She had to smile, she couldn’t help it. Saved by fucking bankers. Of course the whole world was making them do it. Now they were discussing other new ideas, experiments beyond anything she had ever dreamed of. Minister Chan was now smiling, sweetly but slyly— it seemed because she had looked over at Mary and seen Mary’s little smile. The two of them were complicit in their amusement; both were amused that Chan herself would be taking the helm here, and heading off in new directions. It was so amusing that when someone asked Mary what she and her ministry might think of all these new ideas for reform that Madame Chan was proposing to them, Mary stood to extend her hand toward the young Chinese woman, and smile at her, and say, I yield the floor, I pass the torch, I like all of these ideas. I say, be as bold as you can dare to be!
101
What did we teach Beijing, you ask? We taught them a police state doesn’t work! They thought it could, and they tried for fifty years to bring Hong Kong to heel, using every tool that came along— buying people, using CCTV cameras and facial recognition, propaganda, phalanxes of police and army, drone surveillance, drone strikes— and all of that just made the people of Hong Kong more resolute to keep what we had.
— Why do you say that! Of course what we had was real, because hegemony is real. That’s a feeling, and feelings are something your culture explains to you. We in Hong Kong have a very particular culture and feeling. We lived as servants of the British, and we know very well what it felt like to be subaltern to a hegemonic power. That only lasted a few generations, but it set a particular feeling here, right in people’s hearts: never again.
So when the British turned us over to Beijing, fine. We are Chinese, Beijing is Chinese. But we are also Hong Kong. It creates a kind of dual loyalty. Part of that is we speak Cantonese while Beijing speaks putonghua, Mandarin to some Westerners, although that’s actually an elite or written version of putonghua, but never mind, we were different. We speak Cantonese, we are Hong Kong.
— Yes, of course there were Hong Kong people in favor of joining Beijing completely! These people often got money from Beijing, but I’m sure it was a genuine feeling for some of them. But most of us were for one country two systems, just as the saying had it. Our system, many of us call it rule of law. Laws in Hong Kong were written and passed by the legislature, enforced by the police, and ruled on by the courts. That’s why the world trusted us with their money! Beijing didn’t have that. They only had the Party. What got decided behind the closed doors of their standing committee became their equivalent of the law, but it was a rule only, rule without law, and it couldn’t be challenged. It was arbitrary. That’s why when Beijing tried to build Shanghai as their own finance center, to counter us, it didn’t work. The world didn’t trust Shanghai the way they trusted Hong Kong. So we in Hong Kong fought for it, we fought for the rule of law. All through the years between 1997 and 2047 we fought.
— Why 2047? The deal was that on July 1, 2047, we were to be folded entirely into the Republic of China. That was the British kicking the can down the road. They were not the worst empire by any means, but they were definitely an empire, and all empires are bad. So they struck that deal with Beijing, which had it that for fifty years we were to be one country two systems. And during those fifty years we in Hong Kong got used to fighting for our rights. Part of that meant going out into the streets and demonstrating. Over the years we saw what worked and refined our methods. Violence didn’t work. Numbers did. That’s the secret, in case you are looking for the secret to resisting an imperial power, which was what we were doing through those years. Non-violent resistance of the total population, or as much of it as you can get. That’s what works.
— Yes, of course Beijing could have crushed us! They could have killed every person in Hong Kong, and repopulated the city with people from mainland China who didn’t know any better, and would have been happy to take over such a nice infrastructure. Not that they would have known how to operate it! Still, this joke that a Western acquaintance once told me, about the government dismissing the people and electing another one, that was no joke to us. Because Beijing could have done that. It’s kind of what they did to Tibet.
But there were constraints on Beijing too. For one thing they were always trying to entice Taiwan back into the fold. One part of that effort was to say to Taiwan, you’ll be fine if you join us— we’ll treat you just like we treat Hong Kong! One country two systems, and if you come back to us, three systems! Let a hundred flowers bloom! But that argument would only work if they were indeed treating Hong Kong well.
— Yes, there were other reasons that weren’t so convincing to Taiwan, of course. There are always multiple causes, always. In this case there was always June 4. Tiananmen Square, 1989. Now known also as May 35th, or April 66th, or all the way around the calendar, although the joke gets old, and even hard to calculate, and besides every one of those
