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COLONIAL RULE IN HONG KONG
taxation rate on profits and incomes below 20 per cent and no debts to foreign aid, has paid for spectacular hill-flattening and sea-reclamation, for sea-loch rainwater catchments, and for huge workers' housing estates (accommodating more than 40 per cent of the population), and all the rest of the infrastructure for the constant upward spiral of industrial expansion. Dr Miners points out that the success of Hong Kong's capitalist system, thus measured, underlies Peking's "consent" to perpetuation of "imperialism on her doorstep" (Khrushchev's famous gibe), because it affords channels for her to carn foreign exchange, not least by selling food for the four million inhabitants of the Colony, who produce little of what they eat. Conversely, for the time being, the political alternatives to this unique, pragmatic, system of government (“which does not do anything silly or against China's legitimate interests" - Trench again) would be unacceptable to China, namely either having to manage Hong Kong herself or seeing an independent state set up on her southern coast as a "third China". The Chinese Communist Party's "consent" to a colonial rule which facilitates China's overseas commerce, and obligingly applies a heavy hand to her militant fuorusciti, recalls the old imperial practice of bestowing seals of office on native rulers ia borderlands like Burma, Yunnan, or Indochina as t`u-ssu, “local managers", on condition that they kept their side "pacified" and open for trade.
The withholding of parliamentary democracy from the people of Hong Kong may be satisfactory to China's present rulers, and, as Dr Miners also discovered, to themselves, but is not the associated laisser-faire capitalism needlessly exploitative? that is to say, might the political and economic system not be just as workable if the labour laws were so reformed as to enable organized workers to demand and obtain a bigger share in the yield from all this vanted development? Professor Rear and Mr England start from prior conviction that the answer to both questions is Yes. They warn the reader that they “have not sought a false academic 'objectivity'", yet their work is a model of thoroughness and clarity and, on the whole, of accuracy; its on fault of presentation is that they have let themselves be daunted by the bour of compiling a bibliography of the great variety of sources they have worked through, so that the reader who wants to satisfy himself about the reliability of certain of their statements may have his work cut out. The whole field of industrial relations in Hong Kong is covered: first the politeal and economic background; second the types of employer and manager (Cantonese, Shanghai, and foreign public and private) and the parallel characteristics of the labour force; third the extent of unionization of labour; next come three chapters on the legislation governing condrions of employment and safety-and- health-at-work; finally, four chapers describe trade unions in law and in action, and two more the directons and extent of reforms which the authors consider necessary. As win Dr Miners' book, a great deal of space is given to actual cases, whether by way of conditions in single workplaces or accounts of industrial disputs. The authors refrain from supporting outright the charge that Hong Kerg is a "sweatshop", but, while admitting that conditions of work are a great deal better today than twenty years ago or than they are today in China - they leave little doubt that they
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