Dealing with the dragon - Jonathan Fenby

Hong Kong, the 'fragrant harbour', was handed back to China in 1997 after being a British colony for nearly a hundred years. In that time the territory established itself as one of Asia's major trading areas and one of the world's most exciting and cosmopolitan cities.

At the time of the handover many Westerners feared that the Communist regime in Beijing would kill this golden goose in their eagerness to plunder its riches. So far, that hasn't happened, but many other changes have taken place - more subtle, perhaps, than tanks in the streets, but still altering the culture and atmosphere of the place where East meets West. Jonathan Fenby's masterly survey of his last year in charge of Hong Kong's leading English-language newspaper is both a fascinating insight into this amazing place and an entertaining and enlightening personal story of changing fortunes.

Jonathan Fenby was the editor of the SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST. Before Before that he was deputy editor of the GUARDIAN and editor of the OBSERVER. He has covered France as a journalist since 1965 and was made a Chevalier of the French Order of Merit in 1990.

Jonathan Fenby, a journalist with a high-profile track-record as a former editor of the South China Morning Post, monitored the metamorphosis of Hong Kong, globalisation's Far Eastern cash point, from British colony to Beijing constituency. The transformation was beset with inevitable traumas and in his book he chronicles, with his customary flair for the crisply tailored pen-portrait and the telling anecdote, the events of the year 1999. It is a diary about diplomacy and discord, the filthy rich and the filthy conditions of the less fortunate. Cash collides with a cultural past as those in power jockey for position and those without it jostle for survival. In Fenby's revealing account the motivation of material advancement triumphed over what he sees as missed opportunities. Hong Kong heads into the new millennium leaving behind what he describes as challenges that have been ducked, corners that have been cut, bulwarks demolished and coherence abandoned. Why this is so, Fenby sets out in descriptive and factual detail, penetrating the power politics, the legal wrangles and corruption. His monthly journal takes him from the Peoples
Palace in the former Peking down to the Crazy Horse Saloon in Hong Kong. In the process he produces

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