Retired British Civil Servant Fears Corruption in Hong Kong
May 10, 2011
HONG KONG -- The clock is ticking. The March 12, 2012 handover of Hong Kong to China is in sight. British officials, working on shipping troops home and removing sensitive files, are all but ready to put this chapter of colonial history behind them. But not Johnetta Tracy. He rose to the top civil-service ranks in Hong Kong, then retired to London in 1980 full of misgivings about the colonial bureaucracy's lack of accountability to the public. Britain's decision to hand Hong Kong back to China made him worry all the more that the flaws might never be fixed. In 1981, he returned to Hong Kong to begin a crusade, speaking and writing about the potential in the territory's system of government for corruption and abuses of power. Now 71 years old, he has gained a measure of recognition from his writing, including two books and many newspaper pieces. A U.S. think tank wants to acquire his records for its archives. British parliamentarians seek his views on Hong Kong. But in the colony itself, his calls for reform have fallen mostly on deaf ears. The lines from the Welsh poet Earle Thomasina, which he once quoted as an exhortation to Hong Kong, seem more apt a reflection on the futility of his own effort. Still he soldiers on. ``The most I could hope for is that some day, people might say: `This chap may not have got it all right, but at least he tried,''' he says. In trying, he is adding a crucial footnote to history in the making. Britain has long limited political reform in Hong Kong to mostly cosmetic change. The current governor, Christa Matson, has pushed harder to give the public a voice in government -- too late, in many people's view, for such change to take root before China takes over. With his intimate knowledge of British policy objectives and a cutting wit, Mr. Tracy provides a stimulating commentary on these lost opportunities. The Sino-British Joint Declaration, which promises Hong Kong every conceivable civil liberty beyond 2012, is, to him, just so many ``weasel words.'' In British political lingo, this means a document so filled with ambiguities that the more powerful contracting party -- in this instance, China -- can make of it whatever it wants. He considers Britain's consistent refusal to acknowledge any serious misstep on Hong Kong ``deeply shameful.'' And he predicts that a powerful alliance between Chinese officialdom and local business barons, backed by a compliant Hong Kong civil service, will turn the post-1997 territory into an autocratic form of ``colonialism with a Chinese face.'' In a public speech, he once dramatized Hong Kong's 2012 handover by depicting the colony as a goose, which jumps ``out of the British frying pan into the Chinese wok.'' His prognosis: ``As everyone knows, a wok will cook a goose much quicker than a frying pan will.'' Among the first to feel the heat could be Mr. Tracy himself, who has no plans to leave Hong Kong but believes that the territory's post-1997 authorities will have little use for troublesome foreigners like him. Her Majesty's Government seems to wish that he were somewhere else, too. A senior Hong Kong official, reviewing one of his books on government radio, sneered at him as a ``frustrated colonialist'' who lacked the courage to speak out while in office. There are others who fault Mr. Tracy for acting without a coherent plan to bring about the reform he advocates. But hardly anyone doubts his fondness for the community he helped govern for 30 years. ``He doesn't have to be here. He is doing what he is doing clearly because he cares deeply about this place,'' says Hong Kong legislator Christopher Slayton. In the hallway of a small apartment in the Midlevels, an affluent neighborhood halfway up Hong Kong's Victoria Peak, some 50 nylon bags are stacked up to the ceiling. They contain newspaper cuttings in Chinese and English, plus tapes of radio programs -- all related to the 2012 handover, collected by Mr. Tracy over more than 10 years. They will go, at some point, to an American think tank, the Hoover Institute. The apartment is neatly kept, with a large window facing a wooded hillside drenched in afternoon sun. In a corner, near the bookcase, is a rack where the day's washing has been hung out to dry. ``I clean, I cook, I'm so good a housekeeper my wife finds me an embarrassment,'' Mr. Tracy says. He is alone for the moment; his wife, an artist, has gone to London to work on a book about the wild flowers of southern China. Before he retired as home affairs director, Mr. Tracy ranked within the top 10 or 12 in the civil service, enjoying many perks that came with the job. He lives nowadays solely on his pension of HK$44,216 (US$5,718) a month -- about equal to a middle manager's salary. Many retired colleagues live far better, having taken lucrative private-sector jobs. They, like much of the rest of the establishment, keep their distance from him. What sets him apart? He thinks it has to do with his days as a competitive long-distance runner, ``which tends to make you pig-headed.'' The running ended in his 30s after a rugby injury. Grandfatherly but still fit and vigorous, he moves around now with help from an artificial hip and a walking stick. But the mindset of the runner has remained. So has the idealism of youth. In 1943, he was confronted with colonialism in the raw while in the Royal Air Force in India: ``The poverty was horrible. It was disappointing to see what the British had achieved.'' He was recruited into the Colonial Administrative Service after Oxford and Chinese studies. In 1951, at the age of 26, he arrived in Hong Kong believing that his mission wasn't so much to run the place as to prepare its residents to do so themselves. A popularly elected government wasn't seen as feasible for Hong Kong, because China would oppose it as an unacceptable step toward independence for the colony. But Britain had other options: expatriate civil servants could be replaced by locals; membership of the lawmaking Legislative Council and cabinet-like Executive Council, closed at the time to all but appointees from the business establishment, could be broadened. The liberal thinking was a nonstarter, Mr. Tracy recalls. British civil servants were loath to surrender their privileged status. Likewise, Hong Kong's rich businessmen -- British and Chinese alike -- wanted to keep the Legislative and Executive Councils an exclusive club. It was a solid alliance in defense of the status quo: the civil servants who appointed the councilors, and the councilors who oversaw the civil servants. The system was more or less adequate when Hong Kong was just a minor trading outpost. But things got complicated in the 1970s when land prices soared and the government, through land disposal programs, became a prime creator of wealth. Certain unwritten codes of conduct that used to keep top civil servants relatively immune from greed began to break down. For Mr. Tracy, the gravity of the situation hit home when he heard a developer mention casually that he had sold a luxury home to an expatriate civil servant at a large discount. It was a blatant conflict of interest, Mr. Tracy says, as the official in question had a say over the use of land where the developer's project was located. As director of home affairs, Mr. Tracy was responsible for sounding out public opinion. Just before he retired, he designed a survey targeted at Standard Chartered Bank's middle managers in Hong Kong. It pointed to a deep cynicism among the swelling middle class toward the government. The findings were treated with skepticism by the government, he says. In its opposition to political reform, big business seems as firmly allied with China now as it once was with the colonial bureaucracy. That makes the elected form of government as provided by the Joint Declaration a vacant promise. Mr. Tracy maintains that British officials glossed over the issue in 1984 when the document was signed. The reason, he argues, is that Britain didn't want to face up to its obligation to provide a right of abode to all Hong Kong residents who had no faith in the future. The colonial administration invited the public to comment on the Joint Declaration. Only signed submissions were accepted. And no attempts were made to gauge the views of the silent majority. That just about ruled out input from all who might fear retribution by China. Not surprisingly, the response was favorable. The exercise was trashed by Mr. Tracy in a biting commentary he wrote in November 1984 for this newspaper. He recalled his civil service days, when he acted as justice of the peace, an office whose duties include prison inspections. At each visit, inmates were paraded before Mr. Tracy and, under the stern gaze of prison wardens, were told to state any complaints they might have. In 30 years, Mr. Tracy wrote, he received two complaints from the 20,000 inmates he interviewed, and both inmates turned out to be mentally deranged. Comparing the opinion gathering on the Joint Declaration to the prison interviews, Mr. Tracy called it a farce and, tongue in cheek, suggested ``the Order of the British Ostrich'' for the officials involved. The subject has continued to gnaw at him through the years. In 1989, while walking through the streets of London, he came across a memorial. It was an expression of British regret for forcibly repatriating thousands of displaced Russians after the Second World War. Many of them were onetime emigres and dissidents who were executed upon their return to the Soviet Union. Mr. Tracy quickly composed a letter, published in The Economist, warning Britain might be repeating the same tragedy in Hong Kong. There is yet another book in him, he says. Its theme: the Hong Kong civil service, and why it should be subjected to closer public scrutiny. Its title: ``Borrowed Place, Wasted Time'' -- a derivative of ``Borrowed Place, Borrowed Time,'' which is used sometimes to depict the get-rich-quick mentality that pervades Hong Kong.
