THE SURVEY OFFICE REPORT
To monitor responses to its Green Paper, The 1987 Review of Developments in Representative Government, in March of this year the Hong Kong government created a Survey Office, headed by a senior civil servant, Mr A.H. Hsu. The Survey Office was asked to prepare a report by the end of October 1987 that would objectively describe public attitudes to the Green Paper's proposals. It was asked to take account of all forms of public response, as they were expressed in the press, media, public fora and representations to the Survey Office. Two independent monitors Mr Li Foo-kow and Mr Andre So Kwok-wing
were appointed to observe and evaluate the Survey Office's performance and objectivity.
The Report of the Survey Office was duly approved and submitted to the Governor on October 29th 1987.
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On publication it immediately provoked a storm of controversy in Hong Kong, because its findings presented without commentary or judgment were that only a small minority of the public supported the introduction of direct elections to the Legislative Council in 1988. Critics of the report included the Hong Kong Statistical Society and academics, as well as organisations and political leaders who support democratic reform. The latter have condemned the report for sleight-of-hand and unprofessional statistical practises. It is alleged by some that the British administration has given way to Chinese pressure in the most flagrant and deceitful manner. They argue that the Report should be corrected and that a referendum should be held to determine without ambiguity whether Hong Kong's public is, or is not, in favour of direct elections in 1988.
The Report
The Report is a vast document, ten pounds in weight, written like the Green Paper in many faceted bureaucratese. Indeed the Report borrows in detail from the Green Paper's structure and from this stem many of its basic faults. There is no space here to examine the numerous points of constitutional organisation which are meticulously presented. This article will therefore look at the central issue of direct election to the Legislative Council.
The Report acknowledges that this one question received overwhelming attention from the public. It was raised by 98% of those who submitted a comment to the Survey Office.
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Two general remarks should be made first of all, however. It should be recognised that publishing this vast Report, in all its detail, and on time, is an impressive administrative achievement. The great majority of submissions were delivered in the last weeks of consultation
more than 70,000 in the last week alone - and the report painstakingly documents each form of response, under detailed headings and according to subject. There are chapters devoted to no less than thirteen areas of inquiry, from the Presidency of the Legislative Council to "Related Issues not Raised for Discussion in the Green Paper”. Credit should therefore be given to the hundreds of officials who were drafted into production.
It must then be said that the Report is as worthily unreadable as the Green Paper which has been very aptly described by one Hong Kong commentator as a document that “only a committee could author". The Survey Office's decision to follow the structure of a Green Paper which had already been accused of "burying" the crucial issues in a confusion of alternatives and subsidiary matters lies at the centre of the criticisms levelled against it. (For analysis of the Green Paper, see Hong Kong Link 6.)
At the same time, a second and more positive point should be made. This Report documents a new era in Hong Kong's political life. As the Moderators state in their assessment: "The volume of response to the Green Paper far exceeded that to previous major consultative documents". The Report's
detail
exhausting
substantiates this claim. It can no longer be said with any persuasiveness that Hong Kong has an apathetic and apolitical culture compared to other societies which have permitted their political institutions to evolve further.
Bias by Exclusion
The Survey Office Report has been condemned first of all for the different weight given to different kinds of submission. Though no criteria of acceptability were set for the public to fulfil when submissions from them were invited, the Survey Office elected to treat identical pre-printed letters as individual submissions, and petition lists as single submissions.
The effects of this decision were far- reaching, because it so happened that the overwhelming majority of pre- printed letters adopted identical positions in opposition to reform, whereas all but one of the 21 petitions
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received supported direct election to the Legislative Council. In almost every instance, both letter w and petitioners signed their names and provided their identity card numbers.
Of 60,000 individual submissions, for example, 50,000 were in the form of pre-printed letters. Almost all of these, it may be assumed, were circulated by organisations that support Beijing's views. Theirs was clearly a very effective lobbying operation, because the positions contained in these letters figure largely in the report.
On the other hand, over 230,000 signatures in support of direct election were collected (over 170,000 in a single petition) but the existence of this documentation is scarcely visible — at least in the Summary Report which is being circulated publicly.
Critics argue that the entire statistical structure of the report has been distorted in this way with the effect of exaggerating the level of support commanded by advocates of the status quo and diminishing very sharply the number of those who support direct elections in 1988.
Bias by Burial
The second criticism turns upon two polls conducted, at the request of the Survey Office, by a private company, AGB McNair Hong Kong Ltd.
The problem here is that AGB McNair slavishly adopted the format of the Green Paper when preparing its questions. Respondents 3,000 in each survey-
were asked to answer 20 pages of questions, but, despite its importance in the public mind, the issue of direct elections was raised only once and, when it was, as a sub- question in a four-part query.
Nor can it be argued that the four- part question, of which just one part offered the possibility of direct elections, was luminous in meaning. The options read as follows:
“(i) To make no change in the numbers and relative proportions of Official, Appointed and Elected members;
"(ii) To conclude that direct elections to the Legislative Council are not desirable;
"(iii) To conclude that, in principle, some element of direct elections is desirable, but that it should not be introduced in 1988;
"(iv) If changes are desired in 1988, it will be possible to make one or more of the following changes, eg increase slightly the number of Official members, reduce the number of Appointed members, increase the
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