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H. J. LETHBRIDGE
Permanent Board of Direction was established by ordinance in 189352, the Tung Wah Hospital Advisory Board came into being in 189633, the Chinese Permanent Cemetery Committee in 1913 and the Chinese Temples Committees in 1928. Two other Chinese committees should be mentioned: the Chinese Recreation Ground Committee, established in 1890, contained the Registrar General and the Chinese unofficial members of the two Councils; and the Chinese Public Dispensaries Committee, formed in 1909, consisted of the Registrar General as chairman, the Chinese members of the two Councils and the Sanitary Board, the three chairmen of the annual committee of the Tung Wah Hospital and a number of other leading Chinese. In 1941, the official Chinese committees, inclusive of the District Watch, were eleven in number. Together their members represented a Hong Kong Chinese élite, in which such values as wealth, prestige and power, to use William Skinner's expressive term, ‘agglutinated’.
Nomination to the District Watch Committee was a great achievement, but nomination to the other ten committees and boards was also regarded as an honour and an additional notification of a person's standing within the community. But Chinese appointed to these ten committees and boards exercised either a more specialised or more purely honorific role, primarily because these committees did not hold a constant or uninterrupted dialogue with the Registrar General/Secretary for Chinese Affairs. They met infrequently, sometimes only once or twice a year; and although they gave advice on occasions, the giving of advice was not their primary function. Much of the work of these committees centred on the allocation of charitable funds, the management of property and the supervision of accounts. The District Watch Committee represented the real locus of power: at its meetings the members formulated a Chinese point of view on government policies and general issues. The Committee acted as a permanently installed barometer for the government, giving it a clear indication of the state of mind of the Chinese bourgeoisie. It marked out for government how the élite felt on certain questions39.
The same people were to be found represented on all the eleven committees and boards (although in slightly different combinations in each case) so that it is a little unreal to distinguish