Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 25, 1995 TAG: 9506270093
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: HAL BOCK ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: HONG KONG LENGTH: Long
Whenever he's free, the 50-year-old Hong Kong man packs his rugby gear and heads across the border to attend to the 30 teams he has helped put together in China's universities and army barracks.
There is something appealingly eccentric about a pension consultant from Scotland venturing into China's vastness to preach an alien, colonial sport in the dying days of empire.
But his bridgebuilding is one of a thousand points of light in a future darkened by uncertainty. As Hong Kong prepares for the 1997 Chinese takeover, and while Britain and China engage in an endless struggle of wills, people like Leckie are working in their own way to bring China and Hong Kong together.
``I like to think that at the same time as high-level talks are going on about the very big matters, we in our own small way are trying to look to the future and knit things together,'' says Leckie.
He isn't alone. Eric Li, an accountant, travels to China to teach future colleagues about capitalist bookkeeping. Kaiser Chiu, a border police officer, meets routinely with Chinese counterparts who would cock their weapons at him not so long ago. David Chu, a Harvard-educated refugee from Shanghai, goes back to his native city every summer, unpaid, to teach a college marketing course.
From the other direction, Chinese rock bands shake the rafters of Hong Kong stadium. Engineers pipe drinking water from China to Hong Kong. Chinese social workers come to share their experiences.
Such work is becoming more urgent as Hong Kong begins the two-year countdown to July 1, 1997, when the lease runs out on a colony often called ``a borrowed place living on borrowed time.''
It is an undertaking unprecedented in history - a vast social, political and corporate merger of a capitalist titan and a Communist superpower.
The end of Hong Kong's 156-year colonial era was always going to be an unnerving experience for its 6 million people, and they had been counting on China and Britain working together to give them a reassuring hand.
Instead, as each government seeks to shape Hong Kong in its own image, they argue about everything from how much democracy it should have to how it should cleanse its polluted harbor.
Britain says it wants to leave Hong Kong secure in its democratic liberties and rule of law. But a waning imperial power has little leverage over a rising China.
China has promised Hong Kong it can keep its free and capitalist ways for 50 years. But the regime that made the pledge back in 1984 will be gone by 1997. As the Deng Xiaoping era nears its end, and a new leadership struggles to find its feet, this may be a bad time for so complex a step as changing ownership of Hong Kong.
China has never forgotten the historic insult of losing pieces of itself - even tiny ones - to foreign powers. Now it seems convinced the British are scheming to keep a toehold in Hong Kong after 1997 - and if they cannot, to squander its reserves, foment anti-China feeling and render the colony ungovernable.
Beijing's suspicions are sharpened by Gov. Chris Patten's moves to broaden democracy in Hong Kong. China sees these as last-minute spoiling tactics, uncalled for because it already guaranteed Hong Kong an elected legislature, a home-grown chief executive and an appeals court to guard its legal system.
That court is in dispute, however. This month China and Britain finally struck a deal on how it should function. But Hong Kong's democrats are claiming a sellout, saying Britain's compromises have dangerously weakened the court.
Patten, sent by London three years ago as Hong Kong's last governor, sums up the uncertainties with the story of a man asking when the train is due: ``That depends.'' On what? ``That depends, too.''
A successful 1997 depends on whether China can change leadership smoothly; whether it can ride out the disruptive economic revolution unleashed by Deng; whether it will tamper with the freedoms and money-making skills that made Hong Kong so successful.
China has vowed to disband the governing bodies elected under Patten's rules and hold new elections. That begs the question of whether the Democrats, Hong Kong's most popular party and Beijing's fiercest critic, will be allowed to run for election.
Hong Kong should have nothing to fear if China lives up to the Basic Law, the constitution that underwrites Hong Kong's post-1997 separateness.
But many of Hong Kong's people are refugees from Communist China, and they simply do not trust their once and future master.
``We will lose freedom of expression, freedom of the press, artistic freedom, academic freedom, freedom of worship,'' says legislator Emily Lau.
She can already cite several examples.
When China denounced a British Broadcasting Corp. television documentary on Mao Tse-tung, the Hong Kong station that had bought the film refused to broadcast it.
When garment tycoon Jimmy Lai wrote a vituperative critique of Chinese Premier Li Peng, his showcase store in Beijing was ordered closed with no explanation.
When legislator Martin Lee sued a former judge in the pro-China camp for libel, he said he had great difficulty finding a law firm to represent him. Hong Kong's lawyers have extensive business in China.
China has delivered its message to Hong Kong in clear language: Keep making money but don't infect the rest of China with your democratic notions.
No one should be ``so naive as to think that they can turn Hong Kong into a political city in order to influence the mainland,'' Lu Ping, China's man in charge of Hong Kong affairs, warned last year. ``Hong Kong has always been an economic city, never a political city.''
Businessman David Chu is convinced China will respect Hong Kong's separateness, ``like husband and wife, but with separate bank accounts.''
Hong Kong needs China's markets and labor force, and China needs Hong Kong's business savvy, he says.
China and Hong Kong are each other's biggest trading partners. Hong Kong pours money into China, and out come toys, CD players, air conditioners, even the dim sum consumed at Hong Kong lunch tables.
Chu says it's up to Hong Kong people to defend their rights, ``with one hand holding the Basic Law and the other a clenched fist.''
But legislator Lau says: ``My worry is that the Hong Kong people are too frightened, too intimated and too fatalistic, and they will just say there's no point in fighting.''
The optimists, who believe China values Hong Kong's economy too highly to meddle with it, got a boost recently from the tale of the Xiying teapot.
The secret of the Xiying teapot, Beijing official Li Ruihuan told a Hong Kong delegation, is in the residue that encrusts its insides. Clean it, and the tea it brews will lose its special flavor.
Li's analogy was clear: Tamper with Hong Kong, and it becomes valueless.
China scholar Burton Levin, the former U.S. consul in Hong Kong, thinks Hong Kong will benefit from China's sense of national pride.
``The Chinese are determined to show the Brits and the rest of the world that this place is going to run every bit as good, if not better, under Chinese sovereignty,'' he says.
by CNB