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

PREFACE

viii PREFACE ________________ Colonial Hong Kong was a place of contradictions and ironies. It started as a small outpost on the Eastern periphery of the British Empire, but by the time it was handed back to China it had become the last major, most important and most successful British imperial possession. It also, despite never having developed democracy and having been caught up in the politics of the Chinese civil war and in the cold war confrontations of the twentieth century, had earned a reputation for being a well-governed, stable and prosperous place. Right up until the end of the British period it retained its archaic crown colony system devised when Victoria was Queen of England, but it had an infrastructure, economy and life-style that evoked comparison with New York. Thoughtful visitors to Hong Kong are often as intrigued as longstanding residents by what really made Hong Kong tick. The success of Hong Kong’s colonial administration in providing good governance was in fact not a postwar creation, though Hong Kong suffered from poor governance in the early decades of its existence as a crown colony. By the latter part of the nineteenth century the quality of governance had changed so much that the founding father of the Chinese Republic, Sun Yat-sen, acknowledged this in public. When he addressed students at his alma mater, the University of Hong Kong, just over a decade after his republican revolution ended the Manchu Dynasty in China he said: ‘Where and how did I get my revolutionary and modern ideas? I got my ideas in this very place, in Hong Kong. We must carry the English example of good government to every part of China.’ What really could be held to be responsible for the good governance of Hong Kong? As it turned out, it started with the appointment Preface ix in 1861 of three young British graduates as cadets to the Hong Kong government. In this book I address that question. The central importance of the administrative officers, who were called cadets until the 1950s, was apparent to me as I conducted research for other books on Hong Kong in the last quarter of a century. But how important they really were and how they delivered good governance was not entirely clear to me when I decided to embark on this project. The administrative officers made a huge difference to the quality of governance in Hong Kong. Individually, while most of them might not have been intellectually brilliant, they were mostly highly able and dedicated public servants. Collectively, they added up to more than the sum total of their individual efforts and abilities. Team work and a strong esprit de corps enabled them to work together for the general interest of the Hong Kong community (the meaning of which changed in the ‘official mind’ over time) and, though opportunities for graft existed aplenty, by and large they resisted the temptation of corruption. This leads to a particularly intriguing and important conclusion of this book. It is that if Hong Kong’s experience of administrative officers is any guide, there is no need to fill senior governmental posts with the intellectually brightest or most brilliant officers to secure good governance. Indeed, if intellectual brilliance were to be the key, the leading universities of the world should ipso facto be models of good governance – an extremely dubious claim if made. The Hong Kong experience shows that other factors matter more and that to deliver good governance one only needs able and dedicated civil servants who are willing to accept limits in exercising their power to govern. The administrative officer’s successful search for good governance is an important lesson for many – not least for the people of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and for the Chinese government . Both have a vested interest in ensuring that the high standard of governance should be maintained and improved in Hong Kong. This book can be seen as a judicious attempt to examine the roles administrative officers played in searching for and securing good governance in colonial Hong Kong. Although it is about the ethos of the colonial government in Hong Kong and its search for good governance , it is above all about the people who played key roles in this Preface x process. This is also a book that should make an interesting comparison and contrast with the record of colonial governance...