Pukka Pillars Come Tumbling Down
ERIC ELLIS

11/17/1995

IT'S enough to make an old colonial splutter into his pink gin. First the club allowed Chinese members. Now the blasted communists are running the place! And where the devil is the Queen in all this?
For those in Hong Kong's elite clubland, the refrain that 1997 is already here rings all too true.

Less than 20 months before Whitehall hands back Hong Kong to Beijing's communist regime, the high ground of Hong Kong social and commercial life has already gone the way of the comrades.
At the Royal Hong Kong Golf Club, one of the first clubs in the world outside Britain allowed the royal prerogative, the club is not only dropping the "royal" but recently appointed Larry Yung, the billionaire son of China's Vice-President Rong Yiren, as club president.

At the influential Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club, which local conventional wisdom has long held to be the main preserve of the colony's movers and shakers, the club has appointed a Chinese chief executive for the first time, breaking the tradition of pukka Sandhurst men as managers.

The moves in clubland simply illustrate the shifts taking place all over Hong Kong, as it prepares to become a large city in southern China.

The changes are evident on many layers, particularly the way people speak.

Hong Kong's notoriously crotchety taxi drivers have begun voluntarily speaking Mandarin Chinese, China's national tongue, while at the Peak and Island schools, where well-heeled expatriates send their designer Lucretias, Indias and Olivers, the curriculum has replaced French with Chinese.

It is now no longer enough to speak English to qualify for the generous jollies of Hong Kong's civil service. Would-be employees now have to pass proficiency tests in both English and Chinese.

And gone, too, are the days when "gweilos" did the same job as Chinese but got four times as many perks - such as subsidised housing.

Even the derogatory term "white trash" is becoming common currency in today's Hong Kong.

Local Chinese officials now occupy all but three of the top slots of the colonial government, the equivalent of cabinet ministers.

Hong Kong's tycoons are ostentatiously doing their bit for the motherland, like John Howard towards Australia's booming Asian communities, falling over themselves to get invitations to this and that function.

They are currying big favour and giving lots of face ahead of the handover, and they're discovering the commies they and their parents escaped from aren't so bad after all, particularly if a deal is in the offing.

One tycoon, Li Ka-shing of the Hutchison and Cheung Kong property-based groups, is helping China's Foreign Ministry build a new headquarters on Hong Kong Island.

The building, on Kennedy Road and thoughtfully in the heart of the Mid-Levels residential district, will be managed by Li's groups, reportedly free of charge.

Li's companies are also building a new office and commercial complex on the site of the old Hilton Hotel, which was torn down earlier this year.

That complex, in Central District, adjacent to the existing government buildings, is strongly rumoured to have various mainland ministries as tenants, at sweetheart rental rates.

The mandarins therein will be able to look out on the towering Bank of China, which recently began issuing banknotes, making Hong Kong's already confusing money supply all the more convoluted, with three banks now issuing currency where in most places it is done by a single central bank.

The Bank of China notes, which pointedly do not offer any illustration of British institutions here, have seemlessly entered the system. But this correspondent has encountered pockets of resistance, with some taxi drivers and shopkeepers unwilling to accept "communist money" and demanding HongkongBank or Standard Chartered Bank notes be proffered instead.

The Sinofication of Hong Kong is also evident in the telephone system, where the main carrier, Hongkong Telecom, is part-owned by a mainland firm, CITIC.

The notional flag-carrier airline, Cathay Pacific, continually seeks to de-stress its British roots by pointing out the stake controlled by China, also through CITIC, which is a constituent member of the Hang Seng Index measure.

Companies like CITIC are fertile training grounds for China's princelings -the sons and daughters of the Beijing regime's political elites.

Often educated in the English of Harvard and Stanford instead of the Russian universities of their parents, the 1000-odd princelings are effectively apprentice capitalists in Hong Kong, the idea being to take their skills, savings and contacts back to the motherland, while preparing Hong Kong for more of the same when the Brits leave on June 30, 1997.