City of bad omens.

• Author: Elegant, Robert
• Position: Deterioration of conditions in Hong Kong following its handover to China

As every schoolboy would once have known, traditionally the Chinese have believed that a dynasty reigns because it has been vouchsafed divine approval - the Mandate of Heaven. According to this belief, extensive natural or man-made catastrophes demonstrate that the Mandate has been revoked, and that the reigning dynasty will soon fall. Natural catastrophes began in Hong Kong the instant the regime appointed by Beijing to succeed British rule took office in July 1997.

It rained continually for months. Landslides swept away buildings and imperiled lives. The people slipped into dejection under the seemingly endless rain pelting down day after day. The business slump had already begun and was soon to dip - and then plunge - further. But initially it was the weather, not the economy, that depressed the people of the new Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People's Republic of China.

That was not a good start. Neither was it the end.

A few weeks later, Hong Kong was afflicted by a virulent influenza carried by a virus that could leap from its normal habitat in chickens or ducks to human beings. Naturally fearful, the government ordered millions of fowl destroyed. The mass slaughter, which all but impoverished poultry breeders and traders, was not carried out adeptly. Stray dogs and cats gnawed and clawed at black refuse sacks containing dead chickens, as well as some that were not quite dead. Highly efficient under British control, the Hong Kong Civil Service made a mess of that essential execution under Tung Chee-hwa's aegis.

Still another natural disaster struck early in 1998. Hong Kong's inshore fishing had already been curtailed by noisome pollution and by competition from Japanese, Taiwanese, and Korean boats. Nonetheless, Hong Kong's trawlers and motorized junks were still finding good catches not too far away. Then came the "red tide", a flood of scarlet algae that poisoned innumerable fish and imperiled the industry. Within two months fifty to sixty people were struck by the virulent enterovirus called Taiwan flu.

A man-made catastrophe, however, was to all but eclipse nature's malign deeds. A new airport some twenty miles away was built at great speed to replace the dangerous and inadequate old airport at the center of the city. Costing more than $20 billion, it is, after Japan's Kansai Airport, the most expensive in the world. Originally scheduled to begin operations in mid-July, it was prematurely commissioned so that President Jiang Zemin could be the first traveler to set down - and thus mark the first anniversary of Hong Kong's acquisition by China. Opened to normal traffic on July 6, it was so spectacularly incompetent that air cargo to and from Hong Kong had to be suspended for more than a week, at a cost of around half a billion U.S. dollars. Even more gravely, given the nearly simultaneous opening of competing new airports nearby in Macao and Guangzhou, the dismal spectacle severely undermined Hong Kong's reputation for brisk efficiency.

What, then, Hong Kong's people asked, of the Mandate of Heaven? What indeed. To see ahead, let us start by looking back.

In the fifth decade of the nineteenth century, Britain took the island called Hong Kong from China at gunpoint. In the last decade of the twentieth century, China took back from Britain, by force majeure if not directly at gunpoint, not only Hong Kong Island but the small Kowloon Peninsula, which had been seized later, and the broad New Territories, which had been leased for ninety-nine years in 1898. In none of these exchanges was the indigenous population asked its view. Nor were its interests seriously considered. In each case, too, the transfer of sovereignty ran counter to the wishes of the majority of the inhabitants.

The few thousand part-time fishermen part-time pirates using the island in 1840 preferred the nominal rule of the Manchu Dynasty in far distant Beijing to the meddling British. In 1898 the tens of thousands in the farming villages of the New Territories were not eager to exchange ineffectual Chinese rule for British intrusiveness. In 1997 the well over six million Chinese living in the Crown Colony of Hong Kong were happy with the highly effective and low taxing British administration that had made Hong Kong prosperous even by the standards of economically buoyant Asia. They also cherished civil order based upon general consent rather than coercion, as well as a degree of intellectual freedom and expression rare in authoritarian Asia. Opinion polls, and the belated introduction of a measure of democracy by the Colony's last British governor, affirmed as much. In 1995 the people of Hong Kong elected legislators sworn to resist communist tyranny. Three years later they humiliated Beijing's candidates in the first legislative election under China's sovereignty, indeed the first free election on mainland Chinese soil since the communists established the People's Republic in 1949.

Most communist leaders would have preferred a Hong Kong that continued to serve their economic interests by providing financial services and large sums of foreign money. But, above all, they wanted a Hong Kong that would not imperil their hold on power through its constant example of a more relaxed, more free, and much happier political entity next door to the mainland they ruled so harshly. Still another imperative impelled Beijing to demand the return of all Hong Kong when the lease on the New Territories expired on June 30, 1997. The sting of the humiliation and depredation inflicted on China by foreign powers from the early nineteenth century onward could only be salved by reclaiming every inch of territory that had once been Chinese. Aside from Hong Kong, minuscule Portuguese Macau was the only other foreign enclave remaining. Since it was effectively under Chinese rule already, formal reversion was less pressing. Taiwan presented a different kind of challenge - already under Chinese rule but not Beijing's suzerainty.

Hong Kong, the very first and the most conspicuous of the territories Britain had stolen from China, had to be reclaimed to expunge the shame of the past. And it had to be reclaimed no later than July 1, 1997, lest it appear that Beijing was truckling to London.

A very senior and very influential British diplomat assured me years ago that Hong Kong would not suffer as a result of the disorder he correctly foresaw in China, but would remain prosperous and happy after it came under Chinese rule. He was wrong. The mood in Hong Kong is now sour and pessimistic.

Such diplomats - and many in the business community - still insist that such dejection is largely the fault of Chris Patten, the last British governor, who was not one of them but a politician. Patten, they say, aroused false expectations by introducing a measure of democracy. But, they contend, the autocratic rule of previous London-appointed governors had nurtured a populace that was contented, docile, and "not interested in politics." If Patten had not interfered, the argument continues, Hong Kong would today still be a happy land. The discontent and political demonstrations that regularly test the authority of the Beijing-appointed government of the SAR would never have arisen.

Besides, this school...