China's 60th birthday: The view from Hong Kong

In Britain's former colony, now China's property, the mood is mixed.

Michael J. JordanOctober 1, 2009 05:35Updated May 30, 2010 12:09

Editor's note: Oct. 1 is the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China. To mark the occasion we have two dispatches from two very different corners of China — Tibet and Hong Kong. And from Beijing, Kathleen E. McLaughlin looks at the event's unique security arrangements.

HONG KONG, China — One month ago, Chinese journalists flocked to cover renewed violence in Xinjiang province, as ethnic Chinese blamed the Uighur minority for a rash of mysterious hypodermic-needle attacks.

China’s media is among the most restricted in the world, so it wasn’t entirely surprising when reports emerged that police had beaten and detained three of the bolder television journalists, accusing them of inciting inter-ethnic violence.

Except, this trio hailed from Hong Kong, the one beacon of democracy in all of China. So news of their treatment struck a nerve in a territory that London returned to China 12 years ago, after 150 years of British rule. Hundreds of Hong Kong journalists took to the streets to demand not only an apology from the Chinese authorities, but even an investigation of the event.

“Press freedom and rule of law are core values of Hong Kong society,” said Yin-ting Mak, chairwoman of the Hong Kong Journalists Association. “That’s why people were so angry, because this was the most vivid, most extreme example of violating these values.”

The incident exposed ongoing tensions within the “One Country, Two Systems” policy that underpinned the British handover and lies at the heart of China-Hong Kong relations today.

This helps explain why this week, as Beijing celebrates 60 years of the “People’s Republic of China” and Communist Party accomplishments, the reaction is far more mixed in politically polarized Hong Kong. After all, Hong Kong has shared only one-fifth of that history, and many locals descend from the Chinese refugees who fled since the 1949 Communist takeover. Pro-Beijing factions revel in the motherland’s remarkable economic growth and prominence on the world stage — both embodied by the gleaming new military hardware the celebration will showcase.

“We all know we live in the People’s Republic of China, and the central government is run by the Communist Party,” said Horace Cheung, vice-chairman of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong. “We just want to celebrate the New China and the great success it’s achieved.”

The “pro-democracy camp,” though, is wary of any effort to erode an arrangement that uniquely sees a tiny island of citizens enjoy civic freedoms denied the rest of their compatriots. (Hong Kong even fields its own Olympic team.)

Underscoring the point, little news of the journalist protests has trickled onto the mainland.

“Hong Kong people aren’t really politically active in terms of trying to bring about political change, but it’s a very different matter if Beijing tries to roll back their civic freedoms,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a China analyst with Human Rights Watch who’s lived in Hong Kong 10 years. “They don’t want Hong Kong to become just another Chinese city, but to keep their specificities.”