Tsui is a prominent member of the Preparatory Committee, 150 power brokers appointed by Beijing to map out Hong Kong’s future after the handover on July 1, 1997. Of the 96 members who live in Hong Kong (the rest are mainlanders), about half own major companies. Tycoons are the heart and soul of the committee: Chinese businessmen who got rich under the British and now need mainland friends to stay rich. Businessmen and communist leaders share a hunger for Hong Kong’s wealth, and they need each other to keep it flowing.
Since it was established early this year, the Preparatory Committee has behaved like Beijing’s lapdog. It obligingly voted, 149-1, to scrap Hong Kong’s democratically elected legislature after the handover. It warned Hong Kong’s judges that they must be loyal to Beijing if they want to keep their jobs. And it demanded sensitive information from the British governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten. Asked what he would give the committee, the combative Patten replied: “Nothing whatsoever. That’s nothing, spelled N-O-T-H-I-N-G.”
Critics of the Preparatory Committee say the tycoons are betraying Hong Kong’s pro-democracy middle class. And they argue that Beijing doesn’t understand that Hong Kong is fundamentally different from the rest of China. The colony’s Western insti-tutions – freedom of expression, an independent judiciary and open government – are what enabled international business to thrive. “Hong Kong in 1997 is not China in 1947,” says American social scientist Michael DeGolyer, who is studying public opinion on the Hong Kong handover. “They’re trying to use ox-cart tactics in the world of the Internet. Come on, it doesn’t work.” In an interview with NEWSWEEK (page 38), Patten accused the Preparatory Committee of “conveniently forgetting” that Hong Kong’s status as an “open and free plural society” was supposed to be guaranteed for 50 years after the handover. Why are committee members kowtowing to Beijing? “They wouldn’t be doing it,” Patten said, “if most of them didn’t have foreign passports in their back pockets.”
That the tycoons ended up on Beijing’s side is no surprise. As London and Beijing negotiated Hong Kong’s future, the colony’s businessmen were discovering the vast opportunities offered by the cheap, convenient free-enterprise zones, such as Shenzhen and Zhuhai, that Deng had set up on the mainland. Within a decade, every major business plan in the colony focused primarily on the China market – and on cultivating the personal connections and official favors required to make it in the Middle Kingdom.
When China formed a group to consult on a new constitution for Hong Kong in the mid-1980s, prominent tycoons signed up. “They just followed the power,” says a Western diplomat. When the first partly elected legislature was created early in this decade, a solid majority of Hong Kong voters chose anti-Beijing democrats. But these politicians counted for virtually nothing as the key links formed between big business and Beijing.
Chinese officials made it clear they would favor tycoons who supported the party line. “Everybody has a different degree of self-interest,” says committee member David Chu, an American-educated developer who has given up his U.S. passport. “I have seven or eight buildings here, and these investments are not movable. At least I put my money and my passport where my mouth is,” he says. “Look, we have to accept reality. We are not going to be an independent country. Hong Kong people will rule Hong Kong, but if there’s a gray area, China will decide.”
While the tycoons were joining forces with Beijing, some of China’s oldest friends in the colony were being shunted aside. During the 1980s Dorothy Liu, a U.S.-educated lawyer, was a loyal advocate of Beijing’s views. But China quickly lost patience with her after she denounced the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, and she was left off the Preparatory Committee. Liu views it with disdain in any case. “Patriotism has been confused with obedience to a handful of officials,” she says.
Many of the tycoons seem to think that the handover is as simple as switching their memberships from the Hong Kong Club, the stuffy preserve of British colonialism, to the China Club, modeled after a 1930s Shanghai gentlemen’s establishment. As they see it, a few pro forma committee votes to satisfy the Beijing bureaucrats need not change the essential character of Hong Kong. Its plugged-in traders will still follow the latest market blips on their beepers and cell phones.
The tycoons and their new masters in Beijing share at least one conviction: that Hong Kong is primarily an economic city. But many other people in the colony – the silent majority, if election results are a measure – put real stock in the increasing democratization of their legislature. And Hong Kong’s Western partners, especially the cutting-edge American and European firms that run their Asia trade out of the city, have settled there precisely because its system apes the Western model.
There are people in Hong Kong who are trying to get that message across to Beijing. The colony’s top civil servant, Chief Secretary Anson Chan, has managed to serve as Patten’s number two while building up her ties to China. Eager to have contacts with at least one senior Hong Kong official, Beijing arranged for Chan to take a grand tour of her ancestral village in Anhui province and offered another personal gesture: rehabilitating Chan’s late grandfather, an anti-communist general. Beijing pronounced him a revolutionary hero – for his valor during the war against Japan.
Beijing wants Hong Kong to succeed fabulously. China’s leaders stomp on dissent and democratic reforms like so many cockroaches because they think these things will foul the works. In recent years, Beijing has generally behaved more harshly than outsiders expected. So if China cracks down hard on dissidents, intellectuals and judges in Hong Kong, the tycoons will have staked out a survivable position. On paper, however, Beijing is committed in its agreements with Britain to a series of ever more democratic elections in Hong Kong after 1997. If this process goes smoothly and fairly, Beijing may conceivably relax. In that case, the tycoons can always pour money into local election campaigns and give their children names like Jefferson.
