In 1980, the Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman noted “It is somewhat ironic that Hong Kong, a Crown colony of Great Britain, should be the modern exemplar of free markets and limited government. The British officials who govern it have enabled Hong Kong to flourish by following policies radically at variance with the welfare state policies that have been adopted in the mother country.” That explanation serves well enough for Hong Kong’s manufacturers, but how to account for businesses more aligned with the state? Private airlines, for example, inevitably depend on public infrastructure. Moreover, the government’s ability to negotiate landing rights is inescapable when every flight is international by definition. Hong Kong Takes Flight, a new book by John Wong, explores how that city’s flagship carrier adapted and grew for decades amid explosive growth and turbulent politics.
In the early years, London often hindered commercial air traffic in Hong Kong more than it assisted. In 1946, an American and Australian duo founded Cathay Pacific after buying two decommissioned US military aircraft. The local conglomerate Swire soon took an ownership stake, but regulators in the capital made sure to protect the interest of British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC, today’s British Airways) by preventing Cathay from competing on the most lucrative routes. The Empire shrewdly exploited its colony, exchanging landing rights for KLM in exchange for Dutch support in the European Common Market. Despite, or perhaps because of, Hong Kong’s value, negotiations over a runway expansion dragged on for years. Hong Kong ultimately bore the full cost without any financial assistance from the metropole, with both parties knowing that much of the gain would accrue to BOAC once it could land wide-body jets there. Still, that expansion occurred only after a disciplined financial review required the airport to meet market rates of return.
If the city’s fiscal probity earned Friedman’s approval, Cathay Pacific’s business strategy practically embodied his maxim that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” Wong devotes a chapter to Cathay’s branding, from logos and marketing to the air hostesses’ attire and languages. In convincing detail, he shows how the airline cultivated a cosmopolitan and pan-Asian identity in order to prevent (or at least delay) air travel becoming a low-margin commodity like shipping. Cathay agreed in 1978 to hide its flights to Taiwan behind the euphemistic “non-governmental regional air traffic”, the sort of compromise that thousands of companies would eventually make in exchange for access to mainland China. Not even Cathay’s owners were above the profit imperative: just as political pressure led to the acquisition of the firm by Swire, the years leading up to the 1997 handover saw a rapid increase in the shares held by firms under CCP control.
Time and again, Wong reminds readers that history is contingent. In the 1930s the Portuguese aspired to build an airport in nearby Macau, but access to the wider British Empire made Hong Kong the regional nexus well before its economic ascent. For their part, the British would almost certainly have moved Kai Tek airport to another location after 1945, if not for the expansions overseen by the occupying Japanese. Instead, that unsuitable plot would grow into the world’s third-busiest airport before finally making way for Chep Lak Kok on the island of Lantau in 1998. Unforeseen advances in jet propulsion created fresh opportunities and conflicts, as shown by the negotiations over which airlines would fly direct from Hong Kong to London, and which would not. The British Civil Aviation Authority only ended British Airways’s monopoly on the route in 1980 after appeals from both Cathay and the Hong Kong government.
Such contingencies of politics and technology mean that individuals matter. Along the way, Wong introduces readers to a diverse cast, and one can’t help but feel the book might have been enriched if he had tarried longer with Roy Farrell, the American pilot who founded Cathay after delivering supplies over “the hump” into China during the Second World War. The same holds for Candy Wu, Cathay’s first female pilot, or the powerbroker John Bremridge, a Cathay chairman who went on to serve as Hong Kong’s financial secretary. But despite that small criticism, Wong’s professional tone is welcome: throughout the book, the author touches on contentious topics without imposing his own narrative or ideology. British rule in Hong Kong entailed the maintenance of hierarchies, yet Wong shows how unilateral decisions such as the devaluation of the sterling in 1967 contributed to demands for the “informal devolution” of authority to Hong Kong. The economic implications are similarly even-handed; in the case of Cathay, the simple distinction between “private” and “state-owned” obscures more than it enlightens. Most of all, Wong addresses issues of diversity and representation with context instead of cliches. Like other airlines in the 1950s and 60s, Cathay refused to employ married stewardesses; here Wong provides the useful observation that their average “flying life” was 4 years, against an industry average of 18 months. Instead of simply labeling the flight attendants’ uniforms as “Orientalist”, he explains that the pan-Asian appeal was part of the company’s effort to differentiate from competitors such as Singapore Airlines. Lest anyone accuse Wong of writing an uncritical corporate history, he also shows how Cathay’s efforts to hire and train local pilots would have been delayed if the upstart Dragon Air hadn’t used local pilots first as a strategy to seize market share.
All in all, this is a worthy addition to Harvard’s East Asian monograph series. Wong is a professional researcher in both senses of the word, with enough respect for his subject to let the evidence speak for itself.