In Hong Kong the Political Economy of the Asia Pacific
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The Political Economy of the Asia Pacific Fujio Mizuoka Contrived Laissez- Faireism The Politico-Economic Structure of British Colonialism in Hong Kong The Political Economy of the Asia Pacific Series editor Vinod K. Aggarwal More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7840 Fujio Mizuoka Contrived Laissez-Faireism The Politico-Economic Structure of British Colonialism in Hong Kong Fujio Mizuoka Professor Emeritus Hitotsubashi University Kunitachi, Tokyo, Japan ISSN 1866-6507 ISSN 1866-6515 (electronic) The Political Economy of the Asia Pacific ISBN 978-3-319-69792-5 ISBN 978-3-319-69793-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69793-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017956132 © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 This work is subject to copyright. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To all of my former HKU students who inspired me to write this book Preface Hong Kong, a British Crown Colony up until 1997 with an area of 1061 km2,1 has managed to industrialise and become one of the ‘Four Dragons’ economies, and for this reason it has often been touted as a successful case of laissez-faire economic policy.2 Simultaneously, however, Hong Kong was under the yoke of a system of White-minority colonial domination until well after WWII, which has been called “both an anachronism and an anomaly”.3 As recent studies have argued,4 the process of this industrialisation was not nec- essarily originating in the laissez-faire economy advocated by those like Milton Friedman5 or the Hong Kong Government. The ‘laissez-faire’ myth6 in Hong Kong, in fact, is the philosophical descendant of ‘free trade imperialism’, and it was noth- ing other than an ideology of social integration born out of opposition to the con- trolled socialist economy across the border. To strip away this ideological veil is to find lurking below an active role of contingencies organised and planned at the hands of the colonial government.7 The very establishment of the colonial apparatus in Hong Kong required that the territorial entity had to be hewed out ex post facto from a space that had been part 1 Data as of 1980. Census and Statistics Department, Hong Kong Annual Digest of Statistics, 1981 Edition, The Government Printer, p. 19. The area increases a bit every year due to reclamation. 2 Friedman, M., Free to Choose: A Personal Statement, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990, p. 34. 3 Clancy, M., Hong Kong: A Political Anomaly, in Hong Kong: Dilemmas of Growth, ed. by Leung C. K., Cushman J. W., and Wang G., Australian National University, 1980, p. 643. 4 Mizuoka, F., ‘The British white-minority rule in Hong Kong and the policy of “planned” competi- tion’ Sekai Keizai Hyoron, October 1983; Shiffer, J. R., Anatomy of a Laissez-faire Government, the Hong Kong Growth Model Reconsidered, Centre of Urban Studies & Urban Planning, University of Hong Kong (HKU), 1983; Castells, M., Goh, L., and Kwok, R. Y. -W. The Shek Kip Mei Syndrome: Economic Development and Public Housing in Hong Kong and Singapore (Studies in Society and Space, no. 4), Pion, 1990. 5 Friedman, op. cit., pp. 54–55. 6 Mori, K., Jiyu Boeki Teikokushugi (Imperialism of Free Trade), The University of Tokyo Press, 1978. 7 Mizuoka, op. cit. vii viii Preface of China. While most of these colonies gained independence by the early 1960s, Hong Kong remained under British rule as a Crown Colony for approximately another generation beyond that time. White minority, consisting as little as 0.9% of the population,8 dominated and ruled the non-Whites, most of whom were Chinese. As such, Hong Kong shared a common ethnic–political structure with that of former South Africa. In a normal case, this action should inevitably have fuelled racial and ethnic antagonism between (coloured) Chinese and (White) British. Particularly in the post-war period, when ethnic liberation movements advanced and won independence for colonies elsewhere across the globe, the maintenance of sta- ble dominance by the White minority over Hong Kong Chinese came to be all the more difficult and demanded well-calculated techniques of shrewd social integra- tion, or the art of colonisation à la Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, too, the British did enjoy through birth and nationality a privilege from which the majority of coloured children were totally excluded. For example, the British children studied in more privileged government-run schools, segregated from the Chinese children who were cramming for limited university places in Hong Kong. Although the official residential segregation in the Peak area was lifted after reoccupation, the British never lived in congested tenements or public housing. It was during this White-minority rule that the capitalism in Hong Kong flour- ished and succeeded. Without rich resources, as in South Africa, this capital accu- mulation was attained almost solely through the hard work of the Chinese. How was this possible? Why were Hong Kong Chinese so obedient and why did they not remove themselves from an attempt at socio-ethnic integration initiated by the colo- nial British? This is the fundamental question of this book. In 1979, I was given an opportunity to teach at the Department of Geography and Geology at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) as a visiting lecturer. When I first arrived at Kai Tak Airport, I was naturally not aware of anything of the colonial nature of Hong Kong. My knowledge regarding Hong Kong was limited to the common understanding that it was one of the fastest developing regions of East Asia. As I came to experience for a while the life at HKU, my impression of Hong Kong gradually changed: it was indeed a living museum of colonialism, which in my thoughts should have ceased to exist in the world in the 1960s. In reality, the British Empire was still alive and kicking there. The British were the colonial mas- ters of Hong Kong, just as they had been in India until 1947, and in Hong Kong they still behaved in that way, especially at the HKU. To give an example, in the univer- sity there was a space called a ‘Senior Common Room’. It had a section in the style of a British pub offering alcoholic drinks and some pub food, as well as a canteen that offered Chinese food. There was obvious segregation: the former was filled with White expatriates, and the latter always with Chinese. This quaint finding gradually grew into my research agenda: to analyse the dialectics between the colo- nial social structure and space. 8 Goodstadt, L. F., Uneasy partners: the conflict between public interest and private profit in Hong Kong. Hong Kong University (HKU) Press, 2005, p. 8. Preface ix I couldn’t but help recall a famous passage from Forster’s famous novel A Passage to India: The colonial British “all become exactly the same, not worse, not better. I give any Englishman two years, be he Turton or Burton. It is only the dif- ference of a letter. And I give any Englishwoman six months. All are exactly alike” in picking up the behaviour of the colonial master.9 From this maxim, a non-White expatriate from Japan—myself—was a contra- diction embodied in itself: as a non-Caucasian, I in no way behaved as a colonial master, yet I am not Chinese. I felt quite awkward in either of these virtually segre- gated places of the Senior Common Room and indeed in the whole university. Although the medium of instruction at HKU is English, all the students of HKU whom I taught were Hong Kong Chinese. British families seemed to send their children to universities in the UK, Australia or other English-speaking countries. Most of the faculty members of the HKU took a high-handed position towards the students, no matter whether they were British or Chinese. The students put up with it and carried out their tasks quietly. This ambience was so very different to that of Japanese universities. The Chinese students whom I taught were intelligent, disciplined and hard- working almost without exception. They were indeed the crème de la crème of youngsters in Hong Kong society. I recall taking the students on a geography field trip to Japan. On the ‘free research’ day in Tokyo, which if they had been Japanese university students they would happily have spent it on leisurely sightseeing, many of the HKU students visited on their own initiative the local government offices and conducted interviews in spite of the language barrier, based on which they later wrote term papers of excellent quality.