[ { "id": 213968, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1997", "page_number": 37, "title": "RAS-1997", "content_text": "2\n\nCouncillors (of whom 20 would be elected from both Chinese and expatriate jurors, or property-holders of a certain value with residential qualifications), and potentially extendible functions. However Young's successor, Sir Alexander Grantham, soon had second thoughts which were warmly shared by his Executive Council (Exco) advisers, and the plans were put into cold storage, to be quietly forgotten. They had seemed to reduce the wholly centralised powers of the Governor-in-Council, besides being of apparently little interest to a mobile and volatile Cantonese population, passing by customary right freely to and fro across the international border, and more concerned with rebuilding their lives after the war's privations. Besides, the Communist victory over the Chiang Kai-shek Nationalists, and the declaration of the People's Republic in 1949, created a new set of problems. It became common parlance that Hong Kong was \"different.\" Unlike African, Caribbean, Asian and Pacific colonies, it could not be built into a Nation.\n\nIn facing such a novel threat there were cultural divisions within Hong Kong's administration in the 1950s and 60s that commentators have often overlooked. The most obvious was that between those prisoners-of-war or internees during the Japanese occupation who had been judged physically fit to return to post-war duties, and their colleagues who either had fought throughout (in China or in other theatres) or had been recruited subsequently but had served in no other territory. They might differ in their views of what threatened stability, but were in agreement that nothing should, in the cant phrase of the time, \"rock the boat.\" All tended to accept what is now dubbed the economic 'trickle-down' theory, that what was good for the businessmen who dominated the Colony's appointed Councils was good for their employees - and equally for a large proportion of the population that had voted with its feet by flooding into Hong Kong to escape Communism, and also to find employment until it might seem safe to exercise their right to cross the border again and go home. But it seemed to some observers that those who claimed to understand and to love the Colony best had least faith in its unsinkability.\n\nA smaller but growing subset consisted of those colonial servants who had been transferred to Hong Kong within Her Majesty's Overseas Civil Service (HMOCS) from other territories, usually upon the grant of independence, or who had accepted fixed renewable contracts as mature entrants (\"retreads\"). Such officers might well have learnt in", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213982, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1997", "page_number": 51, "title": "RAS-1997", "content_text": "the Social Welfare Department), co-ordinated by regional generalist officers comparable with NT DOs, leading to advisory Regional Councils which might eventually become the main report's Local Authorities. They pointed up more outspokenly than the emollient main report the shortcomings of an out-of-touch government administering a non-English-speaking population that was only too open to misunderstandings and misconceptions (such as that taxes levied were drained off to the UK Treasury.) Interim steps should concentrate strongly on building up public confidence in the unaccustomed principles and practice of popular elected representation (the ‘political education' mentioned above.) The provisional system of regional advisory councils, coupled with departmental decentralisation and administrative co-ordination, should then lead to full local authorities in about six years. Meanwhile Tsuen Wan was indeed a unique opportunity for immediate action (the new towns to come of Tuen Mun, Sha Tin, Tai Po et al had yet to be envisaged.) These three semi-dissenters did not co-ordinate their Note with the other.\n\nDickinson has been described by one of his working party as “the least understood and worst treated member of the Cadet Service\" (the original title of Hong Kong's Administrative Branch of the HMOCS, which survived in common parlance long after the absorption into the Colonial Service of the pre-war Eastern Cadetships.) He chose to retire early for personal reasons. It is ironic that in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution overspill, when special duties officers in the defence branch of the secretariat, the SCA and the Information Services Department became so active in devising new ways to win hearts and minds, to keep in touch with the people and to encourage the use of Chinese language, so much of what had been adumbrated in the Working Party Report re-appeared; but because the new ideas now came from well-established senior sources, they became respectable and it was to be long before they offered electoral participation in executive decisions. The SCA became the Secretariat for Home Affairs; City District Officers were created in ten urban districts, and found much to do that had not been done before; City District Committees were established in 1972; a Tsuen Wan District Advisory Board was at last set up in 1977, followed by others; in 1980 a new pattern for district administration was at last suggested, with direct elections to District Boards. But in all these and still later developments that affect present history, there was no official backward recognition that the ground", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579", "rank": 0 } ]