Governing Hong Kong: Administrative Officers from the Nineteenth Century to the Handover to China, 1862-1997

Chapter 2: THE CADET SCHEME

13 Chapter 2 THE CADET SCHEME _________________________________ Origins Towards the end of its second decade as a crown colony, Hong Kong expanded and matured. Physical extension was mainly a side effect of the second Anglo–Chinese War (1856–60), which allowed the colonists to seize the opportunity to incorporate the tip of Kowloon on the mainland opposite Hong Kong Island.1 The maturing of the colony was the result of economic growth and expansion of the population base. These factors enabled Hong Kong to shake off Treasury control from London and gain financial autonomy in 1858, after the local economy had proved it could generate sufficient income to cover public expenditure on a sustainable basis.2 This meant that the colonial government no longer had to submit its annual budget to the British Treasury for scrutiny, changes and approval before it could be adopted. The local Legislative Council enjoyed for the first time the authority to discuss and debate the annual budget before it was then presented to the Colonial Office for further scrutiny and formal approval. The really important result in practice was that the Hong Kong government now enjoyed much greater freedom in expanding the administration to meet the needs of the colony, as its wage bill ceased to be paid in part by a subvention from Britain. The recognition in Hong Kong during Governor Bowring‘s term of office (1854–59) that there were serious institutional inadequacies in its administration roughly coincided with major administrative reforms in Britain. In 1855 the British government introduced a civil service commission to recruit and promote a portion of officials on the basis of competitive examination rather than patronage. Its Governing Hong Kong 14 leading ministerial sponsor, the chancellor of the exchequer William Gladstone, meant this to be ‘a guarantee of greater efficiency and … a simple act of justice’ in an era where ministerial patronage was still seen by many as ‘an essential part of the political system and its loss’ a factor that ‘would weaken the executive’.3 This important development was the result of ‘the growth of competition to replace patronage; changes in recruitment elsewhere, especially for the Indian Civil Service (ICS); the influence of a small group of leading personalities; and the need to rectify administrative inefficiency’.4 It was also inspired by the Crimean War (1853–56). Had the dreadful results of poor leadership and mismanagement of the welfare and the deployment of troops in the war by noncompetitively selected officers not caught public imagination in Britain Gladstone would have faced more formidable opposition.5 The substance of this reform was based on the recommendations of a commission of inquiry led by Stafford Northcote and Charles Trevelyan a year earlier. They suggested ‘the best method of getting good civil servants, and of making the most of them after they were recruited, was to train young men carefully selected by examination and whose permanent appointment would be confirmed only after the satisfactory completion of a short period of probation.’6 The original model for selecting civil servants on a competitive basis had come from a civil service reform in India. There the East India Company (EIC) had the ‘most effective and best-recruited group of government servants’ in the British Empire, particularly after it ‘restricted all its posts to successful competitors in written examinations’.7 The first step towards putting recruitment to the ICS on a competitive basis was taken in 1806 when the Haileybury College was founded ‘to provide suitable education for young men nominated to join’ the ICS.8 After some further changes the breakthrough came with the Government of India Act of 1853, under which patronage by directors of the EIC was abolished and the ICS had to be filled by open competitive examination.9 In Britain, the Northcote–Trevelyan reform did not in fact result in the recruitment of all senior civil servants to the home civil service on a competitive basis until 1870, after Gladstone became prime minister.10 Nevertheless, it was a landmark event that incorporated the idea of a meritocracy into the British approach to building a modern civil service. The cadet scheme 15 As far as Hong Kong was concerned, Governor Bowring, who was a member of parliament before he went to China to serve as British consul in Canton in 1849, had noted the unsatisfactory state of affairs whereby the overwhelming majority of government officials could not...