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The Community: A Growing Awareness
THE easy relationship which exists in Hong Kong between government and governed has frequently been misinterpreted as being due to paternalistic administrators, who know instinctively what is best for the public good, and a politically disinterested population content that its officials should continue to labour under this illusion.
Whatever the situation may once have been, this is certainly not the case today. This chapter is concerned with the present relationship between the government and the population. It is about the different kinds of machinery and organisation that have been evolved to ensure that though the government may not be elected it should be responsive, and that though the public may not elect they should participate.
Throughout the last century, Hong Kong has improvised its own system of consultation between the government and the people, to overcome the obvious problems arising from its geo-political situation, which is not conducive to the emergence of a fully elected administration. Although its merits may not be readily apparent, this system has often proved more sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the people than the conventional and theoretically more democratic methods applying elsewhere.
The machinery of government is supported by a wide range of advisory boards and committees concerned with particular aspects of policy and representing the varied civic interests involved. At present there are about 120 of these bodies on which views other than those of government officials are represented. Most major policy decisions either emanate from their recommendations or are referred to them for comment and advice.
This advisory system constitutes a versatile framework for sampling public opinion and provides a mechanism which has enabled the government to anticipate, and sometimes to stimulate, the relatively recent upsurge of popular interest in the way Hong Kong is governed.
Although belated in its appearance, a new spirit of awareness has developed among the people, of a force such as dispels the image of indifference to government.
The Younger Generation
The initiative has come largely from the young from the generation which has grown up to accept Hong Kong as its home, realistically discarding the more transient outlook adopted by its elders. Youngsters are not now confronted by the immediate problems faced by their parents, when the latter emigrated here from the mainland