interested in moneymaking than Tony Blair. Plus, the Chinese have extensive experience settling royal-family problems. Or why didn’t Britain sell England to Hong Kong? Hong Kong can afford it, and that way anyone who was worried about the fate of democracy in the Special Administrative Region could go live in Sloane Square, and the rest of England could be turned into a theme park. There’s quaint scenery, lots of amusements for the kiddies (“Changing of the Wives” at Buckingham Palace is good), and plenty of souvenirs, such as, if you donate enough money to the right political party, a knighthood. But this didn’t happen. And the people of Hong Kong (unless they were very rich) were stuck in Hong Kong. Sure, they had British passports. But these were “starter passports”—good for travel to . . . Macao. Of course, they could have gotten passport upgrades. For a million Hong Kong dollars, they could have gone to Toronto. Very fun. Oh, let’s give the limeys a break. It’s not as if we Americans gave a damn, either. We could have threatened to stealth-bomber the Red Chinese or, for that matter, Margaret Thatcher when she started gift-wrapping Hong Kong for Deng Xiaoping. We could have told China to go kiss Boris Yeltsin’s ass if it wanted to be a most-favored nation. And we could have handed out 6.5 million green cards. Imagine 6.5 million savvy, hardworking citizens-to-be with a great cuisine. What a blessing for America. And how we would hate them. Pat Buchanan would hate their race. The AFL-CIO would hate their wage rate. The NAACP would hate their failure to fail as a minority. And Al Gore would hate 6.5 million campaign contributors who didn’t have to sneak pro-free-trade money to the Democratic National Committee anymore but could go right into polling booths and vote Republican. The surrender of Hong Kong was a shameful moment. But if you missed Martin Lee’s soggy peroration in Statue Square, you might never have known it. The stock market was still on a swell, up 30 percent from a year before, with bulging, steroidal gains in the so-called red chips, the mainland holding companies promoted by the ChiComs. Trade and foreign investment were at unexampled heights. No one was running from the real-estate market. Tiny condominiums in unglamorous districts were going for $500,000.
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