SHAPING UP FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
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the place to desperate poverty. As a young man I was among those who took turns to sleep in the office of the Defence Secretary waiting for a call from the border to say that an invasion had started. The North Korea had almost pushed the United Nations army into the sea and there were five divisions of troops just north of our border. In 1956, triad and Nationalist inspired riots brought the place to a standstill. In 1967, an overflow of the cultural revolution sparked riots, strikes, bombs, assassination and an armed raid over the border. And I have not forgotten that I was in the vast crowds in Happy Valley on June 4, 1989.
J
Catastrophe is certainly unpredictable and nobody can say that there will never be another. Events in China will have repercussions here as they always have done. But I think it is possible to set aside some of the sillier fears.
A common fear is that after 1997 the place will be run by people who have no idea how a capitalist laissez faire economy works. The government now leaves people to get on with their lives. Will it continue to do so? The whole point of the Joint Declaration, each word of which was wrestled with over a period of months, is to transfer sovereignty but not to change the system. 'One country two systems' is shorthand for a very complex set of relations which are set down in detail in the Joint Declaration. With a seniority list of the Civil Service, where everybody's date of birth is recorded, with a little imagination you can get a pretty good idea of who will be around and taking decisions six years hence. You may not know them well but a good many are old friends of mine. Like the rest of us they are getting older but I have been impressed by the confidence they have acquired with experience. Devoted capitalists all, I have noticed that they have a stronger belief in the merits of privatisation than was common in my time. This is bound to be healthy.
What if they leave? Some may do so. The standard of young men and women that have joined the Administrative Service is extremely high. They are just the sort of people that will be only too glad to see the back of anyone senior to themselves because they know they can do better than their bosses. At one time, in the late sixties, as a result of a curious recruitment policy, the age of promotion to the Staff Grade, that is the boss class, was in the early thirties and dropping. It was a crazy situation and the trend was reversed but the place did not fall apart in the late sixties.
I do not personally know the rest of the civil service so well though the senior people that I do know are of the same calibre. One thing one can be sure about is that the people who actually do the work of running the government will be sound and not easily driven into silly policies. The safeguard built into the Joint Declaration is that the Public Services Commission will continue to scrutinise appointments and promotions.
The politicians might seem to be more of a gamble. This is not a calling that has much of a history in Hong Kong so it is difficult to say much about how they will turn out. Their seat of power will be the Legislative Council. Here they will be required to pass or stop legislation, vote on taxes and on expenditure. They will operate in public. They will have to be elected from time to time. It is on this last safeguard, which we call democracy, that all depends. In other words we are asking ourselves if the ordinary people of Hong Kong, and of the functional constituencies, have enough sense to recognise a fool or a rogue when they see one.
I worked in the New Territories in the days when the community was largely engaged in farming and had been settled there for two to six hundred years. There were new immigrants who did not have much say, but the bulk of the population was of this old