Another voice
Thoughts from the far east
Auberon Waugh
Hong Kong ?There was a time in the Sixties and early 1 Seventies when it was rather smart to have gone to China. Distinguished guests like the late Lord Thomson of Fleet, with attendant entourage of sycophants and phonies, would look in at Hong Kong on the way back and exclaim at its shallow and venal appearance after the deeply spiritual experience of being banqueted by mayors and clapped at by schoolchildren all around the mainland. China, we were told, had solved most of the problems of imperfect human nature. There was no crime, no tip- ping, no prostitution, no commercialism; everybody was inspired by a child-like faith in the future and the women had no doubt stopped menstruating from the pure idealism of it all, like Tito's heroic female partisans.
Those were the days when people still thought that socialism might hold the key to a better future. I approached Hong Kong from a different side on this occasion: to be exact, in a huge luxury cruise liner of the Royal Viking Line, from Singapore and Pattaya, in Thailand, with a passenger list which was predominantly American and almost exclusively over 75 years old. I wondered if the comparison between Hong Kong and two other small Asian countries might provide a clue to its future.
Politics is practically never discussed in Singapore but there seems to be grudging acceptance that Lee Kwan Yew knows best. His tightly controlled little isthmus seems to be working rather well, if you like that sort of thing, and the Singapore Chinese laugh a lot when they get away from it, to lose all their money on the ship's roulette tables with a gay abandon which suggests their spirit has not yet been broken. I wonder if gambling may not take the place of opium among the Chinese people. It is less damag- ing socially in that it provides an incentive to earn money in the first place, while hav- ing the same advantage that like com- munism it prevents the lower classes having money to spend on their gross consumer preferences, making the sort of smells, sights and noises which have destroyed most of Western Europe. And the Chinese take to it like the proverbial ducks to water. But we will obviously have to wait for the death of Mr Lee for anything interesting to happen in Singapore, and by then it may be too late.
God's own Kingdom of Thailand, which I have written about so often in these pages, would seem to be the happiest country on earth, with everybody getting on with his or her own business in a permanent traffic jam. Freedom of political expression was so deeply rooted even under the military government that nobody paid any attention to the government at all, leav- ing rival politicians to murder each other as they thought best. Occasionally they use this freedom to question where they are go- ing, as in a rather touching lecture on 'Youth in Violen. Society' at Thammasat University last week when Thailand's most eminent psychiatrist, Dr Udomsil Srisangnam, asked if it was really a good idea that there were 7,500 murders and 7,200 suicides in Thailand every year.
'We claim that we are Buddhists. But we marvel at violent pastimes such as cock- fighting, cricket fighting and boxing,' he said. It is true that Thai boxing, done with the feet as well as the fists, is one of the fun- niest sights in the world, although I have yet to marvel at Thai cricket fights and so must suspend judgment until my next visit. He might have mentioned water buffalo fighting too — a most unusual sport which the Thais have developed for their own entertainment.
Was it really a good idea, asked Dr Udomsil, that there were only two zoos in the country and only 14 museums, but 27,000 sex service stations? I do not know. These are weighty matters, and I would not wish to be so impertinent as to advise the Thai government on its domestic affairs. Two zoos would seem to me just about the right number. But the important thing in these dispositions is that they have not come about as the result of government planning. They represent the natural choice of a free country left to itself — with a little help, no doubt, from the tourist trade, but it is easy to exaggerate the importance of the tourist industry on Thai consumption patterns and I might use this opportunity for a little depilgerisation of the matter. The huge majority of tourists to Thailand are not Japanese, German or Scandinavian males on a sex-tour. They are respectable family groups on a package, nearly all of whom would be happier with a zoo than a sex-service station, and they would pro- bably even prefer to go to a museum than to a cock-fight (I cannot judge about cricket fights yet). My own party on board the Royal Viking Star, of about 400 American and Australian geriatrics, was typical. I should be most surprised if any of them went anywhere near a cricket fight, let alone marvelled at a sex service station. My point is that Thai society as it has evolved (with, admittedly, a certain amount of help from the time when Bangkok was used as a Rest and Recreation post for American troops in Vietnam) is an autochthonous phenomenon. It represents the wishes and choice of the indigenous population before any Pilgers, Pol Pots, Shirley Williamses, British colonial administrators or suc- cessors of Ho Chi Minh can get at them and tell them they want something different.
Whither, then Hong Kong? If one assumes that China can resist the tempta- tion to stalinise the colony, reducing it to a few incompetent state industries and leav- ing about a million and a half small businessmen and self-employed to jump in- to the South China Sea, there are still dif- ficulties which will prevent it from going on as it is. On Saturday the Chinese foreign minister, Mr Wu Xuequian, seemed im- mensely accommodating in conversation with the Japanese prime minister. Accor- ding to the Foreign Office spokesman, Mr Wang Zhengyu, Mr Wu said that the mainland would send no one to manage the area after 1997: 'Hong Kong will be ad- ministered by the people there. All capitalist systems there will be maintained. Existing social systems and the way of life will remain basically unchanged and all ex- isting laws will also be unchanged basically.'
Obviously, in fact, self-government will be out of the question. China will send a colonial governor. With him comes not so much the danger as (by my reckoning) the certainty of future convulsions in China along the lines of the Cultural Revolution. Could Hong Kong survive as an enclave of fat cat running doggism if it had a Chinese governor exerting nominal authority over young Communist firebrands? 1 do not think so.
My reason for doubting this is the same as my reason for saying that future cultural revolutions are inevitable, unless China is to relapse into a repressive Stalinist torpor (10 which case Hong Kong would be doomed, in any case). Marxist socialism is almost un- budgeable once it has been imposed and taken root for the good reason that everybody — not just the Party hierarchy — has become dependent on the State. But the asinine propositions of Marx must be maintained after they have been empiricallY disproved in one of only two ways: either by a permanent system of terror and repres- sion, as in Russia, or in a constantly renew- ed spirit of boyish enthusiasm, as in China. The trouble with the latter method is that the boys eventually become old and wise and corrupt. To renew the spirit of en- thusiasm it is absolutely necessary to unleash the hatred of young for old every so often — and with this hatred, all the stupidity, fanaticism and violence of the young.
Which is why I say that whatever haP- pens in China, Hong Kong is doomed. The only way it could survive as a free Port would be under some system of con- dominium such as used to apply in Tangier. But I doubt whether Mr Wang or Mr Wu would agree to that, let alone Mr Deng or Mr Dong.
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