On Hong Kong

Is bread and brand enough for the mandarin?

Feudalism was spacious. Capitalism is priapic. Communism was dogmatic. Democracy is, alas, a bit chaotic.

The world’s postage stamp for capitalism, Hong Kong, keeps rising: my highrise is bigger than yours. The pride of real estate is no longer a mansion sprawling around a mountain peak, gated in faux colonial gold, but an officious perpendicular structure that does what so many cousins across the world merely claim but never achieve. It scrapes the skies.

The dukes of this new royalty sit among the clouds. Finance is not fond of metaphors. Its nose is hard. Its heart is immune to bleeding. Its eyes are beady. But it does encourage ego. It might count money with a microscope but purchases the sky with abandon.

Hong Kong was the second city of the British Raj. Calcutta was the first and, as capital of the empire, fulcrum of its fortunes. The worst mistake that the British made was to shift the epicentre of their authority from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911. They actually reached Delhi only a decade-plus later; within two more decades an empire built over two centuries was gone. By 1947, the British seemed almost relieved to depart, because they knew that India was a responsibility as much as an occupation.

If Calcutta was a need, Hong Kong was a passion that seemed beyond the logic of decline. I can only speculate on the reasons. Perhaps Calcutta was a mere capital, while Hong Kong was a club. The British had to co-exist in Calcutta, a tension which ratcheted up by the decade as Indian aspiration became the unintended consequence of British education. But they could be aloof in Hong Kong, and manage its cosmopolitan needs through mechanisms so dear to the British sense of order, like elections to the club committee.

India required a succession of earls and viscounts who kept the front door open for gentry and left an entrance for tradesmen. India’s ancien regime understood the uses of snobbery. But the mainland Chinese mandarin had no desire for social or any other form of intercourse with kilts and top hats who sold in currency and bought in shares. Opium eater adopted a minimalist approach to opium seller, even while the slow poison induced both self-loathing and hatred for the foreign devil. China had once rejoiced in the glories of a good emperor, and suffered the degradations of a bad, but hallucination was new form of rule.

Mao Zedong resurrected China’s geography up to Tibet to the west, but was strangely circumspect about a tiny island to the east. Mao’s ideology did not need Hong Kong but, in a twist of history that might have left a corkscrew embarrassed, Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, did.

Deng saved China from turning into a family business and reinvented it instead as a Communist corporation. He shrewdly blindsided dogma by turning a mirror on prosperity. Hong Kong became a spur, not a slur. Deng opened the doors when China’s per capita income was $300 and Hong Kong’s $10,000, and the world changed.

Deng upturned Mao’s recipe of cadre and struggle into meritocracy and stability. He set the theme for the new mandarin bureaucracy: popular welfare before people’s will. He fashioned four spaces of graded reward. The dominant space belonged to the mandarin, a ruling elite with defined rules of promotion and stately lifestyle. Then came the heady set of state-protected entrepreneurs granted private sector joys of ownership, flashy toys and permissible levels of corruption.

A bedazzled middle class, which had watched its parents punished and humiliated in the cultural revolution, bought into this new social geometry with amazement at its good fortune. The last reservation was a gradually expanding space on the margin for the poor. This formula’s success reinforced the deep mandarin contempt for democracy, which not only threw up an odd assortment of heroes and crooks, but also had the temerity to threaten the divine mandarin right to rule.

Hong Kong, instead of offering a traditional kowtow to Beijing after the British departure, turned into a plucky guardian of the fifth space, democracy. Beijing, which had assimilated capitalism without much fuss, is troubled, angered and fascinated by Hong Kong’s continuing commitment to oddities like free speech. Patience is a mandarin virtue. Beijing believes it can whittle away democracy in the same way it sabotaged Maoism, by retaining the shell but gutting the content. Pesky Hong Kong, however, will not surrender. You can hear democracy in the spring of its step, or the chatter of its radio waves. Beijing depends on time. But time does not come dressed in guarantees. It is a foxy delivery boy. You never know what it might bring.

It seems strange to quote the Bible in China, but we will find out whether the mandarin can live by bread and brand alone.

The columnist is editor of The Sunday Guardian, published from Delhi, India on Sunday, published from London and Editorial Director, India Today and Headlines Today.