There is no matter more urgent for the 6 million ethnic Chinese who live in Hong Kong–more than half of whom have fled the mainland since the communist revolution of 1949. Beijing’s influence is already pervasive. Since the 1984 Joint Declaration on repatriating the colony, the number of “red capitalist” enterprises has risen from a few hundred to more than 2,000. The largest have reached the heart of the Hong Kong business establishment:China International Trust & Investment Corp.,for example, owns 12.5 percent of Cathay Pacific Airlines and 25 percent of Hong Kong Telecommunications, the territory’s biggest single firm. “China is very control-minded,” says Miron Mushkat, a leading Hong Kong economist. “One way to control events in Hong Kong is to increase their presence in the economy here.” Beijing has entered the political infrastructure, too. People’s Republic loyalists have reportedly infiltrated hundreds of neighborhood clubs, women’s groups and kinship organizations. They control the 170,000-member Federation of Trade Unions, a labor umbrella group. And membership in the legal but secretive Communist Party is said to have hit 20,000.
Opportunity knocked for Beijing with the announcement of the ambitious $16 billion airport project in 1989. The People’s Republic agrees that Hong Kong needs a new airport. But it says the price tag is too high. It has asserted, citing the Chinese translation of the 1984 agreement, a right to oversee key events in the transfer of Hong Kongs sovereignty. In the process Beijing has been able to play on fears that Britain will loot the colony be awarding massive contracts to British firms and paying them out of Hong Kong’s foreign-currency reserves. “The Chinese are happy to have the airport as the test case for control,” says Steve Tsang, an Oxford University China scholar. “There is no other case in which (they) can appear as though they are championing the case of the Hong Kong people.”
The airport talks are continuing, but China’s successful stonewall so far has some Hong Kong leaders worried. If allowed to stand, its interpretation of the Joint Declaration would establish what political analyst T.L. Tsim calls “a very dangerous precedent.” It could allow China a virtual veto power in future clashes over such issues as the policing of Hong Kong, the territory’s relationship to international agencies like Interpol and the billeting of Chinese Army representatives in Hong Kong. It could even affect the ultimate enforcement of guarantees of Hong Kong’s status as a “special administrative region,” with its capitalist economy and British legal system intact. “Beijing is inflicting death by a thousand cuts” on the British position, says an American businessman who has lived in Hong Kong for two decades. “They avoid using the term veto power, but that is clearly all they are willing to accept.”
