A RARE ALCHEMY
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trusted village style, where people know each other at all levels of life, where the proverbial Madam Wong of Wong Tai Sin has as much right to be heard as the Governor. Long may it cling to that most valuable of assets.
Herein also lies the secret of why Hong Kong functions so well, and acts so fast, in the stress of crisis, or in its communal response to the needs of others; why it can, not only ride out, but continue to prosper in times of global recession; why it has earned a place in the Guinness Book of Records for the generosity of its charitable donations. It is, quite simply, a community endowed not only with brains but with heart, a com- munity which cares and shares precisely the way you would hope to find in the village
context.
The phrase 'Hong Kong Inc.' is no glib sobriquet. It accurately defines the corporate behaviour of a highly interactive and integrated society. A society mercifully spared the divisions of class and caste that have bedevilled the efforts of so many other societies to achieve anything like the same unanimity of purpose. Whereas theirs have developed in layers based on social distinctions, long and carefully cultivated, ours is a crucible too much on the boil to permit any such sedimentary process.
In our society, yesterday's hawker can be today's millionaire; and if he over-reaches his cash flow and is forced back to his street stall to begin all over again, nobody will think the worse of him but will admire his courage for trying that hard.
In our society, the carelessly parked Mercedes may be stolen by an enterprising smuggler - with a waiting, high horsepower vessel especially tailored to its dimensions. But it is unthinkable that it should be vandalised by the envious and spiteful simply because it represents unattainable wealth.
Unattainable wealth? Not in Hong Kong. So why should the owner of the Rolls Royce be abused when he can be emulated, when his vehicle testifies to his very proper success and symbolises what others are aiming for and merely waiting to achieve?
Whatever its origins, and however free it may be of the barriers that break down and separate other communities, how do you account for the performance of 'Hong Kong Inc."? How do you get a society to respond with such speed, and with such consensus, to a commonly agreed course of action? Not by imposing the will of an individual or an administration, but by allowing the naturally evolved, in-built machinery of consensus to take its natural course.
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It is a formula that has served both the community and its government to good effect over a long period of time; a process of consultation, either through advisory committees or appeals for public comment, embarked upon before major new policies are put in place. Indeed, in the past we often demonstrated our concerns in the collective, corporate response far better than we did as individuals.
As individuals we were, until relatively recently, less articulate probably because the Chinese traditionally placed common good above individual interest. When I first came to Hong Kong, I was surprised to find there existed no word in the Chinese language that expressed the concept of the individual in terms other than as rebel and renegade.
Happily, in my view, that tradition has disappeared, and a very strong and healthy respect for the individual within the social context has flowered and taken firm root. Which is as it should be in a world where human rights are coming increasingly to the fore, when the world is placing greater value on the freedom of the individual as something not to be readily and automatically surrendered to the interests of the majority.