CLOSING TIME AT THE LAST CHANCE SALOON

Chris Patten takes up the governorship of Hong Kong next Thursday.

Robert Cottrell hopes that he will abandon the policy of standing up

to China in public, but bending over in private

Hong Kong is hostage to its brief past, more so than cities of 20 times its antiquity. China, having asserted its own title to the territory throughout Britain's seizure, is now calling in the loan. When Christopher Pat- ten arrives as the 28th Governor of Hong Kong on 9 July, he will do so as the last embodiment of an already fading British authority, deput- ed to prepare the colony for its formal surrender on 30 June, 1997.

The blueprint for Hong Kong's transi- tion, the 'Joint Declaration' signed by Britain and China in 1984, contains under- takings from China to leave the territory's social, legal and economic systems substan- tially unchanged from those of the present. But such promises do not count for much. China remains as poor and totalitarian a country as Hong Kong is rich and free, its government still led by the same fanatics who ordered the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 and whose contempt for Western notions of democracy and human rights is absolute. Whatever China might have said in 1984, its sovereignty over Hong Kong after 1997 will leave it free in practice to do here just as it wishes.

Even now, with five years of British rule still in theory remaining, China is bullying and cajoling Hong Kong into doing things China's way; and it is hard to imagine that the communists will grow any less intrusive and intolerant when a British administra- tion no longer remains to deflect their undisciplined energies. The present boom in Hong Kong's financial markets may seem to tell a different story; but viewed from within, the excitement has more than an edge of hysteria about it — closing time at the Last Chance Saloon, or Shanghai 1948. The Hong Kong Bank's acquisition of Midland Bank and its transfer of domi- cile to London is a transaction which speaks volumes more about the long-term prospects for Hong Kong than do the gyra- tions of the Hang Seng Index.

These are dangerous days for colonial rule, and Mr Patten apparently plans, not unwisely, to dissociate himself from its more comic aspects. He has forsaken the knighthood which has been the minimum stylistic affectation of the 27 plenipoten- tiaries preceding him, and will dock at Queen's Pier next Thursday without even the traditional ostrich-feather drag, prefer- ring the disguise of a middle-aged, middle- class Englishman, complete with suit and tie, armchair physique and cheerful igno- rance of the local lingo.

For most of the past decade, Britain has ago- nised between its desire on the one hand to `stand up' to China on matters of political prin- ciple and, on the other, its fear that the product of any such defiance would merely be for China to exact retribu- tion at a later date upon Hong Kong. The middle path which Britain invariably used to end up choosing, that of `standing up' in public and then bending over in private, confused and irritated Hong Kong and China alike.

Even that accommodating posture failed to survive Tiananmen, however, when the Foreign Office briefly halted contacts with China on the grounds that it had reserva- tions about negotiating with mass-murder- ers. For that insult, the mass-murderers are now eating their vengeance cold, souring Britain's final years in Hong Kong with harassments and humiliations.

The most successful terrain for Chinese ambushes is proving to be the insanely ambitious port and airport which Britain is determined to build as its parting monu- ment in Hong Kong's western harbour, a project unachievable without guarantees from Peking that the money owed after 1997 will duly be paid. These guarantees Britain neglected to secure from the outset in binding form, with the result that the Prime Minister himself has been forced to join the ranks of British officials repeatedly travelling to Peking since Tiananmen to beg for fresh confirmations of Chinese sup- port, creating a basis for political blackmail the fruits of which will be limited only by China's ingenuity.

On the constitutional front, polite British requests to discuss the addition of further directly elected seats to the Legislative Council, the long wedge of echt democracy in the Colony's otherwise wholly mock political system, are meanwhile rejected with expressions of disbelief that the British could be so stupid as even to raise the matter. Instead, the Chinese are choos- ing to hack still deeper into the rump of alien sovereignty by demanding immediate veto power over appointments to the Exec- utive Council, the governor's policy-making `cabinet'.

Planned privatisation of Hong Kong government assets prior to 1997 are being blocked out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Foreign judges are being all but shoe- horned out of their promised seats on the proposed new Court of Final Appeal. And heaven only knows what sort of integrity will remain with the proposed new Hong Kong Monetary Authority when China has had its say — probably Peking will get to look after the notes, and Hong Kong the coins.

Vengeance apart, the reason for Peking's paranoia is that it has acquired the mind- set of any landlord whose tenant is about to depart, suspecting that the British are scheming to leave behind them a mountain of unpaid bills, and some holes in the wall where the gold- plated fittings used to be. It also suspects the British of trying to plant constitutional booby-traps — democ- racy and foreign judges, for example around the property, which will explode in China's face when it takes up residence there. (The first of those charges would be much easier for Britain to refute, of course, were British companies not being awarded the cream of Hong Kong's early airport contracts, and had Hong Kong-British companies not been emigrating from the territory since Jardine Matheson started the trend in 1984, carrying with them — as Peking imagines — immense bags of ill- gotten swag marked 'shareholders' funds'. As to constitutional reform, China's suspi- cions might be equally easily dispelled if Britain had ever tolerated democracy, about which it now makes such a fuss, dur- ing its own tenure of Hong Kong.) Obviously, Mr Patten has to decide quickly whether he governs with China, or against it. There is no longer a middle way. If he chooses the path of least resistance, yields to China's harangues and agrees to do only what Peking privately blesses, then presumably he will feel rather queasy inside, but he will have a relatively easy life in his dealings, not only with the comrades from Peking but also with the moneyed classes of Hong Kong itself, where the wave of fear and revulsion towards China which swept through even the most docile corners of the bourgeoisie after the Tiananmen massacre has long since reced- ed in favour of appeasement and equivoca- tion.

If, on the other hand, Mr Patten opts for the stand-up posture, then he will have to choose his ground carefully. For it is these same moneyed classes whose appointed representatives pack his rubber-stamp assemblies, nodding through laws and gen- erally legitimising British rule. They are not, however, without an eye to their own interests; and as the British sun approaches the horizon, even the grandest of them, the long-serving and decorated members of the Executive Council, are judiciously starting to put some daylight between themselves and Westminster. Ten or 20 years ago, they would have backed Britain in any conflict with China; but if Mr Patten wants to get tough now, he would do well to sack the lot, and find some new seconds.

The obvious place for Mr Patten belated- ly to turn, if he had the nerve, would be to the few local politicians who can claim any sort of democratic mandate, namely those members of the United Democrats who scored a landslide win in last year's elec- tions for 18 out of the 58 seats on the Leg- islative Council (the most that China would allow), but who were cold-shouldered by Lord Wilson when it came to policy-mak- ing, because China did not like them.

Habitual distaste for universal suffrage apart, Peking especially hates the United Democrats because the party's leadership overlaps with that of a separate movement set up in the wake of the Tiananmen mas- sacre to campaign for democracy within China itself. But no number of communist tirades, however abrasive, can erase the fact that the United Democrats — unlike the Conservative candidate for Bath — 'My name's Lloyd and I want it changed by deed poll.' were elected with very big majorities by vot- ers very well aware of their policies, their antecedents and their standing with China, so that by any conventional standards of democracy they are entitled to share in the government of the territory.

The principled case is clear, yet the undertow of expediency will surely prove too strong. Mr Patten comes in the cool of the evening, not the heat of the day, advised from almost all sides that he will find it easier and much safer to minimise his disagreements with China for the time being, and instead to say his prayers each night for a kinder, gentler sort of commu- nist to prevail in Peking by 1997. If he does accept that advice, and declines to follow his immediate predecessors into the ener- vating maze of Sino-British diplomacy, then he will still have the option of distin- guishing himself as a 'hands-on' ,governor, as Lord MacLehose was in the 1970s, putting the fabric of the municipality to rights and restoring zest to a local adminis- tration which appears now to be losing its resolve.

For the obsession with 1997 has cost Hong Kong dearly in terms of day-to-day housekeeping. The violent crime rate is soaring, to the point at which the armed robbers will soon have to form queues out- side the jewellery shops. The civil service is refractory, demoralised and still ominously dominated by expatriates who do not want to stay after 1997, yet at the same time want to be paid extra to leave. The brain- drain is sucking out the final synapses. Pol- lution is reaching east European levels, with the part of Chernobyl to be taken by a Chinese nuclear power station opening next year across the border. The airport, meanwhile, will need to be managed by a cast of thousands, and bankrolled by mil- lions, if its pilings are not to tower unfin- ished across the harbour like illustrations for an oriental Ozymandias.

Plenty there to keep Mr Patten busy until 1997, when he will be on his way back to Westminster via by-election or peerage, and Hong Kong will be on its way back to ... well, nobody can quite be sure. To China, yes. But to a subordinate relation- ship so improbable and so seemingly unsus- tainable that the Joint Declaration reads ever more like an exercise in official irony. Though China's economic reforms are fast reconciling it with capitalism, it is a colli- sion with the mainland's totalitarian politi- cal system which Hong Kong must fear, and there is no sign of incipient liberalism in that area either among China's present ancient leaders or their likely successors.

A decade hence, against all the apparent odds, Hong Kong may be glittering still more brightly into the Chinese night, swill- ing its shark's-fin and counting its cash. But the tens of thousands of people, the dozens of public companies and the billions of dol- lars leaving it in these final years betray the fear that it may, like Atlantis, just crumble back into the ocean from which it sprang.