Business Week: Trying to Be Just Another Chinese City (Excerpt)

MAY 14, 2001 A visit by President Jiang prompts Hong Kong authorities to put on their toughest face, which isn't really too scary The other day as I was strolling past Chater Garden, a pleasant park like space in downtown Hong Kong, right next to the imposing old building that houses the city's legislature, I thought it a bit strange that a big part of the garden was blocked off, as a local TV station was putting up an outdoor set for a variety show. Stranger still, signs were posted everywhere, but they were all in Chinese. Hong Kong, which calls itself Asia's World City, is a proudly bilingual place, and public signs are almost always in English as well as Chinese. I can read Chinese, though, and once I looked more closely, I realized what was going on. The signs proclaimed warm welcomes for Chairman Jiang Zemin to Hong Kong. That's Jiang Zemin, President of China and Chairman of the Chinese [party' name omitted] Party. No wonder the signs were only in Chinese. When Jiang comes to town, Hong Kong tries to pretend that it's just another Chinese city -- and that means having signs in Chinese and not English. SENDING A MESSAGE. But such symbolic displays are becoming more commonplace lately. Hong Kong officialdom is out to convince President Jiang that the city really is a part of the motherland. Jiang was here to join with former U.S. President Bill Clinton, Thailand Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and hundreds of CEOs from such multinationals as Goldman Sachs, Dell, and Microsoft, in town to take part in a forum sponsored by AOL Time Warner. Determined to keep Jiang from being embarrassed, the Hong Kong government made sure to keep demonstrators as far from his hotel and the convention center as possible. Immigration officials turned away about 100 foreign supporters of Falun Gong, the spiritual group that is legal in Hong Kong but the object of a widespread crackdown in the rest of China. And police roughed up a couple of local pro-democracy activists who tried to get too close to Jiang. It was almost as if the government was flashing a message to Jiang: Look, we're doing our best to stifle dissent. Still, contrary to what critics and dissenters say, reports of the demise of "One Country, Two Systems" are exaggerated. That phrase is shorthand for the formula devised by China's leader Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s under which Hong Kong would be allowed to preserve its way of life for 50 years after its return to China. BRUTALITY? Hong Kong is not just another Chinese city. You know that just by reading the local newspapers or by listening to the local radio during Zemin's visit. Those people who tuned in to the city's most popular radio talk show could hear detained activists denouncing the police. Readers of the English-language tabloid iMail were treated to pages of coverage on how the police forcefully subdued protesters. Pro-democracy lawmakers denounced the police. The cops' action? Confiscating a detainee's mobile phone. Now, in a city that's mad for mobile phones, that is a serious violation. But on a scale of brutality, it doesn't rank very high. The more serious charge against the Hong Kong government was the allegation that immigration authorities had a blacklist of Falun Gong members. Diplomats from the U.S., Britain, and Australia all complained that some of their citizens had been denied entry to Hong Kong. Chief Secretary Donald Tsang, the No. 2 official in Hong Kong behind Beijing-selected Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, did his best to deny the charges. "We have hardly any visa restrictions," he told reporters last week. "But we do keep undesirable elements out." The South China Morning Post quoted an immigration department official saying "we don't have any list of Falun Gong members." Come on. It strains credulity to believe immigration authorities didn't have instructions to keep out Falun Gong members. Like the Chinese-only signs in Chater Garden, the moves by the local government to exclude the Falun Gongers were a brief attempt to score points with Beijing. [...]