On the eve of the Hong Kong handover in 1997, POWER Editor Anthony Spaeth predicted in Time magazine that Hong Kong had nothing to fear in change. On the 12th anniversary of the handover, we reprint that article – and predictions from other journalists who were suspicious, paranoid or just plain wrong

THE QUEEN WAS amused, or so we can surmise. In 1841, Victoria wrote a friend to say that her beloved consort Albert was “so much amused at my having got the island of Hong Kong,” a rocky dollop on the other side of the world so barren and dry that even the Chinese court considered it barely habitable.

Today, Hong Kong is one of the most densely inhabited places on earth, a megalopolis that never fails to provoke a strong reaction: awe at its stalagmite architecture, trepidation for its future, agoraphobia in the face of its crowds, deafness caused by the song of its official bird, the jackhammer. Amusement, however, is an unusual response. Hong Kong isn’t languid enough for that. The 6.4-million-strong population that Victoria, or any 19th century seer, couldn’t have imagined is too concentrated, too propelled and, by visual evidence, collectively late for an important appointment. Of the world’s great metropolises, Hong Kong is the one most infused with a sense of the moment. What’s the Hang Seng Index doing? Where’s the deutsche mark trading? Who’s winning at the Happy Valley racetrack?

One particular moment, of course, is important above all. That is midnight on June 30, the appointment with destiny toward which Hong Kong is hurtling with its characteristic energy. China’s takeover may be a boon for Hong Kong’s future or could throw a bomb at it. Opinion is divided on the editorial pages and on the streets. Roughly one-third of Hong Kong’s permanent residents have expressed willingness and taken steps to leave – either by obtaining a foreign passport or by keeping in close contact with a relative who lives abroad – just in case an escape is necessary. Contradictorily, opinion polls show high levels of confidence in the territory’s post-handover prospects, and property prices have been skyrocketing. Unbridled optimism? Short-term speculation on an inflow of mainland money? Both? Neither?

Or is there something about Hong Kong, that unique amalgam of colonial protectedness, laissez faire worldliness and Chinese practicality  – with a heavy dash of refugee indefatigability  – that makes every moment an opportunity, especially the frightening ones? There have been many of the latter, from invasion by the Japanese in 1941 to the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. In a few weeks, 6.4 million of the most capitalist-minded people on earth will surrender to the world’s last major communist state. Governor Chris Patten will lower the Union Jack shortly before midnight and, along with the visiting Prince Charles, steam away on the royal yacht Britannia, which is perhaps fittingly making its last official voyage before being decommissioned. People’s Liberation Army soldiers will be transported onto soil that has never felt the imprint of their boots before. A fireworks display is expected, always magnificent above the mirrored Hong Kong harbor, with its nocturnal washes of neon from the surrounding skyscrapers.

After all of this the people of Hong Kong will awake to their new moment. (One imagines not alarm clocks, but the simultaneous activation of millions of pagers and mobile phones.) And then they will do what they have done during decades of seemingly permanent uncertainty. They will rise, perhaps finish off a steaming bowl of congee, and seize the day.

You are late for work because the apartment building elevator is stalled on an upper floor  – a family is, as always, moving in or out. (A favorite Sunday pastime for Hong Kong couples is window-shopping at the local real estate firm.) When you reach the office, the tenants’ directory has been removed from the lobby wall to add or subtract a company nameplate. Motion is the dominant element in Hong Kong; it is palpable on the frenetic sidewalks and on every motor journey. (Twisting roads and banked overpasses ensure that seatmates get to know each other well, and every saunter up a bus aisle has the potential for pratfall.) Only part of this pervasive sense of animation can be explained by the mundane realities of people going to work or dropping by the brokerage house. The larger explanation is mass impatience, Hong Kong’s essential ethos. Office workers are so eager to get into an elevator that departing passengers are barely allowed a passage out. Anxiety continues throughout the ride: at every stop, some shampooed office lady or sweating messenger has a finger applied to the Close Door button, lest a second be wasted. On the average day, 2.4 million Hong Kong residents use the subway system, 200,000 vehicles speed through the cross-harbor tunnels, and an astonishing 6.8 million passengers take trips on a bus, train, minibus, tram, ferry or taxi. That’s more than the total population. (Many take more than one trip a day). Where are all those people going?

Ahead, if the colony’s remarkable history is any guide, particularly the post-World War II years. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Britain used Hong Kong as a trading post with China, withering the fortunes of Portugal’s neighboring Macau. By 1939, however, Hong Kong’s population was still only 1.6 million, and the rise of Canton (now called Guangzhou) as Japan’s China port had almost destroyed the economy. As a Time correspondent in Hong Kong reported that year: “Britain plans to abandon it at the drop of a bomb.” Outmanned British troops turned Hong Kong over to superior Japanese forces in 1941 after two weeks of fighting. At the end of the war, Franklin Roosevelt twice recommended that the British leave Hong Kong to China, but they stayed on. After Mao Zedong won the Chinese civil war in 1949, he didn’t dare give marching orders to attack Hong Kong. Instead, more than one million refugees came over  – Mao was happy to have fewer rice bowls to fill  – and they were the ones who built the foundation of today’s city with chicken wire, tarpaper, bamboo poles and optimism not immediately rewarded. The legendary Suzie Wong was one such resident, formerly of Shanghai, and her Hong Kong was a microcosm of the gritty, desperate whole. Suzie’s only opportunity was to sell her body; her only possible salvation was a foreign boyfriend with a pair of air tickets to Britain.
After the Korean War broke out in 1950, the United States slapped an embargo on trade with China, spelling certain economic doom for Hong Kong and its huddled refugees. On October 10, 1953, 150,000 people showed their despair by hoisting flags in support of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, loser of the Chinese civil war, who was in exile in Taiwan. As one local newspaper analyzed the incident: “It isn’t because the past was memorable. It’s just because the present is so hateful.”

But in that seemingly hateful moment, the Hong Kong we know today was being born. Denied trading opportunities, industrialists from Shanghai and elsewhere decided that Hong Kong’s only real asset was millions of idle hands. They started manufacturing plastic buttons and fake flowers in basements and squatter shacks. The idea caught on among the Cantonese community, Hong Kong’s largest ethnic group. When one entrepreneur became prosperous enough to move out of the basement, a cousin would take over. When buttons faced competition from Taiwan or Korea, manufacturers switched to better lines: Dynel wigs, shirts, toys, designer jeans, phones. Factory buildings were operated like industrial cathouses, with manufacturers moving in and bailing out with stunning entrepreneurial promiscuity. Those who got rich enough to buy space instead of rent it entered the other half of the Hong Kong economy, the real estate business, where mega-fortunes were made. Even today, nearly a third of the valuation on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange is accounted for by property companies.

The pattern became the quintessence of Hong Kong: work incessantly, watch the competition  – and never stop moving. The ultimate move came in the 1980s, when rising labor costs threatened manufacturing in its entirety. The solution: relocate factory jobs en masse across the border to newly opened southern China. Once again, Hong Kong sidestepped, leapfrogged, outraced economic doom. That goes a long way to explain why China’s impending takeover hasn’t prompted the despair it might have. Or why a recent cover story in the South China Morning Post’s Sunday magazine didn’t ask the question “Is Hong Kong Finished?” but, instead, “Will Hong Kong Ever Be Finished?” (The topic was the never-ending construction activity.) In a territory where the absence of complacency is visible to the naked eye, and where adversity has often been wrenched into blessing, only the most skeptical, or unimaginative, can foresee the ever-building, ever-moving Hong Kong Chinese being stilled or quelled.

Another reason to believe that Hong Kong will pulse forever is that it’s impossible to fathom, in the opposite case, such a spectacular ruin. Hong Kong is visually magnificent, but aside from coral reefs, it’s hard to find another example of beauty arising from muck and accretion. Nighttime on the Peak, the 554m high mountain above the Central business district, provides the most coherent and ethereal view. Hong Kong’s more handsome towers are lit from the exterior, unsightly apartment buildings are reduced to stacked, yellow windows, the neon is strong and constant  – because of the proximity of Kai Tak Airport, blinking neon signs are forbidden lest they confuse pilots  – and the famous harbor picks up the reflection to produce the effect of an urban jewel box. But come daylight, the massed confusion of Hong Kong returns and a kind of oriental Where’s Waldo? picture emerges, fantastically unruly and, in the summertime, wavery through the fast rising heat.

When the neon fades, Hong Kong’s predominant shade is oystery white, the color of the tiny bathroom-quality tiles that clad the standard Hong Kong apartment block. In the mornings, those structures meld with a mist off the harbor and a glare from on high: from a suitable height, the city appears monolithic, monochrome, damp and permanently immersed in the dull growl of traffic and not-so-distant pile-drivers. You can stare at the apartment balconies  – is there a city with more balconies? – and wonder what a local Edward Hopper would do with them, the billions of chipped, pearly tiles and that pervasive presence of the harbor and the South China Sea beyond.

The Chinese believe in feng shui, the fateful influence of wind, water and fire. In fact, wind and water have created the look of today’s Hong Kong. Tile facings were chosen over paint, which peels too fast in the humidity, or poured concrete, which mildews overnight. And from early on, the local building code required that every room in a Hong Kong apartment, including bathrooms, had at least one window for ventilation’s sake. The cheapest complying design was duplicated over and over. Mass-produced towers, some so narrow as to be single apartments stacked tens of stories high, sprouted from virtually every square meter. Bathrooms are discernable, water pipes snake up the exterior walls  – seawater is still piped in for toilets in many buildings  – and rusted iron stocks protrude from kitchen windows to hold the bamboo laundry poles that whip around dangerously during typhoons.

Only when you descend to the street is the real Hong Kong encountered, and it is unavoidable. No other city is so insistently in your face, your ear and your nose. In the 1980s, the National Lampoon, an American humor magazine, published a parody lease agreement for Hong Kong, dated 1899 and signed by Queen Victoria and Lord Palmerston, with the following first clause: “Residents and their guests shall leave millions of baskets full of live snakes, flayed cow heads, and pulsing, gelatinous organisms of the sea lying about in streets, doorways, corridors, and other places where movement about the premises is likely to be obstructed.”

It was a joke with a whiff of truth that hasn’t faded. Per capita income exceeds Britain’s, and a two-bedroom apartment can fetch US$2 million, but it’s hard to imagine Hong Kong ever losing its rusted, rubbishy aspect, and plunging into a back lane requires the gumption one summons to look under the kitchen stove. Wicker baskets are filled with extraordinary items: frogs for the soup pot, pigs’ heads, live, blinking chickens. An open-air restaurant drenches you with an effusion of soy sauce and dumpling steam. Further on, you are cleansed by the antiseptic aura of a traditional medicine shop, its glass jars filled with dried seahorses and parts of other endangered animals. Strolling isn’t possible in Hong Kong: you struggle through the masses, the odors, a few thousand decibels of Canto-pop from a CD store. Jaywalking is technically an offense, but enforcement is left to impatient double-decker buses that scrape pedestrian coat-sleeves. A more serious infraction is sidewalk dawdling: punishment comes in growls, dirty looks and the occasional frustrated jab in the back.

Logically, this can all be blamed on lack of space, but one wonders how different it would be with additional square kilometers. Jan Morris, one of the most evocative of Hong Kong’s chroniclers, discerns that of all Britain’s colonies, Hong Kong was where the colonial masters interacted least and left the faintest impact. “The British Empire at its most tremendous,” she wrote in Hong Kong, “failed to make much impression on this down-to-earth genius, and the mass of the Chinese in Hong Kong today are not a jot less Chinese because they live beneath the Union Jack.” English is an official language, and officemates with local surnames tend to go by Cecilia, Teresa or, with startling Celtic frequency, Kevin. But Hong Kong is a Chinese city, and will likely always remain one. The British mask long ago became too tiny for the great Chinese mass behind it. And in a few weeks, pretense will be dropped altogether.

Of all the changes that have percolated through Hong Kong, the least celebrated is the equalization of the Hong Kong Chinese and the so-called foreign devils, those well-fed individuals who ran the railroads and graced the pages of the local Tatler. In ultra-colonial days, distance and condescension was the rule. Until well after World War II, Chinese didn’t belong to the Hong Kong Club no matter how wealthy. When a British supervisor slapped a local telephone operator in 1949, the colony braced for possible riots  – and a reaction from Mao Zedong’s forces across the border. (“A most damnable time for something like this to happen,” groused a resident expatriate, sounding capable of a slap or two himself. “Most damnable.”) In 1956, there were riots, probably incited by the mainland, and foreigners were singled out for attack. A Swiss diplomat and his wife were drenched with gasoline by a mob and set afire. As recently as the early 1980s, a clever Chinese nightclub owner hired a young British man to hand out towels in his men’s room. Business boomed, so unique was the pleasure of reverse racial humbling. The social divide still exists, and Pommy pomposities continue. Governor Patten’s Norfolk terriers Whiskey and Soda are featured frequently in the local press. Whiskey made the front page earlier this year when he was almost fatally poisoned by an anti-canine fanatic, race not determined and still at large, who scattered poisoned chicken wings on walking paths. (An echo of the past: during riots in 1967, the colony’s worst, Governor David Trench complained to the press that the clamor had distressed his poodle Peter, who was forced to recover in an animal shelter.)

Nonetheless, serious racial animus is so absent now it seems almost alien to Hong Kong. Perhaps it vanished when per capita GDP hit some magic level. The weary lady on the subway in jeans is no longer working in a sweatshop sewing footwear for the European market. In fact, she has just bought a pair of Italo Carli shoes – European goods are affordable for the Hong Kong Chinese now – and she is probably tired from all those business trips to the garment factories her family owns in Guangzhou. The young man handing out toilet towels was but a forerunner: when a stressed-out Chinese investment banker orders a Corona with a wedge of lime in the trendy Lan Kwai Fong bar district, it’s likely to be served to him by a cheerful British or Australian youth. Long ago, expats lost the means to grumble about uncommunicative amahs or cooks who dropped cigarette ash in the beef bourguignon. The South China Morning Post, that expat bible, published a letter recently from a British resident complaining that new immigration rules make it difficult for his visiting children to get summer jobs: now they need a work visa. Meanwhile, local newspapers and television channels are sustained by ads for apartment complexes in London, directed at rich Chinese traveling in the opposite direction, presumably First Class.

Perhaps Patten’s democratic reforms of the 1990s helped in this process. It was always an irony that residents of Hong Kong, who speak more loudly than any other people on earth  – restaurants should issue ear plugs  – had no voice in their own domain. And, it has to be said, they rarely complained. Until the 1989 Beijing massacre, political parties were banned by the British and the legislature was toothless as a carp. Even in official surveys, the local population said what they thought the government wanted to hear, heatedly disavowing gambling, for example, Hong Kong’s primary passion. Patten pulled a last-minute switcheroo, expanding the risible Legislative Council in 1991 and 1995 and throwing some actual power its way. China wailed about British hypocrisy  – who offers long-denied freedoms just minutes before bailing out?  – and it was easy, for once, to agree with Beijing’s complaint. Too little too late was inevitable judgment.

But in Hong Kong the scantest opportunity has always sufficed. Something clicked. Those Chinese who care for little beyond the fast buck  – perhaps they once claimed that on a government survey  – embraced elections, controversial candidates, confrontation, politics. The pro-democracy politicians, as they are invariably called, won a plurality of seats in the legislature even though they tend to speak in accents acquired abroad. But in the great bazaar that is Hong Kong, foreign ideas are as freely convertible as currencies, and as easy to get accustomed to as a pair of Italian shoes. “I began to wonder,” reflected Sun Yat-sen, father of the Chinese revolution, in 1923, “how it was that foreigners, that Englishmen, could do such things as they had done, for example, with the barren rock of Hong Kong, within 70 or 80 years, while China, in 4,000 years had no place like Hong Kong. Where did I get my revolutionary ideas? It was entirely in Hong Kong.”

Change is an eternal assumption in Hong Kong – doted on, almost prayed for the way other places petition for rain  – and that’s another reason why the coming twist in its destiny has failed to provoke terror. Perhaps the most telling of changes has occurred at Lo Wu, the border crossing into China. In the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, Lo Wu was a tourist destination. Visitors would take an antiquated train through the New Territories and climb a hill to peer into the unfathomable land to the north. They didn’t see much: a farmer with his ox, a field, but the cameras kept clicking. Today, the quaint locomotive has been replaced by a sleek commuter train. The Lo Wu terminus looks like something out of Osaka. Regulations have changed, and mere visitors can’t leave the station. (Lo Wu is a zone restricted to residents.) There’s only one direction possible: across the border into China. The train is packed with Hong Kong Chinese going for business, shopping or a family visit. Standing in that station, watching the backs of all those loud, excited young people pushing through to the mainland  – fully aware, of course, that they can return  – one starts to wonder about July 1. Perhaps Hong Kong’s future doesn’t begin in a few weeks’ time. Maybe it has already come.

“Almost nothing seems built to last,” Jan Morris wrote about Hong Kong. A good observation but not entirely relevant in a place that thrives on rebuilding. (Most often, and most disturbingly, in the dead of night.) A central truth about Hong Kong has been obscured by talk of a borrowed place living on borrowed time, the title of a famous book about Hong Kong by Richard Hughes published in 1968. That bromide refers most to the British borrowers. For 6.4 million Hong Kong Chinese, there is no other place to go. About 10 percent have been able to migrate since 1984  – and about 12 percent of these have raced back with new foreign passports, so compelling are Hong Kong’s opportunities. Few people express an interest in settling in China someday. (An exception is the very old, who fill the new, for-profit mainland nursing homes or arrange to have their ashes shipped northward to some ancestral village.) For all their ceaseless moving about, the Hong Kong people aren’t going anywhere – except into a largely unfathomable future. It’s difficult to know what combination of virtues and talents will be required for that journey. But if smarts, pluck, grit and sharp elbows are of use, the population of Hong Kong will be uniquely and magnificently well equipped. 

© 2009 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted from Time magazine with permission

Countdown to H-Day
Here is a selection of other printed prophecies about Hong Kong post-1997, in chronological order of their publication

“The naked truth about Hong Kong’s future can be summed up in two words: It’s over … Troops of the People’s Liberation Army, which has already formed links with the powerful local criminal gangs known as “triads,” will stroll the streets … As a result of these divisions, Hong Kong, like the US during its Civil War days, is now rife with wrenching human dramas in which friends and family members are deeply split over the best means for survival … Beijing will impose capital controls and replace Hong Kong’s independent currency pegged to the US dollar with Chinese renminbi. Explains [Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton] Friedman, who discounts Beijing’s assurances that this will never happen: “I cannot conceive of a proud sovereign country like China entertaining the prospect of having two currencies at the same time.”
Louis Kraar, “The Death of Hong Kong,” Fortune, June 26, 1995.
(Twelve years later, sister magazine Time admitted that Fortune’s prediction was both “infamous” and “incorrect.”)

“Hong Kong … will inevitably become embroiled in the political competition for control of China. Victims of that competition will be the free press, academic freedom, open and fair elections and at least part of the free market. A powerful coalition of hard-line communists, corrupt military officers and greedy regional elites will erode Hong Kong’s autonomy … The political and economic landscape will be marred by uncertainty, cronyism, lost freedoms and increased corruption.”
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, David Newman and Alvin Rabushka International Herald Tribune, July 1, 1996

“Every step toward the transfer of Hong Kong back to China is a somber reminder that after the recent liberation of so many countries from communism, a vibrant and relatively free society is soon to be swallowed up by a communist dictatorship. The rigged selection this month by China of the future chief executive and legislature of Hong Kong make clear that political freedoms will be severely curtailed if not entirely eliminated once China assumes control.”
New York Times editorial, December 28, 1996

“It is now clear that the Crown Colony will enjoy neither political nor intellectual freedom and will find its financial and commercial freedom restricted … Beijing has made no secret of its plans. Like Stalin and Hitler, it has told the world what it would do – and the world has not taken alarm. There are none so blind as those who will not see.”
Robert Elegant, International Herald Tribune, February 18, 1997

“Hong Kong’s most pressing problem is not economics or politics, but people. A wave of illegal immigrant children sneaking in to be reunited with their Hong Kong parents has created a humanitarian crisis … Exactly who gets to go is decided by China in a bureaucratic process that is riddled by corruption … A sudden surge in population could crush Hong Kong’s economy … Though China promises to control the border, countless other mainlanders hope that after the handover, they, too, might get a chance to make a fast buck in China’s richest city.”
Michael Elliott and Dorinda Elliott, Newsweek, May 19 1997

“Hong Kong will become a battleground for Chinese spying on each other. Different factions in the Chinese leadership, the different interests of northern and southern Chinese, different groups in the armed forces and different Chinese companies will vie for advantage. Taiwanese agents will stay to keep track of these battles and seek their own advantage.”
Gerald Segal, International Herald Tribune, June 25, 1997

“Yet another concern is that Chinese officials might ask criminals to maim or kill journalists who write annoying articles.”
Nicholas D Kristof, New York Times, June 25 1997

“It is about institutional corruption. The PLA, which is something of a state within the state, is desperate to get a foothold in Hong Kong. For underpaid officers, this is a dream posting with untold opportunities, and competition to be part of it has been intense. It is a foretaste of how Chinese administrators may approach the running of a city which is one of the richest fleshpots on earth.”
The Independent, Opinions, June 29, 1997

“The liberty-loving democrats of Hong Kong are doomed to fall victim to China’s power-mad communists. Even if Beijing’s intentions were good – and they’re not – its authoritarian habits and dictatorial rule will not tolerate Hong Kong’s freedoms for long.”
Johanna McGeary, Time, June 30, 1997

“The West’s cherished belief is that, wherever applied, its liberal economic system will lead inevitably to political freedom, too. But for Peking, that is all the more reason to impose on Hong Kong either strict quarantine, or ruthless medicine, to prevent the democratic virus spreading north.”
The Independent, Opinions, June 30, 1997