Hong Kong (24 page)

In a small Chinese shop on Cheung Chau I once bought myself a packet of candies made in Athens, and even as I opened it I marvelled at the chain of logistics that had brought it from the shadow of the Acropolis to be chewed by me on the corner of Tung Wan road. One can hardly name a commodity that does not pass through the mill of Hong Kong. Some things, like my Attic sweets, are Hong Kong’s own imports coming to be consumed, others are Hong Kong’s manufactured exports going out, but many are simply in transit, from one country to another, pausing only to be serviced by Hong Kong’s expertise.

This, the re-export trade, was the original economic purpose of the colony. Hong Kong was a clearing house through which Indian and European goods could pass conveniently into China, and all the produce of China, including its emigrants, could be processed on its way to the rest of the world. The territory still fulfils that function, but now it offers services of altogether other kinds. Sometimes it acts as a back door to China; for example, since neither South Korea nor Taiwan maintains relations with Beijing, they send their exports to China through Hong Kong. Often its activities have nothing to do with China at all; many transactions between third parties, legitimate or clandestine, can be better achieved in Hong Kong than anywhere else in the east, so experienced and worldly-wise is this free port, and so dedicated to the principle that the customer comes first.

Hong Kong’s economy has been described as ‘a transformation economy’, accepting things, changing them in one way or another, passing them on. This applies even to commodities like money, stocks and shares, so that far more complicated service industries now augment the port’s original agents and chandlers. The colony is one of the world’s half-dozen busiest financial centres, with its chief offices around the punch-drunk relics of Statue Square. More than 140 different commercial banks, from many countries, now have offices there, together with countless merchant banks, insurance companies, design firms, public-relations agencies, advertising people, accountants and lawyers specializing in trade and finance. The Hong Kong Futures Exchange is internationally important, and so is the Chinese Gold and Silver Exchange. Hong Kong having no exchange controls, the foreign-exchange market is served by a cosmopolitan multitude of currency dealers.

Central to it all is the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, a post in the line
of speculation that connects Tokyo with London and New York. This was symbolically unified in 1986 in one of the more interesting new office complexes, Exchange Square in Central, which was designed by the Swiss architect Remo Riva, and stands silvery and elegant beside the water. The utterly computerized Stock Exchange looks very like a space mission control station, with its massed banks of VDUs, and so smooth and calm is its atmosphere that for a time they considered playing background tapes of the old exchange’s noisy clatter, to prevent alienation among the brokers.

During the 1980s the development of the port into a financial metropolis, and a base for business with a newly accessible China, brought to all these activities a new influx of opportunists, Chinese, British, American, Australian. In certain parts of town, at some times of the day, Hong Kong seems to have been taken over by regiments of young brokers, insurers, and in particular merchant bankers, a breed which is now part of the Hong Kong fauna.
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Many of them might be classified as yuppies, Sloane Rangers or Hooray Henries, and seem to spend their time either telephoning the other side of the world to discuss exchange rates, or zooming around in Porsches from one cocktail party to another. Others carry more weight. For example in his office high above the harbour there sits an American who knows as much as anybody alive about the contemporary Chinese legal system. A member of one of the most eminent New York law firms, he more or less commutes between Hong Kong, Beijing and Manhattan, often flying to China from Hong Kong three times a week. He played an almost unique role in the opening of the People’s Republic to American business; he also arranged the loan to the Bronx Zoo of the giant pandas Ling Ling and Yong Yong.

He is in Hong Kong partly because he can so easily get in and out of it. The prosperity of this colony, once so far away at the end of the trade routes, has depended always upon a mastery of communications.

In the 1920s it became the only British overseas possession from
which you could book a through train ticket to London. You left from the Kowloon waterfront station on the Guangzhou train, perhaps the streamlined railcar
Canton Belle
, decorated all in green and silver and equipped with cocktail bar; you travelled via Beijing and the Trans-Siberian railway to Moscow, Berlin, Paris and Calais; and from Dover the Pullman coaches of the
Golden Arrow
took you on to Victoria Station, London. The line was, grandiloquently declared Sir Henry May, Governor at the time of its opening, ‘the first tentacle, the first artery through which the red blood of trade would flow to and from the centre of British interests’. After several interruptions the service is available again now, and British expatriates with time to spare sometimes choose to go home on it.

Hong Kong’s first air link was necessarily with London, too. Before the Second World War Kai Tak airport was hardly more than an airstrip reclaimed from the water, and I can remember myself when flying into it on a blustery day, even in the 1950s, seemed an all but suicidal exercise, the aircraft lowering itself crab-like, wobbly with gusts of cross-wind, nervously racing its engines and feathering its propellers, on to the small runway that ran parallel with the sea. In 1936, when the first scheduled flight arrived, the runway crossed a main road, controlled by gates like a railway crossing, and the Imperial Airways De Havilland 86 biplane was, in the imperial manner, escorted in by nine aircraft from the carrier
Hermes
.

One passenger was aboard, plus sixteen bags of mail, and it was the start of a weekly service to Penang, where people could join the flying-boat service from Australia to Britain. It took ten days to get home by way of Karachi, Bahrain, Alexandria, Brindisi and Marseilles. Soon the Chinese opened a thrice-weekly service from Shanghai, and flights began to Macao, and Pan-American flying-boats arrived from San Francisco, and by the end of the 1930s the drone of aircraft engines, the bus-ride to the shed-terminal of Kai Tak, the sight of the flying-boat crews, checking in at the Peninsula Hotel, were all familiars of the Hong Kong scene.

During the Second World War the Japanese extended Kai Tak, using prisoners-of-war as labour, using the walls of the old Kowloon City as rubble, and breaking in the process the memorial stone to the Song boy-emperor. But when peace returned the airport was very soon outgrown, and in 1956 French engineers began work on an audacious new runway protruding 8,000 feet into the harbour. This created an airport like no other, in the heart of the city as Berlin’s Tempelhof used
to be, and as London’s City Airport would presently be, but forming an integral part of the seaport too. The work entailed demolishing a range of low hills, shifting eleven million tons of material to make the runway, and reconstituting the Song stone in a nearby park, where it remains.
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The result was an electrifying new approach to Hong Kong. An American airline pilot once told me that he never made the landing without a clenching of the stomach, so demanding is the flight-path, and no passenger who has ever flown into modern Kai Tak, especially at night, is likely to forget the excitement of the experience, as the harbour unfolds itself around one’s windows, as the myriad lights glitter, as first the mountains, then the skyscrapers rush by, and one lands mysteriously on the runway among the waters, the deep dark blue of the seas on either side, the starry blue of the sky above, as in the middle of some fabulously illuminated bowl of glass.

But it is soon to be replaced, as we shall later see, by something more dramatic still.

Time itself is a commercial commodity in Hong Kong, and the speed of the colony’s financial intelligence was always famous – even in 1843 the merchants of the hongs knew about Charles Elliot’s dismissal from office before he knew it himself. Now, in the days of electronic money movement, the quick tip is more important than ever. When it is eight o’clock in the morning in Hong Kong it is midnight in London, seven p.m. in New York. This gives the speculators and exchange brokers of Hong Kong several hours to make the most of the market, and Hong Kong is as extravagantly computerized, electronically networked and visually displayed as anywhere on earth.

The Victorian Empire was obsessed with the security of its intelligence, and Hong Kong was thought to be especially vulnerable to foreign interference. The cable to Singapore, laid in 1894, was routed via Labuan especially to avoid the French in Saigon, and the line to Shanghai was worked from a hulk in the middle of the Min River, to keep it safe from the Chinese. Even so for years the colony depended for its links with Britain upon the Danish Northern Telegraph Company, and it was only when an All-Red Route to London was opened
through Singapore and India that the colonists breathed easy – ‘moored to England’, as Isabella Bird phrased it, ‘by the electric cable’. Today Cable and Wireless, the British telecommunications company which used to be as essential to the imperial ambience as the Club itself, is the largest employer in the colony, except only the Government. It is a major shareholder in the telephone company, runs all international telecommunications, and with its signal-station at the very summit of the Peak, and its vast satellite dishes on a headland near Stanley, still plays a truly imperial role – eleven of the fourteen daily pages of
Singtao
, the London Chinese newspaper, are sent ready-made by satellite from Hong Kong.

Telephones came early to this colony, in 1882, and exactly suited the talkative genius of the Cantonese. By 1939 there was a telephone for every ten inhabitants (you dialled H for Hong Kong-side, K for Kowloon), and so efficient was the service that during the chaos of the Japanese invasion in 1941 it provided much the best means of communication for the embattled British Army. Hong Kong taxis were among the first anywhere to have radio telephones for their customers’ convenience, and cellular telephones which work in the middle of the cross-harbour tunnel are essential to your really on-the-ball Hong Kong businessman. Since local calls are free in Hong Kong telephones are deposited casually in supermarkets, cafés and fast-food shops, for customers to use.

Television is also ubiquitous – terrestrial, satellite, cable, in English and in Chinese – and virtually all Hong Kong families, even those living on board sampans or in shanties of plyboard and corrugated iron, possess a television set. TV presenters are celebrities, like all public personalities in the goldfish-bowl that is Hong Kong, and after a week or two in the colony you may well find yourself gawping like everyone else when you see one of the European or American newsreaders (getting practical experience in Hong Kong, very likely, as a step to bigger things at home) striding star-like into Jimmy’s Kitchen.

Behind the scenes a thousand less obtrusive electronics media are humming and stirring and bleeping through the hours. Important office blocks in Hong Kong nowadays are built, as it were, around their electronics. The territory has borrowed an idiom from the Americans as it borrows so many, and calls them not merely ‘high-tech’, but actually ‘intelligent’ buildings, able to think. They can think through the circuits that are laid between their storeys, through the aerials and dishes on their roofs, through laser beams and TV systems. The
Hongkong and Shanghai Bank thinks constantly about the state of the Hang Seng financial index, displaying its conclusions on VDU screens all over the place. The Exchange Building will think also, if you pay it a fat enough subscription, about the day’s races at Shatin and Happy Valley, and present the runners’ names, the odds and the form through display units on your executive desk. It also talks: its elevators announce their progress in a sepulchral, very English male voice, like a butler’s.

At night, however late, there are always lights burning in such office blocks of Central, and when I see them it gives me a not unpleasant tremor of the uncanny, as though they are lights from another world. I do not imagine people at their desks in there, only banks of computers, walls of flickering screens, tapes electronically whirring, cursors moving up and down, all bathed in the pale green light of the computer age. Nowhere is more inextricably enmeshed in electronics than is Hong Kong, and if we could see its myriad lines of inner communication, as one sees laser beams, the skies would be criss-crossed, the streets would be festooned, and we would be tripping over percentages wherever we went.

When the First World War was about to start, this is how the
South China Morning Post
commented on the prospects: ‘Leading businessmen regard the present deadlock with some little satisfaction. Provided that it is not unduly protracted, they consider it a splendid medium for reducing the huge accumulation of stocks … which have glutted the market for many months.’ When the Second World War was about to start, Hong Kong entrepreneurs made lots of money by buying up silk for parachutes, camelhair for British Army overcoats.

Like it or not, there was never anywhere quite like Hong Kong for instant opportunities. It swarms with speculators of every sort, building properties and selling them, buying into one another, selling each other out, plotting joint ventures or coordinating takeover bids. It is like a mammoth game of Monopoly, tinged with enigma – for what is an outsider to make of news items like this?: