and so the rewriting of history begins. It was only 10 minutes, maybe less, into the long-awaited resumption of China’s superintendency over Hong Kong, when we heard a new and very curious phrase — a reference, by Chinese President Jiang Zemin, to the “vicissitudes” that Hong Kong and its people have supposedly suffered during the last century and a half of British colonial rule.
Perhaps it was the translation — perhaps the president actually meant “difficulties” or “trials” or “periods of turbulence.” We won’t be sure until the official English version of the speech is offered, in a day or so. But whatever the phrasing’s imprecision, it does seem abundantly clear that the new ultimate leader of Hong Kong thinks, and is telling his new subjects to think, that the past century and a half have been difficult times for the territory, and that now China has taken over, everything is going to be just fine.
Most of us who were listening to his speech — which the president made just after jackbooted Chinese soldiers had raised the Chinese flag and goose-stepped down from the podium — were mildly surprised, to say the very least. For wasn’t it in fact China that had suffered, or had weathered, most of these supposed vicissitudes of history?
Wasn’t it China that had undergone, for example, the 1911 Revolution, had put up with the long traumas of the warlords in the ’20s, had seen the great civil war between Mao’s men and those of Chiang Kai-shek, had undergone the 1949 Communist Revolution, had suffered the terrible trials of the Great Leap Forward, the madness of the Cultural Revolution, the terrors of Tiananmen Square? Hadn’t these been China’s problems, rather than Hong Kong’s?
What “vicissitudes” had Hong Kong ever suffered? The Japanese invaded in 1941, to be sure — and there is no doubt that was a vicissitude writ large. But otherwise, essentially nothing. There was not a single trial or period of turbulence in the colony that was truly worth its name — just the odd typhoon, the occasional revelation of a small-scale scandal and a few riots sparked off by Mao’s agents during the time of the Little Red Book. Otherwise, total (and occasionally, for a journalist, rather tedious) social and political peace.
It was the very fact that the territory was invariably so stable, so free and so prosperous that prompted so many millions of frightened Chinese to swarm there over the decades. Its stability and freedom from vicissitudes allowed them to prosper in turn — to the point where the riches of this little colony are now of staggering dimensions, and are the source of much pride and no little envy.
And yet now, to judge from this first speech, the history books are to be changed, the perspective is to be altered.
China is in control now, and as so often results from the kind of totalitarianism her rule brings in its train, truth becomes the first casualty of the change. Listening to the Chinese president sent a chill down a million collective spines. The people I was with had to blink hard, and to ask around them: Did he really say that? Did he really think Hong Kong was a place that had suffered, and now would not do so again, forever?
The ceremonial that preceded all of this was inexpressibly sad, a sadness made infinitely more so by the onset, as had been feared, of quite atrocious weather. Or at least weather that was atrocious in part. At the very moment that the British soldiers made their formal farewell salute to the monarch’s son, rains burst from the sky, drenching everyone, the prince included. Yet while it was windy and wet at the place where the British were leaving, just 40 miles to the north, where the first of the 4,500 Chinese soldiers to be garrisoned in Hong Kong were sweeping into the territory, all was quite dry and still.
The augury was poor, at least so far as the departing British were made to feel: an ill-tempered prince and a teary-eyed governor quitting in the rain, a glittering array of Chinese soldiers roaring in to take their place, with the weather clear and fair. Some benign Oriental weather god, it will no doubt soon be said, was smiling down on the new masters, and was betimes telling the old to get out, to push off, just as fast as their legs could carry them.
Jiang Zemin’s brief speech came two hours after this weather god’s augury. The former colony was in for better times, he said, was in for a period of benign invigilation by a China who would see to it there were no further vicissitudes to suffer. He clapped himself down from the podium. His soldiers shouldered their rifles and goose-stepped away. Thirty minutes later all the Britons were sailing away on their ships: The territory was China’s once again. And the inhabitants started to go home, mouthing the word “vicissitudes” as an early sign of the enormous new reality that such a change seems now surely bound to imply.
all of a sudden today, the situation here has started to look just
a little bit darker. The party people are still pouring in and officials are still towing the celebration fireworks onto their launching pads in the middle of the harbor. But in the late afternoon a fax came in from the new chief executive’s office, reminding us all of some sterner realities, and for a few moments the hubbub was stilled.
The People’s Liberation Army, the fax announced, had now formally
decided just how and when it would send in its first men. And basically the news is not so good: An awful lot of them are coming, and they are coming very soon.
For the last few days a very small number of PLA men — just over 100 — have been allowed into Hong Kong, helping plan the arrival of the others. There have been strict rules about this first contingent: no guns, no uniforms outside the barracks, no bad behavior. And generally the rules have been observed. A pint of beer in a Wanchai bar sets a soldier back about a week’s salary, so they’ve been keeping well away from the colony’s notorious fleshpots.
But a week or so ago came an ugly little incident. A small detachment of
troops refused point-blank to stop for a customs inspection at the border,
saying words to the effect that they were the bosses now, and they weren’t going to
take orders from some colonial pipsqueak, and that if he wanted them to open
their Chinese suitcases he could go forth and multiply. After a
day or so everything was allowed to settle down — “language communications
problems” the government explained, limply — but the affair left a bad taste
in everyone’s mouth, with people here beginning to wonder if perhaps the
Chinese army wasn’t going to start throwing its weight around once it
arrived in strength.
Well, now they are about to arrive in the strength that will give
them the power to be as high-handed as they like, and to throw about as much weight as they wish.
According to this afternoon’s press release, a further advance
party — this time of 509 soldiers, and this time with their guns — is due to arrive in Hong Kong at 9 p.m. Monday, three hours before the British relinquish control. They will have 39 vehicles, and they will drive to three sets of barracks, preparing to begin their official garrison duties at midnight.
That is probably just what will happen, but the thought of armed soldiers of the Tiananmen Square variety wandering around in Hong Kong alongside
dignitaries from the entire world, together with a host of British princes and
governors and sundry other panjandrums, is more than a little unsettling. Only
three hours though, and then all the panjandrums fly off or sail away.
And it is then, with the British safely out the picture, that the
main Chinese force arrives. At 6 a.m. Tuesday, with China’s sovereignty fully six hours old, a giant group of 4,000 fully armed and equipped PLA men and women will stream over the frontier, in waves of armored cars, ships and
helicopters. There will be 10 warships, six big helicopters, 21 armored cars
– though there was, after Tiananmen Square, a specific request that they not
come in with tanks — and a line of no fewer than 400 other vehicles.
By mid-morning the troops should have fanned out to key points all over the
territory. They will be advertising to the world that Hong Kong is henceforth
to remain secure, and securely under the authority of China; and they will be
advertising to the Hong Kong people that their masters are no longer
colonialists from across in London, but instead a crew of harsher
authoritarians from Beijing.
The move is a significant one, in that it represents the formal beginning of
the process of the re-education of the people of Hong Kong. For a long time,
the Chinese government has taken the view that Hong Kongers are an ornery lot,
not disposed to give the deference that is due to the might and majesty of
China and her rulers. That has to change, the Beijing rulers say. The 6
million who live and work in Hong Kong have to knuckle under, have to respect
the authority of their new masters. The soldiers — specially trained to be
polite but firm — are here to help them remember that.
Small wonder that, for a moment or two, the excited din of party noise
stilled, and one or two people gulped, a little nervously. The realities of
the handover are just what everyone does not want to think about while so good
a time is being had by so many. But a cold dawn is a-coming, and the soldiers
of the PLA, now trembling on the border, waiting to stream in, are an
ever-present reminder of that sobering fact.
the planes are coming in half-empty, most of the hotels are lying half-full. Everyone is saying of Hong Kong today that it is much like Los Angeles was during the 1984 Olympics; unnaturally empty, because all the ordinary would-be travelers were scared off by the gloomy talk of last spring, when the received wisdom was that everything over the handover period would be full, totally full.
The great and the good are pouring in nonetheless, preparing for what they expect will be the party of a lifetime. Actresses and models and society grand dames are here in abundance. Lauren Hutton is here, for some undefined reason. So is Yo-Yo Ma, who has come to play at the reunification concert. Margaret Thatcher is expected, taking a suite at the Mandarin for $10,000 a day. The trio of Jennings, Rather and Brokaw are all here, standing on street corners and making serious faces into expensive cameras, mouthing their customary platitudes, live from the exotic Orient.
The king of Tonga, a man so massively heavy that his hotel has to give him a bed reinforced with iron, has arrived. Tony Blair is going to look in briefly, as is, from Washington, Madeleine Albright and a junior bureaucrat named Richard Boucher, who will attend the Communists’ swearing-in that the White House had earlier said it would rather boycott.
But all the photographers — and there are thousands here already — are busy looking out for a glamorous British society woman and professional party animal named Tara Palmer-Tompkinson, whose only declared interest in finding a marriageable partner is to ensure, as she puts it, “that she never has to turn right when entering a plane.” And David Tang, a tycoon and playboy who is set to open a Chinese clothing store in New York next November, is being interviewed by everyone — Brokaw included — trying to make the case for the new China being now seriously chic.
The Hong Kong handover, in short, seems in sudden danger of becoming a frivolous and bubbly affair, attracting mainly the international society set, and of being commercialized to the hilt. Never before has a moment of international history seemed so tinted by the spirit of Disneyland. It is rather like the Treaty of Paris being sponsored by Gucci, or having Metternich perform synchronized swimming while carving up the Hapsburg empire, or giving up V-E day to the sale of Kodak film.
The whole business is rapidly shifting from being a grave affair of state, a truly historic, end-of-era moment, and becoming instead as tawdry as the Atlanta Olympics. The simile is apt: Next Tuesday’s celebratory fireworks, supposedly the biggest and gaudiest in world history, are being organized by one of last year’s Atlanta team, prompting one to wonder, among other considerations, just how tasteful an event we are in for.
(One’s curiosity on this score may well be satisfied by yesterday’s announcement that the handover is going to be followed by an hour of something called “mass karaoke,” doubtless every bit as dire as it sounds, and which probably hints at the general tone of the evening.)
For the moment, though, everything looks and feels more or less as usual. The Star ferries chuckle back and forth across the harbor, dodging the frequent squalls. The Peak Tram hitches itself up the alarming slope, taking commuting lawyers and bankers from home to office. The jets bank steeply on their approach into Kai Tak airport.
The courts preside, the legislators argue, the police patrol — and supreme above it all, the governor sits calmly in Government House, saying his farewells to his retinue. He is getting a year’s paycheck by way of golden parachute: half a million dollars, tax-free. The soldiers of the Black Watch are sitting around in their barracks, waiting to skirl their way into the history books with bagpipe laments composed by their own pipe-major, in a ceremony due in what is now just a few dozen hours.
The contrast between the rank vulgarity of what seems about to happen next week and the serenely old-fashioned realities of the end of British rule is going to be quite stunning. One sign on Connaught Road, suspended from an awning, seemed to catch the spirit: “Handover Sale, all goods off 40%, this day only.” The Chinese, who have a formidable aptitude for making money out of any given situation, are cashing in on this one too: reunification with the motherland, hotel rooms going cheap, ticket touts on hand and mass karaoke, 50 bucks a song.
the weather is suddenly causing the greatest concern. It has been raining so
much and so heavily here in the past few days that Old China Hands are
beginning to think the unthinkable: What if, they say, there was a typhoon on
the handover day?
A Hong Kong typhoon is a terrible thing to behold. It is also a phenomenon
with which the territory, on the basis of decades of bitter experience, is now
more than amply organized to meet. And yet that very organization could spell
the death of any celebration due to be held next Monday, should the weather
turn really ugly.
There is a steady gradation in both the levels of climatic ugliness and
the measures Hong Kong has designed as a response. It begins when a
typhoon — the word comes from the Cantonese for big wind — is spotted on
radar, hundreds of miles out in the Pacific and coming in the general
direction of the colony. Once it comes within 500 miles
of the coast, the Royal Observatory announces to the public the so-called
Raising of Signal No. 1. People are told to watch and listen, that a
storm is in the offing and may possibly cause the territory some trouble.
If the cyclone does indeed worsen, if it strengthens and moves closer still, to
within 100 miles, then Signal No. 3 goes up. (The numbers are
randomly chosen, but known by all.) With this news, everyone starts listening to the radio, all the time. Charts go up in the lobbies of the skyscrapers and men with pens are charged with plotting the movement of the weather patterns, hour by hour. People are told to bring their geranium pots in from
their windows and their children in from the playgrounds, and small
boats make for the concrete-walled storm shelters that huddle in the
smaller bays around the coast. Everyone becomes tense, nervous; eyes peer up
at the skies, at the threatening bands of black cloud, at the gusts of wind.
Then, if the typhoon appears to be strengthening still and roaring in to
within 10 miles of Hong Kong, the observatory takes the fateful step of
raising Signal No. 8. Hong Kong now officially closes down.
All government offices shut. People are told to go home or stay indoors. The
Star Ferry runs its jaunty little boats for only half an hour more, shuttling
the last few brave passengers across a harbor that is fast becoming roiled by
huge, green, greasy waves. All buses stop. Cars pull off to the sides, to lie
abandoned. Those people who are caught in the driving rain and howling winds
all pour down, if they can, into the subway stations. The territory empties of
people within minutes. Aside from the mad crashing and rushing of the trees,
the place just seems to die.
Once in a while — twice, when I lived here — the Royal Observatory puts up
Signal No. 10. This tells a frightened citizenry that they may soon expect
a Direct Hit, that the eye of the coming storm will pass directly over
Victoria Peak, and that an explosive torrent of rain and wind will lash
without surcease at the territory, for hour upon hour of misery and ruin.
People get killed during direct hits. Huge ships are torn from their moorings
and cast up on the rocks. All aircraft are diverted to cities hundreds of
miles away. Hong Kong’s life is utterly disrupted. The meteorologists run out of words to describe the condition of the sea, raging in its hurricane. They say simply that the sea state is phenomenal.
And this is what the organizers are now worrying about, for Monday. This is the beginning of the Pacific storm season, and the weather has of late been unusually bad here — hot, sticky, oppressive and given to massive and noisy little storms. The perfect breeding ground, in short, for the typhoons for which this region is notorious.
Four thousand dignitaries, scores of heads of state, $20 million worth of fireworks — and every moment of the ceremonies planned for outdoors. The thought that all of this might well be rained out, and that a huge storm — a perfect storm — will rage while so many of the world’s leaders are in town is causing nightmares.
Sixty percent chance of heavy rain, say the forecasters. And the chance of a typhoon? Not saying, reply the experts. But it is possible. Hedge your bets. Keep thinking of a Plan B. And keep your powder dry.
