GATE TO CHINA: A New History

Sub-titled 'A New History of the People's Republic and Hong Kong', the rise of China and the fall of Hong Kong to authoritarian rule is told with unique insight in this new history, drawing on eyewitness reporting over three decades, interviews with key figures, and documents from archives in China and the West. We are swept from the earliest days of trade through the Opium Wars to the 19th century, the age of globalisation and the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China. The story ends with the battle for democracy on the city's streets and the ultimate victory of the Chinese Communist Party. How did it come to this? We learn from private papers that Margaret Thatcher anguished over the fate of Hong Kong, sought secret American briefings on how to handle China, and put her trust in an adviser who was torn between duty and pride. The deal they made with Beijing did not last. The Chinese side of this history, so often unheard, emerges from memoirs and documents, many new to the foreign reader, revealing how the party's iron will and negotiating tactics crushed its opponents. Yet the voices of Hong Kong people - eloquent, smart and bold -speak out here for ideals that refuse to die. The book tells how the People's Republic reformed its economy and changed the world, emerging to challenge the West with a new order that raises fundamental questions about progress, identity and freedom. Hong Kong continues to compete with rivals and retain advantages - its banks, finance houses and traders grease the wheels of business and invest its profits with unique freedom, its courts arbitrate commercial disputes impartially and its administrators by and large do not have their hand held out. And we are taken back to the colonial days when the thwack of cricket balls could be heard on the green and at the Royal Yacht Club the noonday gun as immortalised in Noel Coward's song 'Mad Dogs and Englishmen' sounds. It is a hive of commerce - vendors of ivory, dried fish, abalone and sharks' fins, fragrant mushrooms and chests of aromatic tea, ginseng roots and the calls of porters and the babel of dialects. A delightful piece of writing and research which depicts the motives, fears and internal struggles of negotiating tactics, this is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the world in which we live. 456pp, colour photos, portraits and black and white images, maps, 2021 first edition.