Chinese food, humble pie

More than three years after the handover, Hong Kong has actually become more liberal, vibrant and cosmopolitan. The Chinese are giving the word colonialism a whole new definition

Postcard from the edge — of irrelevance

Is this China? Can this be Chinese territory? Is this one more example of the intriguing, inscrutable Chinese? You could have asked yourselves all these questions and more at Hong Kong’s Victoria Park last Monday, the 12th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. More than 40,000 people, all Chinese, collected as night fell, with candles, flowers, banners and prayer flags, to remember the victims of the massacre and with a not exactly silent curse for its perpetrators. There were some policemen present, but only to keep good order as the crowds gathered and dispersed. Twelve years ago, too, I was in Hong Kong in the same week of the year, en route to Beijing a day after the massacre. There were similar, solemnly mourning crowds. But if you spoke to anyone, he had only one question: it’s fine now. But who can even think of protesting like this once the territory is handed over to the Chinese?

You have to give it to the pragmatic Chinese. They know what is good for them, their national interest, and then go ahead and do it. Which other nation could have employed the ‘one country, two systems’ approach so clinically for its own benefit? More than three years after the handover, Hong Kong not only remains the way it was but has actually become more liberal, vibrant, cosmopolitan, more buzzing, more happening. The Chinese are not interfering with anything, giving the word colonialism a whole new definition.

How come the Chinese establishment and elites do not have insecurities similar to ours? We are still working at Indianising Goa so the state sheds its Portugese character, we want to rename the Pondicherry streets with old French names in an Indianised way, perhaps as Rue d’Some Political Crook or d’other. We haven’t created a single export processing township because we can never get our legal, moral and political dilemmas sorted out. Meanwhile, the Chinese are on a roll, Hong Kong in tow. One hour from Hong Kong, just the small export processing zone of Shenzhen (in mainland China) exports more than all of India does in a whole year.

 

No aunts, no uncles, no nephews, no nieces

One more question. Which is the one international airport (besides Kathmandu) where you and I can land with an Indian passport without needing a visa? It is Hong Kong. Hong Kong is a miracle built on free trade, free access, free movement and millions of travellers. The Chinese haven’t changed any of that. But it is also one of the great Chinese ironies that the only part of the world where an Indian can reach more freely than even the Chinese is Hong Kong, which is Chinese territory. The only people whose travel to Hong Kong is strictly controlled is the native, mainland Chinese, and it is getting some people in Hong Kong very upset.

At the annual Congress of the World Association of Newspapers last week, David Tang, a top Hong Kong businessman, spoke in the most perfect British accent and made a forceful plea for free immigration. Hong Kong’s success, he said, was built on competition and survival of the fittest. In the absence of competition now, the Hong Kong residents were becoming lazy. They needed to be challenged by immigrants. Great trading cities of the world declined after they closed their gates to immigrants or became unwelcome for them for other reasons, he said, underlining the demise of ancient Venice and Constantinople and the more contemporary Shanghai and Beirut. Hong Kong needs more Chinese, he said. Let the Chinese get out of a regimented world where (because of the one-child norm) there are now no brothers or sisters, uncles or aunties, nephews or nieces, and come to Hong Kong where they can grow in any conceivable way, without restrictions. Tang’s point was a simple one. Rather than call itself Asia’s World City, Hong Kong should be the world’s Chinese city because, after all, all culture and civilisation began in China. Except he had one doubt. Adam and Eve, he said, couldn’t have been Chinese. If they were, they would have eaten the snake.

Biodiversity the gourmet way

I guess even an omnivore like me would have trouble handling snake. But almost everything else is fine, particularly if it comes from the woks of some of the finest Chinese cooks at the fabled sea-front restaurants at Lamma Island, a 45-minute ferry ride away. At the ceremonial dinner served by the Hong Kong administration for nearly a thousand publishers and editors from all over the world (three ferryloads) the meal began with prawns and then the rest of the marine and mammal life followed, as a matter of course: oyster, lobster, squid, jellyfish, garoupa, beef and then pork. The lone Pakistani on our table was a bit suspicious. Is it pork, he asked. The waiter thought for a while, and then called an older colleague, obviously with better skills at speaking English.

“Yes sir,” he said most helpfully. “It is pig.”

The Pakistani wasn’t amused, but not entirely witless. “And what you had just before this, gentlemen, was cow,” he said, turning to us Indians.

World city in the Andamans

With 9000 restaurants Hong Kong is the gourmet capital of the world. But that figure vastly understates the number of really terrific eating places in the city because, given its stringent hygiene and fire safety laws, far too many do not qualify to be called restaurants and get by as messes. My favourite of 15 years is the Nanak Mess in Chung King Mansions, Kowloon’s notorious desi ghetto that once used to be crawling with assorted lowlife, illegal immigrants, pickpockets, drug pushers, hookers. Nanak Mess hasn’t changed, for better or worse, but Chung King Mansions has. For starters, it is cleaner. It is also no longer a desi hangout as much as an African one. Its very suspicious “hotels” that could cost as little as five US dollars a night, bargain shops and money changing establishments are still run predominantly by Indians, but the clientele has changed. Much fewer Indians now live in Hong Kong. A lot fewer come visiting. There are hardly any Indian shoppers and the showrooms of electronic goods have disappeared. Gone out of business, you are told, because everything is now available anyway in India.

That speaks well for India’s reform. But the decline of the Indian community here doesn’t. Far too many Indian residents, even the richer ones, suffered after the handover as the British did not negotiate a good enough citizenship status for them. So they robbed their banks and bought passports in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. They even had a pipe dream once. That India would develop the Andamans into a free port, an Indian Hong Kong, and they would move in there to create an archipelago of prosperity for their motherland to rival Hong Kong. Those left behind now talk bitterly of that dream, of the short shrift it got and how they are convinced that India is so burdened with sanctimonious hypocrisy it could never rival China’s energy or enterprise, prosperity or pragmatism.

On the flight back, I run into dear friend Nikhil Gandhi, dressed impeccably and full of beans as ever. Against enormous odds he built a private port (Pipavav) in Gujarat and is now sealing the financial closure for the dream of his life, the free trade zone of Positra, the first of its kind in India. Nikhil is not 40 yet, has outfought cancer, works a long day, neither says no to anything nor takes no for an answer and is in so many ways an entrepreneur in the classical mould of the Hong Kong Chinese. Except, today he is upset. Have you seen how the Chinese are moving ahead? Why don’t you start a series in your paper on how India is being left behind? Somebody needs to tell our government that. Why don’t we send our politicians to China to see how that country is moving?

Should we send them to China?

I am not sure this is such a good idea for four reasons. First, our politicians would never understand, anyway. Second, all our politicians and bureaucrats and other elites are sending their children abroad anyway, so why should they care for what happens to India? Third, they may just get so scared at the pace with which China is leaving us behind, they may give up competing even before the competition has begun. And fourth, they only need to look at some basic figures to know how much we lag behind.

We all know the Chinese exports are much larger than ours but dismiss them as the success of sweat shops producing cheap toys. Then, we believe our IT growing exports will bridge the gap. But today China’s IT exports are two and a half times India’s and the gap is widening. China has six crore mobile phone subscribers against India’s 36 lakh. It has 125 million fixed phone lines, more than four times India’s and growing much faster, while we have a maze of committees and courts still debating our telecom policy. The country is being wired with broadband at a breakneck speed and no surprise therefore that its population of Internet users is 2.2 crore, compared to our 56 lakh. By 2007 Chinese is supposed to become the most dominant language of the Internet, and who knows we might still be dialling a public sector VSNL for access? The one headstart we had over the Chinese was our knowledge of the English language. But they are catching up. Hordes of Chinese are being given crash courses in English, even in small towns and villages, even under streetlights. Meanwhile, Dr Murli Manohar Joshi is making the learning of Sanskrit compulsory for your children in his schools.

One of my closest friends and teachers in the strategic community, the late Gerald Segal of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, London, was an incorrigible Sinosceptic. You Indians worry too much about China, he would say, because the Chinese haven’t sorted out their basic problems first. You are cleaning up those, so wait till your economy also begins to move.

Then, stricken by cancer at a very young age, he wrote a real masterpiece for the New York-based Foreign Affairs magazine, headlined, Does China Matter? He said he wrote it between bouts of chemotherapy so intense he described it as pushing at the outer frontiers of the chemical weapons convention, because he knew he could fight cancer only if he had the self-esteem that he was doing something useful and because he owed it to his friends, particularly Indian ones. His rubbishing of China was well argued, solidly substantiated and will remain a classic for a long time. But we have proved to be such poor rivals so far that you and I had better be asking ourselves a more relevant question: Does India Matter any more?