Covert colonialism: Governance, surveillance and political culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966-97. Florence Mok. Manchester University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781526158192. Price: £85.00  | Reviewed by Chris Chien

Florence Mok’s monograph Covert Colonialism: Governance, surveillance and political culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966–97 is an important study of how the British colonial regime aimed to foster a sense of local identity as a strategy to subdue the threat of revolutionary anti-colonial movements that swept through the Third World during the Cold War. Mok examines why Hong Kong stood apart as a bastion of relative colonial stability amongst the decolonizing tumult of the early Cold War through case studies of political flashpoints in the period after the city’s twin anti-colonial uprisings of 1966 and 1967. The book’s central contention is that British colonial statecraft of this period centered on impeding domestic political ferment by creating pressure valves for grievances through the creation of avenues for Hong Kong people to communicate directly with the government.  

This is what Mok calls “covert colonialism,” which took the form of surreptitious measurings of public opinion on controversial social issues and government policy by MOOD (Movement of Opinion Direction) and Town Talk survey programs, which were successful in re-instilling colonial state legitimacy as the guarantor of social stability in the eyes of the Hong Kong people. This bureaucratic instrument allowed the state to project the appearance of genuine responsiveness to public opinion, which generated a distinct and local civic identity that transformed encroaching revolutionary fervor, incited by both PRC Maoists and KMT Nationalists, into a largely subdued political culture that often took the form of stability-seeking conservatism. Mok argues that the creation of informal avenues for political participation contradicts the traditional sociological characterization of Hong Kong as a “minimally-integrated social-political system,” where the colonial regime was largely unimpeded in its governance and society was composed of apolitical “utilitarianistic familism” dominated by self-interest and family interdependence rather than reliance on the state (11). In encouraging Hong Kong Chinese to engage with the colonial state, covert colonialism, in Mok’s rendering, created the conditions for a more confident and outspoken Hong Kong political culture. 

The foremost strength of the book is Mok’s archive: a newly declassified trove of government records centering on a largely ignored covert colonial domestic surveillance program. The book’s introduction and first chapter establish the framework of covert colonialism and explain how Mok understands it to relate to Hong Kong political culture through the construction of the concept of “public opinion.” Mok’s focus on the 1970s in Hong Kong political culture, less analyzed than the sensational riots of the 50s and 60s, results in a unique set of case studies through which to explore covert colonialism in the subsequent seven chapters. While Mok engages popular episodes such as the movement for Chinese as an official language, she also eschews well-documented events such as the 1966 Star Ferry and 1967 Riots so as to focus on more subdued developments in the city’s political culture at large, such as the 1973 campaign against telephone rate increases. This is a valuable collection of lesser-known histories of resistance in Hong Kong history that, in Mok’s rendering, demonstrate how “covert colonialism” was a central mechanism through which colonial officials could sincerely consider public opinion and Hong Kong people could influence the outcome of government policy. Rather than coopting social struggle, covert colonialism, Mok argues, was a more effective avenue for affecting colonial decision-making in contrast to overtly political practices such as rallies, sit-ins, and hunger strikes that were unacceptable to officials and in a society largely allergic to the tumult of the 1960s.

Issues arise with two central concepts to Mok’s analysis: decolonization and democratization. Mok adopts the historiographical framing common within Hong Kong Studies and forwarded by scholars such as Leo Goodstadt, John Darwin, and Chi-kwan Mark that characterizes the city as having been “decolonised” at various points in the Cold War because of the British “loss of means and will” to exercise power or the slow but formal “devolution of power” from the imperial core to the local government (7). Throughout the text, Mok describes covert colonialism’s effect of opening more direct avenues for communication between state and society as reflecting the colonial regime’s genuine willingness to be influenced by the opinions of the populace. She characterizes this as indicating “some degree of ‘decolonisation’ in the bureaucratic mentality” (26; quotation marks in original). The unqualified use of the quotation marks suggests that she is deploying a different conception of the term decolonisation, one that is unique to Hong Kong and which describes more of a top-down “decolonising” initiative compared to the bottom-up revolutions elsewhere in the Third World.

The concept that colonial rulers make political calculations based on maintaining stability and not angering too large a portion of its subjects is not particularly novel for colonial contexts. This consultative mechanism—or even the notion that officials included public sentiment in their political calculations more generally—does not indicate that Hong Kong people became a “part of the policymaking process” (25) and certainly does not necessarily indicate a “decolonising” of or by the colonial state. Given that Mok intends to examine, in part, why Hong Kong was not swept up in the wave of radical decolonizing movements of the Cold War period, it might have been better for Mok to clarify how this concept is being used in the context of the book.

For instance, in Chapter 2, which covers the Chinese language movement, Mok suggests that covert colonialism’s ability to absorb select public opinions to inform policy indicated “widened channels of political participation and the potential for ‘decolonisation’ of the mentalities of bureaucrats” (78; quotation marks in the original). In this way, she attributes decolonisation to the reformist colonial state’s flexibility in accommodating equity and inclusiveness. Acceding to the movement’s demand for Chinese language equality in governance made it so that, according to Mok, “more Chinese-speaking could now serve the government,” which was a precondition for “a more open political culture” (78). To be sure, one could understand this as the success of a specific political campaign by Hong Kong people but it is certainly not clear that it is decolonisation by any measure. Mok’s focus on Hong Kong’s unique ‘decolonisation’ that eschewed the forms of revolutionary nationalism more familiar in other parts of Asia and Africa also gives short shrift to radical groups of working class organizers, youths, and students who were engaged directly with the radical decolonization movements of their times such as the 70’s Biweekly group.^[1] Mok only gestures to this broad gathering of Maoists, anarchists, and Trotskyists (who frequently enacted staunch anti-colonial and decolonizing actions) twice in passing during her discussion of the anti-corruption movement (Chapter 3) and the campaign against telephone rate increases (Chapter 4).^[2] A more thorough meditation on what decolonization means in the book and how it is being deployed would help to avoid a demand for more coverage of actual anti-colonial forces in Hong Kong in this period.

A similar slippage occurs when discussing the concept of “democratisation” in Hong Kong. Mok notes that the covert solicitation of public opinion constituted “a substitute for representative democracy, enabling the undemocratic colonial government to widen the channels of political participation for ordinary people in a state-controlled manner without provoking China’s resistance nor politicising the Hong Kong Chinese” (17). Taking the British at their word—that they wanted to democratize Hong Kong but they were hamstrung by the PRC and that a wide swath of Hong Kong society said in surveys that they were against the potential chaos of such a process—suggests an implicit trust in the good intentions of the colonial regime. At base, Mok argues that British-initiated consultative governance in the form of covert colonialism, when it ignored popular opinion, did so largely against its will: “The wider interest of the British government and the state of Sino-British relations outweighed the importance of shifting popular sentiment in the policymaking process” (256). And, even as it developed from surveillance programs into the creation of local advisory bodies, in essence covert colonialism “pave[d] the way for further democratisation” (234).^[3]

While it is valuable to understand the ruling elite’s view of these political episodes and how they evolved over time, such characterizations should not be taken at face value, as is often the case throughout each chapter. Moreover, even sections on political culture and grassroots actions still rely largely on characterizations from colonial reports rather than the political actors themselves. This citational practice has the effect of centralizing an understanding of the events through British bureaucratic perspectives. This is especially troublesome since Mok helpfully goes to great lengths to detail the logistical and methodological difficulties and unscientific nature of these qualitative, covert surveys in the first place. For instance, in the discussion of the anti-corruption movement in Chapter 3, Mok implies that changes in social attitudes towards speaking out directly to colonial officials was possible under a flawed but more open system of British liberalism. Thus, a development in Hong Kong political culture required a relatively straightforward path out of the “fatalism inherited from traditional attitudes formed by experience under successive Chinese governments…” under which [middle-aged and elderly groups] did not question “the wrongs of officialdom, or contest its actions.”  These are phrases Mok pulls directly from a colonial MOOD report, which takes at face value colonial officials’ sweeping, racialized generalization of Chinese social relations to the state. These merely echo the narrative of “Oriental tyranny” that Chinese must transcend, or out of which they must be benevolently lead. A more critical stance towards characterizations made in colonial surveillance reports, along with a broader array of secondary sources, would add depth to an analysis that is largely dependent on the subjective perceptions and renderings of whichever colonial bureaucrat assembled the report.

What I find most provocative and useful in Mok’s book is the subterranean contention that covert colonialism was, on balance, a net positive for Hong Kong society. She crucially traces an understudied period in the development of Hong Kong’s historical identity (the liberal faction of which rose to prominence in the protest movements of the 2000s and 2010s) and thereby provides another missing piece in the fuller picture of Hong Kong’s sometimes puzzling political culture. Assessing “positive” outcomes of European colonization is not novel: Arif Dirlik, in one of his last writings, discussed the way in which Taiwan was “the land colonialisms made.” He argues that for Taiwan and Hong Kong, the experience of successive colonialisms as a “source of historical identity” is largely antithetical to the anti-hegemonic impulses of postcolonial studies, which often obscures how “the colonizer’s culture did indeed transform the colonized, setting them in new historical directions, even if the directions taken were not what the colonizers had expected them to be.”^[4]  For Hong Kong, this has often manifested as colonial nostalgia, but as Dirlik notes, the struggle against colonialism itself is also part of this potential wellspring of colonized historical identity. The study of the development of political culture under colonization, as with Mok’s book, has the potential to prepare a people to put robust democratic and other liberatory practices into action.

Though contemporary politics is beyond the purview of her book, Mok does gesture to the present in her conclusion. In Hong Kong’s current era of intense political repression and social movement abeyance, her work encourages us to adjust our gaze toward the way in which political cultures can and do develop outside the familiar containers of political parties, rallies, and riots. As many in Hong Kong are now forced underground to recuperate, read and collectively build political consciousness (whether through the study of histories of Third World decolonizing radicalisms or not), Covert Colonialism is a welcome reminder to look beyond recognizable forms, and that no matter the repression, political culture is not dead in the city after 2020—just transforming.

Chris Chien is a Postdoctoral Associate in Transnational Asian Studies at Tulane University and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Global Asia Program at Simon Fraser University. His book project examines commodities, logistical infrastructure, and visual regimes across the transpacific in order to critically assess the continuities and disjunctures of the Cold War with today’s so-called “New Cold War” between the U.S. and China. His writing has appeared in Amerasia, Verge: Global Asias, positions: asia critique, The Funambulist, The Nation, and Jacobin. He is an organizer and editor with Lausan Collective.

Notes

^[1] Lu Pan’s recently released edited collection on 70’s Biweekly (along with her earlier articles about 70’s) provides a powerful history of grassroots anti-imperialist and anti-colonial activism in the city. See: Pan, Lu, ed. The 70’s Biweekly: Social Activism and Alternative Cultural Production in 1970s Hong Kong. 1st ed. Hong Kong University Press, 2023 and Tam, Gina Anne. “Gina Anne Tam Reviews The 70’s Biweekly: Social Activism and Alternative Cultural Production in 1970s Hong Kong.” positions politics: praxis (blog), November 27, 2023. https://positionspolitics.org/gina-ann-tam-reviews-the-70s-biweekly-social-activism-and-alternative-cultural-production-in-1970s-hong-kong/.

^[2] Scholars such as Au Loong-yu and Promise Li have also chronicled the activities of 70’s Biweekly. These sources could have helped to supplement an understanding of the development of anti-colonial political culture in Hong Kong’s tumultuous 70s. See: Au, Loong-Yu. Hong Kong in Revolt. London: Pluto Press, 2020 and Promise Li, “The Radical ’70s Magazine That Shaped the Hong Kong Left.” The Nation. April 17, 2020. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/hong-kong-leftists-1970s/

^[3] An interesting comparison, in this respect, would be the former democratic centralism of the Cold War PRC as well as the contemporary PRC’s system of consultative democracy and “whole process people’s democracy.”

^[4] Dirlik, Arif. “Taiwan: The Land Colonialisms Made.” Boundary 2 45, no. 3 (August 2018): 3. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-6915545