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v In Place of Democracy - A Privileged Elite Throughout the colonial history of Hong Kong, a refusal to permit any significant progress towards democracy was a major feature of British rule. London gave way to demands for political reforms in the rest of the British Empire, abandoning any pretence that colonial rule was superior to democratic government. Hong Kong was treated very differently. As the two previous chapters have described, colonial officials in Hong Kong responded to London's initiatives with hostility, and British diplomats sympathized with the misgivings of the Chinese Communist Party about democratic reforms. A Capitalist Meritocracy While the Chinese government and the United Kingdom were starting their arduous negotiations in 1982 over the future of Hong Kong, the colonial administration began a campaign to explain why conventional democratic institutions would be out of place and how instead, the community enjoyed political arrangements that were ideally suited to its unique circumstances. The Attorney General, recently imported from private practice in London, produced an eloquent defence of the absence of elected representation. He lauded Hong Kong's ruling partnership between the bureaucracy and representatives from "interested and expert groups ... unpaid private citizens, knowledgeable and experienced in their subject". These were the colonial administration's appointees to the bodies responsible for policy-making (Executive Council) and legislation (the Legislative Council) at the pinnacle of the power structure. There was also a network of advisory boards and committees which made up the government's complex consultative machinery. This set-up, he declared, was "the great Hong Kong innovation, the really local and distinctive feature of its system of government ... vital to social stability in a community whose Government is not and cannot be elected". 98 Uneasy Partners The absence of elections meant, the Attorney General claimed, that the government took "more care to be sensitive to catch even the whispers of the public" and gave those co-opted into the power structure from the private sector "the freedom to represent the interests of the entire community, and notjust of some faction or political party". All this he labelled "Hong Kong's version of Athenian democracy".l In reality, of course, there was little that was either unique or novel about Hong Kong's arrangements. To fend off demands for direct elections, for example, "functional constituencies" were introduced, though not until 1985. These were a mechanism to produce members of the legislature with some representative credentials while not permitting them the legitimacy of being directly elected. They were in the same tradition as the "select vestries" and "rotten boroughs" that England had swept away with the 1832 Reform Act, and they would not have been out of place in several predemocratic states in nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe. The local elite's participation was supposed to be a gesture of respect towards the Chinese population. It seemed to show that the colonial administration accepted an obligation to listen to the views of the Chinese community and to involve its leaders in the process of government.2 Because the representatives co-opted from the elite had to be English-speaking until late in the colonial era, they tended to be well-educated and professionally qualified, as well as affluent.3 The British, it seemed, had set out to recruit collaborators and had ended up with a capitalist meritocracy. The absorption of the elite into the colonial system has been identified as a major factor in assisting British rule to survive in Hong Kong for a hundred and fifty years while the forces of revolution and nationalism inundated the rest of Asia.4 The pretentious rhetoric of colonial officials, however, camouflaged a much cruder political system in which the colonial administration bought off the business and professional classes, which it identified as its main potential adversaries. This chapter examines why the British relied on this special relationship with the elite, where the partnership did not match the extravagant claims made for it, and how the alliance with the business elite survived the transition from British to Chinese rule. Revolution and War In the first decades after the establishment of the colony, it was easy enough to see what colonial officials gained from arrangements that co-opted the local elite and gave it a role in the colonial power structure.5 The alien administration needed intermediaries to communicate with the influx of Chinese sojourners who had no previous experience of British rule. Successful local businessmen and the handful of Chinese professionals had considerable...

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