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I The Colonial Culture and Its Siege Mentality At the heart of Hong Kong's colonial system lay a strange paradox. The British rulers were an alien racial and cultural group installed at the summit of the social, economic, and political hierarchies.l They were agents of a foreign power whose presence was a reminder of China's past humiliations at the hands of Western imperialists. Sovereignty over the territory was claimed by China, the nation to which the colonial population belonged in terms of race, culture, and patriotic sentiment. The United Kingdom's power to demand the loyalty of Hong Kong's Chinese population was limited even before World War II, when China was still weakened by warlords and civil war. The British right to rule appeared even more fragile after the rise of the Chinese Communist Party. Yet Hong Kong never experienced an indigenous political movement bent on the overthrow of the colonial system. On the contrary, the colonial administration achieved a level of acceptance from the local population that would have been remarkable even for an elected government in a democratic state. True, endless criticism was heaped on the colonial administration by the media, by pressure groups and, in the final decade of British rule, by Hong Kong politicians. This abuse was more than counter-balanced, however, by the deference with which expatriate officials were treated by the community at large. The colonial rulers rarely encountered personal hostility from their constituents, and their authority and superior status were constantly acknowledged by the public. Regardless of age or rank, the expatriate official could take for granted a place of honour on the platform, in the front row, or at the top table at any social function, whether official or not. Even China's arrangements for the post-colonial administration of Hong Kong contained a pledge that foreign officials could continue their careers in all but a handful of posts. As was the case throughout the rest of the British Empire, the British colonial presence was insignificant in terms of numbers. Expatriates accounted 20 Uneasy Partners for less than 5 percent of the Civil Service in the 1950s and fell below 2.5 percent in the 1970s. Ultimate control of the colonial administration was in the hands of an even smaller group who belonged to the Administrative Service. Until the final years of British rule, its expatriate members decided policy, controlled public finances, arranged key appointments, and oversaw the operations of government departments. In 1950, there had been only 42 of them to rule a city of 2.4 million people. A quarter of a century later, Hong Kong had become a modern, manufacturing economy with a population of 4.4 million. Yet expatriate Administrative Officers still totalled less than a hundred. Although the numbers of local Administrative Officers had grown rapidly over the same period, they werejunior in rank and inferior in authority to their expatriate colleagues until the 1990s, as the next chapter will explain.2 Thus, until late in the colonial era, Hong Kong was under the almost personal rule of a handful offoreigners whose individual characters and preconceptions mattered because they determined the content as well as the style of government. Colonial officials came to Hong Kong in search of civil service careers and few left before retirement on full pension. But although Hong Kong and its people made up their entire professional lives, they ruled uneasily, cut off by colonial privilege and social convention from the bulk of the Chinese community. Until the very end of the colonial era, opinion polls rated the colonial administration as superior to both the Chinese and United Kingdom governments. The British rulers, however, were not reassured by the evidence of their political credibility. They never felt completely secure in their authority and were never entirely free from the fear that the public might desert them. This chapter examines the colonial culture that moulded their attitudes and shaped their relations with the Chinese community they ruled. The Barriers of Race and Culture Taken collectively, British expatriates seemed powerful figures - an impression reinforced by an arrogant insensitivity which even foreign observers regarded as their characteristic trait.3 As individuals, however, expatriates were far less sure of their authority and of their relationship with the people of Hong Kong. In the middle of the twentieth century, the colonial administration complained that "Hong Kong is geographically in a position peculiarly vulnerable to any form of lawlessness and unrest in the Far East...

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