Chapter 25: Gearing for the New Millenium ISD had been born of a need for the administration to route its information output through a single authoritative channel. But by the late '80s and early '90s it was increasingly difficult for that channel to handle all the traffic. The administration had grown too large and disparate to speak with one voice. The system was becoming unmanageable. The wonder was that Hong Kong's government had persevered so long, and so successfully, with a single department co-ordinating and managing all its public relations. Almost nowhere else in the world had an organisation of similar size and complexity soldiered on in this manner. In the United Kingdom, the Central Office of Information had long been essentially decentralised, and now served only as a service agency for those departments wishing to avail themselves of its services - at rates competitive with what commercial PR agencies might quote. The United States model was a labyrinth of communication channels. Even in Singapore, perhaps the nearest reference point for comparison purposes, the different ministries each had their own information set-ups, often competing vigorously with one another for public attention. Successive Directors of Information Services had fought tenaciously to retain the monolithic approach, arguing that proper co-ordination, consistency and a centralised pool of resources not only saved money but made sense. The counter-argument, derived from models overseas, was that it was still possible to draw on a centralised pool of resources without hampering the freedom of different sectors of government to speak for themselves. Even the established protocol for information output through the information units operating in various departments required a review, now that the government was extending its policy branches at secretariat level to oversee all departmental activities. Policy secretaries each wanted their own information advisers, and their needs had become too diverse for one secretariat information unit to handle. With the arrival of Hong Kong's last colonial governor, Chris Patten, the picture became still more confused. In his book The Last Governor, Jonathan Dimbleby quotes Patten as saying: "'I'm going to have a spokesman for me here in Government House, just as Bernard Ingham was at Number Ten. Someone who can speak for me but can also make sure that the operation of the information service right across the departments is pulled together.' The man he chose was an enigmatic and approachable government official on the GIS staff, Mike Hanson." Dimbleby was jumping the gun. Hanson was never on the ISD payroll, in fact he was on secondment from the British Government, although he had enjoyed a close working relationship with ISD since his earlier appointment as Information Co-ordinator in the Secretariat. However, his successor as Patten's spokesman was a GIS man - no less than Deputy Director Kerry McGlynn, who is described, later in Dimbleby's book, as professing himself 'gobsmacked' by a statement from Michael Heseltine, UK deputy prime minister visiting Hong Kong as president of the Board of Trade. The word was a favourite of Patten's, and marked a departure from the established gubernatorial lexicon. However, in the best traditions of ISD, McGlynn had taken on some of the style, and the colour, of his new surroundings, proving that seasoned information officers are nothing if not adaptable. The same was true of Irene Yau when she stepped down, after more than a decade at the helm of GIS, to spend the last five months before her retirement as PR advisor to Chief Executive-designate Tung Chee Hwa, in the lead-up to the Handover in 1997. Effectively this placed her on the opposite side of the fence from McGlynn, but both were sufficiently versatile to take this in their professional stride. Irene looks back on those hectic months as her 'seven-eleven' period: "Seven am to eleven at night, seven days a week. There were only a handful of us. It was very busy, very fruitful and I wouldn't have missed it for the world. It was a bit like going into the opposition benches. We had little or no back-up. I had to proof read; something I hadn't done in years. We prepared our own press releases and publications, did everything ourselves."
The Government House operation had been even smaller - just McGlynn and Chief Information Officer Tse Cheung-hing, who had been despatched a little earlier to provide support for Mike Hanson. For the last couple of months of the transition, the team was reinforced by Paul Brown, on secondment from the Publishing Sub-division. Remembers McGlynn : "Before I took over from Mike Hanson for the last 21/2 years of Chris Patten's governorship, I was the Deputy Information Co-ordinator in Anson Chan's office, looking after the administration and acting as back up spokesman to Hanson. So I was close to, or at the centre of, the action for most of those final momentous years of British administration. An unforgettable experience and enormously hard work fielding phone calls from journalists at all hours of the day and night, 7 days a week, but hugely stimulating. I think I learned more about political PR in that period than I had in the rest of my career." Irene's departure from ISD, just at the start of Hong Kong's new era as a Special Administrative Region, was not intentional but the result of a decision reached many years previously, when she opted for the new terms that would enable her to retire at 55. "I chose 55, and it so happened that I would reach that age in 1997." She regrets leaving at a time when GIS was experiencing a problem of succession in the directorate. "I anticipated difficulties years before, because I saw that the directorate were all more or less of the same age. If some of us chose to retire at 55, we would be leaving at around the same time. That indeed did happen, but what made it worse was the fact that those I did not expect to retire early also chose that course. "I expected George Yuen and Betty Shum, being more or less the same age, would retire at about the same time. Chris Wong was also due to go around that period. I did not anticipate that Akber Khan and Harold Yau would opt to leave as well. That created quite a problem, from which of course GIS has long recovered." Ironically, the only "survivor" from the old directorate is McGlynn, now a 25-year departmental veteran. Irene's successor as DIS, Thomas Chan, moved quickly to fill the gaps with experienced professionals including Ella Tam, Juliana Chen, Mak Kwok-wah, Joe Yiu, S Y Tam and Alex Choi. Thomas, who like his namesake predecessor John Chan, was also from the ranks of the administrative grade. However, he was coming to the position with a wealth of knowledge of how ISD functioned, derived from his days when he had served as Deputy Director under Irene. His particular strength was his ability to combine the related disciplines of information and information technology - an alliance that brought together both the message and the carrier. To him fell the task of organising the enormous role the department would have to play in providing media facilities and press arrangements for the Handover ceremonies, when 6,500 media personnel collected accreditation badges to cover the various elements of the programme. The world had shown intense interest in Hong Kong in the months prior to the Handover, and live television coverage of the actual ceremonies was relayed around the planet. A world-class press and broadcasting centre - the largest and most complex ever established in Hong Kong - was set up in the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, managed by ISD staff from its opening on June 15 to its closure on July 9, 1997. Much of the credit for the establishment of the media centre goes to the small planning team of information and executive officers in ISD (and later under the umbrella of the Handover Ceremony Co-ordination Office). The team was first headed by Akber Khan and when he retired, the difficult task fell to Ella Tam who was initially assisted by Jonathan Lange as CIO, the first information officer to be specifically recruited into the media centre planning unit when it was set up on April 1, 1996. A much larger team gradually built up to handle the accreditation process for the media 'invasion'. In this task, Ella was helped by CIO, Daniel Sin. Following the Handover, Ella was transferred to the Chief Executive's Office as Assistant Press Secretary. She has since become Deputy Information Co-ordinator with the reintroduction of the Information Co-ordinator post attached to the CE's Office. At the height of the Handover operations, more than 200 Information Officers and 100 Executive Officers and representatives of other grades provided support services for the various facilities made available to the international media. The last years of colonial rule, in particular, could have proved a perilous time for ISD, when four decades of experienced information management were put to the test. Instead, they provided an opportunity to demonstrate the value of all that experience, when the department's most senior and promising personnel were elevated in rank and seconded to the new posts created at much higher levels of the expanding information hierarchy. The fact that the greater part of this transition was achieved when Hong Kong was confronted by all the stresses and uncertainties of changing times, in the final countdown to reunification, is a credit both to the calibre of the information grade and to the quality of its officers. Many have gone on to vital posts in the quasi-public and private sectors; among them Kathleen Lau to Legco, Juliana Ma to Hong Kong Electric, Selina Lo to the Hospital Authority, June Tong at New World Telephone, Philip Bruce at the Airport Authority, George Yuen to the Better Hong Kong Foundation, Peter Randall to the Hong Kong Tourist Association and Irene Yau herself to KCRC along with Akber Khan, Raymond Wong and C. K. Yeung. And the inimitable Arthur Hacker remains one of the most readable contributors to the Hong Kong press. Other old GIS hands have made a mark internationally. Mark Pinkstone secured a globe-trotting job for a Malaysian conglomerate when he left the department and Barry Walsh, Ross Clarke and Richard Linning now run successful consultancies in Sydney, London and Brussels respectively. The Hong Kong Annual Report 1957 carries two paragraphs describing the work of the Government Public Relations Office. Yet the second of those paragraphs speaks - even then - of the government's policy on information being under review. Who at that time could have foreseen that, in December 1995, ISD would launch a Government Home Page on the Internet (http://www.info.gov.hk), making it possible to directly access essential Hong Kong information on a Net-connected computer screen anywhere in the world? Or that digital technology would enable ISD to dispense with issuing photographic prints - except to those who still needed them - and instead digitise its picture output for direct incorporation into page lay-outs on any editor's desktop monitor?
This upgrading should have come with no surprise as Thomas Chan is one of the most technologically literate officers in the SARG. He created the first Hong Kong Government Home Page when he was Director of the San Francisco Office prior to his return to Hong Kong to take up the post of DIS on Irene Yau's retirement.
Recognising the shift in media focus from Sino-British transition issues to domestic concerns, Thomas Chan also set about ensuring an accelerated expansion of the Secretariat Press Office teams under the supervision of two Assistant Directors, Juliana Chen and Mak Kwok-wah, so that the department's professional expertise was on tap to the SARG's policy - and news- makers. There are now 10 SPO teams serving 15 policy bureaux. The eventual aim is to cover them all. Forty years later, the successor to that annual report, entitled Hong Kong - A New Era, summarises the multi-disciplined role of this ever more complex department, pointing out that ISD serves as the government's public relations consultant, publisher, advertising agent and news agency. All of which enables it to continue doing - albeit vastly more effectively - what it set out to do at its inception; namely, to provide the link between the administration and the media and, through the latter, enhance public understanding of government policies, decisions and activities. Nobody who has worked in, or is even slightly familiar with, ISD will believe it can ever be content to rest on its laurels. It has spent the final years of a closing century gearing for the new Millenium. As they say of breaking news in the media world: Watch this space...
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