Hong Kong protests: Confrontation is built into the Chinese model

Talking to young people in Hong Kong this summer, I was surprised to discover how few speak decent Mandarin. Arriving after a 16 year gap, I expected that the young would by now all have learnt putong hua (“common speech,” or Mandarin). They live in a tiny corner of China. Across the border, the Chinese economy has been booming for the last three decades. The future of the former colony will inevitably be decided by Beijing. You’d have thought it would make sense for them to learn the national lingua franca.

Very many haven’t. Their native language is Cantonese. Their second language, if they have one, is usually English. If you speak Cantonese, converting to Mandarin isn’t that hard. The pronunciation of the two dialects is entirely different, but the grammar and characters are the same. Cantonese-speakers attending the Beijing Language University, where I studied Mandarin for a number of years, took about six months to achieve complete fluency. If young people in Hong Kong don’t speak Mandarin, this indicates a widely-shared, profound aversion to engagement with the mainland.

The history of this aversion is long and complex. Economic factors have played a role, but it is about far more than cash. Before 1st July, 1997, when Britain handed back the colony to China, locals tended to look upon their compatriots across the border as poor and ignorant. They sometimes referred to them as tuqi (“rustic”, “uncouth”, “bumpkin”) or by an even more derogatory term, tu baozi (“hicks” or “rednecks”).

For Hong Kong’s people, many of whom were refugees, the mainland was a vast, threatening force to be both feared and despised. They were proud of the vibrant economy and society they were creating in an archipelago of islands and a patch of land on China’s southern tip. Industrious, enterprising, lively, open to the world, their tiny colony was a standing rebuke to the savage, impoverished dictatorship to the north.

Then came the handover. In the very month that Hong Kong huigui—“returned”—the Asian financial crisis struck. Grateful for Beijing’s economic support, the people of Hong Kong began to look upon the motherland with greater warmth. They started to brush up their Mandarin skills.

The optimistic mood was reinforced in 2003, when the local government introduced an “Admission Scheme for Mainland Talents and Professionals.” A trickle of wealthy Chinese began to settle in Hong Kong. Beijing also sought to stimulate the local economy by creating ziyou xing—a travel scheme piloted in a handful of China’s biggest cities, granting their inhabitants the right to visit the former colony on short-term visas. By 2007, the scheme had been extended to 49 cities.

Visitor numbers were accelerating sharply. Pregnant mothers came to give birth so that their children could get Hong Kong citizenship. Successful Chinese paid substantial fees for the right of settlement—taking advantage of a better quality of life, including lower taxes, cleaner air, healthier food, greater educational opportunities for their children and a higher standard of public services. Hong Kong was a good place to bring up your family, if you had the cash.

From 2009 on, mainlanders could get a visa in a couple of hours. Most came for short trips but the numbers mounted up. In 2013, 40.7m visitors arrived in Hong Kong from the mainland, nearly six times Hong Kong’s population. The visitors and incomers boosted Hong Kong’s economy, but property prices were shooting up, reaching levels comparable with London. Public space—always at a premium—became unbearably crowded.

Locals complained that the incomers were rude, dirty and noisy. They called them huangchong, “locusts.” The dislike was mutual. Mainlanders called Hong Kongers Gangsong. The first character—gang—means “harbour,” and comes from Hong Kong’s Chinese name—Xiang Gang, “Fragrant Harbour’; the second character—song—means “cowardly.” (This same character, in a different pronunciation, can also mean “a bear.” The bear, in Chinese culture, is held to have an impressive physique but a cowardly nature.) Gangsong is a linguistically neat, punning insult, pointing up what mainlanders see as the supine behaviour of Hong Kong’s people towards the British in colonial times.

The tensions were, perhaps, inevitable. All along, the issue looming in the background was political: China is an authoritarian state while Hong Kong’s legacy is that of a British colony. Colonial Hong Kong wasn’t a democracy but it was a place governed by the rule of law, where public officials were held to certain standards of probity, where court cases were largely decided on the evidence, where property rights were secure. Some of Hong Kong’s people feel a nostalgia for British methods, manners and morals. More important, they are educated citizens of the modern world who believe in democracy. Now that Beijing has shown its hand by offering them—instead of the democracy they were promised—a packed committee selecting the candidates they’re allowed to vote for, they have seized what may be their last chance to make an effective protest.

The Chinese Communist Party has no settled idea of how to deal with such dissent. It wishes to embrace modernity, but only in part. In so far as modernity is concerned with individualism, democracy and human rights, the Party, of course, rejects it. Its attitude is essentially utilitarian: let's take advantage of what is useful and discard the rest. The focus is on China's power and wealth and, as a corollary, the power and wealth of the Party.

As the leadership doesn't really know how to justify their position, they veer from confrontation to compromise, from bluster to bribery. They emphasise “patriotic education” and present their rule as the culmination of Chinese history. When they are pushed into a corner, they get angry. This week Chen Zuo Er, Chairman of the National Hong Kong & Macao Research Committee, stated: “The Occupy Central movement, no matter how threatening (xiong) it is, will have little bearing on the central government’s decision.”

The use of the character xiong—whose dictionary meanings include ‘‘ferocious”, “terrible” and “fearful”—provides an insight into the Beijing government’s way of thinking: there has been nothing xiong about Hong Kong’s peaceful gatherings, but to Beijing they represent a frightening challenge to their authority. For a senior official to use the word suggests that Beijing has already lost its patience.

The Party is trapped in the amputated modernity of the Leninist legacy which has shaped it from the beginning and which it has never abandoned. The unending paranoia about the very mention of Tiananmen 1989 is eloquent testimony to the fact. While the leaders are quite sure they are right in all they do, and that the growth of China’s economy and power is the proof of it, they remain uncomfortable.

This is the underlying drama of what is happening, not only in Hong Kong this week, but right across the country. Some think the contradictions of modern China will bring about the crisis and collapse of the system. I doubt it, certainly in the foreseeable future. But confrontations like this current one, whether on a small scale or large one, are built into the Chinese “model.”