The Economist May 14th 2022 39
ChinaHongKong’scivilserviceStay neutral, love the party
H
aving taken99.2% of the vote as the
sole candidate in an election from
which an even higher proportion of Hong
Kong’s people were excluded, the territo
ry’s next chief executive, John Lee, made
clear why China’s Communist Party engi
neered his victory. “Protecting Hong Kong
from internal and external threats and en
suring its stability”, he said, would be of
“paramount importance” under his leader
ship. Mr Lee is a former policeman. The
party trusts him to keep Hong Kong in line.
Trust is something that the party does
not have in abundance as it surveys the
city’s elite. Since the territory was handed
back to China by Britain in 1997, that elite,
minus the British, has remained largely
the same. China has relied heavily on two
types of people to do its bidding there:
businesspeople (the first and third chief
executives had such backgrounds) and
members of the bureaucratic aristocracy
(the second chief executive and the current
one, Carrie Lam, once belonged to this
group—the crème de la crèmeof the civilservice known as administrative officers,
or aos). Both types have proved under
whelming. The eruption of months of tur
moil on Hong Kong streets in 2019, on Mrs
Lam’s watch, convinced the party that it
needed to tighten its grip. It concluded that
Hong Kong’s traditional elite should be
kept on a shorter leash.
The 180,000strong civil service is in
the party’s sights. As a policeman, Mr Lee
belonged to it, too. But he was not one of
the 700 or so aos. He is a security specialist
who only branched out of his area of exper
tise in 2021 when he became Mrs Lam’s
chief secretary (ie, deputy). He may ap
point fewer aos to his cabinet than his pre
decessors did, says John Burns of the Uni
versity of Hong Kong. Behind the scenes,
the party’s outpost in Hong Kong, the Liai
son Office, will be more handson.
It is striking how much the party has
trusted civil servants nurtured by the Brit
ish. The territory’s first postcolonial chief
secretary, Anson Chan, was an ao. She had
also served in that capacity under HongKong’s last colonial governor, Chris Patten,
who was much despised by China. Mrs
Chan later became a prodemocracy politi
cian and critic of the party (she is now re
tired). Donald Tsang, the second chief ex
ecutive, had been knighted by the British.
Even Mr Lee only gave up his British citi
zenship when he became undersecretary
for security in 2012. He, Mrs Lam, Mr Tsang
and Mrs Chan are all Catholics—another
attribute to which the party is not, by na
ture, drawn. (Cardinal Joseph Zen, an out
spoken advocate of democracy who is 90
years old, was arrested on May 11th by Hong
Kong’s nationalsecurity police for alleged
collusion with foreign forces.)
The upheaval in 2019 stoked the party’s
anxieties about the loyalty of government
officials. Mrs Lam, with Mr Lee as head of
security, proved their toughness, cracking
down on demonstrations triggered by pro
found public distrust of the party. China,
though, saw disturbing signs of cracks in
the establishment. They included anony
mous petitions, purportedly signed by
hundreds of civil servants (including
about 100 aos), calling on the government
to make concessions to the protesters.
Thousands of civil servants staged their
own demonstration and some went on
strike. Participants said they served the
public, not the territory’s leaders.
Partycontrolled newspapers in Hong
Kong fumed. “Insider devils”, a commen
tary in one of them called the dissentingAn imminent change of leadership hints at China’s wariness of Hong Kong’s
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