There is no important elective office in Hong Kong, no widely qualified electorate and no open agitation for universal suffrage. Nor is there any sign of a forcibly suppressed yearning for democratic rule on the part of the general population. The Communists, of course, loudly profess their love of elective government, but the British and a majority of the Chinese construe this to mean the entering wedge for Red China to annex the colony. This is an old-fashioned colonial autocracy, completely dominated by a small minority at the top, but even without a vote it appears to enjoy more confidence from its subjects than do the Reds on the mainland of China.
The greatest strength of the colony government is that in spite of its pin-point degree of representation, it can rule in an orderly and efficient manner without the excesses of tyranny or dictatorship. For ultimately, it is not the governing few but the law that rules in Hong Kong.
The Hong Kong government is a subsidiary of the British Crown. It gets its orders from the Colonial Office and they are carried out by the governor and two advisory bodies, the Executive and Legislative Councils. The governor is the head of both councils. Five persons have seats in both councils by virtue of their office—the commander of British forces in the colony, the colonial secretary, the attorney general, the secretary for Chinese affairs, and the financial secretary. In addition, one colony official is nominated to the Executive Council, and four other government officials are nominated for the Legislative Council. The governor goes outside the official family to nominate six unofficial members of the Executive Council and eight unofficial members of the Legislative Council. Altogether, there are 31 places in this policy-making hierarchy. Since several of its members hold two jobs in this selective directorate, there are at present a total of 23 men participating in top-level government.
The governor must consult with the Executive Council on all important matters, but he decides what must be done. If he takes action against the express advice of his Executive Council, he owes a full explanation for doing so to the Colonial Secretary. The governor makes the laws with the advice and consent of the Legislative Council, and he must have its approval for all public spending. British common law, adapted where necessary to local conditions and Chinese customs, is the legal code of Hong Kong.
Thus the colony presents a unique governmental phenomenon. Approximately ten to twenty English-speaking men holding undisputed sway over 3,300,000 subjects, of whom not one in ten understands the language of his rulers and hardly fifty percent can claim Hong Kong as their birthplace.
By all visible signs, the colony is one of the best-run governments in the Far East. Its roads are paved and traffic moves in an orderly way in spite of the highest vehicle concentration per mile of road anywhere in the world. The same order prevails in the incessant shuttling of harbor vessels. Public transportation is swift, frequent and generally on schedule. Poverty and privation are everywhere, but starvation is virtually non-existent. Business and trade thrive and unemployment is low. Wages seem minuscule when compared with American standards, yet are higher than in most of the countries of Asia. A majority of its people are indifferent to the government, but they are not afraid of it. When something has to be done, there are people at the top with the resolution and the intelligence to do it without trampling human rights.
Is Hong Kong’s autocracy, therefore, a model for the world? On the contrary, there is hardly another place where its practices would be applicable. Hong Kong’s exasperating uniqueness has defied even the efforts of the Colonial Office to make it conform to British government practices.
With all its efficiency, however, Hong Kong has the weaknesses of its governmental structure and its political environment. Because of its extreme centralization, its almost ingrown character in relation to its constituents, it is often out of touch with the people it governs. Enormous barriers of language and culture block its view, and graft and corruption threaten it from every angle. In Asia, graft is the deadliest enemy of every form of government which pretends to deal justly with its citizens, and Hong Kong is not invulnerable to its attack.
From the earliest days of the colony, the Chinese people who emigrated there were fugitives from restraint and oppression. Many of them were outright fugitives from justice. Whatever their virtues or vices, they had found existence under the government of their homeland so intolerable that they willingly submitted to the rule of an alien people they neither trusted nor admired. From centuries of bitter experience in China, they believed that no government was to be trusted. The secret of survival was to avoid all open defiance of governments and to go on living within the framework of one’s family and clan as though the government did not exist. One did not cheat the other members of his clan, because retribution could be swift and terrible. Relations with civil rulers were not an ethical compact; they were a battle of wits, a stubborn struggle for self-preservation in which the cunning of the individual was the only weapon against the greed and power of the state.
How much more applicable these lessons were when those rulers were foreign devils who did not speak one’s language! One did not rebel against the headstrong foreigners and their military superiority; he obeyed them in externals, so far as it was necessary to escape reprisals, and went on quietly building his own internal mechanisms of graft like a busy termite in an unsuspecting household. If the people of the household mistook the termites for industrious but harmless little ants, it was all the easier for him.