Will Hong Kong's Heart Ever Truly Be Chinese?

In the fall of 1989, the American consul-general in Hong Kong, Donald Anderson, asked a retired local politician to imagine the future: What might life be like after July 1, 1997, the day that Britain's century-old lease on Hong Kong would expire and socialist China would assume sovereignty over the territory? It was possible to imagine at least two distinct futures. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, the Chinese Communist Party agreed to a treaty pledging not to interfere in Hong Kong's laissez-faire capitalism for fifty years after 1997. The agreement, called “one country, two systems,” would allow Hong Kong to retain its independent civil service, judiciary, financial authority, border controls, and civil liberties. It promised a future with few changes for Hong Hong, except the absence of the Crown insignia on government buildings and stationery. Then, in June, 1989, Chinese authorities sent tanks to put down pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, in Beijing. Hong Kongers watched the bloodbath on live television. Here was an alternative vision of the future under Chinese rule. Speaking just a few months after the crackdown, the retired politician answered Anderson's question by reciting a poem by Li Shangyin, a ninth-century imagist who witnessed the bloody fracturing of the Tang Dynasty.