Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  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.7 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.8 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’.9 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’.10

  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 . . .’11

  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’.12 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 histor
y 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’.14

  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.

  From the evidence of his memoirs, Grantham obviously enjoyed being a governor in what was perhaps the most authoritarian colony of the British Empire. His account of the powers and authority granted to the governor were straight from the pages of Somerset Maugham, who had written about Hong Kong in the 1920s. ‘In a crown colony the Governor is next to the Almighty. Everyone stands up when he enters a room,’ Grantham remembered, with some nostalgia. He was ‘deferred to on all occasions’. Grantham’s view of Hong Kong was wholly in accord with received opinion in Hong Kong ever since its beginning as a British colony in 1841: Hong Kong was exclusively concerned with trade and commerce; the Chinese were not interested in politics or democracy, and the British could provide them with the stable background, the law and order, necessary for them to make money. ‘Provided that the government maintains law and order, does not tax them too much and that they can get justice in the courts, they [the Chinese inhabitants of Hong Kong] are content to leave the business of government to the professionals,’ Grantham asserted. He was unsentimental about Hong Kong, the colony in which he had spent the first twelve years of his career, and where he would serve as governor for nine years. He believed that the Chinese had no loyalty to the place, any more than Europeans had ties there: the Chinese came ‘to Hong Kong to work until they retired home to China, just as the Europeans returned home to Europe’. In a striking metaphor, he compared Hong Kong to ‘a railway station, and its inhabitants to the passengers who pass in and out of the gates’. He believed with equal conviction that politicians in Britain were ‘quite ready to abandon constitutional reform for Hong Kong’ on the grounds that the ‘matter did not interest the British electorate’.16

  Of course, Grantham was right. A colonial governor exercised enormous power, in many cases literally a power of life and death. This was shown, to graphic effect, in the case of Dalton and Douthwaite, two British soldiers who were arrested in 1953 for the murder of a Chinese woman the previous December. The soldiers belonged to the 35th Infantry Brigade stationed in Hong Kong. Lance-Corporal George Robert Douthwaite, the older man, aged twenty-four, had fought in the Korean War, while Dalton was only nineteen. They were alleged to have pulled a woman, Ho Sze-mui, off her bike, to have beaten her with a pair of handcuffs in a seemingly unprovoked attack, and then to have left her body in a ditch on the side of a military road known as Route 7. In April 1953, just as Britain was preparing for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the two men were convicted and sentenced to death by Mr Justice Gould, a New Zealand-born judge. The case went to the Court of Appeal, which dismissed the case of the two soldiers that June. There followed a further appeal to the Privy Council in early October, which was similarly unsuccessful. In the meantime, Dalton’s mother wrote a personal letter to the Queen asking for her to intervene. Private Dalton had been a loving son and his parents lived as poor tenants on an estate where the soldier’s father had worked as a dairyman. At this point the Colonial Office adopted a firmly neutral position; in a businesslike letter, British officials told the mother of the younger soldier in unequivocal language that the ‘prerogative of mercy in cases of this nature is delegated by Her Majesty to the Governor of Hong Kong and your petition has accordingly been sent to him for consideration’. It is doubtful that Her Majesty would even have seen the letter addressed to her. Peter Smithers, the Daltons’ local MP, lobbied the government, but was firmly told by Oliver Lyttelton that it was not the Secretary of State’s ‘duty to advise Her Majesty on the exercise of the prerogative of mercy in this case: it is for the Governor of Hong Kong to decide whether it should be exercised’. Lyttelton considered that it would be ‘improper for me to seek to influence him in coming to his decision’. The two soldiers spent the summer of 1953 in a humid cell in Hong Kong awaiting their deaths. Then, on 20 October, the Acting Governor, Robert Black, announced that he had commuted the sentence and had ordered that Douthwaite be imprisoned for twenty years and Dalton for twelve. The men had spent six months on death row and at every stage of their appeals the death sentence had been confirmed. It was only after this lengthy process that the Governor saved the soldiers in an act of clemency which no one had foreseen. The story had a final sad consequence. The elder soldier’s mother, Priscilla Douthwaite, a widow, was found dead in a stream in May near her home. She was sixty-nine and had been traumatized by the news of her son’s impending fate.17

  The 1950s are generally remembered in the West as years of steady conservatism, but there was perhaps no other society in which an atmosphere of paternalism and authority was so prevalent as that of Hong Kong, where the role of the state had not evolved since the nineteenth century. Social provision was minimal and welfare support was organized by voluntary bodies or kaifong associations, which reflected the Chinese reputation for ‘assisting those in need through either the family or through Clan associa
tions’.18

  Drug abuse continued to be an endemic problem in Hong Kong in the 1950s, and the colony’s government sought to counter the problem by getting the Acting Secretary for Chinese Affairs, the Honourable P. C. M. Sedgwick, to give an evening broadcast on the subject in November 1959, in which he urged the public to ‘co-operate in the official campaign against the terrible social evil of drug addiction’. He cited the alarming statistic that ‘over 50,000 persons committed to prison during the past five and a half years have been found to be drug addicts’. He went on to suggest that the number of addicts could be as high as ‘three to five times that figure’; a figure of ‘between 150,000 and 200,000’ in an estimated total population of 2.8 million was intolerably high. This method of public admonishment was crude, and officials deliberately contrasted Hong Kong unfavourably with the law-abiding conditions in Britain, where in 1959 it was claimed there existed ‘only a few hundred drug addicts in a total population of 50 million’. In the United Kingdom, as Sedgwick explained, the drug addict was ‘looked down upon’; even ‘in the criminal classes this is so’, he boasted.19