The date is July 1, 1997. Hong Kong people are ready for their return to China. Is the rest of the world?

What is certain, and very few things are in Hong Kong these days, is that international hype promises a media event in the making. Every press agency around the world will be there, watching, and making us all witnesses to the political switch-over. What better spectacle?

But for many of us, the young people in particular, who grew up in Hong Kong under the shadow of China, 1997 has long been a line of foreclosure on Hong Kong's future. Anticipation of the historic transition from British colonial rule to Chinese socialist rule has already reached its height on the small land with a population of six million. In a sense, the changeover is like the end of millenium pushed three years forward.

Hong Kong people's fear of China has been real, but it has been mostly out of ignorance about the country itself. The people in Hong Kong are getting ready to dispel this prejudice once and for all with integration. After 1997, the sort of brutal, uncompromising consumer modernism that has hung over generations of Hong Kong people as a result of a century of colonial laissez-faire will conflict with and subsequently conquer China's political culture. Economic reform promises a new (and better) China because the market will force China into a reasonable discourse with the rest of the world.

In 1984, with the expiration of the "lease of Hong Kong" in sight, Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher reached an agreement on Hong Kong's return to China. The fate of Hong Kong was sealed with a Sino-British joint declaration and its provision for the Basic Law.

From the beginning, neither of these items has been received with less than salty grains of skepticism by the Hong Kong public. During the late '80s, I still remember how the drafting of the Basic Law dominated everyone's political discussions--at least it dominated in the news.

What really deserves to be questioned, though, is Deng Xiaoping's "one country, two systems" plan for the the co-existence of China's socialism and Hong Kong's capitalism within one national boundary. "One country, two systems" has set the tone of China's policy toward Hong Kong for a long time. China has had to assure Hong Kong of its own future. It has felt it necessary to give confidence to the millions of Hong Kong residents to whom Deng gave his famous guarantee that Hong Kong's autonomy would remain for 50 years after 1997. This promise has turned out to be an empty one. Deng died, and his personal promise died with him.

In recent years, uncertainty in the political and economic situation in Hong Kong has been rising. The Tiananmen Square Incident in 1989, combined with quickened economic reform, has put Hong Kong people in a difficult position. At that point, they became nervous about the menace of a dictatorial China with the projection of frightening images of military havoc during the epilogue of Beijing's student movement on international television.

In Hong Kong at the time, there were demonstrations which condemned the Chinese army's presence and power at Tiananmen. There were virulent speeches against the brutal suppression of students. There were small riots. But above all, disillusionment and cynicism about China became more substantiated and vocal.

Then came the first waves of democratization in Hong Kong. Moral opposition to China took center stage in the democracy activists' rally for free government and free speech. Despite their popularity, the activists failed to provide a motivation for the public to oppose China's increasing economic power. And people in Hong Kong began to realize that China is a better master when it acts paternally than when it does so in a hostile fashion.

There is no mistaking that the takeover itself began in earnest well before 1997. But concerns about Hong Kong's future are only getting more sharply focused now. Let's bring some of these current issues into perspective.

The primary preoccupation of the Hong Kong public is the continuing prosperity of the city. In fact, the key concern is continuity without interruption and turmoil.

Economic reform accelerated through the early '90s with Deng's re-affirmation of China's open door policy, which suffered setbacks after 1989. The optimistic atmosphere led to a large flow of foreign investment into China from Hong Kong and other parts of Asia, as well as from the U.S. and Europe.

The result was that most people in Hong Kong now tend to identify growth in China with security in Hong Kong. This view, of course, has an inevitable flip side for the public. Calls for democracy, individual freedom and civil rights risk being labeled "uncooperative" or "subversion" to smooth transition, because it seeks to bring the whole issue of "One Country, Two Systems" and self-government into practical, negociable terms as opposed to the more abstract talk in earlier years.

Hong Kong's democratic transformation, at this moment, is all but defunct, and legitimate local political representation has been weakened. The popularly elected Legislative Council will soon be dissolved under China's auspices; in its place, a legislative body "elected" by China's appointed representatives from Hong Kong will take charge. Laws protecting free speech and other forms of civil liberty are subject to amendments, putting the future of this free society in danger.