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Published on 05/26/1997 All articles from this issue

Forum speaker ponders fate of Hong Kong

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By Clyde Noel / Town Crier Staff Writer

The Morning Forum of Los Altos audience found out May 20 there is plenty of unfinished business to settle before Hong Kong is handed back to China on July 1.

"Basically China and Hong Kong is a marriage in trouble," said Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. "It's a drama facing incredible proportions because a colony will be turned back to the mother country."

Hong Kong has been a British colony since 1841. Located at the mouth of the Canton River, the 35.5-square-mile Hong Kong Island is supplemented by 355 square miles on the mainland nearby, land that China leased to Britain in 1898 for 99 years. The lease expires this year. However, Britain and China signed an agreement Dec. 19, 1984, allowing Hong Kong to keep its capitalist system another 50 years after the lease ends.

"Hong Kong is a miracle. It was administered beautifully by the English. Britain gave everything they needed to the 6.4 million people who fled there from the mainland for freedom of expression," Schell said. "Today, China is economically powerful and Hong Kong is living out the seconds until it is returned to China."

Schell said most of the businessmen were anti-Marxist who came to the island to do business. Now they are the biggest boosters of the Chinese party because they want to continue to do business there.

"Deng Xiaoping (Chinese leader who died earlier this year after an 18-year rule) has divided politics from economics, but Hong Kong businessmen are concerned with self-censorship. Companies want to do business in China, but to do this, they have to censor themselves, because you can't speak out about China or the party," Schell said. "Hong Kong is liberal and open, but literally closed."

Schell compared China to a 900-pound Gorilla. He noted that one of the thorniest issues China has to face is comprehensive family planning that allows forced abortions and prompts the question of human rights violations.

Schell said Hong Kong is democratically run, and recently Beijing appointed Hong Kong's first chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa. Although Hong Kong will be democratically run, it won't have the freedom it had before. Under Tung, the universities won't be closed down, but there won't be academic freedom.

"The clock is clicking down on a mystery. It's a great drama and hard to tell what will happen," Schell said. "It's difficult to visualize the communist party will wither away. They are not going to yield to foreign pressure and that's why dealing with China is so tough."

Schell asked, "Do we care or just go ahead and do business? Why make trouble? Personally, it's a basic right to have freedom and there has to be freedom of the press. China will listen to outside views, because it wants to be respected by the rest of the world.

Come July 1, Schell estimated there will be 6,000 news people looking for a story. Schell will be one of them.