Hong Kong (32 page)

It could be said then to be the summit of political aspiration among the Hong Kong Chinese, too. The prospect of 1997 has changed their views rather, as we shall later see, but until very recently most of them wanted nothing to do with politics. Bred as they were to the Confucianist conception of government by a specially trained élite, they were quite prepared to let the British do all the governing for them, while they got on with life. The Canadian social-psychologist Michael H. Bond, of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, has analysed
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their attitudes thus: ‘Social truth does not arise from the open clash of contending opinions, but is delivered by conscientious leaders after careful consideration of the issues. A grateful citizenry plays its role by repaying the efforts of the leadership with loyalty and acceptance.’ Democratic, adversarial politics hardly come readily to such a citizenry. It is a step towards chaos, says a Chinese proverb, when argument begins.

The comedy of Legco, 1986, arose because now that the story was almost over, and any future constitutional changes could be made only with the consent, tacit or declared, of the Chinese Government in Beijing, the Legislative Council was conducted as a sort of solemn
parody of British parliamentary practice. Heavy were the courtesies, in the true Westminster style, laboured was the sarcasm, slight but ineffably Parliamentarian were the jokes. Those Knight Commanders of the front bench emanated genial power – three able but sufficiently ordinary Britons, to be encountered one might think any day on a stockbrokers’ commuter train into Waterloo, transformed into Honourable Ministers on the other side of the globe. How the members laughed, when one of these mandarins offered a sally, and with what bridling modesty he resumed his seat amidst the amusement! The nominated members, heirs to generations of sycophancy or self-interest, generally addressed the Chamber respectfully, in all the convoluted usage of Westminster practice – ‘Would the honourable member the Financial Secretary not agree …?’ – ‘I put it to my honourable friend the Secretary for Economic Services …’ The elected members, while keeping within the bounds of Parliamentary propriety, demonstrated their independence with shows of defiance – they were after all the closest Hong Kong had ever seen to an official Opposition, and they had only been invented the year before. The speeches were nearly all in English, but with simultaneous translation into Chinese, and were for the most part earnest but pedestrian. The topics were generally innocuous. The vote of the assembly was, to put it bluntly, powerless.

For the Governor remained, in 1986, omnipotent. Anything Legco decided, he could cancel. Anything he decreed, Legco must accept. The authority of the Governor, sitting up here looking so bored, poor fellow, as the Honourable the Financial Secretary moved into the second phase of his argument about the relationship between inflation and exchange rates – the Governor’s authority was derived ‘from Letters Patent passed under the Great Seal of the United Kingdom’, and was subject only to decisions of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in London, or of the monarch. Like all his predecessors, he was not
just
the Governor. He might no longer be accredited to countless millions, as Sir John Bowring had been, but he was the titular Commander-in-Chief, the President of Legco and the representative of the Crown, ‘exerting’, so the official Hong Kong handbook said in a delicate periphrasis, ‘a major influence over the direction of affairs’. He had an Executive Council to advise him, whose fourteen members were all ex officio or officially appointed, but he presided over it and decided what it should advise him about, and constitutionally he need not accept its advice anyway.

But there he sat, looking a little tired one thinks (as it happens he was the universally liked Sir Edward Youde, who was to die in office later in the year), courteously guiding Legco towards the next subject of its debate – whether or not discounts should be allowed on officially authorized leasehold transfers. It was a somewhat Carrollean sensation, any Wednesday afternoon towards the end of the 1980s, to stray into the protocol of this debating chamber out of Hong Kong’s fantastic tumult.

Of course it was not comical really. Little in Hong Kong is very funny – this must be one of the most calculating and deliberate societies on earth. The degree of Legco’s power, like its ration of democratic system, has been most carefully estimated and controlled, set against the unique circumstances of Hong Kong, and released or restrained as an engineer controls a steam valve.

If it had been situated anywhere else Hong Kong would long since have become self-governing, like almost every other British colony, to turn itself eventually I suppose into another such entity as Singapore. Standing as it does at the mercy of China, on Chinese soil, on Chinese terms, its constitutional situation, as one of the most advanced financial centres in the world, remained almost to the end – until 1991 – more or less the constitutional situation of Gambia or Jamaica half a century ago. It was the very last of the classic British Crown Colonies, even impotent dependencies like St Helena (population 5,147) or the Cayman Islands (population 22,000), having achieved legislatures with an elected majority. Hong Kong was an otherwise obsolete entity astonishingly preserved, or a preternaturally lively fossil: partly a British imperial relic, but in a more suggestive way an echo of a lost China too – it is very proper that the colony’s crest is supported by a lion, sinister, but dexter a Chinese dragon.

Even now the monarchical status of the place, like that of old China, hangs like a thin miasma over its affairs. Pictures of the Queen ornament offices, the Queen’s Birthday garden party is one of the social events of the year, the Yacht Club, the Golf Club, the police force all enjoy the prefix ‘Royal’. Having been graciously recognized in honours lists citizens are largely pictured in the local papers collecting their medals at Government House, or better yet at Buckingham Palace, still the fount of Hong Kong’s chivalry. Royal visits are never forgotten.
When Prince Alfred, the first member of the British royal family to come, arrived on board the warship
Galatea
in 1869, the event was described by a local historian, J. W. Norton-Kyshe, as unique in the history of the world – ‘never before had a Royal Prince visited lands so remote from the centres of civilization’. Only one reigning monarch, Elizabeth II, has ever followed his example, but the future George V came in 1881, the future Edward VIII in 1922, and after Youde’s sudden death in 1986 some people tipped the heir to the throne, Prince Charles, to succeed him – administrative experience, it was argued, knowledge of China and its languages, diplomatic expertise, all being less valuable in Hong Kong than a touch of the royal charisma.

During the spring blossoming of the azaleas the gardens of Government House, home of the Queen’s Deputy, are open for one day to the general public. The occasion seems to exert an arcane compulsion upon many Chinese people of Hong Kong, and suggests to me some traditional festival of China under the Manchus, a day of chrysanthemums or lotus-blossom perhaps. Thousands and thousands of people visit the gardens on Azalea Day, and all day long the crowds hasten up the hill to the gatehouse where the sentry stands, in a mood partly festive (for they come in entire families, bringing their cameras) but partly in a spirit of awe.

Ostensibly, of course, the gardens themselves are the attraction of the day – still agreeable, with their shrubs and sloping lawns, for all the grim commercial buildings which now block their prospect of the harbour. Round and round their gravel paths the wondering throng meanders, taking flowered pictures all the way – small children dimpled among the blossoms, family groups posed in arbours – everywhere, at every splash of colour, the fixed smiles and the click of shutters. It is not however the foliage that is the real focus of the day, but the place itself, and the royal mystique it represents; when I was in the gardens one Azalea Day I saw a Chinese laboriously and reverently copying down in English, as one might copy Imperial Scrolls, the injunctions posted here and there, such as THIS WAY OUT, or DO NOT PICK THE FLOWERS.

A gubernatorial aide once showed me, in his room at Government House, how to affix the blue and white plumes on his ceremonial white topee (makers, Horton and Sons, London). They have their own Plume
Box, and pushed into holes on the helmet’s crown, are fastened with bolts below. Until 1996 the Governor, his entourage, and his armed forces, who were equipped still with many such fancies of the imperial tradition, offered the chief visible reminder that Hong Kong was still a colony.

We have seen that in previous decades, when Plume Boxes were far more common, the imperial factor was inescapable. It is only in the past half-century that Hong Kong has evolved into the condition of a City-State, half-autonomous, maintaining its own trade relations with foreign Powers. Before the Second World War it considered itself only another of the imperial departments, and officials saw their appointments to Hong Kong as steps in a career; just a glance at the roster of Governors down the years shows that they came from, or went to, possessions as promisingly varied as Corfu, Newfoundland, Gambia, New South Wales, Ceylon, Malaysia, India, Borneo and the colonies of the Caribbean.

The usual imperial transmigrations occurred. Ponies and eucalyptus trees came from Australia, indentured labourers went to South Africa, Mr Rynes’ rabbits came from England, convicts were transported to Malaya (Pope-Hennessy indeed once suggested that Labuan might be attached to Hong Kong as its own penal dependency). Hong Kong Chinese, full citizens of the Empire then, travelled and settled everywhere under the British flag. For many years after its foundation, though, Hong Kong was particularly under the spell of British India. Every eastern colony was. The Empire in India was overwhelmingly the greatest of British possessions, the hub around which the entire Empire revolved. It was Curzon, who wrote so rapturously of Hong Kong, who declared that without the possession of India the whole Empire would lose its point.

The colony never had official links with British India. It had never been, like Aden or Burma, governed from Calcutta, and its defence was organized by the British, not the Indian Army – Kipling reported in 1888 that the commanding general talked about nothing but English military matters, ‘which are very, very different from Indian ones’. Nevertheless the Anglo-Indian influence was profound. The ships from Calcutta or Bombay, the Indian soldiers so often to be seen, the Sikh policemen, the Hindustani words that had entered the vocabulary, the rich Parsee merchants, the generally Anglo-Indian style of living – all made British visitors feel they were still on the circuit of the Raj. Kipling, who thought Hong Kong ‘beat Calcutta into a hamlet’,
nevertheless observed that even the richest of the taipans paid that city ‘a curious deference’. At the end of the century surveyors brought from India mapped the newly acquired property of the New Territories; they named its high ground after hills of home, Mendips, Cotswolds, Cheviots, South Downs, but they called its chief rivers the Indus and the Ganges.
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Hong Kong even played a part in the Great Game, that prolonged shadow-boxing by which the British and Russian Empires struggled for control of the approaches to India; when its financiers lent money to the Japanese, in the early years of the twentieth century, it was partly to strengthen Japan’s position against the Russians, and so to relieve pressure on the Raj in the remote marches of the Hindu Kush. The Indian connection provided a hint of glamour, and no doubt the presence of that mighty possession over the horizon offered the British some reassurance of security. How could their supremacy in the eastern seas be shaken, with such a power around the corner? It was in India that the colony raised its first military force – the Hong Kong Regiment, recruited in 1890 among Pathans, Punjabis and Bengalis, and uniformed dashingly in gold, scarlet, blue, and red stripes. When in 1941 the Japanese attacked Hong Kong, Rajput troops bore the brunt of their first assault, and a band of the Jaipur Guards welcomed the Governor back from imprisonment when all was over.

Another highly visible totem of the imperial factor was the Royal Navy. The size of its squadron in these waters varied down the years, but generally included ships of the most modern kind. ‘Large crowds of interested visitors,’ reported the
Navy and Army Illustrated
when the brand-new cruiser
Powerful
went into dry-dock at Kowloon in 1898, ‘streamed every day to get a sight of the monster cruiser
in puris naturalibus,’
and those Hong Kong harbour views down the decades are like a register of naval architecture: now the black-and-white hulls of sailing frigates, now the bulky turrets of the ironclads – tall raked funnels of County-class cruisers between the two world wars, low-in-the-water gunboats
(Bee, Aphis, Ladybird)
from the Yangtze station, the war-torn task force, led by a battleship of the latest class, which restored British sovereignty to the colony in 1945.

In the last years of the nineteenth century Hong Kong was the Navy’s largest naval station in the east, intended in combination with the base at Esquimault, on the western coast of Canada, to give the
Royal Navy supremacy throughout the northern Pacific. Until the fortifications of Singapore in the 1930s the naval dockyard at Victoria was the Navy’s only first-class repair base east of Malta. Hong Kong would not have been Hong Kong without the Navy then, for not only was it one of the colony’s chief employers, it also set the social pace. An invitation to Government House might be the grandest, a taipan’s dinner-table might be the most luxurious, but there was no party like a party on the Commodore’s Receiving Ship, all white awnings and fairy-lights at its mooring in the harbour, and no ball like a naval ball, when the most elaborate and ingenious decorations enlivened City Hall, and there was always a new batch of spirited young officers to keep things going.

In later years there was for naval ratings, too, no club quite like the China Fleet Club. Built in 1933 just outside the dockyard at Wanchai, its hospitable bars and pool rooms were familiar to sailors from all over the world, and provided a beery, homely mirror of Britishness in the east. Generations of Royal Navy men knew Hong Kong; conversely generations of Hong Kong Chinese grew up with the Royal Navy. The dockyard workers were known to the fleet affectionately as ‘mateys’, the sampan girls who painted the warships had friends on every vessel. When the dockyard was closed in 1959, the Civil Lords of the Admiralty sent a message couched in the full glory of English naval language, recalling the loyal craftsmanship of the Chinese workers, and concluding splendidly: ‘Their Lordships desire to express their gratitude for all the benefits thus bestowed upon the Royal Navy.’