Dealing with the Dragon: a year in the new Hong Kong
Jonathan Fenby Little, Brown, 312pp, £14.99
ISBN 0316854158
I last saw Jonathan Fenby, a former colleague from my days at the Independent, in 1997, as Hong Kong was preparing - in an ocean of comment, analysis and speculation - for its return to China. I was there to make some radio features for a BBC news programme. He was the editor of the South China Morning Post. As it happens, both of us have since been fired from those jobs - or, to be more precise, contracts were not renewed - in neither case with any warning or explanation.
It is tempting to say that, in today's journalism, this happens, no matter how undesirable it may be as a management practice or how irritating for the individual. But in Fenby's case, it was immediately read as an example of Beijing's tightening grip on Hong Kong's freedoms.
On the occasion of that dinner, back in 1997, Fenby was bullish about Hong Kong, but hopping mad. His complaint was that it had become fashionable to accuse the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong's most important English-language daily, of a pre-emptive cringe - of kowtowing to Beijing even in advance of the handover.
As the paper's editor, he took the charges hard, and had at his fingertips an impressive list of Post stories of which Beijing would not have approved. But when he was not defending his record, Fenby was equally indignant about the pressures that he was under to do precisely what the paper was accused of - to ease up on critical coverage, either of the mainland or of the Hong Kong government. He was often forced, he said, to threaten to resign in defence of a journalist whom the management found uncongenial, or to resist the demand, as we now read in Dealing with the Dragon, that the paper refrain from using the word "massacre" to describe the events in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. The conclusion I had to draw was that, while Fenby, as editor of the Post, was not guilty as charged, the process of which he complained was exactly the one that the Post's critics perceived as gloomy for the future of Hong Kong.
It was no great surprise, therefore, to hear that Fenby's time as editor of the Post was over. His contract ended in July 1999, halfway through the year in the life of Hong Kong that this book describes. By that time, there had already been some tense encounters with the Post's biggest shareholder, the tycoon Robert Kwok. Kwok is one of a series of Hong Kong billionaires - who include the chief executive of Hong Kong, Tung Chee-hwa - whom Fenby describes as a cosy cartel prepared to do a deal with anybody, especially Beijing, to protect their continuing ability to make fortunes in Hong Kong's low-tax business environment. As Fenby makes clear, he was fired because he would not agree to stop rocking their boat.
Relieved, then, of the need to defend his paper's record and his own reputation as editor, we can assume that the account he provides in Dealing with the Dragon represents his real feelings about the effect of the motherland's embrace on the unruly bastard child that is Hong Kong. This is not a volume of weighty analysis, and the specialist will find little that is new. It is a journalist's book - a diary format skips through the news of the year, some of it weighty, some of it faits divers, punctuated with sketches of some of the central characters in Hong Kong and on the mainland and, occasionally, with Fenby's own take on events. The advantage of the format is that it recreates the sensation of moving through this pivotal year, checking for straws in the wind, with all the contradictions inherent in the "one country, two systems" formula. The disadvantage is that it militates against a more profound analysis.
Fenby leaves us in little doubt about his judgement of the trend. He identifies corruption and the weakening of the rule of law as the most threatening of Beijing's influences on Hong Kong's future: after all, Hong Kong will thrive only as long as it remains a good place to do business, and no amount of favourable taxation will compensate for an environment in which the law does not count.
Hong Kong has not reached that point, but Fenby details a number of worrying cases. Hong Kong citizens have been kidnapped by police in China and released only against huge payments from their families in Hong Kong, without the Hong Kong government feeling moved to intervene. The authority of Hong Kong's Court of Final Appeal has been fatally undermined by the Hong Kong government's request for a further ruling from China's National People's Congress in a landmark case involving the right of abode of Chinese citizens in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong itself, the law seems curiously lenient on the rich: when a newspaper proprietor rigged her circulation figures to boost advertising revenues, she went free, while lesser figures in the organisation were punished. When the son of Hong Kong's richest man, Li Ka-shing, was kidnapped, the family paid the ransom without conferring with the Hong Kong police. A few months later, the kidnapper was arrested in China, tried and executed for crimes committed in Hong Kong on little more evidence than his alleged confession. The man was a notorious gangster, but it is unlikely that a Hong Kong court would have found the case strong enough. For the rich and well connected, the embrace of the motherland brings rewards of many kinds; whether this offers Hong Kong any long-term comfort is another matter.
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