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

Chapter 3: BENEVOLENT PATERNALISM

27 Chapter 3 BENEVOLENT PATERNALISM ______________________________________________ The introduction of cadets eventually created in Hong Kong a modern British bureaucratic elite that appeared to share some elements of the Chinese mandarin built on the basis of the imperial examination system and Confucian teachings. The idea of a fumuguan , or father and mother official, who would treat the people like his own children is inherent in the idea of what a good official should be like in the Chinese political tradition. In principle, he is expected to look after the welfare of the people in a paternalistic way while they enjoy and appreciate the benefits of such benevolence by getting on with their lives, upholding peace and order, and creating prosperity . In other words, county magistrates in imperial China were tasked to provide good governance at the basic level of the imperial administration, in accordance with what was probably the most sophisticated concept for good governance in the pre-modern world. When the cadet scheme was introduced, the British had not intended the cadets to mimic Confucian scholar officials and to import ideas of governance from China. Indeed, the cadet scheme was one of the earlier experiments that laid the foundation of a modern civil service in the British Empire. In Hong Kong, as in Britain and elsewhere in the empire, the modern British civil service that emerged after the latter part of the nineteenth century gradually developed seven common characteristics. These were as follows: impartiality, integrity, objectivity, selection and promotion on merit, accountability through ministers to parliament, a sense of public service, and a commitment to the public interest.1 It should, however, be recognized that most of these ideas in fact have parallels in the traditional Chinese concept of good governance. Governing Hong Kong 28 By the Qing period (1644–1912), Chinese officials were supposed to be recruited from among Confucian gentlemen of high integrity, and were expected to behave impartially through the rule of avoidance, by which officials were not normally allowed to serve in their home county or province. Most were competitively selected through the imperial civil service examination and were held accountable to the emperor by government censors. As Confucian gentlemen they were expected to uphold the public interest in order to promote the common good in the realm. Where the Qing system failed was primarily in two areas. The first was the reservation of a disproportionate number of senior civil and military offices to the Manchus and the deliberate duplication of top level administrative offices, so much so that every ministry would be headed by a Manchu as well as a Han Chinese minister, and all deputy ministerial positions were also duplicated on an ethnic basis. The desire of the Manchu monarchy to secure its control over the majority Han population thus systematically reduced the effectiveness and efficiency of the bureaucratic structure.2 The other failing rested in the government doing too little to minimize corruption, and its lack of sufficient institutional checks and balances to put a stop to officials abusing their authority. Indeed, the long-established habit whereby officials, including county magistrates, would fund official expenditure from irregular or customary charges, known as lougui (the ugly practice), encouraged systemic corruption.3 This failure of the Chinese system worsened from the 1840s onwards when financial stringency, in an era of widespread rebellions and foreign encroachment, forced the government to increase substantially the sale of official ranks and even positions.4 This meant that an increasing percentage of officials, including county magistrates, was not being recruited on the basis of the imperial examination or merit. Together they gravely undermined the ideal of the traditional Chinese civil service. In nineteenth-century Hong Kong cadets were appointed to serve British interests, which required rectifying the institutional inadequacies in the colonial administration. Improving the quality of governance and the channels of communication between the colonial administration and the local Chinese were as much in the interest of the British as in that of the local community. Whatever the original intentions of the founders of the scheme, once in government service, Benevolent paternalism 29 the cadets took on their official duties as they saw fit. They were not concerned with either the Chinese ideal of governance or what would later become basic concepts underpinning the modern British civil service. They were mainly interested in how best to discharge their official responsibilities efficiently and effectively. In the context of...