Covert colonialism

Governance, surveillance and political culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966–97

Author:
Florence Mok
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This book examines state–society relations in one of Britain’s last strategically important colonial dependencies, Hong Kong. Using under-exploited archival evidence, it explores how a reformist colonial administration investigated Chinese political culture, and how activism by social movements in Hong Kong impacted on policymaking. This book is framed around the organisational capacity of the colonial state to monitor public opinion, notably through the covert opinion polling exercises Town Talk and MOOD. Hong Kong people had extremely limited democratic rights but these exercises constructed ‘public opinion’, which was used by unelected officials to respond to public needs and to seek to minimise social conflict. There were two implications of this shift in colonial governance. On the one hand, Town Talk and MOOD provided the colonial government with the organisational capacity to conduct surveillance, monitoring the Chinese society closely: this was a manifestation of ‘covert colonialism’, a strategy to strengthen British control of Hong Kong. On the other hand, the presence of these exercises indicated that the mentality of the colonial bureaucrats was changing. This was an acknowledgment that Hong Kong, an atypical colony that was expected to retrocede to China rather than gain independence, was moving towards a new form of ‘decolonisation’. Significantly, covert colonialism allowed ordinary people to take part in the policymaking process in a state-controlled manner that would not provoke a hostile response from China. This effort by the colonial government to manage public opinion interacted in complex ways with a diverse variety of Chinese communities engaging with new political movements.

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