Column

On the streets of Hong Kong, there are plentiful reminders of the “big event” that gets under way in less than three days.

As one of the host cities for the summer Olympics, Hong Kong has been decked up in radiant Olympics regalia: there are replica reproductions of some of the Olympics sporting venues in Beijing and of the mascots, whose names, when strung together, translate to mean ‘Beijing Welcomes You’.

Yet, for all the engineered air of festive celebration, there isn’t in Hong Kong’s every step the same jaunty bounce that symbolises the Olympics frenzy in cities in mainland China. Unlike in the mainland, where the Olympics are seen as a chance to show off to the world their “motherland’s” emergence as an economic power, the people of Hong Kong, long used to the world’s attention, wear a blasé what’s-the-big-fuss-about attitude.

One reason for this aloofness is that China’s prolonged Olympian party has begun to interfere with the Hong Kong people’s preoccupation with making money. Hong Kong businessmen, who have seen their mainland trading operations disrupted by the Olympics security clampdown and visa-tightening measures, can’t wait for it all to get over so they can resume work. And if the fashionable tai-tais (housewives) who turn up at stockbroking houses to stare fixedly at the trading screens are aware at all that China is hosting a sporting extravaganza, they’ve managed so far to hide that awareness.

For a brief while last month, when thousands queued up outside Bank of China branches in Hong Kong to buy Olympics souvenir currency notes, it appeared that pride in the motherland, by way of association with the Olympics, had begun to bestir in this former British colony. But it turned out that most of them had lined up to procure the Olympics memorabilia only to sell them in double-quick time in thesecondary market for a huge premium.

Hong Kong’s attitude towards the Olympics is only indicative of the huge cultural chasm that exists between people in the territory and even the new-rich in mainland China, despite their shared ethnic roots. It manifests itself in many ways — from social behaviour to perceptions of civil liberties to attitudestowards the outside world.

Thus, for instance, visitors from the mainland recoil in horror upon seeing members of the Falun Gong (which is banned in the mainland as an “evil cult”) holding demonstrations openly in Hong Kong; likewise, Hong Kong hosts, every June 4, a candlelight vigil to remember the student protestors who perished in the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, whereas Tiananmen is one of the“unmentionable” subjects on the mainland.

Such expressions of cultural divergence sit uncomfortably with Chinese leaders, who like to hard-sell harmony and homogeneity. Even with the Beijing Olympics, the somewhat grandiose official slogan is ‘One World, One Dream’. Official propaganda machines, given to hyperbolic analyses dripping with syrupy-sweet turns of phrase, claim that the slogan conveys the “lofty ideal” of people in Beijing and elsewhere in China to “create a bright future hand in hand” withpeople from the rest of the world.

That treacly sentiment, of course, was tempered by a bitter dose of reality check.Following the protests that greeted the relay of the Olympics torch around the world, the Chinese were rudely compelled to acknowledge that homogeneity of thought - of the sorts the Olympic slogan conjures up - is more easily engineered at home, with the help of a sophisticated censorship machine, than in the real world of free information flows. China learnt not only that the world did not share its “one dream”, but also that it wasn’t even “one world” out there.

Hong Kong’s aloofness towards the Olympics in particular, and its celebration of its ‘separateness’ in other aspects of civil society, are a mirror from which China might learn by self-reflection that even within “one China”, there are “many dreams”.And that the world is richer for that diversity.
venky@dnaindia.net