Underground Front

Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong, by Christine Loh. Hong Kong University Press (£32.95, US$45, HK$275)

W hen Tsang Yok-sing, the normally genial leader of Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing political party, was asked in 2008 whether he was a member of the Chinese Communist party, he refused to respond. Mr Tsang said he would not answer such questions because the attitude in the territory to the CCP was “very negative”.

Even when he had founded his own grouping in the early 1990s, he complained that anyone associated with Beijing was branded a “commie thug”.

Mr Tsang’s sensitivity was odd on a number of levels. This was hardly an are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been-a-communist type question. After all, China under the CCP’s rule had gloriously regained sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997. The Chinese economy has been steaming ahead for three decades, pulling Hong Kong with it. The territory’s ruling capitalist class, which had once cuddled up to the British, had long moved on to seek the CCP’s favour.

Mr Tsang’s shyness, however, is easily explained. The CCP has operated in Hong Kong since the 1920s but to this day remains underground, its presence both unregistered and unacknowledged. In refusing to say whether he was a CCP member, which he almost certainly has been for decades, Mr Tsang was just adhering to the ultimate law of the land: party discipline.

Christine Loh grapples in her fascinating book with what she calls “the fundamental contradiction”. “How is it possible”, she asks, “that even when Hong Kong is now Chinese territory that the ruling party has to demean itself by functioning as an underground party?” Not only that, the CCP’s insistence on remaining underground may also be in contravention of Hong Kong’s laws requiring such groupings to register.

Part of the explanation lies in the nature of the party itself. Even in China, the CCP remains a super-secretive body, by habit and instinct. The CCP has 78m members and presides over the most populous country on earth and the globe’s great rising power, but it still feels little need to explain the functions of its leaders and all-powerful departments.

There is a lot to this book that is also peculiar to Hong Kong and its own unique history and status. That necessitates Loh retelling much of the well-worn story of the Sino-British negotiations leading up to the 1997 handover. But it is also important to explain the attitude of people such as Tsang, who remembers being brutally locked up by the colonial authorities along with his brother and sister in the wake of communist-inspired riots in the colony in the 1960s.

Tsang is in many ways an honourable character, forgoing a potentially high-flying academic career to teach at a leftist school in Hong Kong for three decades after his jailing. He is now president of the territory’s Legislative Assembly.

But one wonders how the CCP kept his loyalty – because, much as has happened in China itself, the party has found a new, richer class of allies to cultivate. The CCP’s United Front Department, responsible for herding political friends into impervious pro-China lobbying blocs, worked out early on that it needed the territory’s tycoons onside to win Hong Kong over.

Loh expertly charts the formal bureaucratic reporting lines of the CCP’s functionaries in Hong Kong and fillets the excellent material from the book written by Xu Jiatun, the party’s former senior figure in the territory, who fled to the US in the wake of the 1989 upheaval in Beijing. But the book’s great strength is also, consciously, I think, its chief weakness, that it largely sticks to the official history, relying on documents, news reports and some personal diaries. There are few interviews and little attempt to flesh out the narrative with the drama and personalities.

Trawling through the official story made me yearn to read the alternative, John le Carré version, if you like – about the nods and winks between the British colonial authorities and the Chinese about the CCP’s presence in Hong Kong, the secret meetings across the border by party members, the flows of money from Beijing to the patriots and the cloak-and-dagger summons to the capital for loyalists.

For that, we might need access to the colony’s former intelligence files, gathered by the so-called Special Branch. Those files, though, sailed out of Hong Kong harbour with the last governor in 1997. I suspect all sides still have every incentive to keep them buried deep underground for some time to come.

The writer is the FT’s deputy news editor and author of The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers