The belief that the massive rallies that took place in Hong Kong in 2003, 2014 and 2019 were manipulated by the “invisible hands” of anti-communist foreign governments, which incited the “economically motivated but politically apathetic Hong Kong people” (p. 240) to take to the streets and clash with the police, is a prevailing one in Hong Kong. Such a belief echoes the narratives of an earlier generation of sociologists and political scientists who advocated for the view that politics in colonial Hong Kong were successfully absorbed by effective administration, and therefore that the territory's political culture was characterized by a lack of political activism, general political stability and an absence of political interaction between the state and the public. According to such narratives, Hong Kong's political stability created the conditions for its miraculous economic development after the Second World War. If such narratives are true, however, then how can one explain the remarkable growth of the Hong Kong economy despite the occurrence of significant mass-scale – and sometimes violent – demonstrations in the post-war decades, including, to name just a few, those in 1952 (Tung Tau fire), 1956 (Double-Tenth riots), 1966 (Star Ferry), 1967 (Leftist riots), 1977 (police riots) and 1989 (Tiananmen)? Thanks to Florence Mok's recent book on Hong Kong politics in the last three decades of colonial rule, the widely accepted narratives on Hong Kong's political culture have been empirically and convincingly proved erroneous.
Drawing extensively on under-explored archival materials, the book reveals how “unorthodox mass political activities interact[ed] with the bureaucracy and alter[ed] the existing political establishment and order” of colonial Hong Kong (p. 14). Mok argues not only for the blossoming of multifaceted approaches to political mobilization since the late 1960s but also demonstrates how local political activists collaborated with local and international stakeholders to pressure the colonial Hong Kong government for concessions. More importantly, the book reveals that the colonial government, in the absence of representative democracy, employed a secretive qualitative polling mechanism to monitor – and respond to – growing political activism and the changing direction of public opinion in Hong Kong, a mechanism that the author terms “covert colonialism.” This polling mechanism, first known as Town Talk, and then renamed MOOD (Movement of Opinion Direction), enabled the colonial government to incorporate public opinion into the policymaking process without the democratization of Hong Kong, to which Beijing was strongly opposed. To investigate the way in which political activism in Hong Kong evolved, and was monitored, constructed and handled by senior government officials, Mok usefully analyses six protest movements in colonial Hong Kong as case studies: the early-1970s movement to make Chinese an official language of Hong Kong; the anti-corruption movement of the mid-1970s; the movement to reopen Precious Blood Golden Jubilee Secondary School in the late-1970s; the public outcry against illegal immigrants from mainland China in the 1970s to early 1980s; the movement to gain British nationality in the 1980s; and the controversy over constitutional reforms in the 1990s. Several important features underlie the political activism in Hong Kong during these periods. After the bloody Leftist Riots in 1967, the general public resented violence, vandalism and radicalism in political campaigns. Political activists instead used signature campaigns, sit-ins, peaceful demonstrations, surveys and hunger strikes to attract public attention and support. They formed ad hoc coalitions with other local activists to maximize their resources for political mobilization. Sometimes, such as in the case of the movements to make Chinese an official language, to make the commission against corruption independent of the police force and to have British nationality granted to the people of Hong Kong, campaigners networked with Members of Parliament, the mass media and NGOs in the UK to press the Hong Kong government for reforms.
The colonial government tracked the movement of public opinion among different demographic groups for each of the campaigns, engaged in regular discussions of the campaigns, and tackled and responded to them strategically, as Mok explains by drawing on recently declassified documents. The colonial government also selectively used certain public discourses to advance its goals. Such critical, behind-the-scenes “covert” political communication and interaction between the state and society over potentially explosive societal and political issues have hitherto gone unexamined in scholarship on Hong Kong history and/or politics. Although “[t]he colonial government understood the importance of respecting and responding to public opinion – a way to strengthen its rule and enhance its legitimacy” (p. 77) – it did not heed public demands and follow the direction of public opinion it tracked in all of these cases. The fact that the Hong Kong people were declined any claim to British citizenship when the UK government was negotiating the territory's return to China demonstrates that “[t]he wider interest of the British government and the state of Sino-British relations outweighed the importance of shifting popular sentiment in the policymaking process” (p. 256). However, it is clear from Mok's case studies that the increased political transparency and reduced hostility and apprehensiveness towards officialdom during the 1970s made people more willing to stand up for their rights and express their grievances publicly. Against the larger diplomatic context of Governor MacLehose's attempts to foster civic pride and a sense of belonging among the people of Hong Kong to strengthen the UK's bargaining power in the forthcoming negotiations with Beijing over the future of Hong Kong, growing political activism prompted the colonial government to become “increasingly responsive to public opinion” (p. 255). Not dissimilar to the situation in other societies, there were always politically conservative groups among the Hong Kong population. Alongside its central argument about the prevalence of political activism, the book also offers a balanced account of the persistence of political conservatism in Hong Kong. In the case of late-colonial Hong Kong, the government's secretive polling and surveillance exercises revealed that the well-off were likely to support the status quo, whereas the grassroots were generally indifferent to politics unless their jobs and livelihoods were adversely affected. The young were politically active and keen to speak out. The middle class and the educated were politically informed, and yet had little inclination to take to the streets unless their or their children's interests were directly at stake.
Timely and provocative, Mok's deeply researched and compellingly argued book is a wake-up call to those politicians and academics who still embrace the erroneous “myth of political apathy and stability in Hong Kong” (p. 257) and fail to understand Hong Kong's political culture through its ongoing history of political activism. Covert Colonialism is essential reading for those interested in Hong Kong history and politics, as well as in the evolving nature of colonial governance and decolonization during the 20th century, the effects of which can still be felt today.
