ground—enough, in theory, to give everybody a bean-sprout garden. Instead, half the population is stuck in claustrophobic government housing. Then in the ’70s, one of Hong Kong’s thicker governors, Sir Murray Maclehose, set aside 40 percent of the colony as parkland—cramped comfort to the fellow living in 300 square feet with his wife, mother, kids, and their Tamagotchi pets. But the British never tried to install a European-style Pampers-to-June Allyson welfare system in Hong Kong. Maybe the Labour M.P.s were unwilling to invest vast quantities of groundnut scheme–type pinko planning genius in a place that could be gobbled up at any time by the pinko planning geniuses across the border. Maybe the colonial administrators were overwhelmed by the number of refugees from pinko planning jamming into town. Maybe the mother country was too broke from ruining its own economy in the British Isles. Or maybe the Brits just didn’t care about pushing social justice down the throats of people who were, after all, only Chinese. On the other hand, the British were not irresponsible. The “doing nothing” mentioned at the beginning of this chapter is a relative term. Laissez-faire isn’t Tanzanian administrative sloth or Albanian popular anarchy. Quite a bit of government effort is required to create a system in which government leaves people alone. Hong Kong’s colonial administration provided courts, contract enforcement, laws that applied to everyone, some measure of national defense (although the Red Chinese People’s Liberation Army probably could have lazed its way across the border anytime it wanted), an effective police force (Hong Kong’s crime rate is lower than Tokyo’s), and a bureaucracy that was efficient and uncorrupt but not so hideously uncorrupt that it wouldn’t turn a blind eye on an occasional palm-greasing illegal refugee or unlicensed street vendor. The Brits built schools and roads. And the kids went to school because they knew if they didn’t, they’d have to hit that road. And the U.K. gave Hong Kong a stable currency, which it did totally by cheating—first pegging the Hong Kong currency to the British pound and then, when everyone got done laughing at that, pegging it to the U.S. dollar at a rate of 7.8:1. Now when there’s any money- supply dirty work to be done, Hong Kong can blame everything on Alan Greenspan. Hong Kong was also fortunate in having a colonial government which included some real British heroes, men who helped the place stay as good as it was for as long as it did. The most heroic of these was John Cowperthwaite, a young colonial officer sent to Hong Kong in 1945 to oversee the colony’s
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