Hong Kong: Blurring East and West

What comes to mind when you hear “Hong Kong”? International Financial City? Its vibrant nightlife with hyper-condensed skyscrapers? Or a former British Colony with westernised legacy under the sovereignty of Communist China?

Despite the 1997 handover to China, the British legacy in Hong Kong is highly visible after 99 years of governance. Street names, station names, statues in parks, sports like Cricket and Bowls etc., just to name a few. White collar workers in the Central Financial District, are all suited and booted just like London or New York City. While keeping the Chinese traditional festivals, families do also celebrate Christmas and New Years’.

Although people born after July 1997 won’t be entitled for British Nationality, people in their 20s now feel like they’re living in the West. While dictatorship is still intact in Mainland China, Hong Kong is enjoying the Separation of Power promised. The Court in Hong Kong is independent and everyone is entitled to a fair trial. In harmony with capitalism under the “One Country, Two Systems” arrangement, big corporations see it as a unique gateway to enter one of the biggest markets in the world economy. Expatriates working in Hong Kong would not find it extremely hard to situate themselves in society.

But how did this tiny city located at the Chinese border come to inherit a Western legacy?

It all begins in late 1600 when Britain started trading silver and tea from China. The British love tea and when they conquered parts of India and start converting poppies to Opium, they started to smuggle this addictive ‘Opium’ narcotic to exchange for tea with China. The subsequent Opium War was sparked when the Chinese Emperor made an edict to seize all 20,000 chests of opium into the sea.

 It ended with the “unequal” treaty of Nanking in 1842 which China agreed to make this rocky island, Hong Kong Island, into a crown colony, ceding it to the British Queen, Queen Victoria, "in perpetuity". And in 20 years, it further included the Kowloon Peninsula. The New Territories, with the famous 99-year lease, were the only territories forming the Crown colony of Hong Kong, that were obliged by agreement, to be returned. The diplomat Sir Claude MacDonald who negotiated the Treaty of Peking in 1898 thought 99 years was ‘as good as forever’.

In 1979, Governor of Hong Kong, Murray MacLehose visited Beijing and started informal talks on the future of Hong Kong with President Deng, the same person behind the order of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. He insisted that China should regain sovereignty over Hong Kong and that the whole of Hong Kong should be Chinese territory, due to them being acquired through “unequal” historical treaties. 

After years of negotiation between the Thatcher administration and the Chinese, an eight-paragraph Sino-British Joint Declaration was born and Hong Kong was officially handed over to China, ending 156 years of British rule.

 It was stipulated in the ‘One country, two systems’ arrangement of 1st July 1997, that Hong Kong’s free-market economy and the capitalist system were to remain in place for the next 50 years. Westernised rights and freedoms, including those of freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of travel, of correspondence, of strike, of choice of occupation, of academic research and of religious belief were to be ensured by law. 

Private property, ownership of enterprises, legitimate right of inheritance and foreign investment were to be protected by law in HK, a major difference from the authoritarian Mainland. Even President Deng acknowledged that 50 years would be needed to close the gap between Mainland and HK – be that China hurdling forward or pulling HK behind.

In fact, China has never been under democratic system, bar a few years led by Sun Yat-Sen, the “Father of the Nation” called by mainly Taiwanese, before his death in 1923. Two years after that, China was plunged into the midst of a Civil War between the National Party and the Communist Party. History tells us that the National Party went into exile in Taiwan and now to this day are living under Democracy and that Mainland China ruled by the Communist Party is struggling to gain world respect due to several humanitarian issues.

Hong Kong was little impacted by the Civil War. Ethnic Chinese living under British rule in Hong Kong see colonialism as something inferior and threatens their identity. People today in their 70s would tell you that, they desperately wanted to return to China when they learned that China was united.

 British Hong Kong a few decades ago was not the brightest city in the world economy and politics. Direct universal suffrage was never granted to Hong Kong people in Parliamentary and Local elections. Some democratic reform began after the Sino-British Joint Declaration. Though the British Government was keen to have significant changes in the electoral situation in Hong Kong, it was the Chinese government that kept Hong Kong people away from its opportunity to achieve direct elections in the Legislative Council. Thus even after the Handover, Hong Kong is still searching her way to the westernised democracy in an Oriental setting.

The name of Hong Kong has been in the headlines for the past 6 months. The Fragrant Harbour is undergoing the most enormous scale of protests ever since the establishment of the People's Republic of China. Given the extremely different nature of the two places, with the very complex political relationship between Hong Kong and China, the recent infamous Extradition Bill threatens to give China more power over Hong Kong. 

See, Hong Kong is technically part of China, but it exercises a high degree of autonomy include legislative, executive and independent judiciary power. Bar diplomatic and national defence affairs it is like any other state. Lately, people have started to question the unique nature of Hong Kong. This movement questioning China’s increasing influence in Hong Kong is definitely a wake up call about the sovereignty of former colony as a Special Administrative Region. 

The future of this cultural hybrid is still unknown, at least within the next 30 years when China does not have the legal right to claim full sovereignty over it. Born and bred as a British territory, adopted by the Chinese as a “Special Administrative Region”, this crisis certainly makes Hong Kong question its own identity and even prove its own nationalist movement.

Samuel Chan
December 2019