REVIEW
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In Hong Kong they found no feudal yoke. Neither was there land on which they could return to their traditional rural occupations except in a few cases. Material well-being for most had to be attained without capital by adapting to an urban environment. By developing craft and entrepreneurial skills.
The Mandarin Precept
Happily, though confusingly, they found Hong Kong unlike traditional China. There, for centuries, the mandarin literati had subordinated the merchant and stagnated scientific and industrial development. The mandarin bureaucracy saw economic security and a rich intellectual ambit only in passing that almost insuperable, but character-building, classical Imperial Examination. But in Hong Kong the meritocracy tended, if anything, to be almost the reverse. British bureaucrats had for generations sought positively to encourage middle-men and entrepreneurs in their own right.
Chinese character traits and traditions have not changed in modern Hong Kong but they have been used to fit the circumstances. For example, personal dignity with its roots in the family lineage and in ancestor workshop has always been a spur to personal business achievement. The extended family may have gone in most cases but the almost universal obligation remains to maintain or improve nuclear family standards and to prepare the children to do the same, or much better.
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The mandarin tradition that developed a tremendous propensity to focus on a task and an ability to apply oneself with great determination is applied in school and in business and even in the work ethic on the factory floor. It is still character-building. Pedigrees are not what matters, nor disciplines imposed from above. Rather it is the stiff individual test of the Hong Kong pressure-cooker. The successful are obliged, under that very much alive mandarin precept, to dispense largesse to help community projects and to serve on the councils that run the place with compassion and in the interests of all. Distinctions for community service come, not from the long-gone Emperors, but in the British Queen's awards.
The British, who put the successful on the councils, are sometimes accused of running Hong Kong for vested interests but that is a distortion of the truth. They administer the place with remarkable insight and pragmatism, following the precepts the Chinese brought with them. They provide the climate and the physical and social infrastructure to enable anyone who chooses to develop his own human resources to undertake the modern mandarin test and reach the ranks of the liberated entrepreneurs, not the literati. To better oneself for profit, not to over-rely on public funds.
The test, as Hong Kong becomes increasingly sophisticated, is moving toward more complicated achievement values. For instance, personal dignity is now not enough as a motivation. Nor is self-reliance. The social infrastructure includes nine years of free compulsory education and there is an increasing demand for higher education. Hong Kong now has more students per capita doing higher secondary education than Britain and the pressure is on to expand its universities and polytechnic, since education for Hong Kong students in Britain became much more expensive.
Adaptability
Hong Kong is a sort of microcosm of Britain in its heyday and of modern Japan as it approaches the end of the 20th century. Britain found the raw materials for its factories in its secure pre-war colonies and used Hong Kong as a warehouse for British entrepreneural skills on the China coast. Hong Kong, however, has no natural resources to compare with