HK '96

The People You Meet On The Road

All the political stuff going on in Hong Kong to do with democracy and human rights was foreseeable. I was there in 1996, about 18 months prior to the handover. The Communist take over was slowly underway and they sent in their uniformed state police who stood on street corners demanding IDs from people. I spent a bit of my free time talking to locals about it all and told them that they won't be able to keep all of their lifestyle once the Communists took charge. 

Just about everybody I met insisted that it was going to be business as usual. As long as people were making money, there would be no reason to change things. They resented the mere suggestion that Hong Kong might be about anything but money. Money, yo, money talks and bullshit walks! If the mainlanders could just get first hand experience of capitalism, then they would not want to go all authoritarian on them. I tried to explain to them that's not how authoritarians and totalitarians think. They first thing to be kicked aside would be democratic freedoms and rights, and when those are gone, it would be a lot less pleasant for everybody concerned. They then told me I was paranoid and nuts. The thing is, it's not that paranoid to think an authoritarian organ like the Communist Party of China hates your freedoms. 

Still, given the prosperity gap and the lifestyle gap between Hong Kong and the mainland at the time, it may have been inconceivable that the mainlanders would come to call the shots in such a way as to curtail Hong Kong's very sense of itself. Hong Kong after all was like a wild flower of modern capitalism that blossomed off the coast of the mainland, while the mainland seemed to have more in common with the medieval world than modernity.  

Somehow during that time in Hong Kong, I met an American woman who explained to me the frightening things she had witnessed and told me she was bugging out to Singapore before the takeover. She could see the writing writ very large and in Hi-Viz colours on that metaphorical wall. She even had stats at the ready as to how the mainland would inevitably grow and how when time came, it would would seek to undermine the independent-thinking of Hong Kong. All, that in spite of their promise of one state, two systems. I remember walking around Lan Kwai Fong talking about all this with her. She loved Hong Kong, but she couldn't see how it could stay the same after the Handover. It might look the same but at some point it would breakdown. The pretence would get old and erode away. 

It made a lot more sense than anything else I was hearing on the ground. Years later, here we are. The communists have taken away freedom of speech and have dismantled the institutions of democracy. Democracy as it turned out, was a lot more fragile in Hong Kong, just like she had predicted. 

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