A group of Hongkongers “led by casino tycoon Stanley Ho, is gathering support for the idea of leasing the territory to the United Nations after 1997 as a way to tackle the confidence crisis here” following the Tiananmen massacre, The Straits Times wrote on August 16, 1989.
The article followed a South China Morning Post report at the time, which said that the gambling magnate had drawn up a plan that involved leasing Hong Kong and Macau to the United Nations as its Asian headquarters for 50 to 100 years.
“Mr Ho, who owns casinos in Macau and real estate in Hong Kong, said a UN Asian headquarters could be set up under a 50 to 100-year lease, thereby making Hong Kong the ‘Switzerland of Asia’,” the Hong Kong correspondent of the Singaporean newspaper said in the 1989 article.
The paper quoted Ho as saying, “There will be no loss of face, China is only going to lease the territory of Hong Kong after she has acquired sovereignty,” and that he would convey the message to Beijing himself.
According to the article, the idea of a U.N. Asian headquarters had the support of “eight local organizations and at least 15 prominent individuals, including the stock exchange chief, Mr Francis Yuen, parliamentarian Stephen Cheong, and university professors.”
“Mr Ho said that his idea stemmed from a dream late last month [July 1989] when he nodded off while listening to a Schumann fantasia.”
The Straits Times said that he dreamed that on a night in 1997, “he saw flags from many countries fluttering alongside China’s five-star flag at the headquarters of the HMS Tamar in Central. HMS Tamar is the British military headquarters in Hong Kong.”
His group estimated that in 1989 it would cost HKD6 billion ($820 million) to house the U.N. in Hong Kong.
The Straits Times revealed that in the distant yet unforgettable year of 1989, Cliff Reece, chairman of the Hong Kong 3000 Foundation, a save-Hong Kong lobby group, said, “They had written to 62 Commonwealth and other heads of state to canvass support.”
On how the group planned to get U.N. member countries to agree to its idea, “Mr Cheong said that it was a fact of U.N. politics that veto power[s] lay with the superpowers.”
But that wasn’t Stanley Ho’s only idea for the future of Hong Kong, where he was born.
The U.N. plan had “the same originality of thought that marked several other of his ideas.” These included transplanting Hong Kong to an island off Scotland, or the desert in northern Australia, and leasing an island in the South Pacific.
None of Ho’s bold ideas for the future of his “homelands” has come to fruition so far. However, they show how worried the late tycoon was about the integration of Hong Kong and Macau with the motherland. Ho died on Tuesday at the age of 98.
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