Governing Hong Kong: Administrative Officers from the 19th Century to the Handover to China, 1862-1997 (International Library of Colonial History)

241 Pages·2007·3.02 MB·English

by  Steve Tsang

GOVERNING HONG KONG
TO KWOK-WING CHAN
GOVERNING HONG KONG
_______________________________________________________
Administrative Officers from the
Nineteenth Century to the Handover
to China, 1862–1997

Steve Tsang
Published in 2007 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com

In the United States of America and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan
a division of St Martin’s Press 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

In China, Hong Kong, Macau, North and South Korea distributed by Hong Kong
University Press

Copyright © Steve Tsang, 2007
The right of Steve Tsang to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part
thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the publisher.
ISBN: 978 1 84511 525 8

International Library of Colonial History 9

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd
From camera-ready copy edited and typeset by
Oxford Publishing Services, Oxford
CONTENTS
___________________
Acronyms and Abbreviations vii
Preface viii
1. Governance in a colonial society 1
Managing the expatriate community 3
Governing the local Chinese 6
Institutional inadequacies 9
2. The cadet scheme 13
Origins 13
From language cadets to bureaucratic high flyers 19
Impact on colonial administration 23
3. Benevolent paternalism 27
Learning about the Chinese 29
Life and work as a cadet 33
The making of an elite 43
4. Effects of the Pacific War 51
End of the colour bar 52
A new outlook 58
5. Expansion 67
From cadets to administrative officers 69
Ever expanding scope of government activities 72
The last of the old guard 75
Rapid growth and changes 84
Contents
6. Meeting the challenges of a Chinese community 87
Life and work of a modern district officer 87
The life and work of a CDO 94
Life and work at the secretariat 99
Life and work in departments 104
Fighting corruption 110
7. Localization 114
Colonial ‘retreads’ and transferees 116
Obstacles to local recruitment 120
Beyond the ‘glass ceiling’ 125
End of the gender bar 131
British mandarins or Chinese officials 135
8. Meeting the challenges of modernity 139
The McKinsey reforms 140
Accountability without democracy 147
Preparing for the end of empire 152
9. An elite within the government 161
Esprit de corps 161
Relations with non-administrative officers 167
Relations with London 170
10. Inhibited elitism 181
Intellectual brilliance versus good governance 182
An inhibited political centre 188
Wider implications 191
Notes 196
References 216
Index 223
vi
ACRONYMS AND
ABBREVIATIONS
_____________________________
AO administrative officer
BAAG British Army Aid Group
CAT Central Air Transport
CATC Central Air Transport Corporation
CDO City District Officer
CNAC China National Aviation Corporation
CID Criminal Investigation Department
CS Colonial Secretary
DCS Deputy Colonial Secretary
EIC East India Company
FCO Foreign and Commonwealth Office
FS Financial Secretary
GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
HK Hong Kong
ICAC Independent Commission Against Corruption
ICS Indian Civil Service
MAC Mutual Aid Committee
MBE Member of the British Empire
NT New Territories
PAS Principal Assistant Secretary
PRC People’s Republic of China
SAR Special Administrative Region
TUC Trades Union Congress
vii
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 exis-
tence 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 govern-
ance of Hong Kong? As it turned out, it started with the appointment
viii
Preface
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 govern-
ment. 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 gov-
ernance, it is above all about the people who played key roles in this
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