Hong Kong (31 page)

Within Hong Kong hundreds of thousands of Chinese, like the little porter of the Peak, still lived lives of terrible hardship, working cruel hours for miserable wages, often ill, often addled with drugs. Few of them had been born in the colony, but they were no longer fellow-pioneers, as the first Chinese settlers had been; they were mostly peasants from Guangdong Province plunged suddenly into the bewildering pressures of an advanced western urbanism. Poor people’s housing was not much different from that described by Chadwick in 1882, and the Government was doing little to improve it. An absentee landlord of
Hollywood Road, it was recorded in 1924, sublet his tenement building to a middleman, who let it in separate apartments to other people, who rented out cubicles in each apartment – often twenty-five people in a single apartment, often far more. It was officially estimated, that same year, that about a quarter of the Chinese population smoked opium, and there were at least 2,000 opium divans. All the modernism of Hong Kong was designed to benefit the Europeans, not the Chinese: Station ZBW broadcast only an occasional programme in Chinese, and only one cinema provided a Chinese interpreter – who, sitting on a chair beside the screen, translated as he went along.

But the Chinese were by no means as impotent as they had been forty years before. As Clementi’s dinner-table showed, there were many rich and influential citizens too – more every month, as refugees of substance fled the uncertainties of China. Educated Chinese had infiltrated many of the European residential districts, and Sir Robert Ho Tung had been lording it on the Peak itself for years. The University of Hong Kong, founded in 1911 by the personal efforts of the Governor Sir Frederick Lugard, was now producing a steady flow of Chinese graduates. The Tung Wah had developed into a powerful community organization. More ominously, there were active Chinese trade unions – not just old-fashioned guilds like the Firewood Dealers’ Industrial and Commercial Association, or the Jinseng and Deer Horns Commercial Guild, with their roots in Confucian ideas of loyalty and order, but modern and militant unions with their roots in revolutionary Marxism, and their inspiration in Guangzhou.

The vast majority of foreign residents, as Maugham perceived, had not the slightest notion what was happening among the Chinese masses. The Chinese they met socially were all smiles and common interests, the Chinese they employed all charm and sycophancy. Social segregation kept the generality at a distance, and fierce punishments kept it in order – twelve months’ hard labour and eighteen strokes of the birch, for instance, for stealing a handbag with $HK24 in it, three months’ hard labour for taking a European’s hat as he rode in a rickshaw. Though there had been localized riots about food prices in 1919, and a seamen’s strike in 1922, it came as a shock to them in the middle of the decade to discover that the usual conspiracies of Triad and syndicate, the usual criminal activities in the congested tenements of Wanchai and Kowloon, the snatching of hats or handbags, could be directed to political ends.

Such a shock! The disturbances were hardly more than communal
grumbles at first, almost undetectable upon the Peak; but after the death of Sun Yat-sen, in 1925, and following anti-foreign troubles in Shanghai, they erupted into a full-scale General Strike, together with a boycott of all trade between Hong Kong and the province of Guangdong, which included Guangzhou itself and provided most of Hong Kong’s food. It was very nearly the rising that the British had feared, on and off, ever since the Indian Mutiny. For a few weeks the economic life of the colony was frozen. Seamen, students, hotel staffs, stevedores, domestic servants, bus and tram drivers all walked off the job. Even rickshaw men refused custom. Food prices soared, and there was a run on the banks.

There was much violence, and more violent talk. On the one hand the strike leaders terrified workers into striking, on the other an unofficial strike-breaking body, the Labour Protection Bureau, behaved just as thuggishly. In the middle stood Sir Reginald Stubbs, threatening intimidators with the cat-o’-nine-tails and advocating armed intervention by the Royal Navy, as in the old days. Frightening rumours swept the colony. Bolshevist bogeys loomed large. The Hong Kong Volunteers were mustered for possible action, and a State of Emergency was declared. ‘Those who disturb the peace of the colony’, announced Stubbs, ‘will be treated, as is the way with the English, justly but sternly.’

The Peakites now found themselves obliged to undertake all manner of tasks they were not used to, such as ironing their own clothes, cooking their own meals, burying their own night-soil and even looking after their own children. Volunteers kept things going in hotels and cafés, drove the trams and distributed the mail, while the Royal Navy took over the Star Ferry service, not altogether successfully – as one of the local newspapers complained, the Navy’s ‘spotless uniforms and trailing impedimenta of silken hankerchiefs and lanyards’ were hardly the gear for it. The strike leaders encouraged all Chinese to leave Hong Kong altogether, spreading rumours that the British were going to poison their water-supplies, and at the same time offering free train and steamer passage to Guangzhou. Thousands went, leaving the city half-empty and forlorn.

To make matters worse there was a spate of piratical attacks upon British ships. Sometimes the pirates boarded ships from junks, sometimes they sailed as passengers, attacking the crew when they were at sea, and forcing them to sail to some secluded and sympathetic haven on the Chinese coast. A ferry was actually hijacked on its way from
Cheung Chau to Central; relatives in Hong Kong were sent the amputated ears of three passengers, and a large ransom was paid. A special body of guards, many of them White Russian, was raised by the Government, and many ships went to sea with iron grilles isolating passenger quarters, bridges and engine rooms.

In these circumstances the strike leaders’ demands do not sound exorbitant. They included an eight-hour day, the prohibition of child labour, the suppression of police brutality, an end to segregation on the Peak, a 25 per cent reduction in rents and labour representation in the Executive Council. These requirements were summed up in a
South China Morning Post
headline as
LABOURERS’ EXTRAORDINARY ATTITUDE
, and they severely damaged economic confidence. Stocks, shares and land values dramatically fell, and there were many bankruptcies – twenty a day in September, 1925. A deputation of businessmen even asked Stubbs to arrange a $3 million trade loan from Britain to see them through the crisis. A loan, from Government to Big Business in Hong Kong – the times were topsy-turvy!

The cash was reluctantly provided by the Treasury in London, which did not however inconvenience the British taxpayer with the matter. This was still the Empire, and the money was raised instead from the West African Currency Board and the Straits Settlements of Malaya.

All in all the 1920s were not good years for Hong Kong, but they were not so bad either. They were dogdays after all. The political crisis did not last long, and the worst never happened. China’s pattern shifted again. Guangzhou became less fiercely hostile. By the end of 1926 strike and boycott had both fizzled out, like the General Strike at home in Britain, and Clementi, now the Governor, made a friendly trip up the Pearl River to seal their conclusion.

Colonial life in Hong Kong resumed its style. ‘We are constantly receiving,’ announced Lane Crawford’s catalogue, Autumn 1926, ‘large consignments of Fascinating Creations for Evening Wear, all personally selected in London and Paris by our own representatives.’ The Chinese returned to docility, and nobody had trouble with rickshaw men any more – ‘you just go to the door and shout “Sha” ’, recorded an Englishwoman without malice, ‘and they come running up, seeing who can get there first’.

CONTROL SYSTEMS

I
N STATUE SQUARE THERE STANDS A DISTINGUISHED DOMED
and colonnaded building, with Ionic columns and red-tiled roofs, which is a rare survivor of times lost. Designed in 1900 largely by Sir Aston Webb, architect of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, it used to be the Supreme Court of Hong Kong, until that body moved to its air-conditioned tower-building along the road. It was neighbour to the Palladian City Hall, before that fine old structure was demolished, and to the Gothic Hong Kong Club, before the club’s metamorphosis into a skyscraper. It opened upon the cricket field, until the stumps were transferred to a less valuable pitch. It looked down upon the statues of Queen Victoria and her successors, until Their Majesties were removed by the Japanese Army. For a couple of generations it dominated the central ceremonial place of Hong Kong, a stone’s throw from the sea until reclamation took the sea away, and its dome was one of the prime symbols of the island skyline.

Today it is dwarfed by the commercial structures around it, which have reduced that once fine piazza into a finicky municipal garden, trisected by roads. The one memorial remaining is the Cenotaph honouring the war dead, the one statue still there is of Sir Thomas Jackson the bank manager. Legend says the gardens themselves are
only spared, in one of the world’s most valuable patches of real estate, because they are essential to the happy
feng shui
of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank’s headquarters at the head of them; actually they are spared because in 1901 the Bank agreed with the Government to keep an open space there ‘for all time’.

But the old domed building survives, and has been meticulously restored, and is now the headquarters of the Legislative Council, Legco, the nearest thing the Crown Colony of Hong Kong has ever had to a Parliament. It is here, on a Wednesday afternoon when the Council meets nowadays, that one can best start an exploration of the systems by which this territory has been governed for the past century and a half; a Wednesday some years back, in 1986, say, before the impending change of sovereignty began to alter everything, and made the British no longer their own masters in Hong Kong.

A session of the Legislative Council, in 1986, could be rather a comical affair. The Establishment of Hong Kong was there upon display. There was one double-barrelled Briton, there were Chinese with names like Rita, Lydia, Hilton or Donald, but no Japanese or Americans were present – this was still a British colonial assembly, run to its own rules. Hong Kong being what it is, a Florence of the art of public relations, television cameras were perpetually trained upon the assembly, while still photographs were taken through strategically placed windows on each side of the chamber – ‘The Governor takes a sip of water during the debate,’ said the captions next morning, or ‘Miss Lydia Dunn adjusts her microphone …’

The unfortunate Governor presided, from his high mahogany dais – unfortunate because he must act not merely as Speaker, but also more or less as clerk, taking note of all proceedings hour after hour and only occasionally intervening himself. The British knights of the executive were ex officio there – Chief Secretary, Financial Secretary, Attorney-General, side by side on a front bench like Cabinet Ministers. The seven appointed officials were there, from the Secretary for District Administration (the Honourable E. P. Ho) to the Secretary for Transport (the Honourable I. F. C. Macpherson). The twenty-two appointed unofficial members were there – swells of the community most of them, bankers British and Chinese, businessmen, well-known public benefactors, all nominated to their seats by the Governor. And across the
chamber sat the elected minority of twenty-four members, voted for not by the direct vote of the public, but by members of district, urban and regional councils, or by functional constituencies – this member representing the legal profession, that one industry, medicine or architecture. Of the fifty-seven members, forty-seven were Chinese.

This was the nearest that Hong Kong, while it was still really in control of its own destinies, had ever got to representative Government – the nearest that the British Government had ever thought suitable to the place. Hong Kong enjoys absolute freedom of speech and opportunity, but no freedom at all to choose its rulers. The basic principle of the Crown Colony system was that there should be a Government-appointed majority in the Legislature, and in Hong Kong that principle has always been maintained. Until 1991 the only direct elections were to local councils; it was only in 1985 that
any
kind of election to the Legislature first took place, and even then only a minute proportion of the population was qualified to vote – some 70,000 people in all. Any reforms that have happened since can be construed as reforms under pressure: the Legislative Council, 1986, was the British Empire’s own, voluntary summit of parliamentary democracy in Hong Kong.