00简介

简介

Introduction

 

中国香港

Hong Kong, China

 

 

天际线是一片高楼大厦的森林，从远处就能吸引人的目光。

街道热闹非凡，围板火热，噪音震耳欲聋。

海港是一个将岛屿和半岛连接起来的永久运动场景。

数百年来，只有少数定居点矗立在这些水域中，标志着中国和世界之间的边界。

但在19世纪，一帮海盗冒险家在深水锚地上方的岩石上插上了旗帜，建立了他们的殖民地。

今天，它是世界上最伟大的城市之一。

 

The skyline is a forest of towers that captures the eye from afar. The streets buzz, the hoardings blaze and the noise deafens. The harbour is a scene of perpetual motion uniting islands and peninsula. For hundreds of years only a few settlements stood in these waters to mark the boundary between China and the world beyond. But in the nineteenth century a band of piratical adventurers planted a flag and built their colony on a rock above a deep-water anchorage. Today it is one of the world’s great cities.

 

香港是中国的大门，当时中国生活在一个孤立的墙后面。

直到二十世纪末，当飞行员在夜空下飞过一片广阔的黑暗时，他可以从数百英里外看到它。

客机沿着无线电信标的走廊，穿过为军事航空保留的空旷的天空象限。

在机翼下向南滚动，人民共和国的城镇在阴暗的地毯上像针尖一样展开。

没有超级高速公路，没有高速列车在下面像萤火虫一样移动。

早在下降之前，在昏暗的陆地让位给完全漆黑的大海的地方，机组人员看到了标志着香港的一片光亮。

 

Hong Kong was the gate to China when the country lived behind a wall of isolation. Until late in the twentieth century a pilot could spot it from hundreds of miles off as he flew under night skies across a vast darkness. Airliners followed a corridor of radio beacons through empty quadrants of sky reserved for military aviation. Rolling south beneath the wings, towns in the People’s Republic unfolded as pinpricks of light in a carpet of gloom. There were no superhighways, no high-speed trains moving like glow-worms below. Long before the descent, at the point where the dim land gave way to the utter blackness of the sea, the crew saw a blaze of light that marked Hong Kong.

 

现在，大门敞开了。

一名飞行员在从中国中部延伸到旧条约港口的光明之海上方航行，然后在珠江三角洲的星雨中消散。

四十年来，该地区已成为人类历史上最大的工业综合体。

香港只有通过其独特的地理环境才能被识别出来。

白天，城市、岛屿和水路上空笼罩着一层灰蒙蒙的雾气，标志着香港的接近。

Now the gate stands open. A pilot navigates above a sea of brightness extending from central China down to the old treaty ports before dissolving in star-showers across the Pearl River Delta. In four decades the region has become the greatest industrial complex in human history. Hong Kong can only be picked out by its distinctive geography. By day, the approach is signalled by a dun-hued haze enveloping the cities, the islands and the waterways.

 

这个城市的政治和文化也正在与中国大陆的政治和文化相融合，这是一种缓慢的饱和，似乎像潮汐一样不可抗拒。

 

The city’s politics and culture, too, are blending with those of mainland China, a slow saturation that seems as irresistible as the tides.

 

从中国南海驶入，水手们穿过一条线，那里的水从海蓝色变成浑浊。

珠江在这里汇入深海，它那满载着元素周期表中一半元素的湍急水流渗入海洋。

船只从非洲、澳大利亚或巴西运来原材料，从中东运来石油和天然气，从日本或韩国运来技术，从亚洲各地运来零件，为中国消费者带来肉类、鱼类、谷物和奢侈品。

它们带着满载的制成品驶向各大洲的市场，其价格令竞争者望而却步。

集装箱船和中国工厂的联合效率已经改变了世界经济。

 

Sailing in from the South China Sea, the mariner crosses a line where the water turns from aquamarine to murk. Here the Pearl River spills into the deep, its turgid flow, laden with half the elements in the periodic table, leaching into the ocean. Ships bring raw materials from Africa, Australia or Brazil, oil and gas from the Middle East, technology from Japan or South Korea, parts from across Asia, meat, fish, grains and luxuries for Chinese consumers. They sail away with cargoes of manufactured goods for markets on every continent at prices to decimate the competition. The joint efficiency of container ships and Chinese factories has transformed the world economy.

 

一个多世纪以来，香港的码头意味着汗水和辛劳。

大船停泊在码头边，拖船、打火机和小船在它们周围忙碌着，飞行员引导船只进出拥挤的航道。

装卸工蜂拥进入船舱，苦力将货物搬上卡车和手推车，帮主和经纪人聚集在货仓或仓库周围，每个仓库都有一个猩红的、烟雾缭绕的天后神龛，即海神。

 

For more than a century, Hong Kong’s docks meant sweat and toil. Big ships moored at the quayside, tugs, lighters and small junks fussed around them, pilots guided vessels in and out of the crowded waterways. Stevedores swarmed into the holds, coolies heaved loads onto trucks and handcarts, gangmasters and brokers congregated around the godowns, or warehouses, each with its scarlet, smoke-wreathed shrine to Tin Hau, the goddess of the sea.

 

随着计算机化的起重机和较小的船员，货物量成倍增加，只有最猛烈的台风才会打断商业的节奏。

香港的现代港口与中国沿海的竞争对手竞争。

然而，香港确实保留了一些优势：它的银行、金融公司和贸易商以独特的自由度为商业车轮加油并投资利润，它的法院公正地仲裁商业纠纷，它的行政人员，总的来说，没有被牵制。

 

With computerised cranes and smaller crews, the volume of cargo has multiplied and only the fiercest typhoon interrupts the rhythm of commerce. The modern port of Hong Kong competes with rivals on the China coast. Hong Kong does, however, retain some 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.

 

在殖民地时代，当绿茵场上可以听到板球的 "砰砰 "声时，几家坚固的银行和贸易公司矗立在维多利亚时代的定居点之上，沿着香港岛的北岸向皇家游艇俱乐部和Noel Coward的歌曲《疯狗和英国人》中不朽的正午之枪辐射出去。

向西矗立着一个宏伟的花岗岩和砖砌的市场大厅，周围是一派商业景象--象牙、鱼干、鲍鱼和鱼翅、芳香的蘑菇和一箱箱的香茶的小贩。

药剂师站在人参根的玻璃柜和枯萎的草药柜中，每个抽屉都贴着仁慈的书法标签；所有这些都被喧嚣的交通、搬运工人的呼唤以及用广东话（主要语言）和各种方言的吼叫和猥亵所扰乱。

 

In colonial days, when the thwack of cricket balls could be heard on the green, a few stolid banks and trading houses stood above the Victorian settlement radiating out along the north shore of Hong Kong island to the Royal Yacht Club and the noonday gun immortalised in Noel Coward’s song ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’. Westwards stood a grand market hall in granite and brick surrounded by a hive of commerce – vendors of ivory, dried fish, abalone and sharks’ fins, fragrant mushrooms and chests of aromatic tea; apothecaries perched amid glass cases of ginseng roots and cabinets of wizened herbs, each drawer labelled in benevolent calligraphy; all serenaded by a clamour of traffic, the calls of porters and yells and obscenities in Cantonese, the dominant tongue, and in a babel of dialects.

 

有轨电车仍然沿着二十世纪初铺设的金属线路辚辚而过，而在旧楼之上，耸立着金融业的尖顶和几十座公寓楼，它们似乎无视地心引力，紧贴着山顶的斜坡。

在西区的中央，矗立着中央人民政府联络办公室，它像一座堡垒一样威严，像一座金字塔一样禁忌，像一枚太空火箭，顶上有一个奇怪的科幻球体作为装饰。

 

Trams still clatter by along metal lines laid at the dawn of the twentieth century, while above the old buildings tower the spires of finance and dozens of apartment blocks which appear to defy gravity, clinging to the slopes of the Peak. In the middle of Western District, imposing as a fortress, forbidding as a ziggurat, resembling a space rocket adorned by an odd sci-fi sphere at its apex, stands the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government.

 

建筑即声明是这个城市精神的一部分。

英国建筑师诺曼-福斯特（Norman Foster）为香港上海汇丰银行（HSBC）设计了一个中空的金属巨人，这家银行在全世界被称为汇丰银行，但明显缺乏浪漫。

新的总部花费了其股东近10亿美元。

在中国沿海长大的美籍华裔建筑师贝聿铭在维多利亚时代的英国军官兵营遗址上设计了一座闪亮的1205英尺高的尖塔，以容纳汇丰银行这个共产党的竞争对手。

一些人说，这座塔楼高耸的尖角风格破坏了风水原则，风水是一种传统的风水术，用于为建筑物选址，以示吉利，它被粤语俚语称为 "刀"。

相比之下，汇丰银行的员工在总部工作，据说风水很好，因为其开放的中庭允许龙在海和山之间来回走动。

 

Building-as-statement is part of the city’s spirit. The British architect Norman Foster designed a hollow metallic leviathan for the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, the bank branded around the world, with a distinct lack of romance, as HSBC. The new headquarters cost its shareholders almost a billion US dollars. Chinese-American wizard I.M. Pei, who grew up on the China coast, designed a glittering 1,205-foot pinnacle to house the Bank of China, HSBC’s Communist rival, on the site of a Victorian-era barracks for British officers. Some said the tower’s soaring, sharp-angled style broke the principles of feng shui, the traditional art of geomancy employed to site buildings auspiciously, and it passed into Cantonese slang as ‘the knife’. By contrast, the staff at HSBC worked in a headquarters said to enjoy fine feng shui because its open atrium permitted dragons to pass to and fro between the sea and the mountain.

 

至于该地区的第三座大楼，即大亨李嘉诚的集团--长江实业的总部，它是由著名建筑师塞萨尔-佩利设计的，但其企业的矩形线条被希腊领事描述为 "仅仅是中国银行的盒子"，他知道他的多立克和爱奥尼亚。

 

As for the third great tower in the area, the headquarters of Cheung Kong (Holdings), the tycoon Li Ka-shing’s conglomerate, it was designed by the celebrated architect Cesar Pelli but its corporate rectangular lines were best described by the Greek consul, a man who knew his Doric from his Ionic, as ‘merely the box which the Bank of China came in’.

 

更多的摩天大楼在九龙半岛拔地而起，这是一片以九条龙命名的土地，向南伸向海港。

直到1998年，作为世界上人口最稠密的地区之一，九龙的建筑高度受到限制，因为客机在最后接近旧启德机场时从头顶低空飞过，这一动作需要冰冷的技巧，因为飞行员必须将飞机对准山坡上的棋盘，然后向东南急转，掠过屋顶，降落在九龙湾水中的一条跑道上。

错误很少发生。

但是，当一个新的机场在大屿山附近开放，房地产开发商在废弃的航道下面匆匆赶来时，保险公司松了一口气。

 

More skyscrapers rise on the Kowloon peninsula, a tongue of land named after nine dragons that juts southwards into the harbour. Until 1998, the height of buildings in Kowloon, among the world’s most densely populated districts, was restricted because airliners flew low overhead on their final approach to the old Kai Tak airport, a manoeuvre demanding icy skill as the pilot had to aim his plane at a chequerboard painted on the hillside, then veer sharp southeast to skim the rooftops and land on a single runway set in the waters of Kowloon Bay. Mistakes were rare. But the insurers sighed with relief when a new airport opened off Lantau Island and the property developers rushed in below the abandoned flightpath.

 

九龙的丰富性仍然存在；它的市场和寺庙，它的肮脏的街道，地毯店，清真寺和小型电子产品商店，欺骗游客的朴素的裁缝，勤劳的黑社会团伙，招手的女孩和令人眼花缭乱的水疗和按摩店的妈妈桑，其中一些甚至可能是体面的。

 

The richness of Kowloon endures; its markets and temples, its streets of sleaze, carpet emporia, mosques and small electronics stores, the plaintive tailors who waylay tourists, the industrious triad gangsters, the beckoning girls and the mama-sans of a dizzying selection of spas and massage joints, some of which may even be respectable.

 

对香港来说，新加坡的安静的街道或曼谷的混乱都不适合。

在正常情况下，其公民的行为--有秩序但不规范--是对那些声称只有专制统治才能避免拥挤的中国社会出现混乱的人的一种责备。

成千上万的上班族在十字路口穿行，遵守行人信号。

在闪闪发光的地下铁路系统中，人群保持着文明的步伐，而学童和老人则来来往往，不用担心被压垮。

每个人似乎都在支付车费，网络上的犯罪行为几乎不存在，即使是在狂欢者晚上回家的时候也是如此。

香港也有一些粗鲁、鲁莽的出租车司机，只有勇敢的人或别无选择的人才会乘坐绿色和奶油色的小巴，在山顶的螺旋形道路上来回穿梭。

但总的来说，这里是一个安全和守法的地方。

Not for Hong Kong the hushed streets of Singapore or the mayhem of Bangkok. In normal times its citizens’ behaviour – orderly but not regimented – is a rebuke to those who claim that only authoritarian rule can avoid chaos in a crowded Chinese society. Thousands of office workers troop across intersections obeying the pedestrian signals. In the gleaming underground railway system, the crowds keep a civilised pace, while schoolchildren and the elderly come and go without fear of being crushed. Everybody appears to pay the fare and crime on the network is all but unknown, even when revellers go home at night. Hong Kong has its share of rude, reckless cab drivers, and only the brave or those with no choice ride the green and cream-coloured light minibuses that ply up and down the spiralling roads of the Peak. In general, though, it is a safe and law-abiding place.

 

宗教和传统道德在这个经常以粗暴的收购、无情的商业行为和沉溺于贪婪和罪恶而闻名的社会中扮演着令人惊讶的角色。

一代人之前，香港已经把它作为东方最邪恶的城市的名声让给了其他地方。

基督教的影响是显而易见的。

它甚至可能在异议人士的新时代有所增长，他们的言论经常借用经文。

一座英国圣公会大教堂、华丽的罗马天主教教堂、无数的圣经祈祷厅、学校、修道院、医院以及教会经营的社会中心和老人院，都显示出这种外来的西方宗教在一个半世纪的迫害、屠杀和大陆驱逐中坚守其在华南沿海的立足点的韧性。

 

Religion and traditional morality play a surprising role in a society often known for brash acquisition, pitiless business practices and indulgence in gluttony and vice. Hong Kong ceded its reputation as the wickedest city in the Orient to other places a generation ago. The influence of Christianity is conspicuous. It may even have grown in the new era of dissent, whose rhetoric often borrows from scripture. An Anglican cathedral, ornate Roman Catholic churches, innumerable biblical prayer halls, schools, convents, hospitals, and church-run social centres and old people’s homes all show the tenacity with which this imported western religion clung to its foothold on the south China coast through a century and a half of persecution, massacres and expulsions on the mainland.

 

然而，香港代表的是多元化，而不是说教。

宽容被嵌入其世界性的遗产中。

其红色的道教寺庙，香火旺盛，金光闪闪，吸引着无数的祈求者。

佛教注入了中国的传统宗教；因此，许多宁静的佛像出现在寺庙的祭坛上，与怒目圆睁的神灵和盘旋的龙一起安抚大多数的崇拜者，他们对佛教、道教、孔子的哲学和一套与感知的中国身份相一致的道德价值观感到舒服。

在香港的泰国社区中，佛祖本人在数以百计的家庭神龛中受到敬仰，神龛上铺着茉莉花，点着蜡烛，主持着米商、银行、餐馆和水疗中心。

 

Yet Hong Kong stands for plurality, not preaching. Tolerance is embedded in its cosmopolitan heritage. Its red-hued Taoist temples, fragrant with incense and glimmering with gold, attract legions of supplicants. Buddhism infuses Chinese traditional religion; thus many serene images of the Buddha appear on the altars of temples alongside glowering deities and coiled dragons to soothe the majority of worshippers who feel comfortable with a blend of Buddhism, Taoism, the philosophy of Confucius and a set of moral values resonant with a perceived Chinese identity. By himself, the Buddha is venerated among Hong Kong’s Thai community in hundreds of household shrines draped in jasmine and lit by candles, presiding over rice traders, banks, restaurants and spas.

 

鲜花环绕的雕像装饰着印度教的神龛，其精致程度不亚于印度或尼泊尔。

在星期五，穆斯林挤满了分布在境内的清真寺，这些清真寺以其优雅的绿色圆顶和适度的尖塔而闻名。

一个约有5000人的犹太社区可以追溯到香港早期的殖民时代；它拥有一个可以追溯到1901年的精美的主要犹太教堂，其杰出的成员包括卡多里和沙逊的塞法尔商业王朝，而九龙最繁忙的道路之一的 "黄金一英里 "购物区的名字是由爱德华时代的英国总督和工程师马修-内森建造的。

 

Flower-wreathed statues adorn Hindu shrines as elaborate as any in India or Nepal. On Fridays, Muslims crowd the mosques dotted around the territory, notable by their elegant green domes and modest minarets. A Jewish community of some 5,000 traces its roots to the early colonial days of Hong Kong; it boasts a fine principal synagogue dating to 1901 and its distinguished members include the Sephardic business dynasties of the Kadoories and Sassoons, while the ‘golden mile’ of shopping on one of Kowloon’s busiest roads bears the name of the Edwardian British governor and engineer who built it, Matthew Nathan.

 

流经这道门的不仅仅是贸易，还有文化。

虽然是英国的殖民地，但香港是中国艺术、音乐、戏曲、小说创作、电影制作、书法、小册子和新闻业生存的关键，所有这些都不受审查。

在共产党在新中国引入更简单的字符系统后，香港的学者们保留了古代经典表意文字的复杂之美。

无论好坏，源源不断的古董从人民共和国流出，进入拍卖行和经销商手中，他们很少问问题；对买家来说，这是一个谨慎的选择，毫无疑问，走私者和造假者从中获利，但另一个选择可能是在毛派红卫兵对 "四旧"--习俗、文化、习惯和思想的讨伐中被摧毁。

这样一来，香港和台湾一样，成为中国文明的方舟。

 

It was not just trade but culture that flowed through the gate. Although a British colony, Hong Kong was key to the survival of Chinese art, music, opera, novel-writing, film-making, calligraphy, pamphleteering and journalism, all free from the censor. Its scholars preserved the intricate beauty of ancient classical ideograms after the Communist Party introduced a simpler character system in New China. For good or ill, a steady supply of antiques came out of the People’s Republic, making their way to auction houses and dealers who asked few questions; it was caveat emptor for the buyer, and doubtless smugglers and fakers profited, but the alternative might have been destruction at the hands of the Maoist Red Guards in their crusade against the ‘Four Olds’ – customs, culture, habits and ideas. In that way Hong Kong, like Taiwan, became an ark of Chinese civilisation.

 

除了中国传统之外，还有西方的音乐演奏会、前卫的剧院和大胆的艺术表演。

香港人吸收了外国的影响，对那些认为到处都有颠覆中国人身份的阴谋的党派宣传家的说法不以为意。

在殖民时代后期，大批穿着英式制服的严肃学童在四重奏或奏鸣曲中锯开，然后在回家的地铁上沉浸在中国漫画中。

下一代人则紧盯着智能手机和社交媒体。

香港人可以自由地阅读和观看他们喜欢的东西，他们不希望放弃他们心爱的广东语言和文化。

香港没有完全的民主，但它确实有自由--自由允许几乎所有在中国大陆受到国家限制的事物蓬勃发展：盈利、家庭、崇拜、爱情、知识、表达、实验和犯错。

对于一个植根于不确定性的地方，香港增长了一种自信的感觉。

 

Alongside the Chinese tradition came western musical recitals, avant-garde theatres and daring art shows. Hong Kongers absorbed foreign influence unbothered by the claims of party propagandists who saw plots everywhere to subvert Chinese identity. In late colonial times, legions of serious schoolchildren in British-style uniforms sawed their way through quartets or sonatas, then immersed themselves in Chinese comics on the subway home. The next generation was glued to smartphones and social media. At liberty to read and watch what they liked, Hong Kongers showed no wish to abandon their beloved Cantonese language and culture. Hong Kong did not have complete democracy but it did have freedom – freedom that allowed almost everything to flourish that was constrained by the state in mainland China: profit-making, families, worship, love, knowledge, expression, experimentation and making mistakes. For a place rooted in uncertainty, Hong Kong grew a sense of self-confidence.

 

十九世纪末，香港是城墙的一个缺口；是逃离清朝刽子手的改革者和持不同政见者的天堂。

中国南方的文人、政治活动家和学生络绎不绝，他们前往日本学习另一个古老的亚洲大国是如何改革和向世界开放的。

在中国的暴力政治觉醒中，香港为共和党人、民族主义者和革命者提供了庇护，导致中国最后一个皇帝在1912年退位。

各方都使用香港的港口、电报服务、医院、银行和印刷厂。

 

During the late nineteenth century Hong Kong was a breach in the wall; a haven for reformers and dissidents fleeing the executioners of the Qing dynasty. A stream of south Chinese literati, political activists and students flowed through the colony as they travelled to Japan to study how another ancient Asian power was reforming and opening up to the world. Hong Kong sheltered republicans, nationalists and revolutionaries through the violent political awakening in China that led to the abdication of its last emperor in 1912. All sides used its ports, its telegraph services, its hospitals, banks and printing presses.

 

1920年代，军阀和革命者之间爆发了漫长的中国内战。

一个由军官领导的民族主义政党，即国民党，从中国南方崛起，成为该国最强大的力量。

然后，轮到左翼激进分子在英国殖民警察的监视下到香港避难。

 

In the 1920s the long Chinese civil war broke out between warlords and revolutionaries. A nationalist party led by military officers, the Kuomintang, emerged from south China to become the most powerful force in the country. Then it was the turn of left-wing radicals to take refuge in Hong Kong, under the watch of the British colonial police.

 

日本在20世纪30年代入侵中国，带来了来自各方的新的间谍涌入，而逃亡者在殖民地寻求安全，代理战争在殖民地的后街展开，直到1941年12月香港落入日本皇军手中。

四年后占领结束时，英国恢复了殖民统治，但当中国恢复内战时，香港才刚刚重新站起来。

共产党在1949年取得了胜利，将大批战败的民族主义者和难民推入殖民地。

殖民地成为顽固的反共分子的前哨，他们受到一个小而有力的左派运动的反对。

它的人民生活在一个充满竞争、狂热和无悔的资本主义社会中。

工作、积累和继承是他们的生活方式。

 

Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s brought a fresh influx of spies from all sides, while fugitives sought safety in the colony and proxy wars were waged in its backstreets until the city fell to the Imperial Japanese Army in December 1941. At the end of the occupation four years later, British colonial rule was restored but Hong Kong had barely got back on its feet when the civil war resumed in China. The Communists won in 1949, pushing a horde of defeated nationalists and refugees into the colony. It became an outpost for diehard anti-Communists, who were opposed by a small but vigorous leftist movement. Its people lived in a competitive, frenetic and unrepentantly capitalist society. Work, accumulation and inheritance defined their way of life.

 

当朝鲜和越南的战争肆虐时，香港却繁荣起来；当中国其他地区保持贫穷时，香港却变得富有。

当饥荒笼罩大陆时，香港的殖民地人民却吃得饱饱的。

它是数百万中国穷人的避难所，是上海资本家的安全港，也是宗教的避难所。

殖民统治是稳定的，没有威胁到中国，正如我们将看到的，新中国的统治者决定不打扰。

随着时间的推移，这意味着香港可以成为中国迈向伟大的大门。

 

Hong Kong prospered while wars raged in Korea and Vietnam; and it grew rich as the rest of China stayed poor. Its colonial subjects were well-fed while famine stalked the mainland. It was a refuge for millions of poor Chinese, a safe haven for capitalists from Shanghai and a sanctuary for religion. Colonial rule was stable and did not threaten China, and as we shall see, the rulers of New China decided to leave well alone. In time this meant Hong Kong could be the gate through which China marched to greatness.

 

1967年，极左派煽动暴乱，同情在中国肆虐的文化大革命，直到来自北方的政治风向改变，暴乱才得以平息。

随后出现了一个宽容的时期，尽管香港没有民主，因此也没有办法竞选公职，但共产党政权的反对者和支持者在这里出版、广播、集会、经营自己的社会服务并举办政治活动。

言论自由也提高了这个城市对外国势力的价值，使之成为研究毛泽东中国封闭社会的一个有利地点。

 

In 1967 the ultra-left fomented riots in sympathy with the Cultural Revolution raging in China, until the political wind from the north changed and the rioting burnt out. A period of tolerance ensued in which opponents and supporters of the Communist regime published, broadcast, rallied, ran their own social services and staged political events, despite the fact that there was no democracy in Hong Kong and thus no way to run for office. Free speech also enhanced the city’s value to foreign powers as a vantage point from which to study the closed society of Maoist China.

 

当中国开始开放时，香港开花了。

它因贸易而繁荣，建立了工厂，几乎发明了供应链，并开创了外包制造业。

然而，1989年，长期以来被自鸣得意的精英们视为不关心政治和财富的香港人，起来抗议北京的天安门广场屠杀事件。

一个新的行动主义诞生了。

书籍、杂志、小册子、广播和传真纷纷涌入中国。

 

When China began to open up, Hong Kong flowered. It prospered on trade, built factories, practically invented the supply chain and pioneered outsourced manufacturing. Yet in 1989 the people of Hong Kong, long deemed apolitical and wealth-obsessed by their complacent elite, rose up in protest against the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. A new activism was born. Books, magazines, pamphlets, broadcasts and faxes flowed into China.

 

这种抗争并没有因为1997年英国向中国的移交而停止。

起初，香港作为一个 "高度自治 "的特别行政区，获得了独特的收益。

然后，中国变得更加富有，其马克思主义领导人开始关注其奖项中的'矛盾'。

一场关于政治权力、财富、身份、数据、自由和服从的斗争爆发了。

 

This defiance did not stop at the handover from Britain to China in 1997. At first Hong Kong reaped unique gains as a Special Administrative Region with a ‘high degree of autonomy’. Then China grew richer and its Marxist leaders began to focus on the ‘contradictions’ in their prize. A struggle broke out over political power, wealth, identity, data, freedom and conformity.

 

由北京安排的历届地方领导人来来去去，都没能阻止政治活动的浪潮，2014年出现了广泛的和平民主群众运动，然后是2019年的大规模示威和与警察的激烈战斗。

这场纷争导致家庭分裂，精英阶层分裂，并带来了中国政府的警告，即 "黑手 "和外国敌对势力正在煽动一场旨在改变中国政权的 "颜色革命"。

 

Successive local leaders installed by Beijing came and went, all failing to stem a tide of political activism that saw a broadly peaceful mass movement for democracy in 2014, then huge demonstrations and pitched battles against the police in 2019. The strife divided families, split the elite and brought warnings from Beijing that ‘black hands’ and hostile foreign forces were stoking a ‘colour revolution’ that aimed at regime change in China.

 

2020年，中国政府实施了《国家安全法》，导致民主活动家被逮捕，学校开设新课程，公务员宣誓效忠，中国安全机构可以自由地把人带走。

一些人在被抓之前就已经逃走了。

中国领导人称赞这是秩序的恢复，而他们的反对者则说这是自由的结束。

 

In 2020 the Chinese government imposed a National Security Law which led to the arrest of democratic activists, a new curriculum in schools, loyalty oaths for civil servants and a free hand for China’s security agencies to spirit people away. Some fled before they could be caught. Chinese leaders hailed it as the restoration of order, while their opponents said it was the end of liberty.

 

现代香港的故事中的人物构成了一个生动的角色。

其中一些是著名的：船长和国王，总督和大亨，商人和财主，那些把高楼林立、远处闪闪发光的王朝，以及那些船只在海上航行的航运巨头。

最后一任总督彭定康、亿万富翁李嘉诚、赌场大亨何鸿燊、苏格兰银行家威廉-珀维斯、风格仲裁人邓永锵；讨伐者、雄辩的民主人士，如大律师李柱铭和年轻的冠军黃之鋒--都赢得了国际认可。

 

The characters who populate the story of modern Hong Kong make up a vivid cast. Some are renowned: the captains and the kings, governors and tycoons, traders and money men, the dynasts who reared to the sky that forest of towers that glittered from afar and the shipping magnates whose vessels plied the sea lanes. The last governor, Christopher Patten, the billionaire Li Ka-shing, the casino king Stanley Ho, the Scottish banker William Purves, style arbiter David Tang; crusading, eloquent democrats, like the barrister Martin Lee and the young champion Joshua Wong – all have won international recognition.

 

然而，最有影响力的演员很少在香港公开露面。

他们是沉浸在革命秘密和党的纪律中的中国共产党人，对名声的诱惑免疫，对公众的认可不在意。

本书将表明，关于香港的关键决定一次又一次地由具有战争、阴谋、丧亲和牺牲的残酷经历的人--他们都是男人--在密议中作出。

他们毫不犹豫地杀人或监禁，但他们表现出令人印象深刻的长期计算能力。

按照中国的国策，他们在1977年至1997年期间表现良好。

他们从殖民统治中收回了香港，埋葬了两个他们长期以来宣布为不平等的条约，并击败了战后最强大的英国首相撒切尔夫人，她一直渴望坚持英国的岛国。

他们没有开一枪就完成了这一切，遵守了古代作家孙子的箴言，孙子认为最好的胜利是仅靠诡计取得的。

 

The most influential actors, however, were rarely if ever seen publicly in Hong Kong. They were Chinese Communists steeped in revolutionary secrecy and party discipline, immune to the lure of fame, careless of public approval. This book will show that time and time again the critical decisions about Hong Kong were taken in conclave by men – and they were all men – with cruel experience of war, conspiracy, bereavement and sacrifice. They did not hesitate to kill or to imprison but they displayed an impressive ability to calculate for the long term. By the lights of Chinese statecraft, they did well between 1977 and 1997. They recovered Hong Kong from colonial rule, buried two treaties they had long declared unequal and defeated the strongest British prime minister of the post-war era, Margaret Thatcher, who had yearned to cling on to Britain’s insular possession. They did it all without firing a shot, obeying the dictum of the ancient writer Sun Tzu, who held that the finest victory was one achieved by guile alone.

 

这些人中有一些是世界名人。

人民共和国的创始人毛泽东、他的副手周恩来和他们的继承人邓小平，在所有历史书中都有记载。

他们把党在香港的工作委托给了资深的马克思列宁主义者，他们的名字可能在这里的许多读者面前是第一次出现。

其中一个人物是廖承志，这个讲日语的共产国际代理人，至少被监禁过七次，被清洗过，又被改造过，他在阴影中的角色之间徘徊，并在60多岁时挺身而出，制定了一项对中国和香港有利的政策，在即将获得高级职位时死去，这本来是他的回报。

另一位是李强，他在1970年代作为外贸部长的平淡角色掩盖了他在间谍小说中的生活故事，从殖民地香港的地下工作到美国战争高峰期对北越的无畏远征，所有这些都是由于他在党内作为技术和金融奇才的声誉。

第三个人物，习仲勋，应该得到比他更多的关注：作为广东書記，他说服共产党领导层进行了第一批改革，开放了广东与其邻国香港和澳门之间的贸易和投资。

他作为未来中国统治者习近平的父亲，也值得在历史上留下一个脚注。

 

Some of these men were world figures. Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic, his lieutenant Zhou Enlai and their heir, Deng Xiaoping, are in all the history books. They entrusted the party’s work on Hong Kong to veteran Marxist-Leninists whose names may come before many readers here for the first time. One such character was Liao Chengzhi, the Japanese-speaking Comintern agent, jailed at least seven times, purged and rehabilitated, who flitted between roles in the shadows and stepped forward in his late sixties to forge a policy that worked for China and for Hong Kong, dying on the threshold of the high office that would have been his reward. Another was Li Qiang, whose bland role as foreign trade minister in the 1970s belied a life story out of a spy novel, ranging from underground work in colonial Hong Kong to a fearless expedition to North Vietnam at the height of the American war, all due to his reputation inside the party as a technical and financial wizard. A third figure, Xi Zhongxun, deserved more attention than he has received: as the chief of Guangdong province, he talked the Communist Party leadership into the first reforms that opened up trade and investment between Guangdong and its neighbours, Hong Kong and Macau. He also merits a footnote in history as the father of Xi Jinping, a future ruler of China.

 

所有这些人以及其他许多人的故事，照亮了引领中国从70年代孤立的社会主义走向全球化高峰的道路，这是一个从挖沟到管理改变地球的资本流动的旅程。

 

The stories of all these people, and many others, light the path that led China from the isolated socialism of the seventies to the heights of globalisation, a journey from digging ditches to managing capital flows that changed the planet.

 

香港的繁荣与人们经常宣称的观点之间存在着一种浮士德式的联系，即由于香港没有执政党，因此它没有政治，商业利益应该支配它。

只要香港保持沉默，只要香港的大人物们满面笑容地来到北京，欢迎共产党大家庭的资金和他们自己在人民共和国赚钱的机会，这就适用。

双方都没有指望香港的年轻人、聪明人、愤慨者、弱势群体、被剥削者和智能手机的煽动者。

他们将书写香港历史的下一页。

 

There was a Faustian bond between the prosperity of Hong Kong and the oft-proclaimed perception that, since it had no ruling party, it therefore had no politics and business interests should govern it. This applied so long as Hong Kong stayed quiet and its grandees trooped up to Beijing, all smiles, to welcome the funds of the Communist Party’s great families and their own opportunities to make money in the People’s Republic. Neither side counted on the young, the clever, the indignant, the disadvantaged, the exploited and the smartphone-agitators of Hong Kong. They would write the next pages of its history.

 

对于中国这样一个伟大的国家来说，香港是一块小小的飞地。

然而，它在心理上和政治上的重要性是巨大的。

人们有时会忘记，俄罗斯和日本比任何西方国家都更多地攫取了清帝国的领土。

但是，在19世纪40年代被称为鸦片战争的旷日持久的冲突中，英国夺取了香港，以及后来英法联军烧毁了北京的颐和园，对中国人的心理造成了最大的伤害。

十九世纪的外国入侵打碎了文化优势的假设。

它们对君主主义者和革命者都产生了创伤性的影响。

 

For a nation as great as China, Hong Kong was a tiny enclave. Yet it had outsize psychological and political importance. It is sometimes forgotten that Russia and Japan took greater bites of the Qing Empire’s territory than any western power. But it was the British seizure of Hong Kong in the drawn-out conflict in the 1840s known as the Opium Wars, and the later Anglo-French expedition which burnt down the Summer Palace in Beijing, that inflicted greatest damage on the Chinese psyche. The foreign incursions of the nineteenth century shattered assumptions of cultural superiority. Their effects were traumatic upon monarchists and revolutionaries alike.

 

这就是为什么今天在香港发生的关于自由、秩序和进步的争斗会在首都唤起古老的恐惧。

在一个巨大的躯体中存在着微小的外来容器，总是有一些反应。

它们可以作为催化剂，也可以作为腐烂的媒介。

卡尔-马克思说，完全孤立是保存旧中国的首要条件。

他说："这种隔绝通过英国的媒介猛烈地结束了，"他说，"只要让它接触到开放的空气，它的解体就一定会像任何小心翼翼地保存在密封的棺材里的木乃伊一样。

 

That is why today’s battles over freedom, order and progress in Hong Kong revive ancient fears in the capital. There is always something reactive about the presence of tiny foreign vessels in a huge body. They can act as catalysts or as agents of decay. Karl Marx said that complete isolation was the prime condition for the preservation of the old China. ‘That isolation having come to a violent end by the medium of England,’ he said, ‘dissolution must follow as surely as that of any mummy carefully preserved in a hermetic coffin, whenever it is brought into contact with the open air.’

 

马克思的这些话是针对最后一个皇朝--清朝写的，但他的箴言被认为适用于任何建立在隔离和仪式上的专制制度。

近年来，许多人认为，在经过数十年正义的隐居之后，外国对中国国家的影响将再次证明马克思是正确的，接触资本主义和自由将加速其衰落。

治理中国的人并不打算允许这样。

在不到半个世纪的时间里，他们的国家成为世界上仅次于美国的第二大经济体。

它的崛起是第二次世界大战以来最具破坏性的全球转型。

他们认为，它的持续上升取决于坚定的统治和炽热的民族自豪感，需要不断提醒人们注意过去的弱点和耻辱。

 

Marx wrote those words about the last imperial dynasty, the Qing, but his dictum was taken to apply to any autocracy built on isolation and ritual. In recent years many have thought that foreign influence on the Chinese state after decades of righteous seclusion would prove Marx right again and that exposure to capitalism and liberty would hasten its decline. The men who governed China had no intention of allowing that. In less than half a century their nation became the second largest economy in the world after the United States. Its rise was the most disruptive global transformation since the Second World War. Its continued ascent depended, they believed, on firm rule and a burning national pride, requiring the constant reminder of past weakness and shame.

 

2012年后掌握中国最高权力的共产党领导人习近平是这样说的。

'只有了解鸦片战争后国家的屈辱历史，才能理解中国人民对民族复兴的强烈渴望。

 

Xi Jinping, the Communist leader who took supreme power in China after 2012, put it like this: ‘Only by knowing the nation’s history of humiliation after the Opium War can one understand the Chinese people’s strong yearning for national rejuvenation.’

 

实际上，这可以追溯到比这更远的地方。

 

Actually, it goes back an awful lot further than that.