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GOING HOME
MAY 30, 1997TRANSCRIPT |
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The impending reversion of Hong Kong to Chinese control has many residents who came to the city to work moving back home to the neighboring province of Guangdong.
JIM LEHRER: Now, going home Hong Kong style. Many residents of the British colony were originally from the neighboring province of Guangdong. The island reverts to Chinese control on July 1st, but some have already made the return trip. Ian Williams of Independent Television News reports.
IAN WILLIAMS, ITN: The border between China and Hong Kong, where farmland meets a bustling metropolis, only the farms are on the American side and the modern skyline is the new Chinese city of Singan. It's the gateway to Guangdong Province, China's richest, where an economic revolution has taken place, thanks largely to Hong Kong entrepreneurs, men like textile tycoon Su Wy Yam. Like hundreds of thousands of other Hong Kong Chinese, he was born in Southern China but fled from the Communists. He made himself rich in the British colony but when China opened its door to outside investment in the late 70's, he was one of the first to walk back through it, building a factory in Dongguan, the very town in which he was born and the home of 700,000 other Hong Kong people. Sentiment aside, cheap and plentiful labor made his hometown a much more profitable place for manufacturing than increasingly costly Hong Kong, where he maintains his home and headquarters. But like other Hong Kong businessmen, Mr. Yam has plowed some profit into social services. He and two others built a local school. A health clinic is funded by Mr. Yam, and later this year it will be joined by a new hospital, also paid for by the textile tycoon. Mr. Yam's ancestral village is still largely as he left it in 1958. As a boy, he learned how to sew in his father's textile workshop, which was closed down by the Communists in 1955. His father was forced to work on the land, and the poverty of his family and village encouraged him to leave his home.
IAN WILLIAMS: And this was your house?
MR. YAM: Yes. This was my house. I bought here.
NEWSREEL SPOKESMAN: Starvation is rampant in China.
IAN WILLIAMS: His departure was soon followed by a mass exodus. Thousands of people, including half Mr. Yam's village, fled into Hong Kong to escape the hardship and famine caused by Mao's disastrous great leap forward. And those desperate refugees provided the labor and skills for the industrialization of the British colony, building a manufacturing powerhouse, producing everything from textiles to electronics and children's toys. Among them, Mr. Yam. He started as a janitor in a clothes shop, but by the late 60's was a rich man owning his own factory. And the wealth of Hong Kong businessmen like Mr. Yam has produced a similarly rapid economic miracle across the border in Southern China.
HENRY TANG, Hong Kong Business Group: At the height of Hong Kong's manufacturing industry in 1981 we had 900,000 manufacturing workers in Hong Kong. In 1995, the number of manufacturing--in 1996, the number of manufacturing workers in Hong Kong has shrunk from the 900,000 peak to about 300,000 odd. But we employ about 3 ½ million workers in Guangdong Province alone.
IAN WILLIAMS: Hong Kong entrepreneurs have transformed the economy of Southern China. They've been a driving force behind the development frenzy that's changed beyond recognition the towns and villages from which they fled. And now it's not only in the field of economics that Hong Kong influence is being felt. Talk back radio Hong Kong style is the most popular program in the provincial capital of Guanjo and the first of its type in China. Every evening hundreds of listeners call in to comment on the day's hot issue, which ranges from crime to consumer affairs. Guanjo has also been a pioneer in the field of consumer rights in China; a consumer affairs council modeled on Hong Kong has dealt with more than 50,000 complaints about shoddy or fake goods since new laws were introduced three years ago. In China, challenging authority can be a risky exercise, but if the council's caseload is anything to go by, the people of Guanjo appear increasingly willing to exercise their rights, at least as consumers. Hong Kong Television is widely received and watched in Guangdong Province, which shares the same Cantonese language as Hong Kong and has the highest number of televisions per head in China. But it also shows the sensitivities of the authorities towards some aspects of Hong Kong influence. News items about China are frequently blocked. In Mr. Yam's ancestral village, the houses, long deserted by those who fled to Hong Kong, have been taken over by migrant workers. While Mr. Yam found his fortune in Hong Kong, they're among millions seeking theirs in a Guangdong built with Hong Kong money. The handover is certainly not a reunion of two strangers. Hong Kong's contribution to the modernization of China has been enormous and will continue to grow.
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