Defying the Dragon

Hong Kong and the World's Largest Dictatorship

Stephen Vines

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781787384552
• eBook ISBN: 9781787385764
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Defying the Dragon tells a remarkable story of audacity: of how the people of Hong Kong challenged the PRC's authority, just as its president reached the height of his powers. Is Xi's China as unshakeable as it seems? What are its real interests in Hong Kong? Why are Beijing's time-honoured means of control no longer working there? And where does this leave Hongkongers themselves? Stephen Vines has lived in Hong Kong for over three decades. His book shrewdly unpacks the Hong Kong–China relationship and its wider significance—right up to the astonishing convergence of political turmoil and international crisis with Covid-19 and the 2020–21 crackdown. Vividly describing the uprising from street level, Vines explains how and why it unfolded, and its global repercussions. Now, the international community is reassessing relations with Beijing, just as Hong Kong's rebellion and China's handling of the pandemic have exposed the regime's weakness. In a crisis that has become existential all round, what lies ahead for Hong Kong, China and the world?

PART ONE

THE BACKGROUND

1

AN UNHAPPY FAMILY

China’s long history is punctuated by extended periods of division within the nation, rebellions against the centre, and loss of control by the central government. The Communist Party’s overriding fear, in Hong Kong as everywhere else in China, is what it calls “splitism”. All measures are therefore justified to ensure that Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region (SAR), nevertheless remains within the fold of a united nation; and to ensure that the virus of liberty does not spread to the Mainland. What matters to Beijing is total loyalty to China, which in turn means loyalty to the Party. As one of the regime’s most popular slogans goes: “Without the Communist Party, there would be no New China”. The irony is that the Party, born out of a belief in the Marxist slogan “Workers of the world unite”, is today an ultra-nationalist organisation paying limited lip service to internationalism, instead burnishing its patriotic credentials as the mainstay of its legitimacy.

The CCP boasts that it has reversed China’s dismal history of disunity and created a united, harmonious nation. In the Party’s mind, this process has been exemplified by the recovery of Macau, China’s other SAR, ruled by the Portuguese until 1999. The enclave has since been brought under very tight control, in a manner that Hong Kong has not been. If this matter were to be considered in family terms, Macau—with a population of just about 650,000 people—could be considered the favoured son, while Hong Kong would be seen as the troublesome brat.

Much to the delight of Chinese officials, Macau nowadays feels more like a Mainland Chinese city than Hong Kong does. The issue of a distinct SAR identity has been solved in Macau by an enormous influx of Mainland immigrants; unlike in Hong Kong, most Macau residents were born across the border. As a result, Mandarin is much more widely spoken than in Hong Kong. What’s more, on the surface at least, Macau has been more compliant in every way. A national security law was introduced there without much fuss. From day one of the handover back to China, Mainland officials were directly installed in the Macau government. And, unlike troublesome Hong Kong, Macau does not have a significant democracy movement, although opposition politics is not entirely absent.

In December 2019, President Xi Jinping pointedly turned up in Macau to preside over celebrations marking the twentieth handover anniversary. Without allowing the words Hong Kong to cross his lips, he showered praise on the people of Macau for their love of country and faith in “one country, two systems”, placing their loyalty to Beijing above troublesome matters such as democracy, human rights and freedom. Macau government officials beamed as they were told how successful they had been in avoiding disputes and friction. They had, Xi said, understood the importance of harmony and unity, and had done a fantastic job integrating Macau with the Mainland.¹

Although Xi alluded to the need for diversification of the economy, he was kind enough not to stress that Macau’s business world is dominated by the gambling industry, accounting for over 80 per cent of the SAR’s government revenues.² As a result, Macau has sped past Las Vegas to become the biggest gambling centre in the world. And, like gambling centres the world over, this business is replete with the criminality of money laundering, loan sharking and high levels of prostitution.

Macau, like Hong Kong, is also part of Greater Bay Area, linking the two SARs with nine cities in Guangdong, supposedly to create an economic powerhouse. And then there’s the fantastically ambitious Chinese Belt and Road programme, which is designed to physically link China with some seventy nations in Asia, Europe and Africa. The idea is that Chinese-led trade and investment projects will create a new world order of prosperity. Hong Kong, with its great experience of international trade, is expected to play a major role in this initiative, and endless government propaganda is pumped out highlighting its importance. To put it mildly, implementation of Belt and Road has been patchy, and the tangible benefits of the initiative hardly match up to the rhetoric that surrounds it. In Hong Kong, however, both Belt and Road and, even more importantly, the Greater Bay Area initiative have considerable political importance in forging physical ties to the Mainland and bringing the two closer together.

Hong Kong and Macau have been paying a heavy price for turning the Greater Bay Area into a reality. The world’s longest sea bridge, linking Hong Kong, Macau and Zhuhai (the Guangdong border town next to Macau), has cost billions of dollars; a high-speed rail link to Guangzhou, feeding into other Mainland rail lines, has also come with an eyewatering price tag. Both projects establish a very real, tangible link, but have turned out to be white elephants, as neither has even vaguely met the targets set for usage. Nonetheless, more “linking” projects with impressive price tags are in the pipeline, including a new hi-tech city straddling the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen.

As the official propaganda machine has been put to work to talk up these developments, they have largely been met with indifference by people in Hong Kong. Instead of enthusiasm, there is annoyance over how much all of this is costing. In January 2020, the Hong Kong Guangdong Youth Association, one of many pro-China organisations, published a survey showing that 70 per cent of young people interviewed thought Hong Kong would be better advised to keep its distance from the Mainland. Moreover, in the cohort of interviewees between the ages of 15 and 64, almost 60 per cent said that the Greater Bay Area plan would bring more harm than good to Hong Kong.³ It is quite surprising that a body such as this should have published findings of this kind, but it reflects the reality: low enthusiasm on the ground for schemes to bring Hong Kong closer to the rest of China.

More broadly, Beijing’s process of “reunifying” its peripheries has remained stubbornly difficult. Macau has accepted the imposition of tight control from Beijing, but that task remains to be completed in Hong Kong. And an even bigger gaping hole in the reunification process persists: not only does Taiwan remain stubbornly independent but, to the PRC’s fury, it has all the trappings of a sovereign state. To understand how all this has come about, and why it is so troubling for Beijing, requires an understanding of history—which, as ever, shows that unintended consequences have played a major formative role in events, informing both Hongkongers’ and China’s position in the confrontation of 2019–20.

After the fall of Shanghai to the Japanese in 1937, the most international part of the Chinese nation lost this role; its place was taken by Hong Kong, a tiny dot on the southern periphery, occupied by the British. Most of Hong Kong’s territory is attached to the Chinese Mainland; only a small area, the original Hong Kong, is an island, today housing the government headquarters and central business district.

Hong Kong became a British colony in 1842 for the simple reason that the ailing Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) decided to hand over this unwanted piece of territory as an alternative to letting the British get their hands on parts of China that were actually considered valuable. The British, for their part, were hardly enthusiastic. They would really have liked to establish a colony in Canton (now Guangzhou); even tiny Macau would have been a better bet for London’s imperial ambitions, but the Portuguese were too well established there.

It could even be argued that the colony was largely created by accident, after China started cracking down on the opium traders. In characteristic imperial response, Britain sent out gunboats to defend its drug-trading citizens in the far-flung South China Sea. Captain Charles Elliot, commander of the British force, had no precise instructions from London about what to do, other than to defend British interests. So, in view of Hong Kong’s deep and wide natural harbour, Elliot decided to plant the Union flag and claim possession of Hong Kong Island. The foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, was furious: “You have disobeyed and neglected your instructions”, he raged in a letter sent to the now disgraced Elliot. Hong Kong, said Palmerston, was nothing more than a “barren island”.⁴

It took another two years before the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing, ending the First Opium War, gave effect to this land grab. Notwithstanding the solemnity of this accord, the first of what China would come to call the Unequal Treaties, the ceding of Hong Kong was of little significance to either of the signing parties. But what were the views of the people who lived in Hong Kong at this time? It was a question that never even crossed the minds of the Chinese and British negotiators who created the colony. Besides which, the population was minuscule—no more than a few thousand.

Within two decades, however, the new colony’s population had grown sixteen times. It was not because those crossing over from the Mainland had any burning desire to live under the British flag. Their main motivation was simply to escape problems in China. The 1850s Taiping Rebellion proved to be crucial in giving a boost to Hong Kong by creating this exodus. It set a pattern of people arriving from China, primarily to avoid chaos and poverty, with little regard or indeed awareness of what the colonial alternative entailed.

This ignorance was also evident among the British, who had no real plan for their largely unwanted possession, aside from the notion of creating a free trade port and a commercial centre. Yet such was the relentless logic of empire that Britain went on to negotiate two other treaties extending its territory in Hong Kong. The third, the 1898 Convention of Beijing, gave the British the largest piece of landmass attached to the Chinese Mainland, which became known as the New Territories. As the New Territories became the biggest part of Hong Kong, continued British rule became unfeasible without this swathe of land. However, whereas the previous agreements had granted Britain the land in perpetuity, this third concession was a ninety-nine-year lease—a time span dreamt up with little thought for what might happen in 1997, when the lease would expire.

Despite the indifference of the people who mattered in both London and Peking, Hong Kong continued to grow, and the full paraphernalia of a Crown colony developed. As the Qing Dynasty slunk into terminal decline, there were many reasons for people to leave the Mainland and try their luck in Hong Kong. Most of them came from the neighbouring Guangdong Province, and a great many thought that the British colony would be no more than a resting place to wait out the storm before returning to a more stable China. But, as China went from crisis to crisis, the exodus to Hong Kong grew, and the authorities on the Mainland were far too preoccupied with a host of other problems to spend time thinking about getting the British to return their territory. Besides which, in a manner that became even more pronounced after the 1949 Communist Revolution, Hong Kong had demonstrated its usefulness to the Mainland as an entrepôt and a place where business could be conducted on behalf of those across the border.

The turning point in the colony’s growth came with that same Revolution, which turned the exodus from the Mainland into a flood—one that continues in different ways to this day. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the arriving refugees were no longer just poor peasants and workers; they had been joined by wealthy people, primarily from Shanghai, who had every reason to fear a Communist regime and every reason to flee, taking as much of their considerable wealth with them as possible. Despite the rapidly disintegrating Nationalist government’s half-hearted attempts to regain Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong in the wake of World War Two, the Communist regime that proclaimed the People’s Republic on 1 October 1949 did no more than make nominal protests over continued British rule.

This attitude started to change in the 1970s, as China began opening up to the Western world. However it was the British, rather than the Chinese, who brought things to a head, as it dawned on officials in London that the New Territories lease would be expiring in 1997 and that clarity needed to be obtained over the colony’s future.

A crucial meeting was held in March 1979 between China’s paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and the Governor of Hong Kong, Murray MacLehose. This was the first time that a Hong Kong governor had meet a Chinese official of this seniority. The British idea was to find a way of extending the New Territories lease, but Deng was uninterested. Instead he delivered a long monologue that focused on the need for Chinese sovereignty to be resumed. He spoke of how a special status would be created for the territory and insisted that Hong Kong’s capitalist system would be preserved. This came out of the blue as far as London was concerned, but clearly the Chinese had given considerable thought to the matter. Typically, no one from Hong Kong was involved in these discussions, and when Murray returned to the colony he gave no hint of what was in store. Instead he quoted Deng’s remarks about Hong Kong people “putting their hearts at ease”, which was taken to mean that the status quo was to be maintained.

Having delivered the bombshell in 1979, China decided to say no more in public until the visit to Beijing by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in September 1982. She was in buoyant mood and very confident of Britain’s place in the world following victory in the Falklands War. By now, however, the Chinese Communist Party’s plans had solidified and Britain’s colonial posturing was of little interest. Beijing was happy to tell the world that it intended to resume sovereignty. Deng spelled out to Thatcher that “On the question of sovereignty, China has no room for manoeuvre. To be frank, the question is not open to discussion. The time is ripe for making it unequivocally clear that China will recover Hong Kong in 1997.”⁵

While a certain amount of behind-the-scenes negotiation rumbled along, neither side thought it advisable to let Hongkongers themselves know what was going on. The first direct approach to the people of the colony was made in November 1982, two months after Thatcher’s visit to Beijing. Typically, it came in the form of a meeting with one of the colony’s grandees, Sir Yuet-keung Kan, who was leading the first mission to China by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council. Kan was summoned to see Xi Zhong Xun, Vice-Chairman of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, to be told bluntly that China would not contemplate a deal over sovereignty and that the return to Chinese rule was set in stone.

Formal Sino-British negotiations finally began in late 1982, which resulted in the Sino-British Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong, an international treaty signed on 19 December 1984 in Beijing. Two months before this, Hong Kong’s colonial government embarked on a so-called consultation exercise, with the important caveat making it “clear beyond any possibility of misunderstanding” that the agreement could not be modified. This farcical attempt to pretend that Hong Kong’s people had been consulted on their future mainly consisted of regurgitating opinion polls and newspaper articles, alongside consultation with a number of colony notables and civil society organisations. Unsurprisingly, the British government concluded that the agreement enjoyed broad support.

This conclusion was not entirely without foundation, however, because China was making considerable efforts to assure Hong Kong people of its intention to continue business as usual. This pledge was encapsulated in Deng Xiaoping’s famous statement at the time of Thatcher’s visit that, after 1997, “Horses will still run, stocks will still sizzle, dancers will still dance.” Beijing stressed that it had no intention of imposing socialism on Hong Kong and that a system of “one country, two systems” would be put in place, allowing for the resumption of Chinese sovereignty while ensuring that Hong Kong could pursue its existing way of life, within a structure that provided a “high level of autonomy” to what would become the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.⁶

These promises were enshrined in the Basic Law, a mini-constitution for Hong Kong. There are a number of key “General Principles” outlined at the start of the law, which appear to be unambiguous in setting out how the new SAR was to be governed.⁷

Article 2 is the most important. It says: “The National People’s Congress authorizes the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to exercise a high degree of autonomy and enjoy executive, legislative and independent judicial power, including that of final adjudication, in accordance with the provisions of this Law.”

Article 3 makes it clear that Hong Kong will be governed only by permanent residents of the territory. This is a coded way of saying that Mainland Chinese officials will not be running Hong Kong.

Article 4 states that the “rights and freedoms” of the SAR will be safeguarded. This is the clause dealing with the preservation of the social and political framework that sets Hong Kong apart from the rest of China.

Article 5 explains the “one country, two systems” principle, under which Hong Kong is exempt from practising the socialist system which prevails in China, and “the previous capitalist system and way of life shall remain unchanged for 50 years”. Deng Xiaoping added to this by promising that this time limit could well be extended.

However, China’s intentions might not have been this simple. The indications are that Deng Xiaoping’s original vision of “one country, two systems” was really focused on the toleration of economic, not politic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on Transliteration and Names
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: The Background
• Part Two: The Uprising
• Part Three: The Unexpected and the Future
• Appendix I: Timeline of the Protests, the Virus and the US-China Trade War (2019-21)
• Appendix II: Who’s Who in Hong Kong Politics
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index