Hong Kong had been run by civil servants since Britain assumed possession of it in 1841. The current chief executive, Donald Tsang, joined the civil service after university and stayed for 40 years. Regina Ip stayed for 28, spending her last five years as secretary for security. Her replacement is a nearly 35-year veteran.
The Executive Council, effectively the cabinet, is appointed by the chief executive from the ranks of the civil service and business, just as members of the Legislative Council (Legco) were appointed by the governor in earlier days. Forging consensus was easy because most members had worked with one another for years.
But hairline cracks appeared in the system—in 1985, when “functional constituencies” were created, letting different business and professional interest groups elect their own Legco representatives. Then in 1991, geographical constituencies were introduced, giving the general population the vote for the first time. These direct elections were for a minority of Legco seats, but ended civil service control of the assembly.
“When the British were designing the democratic system,” Ip says, “they worried about British merchants being outnumbered by their Chinese counterparts, and business interests being outnumbered by the grass roots who were non-taxpaying.” Ip says Hong Kong’s tax base was very narrow then and remains so now. Only 1.16 million of the 3.5 million in the work force pay tax, she says.
Many think the pace of Legco’s democratization, post-handover, has been glacial. Ip says that charge is “unfair,” considering Hong Kong had its first elections only in 1985.
It is often thought that Chris Patten was the first governor to try to pick up the pace, but there had been earlier attempts. After Japan’s surrender following the second world war, Governor Mark Young tried to introduce universal suffrage for Hong Kong’s old municipal council—only to be blocked by higher-ups in London who worried that any moves to democratize the colony would arouse China’s interest in resuming control.
Forgotten in the shouting of later controversies, Ip herself was given two governor’s commendations for organizing Hong Kong’s first district board elections in 1980. The government had taken its first steps in representative government, but even at the local level, it was very hush-hush.
“They didn’t dare talk about ‘democracy’ then for fear of upsetting China,” Ip says. They didn’t dare because 90 percent of Hong Kong’s territory was on a 99-year lease due to expire in 1997. After that, only Hong Kong Island and part of the Kowloon Peninsula would be left in British hands. Because it was always China’s view that Britain had secured Hong Kong and other concessions through “unequal treaties,” and because Hong Kong was dependent on water piped in from China, it was a given that the sun would finally set on the last Asian patch of the British Empire.
Besides, the world had changed. In 1971, The People’s Republic of China took its seat at the United Nations, finally routing the Republic of China (Taiwan). One of the PRC’s first moves was to have Hong Kong and Macau, then a Portuguese dependency, removed from the U.N.’s list of territories targeted for decolonization (and future independence). Like it or not, Hong Kong was heading home.
