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Passages to the Post-Colonial State 33 C H A P T E R T H R E E Passages to the Post-Colonial State THE POLITICAL TRANSITION THAT STARTED in 1984 led to a fundamental change in the political landscape of Hong Kong. On the one hand, the Chinese government tried to build its corps of post-1997 ruling elites by a united front strategy. On the other hand, gradual democratization enabled elected representatives and grassroots political groups to challenge for public power via competitive elections. In between, the business elites, used to being dominant in the pre-1985 regime, tried very hard to maintain their position in the post-1997 system by entering into a conservative partnership with the Chinese government. On top of the political changes, socioeconomic changes since the mid-1980s drove the previously less interventionist state to play an increasingly regulatory role. This brought a new myriad of governmental or quasi-governmental organs as appendages to the administrative state. Public sector reform after 1989 created another group of quasi-governmental organs which were at arm’s length to the state. These new bodies, though under the supervision of the government, created alternative loci of decision-making, rendering a fragmentation of authority and diffusion of accountability in the post-colonial system. This chapter shows how competing forces during the last years of colonial rule shaped the post-colonial state. The outgrowth of the administrative state in the last years of colonial rule brought more diversified and fragmented state institutions. In contrast, the united front as directed by the Chinese government, and the more interventionist and regulatory state, would serve to increase the state capacity that allowed a stronger state to penetrate more into society. Events after 1997 show that the forces of fragmentation were greater than those of integration and cohesion, partly due to the failure of the Chinese government to engineer a cohesive pro-China elite for the post-colonial state in the SAR. 34 Political Development in Hong Kong The making of the pro-PRC elite The Communist Party elite The major political actor that was in a commanding position to engineer the postcolonial state was of course the Chinese government. The post-1997 constitutional structure was defined by the Basic Law, the drafting of which the British government had no right to participate in. In 1985, the Chinese government appointed the 59-member Basic Law Drafting Committee (BLDC), with 36 of its members from the mainland. The BLDC was entrusted with the task of writing the post-1997 constitution of Hong Kong, which would eventually be enacted by the National People’s Congress in April 1990. With the rules of the game firmly in the hands of the Chinese government, the Chinese government in fact had full authority to define who runs Hong Kong after 1997. One major promise of “one country, two systems” is that the Central Government will not send its officials to run Hong Kong directly, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will not lead political organizations in Hong Kong after 1997 (Chu, 1995; Ting, 2000). The post-colonial elite must be groomed within Hong Kong to fulfill the promise of “Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong.” The CCP had a long history in Hong Kong before the triumph of the Communist Revolution in the mainland. Hong Kong has been an important base for CCP activities since the early 1920s (see Chan Lau, 1999). After the CCP took power in mainland China, it began to build an elaborate structure of political control in Hong Kong (Burns, 1990). In 1947, the CCP Central Committee decided to set up a Hong Kong Work Committee to handle the party organizations in Hong Kong. In 1955, it was restructured to become the Hong Kong and Macau Work Committee (HKMWC) to oversee party work in both Hong Kong and Macau. Although headquartered in Guangzhou, the committee dispatched a workgroup to Hong Kong, which was based inside the headquarters of the New China News Agency (NCNA) (Burns, 1990, pp. 749–750). Before the Cultural Revolution, the HKMWC was under the supervision of the Hong Kong and Macau Leading Group of the Foreign Affairs Office under the State Council. In 1978, the State Council set up the Hong Kong and Macau Office (HKMAO), which from then on was officially responsible for China’s policy over Hong Kong and Macau (Xu, 1993, p. 67). The HKMWC commanded and controlled a network of “leftist” organizations in Hong Kong. These...

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