Then & Now | Hong Kong in the 1990s: a new airport, handover fears, Chris Patten, the BN(O) passport, David Tang, and the British recession refugees and chancers
- Hong Kong was a different place in the 1990s, a city experiencing the dying years of British colonial rule
- It was a boom time of giant construction projects, David Tang’s China chic, and a last hurrah for economic refugees and chancers arriving visa-free from the UK
The past is a foreign country,” L.P. Hartley’s famous opening lines in The Go-Between (1953) poignantly observed. “They do things differently there.” And thus it was in Hong Kong in the 1990s. What was Hong Kong’s fin de siècle like, for those who lived through and remember those times, and for a generation who did not? What jumps out in sudden memory?
Of course, 1997 was on everyone’s lips, and “What’s going to happen when…?” dominated far too many conversations. Economic boom fed on its own energy; land reclamations – the Airport Core Programme – greatly transformed the shape of Hong Kong. Tertiary education expanded, though quality remained patchy; subsequent employability eventually became a key factor in intermittently exploding youth discontent.
Former parliamentarian Chris Patten – now Lord Patten of Barnes – was the last British governor, and didn’t he relish the role! From the moment this larger-than-life figure arrived in 1992, broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby trailed him for posterity; a legacy project planned right from the get-go.
Like a long-stopped grandfather clock in an infrequently used, occasionally aired, faraway drawing room, Patten’s contemporary comments on Hong Kong affairs remain dead right twice a day, with a peal of chimes now and again, when bumped against. But otherwise – much like the aforementioned clock – Patten is now either a treasured heirloom, or a space-wasting relic of earlier times, according to taste.
Introduction of the British National (Overseas) passport – better known as the BN(O) – is now viewed positively by those who no longer feel at home in the city of their birth. But back then the travel document was derided as a rank betrayal of Hong Kong’s people.
