六四事件彻底结束了香港人只关心赚钱而不关心政治的居高临下的正统观念

 大屠杀的冲击摧毁了殖民地的一些管理者和商业王朝对延续低税率、有限代表权和尊重权威的制度所抱有的任何残存的希望。

这种希望建立在对广大民众的宗法式的、过时的看法上，认为难民心态、对谋生机会的感激和对混乱的恐惧会抵消任何对城市治理或税收使用有发言权的愿望。

 这一理论早已被扭曲得不可信。

1987年，当公众被邀请对一份专门针对代议制政府的咨询文件发表意见时，曾有过最后一次试图说服世界，即香港的中国人并不真正对代议制政府感兴趣。

为收集调查结果而成立的调查办公室得出的结论是，大多数人不想要直接选举。

这是一个官僚主义扭曲的杰作，通过对同情中国共产党的团体的集体意见的重视，而不是对公民个人的重视来设计。

香港的民主人士理所当然地认为这是一种玩世不恭的做法，甚至在殖民地政府内部，"咨询 "后来也作为一种尴尬被掩盖了。

最后一任总督认为这是不光彩的行为，但却将这一行为归咎于珀西-柯利達爵士爵士和他的追随者们。

六四事件彻底结束了香港人只关心赚钱而不关心政治的居高临下的正统观念。

 

The shock of the massacre destroyed any lingering hopes which some of the colony’s administrators and business dynasties had entertained of perpetuating a system of low taxation, limited representation and deference to authority. Such hopes were founded on a patriarchal, outdated view of the mass of the population which held that a refugee mentality, gratitude for the chance to earn a living and fear of disorder would offset any desire to have a say in how the city was governed or taxes were spent. The theory had long been stretched beyond credibility. In 1987, there had been a last attempt to persuade the world that Chinese people in Hong Kong were not really interested in representative government when the public were invited to comment on a consultation paper devoted to that subject. The survey office established to collect the findings concluded that the majority did not want direct elections. This was a masterpiece of bureaucratic distortion, engineered by according more weight to collective submissions from groups sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party than to individual citizens. It was rightly dismissed by Hong Kong’s democrats as a cynical exercise, and even within the colonial administration the ‘consultation’ was later buried as an embarrassment. The last governor thought it verged on the dishonourable but blamed the exercise on Sir Percy Cradock and his acolytes. It took June Fourth to end once and for all the condescending orthodoxy that the people of Hong Kong were only interested in making money and not in politics.