City of the Interstices (0:0)
by Vincent Garton
Loop 0
反历史虚无主义的综合防御和时间复化科学发展领导小组
Expert memorandum for the Central Leading Group for Comprehensive Defence Against Historical
Nihilism and Scientific Development of Temporal Complexification
Designated informational quarantine status: 9:3 (高度传染) (SUSPENDED)
Classification: VORTICAL–CONTRAPUNTAL
From the transcendent perspective of history, the city of Hong Kong appears as an abomination.
Since the island’s annexation to the British Empire and the foundation of the City of Victoria in the
1840s, it has remained an anomaly, provoking, in varying degrees, contempt, impatience, and
outrage among all those bureaucrats charged with its ultimate imperial oversight. From Charles
Elliot, Hong Kong’s first, unmourned administrator — whose recompense for securing the isle was a
letter from Lord Palmerston informing him that in taking this “barren Island with hardly a House
upon it” he had “disobeyed and neglected [his] Instructions”, and would promptly be relieved of his
post1 — to CY Leung, whose handling of the present swelling vortex of cultural conflict lost him the
Party Centre’s confidence and his office shortly thereafter, few of Hong Kong’s administrators have
escaped some measure of opprobrium from their overseers across the sea, whichever sea that may
be.
Even perhaps the earliest inkling of Hong Kong’s future material glory, a prophetic fragment
attributed to the mendicant Song-era poet-alchemist Bai Yuchan, which appears to foretell, many
centuries in advance, myriad ships crowding Hong Kong’s waters beneath a glittering night sky,2
was amply repaid by Bai’s earlier unhappy attempt at a career as a bureaucrat — squandered,
tellingly, due to his examiners’ censure of his youthful pride. That he subsequently attained
immortality was presumably only insult to injury.3
Hong Kong is a space of negative sovereignty.4 From its beginnings it has been a site of autonomy
defined not as the positive expression of liberty but as the modulated suspension of authority. This
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negativity, today, is embodied in its constitutional character as the ‘Hong Kong Special Autonomous
Region’, a region shielded against the central institutions of the People’s Republic, defined by an
intentional state of exception fixed teleologically on Eschaton 2047. The Basic Law that enshrines
the condition of One Country, Two Systems is unequivocal: the fundamental basis of the selfgovernment of this city is that “The socialist system and policies shall not be practised …” (Article
5).5
In the past, however, Hong Kong’s negativity was immanent to its colonial distance in space and
time, sustained by an administration that remained serenely uninterested in the desires of its
superiors in Whitehall. It shares this trait of negativity, at least in part, with the other great outpost
of the Singlosphere, Singapore — perhaps the only country to have gained its independence
against its will.6 In Singapore, this occasion was commemorated by Edwin Thumboo, whose poem
“9th of August — II” expresses his rage at the Malaysians, minds set against Lee Kuan Yew’s efforts
to hold the federation together, whose
call became a prayer
In firm ancestral beckoning.
They kicked us out.7
There is no such single traumatic instant of negative self-definition in Hong Kong — no inherited
ancestral beckoning echoing and inverting in a developmentalist drive to national self-betterment.8
Rather, Hong Kong’s negativity remains anchored historically in the attitude of its colonial
administrators. These were men who circulated from the elite universities of Britain, often trained
only in the Western and Chinese classics and with little or no experience in administration, with
neither settler ties to the land they now governed nor effective responsibility to the imperial
government they represented. And so they perched, for much of the year, on Victoria Peak — aloof
from the growing native population that gathered below, partaking only in an insulated colonial
high society.
Indeed, this sequestered colonial administration refused, from the beginning, to engage in the
affairs of the native Chinese, allowing them to self-organise; they, in turn, lacking a scholarly
bureaucracy inherited from imperial China, were left to promote merchants — rather a euphemistic
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term for a pirate and owner of brothels and casinos like Loo Aqui — to positions of leadership,
renouncing the lowly status awarded them in Confucian evaluation. This laissez-faire attitude was
no small source of consternation to successive imperial overseers — by 1941, the Hong Kong
authorities were derided by an incoming reformist administrator for their “pig headed
provincial[ism]”.9 Nonetheless, in varying degrees, this studied disinterest persisted — to the end of
colonial rule, and beyond.
The most infamous manifestation of this disinterest has undoubtedly been Hong Kong’s economic
policy. With the exception of its provision of public housing, a policy rooted in the Crown monopoly
on the colony’s land (still maintained today by the SAR government), even at the height of the
gathering Keynesian hegemony of the 1930s on, Hong Kong’s administrators stubbornly rejected
both the advice of the increasingly decisive bulk of the economics profession and the dictates of
their London superiors — pressure that reached a climax after the Labour victory following World
War II. Making the most of its spatio-temporal isolation from the mother country, the colonial
administration deployed every legislative response and tactic of prevarication at its disposal to
prevent the encroachment of the new economics on its internal policy.
It is a mistake to ascribe this anomaly simply to voluntary choice or an ideological principle current
among Hong Kong’s administrators. It was not merely that there was little appetite for
Keynesianism among the colonial administrators, for instance. Decades of distance between a
circulating imperial government and a fixed — or, more properly given the flux of migration that
characterised mid-twentieth-century Hong Kong, counter-circulating — population, fortified by the
government’s bloody-minded indifference, meant that the basic econometric infrastructure that
would have enabled such interventionism in the first place simply did not exist. Elementary trade
statistics; GDP figures; accounts of aggregate industrial production — none of these were collected
until the 1970s: “the colonial administration had no reliable data by which to gauge economic
performance” at all.10
By and large, those ambitious men who would implement such reforms were equally lacking. One
searches in vain among Hong Kong’s policymakers for a visionary like Lee Kuan Yew: John
Cowperthwaite, the man who has attracted occasional attention as a candidate for this status,
merely helped justify a policy that had already been sustained for decades by his predecessors;
promoted to Financial Secretary more out of convenience than specific merit — common practice
for the classically educated Cadets who formed the top leadership of the colonial administration11 —
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his knowledge of fiscal procedures was underwhelming, and under his intermittent supervision,
“unsound” practices were allowed to flourish.12 Though for the native population real power often
resided elsewhere — in temples, local committees, in the industrialists and entrepreneurs
themselves — these men and institutions never aspired to the comprehensive articulation of a
general urban policy.
Surveying Hong Kong’s evolution, we are left with a decidedly strange impression. With the
managerial sureties of Singaporean developmentalism in mind, we might search for the great
commanding authority, the embodied great-man accelerator responsible for the development of its
sister city to the northeast. Yet a decade after the War, above the apartments, the smokestacks,
the textile factories of Tsuen Wan, beneath Leviathan’s crown, we find only clouded, unseeing eyes
— or, worse, a gaping stump. The Japanese occupation of the city in 1941–45 was enough, it is true,
to provoke a faction of the city’s exiled administrators to hatch a plan for its reordering upon their
return. After the resumption of British governance, the plan was promptly ignored.13 Hong Kong’s
government retained, quite deliberately, no sensible awareness of the reality it governed; it was
beset by crises, and as we shall see, it invented others. Through and across a landscape that
began, by the operations of credit and entrepreneurial immigration from the Communist north, to
be rent by the explosive genesis of overproduction, systolic boom and bust could reign without
restraint. Now pressed into a city indifferent not just to its imperial context but to much of its own
internal territorial extension — a government of “small Hong Kong chauvinists” — such
development, following the trajectory first diagrammed by Jane Jacobs, could concentrate to whitehot intensity.14
If, as some of the more alarming writings to emerge from the West suggest, sovereignty
is NOTHING, 15 Hong Kong must be said to have embodied it to perfection. A bunkered colonial
government fighting crises imaginary and real, anxious to protect local practices already being
scrapped and recycled in positive-feedback industrial development, a “servile” government
refusing the lure of expertise and legislating through its own forgetting: Hong Kong acéphale —
sovereign of sovereigns!
Despite this obvious insanity, the troubling fact remains that Hong Kong was not just the first Asian
economy to recover from the devastation of the Second World War, but could blaze over the ruins
of this continent as the earliest crack of dawn over the horizon of an East Asian future — a future, in
the end, that Europe had brought upon itself. What was more, this diminutive colonial outpost soon
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drew into itself such enormous economic potential as to threaten the very foundations of the
“liberal” West’s new world order itself. It is apparent, then, that we are dealing here with something
truly monstrous. —
1. Viscount Palmerston (Foreign Secretary) to Elliot, private letter of April 21,
1841. Palmerston goes on to note that “it seems obvious that Hong-Kong
will not be a Mart of Trade”.
2. “長沙左手接青羅，右攬青衣濯碧波，深夜一潭星斗現，里頭容得萬船過.” The provenance of this verse is
obscure; the sole reference in English, Michael Ingham, Hong Kong: A
Cultural History (Oxford University Press, 2007), 1, does not relate the
original Chinese and misattributes the verse to a “Bai-yu Shan”. In
Chinese, see here.
3. O n t h e c a r e e r o f B a i Y u c h a n , s e e L i W a n g , ‘ A D a o i s t W a y o f
Transcendence: Bai Yuchan’s Inner Alchemical Thought and Practice”, vol.
1 (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2014), 26–86. Cf. also FYSK: Daoist
Culture Centre — Database, “Bai Yuchan”.
4. It is, of course, also a space of positive sovereignty; but any empire of the
sea is at one and the same time poisoned by its land.
5. Basic Law.
6. One of many hagiographies recounts the press conference in which Lee
announced Singapore’s independence as follows: “[Lee] wept. He sat
back in his chair, asking for a few minutes’ adjournment as he wiped
away his tears.” Anthony Oei, Lee Kuan Yew: Blazing the Freedom Trail
(Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2015).
7. Quoted in Ee Tiang Hong, ed. Leong Liew Geok, Responsibility and
Commitment: The Poetry of Edwin Thumboo (Singapore University Press,
1997), 34.
8. Albeit that some Hongkongers now themselves take the British to task for
kicking them out, unwilling to protect their rights — so they claim.
9. Namely David MacDougall (later Colonial Secretary, 1946–49). Steve
Tsang, Governing Hong Kong: Administrative Officers from the Nineteenth
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Century to the Handover to China, 1862–1997 (I.B. Tauris, 2007), 49.
10. Leo Goodstadt, Profit, Politics, and Panics: Hong Kong’s Banks and the
Making of a Miracle Economy, 1935–1985 (Hong Kong University Press,
2007), 71. This intriguing book, one of the most comprehensive recent
summary treatments of Hong Kong’s meteoric economic development,
reveals much more than its author — an avowed proponent of fiscal
regulation whose thematic purpose is to demolish the image of
competence of the colonial administration — would like.
11. Though Cowperthwaite did receive an accelerated one-year basic degree
in economics, he had originally studied classics.
12. Relating
that
“administrative
officers
could
not
be
relied
on
to
comprehend even the most ordinary features of banking business”,
Goodstadt adds that Cowperthwaite was particularly “ignorant and
incompetent”, repeatedly making misjudgements on the soundness of
banks’ finances, and lacking elementary knowledge on matters such as
the accounting of bank deposits. Goodstadt, 28, 3. Of course, the ultimate
results of this “ignorance and incompetence” speak for themselves.
13. Discussed in Tsang, Ch. 4. As Tsang notes delicately, “For several reasons
the colonial government’s new outlook was less strongly entrenched than
one might have expected”: Tsang, 59.
14. Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations (Random House, 1984).
15. Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes (Gallimard, 1976), VIII: 300.
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