Here is what I wrote for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It was published in the P-I Focus section of the Sunday Times-P-I on November 21, 1993.

A few days after Hong Kong’s first election for the legislature, I got my man-in-the street reading from a taxi driver. He proudly told me he hadn’t voted, and didn’t intend ever to vote. He had no say under Britain and expected none from China after 1997. He would keep his head down and do his job.

All around the world, people in new democracies have been voting with enthusiasm. Not in Hong Kong.

There, the party that won the 1991 election couldn’t take power, because only 30 percent of the seats were subject to public vote. Most of the power is held by the governor, who is appointed by Britain. In 1997 the governor will be appointed by China.

I lived in Hong Kong from 1989 to 1993. During that time, I saw the political half-awakening of the Hong Kong Chinese, and an eleventh-hour attempt to expand democracy. All the while, people around me said, “None of this political stuff matters.” It was too little and too late.

What matters is money. Hong Kong is booming. People are moving up. Ambitious bankers expect to make vice president by age 30, and have a mobile phone and a Mercedes-Benz. If their employer won’t provide, they’ll walk out and find one who will.

More jobs open up because so many people are emigrating. More than 1,000 a week, about 1 percent of the population per year, are leaving. In some companies, all senior managers have a foreign passport or a scheme underway to get one. I knew of one legislator, no enemy of China, who secretly had all his money sent to the United States.[1]

Canada is the favorite destination because foreigners can legally buy their way in as investor-immigrants. Australia is No. 2. But there are few jobs these days in Canada, Australia or the United States. About 15 percent of the emigrants have been returning to work in Hong Kong.

The “reverse emigrants” I knew, however, did not intend to stay beyond 1997. Some left their wives and children abroad, and were dubbed “astronauts.” In local parlance, they were back only to “milk the cow.” These days, all Hong Kong is milking the cow: The British, Americans, Filipinos—everyone.

A scrap of land three times the area of Seattle, Hong Kong has grown rich as the tollgate to China. The policy of the British rulers is laissez-faire—unregulated business, no welfare checks, and a top tax rate of 15 percent.

Life is intensely competitive. Hong Kong’s 5.8 million people now have a gross domestic product per capita of about $16,500, fast rising toward the $23,500 of the United States, and far above the $325 per person in China.

Hong Kong’s people also have the protection of British common law. Their freedom of speech and press is matched in Asia only by the Philippines and Japan. They are, in fact, quite free—except that they can’t vote to change their government. And their liberty has not been won by any struggle of their own, but has been a gift of Britain.

That gift ends June 30, 1997.

The terms of the give-back were sealed in 1984, in a deal between Britain and China. The Hong Kong people were not allowed at the table, being regarded by both governments as subjects.

In that deal, China promised to preserve Hong Kong’s system for 50 years. It promised to respect private property, a convertible currency, religious freedom, a free press, and all manner of things not available in China.

I met only one person in Hong Kong who believed all those promises—and he was an Australian.[2] Hong Kong Chinese assume that China will run the place as it likes. They disagree on how much to worry about it.

Often it seemed to me that Hong Kong people were politically neutered. The good things about British rule they got without struggle, and the bad things they accepted without protest. Nowhere else on the planet do 5.8 million people tolerate British imperialism. In Asia the British were ejected from Singapore, Malaysia, Burma, India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. Surely, I argued, Hong Kong could have at least had democracy if people had demanded it.

Filipinos and Indians tended to agree with me; Hong Kong Chinese told me I did not understand. Chinese are trained not to stick their necks out, challenge authority, or show negative emotion in public. Children are told to obey, honor the family, and mind their own business.

Britain does not teach its subjects the political ideas that underlie the Parliament and common law. Students are not trained to analyze and think about history. They memorize facts, so they can pass the crucial exams to squeeze into the colony’s one university. A student I know was forbidden to write about 1997 in a high school newspaper.

Hong Kong people have not traditionally organized political parties or unions. The one big strike while I was there, by Cathay Pacific flight attendants, was led by Filipinos.

Hong Kongers are proud Chinese, but often confused about nationality. I met few who were willing to embrace Communist China as their country—and none who accepted Taiwan. Yet Hong Kong is not a country. It does have a flag, but you have to hunt to find it, and I never met a Chinese who displayed it. The official anthem is still “God Save the Queen.”

The territory’s 80,000 Filipino maids have a much stronger sense of national identity than their Chinese employers. Some had been in the demonstrations that toppled Ferdinand Marcos.

The event that began the political awakening of the Hong Kong people was China’s crushing of the democracy movement of 1989. Outraged at the slaughter of fellow Chinese, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people poured onto the streets. Hong Kong had never seen anything like it.

The protests petered out, as most people gave up on the idea of democracy in China. But some shifted their efforts to democracy in Hong Kong. Two years later, when 18 of the 60 seats in the Legislative Council came up for public election for the first time, the protest leaders of 1989 formed Hong Kong’s first political party, the United Democrats.

These were the liberals, led by lawyers, teachers and the foreign-educated. They argued that Hong Kong needed to protect its freedoms after 1997 by setting up its own supreme court, bill of rights and directly elected legislature. The conservatives, mostly businessmen in the China trade, argued that Hong Kong has grown rich without democracy, isn’t ready for it, and that China won’t accept it. China will accept capitalism, and that’s enough.

The liberals won the election, but the conservatives still had most of the seats. China insisted that no more than one-third of the seats would ever be elected by a general vote.

In came Christopher Patten, the new British governor. He promised to reopen that issue with China for the 1995 elections, the last under British rule. Hong Kong people were amazed; they had never had a governor that championed their political interests. But the short time before 1997 gave Patten little bargaining power.

Patten proposed a plan that preserved the undemocratic structure that China liked, but subverted it with public votes. China flatly rejected his plan, and threatened to dump the entire legislature in 1997 if Patten went ahead with it.

There the matter has been deadlocked for a year. Patten appealed for the strong backing of the Hong Kong people, and didn’t get it. People might vote for the liberals, but polls showed that they had no stomach for a test of wills with China.

“The British should have offered us democracy years ago,” people say—“many years ago. But why stick your neck out for them now? In four years they’re gone.” To stick up for Patten is to defy China. Do that, and after 1997 you might be blacklisted.[4]

Even today, freedom to oppose China is for people with foreign passports.

The optimists, whose views dominate the television and newspapers in Hong Kong, argue that China’s roaring economic boom is making China more like Hong Kong every day. Why worry about 1997? “By then, they’ll be just like us.”

No, they won’t. The convergence theory is plausible if you look only at the part of China right across the border, and only at the economy. But elsewhere in China the economic, political and cultural gap is far too great.

China’s progress of the past 15 years has been led by Deng Xiaoping, now 89 years old. The best bet is that Deng’s supporters will win the coming struggle for power. But it’s only a bet, and the Chinese people have learned not to wager too much on such things.

Deng and his supporters seemingly do intend to honor China’s promises about capitalism in Hong Kong. China has tens of billions of dollars invested there, and it needs Hong Kong’s entrepreneurs and money. But Hong Kong is far from Beijing, and how this is carried out will depend on local officials.

For a hint of the future, look across the border. Yes, business is rip-roaring—but so is crime. In 1992 gangs from China started robbing Hong Kong shops that specialize in 24-karat gold jewelry. The hit squads shocked the gun-free territory by using pistols and grenades from the People’s Liberation Army. After the British raised the issue with China, the robberies stopped.

Thieves continue to target Mercedes and BMWs, running them in 70-knot boats to China. There the stolen cars are obvious, because they have the steering wheels on the wrong side. These cars are often owned by government officials.

A 1990 survey by a Hong Kong consulting firm ranked Hong Kong as one of the cleanest governments in Asia, along with Japan and Singapore. China was far and away the most corrupt.

Hong Kong’s most immediate fear of 1997 is a horde of politically connected carpetbaggers. Customs and immigration, the police, stock market, utility franchises and the auction of government land all provide rich opportunities for graft.

I left Hong Kong admiring Chris Patten, and disagreeing with cynics who said he was just there to make Britain look good. But his democracy plan is not bold enough, and anyway, China won’t accept it. The liberals will lose their battle for democracy and individual rights in Hong Kong. Most of them will probably emigrate.

Foreign business will stay. The community of foreign-passport holders, who can leave at any time, should be big enough to have bargaining power with China. Locals will be under more pressure to conform.

The businessmen will have a revealing test of their creed, which is that economics moves the world, and politics does not matter: “He who has the gold makes the rules.” They could find out after 1997 that it is very often the other way around: He who makes the rules gets the gold.

That would be no surprise to my taxi driver, whose life probably will not change that much.

In Hong Kong, readers would have reacted to this column. In Seattle, there was nary a peep.

         When they met recently in the Bay Area, Joe Biden and Xi Jinping had nothing to say about Hong Kong. Four years ago, China’s suppression of Hong Kong would have been at the top of the agenda when they met. But the Hong Kong story is out of the news. Already people are forgetting it.

Hong Kong’s political struggle is a David-and-two-Goliaths story in which Goliaths won. A new book Among the Braves, tells the story from the protesters’ point of view. The book’s authors, Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin, are a couple who lived in Hong Kong. She’s a Washington Post correspondent who was stationed there. He’s a writer for TheAtlantic. Their book gives a 30-year background to the protests, then follows four activists through the struggles of 2019 and 2020. The “braves” of the title are the radicals who fought with police — and lost.

The story speaks to me because I once lived in Hong Kong. From 1989 to 1993, my wife Anne and I worked there. She was a private banker. I was a journalist at Asiaweek, an English-language newsmagazine — long dead now — then owned by Time-Warner.

Some 50,000 American expatriates lived there. Hong Kong was a British colony, but in 1984 Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping (both now dead) had struck a deal, without asking the people of Hong Kong, to return it to China in 1997. Under their agreement, China promised to keep Hong Kong’s British laws for 50 years under Deng’s formula of “one country, two systems.”

The Hong Kong people I knew had little faith in that promise. The establishment pronounced it good. My employer, Asiaweek, thought so, too. A few years after I left, Asiaweek put Deng on its cover and proclaimed him Man of the Century. China was changing, my editors believed, and in another 50 years it would be a capitalist country much like Taiwan. That was the Asiaweek company line. The end of “one country, two systems” would be one system — a system more like Hong Kong’s than China’s.

As Mahtani and McLaughlin outline in their book, China’s leaders had a different idea. Their version was that the end of the 50 years there would be one system — China’s. By 2047, the old generations would have died off, the Western pollution would been cleansed, and the new generation would be loyal to the People’s Republic of China. I remember thinking, “This isn’t going to work.”