Hong Kong & Taiwan: how China sees things.

More than twenty years ago, on my first trip to the China mainland, I visited a grade-school English class where children were learning the Roman alphabet. This was not a particularly edifying spectacle, so my attention wandered to a world map on the wall. In bold Chinese characters the map's title proclaimed: "The Imperialists' Aggression All over the World." Sure enough, numerous instances of conquest and colonialism were marked in green on the map.

My guess is that the school staff did not realize their visitor could read Chinese, so they were having a secret joke at my expense. The map was surely hung there to communicate loathing for the imperialists, and to remind its viewers of the numerous affronts to national pride inflicted on China by the West and Japan. Beginning with the two Opium Wars in the middle of the nineteenth century, the map highlighted the Westerners' repeated uses of force that resulted in territorial and diplomatic losses for China. Not only were Hong Kong and Taiwan seized - albeit by treaties which the Chinese today regard as having no basis in international law - but other territorial enclaves known as "Treaty Ports" were appropriated as well. In addition, the Chinese now regard Great Britain's attempt to straighten out the finances of the last dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911), as having seriously undermined China's financial system in order to collect outrageous indemnities. According to this version of events, China was even forced to watch helplessly as the powers stipulated the level allowed for Chinese tariffs and then grabbed much of the proceeds. Today the Chinese term this infamous history the "Century of Humiliation."

The map also told me how strongly the Chinese felt about these issues, and more important, that such feelings had become part of everyday discourse even among staff members in a provincial elementary school. Recently this ardent nationalism has found new voice in a popular Chinese book titled The China That Can Say No. To whom is China at long last able to say "no"? To the imperialists, of course.

Chinese national pride is neither well understood nor given its due outside of China. Instead, our journals and newspapers stress the dim prospects for human rights and democracy but fail to explain the Chinese point of view or the possible long-range advantages of a return of Hong Kong and Taiwan to Chinese control. Let me describe these matters as many Chinese see them - not necessarily because I subscribe to these views, but because our thinking about these issues should rest on as broad an understanding as possible.

When Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978 following the death of Mao Zedong, he soon moved to recover China's unredeemed territories of Hong Kong and Taiwan. "One Country Two Systems" was the slogan for Deng's policy. This was a bold approach to a knotty problem: How could a socialist, agrarian China just emerging from the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and just beginning the one-child per family experiment absorb the cosmopolitan industrial and financial centers of Hong Kong and Taiwan without upsetting the sophisticated mechanisms of money-making? The policy was designed to satisfy Chinese nationalist aspirations for full sovereignty while reassuring both the local subjects and the world trading community that the local systems would be left in large part intact.

Hong Kong, a city of about 6 million people, was to submit only to Beijing's control of its military and foreign relations, but would otherwise direct its own destiny. By the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, China promised Hong Kong that it would become a "Special Administrative Region" (SAR) with its own "system" - "a high degree of autonomy" in government, finance, banking, business, and life-style, all to last for fifty years. It is as if Mexico were to take back the Gadsden Purchase portions of Arizona and New Mexico but allow fifty more years of local autonomy and U.S. legal and financial arrangements there before completing the final re-absorption.

The Deng Xiaoping government has rarely been praised for the understanding of Western and local concerns that re-suited in this imaginative plan. After all, had China insisted, she probably could have taken back Hong Kong and integrated it directly into China as part of nearby Guangdong Province. (A similar take-over could probably not have been achieved against the better armed and heavily defended Taiwan.)

Over the course of the nineteenth century, Britain had acquired the 400-square-mile territory of Hong Kong in three grants. The final grant in 1898 was the ninety-nine-year lease of the large area that serves as the source of much of Hong Kong's water. It is that lease that will end this year. In 1984 some British negotiators offered to yield sovereignty while continuing to administer Hong Kong beyond 1997. This was summarily rejected by China. Deng Xiaoping was adamant that all of Hong Kong, including the right to administer it, had to be returned.

If the Hong Kong transfer works well, the Chinese hope to persuade Taiwan to rejoin the motherland as well. Although the Hong Kong retrocession presents problems for China, the situation is relatively simple compared with that of Taiwan. China lost Taiwan a century ago at the end of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 by a treaty that China today dismisses as illegal because imposed by force. Following World War II, Taiwan was taken from Japan and handed back to the Chinese government of the time the government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. At the same time, Chiang's Republic of China was awarded China's United Nations seat and was able to keep the mainland Chinese government out of the United Nations as well as other international organizations for many years - a history that is bitterly resented on the mainland. But China's greatest difficulty in absorbing Taiwan will be that approximately 80 percent of Taiwan's population of more than 20 million consists of the descendants of immigrants who came to Taiwan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These people have been cut off from China for generations and no longer feel themselves to be Chinese. Today many of these people are clamoring for Taiwan independence and United Nations membership in order to forestall a Chinese take-over. In acknowledgment, China has made an offer to Taiwan that is even more accommodating than Hong Kong's: Under the "One Country Two Systems" policy for Taiwan, the island is to be allowed all the same conditions as Hong Kong plus the possibility of retaining its own military, with permission to buy weapons abroad. China will retain only the responsibility for foreign affairs. So far the Taiwan government has steadfastly resisted all such propositions.

How did Hong Kong and Taiwan become such successful entrepreneurial societies over the past half-century, and such desirable assets for China to recover? Both Hong Kong and Taiwan have long been organized to support business growth. Initially companies enjoyed low wages, low taxes, and stability through the rule of law. For many years there was little democracy and only weak trade unionism, which hardly roiled the seas on which business serenely sailed. The presence of British law in Hong Kong discouraged the Chinese preference for relationships (guanxi) and held corruption to a minimum; this was not true, however, of Taiwan. Finally, in the past decade investors from both places have swarmed into China, speaking the dialects of the nearby provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, and bringing investment capital, organizational skills, and technological know-how.

Under these circumstances business has recently prospered, but there has been little concern for human rights and democracy - Britain, for instance, introduced a few democratic reforms only after the Joint Declaration, and Taiwan has enjoyed similar reforms only during the last decade. The Chinese position is that, because historically Hong Kong and Taiwan have both profited without much concern for democracy or rights, surely these are not needed now.

History tells us that this is not the first time that China has set up a kind of special subregion with a "high degree of autonomy." The Qing government allowed a few fairly independent local aboriginal headman systems on its southwest border, and in the nineteenth century it permitted a substantial foreign presence in the treaty ports to be self-governing. During the second half of this century, there have been other specially administered districts, for instance for the Zhuang aborigines in Guangxi province. These systems had their ups and downs. When the local enclave could hold its own or had something special to offer China, such arrangements were successful. When the locals were weak, the center shamelessly took advantage of them. Hong Kong's business acumen and experience ought to give it the edge in the coming partnership. Whether or not these conditions will persuade Taiwan is an open question.

Business confidence is the key to Hong Kong's future. The new partnership will work well if China remembers the elements that built Hong Kong's prosperity. If China alters the conditions of economic growth and business confidence declines, the jewel that is Hong Kong will disappear. So far China has stressed business prosperity, while downplaying other considerations such as democratic elections and civil rights, including freedom of the press. By the Joint Declaration, China reserved the right to appoint Hong Kong's chief executive, and this past year it has exercised that right by putting a business-oriented party in the saddle: appointing a businessman as governor, and some say exceeding its authority by assembling a pro-Chinese legislature of "patriots" ready to take over on July 1. The Chinese have even canceled recently enacted laws protecting civil liberties in Hong Kong. Today, a large vocal group is opposing these moves and instead championing the retention of democracy and particularly press freedom, arguing that these are essential to a well-informed electorate as well as to business vision and creativity. But others disparage these same rights as irksome restraints on business independence. For Westerners schooled in the idea that two world wars of this century were fought to make the world safe for democracy, China's actions have been difficult to swallow. Still, faith in business is a point where both China and Hong Kong may be able to make common cause.

As the age of imperialism fades, the map on the classroom wall will be rolled up. What will take its place? Perhaps China's business cooperation with Hong Kong will succeed in paving the way for the return of Taiwan. Perhaps China will become more westernized through its Hong Kong connection. Perhaps the West will learn to allow China scope for national pride. Whatever happens, a new map is being drawn. One point is certain: In this round, China intends to be one of the mapmakers.

Beatrice Bartlett is professor of history at Yale University, and has written widely on Chinese history. Her most recent book is Monarchs and Ministers: The Grand Council in Mid-Ching China, 1723-1820 (University of California Press, 1994).