The world-audience, looking on through investment-banker eyes, is oblivious to the human equation, mesmerized by the classic econo-psychological drama of buffeted exchange rates and plummeting property values. Hongkong's citizens, once vastly content to obscurity behind their bustling marketplace, now gesture in voiceless agony, unremarked in financially oriented global media coverage.
The colony's money jitters are clearly inherent in the inability of the Peking regime to guarantee the city's economic structure beyond the repeated pledges of the current Communist leadership. Observers everywhere are intensely cognizant of the fact that British leases on much of the Hongkong area terminate in just 15 years. But few acknowledge that the consequences of that vulnerability are evidenced not only at the money exchanges, but in a gathering turmoil in Hongkong hearts.
"Politically apathetic" is their press characterization. But the people of Hongkong have merely been quiet. Long the world's prime China watchers, many themselves refugees from the Red-engulfed mainland, they have kept their silence on the very edges of Communist domain to avoid arousing further Red passions. To sate Chinese Communist appetites, they have allowed Peking to nibble from the bountiful foreign exchange and diplomatic tidbits that have overflowed Hongkong's capitalist table. They have watched, and carried themselves carefully, and kept their silence...but not in apathy. Still, only the rustle of Hongkong's money has been heard abroad these many years. And the world has listened.
The "strange" silences of Hongkong's citizens, like the new electronic light switches, transform with a touch: But it must be the touch of a friend, or a gifted reporter, and seldom in public circumstances. Hongkong has not watched the mainland so avidly just to miss the significance of Chinese Communist affinity for hit lists of people who may obstruct the oncoming Marxist paradise. This, again, is not "apathy."
Hongkong, in persona, is quick to dispel the world stereotype. Money is, quite clearly, not the root of the evil that is panicking the colony. The precise source of the affliction is the inability of the citizens of Hongkong to perceive an acceptable lifestyle for themselves and their children as creature-objects of Communist neighborhood cadres—without choices, denied the freedom to speak their minds, and distant from concepts of human dignity. In short, Hongkong's citizens are flesh and blood; they cannot accede to the loss of their freedom.
"Ah, freedom," the world inquires, "in a colony?"
Nevertheless, Hongkong's system does not give others absolute control over what a citizen and his children may think, do, and be...where they may live, how they may live, even unto whom and when to marry. Hongkong's inhabitants can publicly complain over their lot, criticize the officials, and air their grievances in the press. They have access not only to public opinion, for social justice, but to arbiters of justice ruled by dedication to law.
On the nearby Communist mainland, there is access only to a perpetual and pervasive hassling, a Communist-prescribed way of life and behavior that high Communist officials disdain for themselves, even in the smallest things (Teng Hsiao-ping's passion for bridge, for example, would be a dangerous fascination for the average mainlander, who would, more than likely, find his harmless diversion ending in a Red Chinese "labor-reform" camp).
Hongkong's people treasure the freedom to choose their own lifestyles and plot their own futures. And they are passionately aware that they have been a great deal more free in that anachronism of the 1980s, an imperial colony, than could ever be possible under the sway of the Chinese Communist Party. Ask them, indeed, what they admire in the Communist lifestyle. Then they are silent.
In viewing Hongkong, we have before us the tragic lessons implicit in the never ceasing exodus under Communist rule of the people of Vietnam: They withstood the sufferings and horrors of decades of warfare, but have been fleeing a Communist "peace."
For those of us who wave the free world's banners of human rights, who presume to dedicate our countries to ever-greater prospects for our individual citizens Hongkong looms as a moral test of the highest order. The collective force of world opinion, strongly expressed, should now be the support of every Hongkong man, woman, and child in his joined struggle for a lifestyle of his own choosing. Any of us who bow without protest to the prospective passage of 5.5 million Hongkong dissidents into the vast Communist Chinese gulag, will share in conscience the subjection of a talented Chinese society that has outperformed the Communist mainland in every aspect not only of commerce, but of the arts, education, human development…human warmth.
If the free nations of the world do not add their voices to the voiceless cries of Hongkong, it is not just a few thousand financiers and property moguls who will pay, nor even just the 5.5 million residents of Hongkong—all human beings everywhere will share in a measureless loss.