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

Chapter 9: AN ELITE WITHIN THE GOVERNMENT

161 Chapter 9 AN ELITE WITHIN THE GOVERNMENT _________________________________ From the outset when the cadet scheme was introduced in the 1860s, administrative officers were intended to be the elite within the colonial government.1 Whatever flaws they might have suffered collectively, they did not fail to live up to this expectation. Right up until the end of the British period, administrative officers played the leading role in seeking to improve governance in Hong Kong. This is not to imply that other constituent parts of the civil service, particularly professional officers serving in various departments, did not make major contributions. They did, but their specialist qualifications and orientation meant that most of their contributions were towards improving the quality of professional services and performing specialized duties. Administrative officers, by contrast, served first and foremost as generalist officers deployed to perform a wide range of duties. What ensured cohesion and a strong team spirit among the administrative officers, despite the non-existence of a formal corporate organization called an administrative service, was the existence of a strong esprit de corps. Esprit de corps The esprit de corps of the administrative officers at the end of the British period was not fundamentally different from that created shortly after the first cadets were appointed over a century earlier. It is based on the fact that they were, in the words of former cadet and Governing Hong Kong 162 Governor David Trench, ‘all very highly educated, fairly highly motivated people … chosen for their apparent qualities of character’ to improve the standard of governance.2 While a good public school and university education made the early cadets in general terms the best educated officials in Hong Kong in the middle of the nineteenth century, the same educational attainment towards the last decade of British rule could no longer be deemed ‘very highly educated’. In Hong Kong, as in modern Western countries and Japan, the educational standards of civil servants had improved exponentially in this century and a half. Towards the end of the twentieth century most civil servants in Hong Kong above the clerical and menial grades, be they specialists in professional departments or locally recruited executive officers, usually had received a university education. In terms of educational achievement, administrative officers were merely above average among the graduate intakes of civil servants.3 What marked them apart from most of their graduate colleagues, however, was their strong sense of motivation and ‘their apparent qualities of character’. Towards the end of the British period what really made the administrative officers of Hong Kong the elite within the government was not so much superior education but the spirit instilled in them by their senior colleagues. The ‘qualities of character’ to which Trench refers are by nature intangible and difficult to define. For most of the British period they were perpetuated in the first instance by serving administrative officers seeking to recruit people like themselves. These qualities were then shaped and reinforced among new recruits by the strong esprit de corps inherited from senior administrative officers. By the 1990s this came to be done more professionally and was institutionalized in the recruitment process. By then successful applicants would need to be graduates who showed ‘integrity and powers of analysis who can assume the role of arbitrator of different interests in policy formulation’, and have a ‘broad outlook’ as well as the ‘ability to work with a wide spectrum of personalities’.4 These qualities encourage and enable administrative officers to behave with great confidence and take initiatives. These qualities also implied a willingness on the part of administrative officers to take on the role of guardian of the public interest. This does not always mean defending existing bureaucratic practices, even though administrative officers collectively dominated the upper An elite within the government 163 echelons of the bureaucracy and were never reticent about claiming their turf. On the contrary, it means that administrative officers believed that upholding the public interest required them not only to defend established bureaucratic practices where appropriate but also to break rules or to advocate ending practices where necessary. Choosing one or the other was a matter of judgement – whether the protection or enhancement of the public interest would justify or even demand either course of action. Administrative officers accepted that their judgements and therefore their actions might turn out to be misguided but they believed they must act according to their conscience and do...