pass. People in Hong Kong are about as free as they have always been--to live their lives, to criticize the politicians, to keep what they earn. Street demonstrations still occur, but the uniformed soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, virtually imprisoned in their large vertical barrack near China’s central business district, aren’t permitted to show their faces during daylight hours. Of course, the Taiwan issue is indeed a touchy subject, and no major newspaper since the hand-over has editorialized in favor of formal independence for the island. Then again, no major Hong Kong newspaper had taken that position before July 1, 1997, either.

What’s also unchanged is politician-bashing: The local media still knocks the government around, only now it’s the Beijing-approved administration of Tung Chee-hwa. “Tung Casts a Shadow Over Press Freedom,” said a recent headline in the prestigious South China Morning Post. The stock market hovers only slightly higher today than it did after the takeover, but Hong Kong has been rocked far less by anything Beijing has done to it than by the regional economic downturn that has only recently abated. As far as anyone can tell, that stock market, and other financial institutions, remain independent. “You know, London used to make us call more frequently,” Financial Secretary Donald Tsang recently told me. “The chief concern about Hong Kong was that China would mess it up,” a chagrined Fortune magazine said in 1998. “It hasn’t.” As promised, Hong Kong’s finances have stayed completely separate from those of the People’s Republic. China has mostly kept its promise to keep its hands off.

Even observers in anti-communist Singapore, which competes fiercely against Hong Kong for business and which has every motive to bad mouth it, concur. “The fears the Western media expressed have not come to pass,” Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew told me.

In short, many in the Western news media missed the boat. Why was that? An understandable distrust of communism was part of it. But also responsible was the patented Western media formula of negativity and sensationalism. This prompted some elements, especially television, to throw caution, balance and objectivity to the winds.

To be sure, Hong Kong has changed. Chinese, not English, is now the primary language of the public schools, and over the long run Hong Kong will become more and more Chinese--thus decreasingly Western. That’s true of the entire region; last December, the Portuguese colony of Macao was returned to Chinese control with little fanfare.

Most of all, Beijing hopes to add Taiwan to the fold. That’s not likely to happen in the foreseeable future. But with the entire world watching, was it any surprise that President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji did not want a public spectacle over Hong Kong? And there wasn’t one.

Oh, about those two frightened widows. Their expensive Singapore “escape” homes are unoccupied and up for sale. The women happily remain in Hong Kong.