Bulletin Autumn 1988

Address b y S ir D a v id Akers-Jones Ladies and gentlemen: It is a great honour and a source o f great pleas ure to receive this honorary degree today. I little thought, when I motored here from Yuen Long on a bright winter's day in December 1967 to attend the ground breaking ceremony o f the University per formed by the then Chancellor Sir David Trench, that I would stand here today in these dignified and colourful robes in the heart o f this great University. In 1962, some time after arriving in Hong Kong, I was sent to work in Yuen Long. Rice was still grown but already many changes had taken place in the pattern o f life o f the past, w ith its days o f worship, market and festival. The pace o f life and the place itself was changing. Behind the altar in the chi-tong the unused carved wooden heads o f dragon boats gathered dust; in a village hall the straw-hats and ancient pumps o f the village fire brigade lay neglected. The past importance o f Yuen Long as a farming centre was receding and that word 'development', which paradoxically leads to so much destruction, was beginning to be used. In Yuen Long in 1962 when the priest in his black hat and scarlet robes sprinkled wine upon the ground, killed a cockerel and burnt scrolls o f paper w ith the names o f the dead and the living inscribed upon them he performed the rituals necessary to appease the gods, to smooth the path and quieten dissonance and disturbance 一 the necessary accom paniment o f progress. And, sure enough, Yuen Long has progressed and prospered, grown enormously, w ith wide roads, sportsgrounds, huge housing blocks, industry and recently a railway. I paid another visit to Yuen Long a few weeks ago. The balance between town and country had been even more disturbed. Huge tower blocks o f housing emerged in gleaming white from asurrounding o f neglected fields, used cars, blackened, smelly streams and the detritus o f ‘development' . So, it seems in Hong Kong at times, not that one is growing old but that one has lived for many centuries. Challenge and change are always present, everyday, all day. And somehow we survive. I f you cannot live w ith change Hong Kong is not the place to live at all. I f you look back over your shoulder into the past fo rty years you see a different landscape, fu ll o f different people, differently employed. We look back at the years o f typhoon and drought, o f great surges o f immigration, o f rio t and disorder. The response to all these challenges has been taken up and thrown back. And yet it is not by accident and good luck that we survive. Certainly we have had our measure o f good fortune and things have often turned out better than we expected; but, for reasons which are well-known and hopefully understood, because o f our inability to follow a normal pattern o f developing our political and economic structure, we have had to devise alternatives 一 for example, negligible taxation, consensus government and absence o f direct elections —which, despite their idiosyncratic and non-conforming nature, have not hindered, indeed they have contributed greatly to our progress and prosperity. Despite this success our failure to conform nevertheless seems to give rise to feelings o f guilt and inadequacy, a feeling that we ought to be more like other places and less out on our own. However, in our anxiety to allay these feelings, to reach out for democratic orthodoxy and more formal and well- known forms o f government, we should be careful we do not weaken or neglect the underlying organ izations and style o f administration which have made a unique contribution to the well-being and stability o f our community. For it is, after all, stable Hong Kong, prosperous Hong Kong, which has become home for nearly six million people; because o f the order and dependability o f its institutions, its free dom o f expression, movement and activity. Here in Hong Kong the human spirit, ingenuity and intellect has produced uniquely successful answers to adverse circumstances and a total lack o f natural resources. Looking for a moment outside our little world, it may be, when the judgments o f analysts and histor­ ians are made in years to come, it w ill not be the 12