Ghosts of Empire (58 page)

The growing consciousness of the significance of 1997 in the 1960s was coupled with an air of resignation, even of defeatism, which clung around the old Colonial Office, as it lingered on till its ultimate abolition in 1966, and also around the Foreign Office. There was no point making a declaration about 1997 because any announcement would simply cause a panic, in which people might flee the colony, but some sort of plan was needed. In 1962 Black wrote gloomily, in his best official, circumlocutory style, that we ‘would deceive ourselves grossly if we failed to acknowledge that we hold our position in Hong Kong at China's sufferance'. This, in his view, had been the case since 1950. He added that there ‘can be no doubt whatever that many people here are even now discussing and speculating upon the situation that lies little more than a generation ahead'. Black was a devotee of the principle of ‘masterly inactivity' which had been a guiding notion in Britain's handling of foreign and colonial affairs from the time of Lord Salisbury. His ‘single conclusion' was that there ‘should be no official or authorised pronouncement on Hong Kong's future until and unless this becomes clearly unavoidable'. He could see very clearly in 1962 something which some British officials never fully grasped, that ‘eventual incorporation with China is the only feasible long-term future for Hong Kong'.
³³

What Churchill had once called the ‘drawling tides of drift and surrender' had, by the mid-1960s, nearly submerged the once confident imperial bureaucrats in London and the formerly proud British diplomats overseas. The Queen's proposed visit to South-east Asia in 1965 was carefully scheduled to avoid Hong Kong on the grounds that if she stopped over here this could ‘provoke' the Chinese. Lord Palmerston would have been horrified by the British diplomat in Beijing who stated before the Queen's tour that although ‘we have for the past 18 months had comparatively easy going with the Chinese over Hong Kong, I believe that this period may be drawing to a close'. The diplomat advised against her visiting Hong Kong, concluding that ‘all in all, pusillanimous though [this] may appear, I believe discretion is, in this case, the better part of valour'.
³⁴

British diplomats were also afraid that rivalry between the Soviet Union and China might goad the Chinese into rash action. T. W. Garvey, the man in Beijing who had counselled against the Queen's visit to Hong
Kong in 1965, noticed that the Soviet propaganda machine was now using Hong Kong as a stick with which to beat the Chinese. At the end of May 1964,
Pravda
, the official Russian newspaper, carried a feature entitled ‘The Ill Fame of Hong Kong' which criticized the British imperialists while taunting the Chinese:

Pravda
mocked Beijing's inertia in relation to Hong Kong, claiming that the Chinese press ‘displays extreme indifference to the fate of the unfortunates living in the floating quarters of Hong Kong or in the shanties of Kowloon'. The Chinese, the Russians sneered, were not good communists, since ‘talk of principles dies away when the call of the dollar is heard'.
³⁶
Britain was worried, during the 1960s, that the Chinese, merely to prove their anti-imperialistic good faith, would act in an aggressive way over Hong Kong.

The year 1967 is one which people in Hong Kong would rather forget. The background to the disturbances of that time did not lie in anything John Cowperthwaite did or omitted to do, but rather in the precarious nature of the relationship between Britain and the People's Republic of China. The actual cause of the unrest that shook Hong Kong was a labour dispute at a plastic-flower factory in May of that year. The industrial dispute quickly widened into a series of demonstrations and riots, and to the laying of bombs, both real and dummy. In Beijing, the
People's Daily
fulminated against the British, urging the Chinese to ‘tell the British imperialists that not only have Chinese peasants the right to fill the land in the New Territories, but the whole of Hong Kong must return to the motherland'. Sir David Trench, the Governor of Hong Kong since 1964, managed to keep up a front of characteristic British insouciance by playing his weekly game of golf, but the official messages that flew between London
and Hong Kong betrayed grave concern on the part of British officialdom. The brokers on the floors of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange experienced real fear as the Hang Seng index, a crude but powerful measure of local sentiment, plunged to a low of 59 points in 1967.
³⁷
In between his weekly rounds of golf, Sir David Trench, in a telegram of May 1967 marked ‘Top Secret', showed his true feelings, admitting ‘that in the face of an
all-out
confrontation we probably could not last very long', as the Chinese could always cut off the water supply. The Governor was sufficiently calm, however, to observe that the communists in China would probably want merely to humiliate the British and not ‘force us out of Hong Kong'.
³⁸
The extent to which Beijing was involved in the disturbances was unclear, although the Governor was cautious about blaming the Chinese directly.
³⁹
The incidents that May led to a long summer in which relations between China and Britain sank to their lowest ebb in decades. In August, the
People's Daily
denounced the British in inflammatory language, promising that the ‘debt of blood which British imperialism has accumulated will certainly be paid off'. Much of the denunciation of the British was openly racist: in October, the same newspaper denounced British hypocrisy in lurid terms, claiming that the ‘barbarous bald-pates of British imperialism on the one hand carry out fascist barbarities . . . and on the other hand assume the airs of gentlemen with talk of British democracy and freedom'. The ‘bald-pates' of Europeans were the equivalent of the Western view of the Chinese as ‘slit-eyed'.
⁴⁰

The crisis of 1967 was taken sufficiently seriously in London for the Treasury to draw up secret plans for evacuation. In a paper written in August on the ‘Possible Economic Effect on the UK of the Disturbances in Hong Kong', Treasury officials pointed out that the Chinese, if they occupied Hong Kong, would probably seize the assets of the residents of Hong Kong and the assets of the banks. They recommended that, in that event, the British government should immediately block all the Hong Kong sterling balances, which included the money held by Hong Kong institutions on deposit in London; this would be a ‘grave step', but it would essentially freeze all the deposits of Hong Kong banks in London and keep their money out of Chinese hands. In the context of a ‘forced evacuation', it was decided that the sterling balances would be frozen by
the government, although there would be ‘no possibility of protecting British property' in the form of ‘fixed physical assets', such as buildings, in the colony itself.
⁴¹

These plans were top secret and it was vital that ‘absolutely no hint should be given to Mr Cowperthwaite that we have been considering contingency plans' for evacuation. In the event, Cowperthwaite displayed his usual calm confidence and seemed, in the words of the official who met him in London in September 1967, ‘entirely unworried'.
⁴²
To Treasury officials in London, the most likely scenario in the face of continued disturbances would be a ‘loss of confidence and flight of capital'. The contingency plan had been carefully considered, but the pragmatic view was that there would probably be ‘no alternative but to sweat it out in the hope that in time a Chinese regime will emerge with which at a suitable moment we could negotiate an orderly and mutually satisfactory withdrawal from Hong Kong'.
⁴³
At this time Whitehall still believed that the withdrawal should occur ‘in advance of the expiry of the lease on the New Territories in 1997', since the common opinion at the time was that capital flight and panic, once people knew the British were leaving, would be such that Hong Kong would be of little value when the year 1997 itself finally arrived.
⁴⁴

Throughout 1967, Hong Kong remained Britain's ‘main problem in relation to China'.
⁴⁵
The situation was tense and difficult, as rioters were confronted by an equally determined police force. By December, there was a ‘steady decrease in the use of genuine bombs', but the police remained the ‘main target for bomb attacks and other acts of violence', and the communist press still continued to produce large quantities of ‘anti-British propaganda'.
⁴⁶
At this time, China was experiencing the worst days of the Cultural Revolution, and to the colony's government the likelihood of Maoist revolutionaries taking over Hong Kong seemed high. A Special Branch report of the Hong Kong Police, dating from January 1968, surveyed the scene with alarm. The ‘local Communists here have no intention of abandoning their long term aim of obtaining a victory over the Hong Kong Government', the police believed. Of nine communist newspapers three had been suppressed, but the communists still had ‘a forceful propaganda machine'. Radio broadcasts from Macau, from the radio
station Villa Verde, attacked the Hong Kong government every day, though it was noted that the nature of these attacks had softened since December 1967. The police were also worried about widespread interest in the thought of Mao; the police report painted a lurid picture of study groups, large-scale meetings and exhibitions at ‘Communist premises', which aimed to make the whole Hong Kong community ‘red'. ‘It should not be forgotten', the report observed, ‘that the continual study of the “little red book”–a handbook of Mao's political philosophy–breeds fanatics with no respect for law and order.'
⁴⁷
Even though, by the beginning of 1968, the situation had quietened down, the police were concerned that the communists had now adopted a policy of the ‘friendly hand and the smiling face' in order to ingratiate themselves with a sceptical local community.

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.

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.