HONG KONG BACKGROUND BRIEF
DEVELOPMENT OF REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT IN HONG KONG
1.
The system of government in Hong Kong has evolved in a way which has reflected the particular circumstances of the territory. In other British dependent territories our policy has been to promote the development of democracy as part of the preparations for eventual independence. There has however never been any question of Hong Kong becoming an independent state: different considerations have applied. Indeed, when relatively modest proposals for constitutional reform were made by the then Governor in the period following the Second World War, they met with virtually no public support in Hong Kong. The territory was preoccupied with absorbing and accommodating very large numbers of migrants, mainly from China, and with adjusting economically to the loss of its entrepôt trade with China as a result of the Korean war. As a measure of the size of the problem, Hong Kong's population rose sharply from about 600,000 in August 1945 to an estimated 1.8 million by the end of 1947, and to some 2.2 million by the middle of 1950.
2. The priority for a large proportion of this transient and highly mobile population was that Hong Kong should be an environment in which they could settle and make a prosperous living, rather than the development of representative government. It was not until the mid-1960s that consideration of constitutional changes resumed, but again external events intervened: the Cultural Revolution in China and the consequential disturbances in Hong Kong threatened the very existence of the territory. A further consideration, to which many people in the community attached particular weight, was the fear that the
introduction of party politics on western lines would serve to polarise the community and to reproduce in Hong Kong the rivalries that continued to exist between the Chinese
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