political power.
4
Conditions of Effective Colonial Governance in the Post-War Era
Notwithstanding the colonial status of Hong Kong, Britain
rarely justified her rule on ideological grounds. Tenets such as
'the White man's burden, 'the manifest destiny,' or the
civilizational mission of imperialism were rarely deployed
explicitly to articulate a doctrine of colonial rule centering upon the redemptive function of colonial domination. 2 This de-
emphasis upon the ideological basis of colonial legitimacy
stemmed apparently from the pragmatic economic motive which drove
Britain to wrest Hong Kong from the moribund Manchu China in the
first place. It also reflected the peculiar context wherein Hong
Kong had been preserved as a British colony for more than one and
a half centuries. Until the early 1980s, colonial rule was never
seriously challenged (except for the brief period of Japanese
rule during the Second World War). What underlay this remarkable
political enterprise of Britain was a fortuitous constellation of
conditions which made prolonged colonial rule possible. These
conditions over time had endowed the colonial government with a
veneer of political legitimacy, which enabled it to unabashedly
boast of benign rule and rule by consent. In another sense, the
concurrence of these conditions also delineated the uniqueness of
Hong Kong as a colony.
2 For a discussion of colonial ideologies, see for example Phillip Darby, Three Faces of Imperialism: British and American Approaches to Asia and Africa 1870-1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
1