Hong Kong (36 page)

‘Corruption,’ snorts John Le Carré’s world-weary Hong Kong police superintendent in
The Honourable Schoolboy
, set in 1974, ‘they’ll be discovering bloody steam next.’ One after the other, through the 1970s, discredited policemen entered the headlines, first in Hong Kong’s own newspapers, then in the London tabloids. A protracted sensation occurred when Inspector John MacLennan, found to be enjoying a homosexual relationship with a Chinese, was alleged to have shot himself, but was thought by many people to have been murdered in self-protection by his own colleagues. More celebrated still was Chief Superintendent Peter Godber, holder of the Colonial Police Medal for Meritorious Service, who was for a few years to enter the local demonology.

Having made very large sums of money by dubious practices involving the colony’s crime syndicates, Godber fled Hong Kong just as investigations were catching up with him, and for some time lived comfortably beyond extradition in his cottage in Sussex, a perennial favourite of Fleet Street photographers. Charges of another kind, however, enabled the Hong Kong authorities to get him back again, and in 1975, on the evidence of two other confessedly crooked policemen, one British, one Chinese, he was convicted of corruption in the course of
duty. He served thirty-one months of a four-year sentence, and retired to a villa in the south of Spain, where he found many colleagues, friends and sympathizers.

On the Hong Kong streets they were probably not much surprised: the lower ranks of the police force were, as everyone knew, almost without exception corrupt, so it was only to be expected that its senior officers would be too. The formidable Elsie Tu had been saying so for years. However the repeated exposure of police corruption made the venality of Hong Kong, whose economy depends so largely upon its good name, notorious throughout the world, and led to the establishment of the Independent Commission Against Corruption, the ICAC, whose chilling lights we saw at the Garden Road Car-Park that evening after dinner. Its first director of operations was a formidable imperial intelligence officer, Sir John Prendergast, who had previously served in Palestine, the Gold Coast, Egypt, Kenya, Cyprus and Aden, and the effect was immediate. Many a less prominent culprit was caught, and policemen with guilty consciences scooted away to bolt-holes across the world.

Petty corruption continues on many levels of Hong Kong life. In the passing of driving tests, they say, in the obtaining of houses, in the retention of profitable shoe-shine stands, in countless little matters of everyday life bribery can tell. I am told that firemen sometimes demand a bribe before they will turn their hoses on – or off. The police, however, for so long the worst of the lot, have lately stayed out of trouble – since the late 1970s, when 140 officers were arrested for involvement with crime syndicates, and in a last brave flourish of tradition some of them tried to break into the ICAC offices to destroy the evidence. ‘This is certainly the right place to be a policeman,’ I said one day to an expatriate officer at a well-known border smuggling point, thinking of the possibilities of excitement. ‘Not since the ICAC it isn’t,’ he replied with a wink, thinking of the possibilities of graft.

Hong Kong has always lived by the freest of free enterprise. Government does regulate banking and stock-market standards, has lately stepped in to rescue several ailing banks, and was obliged to bail out the Futures Exchange during the great crash of 1987. It also manipulates the exchange rate for the Hong Kong dollar, pegging
it to the US dollar. Nevertheless the essence of its economic policy is a determination to try anything once, coupled with the resolve to leave well alone, and the rigidly controlled economy of Singapore, Hong Kong’s rival to the south, is held up as an example of how not to do it. Taxation is very low, there are no restrictions on the movement of currency, and as Hong Kong remains a free port only a handful of commodities (tobacco, alcohol, soft drinks, gasoline, cosmetics) are subject to duty. The energies of the market are left unshackled.

Economics apart, though, the official control systems are far from free-and-easy. Even today, among the apparently anarchic office blocks of Central, I fancy I can detect a heavy swathe of Authority running allegorically down the slope they used to call Government Hill: down from the symbolical Peak through Government House and its gardens, through the Anglican Cathedral and its close, across the Government offices, the Supreme Court and the Legco Building, to end at the military headquarters still at the old dockyard by the sea. It is like one of the energized ley-lines supposed to link holy places in England, or like the mystic route the Manchu Emperors used to follow, when they left the Forbidden City to commune with the gods in the Temple of Heaven.

Sometimes Hong Kong feels, in the British kind, excessively governed. In the 1950s and 1960s any sign of political protest was fiercely suppressed, and an ironic element of puritanism still tries to keep the place in hand – gambling illegal except at racecourses or betting shops, homosexuality illegal anywhere, prostitution illegal, exploding firecrackers illegal except on official occasions (but they are often exploded anyway), eating dogs illegal (though they turn up in restaurants pseudonymously as goats). On a very small country bus I once took note of the following instructions, pasted largely beside the driver:
NO STANDEES, TENDER EXACT FARE, DON’T SPEAK TO DRIVER, NO SMOKING, DON’T STAND NEAR THE DOOR, NO DOGS ALLOWED
. You need a licence to do almost anything, it sometimes seems: only the last few rickshaw men, dragging out the final years of their trade at the Star Ferry terminal, are ignored by the licensing authorities on the grounds that officially they no longer exist.

The police force numbers some 26,000 men and women, and includes forces within forces. The Serious Crime Group is chiefly concerned with Triads, and employs 200 detectives, it is said, to observe and infiltrate the societies. The Special Branch is a political police force,
concerned sometimes with Communist activities, sometimes with Kuomintang: its senior officers are nearly all British, Chinese preferring not to run the risks of reprisals after 1997. The run-of-the-mill force is never out of sight for long. Everywhere smooth-faced, robotic Chinese constables are riding about on immaculate motor bikes, sailing about in motor launches or signing the patrol books which are sometimes to be seen, unaccountably ignored by vandals, hanging from nails in public places. They are no doubt still corruptible on occasion, but look unforgivingly correct; one reads constantly of unauthorized market-stalls forcibly removed, unlicensed hawkers fined, and one can hardly look out across the waters of Hong Kong without seeing a police boat stop a passing sampan for inspection.

When in the 1950s a school charity wished to put up a temporary open-air stage for a fund-raising show, it entailed getting permission from the Secretary for Chinese Affairs, the Commissioner of Police, the Fire Brigade, the Urban Council, the Building Authority and the Accountant-General. The bureaucracy has a long arm still. ‘Remote-controlled toy cars and other devices are strictly prohibited in the park area,’ children are sternly warned in an announcement in Victoria Park; the penalty for non-observance could be twenty-four days’ imprisonment, and the relevant regulations, so the infants are told, are to be found in Sections 17 and 18 of Pleasure-Ground By-Laws. At the Po Lin monastery I once saw a notice proclaiming
REVISED EX-GRATIA COMPENSATION RATES FOR RESUMED LAND
. In a dilapidatedly Chinese back street of Cheung Chau, all sagging wooden houses and sleeping dogs, I found an official announcement on an infinitesimal plot of overgrown ground, litter-strewn between two shacks:
PROPERTY OF THE CROWN
, it gravely said.

You would hardly know it from the dizzily scrambled appearance of the place, but strict zoning laws govern Hong Kong’s development, especially in the meticulously planned New Towns. It requires a persuasive geomancer nowadays to bend a building regulation. Until 1994 twelve storeys was the maximum height allowed in Kowloon, which accounts for a monotonous warehouse-look among even the most fashionable new structures, while Hong Kong-side restrictions vary from district to district. The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank building, at forty-eight storeys, is as high as one can build in its particular area; but fortunately for relations with Beijing, the new Communist Bank of China nearby, designed to be much, much taller, is situated on the other side of a zoning boundary.

Hong Kong is a place of Restricted Zones – Closed Areas, Security Areas, Correctional Centres, Drug Addiction Centres and an astonishing number of prisons. The Government established Closed Camps to house refugees from Vietnam, the boat-people of the 1970s. Though surrounded by barbed wire, they are generally run humanely enough, and their purpose is logical – to provide a home for refugees hoping for permission to re-settle permanently somewhere else, while making the experience sufficiently unwelcoming
pour encourager les autres;
but in the Hong Kong official manner they have a numbingly institutional air, with their fences, their bunk-houses and their blazered, royal-badged staff seconded from the Correctional Services Department, while as the years drag by, and nobody offers the poor inmates any happier sanctuary, and more and more of them are forcibly repatriated, the camps come to seem more and more like prisons themselves.

For one feels even there an instinct towards
punishment
. Punishment rather than reform has traditionally been the Hong Kong way of law and order, and its methods have often been crude. Even in the 1920s people used to be put in the stocks, and hard labour then was hard indeed. In one form it meant shot drill and stone carrying, in alternate periods of half an hour each, not exceeding eight and a half hours a day; in another it meant turning a crank, with a resistance equivalent to twelve pounds, 12,500 times a day. Chinese strike agitators, declared Sir Reginald Stubbs the bishop’s son in 1923, should be ‘dealt with in a manner which will be likely to appeal to their deepest feelings, that is, by “the cat” ’.

For a temple of
laissez-faire
, then, this is a very disciplinary place. Corporal punishment is practised, and capital punishment too is still on the statute book, though for many years the Governor has always commuted it to life imprisonment. An Englishman of military mien who once gave me a lift on Lantau, and who told me about his frequent experiences as a film extra, generally in authoritarian roles, turned out to be the hangman.

But in its final decade Hong Kong is also, belatedly perhaps, and unexpectedly to many, half-way to a Welfare State.

Before the Second World War official attitudes towards social progress in the colony were extremely cautious, on the grounds that if conditions
got too easy people would flood in from all the surrounding territories – the same argument that governs the camps of the boat-people now. ‘Reforms based on western models,’ said an official report in 1936, ‘should only be introduced into Hong Kong in reasonable conformity with those enforced in neighbouring countries.’ In the 1930s almost the limit of social services was the compulsory cleaning of Chinese premises, at least twice a year; thousands of people lived on the streets, as in Calcutta, and in 1937 a writer in the
North China Herald
went so far as to claim that half the population was starving – ‘products of the social system of the colony, which does not provide wages at which the average Chinese family can subsist’.

Actually conditions in Hong Kong then compared quite favourably with those in other parts of the Empire, in India for instance, or in the terribly neglected Caribbean colonies, let alone with those in China; but it was not until the Chinese Communist revolution, in 1949, that matters were drastically to change. The influx of refugees into the city then dwarfed everything that had happened before, and placed Hong Kong under such social pressure as to be almost ungovernable. Not much more difficult than running Portsmouth, the sanguine Bowen had thought the running of the colony, but he could hardly claim it now.

For years after 1949 hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong people lived in ramshackle huts or mat-sheds, or were crammed hugger-mugger into stinking sampans, in a congestion that would have shocked even Osbert Chadwick seventy years before. In 1952 a survey showed that of 1,000 Chinese families, 687 lived in one room, and 120 in
part
of a room: twenty-three families lived on rooftops, only eight had a house. There was virtually no public housing. No-holds-barred was the rule among the new industrialists who proliferated in Hong Kong then, and in ghastly sweatshops, hidden away in tenements and dingy factories across the city, workers aged from eight to eighty worked fearful hours putting toys together, or making wigs, or operating dangerous machinery.

Arriving in Hong Kong myself late one night in the 1960s, and looking out of the window of my modest Kowloon hotel, I saw across the dark and rubbish-strewn pit of the place the slab of a gloomy industrial building beyond. Each of its windows was brilliantly lit, nearly midnight though it was, and in each a little Hong Kong cameo, distinct from all its neighbours, was joylessly displayed. Here four girls sat tense at their sewing-machines, silent and unsmiling, here a solitary shirt-sleeved man was hunched over his files, beneath the light of a
naked bulb. Along the way eight or nine families seemed to be packed into one room, and I could see only flashes of infant limbs, waves of drapery, buckets, black loose hair, bedclothes. Every room was ablaze, every room was jam-packed, and across the intervening dark I could hear radios, clicking machines, shouts and children’s screams.

In another city, I thought then, all that life out there might be a comfort, a reminder that all around me was the warmth of community. In Hong Kong it felt to me utterly indifferent, as though nobody was taking the slightest notice of anyone else. Hong Kong was certainly not noted then for social conscience, most of the Europeans preferring to ignore the miseries around them, most of the Chinese concerned only with their own families. Visiting liberals invariably went home horrified, demanding immediate reforms; but in the colony itself the purpose of Government was seen as being simply to govern, to provide the Confucianist order that enabled private enterprise to flourish.