Archival records indicate that by the late 1970s, Town Talk and MOOD were no longer the only covert opinion monitoring mechanisms. During the 1970s, the colonial government introduced other similar covert exercises of different scales and with different areas of focus. The emergence of exercises, such as Squatter Talks, Estates Talk and Flash Points, suggested that the surveillance system developed by the colonial government to monitor public opinion had been expanded considerably and had become increasingly sophisticated. However, how did these covert consultative forms of colonialism, which were an imperfect substitution for democratic elections, evolve as constitutional reforms were discussed in the last years of colonial rule? This chapter investigates the introduction of the City and New Territories Administration and elections in District Boards in 1982. Although the reforms were not introduced with the goal of ‘democratising Hong Kong’, they widened the channels of political participation. The chapter also examines why scientifically organised public opinion surveys conducted by commercial firms and universities were commissioned by the colonial government. It explores constitutional reforms at the level of the Executive and Legislative Councils and how they affected ‘covert colonialism’. Lastly, it reveals changing popular attitudes towards constitutional reforms and explores to what extent political cultures varied across society.
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.