Ten years since Hong Kong took over China!
10 July 2007
Have I got this the wrong way round? Tim Fryer argues that China is becoming more like Hong Kong rather than the other way round
It is, of course, ten years since the British government honoured its agreement with China and handed back rule after its 100-year lease. At the time of the hand-over there were fears that a repressive Chinese system would envelop Hong Kong and destroy its way of life. Many fled the colony to Canada and other places in the years before the hand-over. The burgeoning electronics manufacturing market in China at the time also held its breath as Hong Kong was the conduit to the West, not just for so much of its manufactured goods but also as a mutual acceptable meeting ground between two different cultures.
We can look back now at such fears with a wry smile. The Hong Kong way of life has remained largely unaffected, while its role in the global electronics industry has grown in the same way that Singapore’s did before it – as a place where East and West merge, embrace technology and are also symbolic of ‘the global electronics industry’.
In fact the cultural changes have been more the other way round. In our lifetimes we have not seen such an air of liberalisation from China, with the opportunities to visit and do business existing where they would not have before. And the manufacturing industries, none more so than electronics, have played a significant role in this – after all, if China has set out its stall as the world’s factory, then it must be prepared to talk to its customers.
Superficially then it appears that the capitalist and communist philosophies can gel into a winning formula. But there remains a dark cloud that is hanging over the horizon. The rest of the world has become so dependent on China for all manufactured goods that it tries to ignore this dark cloud and China, possibly even with the showcase of the Olympics next year, tries to hide the dark cloud away. So we are all complicit. The dark cloud I am referring to is human rights. The horror of the Tiananmen Square massacre was only 18 years ago. Although this really makes it recent history, it seems almost inconceivable that it could happen now. Yet individual freedoms are still not what we in the west would term ‘acceptable’. A UN resolution this spring (which was not passed) included areas of concern such as ‘extrajudicial killings, torture, repression of religious and political groups, and arrests of internet dissidents and HIV/Aids activists’.
Progress in this field has been so rapid, but must continue – that dark cloud needs to carry on getting smaller. China needs the World and the World needs China – we have a truly global electronics industry and there is nothing we all like more than stability. It seems to me that what could affect this stability is not the business model or even economics, but ethics and morality.
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