China rules with iron hand in boom town on the border
Shenzhen, Hong Kong's "twin city" across the frontier, provides a disquieting glimpse of the future, writes CHRISTOPHER LOCKWOOD
A 20-MINUTE ride on the Kowloon-Canton railway from Hong Kong lies a foretaste of what the colony may be like under Chinese rule.
The Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen, immediately north of Hong Kong"s border, is a 15-year experiment in capitalism that has bred off its neighbour's prosperity and has helped show the way to the rest of China.
Its streets are broad and bustling. Limousines and taxis cruise where a decade ago there were only bicycles. The sound of piledrivers is everywhere, as building work hurries ahead on yet more hotels and office-blocks.
The executives in the commercial district are just as fond of their mobile phones as their counterparts anywhere, and the women in European fashions are scarcely less elegant than their sisters to the south.
Cantonese people are renowned gastronomes, and Shenzhen is bursting with restaurants, almost all of them privately owned. Many of the clientele are from Hong Kong .
Banks and legal firms also flourish, and there is a thriving stock exchange where the key indicators are flashed on video screens for the passing speculator.
Ringed by lowering hills, the city's skyline is now almost as dramatic as that of Hong Kong harbour, and the population has soared from a few hundred thousand when the experiment began to three million - still rapidly rising.
Yet Shenzhen remains an integral part of China, subject at least nominally to the communist system, or "socialism with Chinese characteristics", as Deng Xiaoping's formula goes. If such unbridled prosperity can exist in Shenzhen, perhaps there is nothing that Hong Kong - which is promised its own system of government under the slogan "one country, two systems" - needs to fear.
But Shenzhen's freedoms are still purely economic and, for all its vitality, the city is a joyless place.
For instance, last year no fewer than 100 alleged criminals were executed in Shenzhen, dispatched with a single bullet to the back of the head, after trials that are routinely condemned by human rights organisations as travesties.
And it is a place where, as in the rest of China, the press is heavily censored - though Hong Kong television broadcasts can be picked up and are widely watched - and where dissent is unknown.
In Hong Kong, tens of thousands of people marched three weeks ago to commemorate the eighth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. In Shenzhen, no one did.
The instinct to repression is obvious to the casual observer. When a small crowd gathered to watch a visiting celebrity arrive at the Shangri-la Hotel in a large dark-windowed car yesterday, a policeman had simply to wave a hand for them to scatter like frightened sheep.
Shenzhen's Governor, Li Youwei, recently insisted that there would be no deviation from "socialism", which now means not an economic system, but an apparatus of state political control.
But, just as Shenzhen is rapidly coming to resemble Hong Kong as an economic entity, the fear of many of the democrats in the colony is that Hong Kong will come in time to resemble Shenzhen in respect of the rule of law and the observance of human rights. In a decade, perhaps, the two will have become indistinguishable.
Proposals are already being aired by pro-Chinese businessmen in Hong Kong to create industrial zones that will straddle the supposedly sacrosanct border between China and its new possession.
Hong Kong democrats have warned that this could be a very dangerous step.
Already, Hong Kong's newspapers are starting to practise a degree of self-censorship when writing about the Beijing government, and potential demonstrators are being warned that tough new powers will go into effect at the instant China resumes its sovereignty.
And, on Monday night, the People's Liberation Army will march, from Shenzhen, into Hong Kong, where it will be charged with maintaining national security, responsible not to the new Chief Executive, C H Tung, himself a hand-picked appointee of China, but to China's military command.
