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on the Canton-Hong Kong group. As shall be seen in this article, since the opening of China in 1840 to 1927, when China was nominally united by Jiang Jieshi (7), settlers in Hong Kong at least found three good seasons to invest in China - they were the Western Affairs Movement in the 1870s, the late Qing reform in the 1900s, and the post-revolution “rehabilitation” in the 1910s and the early 1920s. Each occasion was accompanied by investment blooms in China - ship-building and mining in the 1870s, railway, steamship land reclamation and port developments in the 1900s, banking (especially for currency redemption) and real estate in the 1910s and 1920s.
The Western Affairs Movement
Since the forced opening of China in 1840, and the subsequent establishment of trade ports in Hong Kong, Canton, Shanghai and Tianjin in 1843, 1844 and 1861 respectively, a commercial axis was gradually extending northward within coastal China. This development gave rise to an urban population which was linked by telegraph, railways, steamship, printing, census, minting, urban planning and western schooling. Before the peasant population in the inner parts of China was appealed to in the political movement of the 1930s, it was this urban population in coastal China that was being appealed to in the national politics of China. Among others things, this coastal population played a significant part in the Western Affairs Movement, as well as the "late Qing reform" in 1904.
Thanks to the hard work of Rev. Carl Smith, we recognize that in the late nineteenth century a Cantonese group was emerging within this commercial axis along coastal China. They were western-educated Cantonese, including Eurasians, who emerged in Hong Kong and Macau, where western missionary schools found their earliest presence. These Cantonese, without proper education in classical Chinese, were regarded by the Chinese as a group marginal to the Chinese community. Their job market was small - they could not climb up the traditional social ladder in the same way as their Chinese-educated counterparts could through the Imperial Examination, and the number of their potential employers was very few. This explains why their career paths were more or less identical - at one time or another, they were employed by the Maritime Customs, the Hong Kong government, or for the lucky few, they would be employed as compradores in western firms.
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