Hong Kong (35 page)

Even so the expatriate civil servants remained almost to the end a remarkably mixed bag. From senior executives to police officers, they were drawn from many origins and many administrative and technical disciplines. They may have been inherited from lost colonies elsewhere – many moved on from Africa in the 1960s, many more from Singapore and Malaysia in the 1970s. They may have been recruited across the divide from private enterprise. Some just turned up, in the old way, and many were on short contracts: those who were making a career of the administrative branch were, in the British colonial tradition, expected to prove themselves as jacks-of-all-trades.

In 1986 the Financial Secretary was a former chairman of Swire’s, while the Chief Secretary, having started life as a merchant seaman, had served as a colonial officer in Malaysia and was one of the few foreigners to speak both the Cantonese and the Hokkien dialects. The Attorney-General, previously a counsel to the Ministry of Defence in London, was the co-editor of
Temperley’s Merchant Shipping Acts
. The Chief Justice, a former Attorney-General of Gibraltar, was the author of
The Bones of the Wajingas
and
How to Dispense with Lawyers
. The Deputy Director of Trade had spent time on attachment to the Royal Visit Office, and the Staff Officer (Hawkers and Markets) had previously been Coordinator of the Festival of Asian Arts. In 1992 the newly appointed head of the Marine Department, responsible for one of the world’s greatest ports, was an Arabist, educated at the London School of Oriental and African Studies and at Harvard, who had previously served with the Housing Authority and been in charge of hawkers and markets at the Department of Urban Services.

There are at least 180,000 servants of Government in all, 99 per cent of them Chinese, making it much the largest Hong Kong employer. The Government Telephone Directory is 569 pages long. The Government Land Transport Agency has more than 7,000 vehicles, six and a
quarter for each mile of road. And the most heterogeneous of all Government branches is the Information Services Department, the front of it all, which includes twenty-seven Chief Information Officers, fifty-three Principal Information Officers, eighty-seven Senior Information Officers and eighty-seven Information Officers plain and simple. It is rumoured to act sometimes as a dis-information department: a Conservative Member of Parliament, Robert Adley, alleged in the 1980s that because of his heretical views on the future of Hong Kong the ISD had deliberately set out to besmirch his reputation, and reformist citizens of Hong Kong, too, have felt themselves to be the victims of its expertise.

In the main though it is a vast and skilful publicity instrument. It publishes myriad books and pamphlets, from economic abstracts to architectural guides. It brings a ceaseless stream of overseas journalists, politicians and businessmen to Hong Kong, chaperones them carefully and sends them home to disseminate the received truth about the place. It shepherds foreign correspondents through their assignments, it briefs Government officials on their images, it produces every year the annual review of Hong Kong, almost as rich in colour plates as it is in statistics, which sells more copies in the territory than any other book. It publishes a daily digest of the Chinese Press. It is very kind to people writing books.

An astonishing gallimaufry of people has found jobs in this organization, from many parts of the world. Distributed among Government offices all over Hong Kong, with representatives in London, Brussels, Tokyo, San Francisco and New York, between them they constitute a most powerful engine of propaganda: for the size of the colony, I would guess, the largest, most active and most aggressive of all State publicity machines – so important is image to this system of control.

Hardly less varied are the officers who administer the Common Law in Hong Kong. They are no longer called upon to administer Chinese customary law, and are not obliged to understand any Chinese language – except in special hearings of trivial offences, the language of the courts is English, laboriously interpreted into Cantonese, Hakka, Hoklo or Tanka. There are four degrees of court, from magistrates’ court to Court of Appeal, and in serious criminal cases juries of seven people are required to reach a verdict. I have spent many days, over many years, haunting the courts of Hong Kong, from the High Court
to district magistrates’ courts, and I have never seen, anywhere in the world, such a variegated assortment of jurists.

There are judges of a truly awful Englishness, the very embodiment of the Common Law, rigged out of course in full paraphernalia of full-bottom wigs and buckled shoes, and fluent in the circumlocutions of their trade. There are learned Chinese, similarly accoutred, just as bewigged, and hardly less as to the manner born. There are the inevitable Australians. I remember with affection a small neat judge, Scottish I think, who seemed to be in a condition of perpetual fidgety motion, never still, never at repose – now twitching his head this way and that, now suddenly removing his spectacles, now moving his pen, rearranging his papers, looking suddenly around the court, shifting his wig, putting his pen down, picking his pen up, for all the world as though he were some kind of mechanical toy, made in Hong Kong no doubt, and would presently run down into a recess.

It would be a miracle if all the legal men of Hong Kong were of high standard. For most of them the only true inducement to work in the territory is the inducement of money, and the quality of the law they administer seems to me distinctly variable. It is degrading enough, for my tastes, that after 150 years of British rule a population 98 per cent Chinese should still have many of its cases tried in English. ‘What’s going on? What’s happening?’ judges sometimes irritably inquire, when interpreters are delayed by knotty points of translation, and the cry rings shamefully: how terrible to see, as I saw with pity one day, a young man from a refugee camp, charged with murder in the misery of his condition, tried before a European judge, British, Australian, Indian and New Zealand lawyers and a jury of five Europeans and two Chinese, all in a language he did not understand, below the crest of a monarchy resident on the other side of the world! I would not like to be defended by some of the lawyers appearing in the courts of Hong Kong. Nor would I happily appear before some of the magistrates. They are all professionals, members of the Civil Service, but some are both more professional, and more civil, than others.

Observe for example the magistrate, nationality immaterial, presiding over this morning’s petty cases in one of the air-conditioned lower courts. He is a master of the legal cliché, besides being a stickler for every last nicety of the Common Law. The rules of evidence are sacrosanct to him, the pedantries of the court are as the bread of life, and sitting as he does alone upon his bench, hearing cases involving simple Chinese in a language he does not understand, he has long since
perfected his techniques of brief authority. He bullies defendants mercilessly – ‘Shut up, don’t you open your mouth and blurt out.’ He bludgeons witnesses – ‘I’ll ask you the question ten times, 100 times, 1,000 times if necessary, until it sticks into your thick skull.’ He testily proclaims his own importance – ‘This is a court of law, not a fish market, and I am presiding over this court. Do you understand that? Do you hear me? I am not speaking German or Greek to you.’ And when at last he fines some miserable prostitute, or sends a bewildered hawker off to the cells, he does so without a flicker of regret, without a hint of understanding, only a petulant exertion of his own supremacy.
⁶

Of course he stands very low in the hierarchy of imperial justice, which until the Chinese take over in Hong Kong, still ascends, as it did in all the Empire once, to that ultimate court of appeal, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London.

Once this was among the most august of all lawcourts, with a jurisdiction far exceeding that of the Roman Empire at its widest. It heard appeals from every part of the British dominions. Its judges were drawn from all over the British world, and its plaintiffs and respondents too came from anywhere the flag flew. Today its powers are sadly shrunken, few countries now recognizing its authority, but far away in London it still represents the ultimate hope of justice for appellants in Hong Kong.

Cases seldom in fact reach the Privy Council – it is not easy to get leave to appeal there, and the cost is great. Among those that were heard in the past, some must have made Whitehall hearts sink, so peculiarly complex were the affairs of this possession. Cases of land tenure were always especially awkward, and all too often Hong Kong legal affairs impinged in one way or another upon international law. A piquant example was the case of The Attorney-General of Our Lady the Queen for the Colony of Hong Kong versus Kwok A Sing, which reached the Judicial Committee in 1863.

Kwok A Sing was one of 310 Chinese migrants who boarded a French ship in Macao, bound for a new life in Peru. They were indentured labourers, and were treated almost as slaves, kept below decks at night, and separated from the crew quarters by armed barricades.
This was not what Kwok A Sing had expected, as he set off for his fresh start, and after a few days at sea he and several other men attacked the captain and crew. They killed some, and obliged the rest to sail the ship back to China. The mutineers disappeared, but Kwok A Sing presently turned up in Hong Kong. There he was arrested as a suspicious character, and when his identity was established the Chinese authorities applied for his extradition.

This was refused. The Chief Justice of Hong Kong maintained that the extradition treaty with China did not apply to political offences, which Kwok’s arguably was, or to crimes like piracy which were justiciable in Hong Kong, while conditions on board the ship, it might also be argued, were such as to make murder justifiable – part of ‘the first law of nature, committed under the right of self-preservation’. Anyway, the Chief Justice ruled, since the crime was committed on board a French ship on the high seas, only the French could demand extradition.

The French had in fact considered asking for it, but perhaps preferred not to have conditions on board a French ship exhibited, and decided not to pursue the claim. Kwok was freed. The Attorney-General immediately had him re-arrested and charged with piracy, a crime justiciable in the colony regardless of the nationality of the ship on which it had been committed; but the Chief Justice promptly ordered him released again, on the grounds that the facts had not altered, and an accused could not be placed in second jeopardy.

Unhappy Kwok! The Chinese wanted him, the French did and didn’t, the British in Hong Kong could not agree. Six thousand miles away five eminent judges pondered the rights and wrongs of his predicament – Sir John Colville, Sir R. Phillimore, Lord Justice Mellish, Sir Barnes Peacock and Sir Montague E. Smith – far from the China seas, remote indeed from the slave ship on its way to Peru. What they decided was this: that on the one hand, the murder by a Chinese subject of a person who was not a subject of China, committed outside Chinese territory, was not an offence against the law of China, so Kwok was not extraditable there. On the other hand the Attorney-General was right, and he should indeed be re-arrested and tried in Hong Kong on a charge of piracy under the Law of Nations.

But the decision, though it found its way into the law books, was hypothetical anyway, for by then Kwok A Sing had sensibly left Hong Kong for ever, never to be heard of since.

Sad to say, one characteristic which set the Hong Kong administration apart from its colonial peers across the world was its tendency towards the sensational. From the beginning until our own times Hong Kong officialdom has been periodically rocked by accusations of corruption, and made notorious by quarrels and intrigues, sometimes venal, sometimes merely bizarre. By Asian standards they were untoward, by British imperial standards they were spectacular: Pope-Hennessy’s umbrella attack upon the Leader of the Bar, pursued so the victim said ‘with a fury quite inconceivable’, was only the most farcical of a run of disgraces unique among British colonies.

In one period of ten years, between 1845 and 1855, the following things happened: the Chief Justice was sacked for drunkenness; the Registrar-General was accused of associating with pirates; the Attorney-General was dismissed for calumniating a colleague; the Superintendent of Police was accused of having a financial interest in brothels; the acting Colonial Secretary was accused of accepting bribes; the Lieutenant-Governor (Caine) was accused of extracting rake-offs from market-men; the Governor (Bowring, whose son was a director of Jardine’s) was accused of partiality in the award of contracts.

The advent of the well-paid and well-educated cadet officers improved matters, but scandals continued to erupt even among the hyphenated. In 1893 the most respectable N. G. Mitchell-Innes was sacked for alleged irregularities in his handling of Treasury accounts (though he went on to be an inspector of prisons in England). And in 1938 there arrived in the colony, as Director of Air Raid Precautions, Wing-Commander A. H. S. Steele-Perkins, a highly regarded expert in civil defence. Almost at once the colony corrupted him, and he became all too friendly with Miss Mimi Lau, secretary of the Chinese company that supplied pre-cast concrete blocks for his air-raid shelters. Unfortunately the blocks, though suspiciously expensive, were undoubtedly sub-standard. In the course of consequent inquiries into the conduct of Steele-Perkins’ department, revealing all manner of peculation, its chief architect shot himself, one of its executive engineers tried to commit suicide, witnesses vanished and documents disappeared. Steele-Perkins himself was never charged, but his defective materials went for a time into the Hong Kong vernacular as ‘Mimi Lau blocks’.

More recent scandals have generally concerned the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, whose senior officers, until recently, were mostly
British – in the years after the Second World War many came to the east after losing their occupations in Palestine, Cyprus and East Africa. The colonial police were often the weakest link in the chain of imperial probity, and in Hong Kong they have frequently been seduced by the general lubricity of life. The universal taste for gambling, the chance to smuggle, the immemorial habit of ‘squeeze’, the enormous profits of the drug trade, the display of great wealth, the familiar Hong Kong attitude of live-and-let-live – all these have been fatal to policemen of susceptible temperament, whether British or Chinese. In 1898 half the entire police force was dismissed for corruption.
⁷
Of the European police officers who entered the force as sub-inspectors in 1952, four ended up in gaol. In 1966, at a time when Triad infiltration of his force was rampant, Hong Kong’s Commissioner of Police admitted that there was corruption in virtually every walk of life, but added cheerfully that ‘in terms of money the police force is probably not the worst’.