Ten years after the handover to China, Hong Kong carries on much the same as before, although calls for democracy are starting to rumble beneath the commercial veneer, writes Clifford Coonanin Hong Kong.
An elderly woman, wearing old but well-kept pyjamas, wielding a cane and sporting a youthful, bobbed haircut only slightly flecked with grey, is walking up an impossibly steep slope in the western district of the former Crown colony of Hong Kong. She shrugs when asked how the reversion to Chinese rule has affected her life. "No matter who runs Hong Kong, this hill is still a tough climb," she says and laughs. It starts to rain.
In 1997, torrential rain drenched the shoes of British army officers and People's Liberation Army troops, fell on Prince Charles and late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, and inundated the British handover ceremony and Chinese fireworks alike. Ten years after the reversion to Chinese rule, it looks like rain again in Hong Kong, and it's the deluge that people remember the clearest.
Mr Tam, who runs a shop selling everything from Marxist knick-knacks and spectacles to lanterns and fortunes, is moving his wares in out of the rain. He initially reacts sceptically when he hears a foreigner speaking Mandarin, but, as someone who came from Beijing 50 years ago to settle in Hong Kong, he's happy to switch from alien Cantonese into northern dialect.
Asked how he feels about China running Hong Kong, he responds "Mamahuhu" in Mandarin, which translates as "so-so". But his big beef is with the gentrification of the SoHo area, where his shop is located.
Hong Kong's economy has thrived from the closer relationship with the mainland, despite some predictions that unification would see it sidelined by Chinese economic powerhouses such as Shanghai and Shenzhen.
Hong Kong has just witnessed its three fastest years of growth since the late 1980s.
"Look at these places. Lots of fancy places. No one comes to mine, though," says Tam, pointing towards the row of premises which includes a Lebanese restaurant, a tapas bar, an upper-end Thai place and a couple of estate agents.
"Everything is so expensive these days," he says.
Not so far from Tam's bric-a-brac shop is the Green Lantern, which is owned by Olive Dundon from Stillorgan. It sells gorgeous bed-sheets, silks and traditional furniture from Fujian and Shaanxi in China, and is about to launch a contemporary furniture line. She set up her shop seven years ago, but founded the company in 1997.
"I came for one year and ended up staying. I didn't expect anything too dramatic from the handover. Hong Kong people are very connected with Hong Kong. Some were afraid, some went to Canada or Australia, but they were so determined," says Dundon.
"People were so busy that life went on. They were not worried that something could happen. They still know that Beijing controls things, but they just get on it with it," she says. "That's the Hong Kong way. Hong Kong evolves every couple of years. People are emotionally attached to it."
While most people are expecting rain, fire is also on the cards, and pyrotechnics are going to be high on the agenda in the 10th anniversary celebrations as citizens prepare for a huge display of nearly 32,000 fireworks above Victoria Harbour.
"This is the same as during the bloody handover ceremony," says exasperated driver Li Fat Cheung, whose classic red and white Hong Kong taxi is stuck behind at least five Lexus cars on Queen's Road Central.
"The leaders are staying at the Hyatt and it's screwed everything up here. Bah. I don't mind the Chinese coming in - we're all Chinese after all - but it has made things expensive," he says. "And it looks like rain." The rain seems to preoccupy people. Plus the traffic. And, increasingly, democracy.
Hong Kong was taken from China by Britain in three phases, starting with the mid-19th-century "opium wars". In 1984, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and Chinese leader Zhao Ziyang signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which agreed that all of Hong Kong would be returned to China at midnight on June 30th, 1997.
Among the officials coming to Hong Kong is president Hu Jintao, who said this week he was satisfied with the way Hong Kong had developed in the last 10 years.
"With the compatriots' united efforts and the solid support from the motherland, I firmly believe Hong Kong will have a more splendid future," Hu said this week in Beijing.
China's Communist rulers have largely allowed Hong Kong to govern itself, and do not interfere in press freedom, just as promised in the "50-years-no-change" terms of the handover. The territory's mini-constitution, called the Basic Law, promises autonomy until 2047, under the "one country, two systems" formula.
However, Beijing has not allowed the city's chief executive to be directly elected by universal suffrage. China fears calls for democracy could spread onto the mainland.
As it stands, the chief executive is picked by a committee of 800 electors who largely back Beijing, while only half of the legislative council's 60 members are elected.
This suits the powerful business lobby, which holds sway in the free-market territory of Hong Kong, where even the top government figure is known as a chief executive. They say democracy is bad for trade and might anger the central leadership.
But calls for increased democracy are growing and polls show most Hong Kong residents favour universal suffrage. In recent years - notably on July 1st, 2003 - hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong people have taken to the streets to call for democracy. The marches embarrassed Beijing and forced the central government to replace the unpopular Tung Chee-hwa with Donald Tsang, a career civil servant who is famous for his smoothness and his bow ties.
"Hong Kong people have learned to trust Chinese leaders more but the majority of us feel Hong Kong Chinese," says Martin Lee, the founder of Hong Kong's Democratic Party and a veteran campaigner for universal suffrage in Hong Kong.
"What I'm afraid of is when Donald Tsang gives us democratic elections in 2012 that they won't be genuine. They'll make sure there's a screening process. Beijing will pick two candidates," adds Lee.
"The most frightening thing I've experienced since the handover was Beijing's decision in April 2004 that Hong Kong would not have democratic elections," he says.
"The rule of law is still fine here - we have independent judges. But the worrying thing is there is no democracy and no sign of a democracy in the future. The rule of law can only function when judges are independent and when the laws are good. A good judge applying a bad law doesn't work."
Christine Loh, chief executive of the Civic Exchange pro-democracy forum, believes Tsang faces challenges in the future.
"Firstly, his Achilles heel is the lack of political legitimacy. He has to try and make up for it by doing the right things well. But he is hampered by a policy capacity deficiency, which makes it hard for him to identify what are the right things to do in the first place," she says.
Dubliner Ian Candy arrived in Hong Kong in 1985 as an economic migrant when "the Irish economy was on the floor and the World Bank was about to take us over and I was paying 60 per cent tax". He worked as magistrate until 2006 when he retired and he now teaches at City University.
"Hong Kong's ordinary life hasn't changed at all. Political life has a different form but in many ways it's more of the same. The forms have changed but we never had democracy or suffrage in any way until 1986, when we got a very limited form quite like a Seanad election at home," says Candy.
We meet in the Dublin Jack, an upmarket Irish pub in the bustling Lan Kwai Fong nightlife area of the city. Also at the bar is Ian Lawlor, who is a stylist at a hair and beauty salon in Central, which he set up in 2003. He arrived in Hong Kong in 1995.
"A lot of Hong Kong's appeal is that you never feel like a foreigner. Success here is built on the legal system, banking," he explains, "it's built on expatriates. You don't need to watch your Ps and Qs here with the police."
Candy says the government does listen to the people of Hong Kong.
"Beijing has learned slowly and surely to deal with the new openness and communication to the outside available here."
While sentiments remains upbeat in Hong Kong, a recent survey showed that only 51 per cent of respondents are optimistic about Hong Kong's future as a part of China, as opposed to 60 per cent in June 1997.
"When I think about my daily life since 1997, I can't think of anything that's changed. I get into my car, drive to work, the traffic is the same, the police are the same," says Harry O'Neill, who works in the executive search business and is Ireland's general consul to Hong Kong. "In my day-to-day life, all that's changed is that China is more powerful driving my day-to-day business - we are that service centre here in Hong Kong."
O'Neill spent the night of the handover drinking Moet & Chandon in a closed hotel.
"It was a lot more emotional than I thought it would be, the end of empire in a big way," he remembers. "The funny thing was, when the countdown was finished, no one really knew what to do."