Hong Kong (37 page)

Members of Parliament in London often advocated parliamentary institutions for Hong Kong, as the right cure for its inequities, and they were supported by a few modernists on the spot. Government though was reluctant to rock the boat, as a favourite Hong Kong idiom had it. Any move towards self-government might displease the authorities in Beijing, who would not fancy the idea of a capitalist Chinese City-State at the mouth of the Pearl River. Besides, many Hong Kong people distrusted the idea of an elected Government. Communists, or alternatively Kuomintang supporters, might accede to power, making life distinctly less comfortable for the other half, and anyway the British provided a reasonably benevolent kind of autocracy, enabling the rich to get richer and the poor at least less poor.

So let-do ruled, as much in social policy as in financial. It is one of the astonishments of British imperial history that before long this archaic colonial autocracy was to become the most socially interventionist Government any Crown Colony had known. It was foreseen at the end of the Second World War that cradle-to-grave public welfare in Britain would have to be reflected in the colonies, and London’s directive to Hong Kong’s first post-war administration spoke of ‘a general plan for social welfare’. Nothing happened for years, and then it happened with an amazing suddenness.

It happened most obviously in housing. One year the myriad poor refugees of Hong Kong were herded into those unhappy squatters’ camps, straggling over the hillsides in foetid grey muddles, and offering all the familiar symptoms of twentieth-century calamity: canvas-topped
shacks, scavenging pi-dogs, pot-bellies and sunken eyes, old women scrunched in the corners of shanties, harassed defensive officials, good works by overworked volunteers, runny noses, festering open drains, flies, half-naked children and mud. Along the streets tin boxes were mounted, into which the populace might deposit dead rats; 13,000 a month was the average haul.

The passing of a couple of Governorates, the publication of five or six annual reports, and abruptly we find half a million people housed in brand-new Government-built estates, totally unlike anything seen in Hong Kong before. The Government had been forced into a vast programme of public welfare and civic planning – basically by the uncontrollable flood of refugees out of Communist China, but in particular by a disastrous fire which, on Christmas Day 1953, not only made 50,000 settlers homeless, but brought to the notice of the world the terrible predicaments of Hong Kong’s new proletariat. The colony never looked back. In what is claimed to have been the fastest building programme in history the twin cities of the harbour were transformed, over a few years, into a complex, multi-centred, State-organized metropolis.

‘If you have massive problems, you must apply massive solutions,’ decreed Sir David Trench, Governor at an early stage of this revolution. The population of Hong Kong doubled between 1951 and 1971, and the clumped and generally unlovely buildings of the public housing estates, some of them emblazoned with big numbers like barrack blocks, some embedded in parkland, some in jagged rock-like declension on hillsides, burst willy-nilly, as those resisting elders of the New Territories foresaw eighty years ago, through the general
feng shui
. Today’s apotheosis of it all is provided by the seven New Towns of the New Territories, the first deliberately planned urban centres of Hong Kong, and prodigies of social intervention. Great new roads link them. Industries have grown up around their flanks. Ships moor alongside their wharfs, slinky electric trains slide in and out of their stations, and about as many people live in them as live in the original urban settlements.

The Government’s Housing Authority is now one of the world’s biggest public landlords, and the challenge of providing decent homes for all those hundreds of thousands of indigent fugitives seems to have affected the whole nature of Government in the territory. There are still sufficient social miseries, Heaven knows – what a Chief Secretary of the Colony once identified for me as ‘rough edges of capitalism’. Housing remains desperately short, the population having increased,
at a million each decade, faster than even Hong Kong can build. Dreary slums abound – the first hasty public housing of the 1950s is slummy itself now – and here and there that greyish nebulous stain upon a hillside still marks the presence of a squatters’ camp. There are beggars in the subway stations, street-sleepers in alleys. A well-worked subject for visiting reporters is the survival of the Cage-Men, poor down-and-outs whose bunks in squalid doss-houses of Kowloon or Wanchai are screened with wire, like cages, to keep thieves out. No doubt in many a back-street factory working rules are still ignored.

But things have unimaginably improved, since I looked out that lonely night from my hotel window in Kowloon. Today half the entire population lives in apartments provided in one way or another by the State – horribly crowded very often still, especially in the older blocks, but at least with electric light, running water and probably a telephone. Nobody starves in Hong Kong, and there is enough in the way of public welfare to ensure that nobody need be utterly penniless, even the street-sleepers and the Cage-Men. In the 1920s 90 per cent of the population was illiterate; today 21 per cent of the Government’s budget, the biggest single proportion, goes in education. Schooling is free and compulsory to the age of fifteen, illiteracy is unknown except among old people, and even the children of the Tanka boat communities now have their own schools, courtesy of the Fish Marketing Organization – as they sing in their dialect at the end of their annual summer camp:

There are seven universities of one sort or another, headed by the University of Hong Kong, whose first language is English, the Chinese University, whose medium is primarily Chinese, and the University of Science and Technology. Even so, two people apply for every available place, and it is said that about as many students go abroad for their higher education as stay at home – something like 45,000 (the statistics are uncertain, because so many Hong Kong people travel on foreign passports).

As for the health of Hong Kong, which for so many generations made it notorious as one of the unhealthiest places in the British Empire, it has been transformed. The fearful epidemics have long been
checked, and the sanitation is much less unnerving than it used to be.
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Medical care is not free, except to those in abject poverty, but it is very cheap, and is probably as good as anything in Asia. The infant mortality rate, 73.6 per thousand in 1953, is 4.8 per thousand today; while according to the World Health Organization the territory’s life expectancy – remember 1882? – is now the highest anywhere, promising its male residents 75.4 years, its female 81.4, in which to make their fortunes.

Nevertheless it is not towards benevolence that the systems of Hong Kong are chiefly directed, but towards efficiency. Efficiency equals wealth equals stability, still we are told what Chinese people chiefly want. For all its social betterments a pragmatized version of
laissez-faire
remains the ruling philosophy of this colony in its final year: all possible techniques of twentieth-century modernity support the Victorian principles of Free Trade, Free Enterprise and the Open Door, re-defined by a Financial Secretary of the 1970s as ‘positive non-interventionism’.
⁹

Hong Kong’s whole purpose, indeed, depends upon keeping a technical jump ahead of its neighbours. In previous times the contrast with backward Asia was much more pointed. To come from Guangzhou down the Pearl River a century ago was to move from one world to another. Guangzhou was still a pestilent walled city of narrow lanes and stinks (‘Phew!’ grumbled Kipling. ‘I want to get back to the steamer’). Hong Kong was equipped with all the conveniences of steam, gas, electricity, telegraphs and artillery. The virtuoso Peak tram clambered up the mountainside, the double-decker electric trams trundled along the foreshore below.

They trundle still, as a matter of fact – now the very last of their kind in the world, carrying 11 million passengers a month, swaying rather junk-like along their tracks with a creaking of slatted seats, and pressing so hard upon each other’s wheels that often only a few seconds separate one from the next. The Hong Kong Tramway Company is the only surviving builder of wooden double-deck streetcars (though it does
not exactly build them, but rather maintains them as palimpsests, constantly replacing parts, adding improvements, so that none of its 160 vehicles are exactly the same, and none can really be dated).

The trams are however almost the last mechanisms of nostalgia among the public services of Hong Kong, where as a rule nothing but the latest thing will do – there is not much nostalgia for the surviving rickshaws, and the very last of the sedan-chairs was found abandoned in a street in 1965. Today’s public transport system is by common consent brilliant – Peter Hall the authority on civic planning has called it
¹⁰
‘perhaps the most modern and efficient public transport system in any of the great cities of the world’.
¹¹
Besides those 160 trams, and those innumerable sampans, and the Star Ferry and the 11,000 buses, and the 17,000 taxis, the underground Mass Transit Railway offers as good a rush-hour service as anywhere, so long as one has mastered the combination of snake-like weave and heave-ho necessary to get a seat.

Hardly had they built one tunnel under the harbour, soon claimed to be ‘the busiest four-lane facility in the world’, than they started work upon another – and
another!
Elaborate walkways and subways, served by countless escalators, link as in a web the offices of Central. In the New Territories a bay has been blocked, drained of sea-water and filled with rain to form the Plover Bay reservoir. A tunnel through the hills of Hong Kong Island links Central with Aberdeen, and three more pierce the Kowloon Massif. Everything must be slick, smart, shiny. The maps of Hong Kong are very fine, that annual report is sumptuous. I once saw a senior police officer arriving in his magnificent grey patrol boat on Cheung Chau, and as the craft swept in with a growl of diesels, and the officer stepped ashore to ramrod salutes, striding off into town head-and-shoulders above the bobbing elders and underlings, I thought the style of the event was less Empire than Hollywood.

Penny-pinching was more common in the Empire as a whole: Hong Kong is as it is because its systems have been balanced always between private and public enterprise. The retired colonial officer Harold Ingrams, invited to write a Colonial Office book about Hong Kong in 1950,
¹²
concluded that Hong Kong should be regarded not as a colony like all the others, but as a department store, the board of directors being its leading citizens, official or unofficial. Often enough, as we know, there was not much love lost between the two sectors, but it is true that the territory has habitually been run by a diarchy of Government and Big Business, British, Chinese and foreign. ‘Hurrah for private enterprise!’ wrote Sir Alexander Grantham, who had been appointed to his Governorship by the British Socialist Government of 1945.

Nothing is more absolutely Hong Kong than the entrance to the first harbour tunnel, completed in 1972. It is one of the major arteries of the entire territory, the chief link between its original twin cities, yet above its high portal are inscribed the words:
THE CROSS HARBOUR TUNNEL CO.
,
LTD
. It always reminds me of Brunel’s great inscription above the Great Western Railway Company’s Tamar Bridge linking Devon and Cornwall – I. K. BRUNEL, as tall as a man – so gloriously redolent is it of capitalist brag and energy. The Government sponsored the tunnel: The Cross Harbour Tunnel Co., Ltd took the risks and gained the profit.

Much of Hong Kong depends upon such compacts. It was Lugard, the Governor, who proposed the foundation of Hong Kong University, but it was the business community that paid for it. Today the Treasurer of the Chinese University is usually the chairman of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, and the third university has been largely financed by the Jockey Club. Most of the land reclamation has been done by private enterprise: the very name of the reclaimed district called Kai Tak, where the airport is, commemorates its capitalist creators, Sir Kai Ho-kai and Mr A. Tack.
¹³
The mounted troop of the Hong Kong Volunteer Regiment was raised and commanded by Jardine’s, and until 1922 there was no official fire brigade – the business houses each had their own. The buses, the trams, the
Peak tram, the ferries, the telephones, the electricity services are all privately run; of the basic services, only water is provided by the public sector. The harbour pilots are members of a private cooperative, radio and TV are largely commercial, and many of the hospitals and clinics are financed by the Jockey Club or private enterprise.

Most telling of all, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank is in effect the Central Bank of Hong Kong, one of the very few non-Governmental concerns to fulfil such a role in the modern world. It holds the colony’s reserves, and together with the Bank of China and the Chartered Bank, which is part of a London-based conglomerate, it issues all the colony’s notes in denominations of ten dollars and above; they are ornamented with pictures of the Bank’s offices, and signed by the Chief Accountant. Stitt the cross lion is featured on the $HK500 dollar bill, Stephen the snarler on the $HK1,000.

No wonder the Government, which has shares in several of the great companies, has adopted so many commercial styles and practices for itself. The auction for example has always been an instrument of its policy: it auctioned land leases from the start, it auctioned the opium concession, it used to auction the jobs of temple curators and it still auctions lucky car numbers. More recently the advertising industry has had a profound influence on official attitudes, too. The Government information service is in many ways no more than a huge public relations company, producing brochures and reports as extravagant as any private firm’s, while the Royal Hong Kong Observatory, from its austere premises upon a Kowloon hillock, issues each year a calendar so glossy that one almost expects its monthly photographs to portray nubile girls, instead of View Across Mirs Bay, or Forest Activities in Guangdong Province. ‘One Of The World’s Biggest Homemakers’, is how the Hong Kong Housing Authority describes itself.