Good Samaritans of Hong Kong
Nearly 150 years ago, a Eurasian boy in Shanghai was nicknamed Donggua, or 'winter melon', because of his long, narrow head. The nickname became history when he adopted the name He Dong, combining schoolyard slang and the surname of a lodger in his Chinese mother's boarding house.
As Sir Robert Hotung, the boy later became chief comprador to Jardine Matheson and financier to the Chinese revolution. His children and grand-children enlarged the family fortune with ventures in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macau. Their exploits and their wealth still dazzle, in a larger-than-life manner that has become synonymous with the glamour of Hong Kong.
Deep in the hills of rural Guangxi, near a stream that flows into the Pearl River Delta, lives another little boy. Wu Donglu's name honours both the long-dead Sir Robert and the fact that the child was born on a dirt strip on the side of a country road - so that he is 'Dong born-in-the-road'. The role of circumstance, enterprise and good ideas linking the two boys reflects the positive energy unleashed when Hong Kong sophistication meets Chinese ingenuity.
Usually, the results are commercial. This time, they worked together to produce a humanitarian solution to one of the outcomes of China's deepening wealth divide - astonishingly high rates of infant and maternal mortality in the nation's poverty zones.
Longsheng county is a pocket of destitution in a tour-destination region. It is near Guilin and the Li River, studded with limestone cliffs and lime-green rivers. Nearly 80 per cent of its residents are poor farmers of the Zhuang, Dong, Miao and Yao minority groups. As recently as 1997, 46 per cent of babies died in childbirth because their families were either too poor to afford hospital care, or the journey down hillsides to the public road was too long and arduous for the mothers.
Hou Qiuying, from the Zhuang minority, was vice-director of the Longsheng county women's association in 1999, when it began to focus attention on the horrendous plight of minority women facing market-driven health-care costs.
In March 1999, Ms Hou noticed a letter sent to the women's association from the wife of a colleague of Eric Hotung's Beijing representative. A grandson of Sir Robert, Mr Hotung was looking for new philanthropic projects in China, large or small. The women's association had already managed to raise 10,000 yuan in its first month, but the Hotung fund added significant financial clout.
Su Hunluan, the mother of Wu 'born-in-the-road' Dong, was a typical case. On the morning that she felt labour pains, she sent her husband to raise 400 yuan from relatives to cover hospital costs. Then she went out to wait for the bus.
Once on the bus, Su's water broke. The driver made her get off because of a local belief that a birth in transit would make his vehicle unlucky. Nobody on the bus helped her. 'I had no choice but to wait by the roadside until my husband came,' she said.
Her husband brought a doctor, who delivered the baby on the roadside. The Hotung fund covered the costs of her subsequent recovery, in hospital. Since October 2000, when Wu Donglu was born, the fund has spent 2.4 million yuan on direct subsidies, education - and a maternity ambulance sparked by his mother's roadside plight - for Longsheng county.
In just three years, Longsheng's infant mortality rate has dropped by half, to 21 per cent. As Hong Kong worries about its political future in China, it should remember that its contribution can be not just financial, but in human terms. Projects such as the Hotung fund in Longsheng can represent the human face of Hong Kong across the mainland, and should be imitated.
Edith Terry is a writer based in Hong Kong
