Hong Kong Studies Vol. 2, No. 2 (Winter 2019) 1 A “Constitutional Experiment” Before and After the Shek Kip Mei Fire: The Vesting of Public Housing Responsibilities ls ia in the Urban Council, 1948–1954 er at Chui Wing-kin M d te Abstract gh This article investigates the decision-making process behind a rparti of the constitutional advancement in Hong Kong before the 1980s. I willy answer one question: why did the colonial government, before and after othep Shek Kip Mei Squatter Fire, entrust low-cost housing and squatterC resettlement responsibilities to the Urban Council, the only institution: with elected members in the then Crown Colony’s constitutionals system?s Housing affairs were proper municipal responsibilities: in Metropolitanre Britain, public housing matters were under the municipal authorities’ P control; in Hong Kong’s port colony counterpart, British Singapore, a municipalg authority was indirectly involved in such functions. It was naturalon and logical that the Hong Kong Government followed Britain’s andK Singapore’s practices when it had to commence a public housing program,g which was completely new to the colony. Nevertheless, many colonial officersn and business figures were skeptical to such partially elected institutiono and the politicians therein, and hence opposed the proposal of Hgranting public housing functions to the Council. However, their oppositionsf were ignored, as Governor Alexander Grantham intended to implement o a “minor constitutional change” after major plans such as the Young Planty had been shelved indefinitely. In addition, with public housing functionssi being added to the Council’s purview, the government could win the Councilors’er support and keep itself informed of public opinion regardingiv housing affairs. Through being heavily involved in public housing affairs,n elected Councilors enjoyed a rise in popularity among the people. In thisU sense, the vesting of housing-related responsibilities in the Urban Council esubstantially enhanced the elected Councilors’ political influence in the colony. es in h Rather than meticulously reconstructing the history of early public C housing in Hong Kong, this article studies an episode in the city’s he constitutional advancement before the 1980s and the controversies T surrounding it. After providing the historical background on Hong Kong as a quasi-municipality before 1941 and on official discussions on urban and housing improvement planning in the late 1930s, the major Hong Kong Studies Vol. 2, No. 2 (Winter 2019) 2 component of the article will be on the decision-making process related to the post-war vesting of public housing functions in the Urban Council. By 1952, the colonial government had withdrawn all major constitutional reform proposals, including the establishment of an elected municipal council with a wide range of functions (a.k.a. the so- called “Young Plan”) and the introduction of elected seats into the Legislative Council, both of which were shelved indefinitely. This meant s that Hong Kong diverged from the usual track of obtaining self- al governance or independence for other British colonies. In the eyes of ri political scientists and sociologists of the time, Hong Kong from the te 1950s to the 1970s was like a backwater lagoon, untouched by the global a wave of decolonization. All politics in Hong Kong was brought into “the M administerization of politics” through the mechanism of “administratived absorption of politics,” that is, incorporating social elites into variouste consultative organs and governing the colony by consulting them.g Withinh the constitutional system, the only institution with elected memribers, the Urban Council, was one that was engaged in “politics withoutpy power.” Until the last two decades, researchers had generallyo viewed Hong Kong people as indifferent to politics (King 424–29; CS. K. Lau 115–18; Hoadley 616), citing low voter turnout rates in Urbans: Council elections as evidence.1 For these scholars, the colony enjoyedes political stability unmatched by most Asian countries in Pther same period, despite occasional disruption by certain social unrests.g In the last two decades, however, scholars have taken a more nuancedn view of the political culture as well as the state–society relations ino that period. Lam Wai-man’s work published in 2004 discussed the activist K tradition of Hong Kong people by reconstructing and examiningng a series of social movements that took place from 1949 to 1979. Theo Hong Kong Reform Club and the Hong Kong Civic Association, which H held the majority of elected seats in the then Urban Council, wereof usually involved in those movements. Edmond Tsang’s 2019 monograph,y The Earliest Political Parties in Hong Kong and Democracy Fightersit (in Chinese), depicted the roles and activities of these two organizationsrs as some kind of embryonic party politics of Hong Kong.v eIn this sense, the Urban Councilors, despite lacking real powers, hadni political influence. TheU annals of democratization in Hong Kong will not be complete if the epart pertaining to the pre-1980s era is not thoroughly studied (E. Tsanges 27). Even though the idea of a drastic reform in the constitutional insystem was abandoned in 1952, the then existing Urban Council still h underwent continuous modifications. “I am at all times ready to consider C further proposals for constitutional changes, provided that they are not he of a major character,” wrote Governor Alexander Grantham to the T 1 Between 1952 and 1973, the highest turnout rate for an Urban Council election was only 38.8% in 1967, and the lowest 13% in 1955. (Y. W. Lau 98–99; Miners 159; “Savingram”). Hong Kong Studies Vol. 2, No. 2 (Winter 2019) 3 Secretary of State for the Colonies (“Inward Telegram”). The colonial government at the time still believed that a municipal council with a wide range of functions would be established in the future. More elected seats were introduced into the Council until 1965, at which point half of the unofficial councilors were elected (Miners 156). The franchise was widened in 1965, though still narrow and estimated at no more than 10% of the total population (Ko 20; Y. W. Lau 102). More and more s responsibilities were entrusted to the Council, including low-cost al housing and resettlement housing-related functions. However, the above ri progressions have yet to receive much scholarly attention. te It seems intriguing that the authoritarian colonial government a decided to entrust such important and “urgent” (as the government M viewed it) responsibilities to the only government institution withd “politicians” (elected Councilors). Given such uniqueness, one cant saye that the government’s assignment of public housing responsibilitiesgh to the Council was not based on administrative convenience, but insteadri on political consideration. David Ronald Holmes, the first Commissionerpy for Resettlement, described such a move as a “constitutional experiment.”o In this article, the decision-making process will be reconstructed C based mainly on documents from the Colonial Office ands :the Government of Hong Kong. es The vesting of public housing functionsP inr the Council within the context of the colony’s constitutional historyg and the administrative history of early public housing affairs meritn scholarly examination. The only extant study focusing on the connectiono between the Urban Council and early public housing was published K by Ip Iam-chong in 2002. Ip argued that the colonial governmentng was extraordinarily anxious about public health, and that such anxietyo was a characteristic of colonialism. The housing problem in theH colony had been construed by the British colonials as a public healthof issue from the very beginning. To support the above argument, Ip ypointed out that the Urban Council, with sanitation being its main function,it played a key role in public housing matters in the 1930s as wellrs as the 1950s, and it was consistent with “past colonial traditions ofv associatinge sanitation and building together” (Ip 200–07). However,ni Ip seemed to have overlooked the historical fact that the practiceU of connecting public health with housing issues in a city was not uniquee to colonial regimes, and is quite common in modern governance. Thises is well illustrated by the early history of low-cost housing in Britain in(Merrett 3–20). A municipal body in Britain also had authority on public h housing. Therefore, it was logical that the quasi-municipal authority of British Hong Kong, the Urban Council, was granted the responsibilities C e concerning public housing. It is this history that I will now turn to in the h following section, illustrating the special implication of the municipal T power distribution in Hong Kong as a quasi-municipality before 1941. Hong Kong Studies Vol. 2, No. 2 (Winter 2019) 4 The Special Meaning of Municipal Power in Pre-1941 Hong Kong In many port colonies under the British Crown Colony system, the elections of municipal authorities were the first elections in each of their own constitutional history. In British Singapore, the Municipal Commission was established in 1888 and the first election, despite having a narrow electoral franchise, was held in the same year, 60 years ls earlier than the first election of the legislature (Yeoh 51, 60–61). In ia Gibraltar, a semi-elected City Council was established in 1921 and the er Legislative Council with elected seats was founded in 1950 (Constantine at 322–23, 389). In these two small colonies, as in Hong Kong, the majority M of the population inhabited the urban area under the governance of da single municipality. In this situation, the fine line between properte municipal functions and the colonial government’s responsibilitiesh was not always clear. ig As Ian Scott wrote, “[t]he notion that an elected Urban Councilyr with extensive powers might provide a solution for the politicalop development of Hong Kong runs like a thread through the colony’sC history” (138).