Then & Now | How Hong Kong’s handover passed the reins from one distant power base to the next

Hong Kong, for all practical purposes, has been run as a colony since the 1997 handover. Some official titles changed – governor became chief executive; Crown Colony became Special Administrative Region – and sovereignty shifted from London to Beijing. But little else changed. In particular, the unrepresentative, re­volving-door clique of stooges, toadies, self-servers and time-servers that comprised Hong Kong’s late-colonial consultative bodies has remained largely intact.

Other times and places, where indirect imperial rule was orchestrated through a cabal of compliant, paid-off local proxies, provide an instructive comparison with Hong Kong now. Frederick Lugard, whose time as governor of Hong Kong between 1907 and 1912 bisected a career spent mostly in East and West Africa, wrote The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1922), a compelling theoretical handbook for effective, cost-efficient indirect colonial rule.

Indirect rule, as outlined by Lugard, allowed for local affairs – typically religion, customary law, land claims and other “native” concerns – to be managed by carefully selected, thoroughly co-opted local potentates. Ultimate power was vested in the senior local British official, and periodically deployed when indigenous customs, such as slavery, came into open conflict with international norms. Variously styled as the resident, chief collector or commissioner, ultimate authority remained the same; the buck stopped with the British administrator, however much his power was camouflaged behind layers of consultation.

Other forms of indirect rule, including the quiet use of Chinese criminal networks for political enforcement purposes, have a well-documented history in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaya, as well as in China itself. Since the British colony’s earliest years, “rule of law” has remained Hong Kong’s most fondly cherished collective comfort blanket, which makes openly processing the darker underlying reali­ties of this society so much harder. Wide­spread gangster influence on various forms of “unofficial” or “parallel” poli­cing activities has graphically re­surfaced in the wider public consciousness as months of protest have trudged on.