The British crown colony of Hong Kong came into existence under circumstances bearing less resemblance to the majesty of British law and order than they did to a territorial dispute between the Capone and O’Banion mobs during the Chicago of the 1920s. Its founding fathers were dope peddlers whose ability to bribe Chinese customs officials made the traders rich and goaded the Chinese Emperor into a war that cost him the loss of a worthless island called Hong Kong.

The Rev. George Smith, an English missionary who visited the colony during its first five years, approached the place with the exalted conviction that his country had “been honoured by God as the chosen instrument for diffusing the pure light of Protestant Christianity throughout the world.” He went ashore to discover a polyglot Gehenna with no market for the Word.

“The lowest dregs of native society flock to the British settlement in the hope of gain or plunder,” he wrote. “There are but faint prospects at present of any other than either a migratory or a predatory race being attracted to Hong Kong, who, when their hopes of gain or pilfering vanish, without hesitation or difficulty remove elsewhere.”

The Rev. Smith was no more favorably disposed toward his fellow countrymen. He felt the British rulers were too harsh with the Chinese, permitting the general population to be exploited by a few Mandarins. As for the merchants and traders, he regarded their behavior as setting a bad example for the Chinese. Saving souls in Hong Kong, he decided, demanded more miracles than he had at his disposal, and with considerable relief, he transferred his missionary efforts to the more congenial atmosphere of South China.

Other missionaries accepted the long odds against grappling successfully with the devil in Hong Kong, but the struggle left many of them disheartened. When the merchants and sailors were not engaged in the opium traffic, they frequently busied themselves by purchasing Chinese mistresses from the Tanka boat people. Many of the Eurasians of South China were the issue of this type of transaction.

Law enforcement in the colony was a farce. The few Europeans who could be induced to join the underpaid police force were the scourings of the Empire, remittance men or wastrels who accepted the jobs because they did not dare go home to England.

Householders, disgusted with the ineptness of the police, hired private watchmen who went about at night beating bamboo drums to advertise their presence. This noisy custom was later forbidden, and burglary, highway robbery and harbor piracy increased. Sir John F. Davis, the colony’s second governor, tried to persuade property owners to improve police protection by paying more taxes for it, but the merchants demurred, setting a precedent which was applied to many proposed improvements in years to come. The attitude seemed to be: Progress is fine, provided one doesn’t have to pay for it. Sir John attempted to keep track of known criminals by obliging every colony resident to register, but was forced to abandon the idea when the Chinese staged a three-month general strike in protest.

Piracy, smuggling, opium-smoking, prostitution, semislave trading in contract laborers, gambling, and graft flourished for many years, resisting the sporadic attacks of a succession of governors. In 1858, for the first and last time, an exceptional balance was achieved. Licenses for the sale of liquor, the favorite Western vice, and revenue from opium, the leading weakness of the Chinese, each brought 10,000 pounds of income to the colony government.

Under such powerful governors as Sir Richard Graves Macdonnell (1866-72) and Sir Arthur E. Kennedy (1872-77), the colony made significant advances in the control of piracy and urban crime. The quality of police protection improved and both men won the applause of local merchants by their Draconic policy of branding, flogging and deporting law-breakers. The Chinese Emperor and the liberal elements in the British Parliament disapproved of the severity applied but did not intervene to stop it.

The Chinese government never ceased its opposition to the smuggling of opium from Hong Kong, although many of its venal officials shared in the profits of the traffic. For two decades, from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s, China attempted to enforce a blockade against smuggled salt and opium, but opium continued to represent almost half its total imports.

A joint Sino-British commission agreed to place some limitation on the trade in 1886, but the British zeal for enforcement was diluted by the desire for continuing profits. Even after controls were repeatedly tightened in the early 1900s, the returns held steady; in 1906, the opium trade was valued at 5 million pounds and yielded $2 million in colony revenue. Unfavorable world opinion gradually narrowed the trade, but the nonmedical sale and use of the drug was not entirely banned until World War II.

In the last several decades, the Hong Kong Police Department has outgrown its disreputable origins and has become an efficient law-enforcement organization. Nevertheless, the image of the colony that persists in the imagination of many Westerners who have never been there is a cesspool of iniquity such as the one that horrified the Rev. Smith.

Just how wicked and criminal is today’s Hong Kong?

A layman’s comparison of the crime rates of the United States and Hong Kong for the year 1960, as published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Hong Kong Police Department respectively, gives an objective picture of their relative lawlessness.

Both sets of figures are for predominantly urban areas, covering ten of the most comparable categories of crime. The figures give the actual number of crimes per one million population. Because of inherent differences in the manner of classifying and reporting crimes, a margin of error of ten percent should be allowed in their interpretation.

1960—CRIME RATES PER 1 MILLION POPULATION

Such statistics are always subject to many different interpretations, which will not be made here. But they confirm one impression shared by virtually everyone who has spent many nights (either at home or on the streets) in both New York City and Hong Kong: You’re a lot safer in Hong Kong.

The most glaring disparity between the rates is, of course, in the comparative number of arrests for drunkenness. The American rate is more than 60 times higher than that of Hong Kong, and it is a safe inference that a fair share of the colony arrests for drunkenness are made among Europeans and Americans, who comprise less than two percent of the population. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese in Hong Kong drink beer, wine or hard liquor, but a Chinese drunk in public is a rarity.

In major crimes of violence—murder, rape, serious assault and robbery—America has a much higher crime rate. With the stated allowance for error, the United States and Hong Kong could be considered about equally inclined toward larceny—a legal term which covers the more popular forms of stealing. Stealing automobiles, however, has not really caught on in the colony; there is practically no place to hide a car after stealing it. Bicycle theft is more common there.

Prostitution is one of the two categories in which Hong Kong has a higher rate than America. A highly intelligent missionary who has dealt with the problem for many years had this succinct comment:

“The problem hinges on two factors; the British Army Garrison and the fact that Hong Kong is a recreation port for the United States Navy. Remove these and the problem vanishes.”

For a variety of realistic reasons, this missionary does not expect the problem to vanish, though the police and the clergy, working from different directions, are doing their best to reduce its incidence. Both groups recognize poverty as one major cause of prostitution that can be fought with education and better jobs.

The comparative rates of narcotics offenses in the United States and Hong Kong indicate that such crime is sixteen times more prevalent in the colony than in America. They also confirm a fact recognized by every law-enforcement unit in Hong Kong: Drugs are the No. 1 colony crime problem. By government estimates, there are no less than 150,000, and perhaps as many as 250,000 drug addicts in the colony. In the entire United States there are between 45,000 and 60,000 drug addicts.

The gravity of the colony’s narcotics problem is best illustrated by the type of addiction practiced there. Almost all addicts use either opium or heroin, with heroin users three times more numerous than opium addicts. The trend toward heroin has grown more powerful every year since World War II, because the tight postwar laws against opium drove the drug sellers to a much more potent narcotic and one that could be smuggled more easily. Heroin is a second cousin to opium, being derived from morphine, which, in turn, has been extracted from opium.

Heroin, commonly called “the living death,” is from 30 to 80 times stronger than opium. An opium smoker may go along for years, suffering no more physical damage than a heavy drinker; a heroin addict, who may be hooked in as short a time as two weeks, sinks into physical, mental and moral ruin within a few months.

A peculiar kind of economic injustice operates among drug addicts, who are most often found among the poorest segments of the colony’s Chinese population. Even in the years when the British traded openly and without compunction in opium, they almost never became addicted to it, and today a British addict in Hong Kong is an extreme rarity. A number of young Americans living or visiting in the colony have picked up the habit, probably under the impression that they are defying conventions. They, at least, can afford the price of the rope with which they hang themselves. This is not so for the Chinese addict, whose habit costs him an average of $193 a year (HK $1,100), or much more than he can earn in a similar period. Unless he has saved enough money to keep him going until the drugs kill him, he turns to various kinds of crime to support his habit.

Opium-smoking is a cumbersome process requiring a bulky pipe, pots of the drug, a lamp to heat it and scrapers to clean the pipe. Smoking produces a strong odor which makes a pipe session vulnerable to police detection and arrest. There are no opium dens in Hong Kong; the usual term is opium divan, implying an elegance seldom encountered in the addicts’ squalid hangouts.

Heroin, odorless and requiring no bulky apparatus, is taken in various ways. “Chasing the dragon” is done by mixing heroin granules and base powder in folded tinfoil, then heating it over a flame and inhaling the fumes through a tube of rolled paper or bamboo. When a matchbox cover is substituted for the tube, the method is called “playing the mouth organ.” A third technique involves the placing of heroin granules in the tip of a cigarette, which is lit and held in an upright position while the smoker draws on it; this is known as “firing the ack-ack gun.” Needle injection, and the smoking or swallowing of pills made by mixing heroin with other ingredients are additional methods.

The opium poppy may only be grown illegally in Hong Kong, but the few farmers who attempt to raise it in isolated valleys have produced hardly enough for their own use. Practically all of it comes in by ships and planes in the form of raw opium or morphine, which can be converted to heroin within the colony. On ships, the drugs are hidden in the least accessible parts of the vessel or concealed in cargo shipments; they can also be dumped overside in a waterproof container with a float and marker as the ship nears the harbor, to be picked up by small, fast boats which land them in sparsely settled areas. Variations of the same methods are used by incoming planes, with a prearranged airdrop sometimes being employed.

With thousands of ships and planes arriving and departing every year, the chances of stopping all narcotics smuggling are practically nil. A complete search of every arrival would be physically impossible, and even in cases where the police or the Preventive Service of the Commerce and Industry Department have been tipped off to an incoming shipment, it may take a full day to locate the hiding place. The drugs may be packed inside a cable drum, buried in bales of waste, concealed in double-bottomed baskets, cached inside the bodies of dolls or surrounded by bundles of firewood; the hiding places are as inexhaustible as the cleverness of the smugglers.

Where do the narcotics come from? Harry J. Anslinger, United States Commissioner of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, had been telling the world for at least a decade that Red China was the chief source of supply. Anslinger said the Chinese Communists were up to their necks in the traffic because it brought them the foreign exchange they desperately needed and simultaneously undermined the morale of the West by spreading drug addiction among its people.

Not one official in the British crown colony accepted Mr. Anslinger’s thesis for a minute. Hong Kong Police Commissioner Henry W. E. Heath, the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs, and the Preventive Service of the Commerce and Industry Department unanimously declared that there was absolutely no evidence that any large amount of the drugs smuggled into the colony came from Red China. American customs officials in Hong Kong were inclined to sustain the British view.

Anslinger had named Yunnan Province in southwestern China as the leading opium-growing area. Colony officials will concede that some opium may be grown in Yunnan, but they believe that a much greater share is cultivated in northwest Laos, northern Thailand and the Shan States of eastern Burma. These four areas are so close to one another that the difference between the two hypotheses is more political than geographic.

Regardless of which field the poppy comes from, colony officials have found that more than half the opium seized upon entering Hong Kong has arrived on ships and planes that made their last previous stop at Bangkok, Thailand. It is presumed that few drugs arrived bearing the name and address of the manufacturer or the stamp giving the country of origin.

In 1960, the colony’s antinarcotics units set what they believe to be a world record for drug seizures, grabbing 39 shipments that included 3,626 pounds of opium, 153 pounds of morphine, 337 pounds of morphine hydrochloride, 5 pounds of heroin and 155 pounds of barbitone. On November 30, 1960, the Preventive Service captured 1,078 pounds of raw opium hidden in bundles of hollowed-out teakwood on a newly arrived ship. Less than two weeks later they discovered another vessel trying the same trick and made a haul of 769 pounds of raw opium, 16 pounds of prepared opium, 45½ pounds of morphine and 293 pounds of morphine hydrochloride. There were 50 seizures in 1961, putting a further serious crimp in the smuggling racket.

Feeling persecuted and hurt, many smugglers shifted their base of operations to Singapore. Even so, it was not an unqualified triumph for Hong Kong’s antinarcotics force; by pinching off the drug supply they forced its market price sky-high, and desperate addicts began stealing and robbing to pay for their dope.

Halting the manufacture of heroin within the colony is as difficult as catching dope smugglers. A heroin “factory” requires little space and can be set up in some obscure corner of the New Territories or lodged in an expensive top-floor apartment on Hong Kong Island; the profit margin is so great that production costs are but a small obstacle. Enforcement costs are almost as steep. In 1959, the Preventive Service trebled its manpower. In February, 1961, maximum penalties for drug manufacturing were raised from a fine of $8,750 and ten years in prison to a $17,500 fine and life imprisonment.

Almost two-thirds of all prisoners in Hong Kong jails are drug addicts, but the jailing of addicts, however necessary to protect society, offers no cure for addiction. The colony government has sought to meet this phase of the problem by setting up a narcotics rehabilitation center at Tai Lam Chung Prison and a voluntary treatment section in the government hospital at Castle Peak.

Dr. Alberto M. Rodrigues, a colony-born physician of Portuguese ancestry and an unofficial member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council, became chairman of a voluntary committee formed in 1959 to help drug addicts. With government approval, his committee took over Shek Kwu Island near Lantau in 1960 to establish a center where about 500 addicts could be accommodated if they volunteered for treatment. The island was chosen because it was isolated, and with proper security measures, could keep the addict entirely away from drugs until medical and nursing care had put him back on his feet. Gus Borgeest, the refugee rehabilitation pioneer who established a welfare center on Sunshine Island, helped in the early planning of Shek Kwu Chau, which began operations during 1962.

Sir Sik-nin Chau, who has served on both the Executive and Legislative Councils, headed an antinarcotics publicity campaign which was solidly backed by the British and Chinese newspapers. The Kaifong associations joined in the drive with lectures and leaflet-distribution among the Chinese community. The public was urged to report any information about narcotics sales or divans, but the response was slow and timid; many ordinary citizens were obviously afraid of beatings and reprisals by the Triad gangs engaged in drug-peddling. Others hung back in obedience to a deep-seated Chinese tradition of not sticking your neck out by reporting on the other fellow’s dirty work. Some headway has been made against this attitude, but the general feeling of the drive’s publicity people is that their campaign must be sustained for years to overcome it.

Hong Kong’s drug problem is unlike that of New York City, where drug addiction among teen-agers is cause for grave concern. Few Chinese youngsters seem to be attracted to the habit. It is the middle-aged, the unemployed, and most of all, the desperately poor who chase the dragon for a brief sensation of well-being, ease and warmth that is succeeded by a crushing letdown, physical collapse and eventual death. Abrupt withdrawal of the drugs is like an earthquake from within, causing cramps, vomiting, excruciating bodily pain and pathological restlessness. Only a gradual withdrawal under close medical supervision will bring about a cure, and even that carries no guarantee if the rehabilitated addict is turned back to joblessness and squalor.

Much of the drug traffic into Hong Kong is not intended for local consumption, but for reexport to America and Europe. The crossroads position of Hong Kong on international air and shipping routes makes it particularly advantageous to this trade, and internal enforcement is insufficient to cope with it. To bolster their defenses against this traffic, colony drug-suppression officials depend on close coordination with police in Southeast Asia, with the World Health Organization Committee on Drugs Liable to Produce Addiction, and the Commission on Narcotic Drugs of the United Nations Economic and Social Council. The colony police force has opened its own sub-bureau of Interpol (International Criminal Police Organization) to strengthen its offensive against international drug peddlers.

One oddity of the colony’s widespread drug addiction is that it is seldom apparent to the average visitor; he may spend weeks there without seeing a single identifiable drug victim. Trained observers can often spot an addict by his dazed expression or emaciated appearance, but even in these cases they need further evidence to verify the appraisal. Dragon-chasers don’t charge through the streets like rogue elephants—not in the colony, at any rate—they stay hidden and comatose in their squatter shacks or divans.

Police find the Triad gangs perennially active in the sale of narcotics, just as they are in pimpery, extortion and shakedown rackets. Congested areas such as Yau Ma Tei and Sham Shui Po have the highest crime rates and the largest Triad membership. Only about five percent of the 500,000 Triad members are engaged in major crimes, yet the threat of vengeance from this militant minority is generally sufficient to keep the other members silent and submissive. The mere implication of Triad backing, in a threatening letter sent to a rich Chinese, usually produces cash to pay off the letter writer, although police have recently had more success in persuading prospective victims of these menaces to contact them instead of paying off. Kidnapings are rare, though at least one case made the headlines in 1961.

The makeup of the police department closely reflects both the hierarchy and the numerical grouping of the colony’s population. The line force of uniformed men and detectives in all grades totaled 8,333 in 1961. Nine-tenths were Chinese and less than 500 were British, with less than 200 Pakistanis and a handful of Portuguese. The top 50 administrative posts were almost solidly British, however. The force also includes a civilian staff of 1400.

For the purposes of the ordinary citizen, a colony cop is a Chinese cop, for these are the only officers he sees regularly. Taken as a group, they are an alert-looking, smartly uniformed body, predominantly young, slim and athletic. Day or night, they appear to be very much on the job, and the worldwide complaint that a cop is never there when you need him seems peculiarly inapplicable to Hong Kong. The Chinese officer quite obviously is proud of his job, but the swaggering bully-boy pose is alien to his nature.

A few Chinese officers, like police in all other cities, go bad. When they are drummed out of the force, it is generally for shaking down a hawker or a merchant. More serious cases involve the protection of gambling, prostitution, after-hour bars, or even collaboration with Triad gangsters who split their protection money with the man on the beat. Once in a great while a case like that of Assistant Superintendent John Chao-ko Tsang crops up, with a high-ranking Chinese officer involved in spying for a foreign government—Communist China, in this instance. But such is the exception and does not change one lesson the British rulers have learned in 120 years of hiring almost every kind of recruit from a Scotsman to a Sikh; that of them all, the rank-and-file Chinese cop is the finest the colony has ever had.

The command structure of the police department, which is highly centralized under an all-British top administration, is reflected in almost every branch of the colony government. There are approximately 15,000 natives of the British Isles in the colony, excluding members of the armed forces and their families, and they occupy virtually all of the top government posts.

A number of writers have expressed the view that Hong Kong is actually controlled by about twenty persons, and while this could be criticized as extreme—and certainly impossible to prove—it could just as well be said that it is controlled by not more than ten persons: The governor; the colonial secretary; the financial secretary; the director of Public Works; the managing director of Jardine, Matheson & Co. (the most powerful and longest-established business house); the general manager of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank (the leading financial institution); the two most influential Chinese members of the Executive and Legislative Councils; and the most prominent Portuguese and Indian member of the Executive or Legislative Council. Perhaps the best way to test this top-ten theory would be to try running something in opposition to these ten, and no one has ventured that yet.

There is no important elective office in Hong Kong, no widely qualified electorate and no open agitation for universal suffrage. Nor is there any sign of a forcibly suppressed yearning for democratic rule on the part of the general population. The Communists, of course, loudly profess their love of elective government, but the British and a majority of the Chinese construe this to mean the entering wedge for Red China to annex the colony. This is an old-fashioned colonial autocracy, completely dominated by a small minority at the top, but even without a vote it appears to enjoy more confidence from its subjects than do the Reds on the mainland of China.

The greatest strength of the colony government is that in spite of its pin-point degree of representation, it can rule in an orderly and efficient manner without the excesses of tyranny or dictatorship. For ultimately, it is not the governing few but the law that rules in Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong government is a subsidiary of the British Crown. It gets its orders from the Colonial Office and they are carried out by the governor and two advisory bodies, the Executive and Legislative Councils. The governor is the head of both councils. Five persons have seats in both councils by virtue of their office—the commander of British forces in the colony, the colonial secretary, the attorney general, the secretary for Chinese affairs, and the financial secretary. In addition, one colony official is nominated to the Executive Council, and four other government officials are nominated for the Legislative Council. The governor goes outside the official family to nominate six unofficial members of the Executive Council and eight unofficial members of the Legislative Council. Altogether, there are 31 places in this policy-making hierarchy. Since several of its members hold two jobs in this selective directorate, there are at present a total of 23 men participating in top-level government.

The governor must consult with the Executive Council on all important matters, but he decides what must be done. If he takes action against the express advice of his Executive Council, he owes a full explanation for doing so to the Colonial Secretary. The governor makes the laws with the advice and consent of the Legislative Council, and he must have its approval for all public spending. British common law, adapted where necessary to local conditions and Chinese customs, is the legal code of Hong Kong.

Thus the colony presents a unique governmental phenomenon. Approximately ten to twenty English-speaking men holding undisputed sway over 3,300,000 subjects, of whom not one in ten understands the language of his rulers and hardly fifty percent can claim Hong Kong as their birthplace.

By all visible signs, the colony is one of the best-run governments in the Far East. Its roads are paved and traffic moves in an orderly way in spite of the highest vehicle concentration per mile of road anywhere in the world. The same order prevails in the incessant shuttling of harbor vessels. Public transportation is swift, frequent and generally on schedule. Poverty and privation are everywhere, but starvation is virtually non-existent. Business and trade thrive and unemployment is low. Wages seem minuscule when compared with American standards, yet are higher than in most of the countries of Asia. A majority of its people are indifferent to the government, but they are not afraid of it. When something has to be done, there are people at the top with the resolution and the intelligence to do it without trampling human rights.

Is Hong Kong’s autocracy, therefore, a model for the world? On the contrary, there is hardly another place where its practices would be applicable. Hong Kong’s exasperating uniqueness has defied even the efforts of the Colonial Office to make it conform to British government practices.

With all its efficiency, however, Hong Kong has the weaknesses of its governmental structure and its political environment. Because of its extreme centralization, its almost ingrown character in relation to its constituents, it is often out of touch with the people it governs. Enormous barriers of language and culture block its view, and graft and corruption threaten it from every angle. In Asia, graft is the deadliest enemy of every form of government which pretends to deal justly with its citizens, and Hong Kong is not invulnerable to its attack.

From the earliest days of the colony, the Chinese people who emigrated there were fugitives from restraint and oppression. Many of them were outright fugitives from justice. Whatever their virtues or vices, they had found existence under the government of their homeland so intolerable that they willingly submitted to the rule of an alien people they neither trusted nor admired. From centuries of bitter experience in China, they believed that no government was to be trusted. The secret of survival was to avoid all open defiance of governments and to go on living within the framework of one’s family and clan as though the government did not exist. One did not cheat the other members of his clan, because retribution could be swift and terrible. Relations with civil rulers were not an ethical compact; they were a battle of wits, a stubborn struggle for self-preservation in which the cunning of the individual was the only weapon against the greed and power of the state.

How much more applicable these lessons were when those rulers were foreign devils who did not speak one’s language! One did not rebel against the headstrong foreigners and their military superiority; he obeyed them in externals, so far as it was necessary to escape reprisals, and went on quietly building his own internal mechanisms of graft like a busy termite in an unsuspecting household. If the people of the household mistook the termites for industrious but harmless little ants, it was all the easier for him.

The metaphor need not be done to death, for it is no longer as apposite as it once was. But there is no question that graft and corruption continue to eat away at the structure of the colony government. In a hundred casual conversations with a hundred different colony residents—English, Chinese, American, Portuguese, governmental and nongovernmental—the visitor will almost never hear that the ruling powers have railroaded some poor devil off to jail without cause, swindled him out of his property to benefit the state, or hounded the populace into semistarvation with unbearable taxation. If these evils exist, they are neither frequent enough nor sufficiently conspicuous to engage people’s passions.

But on the subject of graft—the innumerable, small nicks taken from merchants, builders, and the ordinary citizen seeking any type of official favor or permit—the floodgates of complaint are wide open. Much of this is generalized, unproved, even irresponsible, operating at about the same intellectual level as a taxi-driver’s jeremiad. Nevertheless, there is a core of solid complaint that cannot be ignored.

Within the colony government, there is a large segment that bridles at the least intimation of official graft. The motto of this segment is: Don’t rock the boat. We know we’re not perfect, they seem to be saying, but don’t go around kicking over beehives, or the first thing we know, the Colonial Office will be down on our heads with all kinds of inquiries, full-dress investigations and a fearful flap. We’ll all be sacked, sent home in disgrace, and it won’t change one thing for the better. So let’s keep quiet, muddle along as best we can and try to eliminate the grafters quietly, one at a time. We’re really not a bad lot of chaps, you know.

Fortunately, some of the colony’s chief officers do not subscribe to the theory that corruption can be defeated by a public pretense that it does not exist.

Something like a civic shock-wave was recorded in Hong Kong on January 11, 1962, when Chief Justice Michael Hogan opened the Supreme Court Assizes by coming to grips with the issue of corruption.

“No one would claim we are entirely immune from this evil,” Sir Michael said. He noted that the heavy penalties prescribed for corruption offenses must be enforced without recourse to “the surreptitious whisper in the corridor; the accusation made behind his (the accused’s) back; or the anonymous letter. If such methods should come to be accepted, then we would have another evil just as bad, if not worse, than corruption.”

The Chief Justice proceeded to put his finger on one of the main obstacles to the exposure of corruption:

“There is a reluctance to come forward and give information; to come, if necessary, into court and face the possibility of a cross-examination, attacking character, credit and the power of recollection—in fact a reluctance to pay the price that the rule of law demands.”

He contrasted this attitude with the recent case of a Mr. Tong, who captured and held on to a sneak-thief despite six stab wounds, and asked:

“Does this mean that physical courage is more plentiful than moral courage in Hong Kong today?”

He reached the heart of the matter with the observation that a citizen will be very slow to come forward with a complaint against an official if he knows that perhaps tomorrow or the next day or the day after, he has got to come and ask that official, or some colleague of that official, or somebody apparently identified with him in interest, for a concession, or a privilege, or some act of consideration.

It is only when men have clearly defined rights, he continued, that they enjoy the security to challenge the abuse of power and the ability to choke off corruption. If an official can grant or withhold permission “without the necessity of giving public reasons for the decision,” the Chief Justice declared, “you immediately create an opening for corruption or the suspicion of it.”

The Chief Justice’s address, particularly in its allusion to “closed-door” decisions and a lack of moral sense in the community, produced headlines and editorials in the local press and acute twinges of discomfort among those who either benefited by corruption or feared any public admission that it existed. In itself, the address was neither an exposÉ nor an indictment, but its delivery by the brilliant and articulate Chief Justice in one of the most solemn ceremonies of the governmental year rang a clear warning from the citadel: If the corrupters were haled before the courts, they could expect no easy-going tolerance for their misdeeds.

During the previous July, Governor Black had moved to correct one weakness peculiar to Hong Kong. Because of the Chinese tradition that personal contact with the government is to be avoided, many residents were reluctant to approach an official for such routine information as where to apply for an identity card or how to locate a lost pet. If they plucked up the courage to ask a question, they assumed that some fee, to be paid either above or below the table, would be exacted for any answer given. The situation offered a happy hunting ground for grafters, either those on the government payroll who dealt with the general public or the self-appointed private “fixers” who directed the applicant to a particular official for a small fee. Sometimes the fixer and the official were in cahoots and sheared the lamb at both ends of his journey.

Why it took the colony 120 years to plug this rat hole is a baffling question. It was done at last by creating a Public Enquiry Service with an all-Chinese staff capable of speaking virtually any local dialect and of supplying direct and accurate answers to every kind of question about the government and its functions. Coming under the general authority of the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs, it is headed by Paul K. C. Tsui, a native of Hong Kong and a colony administrative officer since 1948. Controller Tsui spent months roaming the colony, talking to editors, listening to gossip in goldsmiths’ shops and to the complaints people dictated to sidewalk letter-writers or expressed to housing and tenancy offices.

When he felt that he had gained some idea of the questions and problems on people’s minds, Mr. Tsui sought the answers to them from the appropriate departments. He then assembled a small staff, compiled and cross-indexed a vast store of information in readily accessible form, and established an office in the entrance hall of the Central Government Offices, West Wing, on July 3, 1961. There his three information officers, who had expected to have to handle 80 requests for information a day, found them streaming in at the rate of about 135 a day. Early in 1962, a similar office had to be opened in Kowloon to meet the same demand. When the Chinese people were satisfied that they could get specific, friendly answers to their problems without having to pay a fee, they were both amazed and grateful.

Mr. Tsui, taking a tip from the operators of goldsmiths’ shops, put his staff on hard chairs and the public on soft chairs, permitting them to talk comfortably across a low counter in a pleasant, informal atmosphere. At times it takes an agitated inquirer fifteen minutes to blow off steam before he can get around to stating what it is he really wants to know, but the staff will patiently wait him out. A married woman about thirty years of age appears to represent the favorite official type of most questioners, although they like also to have an older male official handy as a corroborating reference. Queries in English are handled as efficiently as are those in Chinese.

Once the news of this service reaches all colony residents—many English and Chinese had still not heard of it in 1962—one of the most prevalent forms of petty graft and ill-will toward government will have been eliminated.

Chief Justice Hogan’s attack on “closed-door” decisions and official impropriety was followed a week later by the sixth report of the Advisory Committee on Corruption, composed of a five-man body appointed by Governor Black from the membership of the Executive and Legislative Councils.

The report found the highest susceptibility to corruption among the departments dealing directly with the general public—police, public works, urban services, commerce and industry and refugee resettlement. Inspection services of all kinds, it said, showed the greatest vulnerability to graft.

So far the report only echoes a truism known to every municipal administration; that when the government comes to bear on some individual’s right to perform a particular function, usually for money, a few gold coins in an inspector’s pocket will often expedite a favorable decision.

The Advisory Committee on Corruption has recommended clearly defined, simple licensing procedures and the introduction of bilingual (Chinese and English) application forms and explanatory booklets. A corollary recommendation that all new government employees receive a pamphlet detailing the penalties for corruption has already been accepted.

The Committee called for legislation that would require a public servant to explain exactly how he came to be in possession of any property that was not in keeping with his income, and to face a penalty if his explanation did not hold. They also sought a law giving the courts the power to seize any money involved in a corruption charge, plus a recommendation for stiffer punishments against corruption.

The report urged that the names of officials convicted of corruption be made public, and that figures showing the total number of officials dismissed be published at certain intervals. At present, there are numerous angry cries that when a crooked British official is caught and sacked, he is spirited out of the colony without a word about it; whereas a Chinese official fired for a similar offense receives unrelenting publicity and back-handed treatment that implies, “Well, what else can you expect from these Orientals?”

The Anti-Corruption Branch of the police department is now the chief agency responsible for detecting corruption in all departments of government. The Committee has invited direct reports of corruption from the public, some of which have led to the prosecution and firing of several officials. During the first eleven months of 1961, the police department received an additional 422 complaints charging corruption. Americans are usually surprised to find that the colony’s police department is charged with detecting corruption in other government departments. In America it is done the other way around; other government departments seem to be investigating the police force for signs of corruption.

Generally unsubstantiated but endlessly repeated to visitors, are the popular charges that the police are shaking down shopkeepers and peddlers, or that building inspectors are blinded by gold when a builder is detected extending a structure over a sidewalk in violation of local codes and ordinances.

The report, last of the series issued by the Committee, suggested that it would be desirable to hold the givers of bribes equally guilty with the civil servants who accepted them. This is a sticky issue in any community, despite the unassailability of its ethical position. If it were rigidly enforced, it would infringe the freedom of speech of many prominent persons who deplore dishonesty in government, because it would put them in jail.

The Advisory Committee has also warned civil servants to deal only with the applicants in person, or with professional representatives in order to exclude corrupt middlemen from all transactions. This warning is especially appropriate in Hong Kong, where a middleman with no discernible function except his ability to collect a fee will attempt to worm himself into every business deal.

All of the Committee’s recommendations are made directly to the governor, who in turn discusses them with the Colonial Office before taking action.

Colony newspapers have printed long excerpts from all the reports, and the China Mail declared that they simply said what the newspaper had been publishing for two years.

What Chief Justice Hogan and the Committee have jointly accomplished is to raise an issue of critical importance in the survival of the colony government. Whether it will be resolved as decisively as it has been faced may require months and years to answer.