On the Edge of a Typhoon in Hong Kong

The political retrospectives of 1989 rolled in during the last few months of the 2009, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breaching of the totalitarian dam in Russia’s European empire taking, reasonably enough, pride of place. In what we like to call “our part of the world” the memories of the dark days in Beijing in June 1989 were to some extent overshadowed by those other anniversaries and of course by the goose-stepping, missile-towing, and mass ribbon-waving celebrations for the sixtieth anniversary of the communist victory in China in 1949—a reminder that at least the remnants of big-time twentieth-century totalitarianism are still with us.

The twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre was the one that brought back the most poignant memories for me, and they are all bound up in a China venture about ideas that almost went severely awry. If it were a movie it might carry a title along the lines “Mission Impossible: The Hong Kong Caper”, for the reality, at least at the moment of truth, was quite as gripping as any thriller and the issues, particularly at the time, were as far from fantasy as they could be.

I was in Hong Kong for the last of a series of three conferences featuring leading conservative thinkers that I had conceived and organised for some major American corporate interests who wanted to establish, as they put it to me, “an intellectually sophisticated, public policy profile”, under the umbrella of a new organisation called Libertad, based in New York and mainly dedicated to advertising freedom. The money and the organisational umbrella were there, and they asked me to think up a concept, organise the whole thing and then make it work. We had just completed the first two conferences, in Melbourne and Sydney.

Having arrived in Hong Kong with a troupe of star thinkers on Saturday, July 14, I first realised something was up on the Sunday. I had taken the speakers over to Macau, which at the time was the last remaining part of the Portuguese empire, for a splendid lunch at a romantic little hotel, Pousada de Sao Tiaso, built in a seventeenth-century Portuguese fort. After a visit to Macau’s maritime museum, we strolled back to the ferry along the promenade. In the hotel near the ferry I noticed a sign at the desk with the words “Typhoon alert” and a big red arrow pointing towards the Pearl River Delta, but particularly aimed at Hong Kong. Naively, I asked whether it was normal to put up such a sign. “Oh yes, sir,” came the response, “but only when there’s a big one on the way.” Having been so distracted over the previous few days, this was the first I had heard about any typhoon. At the press conference back in Hong Kong the next day, the media only wanted to know one thing—would the conference go ahead despite the fury on its way? With a bravado all the more defiant given the total ignorance on which it was based, I shot back: “But of course. It has to.”

To add to the strange sense I had that the whole thing was somehow preordained, and its success predetermined, I had quite randomly thrown into my suitcase on leaving Melbourne a copy of a novel titled Typhoon, by John Gordon Davis, who I had met in 1960s Rhodesia when I was teaching there and he was a Crown Counsel, before he moved on to Hong Kong to take up a similar post. He had written probably the sexiest book about Rhodesia ever published, Hold My Hand I’m Dying, a steamy pot-boiler of the most diverting kind. I had been meaning to read Typhoon for months but didn’t open it until the typhoon approached. The coincidences were uncanny.

Typhoon’s plot was pretty basic but it had great pace. In Hong Kong as a typhoon approaches, a former policeman is hunted by sundry Triads and communists while he mourns his lost love, a local girl and herself a communist. The hero, the former policeman on the run, was, strange to say, called McAdam. Even the author’s middle name, Gordon, seems to have been part of the eerie plot. Here was I, after all, in Hong Kong struggling under huge pressure to pull off a conference about communism, and much else, while this monster of a typhoon, Typhoon Gordon, was raging towards us with every possibility of blowing me, McAdam, out of the water for good. The publisher’s blurb summarises: “a hot summer of passion and terror as Typhoon Rose moves relentlessly towards Hong Kong”. Pretty close, except for me there was a great deal more terror than passion in the real story.

The challenge at its most dramatic came late on the evening of Monday, July 17. We had a room overlooking the harbour at the fairly new Marriott Hotel in Hong Kong’s Central. It was blowing a gale outside and the windows were knocking out a steady rhythm behind the heavy curtains. It wasn’t just a storm; it was a blustering, hell-raising leviathan of a gale.

The typhoon warning was at its highest, just short of the “direct hit” catastrophic level, level eight, which meant the colony was completely shut down. Gordon was now officially a “super typhoon”.

About ten o’clock on that Monday night, the conference eve, I received a call from Martin Lee QC, our star local speaker. His message was simple and to the point: “Tony, this conference must go ahead, it’s very important at this particular time. Tiananmen has rocked the colony. I have a friend who is director of the Hong Kong Observatory, the main source of all our met information, and he is going to call me at 5 a.m. and tell me if the typhoon is moving in another direction, away from us. I will call you soon afterwards. You must be ready with all the phone numbers of the radio and television stations so that you can call them right away. Assuming the typhoon is changing direction, we can start the first session later in the morning and still proceed with the conference. Please stay alert and be ready to move quickly.”

My wife and our four-year-old son Andrew were sleeping and, in order not to wake them, I had commandeered the spacious hotel bathroom, with its telephone and other useful mod cons. I stretched out on a blanket on the bathroom floor and with Martin’s call at the forefront of my mind I had beside me a list of the phone numbers of the news desks at all the main radio and television stations. About two in the morning the desk called to ask whether we would like to change rooms as there was a mighty crane outside our window which might just fall our way. It was a measure of my focus, and possibly my exhaustion, that I replied, “No, thank you, I’m sure we’ll manage.”

Tuesday, July 18, was the date set for the conference under the title “Democracy, Capitalism and 1997”. Registration was supposed to start at 8.15 a.m. with the first speaker, Bernard Levin, launching the day’s proceedings with a talk titled “Capitalism, Democracy and the Present Crisis”. The crisis in question was the pall of anxiety and outrage that had enveloped Hong Kong since the massacre in Tiananmen Square six weeks earlier, prompting the largest protest march Hong Kong had ever seen (over a million people—out of a population of approximately 5 million). The citizens of Hong Kong had been provided with a ghastly glimpse of their possible future and it had stung them into action. That Monday night I was engulfed in my own more pressing crisis, having spent so much time and effort putting the conference together.

There was no way to postpone the event: the speakers were flying out late Tuesday or early Wednesday (if the airport was operating) and the hotel’s function rooms were fully booked out for the next few weeks. And besides, there was no budget to fund a postponed event and all the promotion would be out of date anyway. It was now or never.

When I had dropped into Hong Kong on my one and only planning visit in late April, a three-day whirl of meetings, I was universally counselled that holding such a politically explosive talk-fest in the legendarily apolitical and business-obsessed enclave of Hong Kong was a recipe for a flop. But notwithstanding its traditional aversion to thinking about politics and its future, the business community of Hong Kong was at the time experiencing a state of growing anxiety with the realisation that Margaret Thatcher’s 1984 deal to hand over the colony to China in 1997 was indeed going to happen and they had better make plans. Those plans, as we observed over the next few years, involved finding bolt-holes in the West, and particularly securing Western passports. Vancouver, a city with a similar layout to Hong Kong, in a country with a recently relaxed immigration policy and conveniently close to America’s west coast, seemed to be the most popular destination, with the result that property prices in that city went through the roof.

During that April visit all attention in Hong Kong was focused on the students then massing in Tiananmen Square in a pro-democracy tribute to Hu Yaobang, a rare democrat of sorts and something of an anti-corruption figure in China’s geriatric leadership cabal. He had died on April 15. In May the students were addressed by Zhao Ziyang, a leading reformer and then secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party. It was all gathering momentum and, due largely to the international media (much of which was there for Gorbachev’s historic visit to Beijing in May), had become a unique exercise in political theatre, capturing the world’s attention and mounting fascination. But I was busy, and my attention was elsewhere.

During that brief planning visit I tried to make the Hong Kong leg of my roadshow a success. I shored up a nominal partnership with the Australian Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong (our Sydney and Melbourne conferences had the ACC as partners), thanks particularly to the support of its president Bill Wylie, the leading Australian business figure in Hong Kong for decades and a great gentleman. While the ACCHK did open some doors, the main ACC in Canberra contributed little other than its name and threatened more than once to pull out, arguing that there wasn’t enough time. Hong Kong’s General Chamber of Commerce, run by a starchy former senior British officer, didn’t want anything to do with us; the whole prospect of considering the colony’s future was clearly anathema. Besides, much of their membership wanted to remain as anonymous as possible rather than incur the wrath of the big boys over the border.

I made a deal with the colony’s leading English-language paper, the South China Morning Post, at that time the most lucrative newspaper in the world, by offering them “first bite” with interviews of the conference stars in return for a series of promotional ads. I also lined up a deal with the main Chinese-language business paper, the Hong Kong Economic Journal. Other deals, were struck with radio and television stations.

Of all the issues and intellectual challenges facing the world in that year—and at the time it was far from obvious that it would come to be seen as a watershed year that would witness the collapse of communism in Europe—it struck me that a defence of democratic capitalism was well overdue. For all I knew, communism was here to stay. Orwell, Hannah Arendt and more recently Jeane Kirkpatrick had long convinced me that totalitarianism was that kind of beast. Not least of my motives was the itch to deliver a punch in the nose to all those smug, jargon-ridden, lefty theoreticians I had had to endure over the previous twenty years in Marxist seminars on the “Third World” in universities in Africa, Britain and, most painful of all, Australia.

The growing anxiety in Hong Kong as the year progressed was but one piece in a huge global drama, but Hong Kong’s reaction to the fast-moving events in China would be highly significant, for Hong Kong was being held out as Communist China’s best hope of moving from a totalitarian basket-case to a modern and successful society. The events demonstrated that while communism was collapsing in the West, Tiananmen proclaimed that at least one variant of world communism held that old-style thuggery still had some life in it, if one could call murdering the best of your nation’s youth “life”. And even if I had doubted the Western media’s coverage of the massacre, I had reason to believe the worst. Just before my departure for Hong Kong I received a blow-by-blow eyewitness report from a brave ex-colleague of mine from Monash, Bob Beveridge. He had committed himself to teaching in China and was shattered by what he had seen.

Initially, I just thought of the conference project as one confined to Australia. But given that the costs of drawing on a glittering cast of world thinkers could easily be spread over a few extra days without adding much to the cost, it struck me that we could include a show in Hong Kong without much pain. The funders greeted the suggestion with enthusiasm. Oh, as I reflected at the time, to have backers with deep pockets who let you get on with it!

As for the question of why I was putting on such a potentially incendiary event in a town as tough as Hong Kong, the answer was personal as much as anything. My uncle John Luff and his wife Kay had lived there since before the war, and before that in Shanghai. For almost thirty years he was a well-known journalist, columnist, film critic and man about town and wrote two books about the colony, The Lost Years, the story leading up to the Japanese invasion and the early stages of the occupation, and Hong Kong Cavalcade, a celebration of all the things that made the place special. Both of my dear sisters went out there in the 1960s in their late teens to teach in Kay’s primary school and both met their future husbands there. Throughout my growing-up years I knew about Hong Kong from the photos which seemed to arrive with great frequency, and the marvellous stamps plastered all over the envelopes. To a child’s mind the place was an exotic hideaway. As I discovered for myself many years later it could also be a lot of fun.

Jan Morris, Hong Kong’s most eloquent chronicler, summed up Hong Kong’s unique historical and geopolitical claims in Hong Kong (1988):

By the 1980s the British Empire was, in a generic sense, dead and gone. Hong Kong was a posthumous prodigy … It was like a race against time—as though in some ill-defined way Hong Kong might prove something, accomplish some definitive act, before it passed out of the hands of the capitalist West into those of the always unpredictable Chinese. It might prove something about capitalism itself, or it might send off a valedictory testament to the meaning of the lost empire.

Jan Morris had a marvellous feel for the place and, although I had met her before, I consider it one of the high points of my travels in Asia when, the day after the handover in 1997, July 1, we had tea at the Peninsula Hotel and she reminisced about her more piquant experiences in the colony, and what the day before might portend for years to come. Her enthusiasm for so many things was endearing, and she was delightful company.

As I lounged on the bathroom floor through that night before the conference that might not happen, I started to wonder what on earth I was doing. I had given myself only three months from conception to execution to pull this whole thing off, with little administrative backup. As the conference drew closer I gathered that there were a few parties gleefully hoping that I would crash, and not all were lefties. Fortunately, I had a good friend in Bob Browning to keep an eye out for snipers and a first-class PA called Suzie, a rare no-nonsense personality with a redeeming if mischievous sense of humour.

It was a very long night in that stylish bathroom. I listened to the BBC World Service on the radio, with all the latest on the drama and violence in Beijing, and that’s when it struck me how close even the plot of Davis’s thriller was to the reality of that moment. I didn’t sleep, I didn’t dare to. If the typhoon hit dead on, the conference would collapse in a heap, and I could just imagine the recriminations in New York. There was already a power play in progress. Apparently the initial enthusiasm had waned somewhat and there was an attempt to get rid of a senior vice-president who was the main champion of the conferences. They assumed this Hong Kong venture would be a flop and they would be able to dump him with a plausible excuse. This went some way to explaining why their Hong Kong office seemed to have no interest in the conference.

Then at 5.15 a.m., the call came. It was Martin. “Good news,” he proclaimed for starters, with discernible optimism in his voice. “The observatory tells me Gordon is moving away from Hong Kong. We can go ahead. The typhoon warning will be lifted by 10 a.m. and we can start just after that.” I got onto the phone and called up every media outfit on my list. By 6 a.m. almost all the radio and television news broadcasts were the same. Two items led the news: “Typhoon Gordon is moving north towards the Chinese coast and away from Hong Kong”, followed by “Today’s conference on ‘Democracy, Capitalism and 1997’ to be held at the Marriott Hotel is going ahead, but with an 11 a.m. start and concluding at the later time of 6 p.m.”

It was the kind of publicity you couldn’t buy. It meant that a conference which might have attracted a hundred or so business and media types a couple of months before, if you were lucky, was now the biggest show in town.

The cast included Michael Novak, the eloquent explicator of the subject of his best-known book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Michael held a Chair with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. To convey the flavour of each speaker’s contributions, I will insert a sample of their writing from around the time of the conference, starting with Novak:

Late in May of this anniversary year of the French Revolution of 1789, Chinese students … openly defying a communist regime carried before them a white plaster replica of the Statute of Liberty. During this same spring, both the Soviet Union and Poland were experiencing their first relatively free elections under communist domination. In Hungary, moves toward democracy and capitalism are proceeding … Recently one hears often that of the three great systemic ideas of the twentieth century—communism, fascism, and democratic capitalism—only the last is still vigorous and growing. Just as fascism collapsed in the ashes of its cataclysmic defeat in 1945, so also, not quite forty-five years later, communism has died, even in the minds of party elites. I want to emphasize: has died as an idea; in other words, not necessarily as residual reality—a militarily dangerous reality, at that …

Also from the States was Peter Berger, one of the most interesting sociologists of our time, in fact so interesting that one hesitates to call him a sociologist at all. His interests were very much in the history, and I suppose sociology as well, of ideas. I had been particularly fascinated in my twenties, when I taught political philosophy at various African universities, with his early book on the key paradigms of the development debate, Pyramids of Sacrifice, mercifully free of the turgid Marxism which pervaded the subject in those days. What made him particularly attractive for my immediate purposes was the fact that he had just had published a book titled The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty Propositions about Prosperity, Equality and Liberty, an anatomy of capitalist dynamics from a socio-historical perspective, the whole infused with the author’s characteristic incisiveness and verve. Berger:

Both those who fear and those who hope that tomorrow belongs to capitalism are a bit premature. Socialism is not primarily a theory that can be falsified by empirical evidence; it is a potent myth, which means ipso facto that it resists falsification; it is also the repository of powerful vested interests that could not care less about the scientific validity of the ideas that legitimate them. Hegel to the contrary, human history is not the march of reason on earth. What is more, the socio-economic successes of capitalism by no means guarantee its future triumph. Darwin to the contrary, it is not necessarily the fittest who survive in the evolution of human institutions … Capitalism faces serious problems … It is possible that these problems may at some future point end in catastrophe. Possible, yes; probable, no … I believe that we really have no morally plausible alternative to continuing betting on capitalism. Capitalism, over against any empirically available alternative in the modern world, is the best bet to raise large numbers of people from degrading misery to an acceptable standard of living. Capitalism offers the best chance for a reasonably open and equitable society. And the evidence indicates that capitalism is the necessary (although obviously not the sufficient) condition for democracy. Under modern conditions, socialism is the only real alternative to capitalism (on this the Marxists are quite right), and socialism has been a global fiasco … the notion of some as yet undefined “third way” between capitalism and socialism is an unhelpful mirage. Morally speaking, capitalism is the only plausible game in town. All we can do is to play it responsibly.

I had also approached two British writers I had long admired, each highly controversial in his own way, and eloquent exponents of the indivisible link between capitalism and freedom—Bernard Levin and Paul Johnson.

I had read Levin for as long as I can remember reading newspapers, way before he was locked into his famous column in the Times. I particularly remember his often devastating theatre reviews in the Daily Mail, and his contributions to that pioneering television satire, That Was the Week That Was, in the 1960s. In England he was something of a revered presence. The South China Morning Post carried a profile of him that went a bit over the top, but only a bit: “Wherever he goes, it follows, Most Remarkable Journalist of Our Time, Best Living Essayist et al, his name evokes admiration, adoration, anger, angst … He believes Britain has a moral responsibility to give right of abode to Hong Kong’s people. He also believes this won’t happen, so argues for a fallback position involving other countries giving passports.”

Bernard was the star of the conference. He was seen by the citizens of that de facto city-state as their international champion. One of his contributions rang true to many at that time:

Contemplating the present discussion, in political circles and the press, of the future of Hong Kong, I own to feeling very slightly sick. Wherever you cut the argument, it bleeds nothing but money … Has nobody noticed, or are we supposed to ignore … the fact that there are five million human beings in Hong Kong who are more important that the rate of exchange?

He wasn’t in the best of health in Hong Kong and decided to stay at the hotel rather than join the group to Macau. He was also rather depressed, which seems to fit in with his request to fly to Easter Island as part of the speaker’s deal. He was afflicted with some serious ailment which he didn’t want to mention. When he died in 2004 I read that he had been suffering from Alzheimer’s. I think he was a sad soul as he grew older but he was also more alive and pugnaciously brilliant than any other journalist I’ve met. Levin:

I … give notice that for the rest of this address I shall eschew entirely the suspect word [capitalism] … and use instead, as a description of the economic system we advocate, the word “enterprise”, which in addition to being a better description of what we mean, and a word much more appropriately dynamic, can boast a far older lineage, being first recorded, and in its modern sense, too, as early as 1475. Clearly, our ancestors knew what they were about. Hail, then, enterprise … The idea which it encapsulates is literally the most important principle in the modern world, for it is the only true test of liberty itself. We recently observed the bicentenary of the French Revolution, a movement that began with a promise of freedom, justice and plenty, and turned into a nightmare of tyranny, illegality and want. But the perversion of the movement into the opposite of what it was supposed to be was not an accident; it was the first truly ideological system, grounded in Rousseau’s terrible doctrine of the General Will, the source and strength of every totalitarian system from that day to this. We do not live, you and I, under a totalitarian system; nor do we seriously fear to fall into totalitarian hands. But we, too, in a hundred ways, are subject to the malign influence of Rousseau’s doctrine, which in its essence declares that A knows what is good for B better than B does himself.

Whereas Bernard was a somewhat temperamental grenade thrower, Paul Johnson was (and still is) an elegant all-rounder, as much at home knocking off a thousand words for the Spectator or some American journal as putting together a formidable portrait of an age in book form (rarely under 500 pages and packed with rich anecdotes and beguiling erudition). He had published Modern Times a couple of years earlier, and his excoriating portraits of the leading thinkers of the modern age, The Intellectuals, his favourite book, had just appeared. In a recent profile in the Wall Street Journal he is described as “the most celebrated and best-loved historian in America”.

Whereas I hadn’t met Bernard before and negotiated his involvement through his agent in London (he seemed to like the impersonal approach), I had had dealings with Paul. Initially at a distance: he was editor of the New Statesman when I contributed pieces from Rhodesia in the late 1960s. While he was on a lecture tour of Australia in the mid-1980s, I was asked by Richard Krygier, the founder and then publisher of Quadrant, to introduce him at a Quadrant dinner in Sydney. I think the logic of my involvement was that Paul at the time was writing a lot about journalism and I was Quadrant’s “Watchman” columnist on the media. We struck up a rapport, flew to Melbourne together and met up again there. It was consequently easier for me to enlist him to the cast of speakers than might otherwise have been the case. Johnson:

Our century has witnessed a titanic struggle between the forces of collectivism and the forces of free enterprise … As we approach the last decade, it appears that the battle, which began in earnest with Lenin’s seizure of power in Russia in 1917, will end in a decisive victory for capitalism … After seventy years of costly and unsuccessful experiment, even those who were once most wholeheartedly committed to socialism are now, by their actions if not yet by their words, repudiating it, for the simple reason that it has failed to produce the goods. This is clearly an economic victory. It is a political victory too. But also, perhaps even more important, it is above all a moral victory … How so? Is there not a paradox here? Is not socialism, with all its faults, about generous, moral impulses? And is not capitalism, with all its practical virtues, about greed? Now it is certainly true that socialism, in so far as it seeks to create an earthly utopia, enshrines a fundamental moral impulse. It aims to better entire societies, indeed of humanity as a whole. Most socialists, like Lenin, or Marx himself, tend to be middle-class intellectuals, who see themselves as idealists, fighting on behalf of the poor and underprivileged … Unfortunately, the study of history, and usually our own personal experience of how the world works, shows that the moral impulse of socialism is only too easily corrupted by the far more compelling desire to assert authority over others. I often think that St Paul was mistaken when he asserted: “The love of money is the root of all evil.” He would have been closer to the truth had he argued that the root of evil is the love of power. The pursuit of power destroys idealism more surely than any other force, and nowhere is this maxim more conclusively demonstrated than in the history of socialism.

All our speakers were well known and regulars on the international lecture circuit; they were busy people. Juggling the dates to fit all concerned was consequently not easy but somehow we funnelled everything into a ten-day period in the middle of July: the time allowed for them to fly to Sydney, speak at the two big events in Sydney and Melbourne and fly on to Hong Kong for four days and then home.

One speaker I failed to land was Jean-Francois Revel, the author of The Totalitarian Temptation and other seminal books about the trendy perversions of French intellectual life and much else besides. I was familiar with his contributions to such journals as Encounter over the years, but I was particularly struck by a piece that had appeared in Commentary in January 1989 titled “Is Communism Reversible?” to which he provided a fairly clear response: No. We had a long and enjoyable phone conversation on the subject—he in Paris and I in Melbourne—and he reiterated his view that communism would probably last for many years. He said he would have loved to come to Australia in mid-July but was trapped into a Bastille Day speaking engagement. It was a day, he told me, he had little enthusiasm for and his commitment, that day, the 200th anniversary, was to speak against the legacy of the revolution.

In early 1989 the evidence for the irreversibility of communism in its full Marxist-Leninist manifestation seemed pretty overwhelming. Noting the first English-language publication of Revel’s Last Exit to Utopia, the Wall Street Journal recently carried an appreciation of the writer, who died in 2006, by favourably comparing him to “such bien-pensant idols as Jean-Paul Sartre (an admirer of Stalin) and Michel Foucault (a cheerleader of the Ayatollah Khomeini)” besides whom he “deserves to be ranked as the pre-eminent French political philosopher of the second half of the 20th century”. High praise indeed, although probably not sufficiently generous to that other estimable French thinker and anti-totalitarian, Raymond Aron.

To insert a polished Australian dimension into the two local conferences, I asked Geoffrey Blainey if he would be an after-dinner speaker at the conclusion of the day’s talk. In both cases—in Sydney and Melbourne—he shared the evening with Robert Emmett Tyrell Jnr, then publisher of the American Spectator, who unfortunately revealed himself, as a speaker, to be a bit of a ham and he went on for far too long (in my defence I can claim he had been foisted on me by our sponsors). Geoffrey saved the two evenings with that inimitable grace of his, spanning the decades of history’s wry curiosities and prompting his audience to chuckle through it all. Blainey:

The political success [of Australia] was to set up a democracy when that form of government was untried in most parts of the world … In the eyes of some commentators, capitalism and democracy are natural opponents but in Australia in the last 130 years they have co-existed … Like two big ships carrying a wide range of passengers and possessing no captain, they rarely travel in convoy. On the other hand they have rarely been in danger of a major collision in the 20th century.

There was massive coverage of the conferences in both Australia and Hong Kong, particularly Hong Kong. In Australia the backing of News Limited made a huge difference; we were well served throughout by the Australian and its editor, the witty, warm-hearted Frank Devine, who took a close personal interest in the success of the venture. For two weeks before the first conference we had large ads in the Australian promoting the show as “the Business Event of the Decade”, admittedly not an extravagant claim. More to the point, I would say, not without bias, that it was probably the greatest festival of conservative ideas this country has ever seen. The quid pro quo for the Australian’s valuable advertising was for me to feed articles from the speakers for exclusive publication in the days leading up to the first conference, in Sydney, on July 11. The first piece was by Paul Johnson on “Why Communism Capitulated” in the Weekend Australian of July 1–2.

Given the priorities of the sponsors and the need to promote a “top end of town” image, I targeted the big business community, despite knowing full well, after years of observing their general indifference to matters intellectual, that when it came to ideas about the world at large they tended to look the other way. I was much taken by an observation in an Economist editorial which I used in the promotion: “During the 1990s the business ethic is going to be questioned, criticised, sometimes even vilified. Many of its supporters are in no position to answer back.” Peter Alford, writing for the Melbourne Herald, nicely captured the challenge:

 ‘Local right-thinking folk are agog at the prospect of sitting at the feet of not one, not two, but five international conservative gurus. The organisers … are seeking to instil a bit of missionary zeal for capitalism among Australian business people. Since Australia isn’t exactly fermenting with free enterprise-type thinkers and writers to serve up some high-minded ammunition, business people tend to hunker down in silence.’

Bob Santamaria was in awe of the line-up of stars. Writing in the Australian, he said:

‘It would be difficult to equal the identity and intellectual quality of the five speakers … The explicit objective of the conferences—to drive home the essential superiority of what Karl Marx called the capitalist mode of production over its various collectivist alternatives (particularly the Marxist)—could not have been more fortunately timed.’

He appreciated the clear anticommunist thrust of the conferences but, consistent with his own distinctive brand of Christian communitarianism, observed: “Whether the victor [capitalism] will long survive the victory is open to doubt when it shows so little sign of caring for its own legitimacy.” One could easily imagine Bob’s thundering contempt (mixed with a certain glee) at capitalism’s recent close shave with catastrophe.

In the September 1989 issue of Quadrant, Brian Buckley wrapped up the Australian conferences. Writing during domestic economic doldrums, long before the China commodities boom had taken off, he concluded: “At least Australia exported something to Hong Kong this year.”

For the Hong Kong event I realised we would need a degree of China-specific content, or at least some speakers who could address Hong Kong’s unusual situation. After all, here was a place that had been declared for decades the most economically free place on the planet, with all the personal liberties one would expect in a modern British territory, colony or no colony, democracy or no, and it was being handed over to a totalitarian communist regime whose human rights record had been atrocious. To cover myself on the business front, we had been targeting the local business community in our promotions (we were after all charging approximately US$100 per person to defray some of our costs and keep the audience relatively up-market).

I had lined up Leon Richardson, an American who had lived in Hong Kong for years and was a respected economic commentator for the press and radio. For an historical perspective I invited an old teacher of mine, Professor Michael Lindsay, Lord Lindsay of Birker, a remarkable figure who had been a university lecturer in Beijing before the war and then served as press attaché at the British embassy. During the civil war he served behind the lines, the subject of his first book, The Unknown War. He had taught at the School of International Service at the American University in Washington DC for many years, after a difficult spell at the ANU, and was the son of the legendary political philosopher and Master of Balliol College, Oxford, in the 1930s, A.D. Lindsay. Michael, who died in 1994, was the subject of much media curiosity during and after the conference, possibly explained by his less than diplomatic contempt for Mao and his legacy. We met up again in Washington in 1992. With him was his sprightly wife and close companion Hsiao Li Lindsay, the author of the memoir Bold Plum: With the Guerrillas in China’s War Against Japan. He told me that he found the conference and his time in China in 1989 one of the most enjoyable experiences of his long retirement.

Pierre Ryckmans, a good friend of Michael’s over many years, described him as “a most unconventional man … for the last quarter of a century, with perverse obstinacy, historical events repeatedly proved him right in his basic diagnosis and forecasts”. Given that Pierre was and is one of the world’s great authorities on all aspects of Chinese culture, and with the publication of Chinese Shadows in the late 1970s, one of the wisest and bravest scholars of modern Chinese history, he was an obvious choice as one of our speakers for the Hong Kong leg. Alas, he declined, but he did attend the Sydney conference, which he told me he enjoyed immensely. At the time of the Tiananmen massacre, of all the West’s sinologists he could probably claim the most perceptive and honourable record on the subject of Mao’s depraved reign. But, of course, being the man he is he wouldn’t make any such claim, or any claim at all.

I visited Pierre and his family in their Sydney apartment, before the conference but after Tiananmen, in the company of Bob Browning, and he enthralled us with his testimony of how some of his arch-enemies over Mao’s contribution had been stunned by the massacres to the point of submitting a mea culpa. This didn’t include, I gather, Gough Whitlam, who had exercised his influence as a member of Sydney University’s Senate to try to block Pierre’s appointment to the Chair of Chinese Studies; luckily for the university’s reputation Whitlam failed.

Our star local attraction was the barrister and human rights fighter Martin Lee QC, then leader of the democracy forces in the colony’s Legislative Council. Martin was the great challenger of Britain’s claims for the future. He didn’t think Britain would come through in the end but he knew that only by pushing the case for democracy and the protection of inherited freedoms would the colony’s citizens have even a hope of securing a tolerable result. With the hindsight of thirteen years, it would have to be conceded that the efforts of Martin and his fellow democrats have made a significant difference, and infused the fifty-year guarantee of the Basic Law with enhanced inviolability.

There was a final footnote to this footnote to Tiananmen. The Hong Kong show was over, the typhoon didn’t hit square on, the conference was a success and I survived. All the speakers were happy, they had got plenty of publicity for their views and their books, and they left the colony. I too planned to leave after a couple of days tidying up the loose ends.

We got to Kai Tak airport in good time in late afternoon on the Friday only to have to wait for several hours for our flight to Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, on the northern shore of Borneo, our much anticipated holiday after weeks of stress. Our specific destination was the very beachside resort later chosen by Nick Leeson in 1995 while on the run from the authorities in Singapore over the collapse of Barings Bank. Having tasted its delights I can recommend it, especially for someone on the run or, as in my case, for someone who has just survived a near wipe-out.

Just getting to this tropical idyll wasn’t simple. As the plane taxied to the take-off runway, the pilot made an announcement that triggered a noticeable emotional response throughout the plane: “Ladies and gentlemen, we apologise for the delay but we had to wait for an essential engine part. Unfortunately it has not arrived. As a result, our take-off and landing will be very pronounced. We apologise.” As the plane lifted into the air and assumed the near-vertical trajectory of a missile, I remember thinking, this is how it happens, you survive everything and they get you when you think you are home and dry.

My only source of reassurance, faint as it was, was the memory of the hero’s survival in the John Gordon Davis novel. As this retrospective ramble attests, the worst didn’t happen and the conference triumph was all the sweeter.