Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  This wide-ranging report was perhaps a typical product of police forces everywhere, which often exaggerate dangers in order to justify their own powers. Yet the report offered constructive suggestions for how to improve Hong Kong’s internal security and oppose the communist threat: ‘To counter this new phase of communist confrontation the government must, in addition to maintaining law and order’, bring about ‘genuine and lasting improvements in standards of living, especially among the poorer classes’. ‘Trade disputes’ needed to be avoided, and a sophisticated public relations machine had to be established which could ‘meet the challenge of communist propaganda’.48

  In February 1968, the ban on the three suppressed newspapers was lifted. The nine communist daily newspapers now had a combined daily circulation of only 250,000, compared to a figure nearer 350,000 the year before. Trade had been seriously affected by the confrontation, as there had been a 45 per cent decrease in imports from China in the period from May to September 1967, compared to the same period in 1966, but the police felt that the battle for ‘hearts and minds’ was turning in the Hong Kong government’s favour. During the confrontation, the Hong Kong community had gained ‘considerable confidence’ in the ‘Government’s ability to contain communism’. The tension had been defused by initiatives of the Chinese government. As always, the police report of March 1968 continued, ‘everything depends on the attitude of China’. So long as the Chinese government supported local Hong Kong communists only with propaganda and ‘limited financial aid’, the communist problem was containable. This seemed to be the path the Chinese were likely to follow, ‘so long as the economic value of the colony remains an over-riding factor in the eyes of Peking’.49

  And what of democracy? Democracy played an even smaller part in the thinking of the Hong Kong government in the 1960s than it had done in the late 1940s. There was the issue of local apathy, since, as one official had crudely noted as early as 1952, the man in the street in Hong Kong wanted only a ‘full belly’.50 But more relevantly to the colony’s actual situation in the late 1960s, any move to democracy could result in Hong Kong falling into the wrong, communist hands. This had always been a worrying consideration, from the days when Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang held power in China before 1949. In a memorandum on the history of the Young proposals, the argument was explicitly stated: ‘These proposals, though approved, were never implemented chiefly because they would have resulted in effective control of many essential services passing to a body whose British character and loyalty could not necessarily be guaranteed during a period of strained relations with China’.51 This argument carried even more weight after the communists had taken over China in 1949. Hilton Poynton, a Colonial Office veteran, had been unequivocal about this in a letter to the Governor in 1964: ‘Hong Kong’s constitutional development cannot be along normal lines leading to self government and independence,’ since this would leave it ‘open to communist penetration and control’.52 The events of 1967 made this line of argument even more compelling; as a consequence, democracy in Hong Kong was never seriously contemplated.

  18

  Red Dawn

  As Hong Kong entered the 1970s, Britain was leaving its imperial past behind. The upheaval of decolonization had left large tracts of Africa and Asia to fend for themselves as newly independent states, but Hong Kong remained in much the same condition. As a consequence of the failure of any movement towards self-government, the governor continued to be an all-powerful figure. In 1971 a new governor, Murray MacLehose, had been appointed not from the ranks of the Colonial Office, but from those of the Foreign Office, yet in all other respects his background was very similar to that of his immediate predecessors. Like many others who served in the Hong Kong government, MacLehose was Scottish, but he had been educated in the very English institutions of Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford, perhaps the most imperially minded Oxford college, where he had taken a third-class degree in Modern History in 1939.1 ‘Big Mac’, as he was fondly called, has been described as the ‘last of the great British proconsuls’, but the start to his tenure as governor of Hong Kong was modest.

  There was nothing to indicate that Big Mac would differ in any way from his predecessors. He was just another Scottish diplomat who had been made governor of Hong Kong, but as the 1970s went on it was clear that he would have to face fresh challenges, negotiating relations between Hong Kong and London, while attempting not to irritate the communist regime in Beijing. Commercially, the early 1970s were years of expansion and confidence, after the low point of the 1967 disturbances. The Hang Seng index leaped from its low of 59 in 1967 to 1,775 in March 1973, making this six-year period one of the greatest bull runs in international stock-market history.2

  Politically, MacLehose’s nominal bosses in Whitehall were less optimistic. As late as 1972, officials in London remained gloomy about the future of Hong Kong, and were considering plans to evacuate the colony, or at least for a managed withdrawal, before the official end of British rule in 1997. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a new department created in 1968 from an amalgamation of the old Commonwealth and Foreign Offices, was realistic about the prospect of holding on to Hong Kong. Officials in the newly created department argued, no doubt correctly, that ‘if the Chinese allowed the lease of the New Territories to run its full term, we could not expect to renegotiate it in 1997’. ‘Sovereignty in Hong Kong’, a Foreign Office official wrote in 1972, ‘will have to be handed over to China and this is likely to become an issue in the 1980s.’ The prospects for Hong Kong in the 1980s seemed bleak, as ‘confidence and the economy’ would ‘inevitably start to run down’. In the event of a general economic decline, which officials in London anticipated, Hong Kong could ‘become a major liability’.3

  The early 1970s were a bleak time for Britain, as constant threats of industrial disputes and strikes dominated the headlines, and the country was still trying to find a role in the world after the rapid decolonization of the 1960s. Much of this pessimistic outlook is reflected in the pronouncements of officials. Since Hong Kong’s economy would wind down in the 1980s, so it was presumed, one official drew the obvious conclusion that ‘the disadvantages of our remaining in Hong Kong up to 1997 seem greatly to outweigh the advantages’. The only problem was that any hint that the British intended to leave ‘could well precipitate the collapse of confidence that we want to avoid’.4 Others in the new FCO joined in the chorus of doom: ‘we should withdraw as soon as we can reasonably do so’ because there was a ‘lack of defence for Hong Kong’ and because of the ‘drain which our presence there imposes on our financial balance of payments and manpower’. Another could only observe that ‘to stay in Hong Kong would be contrary to our general colonial policy’.5 Organized retreat seems to have been the favoured policy with regard to Britain’s imperial commitments at the Foreign Office in the early 1970s. The Chinese, by contrast, after the excesses of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, had become more reconciled to current circumstances than their harassed counterparts in London’s Foreign Office. Showing admirable pragmatism, the Chinese were now content to allow the current situation to continue, as they waited patiently for 1997. In 1971, the veteran Chinese politician Zhou Enlai informed the former Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald that China would not seek to recover Hong Kong until the expiry of the New Territories’ lease in 1997.6

  Strong economic growth in Hong Kong had led to an epidemic in corruption that threatened to destabilize the colony, and it was for his fight against corruption that much of MacLehose’s subsequent reputation was gained. ‘Fast money’ in Hong Kong encouraged a culture in which the police took bribes from Triad gangs and other known criminals, allowing the gangsters to run gambling syndicates, drug rings and brothels without any interference.7 The most notorious case involved Peter Godber, a police chief superintendent, who had fled the colony in June 1973, whereupon the slogan ‘Fight Corruption, Catch Godber’ became widely heard. Godber had escaped the colony just at the moment he
was about to be charged for corrupt practices. Four days before his flight to London, police investigators had raided Godber’s car and house, where they found boxes full of silver bars and what they described as ‘a trail of fortune’, leading them to bank accounts in Singapore, Australia, Canada and other countries. Godber’s escape was the sensation of the year, but he was brought back from London and sentenced to four years in jail in Hong Kong. He served thirty-one months of his term and then, on his release in October 1977, he disappeared. Ernest, otherwise known as ‘Taffy’, Hunt was an associate of Godber who later turned against his old mentor: ‘Make no mistake about it,’ he assured the Daily Express in 1975, ‘I was a villain.’ He candidly told the BBC later in the same year that being corrupt in Hong Kong was ‘as natural as going to bed at night and brushing your teeth in the morning’.8

  The scale of corruption prompted MacLehose to establish the Independent Commission Against Corruption, or ICAC, in 1974. This body was ‘flabbergasted’ by the scale of corruption in the police force, where policemen were found to be ‘salting away sizeable fortunes to acquire villas in Spain’, and it was discovered that highly organized police syndicates took ‘breath-taking’ sums of money, ‘amounting to hundreds of millions of US dollars’. The key figure in each police syndicate was known as the ‘caterer’, and he alone possessed all the information on the deals, acting as a sort of banker in the distribution of kickbacks and bribes to the other members of the syndicate. This was the other, seamier side of the laissez-faire culture which Cowperthwaite and his superiors in Government House had promoted.9 The air of corruption in Hong Kong was part of a wider malaise in the colony which stemmed partly from the free-wheeling nature of its capitalism and partly from the ossified nature of its society, which remained snobbish and static. In such an environment, where free enterprise was promoted but society stagnated, a criminal underworld, with its own rules, rapidly emerged. This was the time when it was said that ‘the Jockey Club, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, and the Governor’ ruled Hong Kong ‘in that order’.10 The Jockey Club had, by the 1960s, replaced the Hong Kong Club as the colony’s most elite social institution, though the Hong Kong Club kept its gentlemen’s club atmosphere until 1997.

  But it wasn’t from the Chinese, the gentlemen’s clubs or even the corrupt police force that MacLehose experienced the most acute political pressure. It was the advent of the Labour government in Britain in 1974 which put Hong Kong’s rather anomalous position as a benign dictatorship, or at best a benevolent oligarchy, in the spotlight. Democracy in Hong Kong was back on the discussion table, in the corridors of Whitehall at least. The 1970s in Britain was probably the decade when inverse snobbery, a hostile suspicion of many of the elite presuppositions which had underpinned the British Empire, was at its strongest. It was the time when the top rate of tax on earned income reached 83 per cent, and when grammar schools, which selected their pupils by rigorous examinations at the age of eleven, were mostly abolished in Britain. British Labour MPs had started noticing the archaic flavour of Hong Kong when they visited the colony as opposition MPs in the early 1970s. At the end of 1973, the Labour MP Robert Hughes wrote to his even more left-wing colleague Ian Mikardo that he had been ‘recently in Hong Kong and no one who has visited the colony can fail to have been greatly concerned at the manner in which the Hong Kong Government runs affairs’. Hughes’s letter enumerated the usual left-wing objections to Hong Kong in a litany which recalled the Pravda article of 1964 entitled ‘The Ill Fame of Hong Kong’. Hughes complained to Mikardo of the ‘tremendous disparities of wealth, of working conditions, of housing conditions’–disparities which would not be tolerated in Britain. He compared the state of affairs in Hong Kong to that in South Africa and attributed this to the ‘lack of Trade Union rights and organization’. More importantly, in a classically Marxist critique of the Hong Kong government, he said that ‘all the nominees to the Legislative Council represent the commercial and business interests of the Colony’ and that there was no ‘democratic right of people to influence their way of life’. This had been the case for the 130 years before Robert Hughes had come to this realization. At the conclusion of his letter, he added astutely that ‘[we] forget that [Hong Kong] is a colony because of its autonomy’.11

  In a series of meetings which took place when the Governor visited Britain in April 1975, MacLehose was told very clearly what the Labour Party thought of Hong Kong. The Governor, of course, was treated in a civilized manner; he often met officials for lunch in London at gentlemen’s clubs like Brooks’s or the Travellers, but real business was conducted in the Foreign Office where, on Friday 11 April at 11.30 in the morning, MacLehose met James Callaghan, the Foreign Secretary. Callaghan was a stalwart of the Labour movement who had been elected to Parliament in 1945 and was very much in touch with the grass roots of the party, in contrast to his more privileged colleagues, such as Anthony Crosland and Roy Jenkins, who had enjoyed more financial security in their upbringing and had earned first-class degrees at Oxford University. ‘Sunny Jim’, as Callaghan was popularly known, had left school at fifteen and had served in the navy before becoming active in Labour politics. His interview with MacLehose on that April morning was characteristically frank. Callaghan opened the meeting by baldly stating that ‘the reputation of Hong Kong did not stand particularly high in the Labour movement in the United Kingdom’.

  Interestingly, the objections of the ‘Labour movement’ to Hong Kong did not really stem from the lack of democracy in itself, but rather from the poor labour rights which existed in the colony, the low wage rates of Hong Kong seamen and the narrow social composition of the Legislative Council, which continued to be handpicked by the Governor. The embattled MacLehose argued that the Legislative Council ‘more closely approximated to a Cabinet than to a Parliament’ and, as a consequence of this, a ‘high calibre of member’ was essential. He did however accept that members ‘from lower income brackets’ would need to be included ‘in due course’. Callaghan conceded the need for ‘high calibre in the members’, but made the obvious retort that such arguments would not ‘carry much weight politically’ in the Labour Party in Britain. At an earlier meeting with the Foreign Office minister Goronwy Roberts, Callaghan’s junior in the department, MacLehose had played the stalling game beloved of natural conservatives when faced with a radical onslaught, insisting that he did not think that any ‘precipitate action should be taken . . . to broaden the membership of the Legislative Council’. Given time, he told Roberts, ‘one or two of the natural leaders’ of the workers could emerge. Roberts was unimpressed, continuing to harangue the Governor; and in his summary of the conversation he claimed that MacLehose shared his view ‘that Hong Kong must continue to move towards more progressive taxation and social security policies’. These were the very measures which Cowperthwaite had so vigorously opposed in the 1960s, and which Milton Friedman believed had made Britain less prosperous in the period after 1945.12

  Unsurprisingly, the Governor earned the same polite rebuke when he came back to Britain in July the following year. Yet he clearly knew how to handle his political superiors in London. Labour ministers had by then become fixated with the idea of placing a trade union representative on the Legislative Council, and had abandoned any interest, if they ever had any, in establishing real democracy in Hong Kong. They ‘recognized the difficulties in Hong Kong terms of appointing a trade unionist to the Legislative Council’ but contended that it ‘would be virtually impossible to defend a decision not to do so here’. The ‘Labour movement’ was still very concerned that the ‘interests of wage earners [should] . . . be represented in the Hong Kong government’. The government ministers were polite enough to show understanding of the difficulty the Governor was in, but ‘ministers were under severe pressure’ in Britain, especially from the TUC (the Trades Union Congress) and from the NEC (the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party). Towards the end of his visit to Britain, MacLehose met Ted Rowlands, who had replaced Go
ronwy Roberts at the Foreign Office in March 1976, when Callaghan moved from the Foreign Office to become prime minister.

  Rowlands showed considerable aggression at the meeting, asking about corruption in Hong Kong. MacLehose acknowledged that there had indeed been corrupt practices in the Hong Kong police force, to which Rowlands, in an extraordinary attack, responded that ‘Victorian attitudes sometimes seemed to prevail in the Colony.’ MacLehose objected to this, by pointing out that Victorians did not provide ‘housing or health on the scale that was being provided in Hong Kong’. The next day, MacLehose saw Tony Crosland, the Foreign Secretary, who told him in schoolmasterly fashion that the ‘matter of a trade unionist on Council had now assumed symbolic importance here and it was, in his view, essential that such an appointment should be made now’. Crosland was prone to seeing Hong Kong politics in terms of tension between social classes. The notion of class conflict had, of course, been the legacy of Karl Marx to progressive political thought. In this context, Crosland asserted that there had to be a ‘representative of working class interests’ on the Legislative Council.13

  It was unlikely that many people in Hong Kong saw their society in such narrowly defined social categories. There was grotesque inequality in Hong Kong, but the Chinese hawkers and traders had never subscribed to a Marxist philosophy which saw everything in terms of class. In this respect, the Hong Kong Chinese were more like Victorian liberals who believed, as Deng Xiaoping later said, that ‘to grow rich is glorious’ and that wealth was a reward for industry and individual initiative.