question. It was done at last by creating a Public Enquiry Service with
an all-Chinese staff capable of speaking virtually any local dialect and
of supplying direct and accurate answers to every kind of question about
the government and its functions. Coming under the general authority of
the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs, it is headed by Paul K. C. Tsui,
a native of Hong Kong and a colony administrative officer since 1948.
Controller Tsui spent months roaming the colony, talking to editors,
listening to gossip in goldsmiths’ shops and to the complaints people
dictated to sidewalk letter-writers or expressed to housing and tenancy
offices.
When he felt that he had gained some idea of the questions and problems
on people’s minds, Mr. Tsui sought the answers to them from the
appropriate departments. He then assembled a small staff, compiled and
cross-indexed a vast store of information in readily accessible form,
and established an office in the entrance hall of the Central Government
Offices, West Wing, on July 3, 1961. There his three information
officers, who had expected to have to handle 80 requests for information
a day, found them streaming in at the rate of about 135 a day. Early
in 1962, a similar office had to be opened in Kowloon to meet the same
demand. When the Chinese people were satisfied that they could get
specific, friendly answers to their problems without having to pay a fee,
they were both amazed and grateful.
Mr. Tsui, taking a tip from the operators of goldsmiths’ shops, put his
staff on hard chairs and the public on soft chairs, permitting them to
talk comfortably across a low counter in a pleasant, informal atmosphere.
At times it takes an agitated inquirer fifteen minutes to blow off steam
before he can get around to stating what it is he really wants to know,
but the staff will patiently wait him out. A married woman about thirty
years of age appears to represent the favorite official type of most
questioners, although they like also to have an older male official
handy as a corroborating reference. Queries in English are handled as
efficiently as are those in Chinese.
Once the news of this service reaches all colony residents—many English
and Chinese had still not heard of it in 1962—one of the most prevalent
forms of petty graft and ill-will toward government will have been
eliminated.
Chief Justice Hogan’s attack on “closed-door” decisions and official
impropriety was followed a week later by the sixth report of the
Advisory Committee on Corruption, composed of a five-man body appointed
by Governor Black from the membership of the Executive and Legislative
Councils.
The report found the highest susceptibility to corruption among the
departments dealing directly with the general public—police, public
works, urban services, commerce and industry and refugee resettlement.
Inspection services of all kinds, it said, showed the greatest
vulnerability to graft.
So far the report only echoes a truism known to every municipal
administration; that when the government comes to bear on some
individual’s right to perform a particular function, usually for money, a
few gold coins in an inspector’s pocket will often expedite a favorable
decision.
The Advisory Committee on Corruption has recommended clearly defined,
simple licensing procedures and the introduction of bilingual (Chinese
and English) application forms and explanatory booklets. A corollary
recommendation that all new government employees receive a pamphlet
detailing the penalties for corruption has already been accepted.
The Committee called for legislation that would require a public servant
to explain exactly how he came to be in possession of any property
that was not in keeping with his income, and to face a penalty if his
explanation did not hold. They also sought a law giving the courts
the power to seize any money involved in a corruption charge, plus a
recommendation for stiffer punishments against corruption.
The report urged that the names of officials convicted of corruption
be made public, and that figures showing the total number of officials
dismissed be published at certain intervals. At present, there are
numerous angry cries that when a crooked British official is caught and
sacked, he is spirited out of the colony without a word about it; whereas
a Chinese official fired for a similar offense receives unrelenting
publicity and back-handed treatment that implies, “Well, what else can
you expect from these Orientals?”
The Anti-Corruption Branch of the police department is now the chief
agency responsible for detecting corruption in all departments of
government. The Committee has invited direct reports of corruption from
the public, some of which have led to the prosecution and firing of
several officials. During the first eleven months of 1961, the police
department received an additional 422 complaints charging corruption.
Americans are usually surprised to find that the colony’s police
department is charged with detecting corruption in other government
departments. In America it is done the other way around; other government
departments seem to be investigating the police force for signs of
corruption.
Generally unsubstantiated but endlessly repeated to visitors, are
the popular charges that the police are shaking down shopkeepers and
peddlers, or that building inspectors are blinded by gold when a builder
is detected extending a structure over a sidewalk in violation of local
codes and ordinances.
The report, last of the series issued by the Committee, suggested that
it would be desirable to hold the givers of bribes equally guilty with
the civil servants who accepted them. This is a sticky issue in any
community, despite the unassailability of its ethical position. If it
were rigidly enforced, it would infringe the freedom of speech of many
prominent persons who deplore dishonesty in government, because it would
put them in jail.
The Advisory Committee has also warned civil servants to deal only
with the applicants in person, or with professional representatives in
order to exclude corrupt middlemen from all transactions. This warning
is especially appropriate in Hong Kong, where a middleman with no
discernible function except his ability to collect a fee will attempt to
worm himself into every business deal.
All of the Committee’s recommendations are made directly to the
governor, who in turn discusses them with the Colonial Office before
taking action.
Colony newspapers have printed long excerpts from all the reports, and
the _China Mail_ declared that they simply said what the newspaper had
been publishing for two years.
What Chief Justice Hogan and the Committee have jointly accomplished is
to raise an issue of critical importance in the survival of the colony
government. Whether it will be resolved as decisively as it has been
faced may require months and years to answer.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Two Worlds in One House
“Care must be taken not to confound the habits and institutions
of the Chinese with what prevails in other parts of the
world.”—BRITISH HOUSE OF LORDS (circa 1880)
Hong Kong has furnished the Sino-British answer to a universal question:
What’s in it for me? Its progress from the earliest days has been more
powerfully influenced by the lure of gold than by the Golden Rule, with
its British and Chinese residents having little in common except their
human nature and an equal dedication to the maximum profit in the minimum
time.
“They don’t even speak the same language!” is a convenient expression
of the ultimate separation between peoples, but while it is true that
nine-tenths of Hong Kong’s Chinese do not speak English, the linguistic
gap is only one of the many chasms that stand between them and their
British rulers.
The British traders and fighting men who muscled their way into
possession of Hong Kong Island in 1841 were looked upon with fear and
loathing by the Chinese governing class, who considered them gun-toting
barbarian brawlers. To the English, the Chinese seemed a docile
subspecies of humanity. It has taken most of the intervening 121 years
to convince a majority of both sides that the initial judgments may have
been wrong.
The differences between nineteenth century Chinese and European
civilizations were wide. Europeans, when they thought about religion
at all, worshipped one God in a variety of antagonistic churches; the
Chinese worshipped hundreds of gods, sometimes subscribing to several
contradictory creeds simultaneously, without apparent conflict. Europeans
were monogamous by law and custom; the Chinese, without odium, could be
as polygamous as their means would allow.
None of these theological or moral disparities weighed heavily on the
English while they were securing a foothold in China and building the
opium trade. On the contrary, when they noted the willingness with which
Chinese customs officials accepted their bribes, they felt they had
established a kind of moral bond with the East. These people, whatever
their eccentricities, were ready to do business in the accepted Western
way.
When the British settled down to the business of governing their new
colony, they collided at every turn with the language barrier. Except for
a few conscientious missionaries and a minuscule number of lay scholars,
the British were wholly ignorant of Cantonese, the prevailing Hong Kong
tongue, and they were loftily disinclined to learn it. The extremes
to which this arrogant insularity sometimes went were demonstrated by
Governor Samuel George Bonham (1848-1854), who denied promotions to
those subordinates who learned Chinese; he felt that the language was
injurious to the mind, robbing it of common sense. In other respects,
Governor Bonham was not so benighted as his linguistic convictions would
indicate. Nor was he alone in his attitude toward the Chinese people;
Governor Hercules Robinson (1859-1865) once wrote that it was his
constant endeavor to “preserve the European and American community from
the injury and inconvenience of intermixture” with the Chinese population.
Since all government business was (and continues to be) conducted
in English, British officials frequently had to rely on Portuguese
interpreters who had moved to Hong Kong from Macao. The Portuguese,
facile linguists and unburdened by delusions of racial superiority,
filled the role admirably. But in the colony courts, the simple task of
swearing a witness in presented obstacles even to the best interpreters.
Having never sworn an oath in the English fashion, the Chinese viewed it
as just one more instance of outlandish mumbo-jumbo. At first the English
tried cutting off a rooster’s head as a testament of the witness’s
intention to tell the truth; then an earthenware bowl was broken to
signify the same thing. A yellow paper inscribed with oaths or the name
of the witness was burned in court as another form of swearing-in.
Governor Bonham instituted a direct oral affirmation in 1852, but the
complications that ensued must have intensified his conviction that the
Chinese language was an insult to logic. If a defendant were asked, “Do
you plead guilty?” the question was rendered in colloquial Cantonese as
“You yes or no not guilty?” If the respondent answered “Yes, I am not
guilty,” it could mean either “Not Guilty” or “Guilty.” Somehow the oaths
were sworn, but not without a certain despair among the court attendants.
Although the European community seldom concerned itself with Chinese
customs, it managed to raise a considerable storm over their “places of
convenience” during the 1860s. These creations of the colony’s Chinese
merchants were a sort of employee-retirement plan which consisted of
taking one’s elderly or ailing workers to a crude shelter located on the
north slope of Victoria Peak. There the faithful employee was rewarded
for his long service by being given a quantity of drinking water and
a coffin and left to die; if he were blessed with friends, they might
visit him at this place, offer him an occasional scrap of food or a
fresh ration of drinking water, and finally bury him. Often he died
alone and without proper burial. This was too much, even for European
opium traders, and Governor Richard Macdonnell stilled their protests
by offering a free site for a Chinese hospital at Possession Point.
This replacement of the terrible “dying-houses” was financed by the
wealthier Chinese for their destitute countrymen. It became the first
of the Tung Wah Chinese hospitals, now greatly expanded and modernized.
The inevitable outcry that provision of the simplest medical care for
the destitute would cause these facilities to be jammed by hordes of
undeserving poor was raised—as it still is today—and proved false.
Sanitary conditions among the Chinese were horrible when the British
arrived and remained so for the rest of the nineteenth century. The
colony government made many attempts to improve them, but it was
regularly stymied by the tenement dwellers who opposed any form of health
inspection as an invasion of privacy, and by landlords who resented
any proposal which threatened their profit margins. During the bubonic
plague epidemics of the 1890s, the government provided a special plague
burial-ground and offered the families of the dead quantities of lime to
render the bodies of the victims noninfectious. The Chinese responded by
abandoning their dead in the streets or throwing them in shallow graves;
the donated lime was sold to building contractors.
The surviving tenements of the Western District of Hong Kong Island
are still a shock to visiting Westerners. Still, their dark, dirty and
overcrowded condition is a distinct improvement upon the disease-ridden
pestholes of the last century. Sanitary inspectors, no longer detested
and attacked by the population, can go anywhere and they carry full
police powers for enforcing corrective action. The Chinese, never any
fonder of dirt than the English, have been converted to the belief that
the once-hated British methods can help them to achieve cleanliness.
Because of their tenuous contact with the Chinese residents of
the colony, the British rulers tended to deal with them through
intermediaries. This function was at first performed by the Mandarins,
or members of the Chinese official class, who were as willing to gouge
their countrymen for the British as they had been to do it for the
Emperor; provided, of course, that they were able to deduct their usual
cut. Governor Arthur Kennedy (1872-1877), who was the first to invite the
Chinese to receptions at Government House, relied on the committee of the
Man Mo Temple to control Chinese affairs.
Man Mo Temple, an ancient building still standing on Hollywood Road in
the congested Western District, was a mixture of Buddhist and Taoist
elements. Its leaders were Kennedy’s very potent allies, all working
secretly to control Chinese affairs, acting as commercial arbitrators,
negotiating the sale of official titles, and welcoming visiting
Mandarins. Man Mo Temple, now administered by the Tung Wah Hospital
committee, remained a respectable institution, but a number of other
temples sprang up to challenge its influence.
In numerous cases the so-called temples were nothing more than a
sanctimonious swindle. Privately promoted as a business speculation,
they solicited funds from the public with fraudulent claims of divine
or political influence. Abuses of this sort became so flagrant that
the colony government, after long delay, enacted the Chinese Temples
Ordinance in 1928, which provided for registration of the temples and
an accounting of their funds to the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs.
Certain long-established temples were exempt from various provisions of
the Ordinance, but the founding of temples as a private business venture
was forbidden. Surplus funds of the existing temples—the amount remaining
after all maintenance and operating costs had been met—were transferred
to a general Chinese charities fund.
The Chinese Mui Tsai custom, that of selling young girls as servants,
troubled British and Chinese relations in Hong Kong for half a century.
From ancient times, Chinese families had purchased little girls from
impoverished parents and put them to work as household drudges. The
colony officials raised their first strong objections to the practice in
1878, condemning it as thinly disguised slavery. Speaking of slavery, the
Chinese retorted, what about the licensed brothels where 80 percent of
the inmates had been sold into prostitution?
A committee appointed by Governor John Pope Hennessy (1877-1882) found
that hundreds of the Mui Tsai, when they had outgrown their household
enslavement, were being resold as prostitutes for shipment to Singapore,
California and Australia. A species of Caucasian scum who lived in the
colony were active partners in the trade. Governor Hennessy and Chief
Justice John Smale forwarded the committee’s reports to the British House
of Lords with urgent recommendations for tight corrective laws. The
Lords, suddenly revealing an unsuspected concern for the integrity of
Chinese customs, killed most of the proposed reforms.
Establishment of the Po Leung Kuk, or Society for the Protection of
Virtue, helped to limit the kidnaping of women and girls, but the
institution of Mui Tsai was to persist well into the twentieth century.
The English eventually outlawed licensed brothels after decades of
criticism from many countries.
Covert prostitution continues at a brisk pace in Hong Kong today, with
sailors favoring the Wanchai district and the bars of the Tsim Sha Tsui
section of Kowloon. The Chinese are more inclined to patronize the
western areas of Hong Kong Island. The dance hall and cabaret girls of
Wanchai, whose ranks include some spectacularly beautiful women, charge
their eager patrons about four dollars an hour for the privilege of
dancing with them, sharing a plate of melon seeds and drinking tea. The
cabarets are murky dens, furnished in Chinese warehouse modern, with
a third-rate jazz band dragging the tempo along in the semidarkness.
There is no guarantee of intimacies—emphatically not on the premises—and
the prospective suitor is obliged to continue shelling out his money
for repeated visits until the girl decides whether he has the kind of
bankroll she could care for. If he is too repulsive to her, not even that
will do.
A cabaret girl can earn $300 a month or more, or about five times as
much as a schoolteacher earns. Few of these girls speak English, but
this ability has never been regarded as a prerequisite. Apart from the
moral considerations of the job, its competitive aspects are becoming
more intense all the time. Bar girls, who have little respect for the
traditional preliminaries, may bestow their favors on five customers
while the cabaret charmers are fencing with one.
The singsong girls, formerly held in great esteem as entertainers and
prostitutes, have almost disappeared from the colony. Many of them were
Mui Tsai who had been trained to sing seemingly interminable Cantonese
songs in a falsetto voice for their tea-shop patrons, accompanying
themselves on a kind of horizontal stringed instrument which they tapped
with padded hammers. In the later evening, they moved about from one
businessmen’s club to another in the West Point section of the island.
Not all were prostitutes, and there is still at least one tea shop along
Queen’s Road Central where entertainment is confined to music. Westerners
who hear their music often find themselves thinking of older days.
Considering the fact that Hong Kong is a world seaport, the rate of
venereal infection is surprisingly low. To a greater extent than in most
Western cities, poverty is a basic cause of prostitution, but here too
sheer laziness, greed and stupidity play their part in the provision
of recruits. As usual, the greatest profits from the trade go to its
protectors—Triad gangsters and corrupt policemen.
The entire subject of the status and treatment of women has provided a
continual source of animosity and disagreement throughout the colony’s
history. The rich Chinese Taipans, with their numerous wives and
mistresses lodged in separate establishments, have remained the envy
of many a Western man who could not emulate them without violating the
laws of the colony and placing himself beyond the pale of polite Western
society.
Since the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1911, well-educated
Chinese women have not looked happily on polygamy. Their convictions
were solidified and shared by millions of other Chinese wives when Red
China tightened the marriage laws, making monogamy not only legal but
practically mandatory. These improvements in the status of Chinese
women have not gone unnoticed in Hong Kong, where a British, Christian,
monogamous community finds itself in the embarrassing position of
tolerating plural marriage among its Chinese subjects long after the
institution has been outlawed in China.
There is nothing in this thorny problem which lends itself to edicts
and sweeping judgments. It is charged with the most delicate emotional
considerations, involving not only the legality of existing marriages,
the legitimacy of offspring and the fundamental rights of women, but
also the division of property and the inheritance of estates. Colony
officials are aware that the work of solving it must be approached with
the greatest subtlety.
To begin with, there are six kinds of marriages to be considered, all
with different premises. Two are classified as Chinese Modern Marriages;
those contracted in Hong Kong under Nationalist China laws, and those
contracted in China or any other place outside the colony under the
same Nationalist laws. Marriages contracted under Chinese custom as it
existed and was recognized in 1843 are Chinese Customary Marriages.
Marriages under the colony’s laws, Christian or otherwise, are called
Registry Marriages. There are also Reputed Marriages, which is the colony
designation for common-law marriages, and, finally, a group called
Foreign Marriages, which includes all those contracted outside the
colony under foreign laws, particularly those performed and registered
in Red China under its monogamous marriage law. Thus, the usually simple
question, “Are you married?” when fully answered in Hong Kong, may take a
considerable amount of the inquirer’s time.
Chinese Customary Marriages, still popular in the colony, are generally
recognized as valid, but there is no single definition which covers them.
There are any number of ancient prescriptions for them which contradict
one another, but they are alike in that they follow the accepted rites
and ceremonies of the families of the bride and groom. Chinese women
with a modern consciousness of their rights have no affection for such
unions, since they permit a husband to divorce his wife for any reason
and give her no right to leave him if she really feels inclined to do so.
Furthermore, and this is an equally sore point, it permits the husband
to take concubines, though the notion that a wife might adopt a similar
polygamy is quite inconceivable.
Chinese Modern Marriages in the colony far outnumber all other types—more
than 200,000, by an official estimate—although Registry Marriages have
recently gained in number. All that is required to make them valid is an
open ceremony witnessed by two persons. The Nationalist laws applicable
to such unions give the man no legal right to acquire a concubine,
despite the fact that some husbands in the colony find it convenient to
pretend they do. The “extra” girls are naturally flattered to be told
they are concubines (i.e., secondary wives with full domestic rights),
rather than mistresses with no legal or social standing.
In everyday relationships with the courts and the government, Chinese
Modern Marriages are recognized as respectable unions. None the less,
they have no legal validity when contracted in Hong Kong, for they
are neither entered at the Marriage Registry nor are they celebrated
according to “the personal law and religion of the parties,” as colony
laws require.