Perspective of the Mainland Discourse of Hong Kong History claims, “is a discourse through which the historians tell us what has happened in the past” (6; my translation)
II. British Carrot-and-Stick Policies
In most Sinocentric history of Hong Kong, Britain is a relentless dictator who inflicts pain, sufferings, and humiliation to Hong Kong people. History, as mentioned above, is a discourse supplemented with imaginary and therefore is subjective and biased; like the British discourse, the Chinese discourse is one-sided too. With the advent of 1997, many Chinese books and documentaries appeared after the 1980s, such as Xianggang de Youyu (The Melancholy of Hong Kong) edited by Wei-luan Lu (盧瑋鑾) and Xianggang Cangsang (The Misery of Hong Kong) issued by CCTV, the Chinese official propaganda which aims to eradicate the contributions of the British governance, demonize Britain while glorifying China, and alienate Hong Kong from Britain while drawing closer relationship with China. Obviously, these productions
attempt to register empathy and compassion for the people and to discredit Britain’s colony as the British rule has made Hong Kong a messy and sinful city. For example, CCTV has thus commented: Hong Kong “is the largest center of opium smuggling in the world” (「全世界最大的鴉片走私中心」) and is regarded as “an unsinkable opium barge” (「不沉的鴉片躉船」) (中央電視台 42; 余繩武、劉存寬 48). Besides drug smuggling, China stigmatizes Hong Kong with other evils, such as prostitution, illegal gambling, poor living condition and corruption.15 Wong has summarized these Chinese discourses and categorized into three aspects to highlight the dismal side of Hong Kong: the absolute manipulative power of Britain, the implementation of racist policies against the Chinese immigrants, and the hardship of the people in Hong Kong (105-07).
Each governor assigned by Britain enjoyed a supreme power in Hong Kong. In 1843, Queen Victoria signed and promulgated Hong Kong Letters Patent and Hong Kong Royal Instructions that bestowed each governor with an unchallengeable authority to rule Hong Kong. Even though there were Executive Council, Legislative Council and Judiciary of Hong Kong, they merely performed a counseling function but had no power to hold back the governor. The speech of Alexander Grantham, the 22nd governor of Hong Kong from 1947 to 1957, is often quoted in all sorts of Chinese discourses to spotlight the absolute controlling power of Britain: “In a crown colony the Governor is next to the Almighty. Everyone stands up when he enters a room. He is deferred to on all occasions. It is always ‘Yes, Sir,’ ‘Certainly, Your
15 For more negative descriptions of Hong Kong, please see 王宏志等 57-62 and 盧瑋鑾 in Works Cited. Both China and Britain criticize the miserable conditions in Hong Kong. For instance, Jan Morris delineates Hong Kong as “a port city so volatile as this: protection rackets, pornography, prostitution, illegal gambling, smuggling, violence of one sort or another.” (43). She speaks in an ironical tone when discussing the issue of corruption: “Most notoriously, Hong Kong has
specialized in criminal venality. When it comes to corruption the territory has always sailed as close to the wind as possible, and bribery . . . has always been a fact of life . . .” (45). Hong Kong, she adds, “seems to have been more prurient even than most such colonial settlements” (47).
Excellency . . .” (107).16
Chinese historians accuse Britain of implementing racist policies which discriminate and torture the Chinese immigrants. They point out that some policies have weakened the power of the Chinese and segregated them from the Europeans.17 Before the 1880s, no Chinese members served in any governmental institutions; in other words, the Chinese never got to have a say in any decision-making process.
Curfew, harsh physical torture, and poll tax were imposed on them. The European District Reservation Ordinance and the Hill District Reservation Ordinance were issued in 1888 and in 1904 respectively in order to maintain the cleanness and security of the living area for the Europeans as the colonizers mostly considered the Chinese contaminated and unsafe—a Eurocentric way of thinking that was prevalent in that period. In addition, the following excerpt from The Hong Kong Government
Gazette is perhaps the most discriminatory and humiliating notification that Britain
has had ever issued: “Chinese Mechanics and labourers will not be allowed to use the Garden as a thoroughfare” and “No admission will be allowed to Chairs and Chair Coolies, or to Dogs unless led” (279). Gardens “having been established for the recreation of the inhabitants of Hongkong [sic]” were open for “respectable persons”but not low-class Chinese and dogs (279).
The hardship of people in Hong Kong derived from the supreme power of Britain and the implementation of racist policies thus becomes an issue for discussion.
Chinese laborers were sold as indentured servants or in-debt workers to the West for
16 This speech is transliterated into Chinese in several books, please see 余繩武、劉存寬 and 劉蜀 永 in Works Cited.
17 See Yu and Liu, and CCTV for a detailed explanation. Not only do the Chinese historians bring up the racist ordinances, but also Western scholars notice this issue of how Chinese were discriminated.
For example, Peter Wesley-Smith quotes a prejudiced speech made by a legislative councilor in 1856: “Above all I object to the admission of Chinese as Attornies [sic] in our Courts of Law. They are a peculiar race of people, and in my opinion are generally crafty, corrupt, mendacious, and deficient in those qualifications which are needful in a trustworthy legal adviser . . .” (qtd. in Wesley-Smith 91).
profit-making, termed as maai zyu zai (literally meaning “selling piglets”) in
Cantonese.18 Hong Kong was congested with Chinese immigrants as the population kept rising. Wang Tao (王韜) describes the crowded living environment in “A Brief Introduction to Hong Kong”: “Most houses where the Chinese dwell are as small as snail’s shell, as dense as beehive” (「華民所居者，率多小如蝸舍，密若蜂房」) (qtd.
in 王宏志等 33). Once the two reservation ordinances were put into practice, the Chinese dwellers were expelled from those areas and packed the buildings outside the reservation zones, which resulted in poor living condition and unwholesomeness. If the Chinese account was infallible, the population in Hong Kong would never
skyrocket from 12,361 in 1842 to approximately 4 million in 1971 (余繩武、劉存寬 299; Young 146), and Chinese refugees would never so desperate to migrate to Hong Kong, a phenomenon called Da Tao Gang (“fleeing to Hong Kong”), in and after the 50s. All the factual evidence proves that the Chinese historical discourse is
unpersuasive and biased.
The stick policies were veritably manipulative and oppressive (the application of stick), but Britain excelled that by maneuvering to “reward followers, exclude rivals, neutralize the hostile, and disorganize the dangerous,” i.e., by offering Hong Kong people “a carrot” (Ngo 2). In his “Chinese Collaboration in the Making of British Hong Kong,” John M. Carroll traces back to the transactional co-operation between Chinese compradors/merchants and Britain, a relationship that “assisted both the British victory in the Opium War, which led to the cession of the island, and the early development of the infant colony [by providing them essential supplies]”
(16-17). Those Chinese suppliers were often labeled as Hanjian (Han traitors) from
18 Indentured servants were those who signed and were bound by indentures that limited the freedom and rights of the servants. The second type, in-debt workers, was devoid of any contracts. Agents paid the ship tickets for them and later reclaimed the money back, adding 5-15% commission, from the workers whose obedience was a must to the creditors. This whole process is termed as Credit Ticket System. For more details, please see 劉蜀永 in Works Cited.
the Chinese nationalist perspective. Colonization and imperial expansion, Carroll writes, involved “a process of physical construction—from government, residential and commercial buildings to entire cities and towns. As in many other Southeast Asian colonies [including Hong Kong], this construction was carried out by Chinese workers and contractors” (18). In return, Britain rewarded them with exclusive
entitlements such as “land grants and monopolies and enforcing separate business and residential districts for the Chinese” (Carroll 23), thereby stimulating the Chinese business and leading to the emergence of the Chinese bourgeoisie who later developed a close operation with Britain so as to stabilize their status and augment their revenue.
Britain’s acquisition of the island aroused the hostility and wrath from the natives in Hong Kong; therefore, Britain aimed at appeasing negative sentiments by proclaiming to govern the natives by the application of Chinese laws and customs.
Charles Elliot announced a proclamation right after the occupation of Hong Kong in 1841: “the natives of the island of Hong Kong and all natives of China thereto resorting, shall be governed according to the laws and customs of China, every description of torture excepted” (Tsang 16).19 Even though Hong Kong (Hong Kong Island in precise) was ceded to Britain after the signing of Treaty of Nanking in 1842, the first to-be governor Henry Pottinger made an official announcement that assured the respect of Chinese habits and customs (Sayer 103). The reason for not coercively imposing juridical and customary changes on the natives was to alleviate the
repulsion derived from the humiliation of losing sovereignty, to facilitate the
governance, and to pave the way for enacting manipulative bills in the years to come.
19 This proclamation justifies the fallacy of Britain’s initial usage of torture on Chinese criminals in those Chinese discourses of Hong Kong’s history. Sir John F. Davis, the second governor of Hong Kong, confessed that the British law—penalty and imprisonment—did not have an intimidating effect, Britain thus finally decided to brutalize Chinese criminals by appealing to the Chinese law which is ferocious and inhuman.
The most illustrious “soft” policy Britain implemented on Hong Kong is laissez-faire or economic non-interventionism. On 1 February 1841, Elliot and James John Gordon Bremer jointly proclaimed that “[t]he inhabitants are hereby promised protection, in her majesty’s gracious name, against all enemies whatever; and they are further secured . . . in the enjoyment of their lawful private property and interests;”
furthermore, “Chinese ships and merchants resorting to the port of Hongkong [sic] for purposes of trade are hereby exempted . . . from charge or duty of any kind to the British government” (Bridgman and Williams 64). By doing so intentionally, Hong Kong has developed into a free entrepôt “so as to give every encouragement to the commerce of all nations” (Tsang 17), a passage extracted from a document written by Foreign Secretary Lord Aberdeen to Governor Pottinger in 1843. The adoption of economic non-interventionism appealed to Chinese merchants who later transferred their business from Canton (now Guangzhou) to Hong Kong, boosting the economy and eventually crowning Hong Kong Pearl of the Orient. The prosperity of the society and affluence of the people in Hong Kong on surface were able to divert their
attention from the dark to the bright side of colonization. Xu Jiatun (許家屯), a former Chinese Communist Party official, has conducted an analysis on the British governing model which aims to pacify the outrage of the people in Hong Kong:
“Britain has implemented a sort of “benevolent” dictatorial governance in Hong Kong.
In other words, it is a soft governance, with much freedom yet with no democracy.
But insomuch as not being intimidated by the British rule, people had opportunities to vent their discontent and present their opinions which, to a certain extent, would be heard and accepted” (「英國在香港的統治，實施了一種所謂「仁慈」的獨裁統治，
換言之，是懷柔性質的統治──有很大的自由度，沒有民主，但又可以讓人在不 危及英國統治的程度下，有各種機會來宣洩他們的不滿或意見，而這些不滿和意 見在一定程度上也得到了傾聽和改善。」) (183).
Seeing the coming of 1997, the last governor Christopher Francis Patten gave a political address in 1992 to advocate democracy, an element that had been absent in the whole colonial history. The first step to realizing democracy was made by Mark Aitchison Young in 1946, known as The Young Plan, but ended in failure.20 But the second attempt made by Patten achieved a phenomenal success of pleasing Hong Kong people and led Hong Kong forward to democracy. Referring to the “one country, two systems” proposed by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s and the subsequent
promulgation of the Basic Law in 1990,21 Patten initiated a series of political reforms, one of which was an electoral system that enabled local permanent residents to vote for the members of Legislative Council. In addition, he delegated Hong Kongers for high-ranking posts such as Chief Secretary and Financial Secretary.22 Despite the anger from the government in China and pro-Beijing parties in Hong Kong, Patten upheld two notions: “Hong Kong People Governing Hong Kong” (港人治港) and
“Handing Over the Power to the People” (還政於民). As a result, the advocacy of democracy highly impressed the people and made them further estranged from the socialist China.
In the end, China failed to break down the relationship between Hong Kong and Britain, but on the contrary draw them even closer to each other. Most Chinese
discourses overemphasize the negativity of the British rule which in fact has brought economical prosperity to Hong Kong. These Chinese discourses failed to set Hong
20 After the Second World War, a host of British colonies were eager for independence. Such circumstance would necessitate an appealing political reform in order for Britain to bribe Hong Kongers and to arouse their sense of belonging.
21 “One country, two systems” means that Hong Kong and Macao could remain as a capitalist society while the rest of China is governed under a socialist system. The Basic Law was co-drafted by China and Britain with reference to the “one country, two systems” and the Sino-British Joint Declaration signed in 1984, and went into effect on 1 July 1997. According to Chapter I Article 2,
“The National People's Congress authorizes the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to exercise a high degree of autonomy and enjoy executive, legislative and independent judicial power, including that of final adjudication, in accordance with the provisions of this Law” (2).
22 These two posts are the most senior officials in the Government Secretariat. The former is responsible for the administration of Hong Kong, while the latter takes the responsibility of all financial and economic matters.
Kong people apart from the British government; worse still, they aroused their distaste for the socialist China. Britain’s carrot-and-stick policies have successfully won concession from Hong Kong people, and by turning Hong Kong into a capitalist society, they were eager to distinguish themselves from the Chinese in socialist China.