No dia 1ro de julho de 1997, quinze anos atrás, portanto, Hong Kong era retrocedida à República Popular da China, depois de 156 anos que o Reino Unido obteve essa colônia do então Império Qing, já decadente, e humilhado pelas canhoneiras imperialistas.
Abaixo a matéria do New York Times, de 1997, sobre sua inauguração como território autônomo dentro da RPC, um gesto que não agradou a todos os residentes locais.
Com efeito, quando visitei Hong Kong, em 2010, e conversei com os "hong konguianos" (ou que nome tiverem), senti dos mais jovens, cujos pais tinham vindo da China continental como refugiados do comunismo, que eles não se consideravam chineses, não queriam ser chineses e não pretendiam ceder um milímetro sequer de suas prerrogativas democráticas para tornar-se servos de uma das últimas ditaduras socialistas existentes na face da terra (as outras sendo, obviamente, a Coreia do Norte e Cuba, pois mesmo o Vietnã começa um exercício de liberalização política, algo ainda impensável nos resíduos do stalinismo neste nosso planetinha redondo, como diria alguém conhecido...).
Muito tempo antes, ou seja, uma década previamente à retrocessão, em torno de 1987, quando se estabeleceram as bases da transição para a soberania da RPC, e quando a glasnost e a perestrojka faziam tremer a União Soviética, eu escrevi um artigo prevendo que, ao cabo dos 50 anos então fixados para a preservação da autonomia do território, depois do seu retorno à soberania da RPC, seria, na verdade, a Hong Kong capitalista que finalmente "absorveria" a China socialista, e não o contrário.
OK, me enganei, mas apenas porque a China socialista deu passos enormes em direção ao capitalismo, e não prevejo -- salvo a preservação de alguns bolsões de pobreza pelo interior, no Tibet e no Xinjiang, talvez -- muitas diferenças entre a antiga colônia inglesa e o continente chinês em 2047, quando essa autonomia teoricamente acaba (acredito que ela vai continuar, pois talvez o sistema político chinês, a despeito do capitalismo de mercado full scope, ainda não terá evoluído para uma plena democracia liberal).
Considero, por exemplo, sumamente errado o título do último livro de Giovanni Arrighi, grande sociólogo marxista, sobre essas transformações do mundo atual. Ele o chamou de Adam Smith vai a Pequim.
Nada mais errado. Adam Smith nunca deixou a Escócia (no sentido metafórico, claro, pois esteve em Oxford e achou uma porcaria, e também andou pela França), e nenhuma linha de seus escritos precisa ser mudada, hoje, para levar em conta o que está acontecendo na China.
Um título melhor para esse livro deveria ser, portanto, A China vai à Escócia, ou A China adota Adam Smith, ponto.
Pois é evidente, a despeito dos ingênuos que acham que a China é o que é, economicamente, graças ao seu "capitalismo de Estado". A China é o que é graças ao fato de seus dirigentes, ao terem reconhecido que a economia marxista é um completo fracasso, terem abraçado plenamente o capitalismo, tornando-se administradores do novo modo de produção (que na verdade não precisa de administradores, pois eles só atrapalham, e tomam o seu quinhão de corrupção). A dinâmica do capitalismo chinês é dada pelo setor privado, não pelo Estado, que faz o seu dever de Estado ao garantir um bom ambiente de negócios para capitalistas nacionais e estrangeiros.
Aliás, se querem a minha opinião, eu diria que a China, mesmo sem HK, é muito mais capitalista do que o Brasil, que se parece com um país socialista, ou fascista, tal o grau de intervencionismo estatal na economia.
Com isso encerro meu longo comentário inicial, e deixo vocês com este primeiro artigo sobre Hong Kong, a ser seguido por outros.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
A New Leader Outlines His Vision for Hong Kong
By EDWARD A. GARGAN
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HONG KONG -- For the first time in Hong Kong's history a Hong Konger, Tung Chee-hwa, stepped before his people as their leader today, explaining in their own dialect of Cantonese how the onset of Chinese rule, and his stewardship of the territory, would change their lives.
In what may be the first test of China's pledge that Hong Kong would be allowed its own distinct form of government, the police allowed a demonstration by a group, the Hong Kong Alliance, that China has branded subversive. About 2,500 protesters marched, some carrying red signs saying 'Build a Democratic China' and 'Put an End to the Dictatorship in China.'
The marchers, by applying for a permit, had complied with rules in force under colonial administration; new rules restricting demonstrations had been laid down by the new legislature appointed by Beijing within hours of Hong Kong's reversion to China, and technically the marchers were not in compliance with those.
For most Hong Kongers, though, the demonstration was a sideshow to the speech by Mr. Tung, China's choice as Hong Kong's new chief executive, who for the first time outlined in detail how he planned to lead what has become a special autonomous zone of China. In a detailed review of the issues that consume Hong Kongers, Mr. Tung promised to solve the territory's housing problem -- 'the aim is to achieve a home ownership rate of 70 percent in 10 years,' he said -- as well as to reinvigorate the school system by improving teachers' qualifications and insure full day schooling at the primary level, introduce a mandatory retirement fund, and establish a government Commission for the Elderly.
'Like most people in Hong Kong,' he said, 'I am not a passer-by. Our home, our career, and our hope are here in Hong Kong. We have deep feelings for Hong Kong and a sense of mission to build a better Hong Kong.'
Then, Hong Kong's new leader laid out a vision of a Government far more involved in people's lives than the old colonial administration. Ranging from exhortations for grown children to live with their parents, to direct involvement in the housing market, to steps to build and encourage a high-tech industrial belt in the territory. Mr. Tung's governmental activism, bred from both a belief in a quasi-Confucian paternalism and the instincts acquired running a shipping conglomerate, suggests a new direction for Hong Kong, one more akin to Singapore, which he has said he admires.
Mr. Tung's address came on the first day of Chinese rule, a day marked by a blizzard of concerts, operas, martial arts displays, what was billed as the world's largest karaoke and a sky-scalding display of fireworks and laser lights, accompanied by the elegaic strains of Yo Yo Ma's cello.
Mr. Tung spoke just hours after the red flag of China was run up flagpoles across the territory, from the former British military compounds to the glittering five-star hotels on the waterfront. His address was a speech for everyone, ranging from grand themes of identity and values to daily life concerns. It was, Mr. Tung explained, a blueprint that begins charting a Hong Kong different in many ways from the one left behind by the British.
Mr. Tung made only a passing reference to the loss of democracy in Hong Kong, saying only that his government would 'resolutely move forward to a more democratic form of government in accordance with the provisions of the Basic Law,' the mini-constitution devised by Beijing for Hong Kong.
China's President, Jiang Zemin, also addressed Hong Kong's elite gathered at the new convention center, in a speech intended both to reassure Hong Kongers and to confirm his own stature as the man who oversaw the end of colonial rule.
Speaking in the Mandarin dialect of northern China, Mr. Jiang repeatedly told Hong Kongers that they were to govern themselves, that their fate was in their own hands, that Hong Kong, a place so utterly different from the rest of China, would chart its own course.
'Hong Kong will continue to practice the capitalist system,' declared Mr. Jiang, as the members of the new government, the territory's multitude of tycoons, its social elite and a bevy of foreign dignitaries listened, 'with its previous socioecoomic system and way of life remaining unchanged and its laws remaining basically unchanged while the main part of the nation persists in the socialist system.'
In an apparent test of the right to demonstrate, the group of protesters, organized by the Hong Kong Alliance, marched across through central Hong Kong this afternoon. Like a rally of democratic protesters who climbed the Legislative Council building just after midnight this morning, they were given enough leeway by the authorities so that no confrontation occurred.
The police seemed to handle the march in the same way they had in the past, even though new civil order legislation gives the government a legal means to block a demonstration on the basis of a threat to China's national security.
The march was relatively small by Hong Kong standards. 'Today we are here to fight for democracy within China,' said Lee Cheuk-yan, one of the organizers. 'We are fighting for democracy now as a part of China, from within China for the first time. I think that's very significant.'
Mr. Lee said he was 'warned' by the police that the march had exceeded the 2,000 demonstrators specified in its application, reaching what the police estimated to be about 2,500 marchers. Mr. Lee said he responded that the group had actually only reached about 2,300, not too much above the original number expected.
However, senior superintendent Gregory Lam, said the police had not issued a warning but had simply pointed out that the march had exceeded the number in the application and asked the group to try not to let the demonstration grow any larger.
'There was no problem,' Mr. Lam said. 'We estimated the crowd at 2,500. They thought it was about 2,300. We don't want it getting too large and we told them that.'
No effort was made to break up the march, which soon dissipated.
Mr. Tung, who has come under considerable criticism for imposing new constraints on civil liberties, has struggled in the last six months since Beijing named him chief executive to overcome skepticism here about his loyalties and motives.
Some of the questions surrounding Mr. Tung's autonomy from Beijing stem from China's bailout of his virtually bankrupt shipping company in the 1980's, a financial rescue he has never explained. Indeed, he has refused repeatedly to explain the details of that arrangement although he insists it was, in his words, a purely 'commercial' transaction.
As one friend of Mr. Tung put it, however, 'he knows very well that Beijing saved his company. They haven't forgotten and he hasn't either.'
He isalso immersed in the West, having spent six years in England. He went on to the United States where he spent a decade, working mostly for his father's shipping company. While there, and during his tenure as chairman of his shipping company, Orient Overseas (International) Ltd., he developed and cultivated contacts with a broad network of American and European business and government leaders.
His choice by China was ordained 18 months ago during a visit to Beijing when Mr. Jiang singled him out from a group of Hong Kong luminaries for a warm handshake.
Because of his seeming eagerness to please Beijing -- Mr. Tung immediately embraced China's demand that Hong Kong's elected legislature be abolished and that a range of civil liberties be curtailed -- many Hong Kongers have come to regard him as a puppet. Indeed, in the last opinion poll taken before Mr. Tung's investiture early this morning, the outgoing British governor, Christopher Patten, won an approval rating of 79 percent, 22 percentage points above that of Mr. Tung.
Today, Mr. Tung sought to speak as his own man, committed to his Chinese heritage while engaging the virtues of the West that Hong Kong has so eagerly absorbed.
'Every society has to have its own values to provide a common purpose and a sense of unity,' declared Mr. Tung. 'We will continue to encourage diversity in our society, but we must also reaffirm and respect the fine traditional Chinese values, including filial piety, love for the family, modesty and integrity and the desire for continuous improvement. We value plurality, but discourage open confrontation; we strive for liberty, but not at the expense of the rule of law; we respect minority views but are mindful of wider interests; we protect individual rights, but also shoulder collective responsibilities.'
'I hope,' intoned Mr. Tung, 'these values will provide the foundation for unity in our society.'
Recognizing that an erosion of more traditional family values has occurred to some extent in Hong Kong, Mr. Tung insisted that government 'will encourage families to live with their elderly members.'
Hong Kong's principal English-language newspaper, The South China Morning Post, argued that Mr. Tung must pay more attention to the territory's political needs. 'His first, and most critical, political challenge,' the paper insisted in this morning's edition, 'will be to restore the degree of democracy that existed before today's swearing-in of the Provisional Legislature,' the Beijing-appointed body that will now pass Hong Kong's laws.
Reaction to Mr. Tung's speech across Hong Kong ran the spectrum from enthusiasm to doubt. Cheng Suk-hon, a 48-year-old property manager, was on his way home on the subway and said that he was impressed and reassured. 'I did watch Mr. Tung on television this morning,' he said. 'I'm confident of him governing Hong Kong. He's the first chief executive of Hong Kong so he must set a good example. He calmed people's concerns. I think he'll keep his promises.'
But Kitty Ho, a college junior who has been studying in the United States and who was scampering toward the harborfront to watch the evening's fireworks, was less charitable. 'He can say anything he wants but he won't necessarily do it,' she said. 'He's been saying the same thing over and over again. I don't trust him because he's just saying what he's been told to do.'
