[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies.]

Drawing mainly on government documents covering all aspects of public policy and social life, the book clearly shows that not only was Hong Kong quite clearly a colony but that it was ruled by bureaucrats very much exercised by their political masters in London. And, well before talks on Hong Kong’s handover to China took place in the early 1980s, officials were constantly looking over their shoulders trying to gauge PRC responses.

Moreover, there is a constant theme of unease and slight mystification from officials trying to discern the attitudes of Hong Kong’s people who, for most of the post-war period, enjoyed no form of elective government. In one document, dated 1956, one official was sufficiently moved by disquiet to declare his belief that Hong Kong ‘is more Communist-penetrated than any other colony’. This is quite some claim bearing in mind the strong influence of the Communist Party in nearby colonies that were poised to erupt into long running insurgencies.

Time and again these documents show that the people running Hong Kong were finding it hard to get their heads around the people they ruled. No problem or manifestation of social unrest was too small not to be met by the reflex response of setting up a committee or stepping propaganda activity to combat whatever the problem was perceived to be.

And while the bureaucrats were puzzling over the inscrutability of the Hong Kong people, they were also resolute in opposing change, not least in resisting use of the Chinese language in officialdom (not permitted until 1974), slowing down the development of the container port, destined to become the biggest in the world and holding back the building of a tunnel linking Hong Kong island with the Kowloon peninsula where most people lived. There are now three road tunnels and it seems incredible that anyone seriously questioned their utility.

Hong Kong – Prospects for democracy (1992)
The democratic party in the Hong Kong special administrative region (1999)
Interview: The Chinese challenge – a conversation with Charles Moore (2020)

What is also highlighted here is that Hong Kong’s much vaunted policy of ‘positive non-interventionism’ was mainly manifest when officials either did not understand or could not hold back developments which were not part of the government’s plan.

That said one of the most important government initiatives was to achieve financial stability in 1983 by pegging the Hong Kong currency to the US Dollar. The peg remains and is widely regarded as having been a success. But what few people know and is one of the few revelations in this book, is that the economist John Greenwood, widely known as ‘Father of the Peg’, because it was indeed his idea, had in fact advocated a link to the UK pound, which would have been far more problematic.

While there is plenty of bungling on display what also shines through this collection is the work of dedicated public servants, especially in the fields of public health, housing and environmental preservation. The benefits of their work remain in place today despite the ravages of the new order concentrating the government’s fire power on suppressing dissent in the name of national security.

Talking of which, it is interesting to read contemporary reports of the colonial government’s response to the violent challenge to its authority during the 1960s spillover rioting inspired by the Cultural Revolution on the Mainland. Unfortunately, the book lingers only briefly here, but we can see officials acknowledging underlying social and economic dissatisfaction as background to these events. Acknowledging what lay behind the unrest provided a wakeup call for the government to make seminal changes in social policy.

Contrast this response with the PRC controlled government’s response to the unrest in the Hong Kong of 2019/20, which consisted of blaming foreigners for stirring up trouble while totally failing to recognise the frustration which fuelled this confrontation. Thus, it not only ignored the protestors’ demands but punished them by turning the clock back on democratic progress and cracking down hard on freedom of expression. It followed the colonial example of the 1960s only in respect of making mass arrests.

Strangely this work does not cover one of Hong Kong’s greatest strengths: the evolution of the rule of law under an independent legal system which has underpinned Hong Kong’s development and laid the foundations for the creation of an international business centre while also safeguarding the individual rights of citizens. Maybe under the new dispensation this was considered to be too controversial for a book published in today’s Hong Kong.

A new documentary history of Hong Kong 1945–1997 edited by Florence Mok and Charles Fung Chi-Keung, Hong Kong University Press.