The Final Chapter Britain Down To Last 100 Days In Hong Kong
As he turned off the lights, locked his apartment and headed off to board a ship to England with his family, there was much to remind Royston Griffey that Britain’s last 100 days in Hong Kong were at hand.
The coins in his pocket no longer bore the queen’s profile. At bus stops, placards warned British nationals that their residency privileges would soon be curtailed. In some villages near the Chinese border, the five-starred Communist flag was already flying.
The Jockey Club, the weather center, even the SPCA have all shed the word “royal” from their names in the quickening rush to close this last chapter in British colonial history.
After the clock strikes midnight on July 30, Hong Kong returns to China. The last 100 days begin March 23.
The worst forecasts of 15 years ago - mass emigration, stock market crashes, runs on banks - haven’t come true. The economy looks set to comfortably straddle the change of sovereignty, with projected growth of 5.5 percent and a nest egg of $63.8 billion in foreign reserves.
Hong Kong’s triumph was stunningly evident from the window of Griffey’s office in the Legal Department: the world’s busiest container port, phalanxes of glittering skyscrapers and a paved-over landfill that had once been the Royal Navy’s anchorage.
“Economically it’s fantastic, no doubt about that,” he remarked, his Bristol accent undiluted by 18 years in Hong Kong.
But this civil servant was also seeing his last three years of work unraveling, since the election laws he had drafted will soon be annulled.
A Chinese-organized provisional legislature will replace a democratically elected one and serve until new elections are held, probably in mid-1998. Controls on rights to demonstrate and have political links with foreign bodies, loosened in recent years, will be tightened again.
The Democrats, Hong Kong’s largest party, see these as signs that China is already imposing its authoritarian ways. Chris Patten, Hong Kong’s last British governor, has protested, as have U.S. officials.
But China feels it has already been generous enough in allowing Hong Kong to remain capitalist, highly autonomous and much freer than any of its other provinces.
Therefore, China’s friends argue, Hong Kong should temper its freewheeling instincts, keep the virus of democracy from spreading into the other provinces, and get on with what it does best: making money and fueling China’s own capitalist revolution.
Hong Kong has become “too politicized,” says Tung Chee-hwa, Hong Kong’s next leader. It needs, he says, to strike a balance between individual rights and collective duties.
Some say Tung’s Hong Kong will be like disciplinarian Singapore, or a throwback to the pre-Patten days, when big business called the shots and the election system was geared to keep Democrats and other social crusaders at bay.
China won’t necessarily have to intervene directly. The business world seems to know what’s expected of it.
Take the successful Next Media publishing group. It says it can’t get a single brokerage firm to underwrite its stock market flotation. Is the reason the virulent China-bashing views of its owner, Jimmy Lai? No one will say.
One encouraging sign for Hong Kong is China’s stress on continuity. Far from putting Communist cadres in the cockpit, it has turned to people like shipping tycoon Tung and the Hong Kong Chinese who head the civil service, trusting them to run the place like a profitable corporation.
Tung is well-liked for his gruff, straightforward manner. He gives no-holds-barred news conferences, and talks regularly to the Democrats, even though China detests them.
He knows the power bases not only in Beijing but in Washington, having lived in America for 10 years. U.S. officials hold him in high regard - “certainly a person we can work with,” says U.S. Consul Richard Boucher.