of industrialisation (1948-1950) came from external financing. Shanghai capital played the major role in this stage. But the big British banks soon moved into financing manufacturing industries as the entrepôt trade slowed down.
The Shanghai wave was followed by a Canton wave. Cantonese factory ow- ners now form a larger and more powerful body. Most of the Canton-owned enterprises were founded in the mid-fifties or later. On the whole, they are smaller than the Shanghai-owned factories, but altogether accounted for about 54% of the manufacturing labour force by the end of the 1960s.
Thus, by the 1950s Hong Kong had been transformed almost into the oppo- site of what it had been earlier. Imperial Preference, a nominal concession at the time, gave the Colony access to a world-wide market. The abolition of for- mal racial barriers within the bourgeoisie made it possible for the Colony to become a centre of Chinese manufacturing. Immigration gave it a labour force, and the Chinese Revolution swept capital and capitalists South along with large numbers of triad gangsters, brothel-owners, etc. The British provided political cover, and demanded protection money in return. Originally an isolated harbour, with a small, largely rural population, which was seized as a base to penetrate the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong has become one of the most crowded cities on earth. But instead of going up-river to Canton and the hinterland, its trade now crosses the oceans - much of it on ships belonging to the Colony's own merchant fleet, now the sixth in the world, crewed by Chinese seamen largely unprotected by I.L.O. and other conventions which most industrialised nations have long since accepted.40
Who Owns the Hong Kong Economy Now?
Among the Hong Kong Government's contributions to capitalism is its refu- sal to publish statistics on Gross National Product, national income, and foreign ownership of assets in the Colony. It is the only major capitalist economy in the world which conceals this information from the general public and from its own citizens.41
Another unique feature of the Colony is that money is not issued by the Government, but by private banks. The main bank, the Hongkong and Shang- hai Banking Corporation, issues about 85% of the notes; the rest are issued by the two other leading "British" banks, the Mercantile Bank (a subsidiary of the Hongkong & Shanghai) and the Chartered Bank. Coins are issued by the Government.
All land other than the New Territories is technically owned by the Crown, and leased out by the Government, which derived about one-third of its in- come from leases (as of the late 'sixties)."
42
One basic difficulty in trying to calculate who owns what in Hong Kong is that the Government does not require anything like full disclosure of assets. Companies understate (or sometimes, in the case of companies going public, overstate) their assets. In the crucial property sector, for example, very little information is made public.43 In fact there is every reason to believe that over- all the big British expatriate combines are still dominant, in league with the
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