Ghosts of Empire (56 page)

The Roman stoicism and stubbornness Sir Mark Young displayed in his blunt refusal to sign the Japanese certificate were a typical response from a man who, so to speak, had been born in the imperial purple. The Classical allusion would not have been lost on Young either, as he had graduated with a first in Classics from King's College, Cambridge in 1908. Yet after the war he could see that the world had changed. American pressure and new political forces led many observers to believe that the empire would have to change, and it was in this spirit that he ventured into the unknown, by trying to make Hong Kong more democratic. The Young proposals were tentative and, to later observers, hardly controversial. Yet in the context of Hong Kong's history they marked a radical departure from the benign authoritarianism which had been a characteristic feature of the colony's political life for more than a hundred years.

Hong Kong was ruled by a governor, chosen by Whitehall but enjoying considerable latitude once he arrived in Hong Kong. The governor was solely responsible for choosing members of both the Executive Council and the Legislative Council. By 1945 this arrangement had lasted more than a hundred years, and allowed for absolutely no democratic involvement at any stage of the process. Until the 1940s, the only appeals for democracy had come not from the Chinese masses, who constituted more than 98 per cent of the population, but from the British merchants, who for a time resented the power and authority of the bureaucrats, but who ultimately were content to confine themselves to commercial activities. The last significant movement to promote democracy in Hong Kong had occurred in 1894, more than fifty years before the end of the Second World War.

Young's proposals were simple. The main reform would be focused on the Urban Council (responsible for basic services and sanitation on Hong Kong Island and Kowloon), which would be turned into a Municipal Council of thirty members, twenty of whom would be elected and, unusually for Hong Kong, only ten appointed. The Municipal Council, Young
envisaged, would be responsible for the day-to-day running of the colony. The most controversial aspect of his ideas, published in the second half of 1946, was the proposal that the seats on the council should be split 50–50 between the European and Chinese populations. Given that the Chinese community made up over 98 per cent of the population, it was clear that any proposal to split the representation evenly would deny them their fair share. By modern standards, there were many provisions that would fail to meet the requirements of pure democratic principles. Young not only proposed a franchise for those who had reached the age of twenty-five, he advocated a literacy qualification in English or Chinese and a property qualification. This was justified on the grounds that there was in Hong Kong ‘a very large floating population (both literally and figuratively)' which made keeping an accurate electoral roll very difficult.
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Young was a typical liberal mandarin of the period after the Second World War; now nearly sixty, he had never been a particularly fierce or trenchant imperialist. More relevantly, for Hong Kong's experience, he was not a Sinologist or, in the jargon of the day, a ‘China hand'. He had served as a colonial civil servant in Ceylon, and as governor in Tanganyika and Barbados.
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He knew very little of conditions in Hong Kong before he was appointed governor in 1941.

His lack of knowledge of Hong Kong perhaps filled him with an idealism which was not shared either by the British officials in Government House or by the Chinese population themselves. In his attempt to win local support for his reforms in the last months of 1946, he often expressed frustration, in his usual measured terms, about the lack of enthusiasm he found among the Chinese population. He complained to Arthur Creech Jones, the trade unionist who was now Labour's Colonial Secretary, of a ‘decided lack of enthusiasm for any constitutional changes'. This ‘lack of enthusiasm' had been apparent throughout the informal surveys of opinion he had undertaken. Young attributed the tepid response to his plans to apathy and in part to ‘apprehension'. After the war, many Hong Kong Chinese believed that it would be only a matter of months before Hong Kong was handed over to the Chinese on the mainland. The majority of the Chinese in Hong Kong, in Young's view, had a ‘vague feeling that it may be expedient to keep in with both sides', and they did not want to lose
influence in China, after the handover of Hong Kong, by appearing to be enthusiastic supporters of a plan devised by British imperialists. Young had been particularly disheartened when a questionnaire canvassing local opinion, which had appeared in two newspapers with a combined readership of 20,000, elicited fewer than a hundred replies.
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The attempt to bring a tiny bit of democracy to Hong Kong in 1946 was obstructed by local apathy and by the lack of any real conviction on the part of the British administrators themselves. Young himself retired from public service in May 1947. He had pursued a vision for democracy in Hong Kong but nothing had been achieved. He went to live in Winchester, where he devoted himself to his great love, music, especially in the form of choral singing, and occasionally dipped into the Classical texts which he had studied so diligently at Eton and Cambridge. He died, aged eighty-eight, in 1974. He was an excellent imperial servant, intelligent and humane, yet his hope for a more democratic Hong Kong was never realized in his lifetime.

The idea of democracy in Hong Kong persisted and found its most concrete expression in the formation of the Hong Kong Reform Club in January 1949. The club's objectives were bolder than Mark Young had ever been. It even petitioned his replacement as governor, Sir Alexander Grantham, for a directly elected Legislative Council. This was more radical than Young's own plans because he had envisaged only a Municipal Council which would act as a kind of super town council. The Reform Club also objected strongly to the idea of having two separate electorates, one European and the other Chinese.
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The new governor, however, was not a man who found the idea of democracy particularly appealing, and, unlike Sir Mark, he had spent a large part of his career in Hong Kong and realized that local public opinion was probably largely indifferent to democratic reform.

Alexander Grantham was quite different from Young. Ten years younger than Sir Mark, he had been in the army at the end of the First World War. He was a product of Wellington College, one of the relatively new public schools, founded in 1853 as a national memorial to the Duke of Wellington. Unsurprisingly, given its origins, Wellington had a more overtly military ethos than older establishments like Eton or Winchester. There was about
Grantham an air of military efficiency, combined with a direct manner, which was practical and hard-edged. It is true that he had been educated at Cambridge, but his mind was not of the same cast as that of Cecil Clementi, who spoke nine different dialects of Chinese and wrote a Latin ode to commemorate the foundation of the University of Hong Kong in 1912. Neither was Grantham like Mark Young, who loved Bach and Classical literature. His practical mind had mastered enough Chinese to read the ‘easiest parts' of the newspaper, and that was all he required.

Grantham's practical intelligence saw the problem of Hong Kong's future very clearly. He believed that Hong Kong ‘could never become independent'. Either it would remain a British colony or it would be ‘reabsorbed into China as part of the province of Kwangtung'. This being the case, he believed that the ‘fundamental political problem of the British Colony of Hong Kong [was] its relationship with China and not the advancement to self-government and independence'.
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The issue of democratic reform in Hong Kong was raised fitfully during the late 1940s and early 1950s, as the Grantham administration prevaricated and dodged the issue. Some articulate opinion in Hong Kong was scandalized by the way things were run in the colony, given that it remained the benign authoritarian state it had always been. Late in 1952, the
Far Eastern Economic Review
reported a speech by Percy Chen, a local barrister and political agitator, who declared, ‘there is no other Colony where the system of Government is so archaic; where the system of nomination instead of election plays a bigger part in the selection of so-called representatives'. Chen concluded with the perfectly accurate observation that the ‘Democratic system of Government has not been developed in Hong Kong'.
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Grantham's own views, though not initially favourable to the idea of democracy, were shaped by what he perceived to be apathy on the part of the local population. At the beginning of 1952, he believed that there was some appetite for limited reform. He had argued, in a meeting in London with Colonial Office officials, that ‘those who do advocate' reform were in a strong position to stir up agitation based on the ‘non-fulfilment of promises dating back to 1945'. It was only when there seemed to be less support for democracy in Hong Kong itself that Grantham became firmer in his opposition to this development. In the meantime, the Colonial Secretary,
Oliver Lyttelton, a large, jovial man whose political career had been very much subordinated to his financial interests in the City of London, followed the Governor almost blindly. In March 1952, Lyttelton accepted Grantham's view that ‘we should now go ahead with the reforms'. Later in the year, in June, Grantham was singing a very different tune, reporting to Lyttelton, his nominal superior, that ‘members of Executive Council now feel apprehensive regarding any major constitutional changes at the present time'. By September 1952, constitutional reform in Hong Kong was firmly put aside. Lyttelton observed to the Cabinet in September that ‘my colleagues will remember that on the 20th May, the Cabinet approved of my proceeding with the measure of Constitutional Reform', but when ‘the Governor of Hong Kong arrived in this country on leave I discussed the matter further with him. I do not propose to proceed with these reforms . . .'
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People in Hong Kong continued to agitate for democracy. In 1953, the Reform Club of Hong Kong intensified its campaign to bring some element of democracy into the colony. The London
Times
reported on 16 October that a petition had been signed by 12,000 Hong Kong residents urging the creation of just two elected seats on the Legislative Council. Yet, once again, the Hong Kong population was apathetic. The
China Mail
, in an editorial published on the same day as the
Times
report, remarked that ‘deplorable though it may seem to enthusiasts, general public interest in constitutional reform of a major character is much less today than it was five years ago'.
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People in Hong Kong, it seemed, were generally pleased with their government. Many, the
China Mail
editorial argued, thought the apathy was ‘an expression of satisfaction with the post-war progressiveness of the Administration'. The paper concluded that there existed ‘little more than academic interest' in constitutional reform. The
South China Morning Post
, on the same day, spoke scornfully of the Reform Club's petition: 12,000–half of 1 per cent of the community–was hardly ‘an enthusiastic endorsement of the zeal and enthusiasm of the reformers'. This newspaper believed that ‘a relatively small group of politically-minded persons is trying to foist upon the citizens rights and responsibilities to which the great majority are indifferent'. Democratic politics were unnecessary as the ‘Government happens to enjoy very
considerable prestige as it is'. What Hong Kong residents wanted was ‘efficiency'. It was, the
South China Morning Post
believed, ‘not a very adventurous outlook'.
¹³

These views highlight a common perception about what made Hong Kong a special place. Trade and money-making were the principal activities that took place there, a theme that runs right through the history of Hong Kong. The British merchants themselves shared that attitude, although they were more likely to suggest that apathy to democracy was part of the Chinese character, and did not simply arise from particular circumstances. P. S. Cassidy was a pillar of the local community and had lived in Hong Kong since 1913. He had served as a member of the Legislative Council and as chairman of the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce. To him, Hong Kong was like ‘Amsterdam in the Middle Ages –the financial centre of Western Europe'. His history may have been suspect, as Amsterdam had enjoyed the summit of its prosperity in the seventeenth century, but the general point remained: Hong Kong was a commercial city, in which the Chinese were ‘mainly concerned with their own affairs' and preferred ‘to leave to trained administrators the management of public affairs'.
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The Reform Club's agitation in the last months of 1953 marked the conclusion of one particular episode in the evolution of democracy in Hong Kong. By the end of that year, Grantham dismissed the club as an institution that did ‘not command wide support'. Lyttelton, as usual, was guided entirely by the Governor and, in response to a question from a Labour MP regarding the petition of the Hong Kong Reform Club, merely retorted that he had been ‘advised by the Governor that the Reform Club of Hong Kong . . . is not representative of public opinion generally in the Colony and that there is no general demand for constitutional change in Hong Kong at the present time'. Lyttelton, in his characteristically blunt manner, further angered the Hong Kong Chinese by claiming that a large number of the 12,000 who had signed the petition were ‘hawkers and others unlikely to understand the issues involved'.
¹⁵

The abortive attempt to bring democracy to Hong Kong reveals once again a recurring feature of the British Empire: individuals mattered. It is likely that, if a more liberal-minded idealist like Mark Young had been
governor in place of Grantham, more democratic reforms would have taken place. A leading historian of Hong Kong has even suggested that the ‘most important factor which altered the direction of Hong Kong was the difference in attitude and approach of the two Governors involved–Young and Grantham'. It was this radical difference in outlook which determined Hong Kong's course in the subsequent decades and ensured that, between 1952 and 1981, both the British and Hong Kong governments ‘ruled out any possibility of developing the Hong Kong constitution' along democratic lines. This difference of outlook between Mark Young and Alexander Grantham shows the anarchic individualism which dominated the empire: individuals who had been granted large responsibility and power were largely unchecked. Each colonial administrator was given a wide latitude to pursue his own policies, and was only rarely overruled by unusually confident ministers like Randolph Churchill in the case of Burma. Generally, the man on the spot had sole responsibility and yet, because another man would soon take over, there was no consistent line of policy that was developed over time. Thus anarchic individualism led to instability because there was no policy coherence or strategic direction. A liberal governor like Sir Mark Young promoted greater democracy in Hong Kong, only for a more pragmatic and less idealistic governor, like Sir Alexander Grantham, to push those reforms to one side.