Sunday Times 2
UK tippy-toes round China but attacks the weak and vulnerable
My one-time colleague on the Hong Kong Standard newspaper Kapila Bandara wrote in these pages last Sunday how Britain, the former colonial power is turning a blind eye to the crackdown on the student protest movement in Hong Kong, now an integral part of China.
It would come as little surprise to old Hong Kong hands and those who have delved into British political history at the insoucience of the former colonial power which still has obligations under the Joint Declaration which led to China reasserting its sovereignty over the territory.
Even as Britain prepared to transfer power, it refused to grant citizenship to some of Hong Kong’s minorities such as the Indians who had contributed much to the growth of Hong Kong.
The minorities had to fight hard to get even a foothold in the UK despite their significant contribution to the colony.
The Nepalese Gurkha soldiers who fought for King/Queen and country and many of whom sacrificed their lives in the various wars that Britain had engaged in were also given short shrift and not allowed to settle in the UK until some of them fought the issue in the courts.
They were not the only colonial subjects or obedient servants to suffer at the hands of the British. The humility suffered by the Chagossian people from Diego Garcia because of British treachery was highlighted in these columns several years ago.
These are but a few instances of British perfidy and the British ignoring the Hong Kong protests except for the pro- forma noises they often make, fits perfectly into the tradition of political behaviour.
That the Hong Kong public, especially the young, have awakened to political awareness is indeed a refreshing and welcome development because during the 10 years I spent there straddling both the British and Chinese administrations, an interest in the political future of the former colony, appeared a matter of little concern. If there was a growing consciousness about politics and Hong Kong’s future under Chinese sovereignty, it was at best in its infancy.
This is not to say that Hong Kong lacked a political culture, that its people were all apolitical and all they wanted was to get on with their lives and grow rich by the day. The almighty dollar reigned supreme over everything else and even the spelling of my name had to be associated with the two ‘l’s in the word dollar for comprehension to dawn on officials, secretaries and others.
There were nuggets of political consciousness centered around such parties as the Democratic Party led by prominent lawyer Martin Lee and movements that had very vocal London-educated activists such as Emily Lau and others who were soon to be thorns in the flesh of the authorities in the colonial administration and also in China.
They were in the front line of the movement to democratise Hong Kong, campaigning for universal suffrage and representative democracy that would give some power to the people.
But there was general public apathy about politics because the business community portrayed the dispersal of power to the people as an obstacle to a prosperous territory and it wanted nothing to stand in the way of amassing money, least of all an underclass with power to stymie the accumulation of wealth by a privileged few whose ostentatious display of it was disgusting .
From the very beginning the business community — Hong Kong Chinese as well as well as the British and other foreigners who were exploiting colonial advantages — stood steadfast against any attempts to bring a semblance of democracy to the territory.
During its 150 years of rule over Hong Kong there is only one instance of a progressive civil servant appointed by London as governor, advocating some measure of democratic governance for the territory. That was in 1946 when Governor Mark Young proposed setting up a municipal council with some elected members that would handle several subjects of public welfare then administered by the colonial government.
This was opposed by the British business community and other Britishers with vested interests who lorded over the colony. Governor Young’s successor slowly dropped the plan bowing to British interests.
It is for the same reasons that decades later Hong Kong’s business community vehemently opposed the last Governor Chris Patten’s attempts to reform the electoral system and instil some representative democracy into a moribund Hong Kong system.
Patten, a former minister of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, who I had interviewed for television in Colombo when he visited Sri Lanka in 1989 during the days of the IPKF, and chairman of the Conservative Party was to the party’s left and had more progressive ideas than the Tories generally held.
A pro-democracy demonstrator checks her smartphone during a rally in Hong Kong. AFP
For the British administration it was quite a change for he was the first politician to be appointed governor. From the very beginning he ruffled many feathers, particularly those of the Beijing leadership which refused to deal with him and, of course, the Hong Kong money-makers who mounted campaigns against him sniping at him from every side.
Sections of the business community also opposed social welfare measures being extended to poorer segments of Hong Kong society. One example immediately comes to mind. I covered the Legislative Council, Hong Kong’s version of parliament, for the Hong Kong Standard and wrote a sketch on the day’s proceedings very much like what I used to do for the Daily News many years earlier.
One prominent businessman whose name I do not wish to mention here, speaking in Legco, as it was called, argued that democracy should be only for those who paid taxes and the funds accruing from taxes should not be used to provide subsidised health or education for the less privileged sections of society.
Disgusted by what I had heard I wrote in one of my weekly columns that I thought such decadent ideas had become extinct with the dinosaurs. But I was sad to find that it was very much alive in Hong Kong.
It was not just the Hong Kong Chinese who opposed Patten’s attempts to extend the franchise and representative democracy to more people. The British business community also did not support Patten’s reforms because Patten had already angered China.
Since I was supportive of Patten’s attempts at political reform I antagonised the British business interests as well. On one occasion at a cocktail party a retired British army brigadier who was secretary of the British Chamber of Commerce said in front of several diplomats that he would shoot me if he had a gun.
When he repeated the threat I said it would not matter as I believed in rebirth. He walked away in a huff, his moustache bristling.
British business lobbied friends in the Commons and in high places to short circuit Patten’s attempts to plant the seeds of democratic change in Hong Kong before the territory reverted to China.
Under the Joint Declaration and even the Basic Law which forms Hong Kong’s constitution, Britain has obligations to ensure that Deng Xiaoping’s “One Country Two systems” policy is continued for 50 years from July 1997 and the British Government should submit a six-monthly report on Hong Kong’s progress to parliament.
But it became clear in the first years after China reclaimed control of Hong Kong that like their ancestors kowtowed to the Chinese emperors the present British leaders were prepared to do the same.
So just three years after Hong Kong changed hands and Chinese President Jiang Zemin made a State visit to the UK, the first Chinese leader to do so, public protests by Chinese students, Tibetans in exile and other anti-Chinese demonstrators were broken up by police who arrested some of them.
When the media asked whether British leaders had raised the issue of widespread human rights violations by China the standard answer was that they were raised in private and it should not be done publicly.
So it has been in subsequent years as a declining power such as Britain clings on to the economic coat tails of a resurgent China.
But when it comes to Sri Lanka or some other government the British do not like it is an entirely different story. Then it is loud-mouthed diplomacy of the worst kind.