A growing awareness
When the history of Hong Kong in the first decade of the new millennium comes to be written, will anyone hail the 'great' achievement of destroying historic piers to build a new six-lane highway across the harbourfront?
On the other hand, what will history have to say about the people who battled to save Hong Kong's heritage, and finally put to rest the wicked lie that the people of this special administrative region care only for money and themselves?
The job of historians is to put events into context and evaluate trends that help form the development of society. Given the nature of their task, it is likely that our historians will regard the present period as an important time in which civil society developed at a pace faster than at any time in the past.
They will see a trend which was astonishingly manifest on July 1, 2003, when the streets filled with people protesting against the repressive Article 23 anti-subversion legislation; they will note that even after the people succeeded in quashing this legislation they still came out to protest, hoping for other changes.
The genie of protest, all of it peaceful, has erupted out of the bottle with a force that still takes government officials by surprise. The spirit of public assertiveness will not meekly disappear; on the contrary the government now feels the heat when it sets out to do its worst.
The old Star Ferry terminal was spontaneously filled with people vainly attempting to prevent its demolition and, this week, protesters struggled to prevent the demolition of the adjacent Queen's Pier.
From the comfortable perch of their well-appointed offices in Lower Albert Road, senior bureaucrats will take comfort from the fact that both these protests failed to achieve their ends.
Possibly next to go is Hong Kong's oldest market in Central, and then the former police headquarters in Hollywood Road may suffer a similar fate. As the wrecker's ball thunders down on these old structures, officials will sing the praise of progress and affirm the triumph of pragmatic officials getting the job done.
Such is the hubris that exists in Lower Albert Road and among the tame poodles in the Legislative Council, most of whom have never faced a real election, but know how to raise their hands when instructed to do so.
Yet their victories have been of a purely pyrrhic nature. While officials have been destroying our heritage and engaging in a sophisticated battle to keep the people from electing their own government, society has been developing in ways they appear not to even understand.
Who would have thought that anyone would have bothered to defend the ageing Star Ferry pier when, not so long ago, the government managed to demolish the old Murray Building without a murmur? Who would believe that, almost two decades after the brutal suppression of the mainland's democracy movement, Victoria Park would still be filled with people of all ages honouring the victims?
And the increasing awareness of civil society is not just seen in these big issues. Even where I live, in rural Hong Kong, district officials complain they are overwhelmed by an increasing number of people writing in and phoning them about planning matters, hygiene issues and practically everything else.
The fact that pyrrhic victories have been scored over the people who are taking an interest in the fate of their community is absolutely no guarantee that the old authoritarian ways can go on forever.
Pressure is building; it is up to the government whether it wishes to try and resist community involvement, or harness it for a better future.
Many people will say the activists who tried to save Queen's Pier were wasting their time. I believe history will judge them far more sympathetically, and recognise their contribution to an awakening in Hong Kong which has the potential to build a community that has much to contribute. History will be far less kind to those who wrecked the harbour and put their faith in six-lane highways.
Stephen Vines is a Hong Kong-based journalist and entrepreneur
