END OF COLONIALISM WORTH CELEBRATING
I watched the countdown to Hong Kong's return to its rightful owners with a strange feeling of deja vu.
This August will mark the 50th anniversary of a similar transfer of power out of the hands of the British and into the hands of the local people, power transferring from white hands to brown hands.
When the British "lost" India 50 years ago, the British Empire lost its crown jewel and the sun that was supposed to never set on the British Empire lost much of its luster.
Today, that once-mighty empire loses another chunk with the return of Hong Kong to China, the country from which it was stolen more than a century ago.
Can two events 50 years apart be linked? Can two lands so different have something in common?
Yes, in the mind of this writer, who was born in India.
What they have in common is that both have been victims of colonialism and that both had become part of the British Empire as an ignoble result of theft, trickery and dubious treaties.
The British, after all, came to India as traders, as welcome guests. Soon, they became paternalistic occupiers, making it their business to tell an ancient people how to live their lives and run their country.
And why not? After all, the Industrial Revolution was fueled by the raw materials and profits that made their way out of colonized nations like India and into the factories of Olde England.
Similarly, the Brits gained Hong Kong as a result of the Opium War of 1839-1842, a dishonorable war fought against China to protect the interests of English traders who smuggled opium into China.
Interestingly, the major supplier of opium into that ravaged country was the British East India Company -- the same company that first entered India to conduct the spice trade.
So today, this former child of colonialism is happy. Irrespective of whether China turns into the big, bad daddy that Western analysts fear, the fact is that today is a day that all democratic-minded, justice-loving people should celebrate.
Because today, Hong Kong has returned to whom it rightly belongs -- the Chinese. The travesty from the 19th century has been righted in the waning days of the 20th century.
Although India was independent of British rule decades before I was born, I know what it is like to live in a former colony. There is a certain schizophrenia that exists, as a nation tries to find its own soul, its own voice, that is distinct from the voices of the past.
I felt the legacy of colonialism in my own life. My entire education was based on the British school system -- an education that has served me well in the West, but which kept me alienated from the culture from which I sprang. Until I was in my early 20s, I had scarcely ever read a novel or poem by an Indian writer.
Now, the people of Hong Kong will get a chance to reclaim their own authentic voices.
As for those of you who want to wring your hands at the thought of democracy in Hong Kong shriveling under the long, dark shadow of China: Remember, until yesterday, Hong Kong was a colony. Democracy requires a free people who are not ruled by a foreign power.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Maurice Meisner, author of The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, says, "The current popular belief that Hong Kong symbolized 'democracy' and 'autonomy' has no basis in historical fact. Hong Kong is a colony and has been ruled as a colony.
"Its all-powerful governor was an Englishman appointed by London, responsible for carrying out policies decided by the British government. Until recent years, the members of such quasi-legislative organs that came into being were appointed by the governor and confined to a purely advisory role."
Indeed, the current hand-wringing in the media is not really about democracy at all. Rather, it's about the future of the free market economy, about whether China will guarantee the capital investments that have poured into tiny Hong Kong.
Granted, there are many unanswered questions about what China's rule over Hong Kong will mean. The horror of Tiananmen Square, after all, is still alive in most of our memories. The unpredictability of Beijing could well mean that the vibrant nature of the erstwhile British colony will soon be lost.
But that uncertainty should not cast a shadow over this day. Colonialism, like slavery, rests on racism -- the belief that the occupiers (usually white) are somehow better able to run a country than the local (usually brown, black or yellow) people.
Just as justice-loving Americans celebrated the end of slavery, the end of colonialism in one more corner of the world is cause for celebration.
In that sense, democracy has already arrived in Hong Kong.
Akron Beacon Journal
Tuesday, July 1, 1997
