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HONG KONG DIARY
Simon Winchester reports from Hong Kong in the days leading up to and following the handover - - - - - - - - - - J U L Y+1 The day of the handover J U N E+2 7 A press release is a rude awakening J U N E+2 6 Tonight they're gonna party like it's 1997 J U N E+2 5 Typhoon!
J U N E+2 4
The party's over
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Farewell, Hong Kong
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It all ended with a cipher signal, serial number 505, a message of the starkest simplicity. It was sent at 1600 GMT, midnight exactly in Hong Kong, and was signed just "Patten," the final colonial governor. "I have relinquished the administration of this Government," it said. "God save the Queen." And then the cipher clerks in the basement of Government House switched off their coding machines, unplugged their radio transmitters and their fax scramblers and emerged into the rainy darkness at last, with no further work to do. A junior official in the Executive Council took the Great Seal of Hong Kong from its safe and formally defaced it, carving a ragged cross on it with a chisel, so it could never again be employed to create the people's laws. And somewhere in a dusty labyrinth in London a diplomatic cartographer erased a small smudge of pink from the official map of the East, removed Hong Kong from the list of Her Majesty's Dependent Territories and shifted it to its new location in his index under China, the People's Republic. Then there was just one last piece of whimsy: a nautical signal tapped out by Morse and semaphore and Aldis lamp, as the royal yacht and her escort vessels moved out of Hong Kong harbor. So far as the old colony was concerned the only remaining order was just: "Finished with Engines." Now comes the process of social engineering that will bring Hong Kong's 6 million into the embrace of China. The two days of gaudy ceremonial that followed the handover were designed to amuse and entertain the interested masses, and to render either melancholy or triumphal the moment of truth. But these displays were, in truth, merely decorative irrelevancies. The ceremony that will come in time to mean very much more to the average Chinese here today is the one that happens each and every day at dawn, 2,000 miles north of Hong Kong, in Beijing. Each day's raising of the great red flag of communist China, and the patriotic stirrings it inspires, remains one of totalitarianism's finest theatrical set pieces. It takes place across from the Forbidden City's Gate of Heavenly Peace, on the northern edge of the immeasurable vastness of Tiananmen Square. Mao's portrait gazes down, benign, fatherly. A digital clock announcing the time of Beijing's dawn clicks down the seconds to zero -- at which moment the great wooden doorways creak open wide, and 60 of the tallest, smartest soldiers in China's army march out, in awesomely perfect unison. It is as they cross Chang-an Avenue that the most truly impressive part begins, when the soldiers begin a slow, impeccable, barely credible goose step. They are never so much as a millisecond off cue; their silvered bayonets glint in the dawn like a forest of steel; their gold epaulettes and the richly polished knee boots catch the light of early sun. It is a heart-stopping moment; from those who watch comes a huge collective gasp, the unforgettable sound of popular awe. The soldiers arrive at the base of the flagpole, the platoon divides neatly into two ranks that flow to each side of the plinth, their leader steps up to attach to its hauling line the folded scarlet flag. The audience -- hundreds of men and women from all over China come here each day to see the event -- falls suddenly silent. There is a huge electric hiss, and from dozens of speakers come the first notes of the national anthem, "The March of the Volunteers," and as it does so the flag begins to rise, inch by inch. The trooper who has been given the honor of holding the flag then tosses it out into the breeze, so that it begins to unfurl slowly in the cold morning air as it rises, slowly and steadily, up the tall steel mast. The timing is always totally impeccable: As the last thunderous crash of the anthem dies away -- "Brave the enemy's gunfire -- March on! March on!" -- so the flag reaches the very top, streaming out over the square and over its audience. It is an immensely powerful symbol, just as the party fathers had ordered, of the vastness, power and disciplined unity of the oldest civilization, most populous country -- and soon to be, all Chinese believe, greatest nation -- in the world. Chinese people see it almost as a sacred duty to witness the event. They come from every province in the hundreds and stand to await the ceremony whatever the weather, however early the rising of the sun. On a June day they might be waiting patiently at 4 a.m.; in December they may stand in bitter cold, whipped by snow. They may have come from as far as Manchuria or Turkestan or Inner Mongolia, from the jungles on the Burmese border, the mountains by Vietnam, or the steppes that divide China with Russia. So far very few Hong Kong people have ever seen it, have ever taken part. This, though, is now almost certain to change, and because of one very simple new fact. The 6 million people who live here are now about to undergo a process of being cajoled, persuaded -- and perhaps even bullied -- into accepting that they are Chinese, through and through, and that their spiritual center is now and forever more in and around Celestial Throne, in the Forbidden City, in their one true capital city of Beijing. This is going to present a true sea-change, a giant shift in the popular imagination. For until now Hong Kong people have really only had a loyalty to themselves. No one else has ever seemed terribly important. After all, they had run away from China in the immediate aftermath of Mao's revolution, and they had settled in this safe, though foreign-protected, enclave. They and their descendants flourished -- but they did so without ever coming to owe any patriotic allegiance to either China (of whom they were frightened) or the British (of whom they were somewhat contemptuous). The result has been a territory and a people who see themselves as having a totally distinct identity, owing little to their origins: "We are Chinese, true," remarked one young woman friend here, a San Francisco-educated restaurant owner named Joyce Wong. "But we are Hong Kong Chinese. And that is truly a very different thing." The Beijing leadership now wants keenly to bring an end to this kind of divisive thinking. It is going to set about a massive program, a mix of propaganda and veiled threats, that will be aimed to bring the Hong Kong people fully into the enfolding arms of China. Beijing now wants to make these 6 million here feel as patriotically Chinese as people already do who come from Hubei or Shaanxi or any of the other 26 proper provinces of the nation. Whether they will succeed in doing it -- in persuading people who live in prosperous parts of Hong Kong like Sha Tin and Lantau Island and the soon-to-be-re-christened city of Victoria to think of themselves as having a spiritual and emotional link with the real China -- is going to provide the most pressing and tense drama for Hong Kong in the coming months and years. The Chinese army is clearly going to be one of the instruments by which the Beijing leadership intends to bring the ornery, very independently minded Hong Kong citizenry to heel. Friday's announcement of the speed and size of the army's deployments suggest the urgency with which China is about to begin the process of the Sinicization, or the patriotic re-education of Hong Kong. Four thousand troops streamed in at dawn on Tuesday, by land, sea and air, in a steady cavalcade of armored cars, helicopters and naval vessels. By next week there may be many more. And these are soldiers for whom mainland Chinese people are accustomed and urged to show respect and gratitude. Their very presence in China serves as a constant reminder of the need for patriotism. There can be little doubt that they are being sent to Hong Kong in such numbers and with such speed not so much for the territory's defense -- for who might wish to attack the place? -- but to help instill in the Hong Kong people politically correct thoughts and attitudes and a fervent love for the motherland. The new garrison commander, Liu Zhenwu, is thus a tremendously important figure in the future of Hong Kong; as is the new Foreign Ministry representative who will be based in the territory, former London ambassador Ma Yuzhen. In all likelihood these two men -- diehard communist party figures of unimpeachable loyalty to Beijing -- will turn out to be the real power behind the throne of Hong Kong's rather mild new chief executive, Tung Chee Hwa. There are many here who are convinced that Tung and his deputy, the very outspoken Anson Chan, will in fact survive only a few months of the rigors of working for Beijing. Any replacements will have first to win the approval of Ma and Liu. Only officials who are infinitely more doctrinally loyal than those in place today will get the nod; and once installed, their impact on the territory will be far harsher than is being promised during these heady, internationally scrutinized post-handover days. But harsh or not, swift to move or slow to settle, one thing is sure: Hong Kong is now China once again. Its people are going to have their loyalties redirected, their love for their motherland rekindled and their futures changed in a thousand subtle ways in one of the greatest experiments in social engineering that mankind has ever seen.
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