Perfidious Albion

Miracles, delivered almost as regularly as the morning milk, have kept Hong Kong alive during the four decades I have known Britain's last Crown Colony. Miracles have also made her prosperous.

How else would a territory of four hundred square miles with no natural resources, not even water, have become one of the world's major manufacturing, trading, and financial centers? It was, further, at least a demimiracle for her relentless commercialism (read: enlightened greed) to have shaped a civilized society where the pleasures of intellectual endeavors and the arts are not scorned, although subordinated to the pleasures of the table, dining and gaming. (That is, among the 96 per cent of her people who are Chinese--not the "expatriates," there just for the money.)

Hong Kong has been nurtured by miracles since her birth 150 years ago. Unless another miracle intervenes, she will perish in June 1997 by the hand of her creator, Great Britain.

As William McGurn points out in his scathing indictment of the Hong Kong policy of the Conservative government, the British took the territory for ignoble purposes and are now cravenly surrendering it to the uncertain mercies of Chinese Communist rule for the same purposes.

In the nineteenth century the British were driven by commercial greed to defy the Chinese Imperial government's ban on the importation of opium. They seized Hong Kong Island as a base for that illicit trade--and later acquired bits of the mainland to further facilitate trade, licit and illicit, notably pocket-handkerchief Kowloon and the substantial New Territories.

The New Territories were leased to Britain by Imperial China until 1997. The Peking regime, which does not recognize the lease as valid, has none-theless used its imminent expiry to lever all Hong Kong out of Britain's failing grasp.

Under no more than diplomatic pressure, the British have agreed to turn the entire territory over to China. Why?

Britain has no stomach for a fight, even a fight largely verbal. In equal part, a Britain that is having its own racial troubles sees no reason to exert itself on behalf of millions of another color. Above all, however, the policy-makers expect their eager acquiescence to Peking's takeover of a territory that China never truly ruled to yield great profits in future trade.

Having made that judgment, the British have been not merely accommodating, but obsequious, indeed fawning, in their efforts to please the Chinese. After all, their purpose in giving Hong Kong to a power whose benevolence is not visible to the naked eye is not to generate ill will. It is just too bad if their purpose conflicts with the interests of millions who have lived all their lives under British law as British subjects.

Peking has promised that the present legal and economic system will endure unchanged for at least fifty years. But Hong Kong's people cannot credit any promise made by that regime, their skepticism having been learned in the school of experience.

Moreover, they know that Hong Kong cannot be the same; the flight of capital, companies, and skilled individuals has already depreciated the efficiency that was to my mind once the highest in the world. They know further that the men of Peking are incapable of not interfering, even if their promises were sincere, which there is no reason to believe.

To sweeten the pill, London offered full British passports to fifty thousand British subjects whose existing British passports--by a recent act of Parliament--did not entitle them to live in Britain. Despite a nearly universal desire to get out of Hong Kong before the Communists took over, few applied. The general view of the once-respected British was too jaundiced.

Hong Kong has not found a way out, but in William McGurn she has, at least, found another champion. His is a very modern Jeremiad. He does not merely prophesy doom, but, first-class journalist that he is, pounds away with facts that refute the anodyne half-truths and untruths uttered by Britain's policy-makers as they complacently accept the knighthoods and peerages that are the rewards for their "services."

The truth is in the details--and Mr. McGurn is great on details, far too copious to cite. Delectably quotable, however, is his observation on the conditions necessary to make plausible the official Sino-British contention that the people of Hong Kong will be just as well off under a benevolent Chinese government after the take-over in 1997: ". . . China had to project a modernizing and liberalizing image; Hong Kongers had to remain pass*e; and both sides had to gloss over the immense practical difficulties of reconciling a Western-style colony characterized by a free market and broad individual freedoms with a Marxist system that had no such experience. Above all, what was required was a gentlemen's agreement not to ask too many questions."

The fig leaf thus contrived was flimsy. It became transparent when it got wet--with the massacre in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.