From the earliest days of the colony, the Chinese people who emigrated there were fugitives from restraint and oppression. Many of them were outright fugitives from justice. Whatever their virtues or vices, they had found existence under the government of their homeland so intolerable that they willingly submitted to the rule of an alien people they neither trusted nor admired. From centuries of bitter experience in China, they believed that no government was to be trusted. The secret of survival was to avoid all open defiance of governments and to go on living within the framework of one’s family and clan as though the government did not exist. One did not cheat the other members of his clan, because retribution could be swift and terrible. Relations with civil rulers were not an ethical compact; they were a battle of wits, a stubborn struggle for self-preservation in which the cunning of the individual was the only weapon against the greed and power of the state. How much more applicable these lessons were when those rulers were foreign devils who did not speak one’s language! One did not rebel against the headstrong foreigners and their military superiority; he obeyed them in externals, so far as it was necessary to escape reprisals, and went on quietly building his own internal mechanisms of graft like a busy termite in an unsuspecting household. If the people of the household mistook the termites for industrious but harmless little ants, it was all the easier for him. The metaphor need not be done to death, for it is no longer as apposite as it once was. But there is no question that graft and corruption continue to eat away at the structure of the colony government. In a hundred casual conversations with a hundred different colony residents—English, Chinese, American, Portuguese, governmental and nongovernmental—the visitor will almost never hear that the ruling powers have railroaded some poor devil off to jail without cause, swindled him out of his property to benefit the state, or hounded the populace into semistarvation with unbearable taxation. If these evils exist, they are neither frequent enough nor sufficiently conspicuous to engage people’s passions. But on the subject of graft—the innumerable, small nicks taken from merchants, builders, and the ordinary citizen seeking any type of official favor or permit—the floodgates of complaint are wide open. Much of this is generalized, unproved, even irresponsible, operating at about the same intellectual level as a taxi-driver’s jeremiad. Nevertheless, there is a core of solid complaint that cannot be ignored.