Since arriving in Hong
Kong late Saturday afternoon, everybody has been telling me how
the former British colony has changed since the handover in 1997. I look around
and I agree, yes, much has changed.
Hong Kong is clearly a more Chinese city today than it was when I last
visited, nearly a decade ago, in 1994. But I have also been observing for some
time, from Taiwan,
another democratizing quarter of “greater China,” the challenge that Hong Kong’s shrinking freedoms have presented to the
special administrative region.
It is a challenge that some Hong Kong
citizens – and they are renowned for their pragmatism, for their business
acumen, for that Chinese quality of bending with the breeze – have met by
curtailing their own freedoms, suppressing
their own freedom of speech, in the perceived interests of a faraway
totalitarian central government.
This is natural enough. It is in the way of
things that people seek the path of least resistance. What is more, it is a tried
and tested formula in the mainland: give people prosperity; they give you the
keys to government house. But the easy path is not always necessarily as easy
as it looks, particularly when it begins to erode hope and dignity.
And that is why the biggest change here for
me is not that so many more people speak Mandarin today than they did a decade
ago, or that Hong Kong’s once infamous reputation for brusque shop clerks and
push-and-shove crowds seems to have taken a turn for the better, but that a new
mood has overtaken the city. In short, Beijing
has not inherited the politically quiescent trading port it thought it had.
Some 500,000 people took the streets in protest against Article 23 last July,
and just two weeks ago another 100,000 marched for greater democratic freedoms.
For me such
actions are grounds for hope, and cannot help but remind me how in 1989 the
people of Hong Kong then took to the streets in support
of the democracy movement I led, and which drove me into exile from China. In
nearly 15 years of exile I have continued to find hope in Hong
Kong’s anniversary vigils – some 40,000 people in 1998, the year
after handover – in remembrance of the tragedy of June 4, 1989.
I am grateful for the support Hong Kong
has shown my comrades over the years, and I also like to think that Hong Kong’s unofficial day of remembrance has blossomed
into a movement that seeks to put its own people’s interests first. Just as I
and my fellow students did in 1989, in both Hong Kong
and in Taiwan
now, people are using democracy to achieve democracy.
The reality is, there is no other way
forward. For more than two decades now the mantra has been, put business first
and everything else will follow. That has not happened. China’s huge
economic strides have not yet translated into more tolerance for democracy.
Just as Beijing
responds to the lively democracy it confronts across the Taiwan
Strait with military threats, in Hong Kong
it blocks the people’s democratic aspirations with rulings from on high.
When I arrived on Saturday afternoon, I
noted my appreciation for being allowed to enter Hong Kong.
What I did not say is that I should have been allowed to visit long ago, if the
one country two systems formula is to be taken seriously by the world, and in
particular by Taiwan,
which watches developments in Hong Kong with
concern.
On my arrival, I also expressed my hope
that this was the first step in a long journey home for a generation of
students who tried to wake a giant from its slumber. When I said to Beijing, to
President Hu Jintao, “let us come home,” it was not in the belief that the time
had come; it was in the hope of reminding the world, on Chinese soil, that
China’s intolerance continues to exile many of its own citizens.
Exile is a forced retreat from problems. And
in a sense the easy path of turning a blind eye to problems in exchange for,
say, low tax rates and a humming stock market is a form of stay-put exile. It
is powerless condition with little ground for hope.
But Hong Kong
has changed, and that change does give me hope. As a returned exile, I find
hope in the fact that Hong Kong is rejecting
the easy path. I find hope in the fact the people have the courage to demand
that, in Hong Kong, Beijing reconsider the controls it exercises
so effectively closer to home.
I find hope in the fact that the Hong Kong government allowed me to visit, and I find hope
in the fact that the Hong Kong people are
using democratic means to achieve democratic ends. After all these years, I
still believe there is no other way forward for the country I call home.
——Published Jan. 14th 2004, South China Morning Post. Copy Rights SCMP, 2004
