Misgivings, Pride Rule Hong Kong Return To China Exposes Ideological Fault Lines
As a counsel for the Crown and a justice on Hong Kong’s highest court, Simon F.S. Li wore red robes and a powdered wig and impartially, dispassionately dispensed Britain’s justice in its last East Asian colony. But in retirement, the former judge is opinionated and uncompromising - staunchly pro-China, highly critical of the territory’s “so-called democrats,” he said, and bitterly resentful of the British colonizers he long served.
“With all humility, I was window-dressing - the Chinese Crown counsel,” he said of his earliest government post. And now that Hong Kong is about to be absorbed by China, Li is bursting with patriotic pride. “I am Chinese. I have a sense of belonging,” he said. “I am proud of my Chinese identity.”
Gladys Li is in many ways her father’s daughter - a Cambridge-educated lawyer who speaks in British-accented English. But in their politics, father and daughter are poles apart. Where the elder Li eagerly awaits Hong Kong’s return to the Motherland, Gladys feels anxiety and trepidation.
“I have very mixed feelings about it,” said Gladys, a former bar association chairman and an outspoken proponent of democracy. “A lot of people are obviously nervous about Hong Kong transferring to the sovereignty of a nation that’s under communist rule.” She added: “I don’t feel particularly Chinese, because I was born in England. I don’t feel I’m returning to my motherland.”
The differences between the Lis, father and daughter, reflect the ambivalence Hong Kong as a whole is feeling on the eve of this colony’s transition to Chinese rule on July 1.
At the stroke of midnight, at the close of Monday’s final hour, a conductor’s baton will swoop downward, a Chinese orchestra will strike up that country’s national anthem, and the red flag with five gold stars of the People’s Republic of China will be hoisted over a colony ceded 156 years ago to foreign invaders. For China, it will be a time of grand celebration, the joyous return of territory ignominiously wrested away during the Opium Wars.
But Hong Kong’s return to China has exposed profound ideological and generational fault lines in this most affluent of Asian cities, with its overlay of Western-style politics and processes.
Accepting reality
For many people here, the return to China is the end of a long and humiliating colonial interlude during which, they say, the indigenous Chinese population faced discrimination, open and subtle, at the hands of white European interlopers. But for many others, this historic turnover carries with it deep misgivings: Will civil liberties be curtailed? Will Hong Kong’s nascent democracy be crushed? Will the police and courts remain impartial arbiters of justice, or will they be turned into tools of repression? Will the press be censored? Will corruption increase?
Opinion polls reveal the ambivalence. In the latest poll by the Hong Kong Transition Project, 60 percent of Hong Kongers surveyed were optimistic about the reunion with China. But a sizable group of people, 28 percent, were pessimistic about the political future under China, and 36 percent of respondents characterized themselves as having “no choice but to accept reality.”
At home in Hong Kong
The Li family shows how the divide plays out within families. The long debate about Hong Kong’s future has not just been the stuff of newspaper columns and the legislative council chambers. It has played out every day across dining tables and living rooms from Kowloon’s congested public housing tenements to the mansions of the Peak and Repulse Bay.
The Li family is unusual in that so many members are so prominent: Simon Li is a deputy chairman of the official group of China advisers called the Preparatory Committee, and two of his nephews, banker David Li and physician Arthur Li, are committee members. Another relative, Andrew Li, was just named the first chief justice of the new Final Appeals court. Gladys Li chaired the bar association, and her brother, Simon Li Jr., is foreign editor of the Los Angeles Times.
But in many ways, the Li family embodies all the elements of the Hong Kong story - the rags-to-riches success of the earliest Chinese immigrants who thrived under British colonialism; the disruptions caused by World War II and Japanese occupation; the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution; the questions about race and identity; and now the political uncertainty of the transition to Chinese rule. At every turning point in Hong Kong’s history, a Li was there.
“I think we’re a typical old Hong Kong family,” said Arthur Li, deputy chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “We’ve been here a long time. That’s why we feel so passionate about Hong Kong. This is our home. We’re not just here to make a fast buck - we’re here for keeps.”
Overcoming discrimination
Li Shek-pang probably did not suspect he was starting a dynasty when he fled here from Guangdong Province in the latter half of the 19th century; he was only 13, and he was running for his life. The son of a wealthy property owner, his uncles conspired to kill him to prevent him from gaining his inheritance. He foiled their plot to drown him and came to Hong Kong to seek protection under the British flag.
After unloading ships as a dockworker, he eventually took over from a Scotsman the entire, nearly bankrupt shipping company, then built it into a major commercial success that controlled all the rice imports from French Indochina.
Li Shek-pang died after feasting on monkey brains during a trip to Saigon, and his son, Li Koon-chun, moved the family’s interests into banking and finance. It was a transfer that foreshadowed the changes in Hong Kong itself, as the city, too, would later shift from shipping and manufacturing to become a global financial center.
Li Koon-chun’s son, Li Fook-shu, was Hong Kong’s first Chinese chartered accountant, and he became an official serving Her Majesty’s colonial government. In 1967, when China’s Cultural Revolution spilled into Hong Kong streets, Fook-shu ended up on a Communist Party assassination list. He survived because of the protection of the British colonial government.
Thirty years later, in one of the family history’s oddest turns, Fookshu’s son David Li, who runs the Bank of East Asia, sits on the China-appointed provisional legislature.
But even though the older Lis benefited from, and prospered under, the British colonial system, they harbor deep resentments over decades of second-class treatment in their own city.
David Li, 58, said he is old enough to recall the discrimination Chinese here suffered under the British. It took a trip to London to open his eyes.
“When I first arrived in Britain, I was a young boy of 12 or 13,” he said. “I had never realized there were English porters to carry your luggage. Here, all the English were high-up people. I never realized there were English garbage collectors. I never realized there were English policemen - here, all the English on the police force were superintendents.”
“We had to work very hard against the system,” he said, recounting his family’s battles to set up the first indigenous Chinese bank, to compete against the more powerful British-run institutions such as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, and Standard Chartered. “I got into politics because of the injustice in the banking system. It was tilted against local banks.”
Generations apart
David Li falls into the category of older Hong Kongers who take a more benign, even positive view of the colony’s return to China. According to the Hong Kong Transition Project, which has been monitoring public attitudes here for more than a decade, Hong Kongers over 55 were much more likely to say the return to China was a “glorious” event, while those under 35 were more likely to say they were nervous about the transition or had no choice but to accept it.
David Li also retains the attitude toward Britain of those who lived through the worst of colonialism. “We’re very proud of the reunification, because I see many injustices,” David Li said, adding that he has also seen “many privileges granted to the colonialists. I’ve basically seen the best and the worst of the British.”
His uncle Simon, who is 74, agrees; Simon gave up his British passport to run, unsuccessfully, for the job of chief executive. Simon’s defining moment was returning to Hong Kong with his British law degree, then discovering that as a local, he did not enjoy the same privileges as his white English peers. He later formed the first civil service association for local Chinese.
The expatriates “got eight months’ holiday every three to four years. I got 24 days a year,” he said, his tone growing bitter at the retelling of old injustices. “They got expat pay; I didn’t. I got 10 days local leave; they got 15 days. They had quarters provided; I didn’t. That was the kind of discrimination I suffered.”
And in those days, he recalled, Chinese and Europeans lived worlds apart, coexisting in the same crowded city, but their daily lives almost never intersecting. “The Europeans liked to distance themselves from the Chinese because they considered themselves superior,” Simon said. “Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve - I was not allowed out, because we were afraid of drunken (British) sailors and soldiers. They might hit you in the head and get away with it.”
But a younger generation of Hong Kongers, born in economic prosperity, is less concerned with the past abuses of the British. Of more immediate concern is the future under a China still controlled by a Communist Party that severely restricts personal freedom. Rather than being concerned about drunken British sailors and soldiers on the streets, for this generation the principal fear is the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army.
In 1959 at the age of 11, Simon’s daughter Gladys left Hong Kong for boarding school in England. She grew up in a more privileged world than her father, his success largely shielding her from the discrimination he suffered.
“I went to an English-speaking school, and most of my classmates were the children of expatriates,” she said. “I was aware as a child that there were certain parents who didn’t want their children to mix with me socially. We were friendly at school, but the friendliness stopped at the schoolhouse gates.”
Gladys heard early on of her father’s battles for equal treatment in the colonial administration. He told her repeatedly, “As a Chinese, you’ll be discriminated against.” But for her, discrimination was not a personal experience. “It’s very different if you haven’t lived through it firsthand and lived with it day-to-day,” she said.
For Simon Li, his humiliations at the hands of the British instilled a stronger sense of his own Chinese identity. But, Gladys said, “The fact that my father used to come back and tell me those things made me very anti-discrimination myself. It didn’t make me feel more Chinese.”
“As a person, I’m rather anti-nationalism,” she said. “If you want to put it in those terms, I would be defined as semi-anti-patriotic.”
Ideological fault lines
For many Hong Kongers, a moment that defined perceptions of China was on June 4, 1989, when Chinese troops brutally crushed democracy demonstrations at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
The massacre sent a shock wave through this colony, which had been lulled into complacency about the coming of Chinese rule and the guarantees of their continued autonomy.
Tiananmen Square also became an ideological fault line within the Li family.
The older Li relatives, Simon and nephew Arthur, tend to play down the importance of the incident. “It’s not fair, if you have an agreement, because of Tiananmen or whatever, that you renege on that agreement,” Arthur said.
Gladys, by contrast, keeps a miniature statue on her desk - the Goddess of Democracy erected in Tiananmen Square in the days immediately before the crackdown.
She faults China for moving immediately to roll back some of Hong Kong’s civil liberties laws. “It indicates a sort of paranoia,” she said. “I think it’s somewhat bizarre that China would want to treat its own citizens the way the British treated them.”
But her father is unabashed in his patriotism. He says he sees “no problem whatsoever” in the coming transition, and he brooks none of his daughter’s dissent.
“She has very little Chinese culture,” Simon Li said. “I say that even though she is my own daughter. I sent her to school in England.
“She knows nothing about the Chinese historical background,” he added. “She is very influenced by Western political ideas of human rights and democracy. But she did not live in Hong Kong under colonial rule. I did.”