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

Chapter 10: INHIBITED ELITISM

181 Chapter 10 INHIBITED ELITISM _____________________________ When the British flag was finally hauled down in Hong Kong in 1997, the administrative officers remained the political elite and continued to take the lead in providing good governance despite momentous political changes. The existence of a politically neutral professional civil service, the most important element of which was the administrative officers, was one of the greatest legacies the British left for the people of Hong Kong. Much of this was of course due to the high degree of institutionalization in colonial Hong Kong. In this context, administrative officers performed no better or worse than any other constituent parts of the civil service. However, the local community and the civil service as a whole had long looked up to administrative officers to take the lead in ensuring a high standard of governance. Administrative officers were also the political officers of the colonial administration and were therefore politically engaged with the affairs and people of Hong Kong. They thus occupied a place in Hong Kong’s governance that no other collective group of civil servants could rival. It raises two interesting and important questions: What enabled administrative officers collectively to play such a positive role in delivering good governance? What are the wider implications of their experience? There are two aspects to the successful search for good governance by the administrative officers of Hong Kong. Both are ironic if not somewhat paradoxical. The first is the very nature of the people selected and the ethos developed. The other concerns the acceptance by administrative officers that the span and scope of government should be limited despite the intoxication of power and status Governing Hong Kong 182 brought about by being the unquestioned elite of the government and society for over a century. Intellectual brilliance versus good governance Their unrivalled status in the colonial government should not be taken to imply that administrative officers were mostly individuals who were so brilliant or thoughtful that they had or should have earned a double first or a first-class degree from the top British universities. They were not. On the contrary, their experience shows that good governance can be delivered by a civil service staffed not by the brightest and most academically able graduates. As a matter of fact, the top scoring British graduates who sought a career in the civil service did not usually choose to go to Hong Kong. In order of preference these graduates generally picked the British Treasury, followed by the British diplomatic service and the Indian Civil Service while it existed before considering the Eastern cadetship or colonial administrative service. Admittedly, some of those who chose to work overseas might not have wanted to join the home civil service in Britain. The fact remains that Hong Kong’s administrative service was not filled with the brightest graduates that the best British universities produced, though they were mostly staffed by very good and able graduates from some of Britain’s finest universities. The great majority of administrative officers from 1862 onwards were not first-rate thinkers or intellectually exceptional, though among them were individuals who were brilliant or so intellectually gifted that they were scholars in their own right despite pursuing a non-academic career. Among the better known postwar administrative officers, John Cowperthwaite and David Jordan were brilliant, while the scholarship of James Hayes earns and deserves general respect and high regard from the scholarly community.1 The overwhelming majority of administrative officers, however, were more akin to today’s graduates from an established British university with a good upper second-class honours degree. They were highly able, well educated and hardworking individuals dedicated to serving Hong Kong proudly in their collective identity as cadets or administrative officers. They might not have been the most intellectually stimulating and imaginative individuals but it was they who collectively played the greatest part in ensuring that, on balance, Inhibited elitism 183 the colonial government delivered good governance within the context of the times over the course of a century. The most important factor to underpin the success of the administrative officers as a whole was the strong esprit de corps they forged together. The qualities in which successive generations of administrative officers took pride were ‘fair-mindedness, even-handedness, integrity, consistency, determination, flexibility and a will to meet and overcome challenges of all sorts’.2 Ever since the first cadets were appointed, most administrative...