The Economist - UK (2022-04-16)

72 Culture The Economist April 16th 2022

Though  dominated  by  events  since

1997,  “Indelible  City”  also  attempts  a  revi­

sionist telling of Hong Kong’s history. This

challenges  both  the  traditional  Western

view that it was nothing but a “barren rock”

until British opium traders found a use for

it, and the Chinese version: that it has been

an integral part of the Chinese polity since

time immemorial. Rather, in the past Hong

Kong  was  “a  sanctuary  for  rebels  and

fugitives from central power” and a haven

for free­thinking. 

The mermen’s song

Ms  Lim  describes  Hong  Kong  people’s  ef­

forts  to  rebuild  a  link  with  this  past,

including  through  the  resurrection  of  an

indigenous  creation  myth  about  the  Lo

Ting, fish­headed mermen who had come

to  Hong  Kong’s  Lantau  island  in  the  fifth

century, after a failed rebellion against the

imperial dynasty. The character who gives

her book its name is Tsang Tsou Choi, who

died in 2007 and left behind a vast body of

graffiti over public spaces in Hong Kong—

much  of  it  supporting  his  eccentric  claim

to  be  the  king  of  Kowloon,  the  peninsula

opposite Hong Kong island. 

For  those  brought  up  in  Hong  Kong,

questions  of  identity  were  unavoidable

and virtually impossible to answer. Almost

uniquely  among  colonised  peoples,  they

were never offered independence. In 1972,

shortly  after  it  joined  the  United  Nations,

China asked the decolonisation committee

to remove Hong Kong from its list of colo­

nial territories, and Britain, as became cus­

tomary in its treatment of its colony, con­

nived  in  this  implicit  condemnation  of

Hong  Kong  to  eventual  Chinese  rule.  Ms

Lim quotes an early British governor, from

1858, who pithily summed up the ethos of

British sovereignty: “We rule them in igno­

rance, and they submit in blindness.”

So  Hong  Kongers,  a  term  that,  for  her

part, Ms Cheung says she has never heard

anyone  apply  to  themselves,  “defined

themselves in negatives—not Communist,

no longer colonial subjects”. Her book, like

Ms  Lim’s,  shows  how  they  did  acquire  a

sense of identity. Sadly, it was still couched

in  the  negative:  in  the  thwarted  struggle

against  the  gradual  erosion  of  their  civil

liberties  under  Chinese  sovereignty—and

the  repeated  frustration  of  their  demands

for a representative political system.

Like  Ms  Lim,  Ms  Cheung  is  a  leading

character in her book as well as its narrator.

Hers is more personal, building up a sense

of a unique Hong Kong identity through an

account  of  her  own  life  and  interests  and

immersion in the local indie­music scene.

A journalist for various outlets, still in her

20s,  she  complains  of  some  foreign  edi­

tors:  “It’s  best  if  our  family  stories  are

somehow representative of the rest of the

Hong  Kong  population...They  want  your

life stories, not your opinions.” 

Indeed. But her story is also Hong

Kong’s.Thepainfulstrugglewithdepres­

sionthatsherecountsbecomesemblemat­

ic ofastuntedgenerationlivingonthe

edge of desperation. She notes that

between 2012 and 2016 the suicide rate

amongstudentsjumpedby76%.

Boththesebookswerelargelywritten

beforethepandemicfurthercutoffHong

Kongfromtherestoftheworld—ashared

isolationthathasseemedmoreacutethis

year,asfirstHongKongandthenpartsof

the mainland suffered widespread out­

breaksoftheOmicronvariant.Thejoint

pursuitwithChinaofa zero­covidpolicy

hasbeenamongthemostpowerfulsym­

bolsofwhereHongKong’sfuturelies.That

futuremay indeedhavebeeninevitable,

butit hasrarelylookedsogrim.n

Wareconomies

Battle of the bonds

W

arcanexposea society’sweakness­

es, or give expression to its latent po­

tential.  This  lesson,  apt  today,  applied  in

spades to the American civil war, as a new

financial  history  of  the  conflict  explains.

Though  Roger  Lowenstein,  a  journalist,

surely  had  no  idea  that  when  “Ways  and

Means”  was  published,  Russia  would

invade  Ukraine,  his  engaging  history

nonetheless makes for timely reading.

In hindsight, it is hard to imagine that

the  triumph  of  Union  forces  could  ever

have  been  in  doubt,  given  the  North’s

advantages  in  population  and  industry.

But  the  Confederacy  did  not  need  to  win

the war outright; it had only to struggle on

until  the  people  of  the  North  grew  tired

enough  of  fighting  to  seek  a  peace.  Presi­

dent  Abraham  Lincoln,  whose  victory  in

the election of 1860 precipitated secession,

was determined to preserve the Union. But

the  patience  of  his  people  in  the  face  of

hardship  could  not  be  taken  for  granted,

and the tools available to him were limited. 

At the outset of the struggle, the federal

government  was  still  a  bare­bones  affair,

which  in  most  respects  deferred  to  the

authority of “these United States”. It lacked

a central bank to help manage the govern­

ment’s  credit.  Neither  did  the  federal

government  control  its  own  currency;  in

the antebellum economy, the role of mon­

ey  was  played  by  private  notes,  issued  by

banks. And the main source of federal rev­

enue—tariffs  on  traded  goods—was  hard

hit  by  the  crisis.  A  third  of  the  ports  at

which customs duties were collected were

in the Confederacy.

Chief  responsibility  for  addressing

these problems fell to Salmon Chase (pic­

tured), a prickly figure and aspirant to the

presidency  who  served  as  Lincoln’s  Trea­

sury  secretary.  At  first  neither  North  nor

South expected a long war, and Chase’s ini­

tial financial requests were a mere drop in

the bucket of money that would be needed

to subdue the rebellion. After he secured a

loan  of  $50m  from  a  bank  syndicate

(around  $1.5bn  today),  a  banker  said  he

hoped the sum would be sufficient to win

the war. The government would ultimately

spend  some  60  times  that  amount.  Both

sides  sought  to  borrow  from  Europeans,

with minimal success. This newspaper de­

clared  it  “utterly  out  of  the  question”  that

the Americans could obtain “anything like

the extravagant sums they are asking”.

Yet  while  the  Union’s  finances  seemed

in  danger  of  collapsing  early  in  the  war,

Lincoln’s  administration  soon  began  con­

structing  the  machinery  to  effectively  tap

the  strength  of  the  American  economy.

From  1862  the  federal  government  started

issuing  a  fiat  currency—called  “green­

backs”,  for  the  colour  of  the  ink  used  in

printing  on  the  reverse  side.  In  1863  Con­

gress  enacted  Chase’s  plan  for  a  national

banking  system,  in  which  federally

chartered  and  supervised  banks  issued

Treasury notes and held federal bonds. The

inflationary  potential  of  such  measures

was  kept  in  check  by  a  big  expansion  of

federal  taxation—including  the  central

government’s first­ever income tax. 

The  government’s  measures  did  not

just  make  the  financing  of  the  war  possi­

ble; they also knitted together an ever more

powerful  national  economy.  The  new

currency  facilitated  commerce,  spurring

economic growth in the North which bene­

fited  the  war  effort.  As  the  fighting  broke

Ways and Means. By Roger Lowenstein.

Penguin Press; 448 pages; $30

Shots and Chase