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

Chapter 6: MEETING THE CHALLENGES OF A CHINESE COMMUNITY

87 Chapter 6 MEETING THE CHALLENGES OF A CHINESE COMMUNITY _____________________________________________________ Although the postwar expansion of the government and administrative grade eventually produced senior administrative officers who had not served in some capacity that involved dealing with the local Chinese community on a daily basis, they remained a minority. Most directly recruited administrative officers usually served either as district officers in the New Territories or assistant secretaries in the Secretariat for Chinese/Home Affairs at an early stage of their careers. This continued even after the number of administrative officers and ethnic Chinese officers had increased significantly in the 1970s. Their scope for exposure to the local community was not diluted because the introduction of the CDO scheme in the late 1960s required and provided additional opportunities for young administrative officers to take on positions that put them in daily touch with the local Chinese community. As life changed quickly in postwar Hong Kong, be it in the New Territories or the highly urbanized parts of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, the work of administrative officers also adjusted to meet the rapidly changing environment. Life and work of a modern district officer The life and work of a district officer in Hong Kong shortly after the Second World War shared many similarities with that of his prewar predecessor. They have been immortalized in a popular book, Myself a mandarin: memoirs of a special magistrate, written by former cadet Austin Coates. In his dramatized rendition of the life of an English Governing Hong Kong 88 colonial civil servant working as a mandarin in the New Territories (NT), Coates highlights that one of the roles of a district officer at least up to the early 1950s, when he served there, was to discharge the duties of a special magistrate. Having been assigned to such a position shortly after taking up his appointment in Hong Kong, he professed that he knew ‘nothing about the common law, and very little about Chinese law and custom’.1 However, he was mindful of the prospect of appeal and thus played safe by discharging his responsibilities as a special magistrate by ‘adhering strictly to Chinese law and custom’ and relied heavily on good commonsense to adjudicate disputes among members of the local community. A distinction should, however, be made between the two roles district officers played in administering the law. The first was that of the special magistrate described by Coates, but this was in fact limited to dealing with debts. A different role that required real knowledge of criminal law was to act as police court magistrate, a role required of the district officers in Tai Po and Yuen Long but not of the District Officer South who had his office in Gascoigne Road in Kowloon.2 The picture immortalized in Coate’s lucid account is therefore slightly misleading, for he in fact started as District Officer South where he did not need a decent knowledge of criminal law to perform his duties properly.3 With a requirement to perform the role of a police court magistrate, cadets recruited after 1948 were in fact required to pass a law examination during their initial probationary period so that they were familiar with criminal law. In discharging his multiple duties, including those of being assistant land officer, police court magistrate and special magistrate for debts, a district officer enjoyed ‘legal powers to enforce judgements ’. In this sense, a district officer ‘was in effect the successor to a Chinese magistrate, bearing in mind that fifty years earlier the NT had been Chinese territory’.4 But this state of affairs did not last, as the long established arrangement for the district officer to take on the roles of special magistrate and police court magistrate ended in the late 1950s, when it was accepted that magisterial responsibilities should be performed by properly qualified members of the judiciary. Much of the work of a district officer involved dealing with the local community. Getting to know the region and local leaders was part of the job, but it involved more than just working with members of the Heung Yee Kuk. In the NT this was the people’s formal Meeting the challenges of a Chinese community 89 advisory and representative body, but in reality it was dominated by the local elite. When James Hayes was appointed District Officer South (1957–62) he promptly visited ‘180 settlements, large and small’ in the...