tim's experiment

It is nice to see that somebody still has a kind word to say for the old colonial government of Hong Kong, which comes in for a lot of gratuitous stick these days. Still I must say that Regina Ip’s piece in the Sunday Post was laying it on a bit thick. I do not doubt that Ms Ip in her career encountered some expatriate civil servants who were humane and intelligent men, genuinely dedicated to doing the best possible job for the people of Hong Kong. There were such people. I met some of them and Ms Ip must have encountered a lot more civil servants than I did.  But are we then to go on and say that “Hong Kong … afforded those elite administrators a chance to build an economic miracle and a successful society by blending the finest of British and Chinese administrative traditions, unencumbered by the divisive, debilitating effects of parliamentary politics”? Let us leave aside the inconvenient fact that most of the economic miracles and successful societies in the world have managed to combine those happy attributes with parliamentary politics. Was the colonial government really the apex of British and Chinese administrative tradition?

This is not how it seemed at the time. No doubt that line about blending the best of the two traditions was a good morale-booster for local recruits, who could hardly be told that they were contributing to the last dying flicker of the glory that was the British Empire. But even Ms Ip’s mentors would, I suspect, be surprised to see this line taken so seriously. After all anyone who has a background in colonial history will recognise in the old Hong Kong system the standard colonial arrangement, in which conservative traditional leaders are recruited to support alien rule by the promise that the wealth and privileges to which they are accustomed will be preserved. No doubt many people thought that Hong Kong was better run than the obvious alternative. But colonial administrators were not all disinterested Platonic philosopher kings. Many of them were a by-word for greed, racism, snobbery, homophobia and above all corruption.

Then we have an interesting passage about the effect of electoral politics on those who practise it. “No geographical constituency legislator could have got elected without honing their (sic) skills in sloganeering, staging public protests, mobilising the masses, attacking their (sic again) opponents and generally all the chicanery of political campaigning,” says Ms Ip. But just a moment, one of the directly elected members for the Hong Kong Island constituency is one Ip Lau Suk-yee, GBS JP, alias Regina herself. So is this a confession that Ms Ip has mastered all the chicanery? Or is she just talking about other people?

I fear Ms Ip is not the only colonial bequest who finds it difficult to understand how a government can manage if it is under public pressure to provide education, health, pensions and such like. Well this is how it works in most of the world: to govern is to choose, and the choices are made by the people who will suffer the consequences, ill or otherwise. Ms Ip has a notoriously tin ear for public sentiment. So does the government of which she is a part. That is its problem. Not the fact that some legislators entertain the sacrilegious notion that the people should get what they want.