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One other result of the plague was mentioned by Robinson in November 1895. 'It is extraordinary not to say discreditable that after fifty-five years of British rule, the vast majority of Chinese in Hong Kong should remain so little Anglicized.' This led to various measures such as the demand for the teaching of more English. Less cogent responses were criticism of the Tung Wah Hospital in the treatment of plague. In fact neither Western nor traditional Chinese medical procedures had any effective treatment for the disease. Government medical men then recklessly demanded the abolition of the Tung Wah. A committee of enquiry of 1896 recognized the organization's valuable work for Chinese poor and sick, but suggested that the Medical Department should act in a supervisory capacity, and that Western medical treatment should be introduced on a voluntary basis under the supervision. of a Chinese trained in Western medicine. The Tung Wah agreed to Dr Chung's appointment he had qualified at the Hong Kong Medical College and was resident House Surgeon at the Alice Memorial Hospital. They insisted that he be paid by the government.
―
Oddly enough, contrary to general opinion among the British, Chinese patients proved not to be as prejudiced as expected. In the scheme's first month 17 of them elected to have Western treatment. In fact almost the sole superiority of Western medical ‘science' at the time lay in vaccination tech- niques and in a more highly developed system of nursing care.
Before he left Hong Kong, Robinson had one more obstacle to address,
Plague, and the New Territories Acquired 189
the reiterated and now increasingly insistent cry for a Municipal Council. After Bowen's reforms affecting the legislature, its members had tasted a modicum of power in that they voted all taxation and held debates on the appropriations suggested by the Finance Committee. Unofficials were not a majority, but were influential and exerted pressure on a system of government by discussion if not always consensus. By 1894 a petition from ratepayers led by T. H. Whitehead of the Chartered Bank, Paul Chater, Jackson of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, and Dr Ho Kai was sent to the Secretary of State in London. Its message, briefly, was that Hong Kong's annual trade was worth $40,000,000; that this prosperous state in the colony had come about largely through the exertions of British merchants and ship owners; yet their reward was only the flimsiest share in decisions affecting the colony. They pointed out that other Crown colonies had been accorded representative institutions, and they wanted the 'common right of English- men to manage their local affairs and control the expenditure of the colony where imperial considerations were not involved'. What they suggested was 'free election of British nationality in the Legislative Council', and that the British should constitute a majority.
Robinson, forwarding the petition, thought that the best course might be to add slightly to the unofficial element in both Councils. Lord Ripon in London treated the matter with the utmost gravity, penning a dispatch in which he passed in review the whole history of constitutional reform in Hong Kong. His conclusion was that 'it had prospered because it has been a British
The Marquis of Ripon, Secretary of State for the Colonies from August 1892 to June 1895.
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colony', having few lifelong residents of either British or Chinese nationality. He wanted to know if the voters could be of any nationality, if the British were to be from the British Isles, or to be subjects by race only; and, con- cluding, he had no difficulty in demonstrating the ill-thought nature of the petition, and its tendency towards setting up what would in effect be a little oligarchy. He thought that the addition of more unofficials to the Legislative Council would best be balanced by adding more officials and perhaps by adding a second Chinese; and that as to the Executive Council, unofficial members should be appointed, who might be any subject of the Queen, not necessarily a European. On a Municipal Council, Lord Ripon wrote: 'I frankly say that I should like to see one established', and (prophetically) he thought that the Sanitary Board might in time develop into such a body. But, in view of the continuing Sino-Japanese war, there should be no im- mediate change.
Lord Ripon was not alone in discerning the defects of the petition. In Hong Kong the Registrar-General, James Stewart Lockhart, soon to be the colony's Colonial Secretary, dissected its contents in a memorandum to the Governor.
Most of the taxes fall almost entirely on the Chinese. The only tax to which the British and other residents as a whole are subject in the same manner as the Chinese is the tax of 13 per cent levied on the rateable value of house property in Victoria . . This tax yields annually about $470,000, of which over $350,000 are contributed by the Chinese and the balance by all the other nationalities combined. The petitioners, who are not in some instances British, and who do not in many cases contribute directly to taxes, claim [the already quoted 'common right of English- men', and so on]. They have, however, carefully omitted to point out that the local affairs include Chinese affairs of which... they are generally ignorant and which the Chinese have shown no desire that the British merchants and other residents should manage, and to indicate that to the expenditure of the Colony of which they desire the control they contribute a very small portion. Petitioners surely do not wish to maintain that Britishers have an inherent right to control all expenditure
8
After further lobbying the Marquis of Ripon recommended that two. unofficials might be nominated to the Executive Council (one of whom was to be Chinese). One official should be added to the Legislative Council (he suggested Major-General W. Black), with two unofficials representing ‘retail traders or skilled labour'. These changes were made in July 1896. J. J. Bell-Irving of Jardine, Matheson and Company and Paul Chater became the first unofficials on the Executive Council; Wei Yuk, an astute business man, became the additional unofficial member, and the General became an additional official member, on the Legislative Council in December 1896. With this little sop, the petitioners had to be content; and the clamour for reform temporarily died down.
Plague, and the New Territories Acquired 191
A vital step had been taken in 1892 towards the goal of honest administra- tion when it was ruled that no government official might own land or prop- erty in the colony except his own dwelling, or engage in commerce, or buy shares in local companies. The rule had been laid down once and for all that holding government office was incompatible with commercial interests, which might conflict with absolute integrity in the administration.
—
The uneasy situation of the colony on the border of a China under attack by Japan emphasized the need to consider its defences. The Hong Kong Volunteer Corps had been revived in 1893, and 1897 saw a new commander installed in the person of the Chief Justice, Sir J. W. Carrington. The 159- member Corps was to come in handy at the take-over of the New Territories in 1899 the cession of which was negotiated in Robinson's term. The requirement was for strict neutrality on the part of Hong Kong, and in relation to this the case of Dr Sun Yatsen was pertinent. He had been banished, accud of Deep Bay, following the Sham Chun river mcties, and had left for Japan. blythe inconsequentiality, running down the midct to appeal to the British pug-ying
China-Britain Street) of the village of o emancipate my miserable nains to this day. Initial delight at the cessiorbeen music to Robinson's eĉas soon tempered by doubts of various kinds. Thsix years (the longest-serviny with Chinese exercising jurisdiction in it, and tbrink of one ketchiest knowledge of the terrain and its inhabit:
The so-called 'scramble for concessions' of territory from the Chinese around the turn of the century was graphically illustrated in Punch. Britain, France, Germany, and Russia are seen tearing at the helpless body of China - Britain with the strongest position, arms encircling the mandarin's chest.
192 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
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of the most extraordinary events by which it acquired 365.5 square miles of territory more than twelve times the area of Hong Kong island. The history of how this came about need not detain us long. Broadly, the reasons were the impossibility of defending the colony against attack from the mainland. By acquiring the land whose shores flanked the harbour its defence would be a more feasible proposition. In what was to be called the 'scramble for concessions' Britain negotiated cession of the needed territory in 1898 on a 99-year lease from China. The documents, signed on 9 June, ceded the waters of the two bays east and west of the Kowloon peninsula, and all the waters and islands north of 22°9′ latitude and between 113°52′ and 114°30' longitude. Civil administration over Kowloon City, unwisely as it turned out, was reserved to Chinese officials. Equally un- wisely, the exact frontier was not defined in detail in the treaty, nor were
n was not alone in discerning the defects of th he Registrar-General, James Stewart Lockhart, s nial Secretary, dissected its contents in a memora
xes fall almost entirely on the Chinese. The only tax er residents as a whole are subject in the same manner per cent levied on the rateable value of house property annually about $470,000, of which over $350,000 ai e and the balance by all the other nationalities co o are not in some instances British, and who do not ctly to taxes, claim [the already quoted 'common rig n]. They have, however, carefully omitted to point ou Chinese affairs of which... they are generally ignorant hown no desire that the British merchants and other re › indicate that to the expenditure of the Colony of wh y contribute a very small portion. Petitioners surely c Britishers have an inherent right to control all expend
er lobbying the Marquis of Ripon recommend ght be nominated to the Executive Council (0: inese). One official should be added to the Legisla Major-General W. Black), with two unofficials or skilled labour'. These changes were made ir g of Jardine, Matheson and Company and Paul C icials on the Executive Council; Wei Yuk, an as the additional unofficial member and-the
1
6. The map attached to the Convention between Great Britain and China signed at Beijing on 9 June 1898, demarcating the area leased to Britain. (Source: Wesley-Smith, Unequal Treaty, 1898-1997, p. 193. Redrawn from MacMurray (comp. and ed.), Treaties and Agreements With and Concerning China, 1894-1919, p. 131.)
Plague, and the New Territories Acquired 193
the positioning and operation of the Chinese customs posts. There was no firm plan for the administration of the territory.
Adding to the prevailing nervousness, the American fleet was anchored in Mirs Bay, intent on taking Manila; and tension was increased by the lack of co-operation between the Foreign and Colonial Offices in London. The confusion was compounded by the fact that the Viceroy of Guangdong was under the impression that China's authority was still paramount in the newly ceded territory.
Stewart Lockhart, in England at the time, was immediately dispatched to Hong Kong to survey the ceded territory. His report prompted the new Governor, Sir Henry Blake, who arrived in November 1898, to suggest a separate administration for it. This was vetoed by Chamberlain in London since it had already been declared an integral part of Hong Kong. After talks between the two sides the boundary was fixed to run from the head of Mirs Bay to the head of Deep Bay, following the Sham Chun river most of the way; the line, with blythe inconsequentiality, running down the middle of the main street (Chung-ying China-Britain Street) of the village of Sha Tau Kok, where it remains to this day. Initial delight at the cession of the New Territories was soon tempered by doubts of various kinds. The inclusion of Kowloon City with Chinese exercising jurisdiction in it, and the absence of any but the sketchiest knowledge of the terrain and its inhabitants, were but
New Territories villagers using a rotary winnowing machine - an ancient Chinese invention.
194 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
two of them. The government was not in any way prepared for the take-over. Lockhart's report offered the opinion that a welcome was by no means assured, and Blake, who had been in Hong Kong only a few months, decided the best way was to proceed with the occupation and not await settlements in all the disputes. He planned to raise the flag over the New Territories on 17 April 1899.
Three days prior to that date, numbers of outraged inhabitants (the total population was estimated at about one hundred thousand) who had not been consulted on their conversion from Chinese to British citizens, rose up in what they must have seen as properly righteous anger to prevent that action. The matshed structures, which had been put up at Tai Po Hui to serve as temporary headquarters for the British administration, were discovered by a party of the colonial police on 14 April to have been burned to the ground; and a threatening band of about one hundred and fifty Chinese was gathered on the hills. The police, under Captain F. H. May (later to be Governor of Hong Kong), decided that the better part of British valour was to retire to the safety of Hong Kong overnight. The next day, 15 April, augmented by a detachment of the Hong Kong Regiment under Captain Berger, the police were sent back by the Governor, who had no expectation of an attack. Reaching Tai Po Hui they were, however, met by considerable numbers of what appeared to be regular Chinese troops entrenched in positions on high ground with artillery. The Chinese took the offensive, many armed with gingalls (muskets fired from stands) and furiously waving banners. But faced with a small, disciplined British force, the Chinese melted away over the hills.
On the following day, 16 April, a larger body of troops under Major- General Gascoigne was sent to the site, and Stewart Lockhart who accom- panied them succeeded in raising the British flag.
This did not mark the end of Chinese resistance. That very evening the Volunteers were called out, and on 17 April several thousand armed Chinese were routed by British forces near Kam Tin. After they had retreated to nearby hills and regrouped, another battle took place, resulting in a Chinese defeat which apparently scotched any further thoughts of resistance.
Blake, blaming Tan, the Viceroy of Guangdong, who had undertaken to supervise the transition of power, sent the Volunteers into Kowloon City, and simultaneously seized Shen Zhen as an earnest of his intentions should the Viceroy fail again. The Colonial Office endorsed this action. A Colonial Office minute records the passing of an Order in Council stating that the city of Kowloon should not be under Chinese jurisdiction, and the matter is at an end'. Chinese official presence there was not thenceforward permitted. The question of Chinese jurisdiction in Kowloon was discussed between Blake and Li Hongzhang, the new Viceroy of Guangdong, when the latter passed through Hong Kong on his return from a visit to the West in June 1900, but
Sir Henry Blake arrived to take up his post as Governor a few months after the New Territories lease had been signed and had come into effect on 1 July 1898. He sits here with the Viceroy of Guangdong.
no changes were made. Shen Zhen was occupied for several months and the customs officials removed from their stations, the latter being re-established at Lingding, Tai Shan, and Sam Mun.
The occupation was completed, the flag unfurled, the proclamation duly read; the new lords of the Kowloon peninsula took up their duties. Their main problem was not military but administrative. It was decided that, with certain omissions, the laws of Hong Kong were to prevail in the newly acquired lands. A local Communities Ordinance created district and sub- district courts with limited civil and criminal jurisdiction, but there was no power to prevent what immediately occurred the wholesale buying up of land at rock-bottom prices by at least one syndicate of Chinese among whom, it was suspected, was the Legislative Councillor, Dr Ho Kai. The syndicate appears to have achieved its aims on the pretext that the British, as rumours
―
Guards at a New Territories Customs Post in 1900. The Englishman is accompanied on his tour of inspection by his wife. Hong Kong people were intensely curious about conditions beyond the familiar hills that formed the backdrop to the Kowloon Peninsula and were keen to travel there once it became possible to do so.
predicted, were about to confiscate the land. Hearing of this, Blake wanted to return the land to the rightful owners, but the legal problems involved were so formidable that the matter was dropped.
The Governor toured the New Territories in August 1899, inspecting the eight districts and 48 sub-districts. He promised to respect Chinese customs, warned that punishments would be according to the laws of Hong Kong, and informed his audience that landowners must register their holdings and that all land rent was payable to the government. In return he promised protection from banditry.
The Governor's subsequent report painted a grim picture of the New Territories, of a population misgoverned by former masters and ‘squeezed' . by corrupt officials. Disputes had frequently been settled only by clan feuding. It was a land, he reported, where malaria was rife, a land of murders in Shen Zhen, of robbery and piracy round the coasts. He asked for more money to police the area, estimating the sum needed at almost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the year.
Much of the early work of organization and the setting up of a workable administration in the New Territories fell to Lockhart who continued, until he left Hong Kong a sick man in March 1901, to interest himself in its problems and their solution, although latterly he was not directly responsible. In his last report, in 1901, he wrote: ... in bidding farewell, I do so with
‘...
An ancestral hall in the New Territories, Door Gods painted on its tall portals.
―
much regret, mingled with pleasant reminiscences of ... work . . . in the midst of its charming and beautiful scenery, and lessened by the recollection that I have been and still am a strong believer in its future'. The day-to-day work of administration was assigned to three cadets E. R. Hallifax, C. M. Messer, and J. H. Kemp. Much discussion went on about how to effect improvements in the economic and other conditions, with Charles Ford of the Botanical Gardens Department being asked for advice on vine and camphor culture, and for improvements in sugar-cane and mulberry cropping. Jardine, Matheson, ever active, wanted the coal concession for the whole area.
But conditions remained highly unsettled, the Chinese rebellious. Village elders, requested to attend meetings on land tenure, refused to do so, and in January 1900 an ordinance gave power to summon Chinese to the Registrar- General's office for questioning. This provoked an outcry. A land court was set up to settle disputed claims, and instructed by London not to be too rigorous, the aim being to confirm occupation and to encourage improvement of the terrain. But the facts as they came to light revealed a tangled mass of disputed claim and counter-claim, often complicated by the absence of adequate, or indeed any, documentation. The bemused court discovered that one in 20 claims was disputed, and yet further problems arose in having lands accurately marked on the map. Corps of surveyors were imported
198 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
from India to deal with this. All unclaimed land was to be held for disposal by the Crown.
To no one's surprise, the land court took until 1904 to complete over 354,000 cases and to determine the real owners of lots, an exercise that cost $143,615. Over subsequent years the New Territories was to prove a costly acquisition. By the end of June 1901 its revenue stood at only $14,140: expenditure amounted to $736,571. Lockhart's optimism seemed unwar- ranted.
Blake's opinion about administration in the leased area was that ‘existing village organizations should be maintained and utilized'. But such organiza- tions had in many cases become invalid, the village elders powerless in a situation where appeal could be made over their heads to British officials. The main problems for the government were law and order and the slippery terrain of land revenue. A workable method of administration was only slowly evolved in the light of long and painful experience.
The New Territories was eventually divided into two geographical and administrative parts: that part between the China border and the Kowloon range of hills became New Territories North; while New Territories South consisted of the tip of the peninsula from the range southward, and all the islands. By 1907 the two chief officers of the northern district, then the Assistant Superintendent of Police and the Assistant Land Officer, became District Officer and Assistant District Officer respectively (the latter office was later abolished). And in September 1910 the Assistant Land Officer (South) was given the title of Assistant District Officer. These civil servants, as well as being in charge of the police and general administration, were also police magistrates, and in 1908 were given power to try petty debt cases up to $200. Education both in traditional village schools and in due course in schools set up by the government was encouraged, and health matters were supervised by the resident Medical Officer the first holder of that office being a graduate of the College of Medicine, Hong Kong. These arrange- ments remained in place until 1913.
The acquisition of the New Territories took place against a backdrop of ominous events in China as that country entered its last decade of dynastic rule, and as the Western powers increased their stranglehold on its economy by both military and commercial means. The year 1901 proved to be inauspicious. The old Queen in England died at last as Hong Kong celebrated its diamond jubilee. The military contribution from Hong Kong towards the cost of the British garrison rose from the figure fixed in the 1890s, 171⁄2 per cent of the colonial revenue, to 20 per cent, and plague returned in the worst outbreak since 1894 so serious that the community petitioned the Secretary of State, alleging the government's failure to implement the Chadwick report's recommendations.
―
Once again, as Sayer recounts it, 'the deus ex machina' in the person of
Water shortage in 1901. A line of people wait to fill their containers from the tanks brought from Tsuen Wan to the Praya.
Chadwick himself returned to the colony, 20 years after his first visit. He must surely have reflected on the irony of the situation, for had his original report been heeded his return would not have been called for. Chadwick brought with him Professor Simpson, a plague specialist. In the following years they produced another report dealing once more with the deficiencies in housing and the appalling shortcomings in public hygiene.
The year 1901 was also the year of a serious drought in which the colony experienced the 'practical value of the newly acquired territory'. Supplies of water were brought from Tsuen Wan by boat to Hong Kong and emptied into tanks set up on the Praya. During the spring and summer it was from these tanks, laboriously, that the population got much of its supply. Drought, hitherto a less serious problem, now made its début (and continued a serious threat sporadically until the 1970s). Steps were taken in 1902 to provide the Kowloon peninsula with an adequate water supply, the old wells at Ho Man Tin being supplemented by a new scheme in which a reservoir was built in the hills near Ma Tsz Keng (Smugglers' Ridge) and a tunnel cut, through which water gravitated down to Kowloon.
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It was the contents of the new Chadwick-Simpson report which inspired Ordinance No. 1 of 1903 (the Public Health and Buildings Ordinance). At last it appeared the government was taking the position seriously. Plague deaths in 1898 were 1,175, rising to 1,428 in 1899. In 1900 a total of 1,434 died, and in the following year the epidemic was so severe that numbers of Europeans died and Chinese began to leave the colony. It is open to suspicion that the numbers of Westerners appearing for the first time in the casualty lists may not have had a negative effect on the counsels of the administration. Despite the medical officer's pronouncement that it was more probable that rats caught plague from man than man from rats, it was generally accepted that fleas transmitted the plague from rats to man. Blake had started a great campaign against rats and an offer of two cents for each rat tail produced by members of the public was a stupendous success; 43,000 tails were handed in during 1900, but suspicion grew that the numbers were swollen by imports from the New Territories even from China
and were not from infected
animals.
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The Governor had done much to improve general sanitary conditions by strengthening the Sanitary Board and by appointing extra Inspectors of Nuisances and introducing drain inspectors. In 1899 he had pushed through the Insanitary Properties Ordinance to deal with cocklofts, and to restrict the partitioning of rooms into tiny cubicles all matters recommended in the original Chadwick Report.
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Embodied in the Chadwick-Simpson report were meticulous directions for the examination of rats, the rat-proofing of all houses, and the need for more
In 1902, Sir Henry Blake and his family moved into the newly rebuilt Mountain Lodge, the Governor's official summer residence on the Peak.
Plague, and the New Territories Acquired 201
water. The report also counselled the government that there was no substitute for the resumption and demolition of unsuitable structures, and rebuilding on sanitary principles. In Central District in 1902 there was still an average of 502 persons per acre, in 1904 no fewer than 608.
—
In the last year of Blake's tenure important public works were begun. The new red brick Post Office and Government Offices started to rise at the foot of Pedder Street; the Supreme Court, designed by Sir Aston Webb, the architect of Buckingham Palace's new façade and of Admiralty Arch in London, was begun on a site next to the Hong Kong Club which, with the statue of Queen Victoria, had been completed in 1898. The memorials to the old Queen the Victoria Hospital on Barker Road, and Jubilee Street connecting Connaught Road with Queen's Road Central, were both com- pleted. But the enthusiasm of town planners for that civic dream, the long- awaited waterfront road to connect Central District with Wan Chai, was again to be dashed when the Admiralty's 1903 plan to build a dock on the naval site in Central was finally approved. The decision, ill-advised and hasty, was made in response to international tensions and the presumed need for a strong naval base in Hong Kong.
The unveiling of the statue of Queen Victoria, commissioned to commemorate her Golden Jubilee. It was enshrined in the domed construction on the left. Beyond, the new Hong Kong Club building is nearly finished.
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—
Partly in the wake of public realization that British rule had so singularly failed to change the outlook of the Chinese in the colony, the subject of education again raised questions in Blake's time; but another reason was to be found in the dilemma which had been faced many times over in other colonies, particularly in India the relative value and the position of the local language and English in education. In Hong Kong this problem, not to be solved either soon or easily, was complicated by the demands of British parents for separate schools for their children, and for the introduction of the Cambridge, and later Oxford, Local Examinations, whose standards compel- led some schools to raise their own in order to prepare candidates who might want to sit them, and who were mostly English.
There was a growing recognition that Chinese private schools were more sought after by parents than the free government institutions offering similar education. Eitel, Inspector of Schools, retired on a pension in 1897 and was replaced by E. A. Irving in 1901. The new Inspector hailed from Perak and was an advocate of vernacular education. The year saw a petition from the European community on the subject of Europeans-only schools, and the allegation was made that in mixed European and Chinese schools the races held each other back. On the Chinese side, eight leading figures petitioned for schools where children of the 'better classes' would not have to sit with those of the lower classes.
The topic was a thorny one haunted by ill-defined questions of racial as well as educational content, and to deal with it Blake wisely set up a com- mittee of enquiry whose recommendations, given in May 1902, turned out to be of a highly controversial nature. It proposed separate schools for European British subjects, and 'English' schools for non-British children whose parents wanted them to be educated with English as the medium of teaching. Grants to four Portuguese-language schools were to be withdrawn. The report criti- cized Chinese education, reasoning that it was better to educate a few Chinese well than to attempt the task with the multitude. The low standard of English where it was taught in Anglo-Chinese schools was deplored and it was pro- posed that the higher forms in these schools be taught by British teachers. Vernacular schools were to be attached to Anglo-Chinese schools under one. headmaster.
A well-known Eurasian philanthropist, Sir Robert Hotung, had presented a school in Kowloon to the government, open to all and having English as the medium of instruction. The government now high-handedly proposed to take it as the British school, excluding other races. Belilios had given Hong Kong a reformatory school, and this too was commandeered by the government for use as a British school on the island.
Joseph Chamberlain, Secretary of State, was deeply critical of the report and strongly condemned the racist attitudes which countenanced the setting up of schools exclusively for the British; and was appalled at the misuse of the
Plague, and the New Territories Acquired 203
Hotung and Belilios generosity in donating schools which were now taken over for British schoolchildren. The report, he thought, was inconsistent since, while advocating an educational system on racial lines, it also wished to do away with the Portuguese schools. 'The first duty was to maintain the vernacular schools', he suggested. And he was against restricting to any one race the entry to Queen's College and the Belilios Girls' School. The purely Chinese classes at the former were to be restored. Since parents had demanded a British school in Kowloon, he sanctioned this. In short, Cham- berlain rejected the report as a basis for reform.
Joseph Chamberlain, Secretary of State for the Colonies from June 1895 to December 1905. The artist is John Singer Sargent, one of the fashionable portraitists of the period.
—
Thus the process of change continued, gradual, unsatisfactory, piecemeal, in the British democratic tradition. The system by which grants were made was amended. Under the next two Governors, Nathan and Lugard, technical education received a boost with the setting up in 1907 of the Hong Kong Technical Institute which also offered teacher training; and later, in 1911, by the formation of the Board of Chinese Vernacular Primary Education after which the principle of this form of teaching was not again seriously challenged. But the government's reluctance to formulate a realistic education policy closely resembled the foot-dragging of successive administrations in the matters of water supply and sanitary legislation. As in the field of public works, so in education, vested interest as opposed to public interest, the
204 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
monied Westerners and wealthy Chinese could be seen making sure that their own received the best education. The efforts they made for those in less privileged positions were, if not merely cosmetic, then less than enthusiastic. Hong Kong entered the twentieth century with a vastly enlarged territory, with an administration groping its way towards a satisfactory means of dealing with 100,000 newly acquired and dubiously loyal citizens and in an atmosphere filled with the gun smoke in which the Western and Japanese powers had engulfed the Orient. Few people in Hong Kong or indeed elsewhere could then have envisaged that this process, begun by Western mercantile rapacity in China, would result under half a century later in an entirely new, sharply different Orient, one in which their influence (apart from that of Japan) would no longer be paramount.
17. The First Two Decades of the New Century
SIR Henry Blake left in November 1903. It was nine months before his successor arrived, the interim filled by F. H. May who had replaced Stewart Lockhart as Colonial Secretary. Sir Matthew Nathan, a bachelor of 39 on his arrival in July 1904, was the colony's only unmarried governor. Although by career a Royal Engineer, he was, as Sayer puts it, 'a natural financier'. He was to put both capabilities to good use.
Sir Matthew Nathan tackled the financial side first, taking measures to stem the constant loss to the treasury incurred as the subsidiary coinage diminished in value in relation to the dollar. He set that department the goal of restoring its proper value. In 1904 and 1905, there was no less than $44 million worth of silver coins in circulation, an oversupply greatly exceeding the needs of the populace. Nathan stopped the issue of further supplies and demon- etized all the small silver received until the sag in value was taken up.
Nathan's civil engineering background was the probable spark that fired his interest in the project for a railway to connect the colony with Guangzhou, and from there north to Hangkou, which was already linked by rail with Beijing. The Russian Trans-Siberian line to Europe had already opened in 1903. Nathan's was the inspiration, and later the dogged patience, in the convoluted negotiations behind the construction by British interests of the sector from Guangzhou southwards, while the line from Kowloon to the border was being laid. That section was completed in 1910. By 1912 it was possible to reach Guangzhou by train from Hong Kong. By raising £1,100,000 from the Crown Agents and lending the sum to the Viceroy of Hubei-Hunan at 41⁄2 per cent interest (the principal repayable at £110,000 per annum), the Hong Kong government enabled the Chinese to start the construction of the Guangzhou-Hangkou track. It was at the time ‘an act of faith', for the line existed on paper only ... and thirty years were to pass before [it] was through'.'
I
In anticipation of further concessions by China following the suppression of the Boxer troubles, the British and Chinese Corporation had been formed
206 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
by the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and Jardine's in 1898. The company built the Kowloon-Guangzhou railway line and later parti- cipated in that from Guangzhou northwards.
2
Meanwhile the reclamation which Chater had initiated, running from Pedder Street to Western Market, was completed in 1905 and two years later had been 'practically built over; there were only one or two lots still vacant'.2 And the first section of a tramway line along the road from Kennedy Town in the west all the way to Shau Kei Wan had been opened in 1904, the inaugural run made in a tram driven by Mrs Jones, wife of the Director of Public Works her son 'operating the bell continuously'. The early trams were open, elegant vehicles designed for summer's heat but less convenient in the torrential rains that accompany it. In 1909 Governor Lugard was to show civic pride in this enterprise by taking his guest, the Viceroy of Guangdong, for a ride in a procession of two decorated cars to Quarry Bay to inspect the new Taikoo Docks built there.
3
H
John Samuel Swire, founder of Butterfield and Swire, now John Swire and Sons.
The First Two Decades of the New Century 207
By the end of the nineteenth century Hong Kong had become a major port in world trade. One factor which had contributed to this development was, importantly, the undeveloped state of land transport within China, which necessitated the efficient linking of its coastal with its inland water communications, and those with the outside world. By 1900, some 41 per cent of China's foreign trade passed through the colony forming 33 per cent of Hong Kong's total foreign trade. In the 15 years prior to 1900 the tonnage of shipping clearing the port had reached 14 million, and most of that was accounted for by British shipping (65 per cent) which also had the lion's share of tonnage clearing China's open ports (58 per cent).
―
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In this all but incredible dominance of China's trade the bulk of the coastal movement was handled by the Hong Kong company Butterfield and Swire Limited, whose China Navigation Company vied with the shipping line owned by Jardine's, the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company. Other lines were smaller
the Douglas Steamship Company (originally owned by Lapraik), and the Macao Steamship Company. Even the inter-ocean scene was dominated by British interests the Peninsular and Oriental, the Glen Line, the Blue Funnel Line. By the turn of the century sailing ships had largely given way to steamers whose ability to keep to fairly tight schedules was a significant factor in import and export profits. But cost-free wind power, as opposed to the expense of coal, permitted sailing ships to linger on, if only in a minor role. Even in 1920, a total of 26 British and nine American square- riggers cleared Hong Kong harbour.
Another component in Hong Kong's growth was the question of the Chinese language. Written and spoken Chinese having proved an insur- mountable obstacle to doing business in other countries, Hong Kong had been quick to offer the conduct of import and export transactions on their behalf.
A third important element in expansion after 1900 related to the changing pattern of things in China where railway development went on apace, and where, after the Treaty of Shimonoseki of 1895, foreigners could operate factories in the Treaty Ports. The railways facilitated the opening up of areas from which local produce could be readily extracted and exported. There was a gradual increase in China's exports and a corresponding increase in her imports of such materials as coal and kerosene, dyes and metals.
But while the Sino-Japanese war allowed foreign expansion in China, it also resulted in a diminution in the export trade through Hong Kong (and also through Shanghai) as Japan extended her sphere of influence over north China. By 1913 the all but 50 per cent of British exports to China which had passed through the colony in the late 1880s had fallen to about 22 per cent. At the same time, however, Hong Kong's trade with other countries was on the increase, and this to some extent offset the decline and began to alter the overall picture of the colony's commerce.
208 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
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Accompanying this trade expansion and diversification was the need for docking and ship-repairing facilities. The new Taikoo Docks was thought to be one of the most sophisticated shipbuilding and ship-repairing yards in the East. Designed in 1900, the dry dock was capable of taking the largest ship then afloat, the Oceanic, a giant 685 feet long with a beam of 68 feet. The docks had been constructed on 52 acres of reclaimed land, the attraction of the site being its close proximity to the harbour's eastern entrance, Lei Yue Mun Strait. With this development and the almost simultaneous naval dockyard extension, Hong Kong harbour reached the peak of its docking facilities although numerous smaller shipyards sprouted later under Chinese management at such sites as Tai Kok Tsui, Cheung Sha Wan, and the north-eastern part of Kowloon Bay. Together with the Hong Kong and Whampoa Dock Company which owned five docks and had been in business since 1866, the Taikoo Docks sufficed for the colony's needs. These docking companies were the leaders in heavy industry, employing an average of 12,000 workers. A demand for deep-water berthing was satisfied by Butterfield and Swire's wharves and back-up facilities at Kowloon Point (Tsim Sha Tsui), collectively known as Holt's Wharf, and extended in 1915 by dredging to permit ocean-going steamers to berth. By 1925 there were 18 deep-draught berths, and Hong Kong had, tardily, in response as usual to events outside its borders, developed into that 'mart of trade' prematurely predicted over sixty years before.
The Taikoo Docks in use.
The First Two Decades of the New Century 209
Nathan's enquiry into the Sanitary Board in 1907, under pressure for its conversion to a Municipal Council, had served a wider purpose than the exposing of irregularities. It had directed attention to the whole question of corrupt practices in Hong Kong. The large number of Chinese in Hong Kong who had been born and brought up in China saw what was termed corruption in the colony as a normal part of living. It was regarded as neither good nor evil, social behaviour institutionalized and related at root to the miserable salaries paid to Chinese government servants, which they supple- mented by levying surtaxes and receiving gifts what were euphemistically called kuei-fei, customary gifts. But the British born and educated cadet officer in the colony was quite another matter. Raised in a climate of values and with a code of behaviour inculcated by public school education, he was not normally tempted into corruption his salary was generally adequate. Few, however, of the middle and lower level officers of the government came from that background. The Sanitary Board's inspectors and overseers were locally recruited, often former servicemen paid off in the colony; others were beachcombers.
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In departments such as the Surveyor-General's (renamed Public Works in 1891), the Registrar-General's (called Secretariat for Chinese Affairs after 1913), and the Police, there were obvious opportunities for corruption. The average Chinese could not reach the officer heading the division or even his Western subordinates. He saw some junior Chinese clerk in the outer office. To obtain the correct form or licence, to voice a complaint, a little money had to change hands in the age-old Chinese manner.
The Hong Kong Gazette of 1898 revealed the extent of police corruption. In the previous year one well-known gambling establishment was raided by the Captain-Superintendent of Police who impounded various receipt books. These revealed that the establishment, headquarters of a Chinese gambling syndicate, had been paying protection money to numerous police constables, and to European inspectors and members of the Registrar-General's depart- ment. The outcome, in a self-righteous flurry of public outcry about immoral practices (which everyone knew existed), was that a European police in- spector received a six-month prison sentence, three others and a sergeant were dismissed, and two sergeants were asked to resign. Nineteen Indian and 18 Chinese constables were dismissed, and a further 44 Chinese constables resigned a procedure which left the force at approximately half strength. Britain and Japan signed the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in January 1902, a pact aimed at isolating Russia. Japan declared war on Russia in 1904 and sank its fleet, emerging as the dominant power in the Far East. China, obliquely, lay under Japanese threat. Into a generally threatening inter- national situation the great typhoon of 18 September 1906 injected a note of terror as it struck Hong Kong with what seemed unparalleled violence and with little warning, leaving in its wake a harbour littered with wrecks, an
The aftermath of the typhoon of 18 September 1906 which, the Hong Kong Telegraph reported, ‘laid the great part of the city in ruins, annihilated the fleet of shipping'.
estimated 10,000 dead, and a waterfront reduced to rubble and matchwood. During the onslaught, one of many tragedies caught the public interest the drowning of the Anglican Bishop, Dr. C. J. Hoare, who was on board a mission vessel with his trainees and who lost his life trying to save one of them from the sea.
Nathan departed after scarcely three years in office in April 1907, two months after receiving the Duke of Connaught who came to see for himself the completed Chater reclamation whose beginning he had marked 17 years previously in laying the foundation stone. Once again F. H. May took over the government until the arrival in July of the new Governor, Sir Frederick. Lugard, who came from a highly successful career in Africa to which he returned after his stint in Hong Kong.
He was greeted by both good and bad news. The good news was that May had just opened the first section of the Tai Tam Tuk waterworks which, with its capacity of 200 million gallons, made a recurrence of the 1902 water shortage seem unlikely in the near future. Yet, in the drought of 1910, the cry for water was heard once again as more Chinese poured into the colony from the unsettled conditions on the mainland.
The bad news was the report of Nathan's Sanitary Commission. Lugard's remedy for the situation and its problems was to substitute, for the President
Sir Frederick Lugard poses on the steps of Government House with the Viceroy of Guangdong and his party. Sir Paul Chater and other members of the Legislative Council are in the background.
:
of the Sanitary Board who was a medical practitioner, a layman from the cadet service, with the Medical Officer of Health as professional adviser. He saw this as replacing curative policies with preventative ones.
As ever, events outside Hong Kong were followed in the colony by perceptible movement in its commercial barometer, and by the reactions of a Colonial Office accustomed to trouble in its most troublesome charge. In an edict of 1906 Guangxu emperor (who reigned in name at least from 1875 to 1908) required all his subjects to cease smoking opium, and set a term of 10 years from 1 January 1907 in which the habit was to be broken. In Hong Kong the legitimate trade in the drug was still considerable. In a memorandum for the Legislative Council, Lugard put the figure at over £5 million in 1906. There was a big local demand over and above the opium sent out of the colony. The home market was supplied by the opium concessionaire who prepared the drug for the licensed divans, significant
212 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
revenue deriving from this source. In 1901 the concession had been let for $750,000 per annum, rising in 1904 to $2,040,000. In 1907, the Chinese and British governments concluded an agreement to run for a three-year trial period from January 1908, in which India undertook to reduce her export of opium to China by one-tenth of the current annual total (51,000 chests). This meant that by 1917 the trade should have ceased altogether. On 6 May 1908 the Secretary of State announced that steps must be taken to close the divans in Hong Kong, the Chinese government having closed those in China.
On the first of March 1909, 26 divans were closed. Licences were not to be renewed after 28 February 1910. To compensate for the loss of revenue a duty was imposed on imported liquor, tobacco, perfumed spirit, and light hydro-carbon oil, and an ad valorem licence fee was instituted on the first registration of an imported motor vehicle. The British government granted compensation – £9,000 in 1910 and £12,000 in the following year. In 1914 the opium concession was taken over by the government and a policy for the extinction of the trade was pursued, no appreciable disturbance to the colony's trade and financial stability being felt.
Thus ended officially, and to a large extent in practice, that miserable commerce by which the British and others had made vast fortunes from the process of slowly poisoning the Chinese, and on the profits from which the very existence of Hong Kong had been based. Opium use in the colony was not fully prohibited until World War II.
-
A bare five months after he arrived in Hong Kong Lugard delivered a speech in which he strongly advocated the foundation of a university. The 'high water mark of educational facilities' was Queen's College, and of course the College of Medicine turned out degree students, but Lugard had in mind an institution on a broader educational basis. And there was, too, an idea in certain circles that such a facility offered the chance of introducing Chinese youth to both philosophical and scientific areas of Western thought. The example of the College of Medicine was there for all to see. In the Alice Memorial Hospital built in 1887 as a memorial to his wife by Dr Ho Kai the college had successfully weathered the death or retiral of the founders, Drs Patrick Manson, W. S. Young, J. Cantlie and the Revd Dr Chalmers. With the aid of the London Missionary Society, and a $50,000 grant from a Chinese business man named Ng Li Hing for a new building, the College was the colony's most advanced educational establishment, by 1901 having 12 licentiates and 23 students in training. Most graduates had found jobs in Malaya and Singapore, and one, as we noted, in the New Territories administration. Others worked in the free dispensaries for Chinese that were being set up about this time. There was every hope, therefore, that a university might spread its graduates far and wide even to China itself
to further the Western dream.
The First Two Decades of the New Century 213
At the St Stephen's College speech day in 1907 Lugard threw out his suggestion for a university. His other thought was that Western learning might, through the graduates, eventually be spread in China unattached to Christian teaching, as a thing worthy of respect in itself. One of Lugard's admirers, H. N. Mody, offered $150,000 for the building and an endowment of $30,000. But, typically in Hong Kong, the men with most money, the merchants, were less than enthusiastic about it, and the Chinese were still hesitant about endowing a seat of Western scholarship. Mody, the director of so many companies that he was known as 'the Napoleon of the Rialto', retained his enthusiasm and was eventually knighted for his generosity. J. H. Scott, a former taipan of Butterfield and Swire, persuaded the com- pany to endow a chair of engineering for $40,000, and in 1921 a further $100,000 was donated towards engineering equipment. By the time the foundation stone was laid in March 1910, over one and a quarter million dollars had been promised, and in 1916, Sir Robert Hotung endowed a chair of surgery.
Lugard thought the university should have two parts
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one to incorporate the College of Medicine and the Technical Institute, with an Arts faculty to be added later. The Colonial Office reaction was cool. They dubbed the scheme 'Lugard's pet lamb'. But personal appeals from Lady Lugard brought in more cash, and the university opened in September 1913, with the then Governor, Sir F. H. May, as chancellor and with 72 students (31 engineering, 21 in medicine, and 20 in arts), drawn not only from Hong Kong but from the Straits Settlements, Guangzhou, and the Treaty Ports. The British govern- ment, less cool when it saw the institution was more or less self-financing, provided a few scholarships, and Sir Charles Eliot, ‘scholar and Orientalist', agreed to be its first Vice-Chancellor. Despite appearances, however, the university was insufficiently funded.
With the turn of the century, the death of the old Queen, and the accession of Edward VII in 1901, the peak of empire had been reached. The worlds of Europe and of the Orient were fast changing in political, commercial, and industrial aspects, and the clouds of a European war that was to be the first world war were crowding the horizons — horizons by now no longer discrete but strung together by telegraphic communication and fast ships. Action in one hemisphere now brought, swifter than ever before, its reaction in an- other. In the East, Japan had risen to the status of a considerable power and was to demonstrate first of all the oriental nations that she was capable of trouncing the might of a Western power, Russia. Japan went on to demon- strate with great aplomb and diplomatic finesse that in terms of remorseless greed she was not to be left behind in the 'scramble for concessions' in which the Western powers were indulging at the expense of a supine China.
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Lugard and his successors up to the time of World War I were governors acting against a background of world tension unparalleled in history because
Sir Henry May during his time as Colonial Secretary, with his wife, a Chinese official, and others on the track of the Kowloon-Canton Railway, somewhere in the New Territories, 1910.
nations had never before been so conscious of what others were doing at any given time. Hong Kong, that tropical plant, reacted to each breath of cold, disturbed, hostile air that swept in from any point of the compass, its com- mercial pulse ever on the edge of missing a beat. But the colony continued, by and large, to prosper.
Lugard's time is not distinguished by much in the way of public works but several important schemes were on the way to completion and several more were finished. The typhoon shelter at Mong Kok progressed, the Kowloon waterworks was completed, as was the British section of the Kowloon- Guangzhou railway. In 1911 the new Post Office, which also housed govern- ment offices, was opened in all its splendour of red brick and turrets, and the domed Supreme Court on Statue Square was ready for occupation, stolid alongside the rather feminine charms of the Hong Kong Club. Chater's Jubilee celebration in the form of the Victoria Hospital for Women and Children eventually came into being. Edward VII's accession was marked by. the intended conversion of a military area in Kowloon into a public park. But the military obstinately refused to grant the facility and a miserable little recreation ground was all that could be managed.
One reaction to the new knowledge that malaria was disseminated by the anopheles mosquito was yet another demand for separate residential areas for Westerners and Chinese. Western opinion averred that the Chinese could not be trusted to obey the rules for the prevention of mosquito breeding
the draining of stagnant water and the spraying of breeding grounds. The recommendation of a sub-committee of the Sanitary Board was to reserve 20,000 acres between Tsim Sha Tsui and Kowloon City for Western use, on
T
QAADDONIA
SiseParkin 196
The new Post Office on Pedder Street was completed in Lugard's time, a handsome building in local granite and red brick. This drawing was made more than a century later, just before its demolition.
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the grounds of malaria control and because wealthy Chinese were forcing up rents. The New Territories Land Court also agreed to resume 119 acres previously claimed in that area. Chamberlain in London agreed that a reservation was needed 'where people of clean habits will be safe from malaria'. But he objected to the exclusion of Chinese of good standing so that Europeans could enjoy low rentals. He wanted the reservation open to all persons approved by the Governor. The Peak area came to be reserved on similar conditions under the Hill District Reservation Ordinance of 1904.
Far away to the north, in Beijing, the Old Buddha the Empress Dowager died on 15 November 1908, the announcement accompanied by another which gave news of the death of her prisoner, the Emperor Guangxu. The coincidence left much to the imagination since the Emperor was reported normally to enjoy good health. Before she died the Old Buddha had decreed 1 that her three-year-old grandson, the hapless Puyi, should inherit. His father the Regent, with other ignorant and arrogant Manchu princes, did all they could to turn back the now remorselessly ticking clock and halt reform. With the revolution of 1911 there came an end to two thousand years of dynastic authoritarian rule in China and the demise of the Confucian ethic as sanction and underpinning of the state's authority. Entering the scene was the concept of a republic with its innate democratic ideas, inserted into the minds of a nation which had never in all its long history evinced a vestige of democracy or any tendency to democratic thought.
For Hong Kong the most obvious and immediate result was yet another flood of refugees seeking its comparative stability.
216 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
In the spring of 1911, Sir Henry May was promoted from his post as Hong Kong's Acting Governor and left to govern Fiji. His replacement was Warren Barnes who died on the polo ground shortly after assuming his duties, and he in turn was succeeded by Claude Severn, a civil servant from Malaya. The Governor, Lugard, left in March 1912, announcing as he did so the impend- ing return of May who had been appointed Governor. The appointment broke new ground it was the first time that a local cadet officer had risen to be Governor. May had been appointed a cadet in 1881, a decade later becoming private secretary to Major-General Digby Barker, whose daughter he married. From 1893 to 1902 he was Captain-Superintendent of Police, rendering conspicuous service in the 1894 plague and, along with Stewart Lockhart, in the take-over of the New Territories in 1899. His vigorous purge of corruption in the police force was also favourably remembered. As Colonial Secretary he had twice administered the government
at the departures of Blake in 1903 and Nathan in 1907 – for which he had been knighted.
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The most visible alteration in Hong Kong between the time when May left for Fiji and the time of his return is neatly defined by Sayer: 'Whereas in the spring of 1911 a Chinese discarded his queue at the risk of losing his head, in the spring of 1912 he risked his head who kept his queue. With this abrupt change of fashion Western clothes and effects were now much in demand ...'. The old order had gone or, if not exactly gone, had yielded place to disorder, ‘and while young China in its foreign cap saw no inconsistency in vociferously denouncing the foreign treaties, old China, in the person of the scholar and official, crept silently away and the immemorial pirate and brigand ventured from his hiding place again'.4
Sir Henry and his wife stepped ashore at Blake Pier and were borne away in their sedan chairs by eight scarlet-clad bearers. No sooner had his chair approached the Pedder Street flank of the new Post Office than a shot rang out and an assassin's bullet whizzed past him to lodge in the chair occupied by his wife Helena. The Hong Kong Telegraph carried the story the following day, 5 July 1912.
All records of crime in this colony were eclipsed yesterday when a daring attempt, miraculously unsuccessful, was made ... to assassinate His Excellency Sir Henry May... The red-coated coolies bearing the Governor's chair had just got into their stride when a man was seen to pass rapidly between the soldiers in front of the Post Office... He fired point blank, about 3 feet range
...
The would-be assassin was at once seized and almost throttled, and beaten by witnesses. ‘Sir Henry preserved a composure which, in the circumstances, was truly remarkable The bullet whizzed under the cover of the chair splintering the bamboo frame of Lady May's chair.' Sir Henry jumped out at
•
1
I
Sir Henry May replaced Lugard as Governor, arriving in July 1912. Disembarked and in his chair of state, he had just passed the statue of the Duke of Connaught near Blake Pier and was passing the new Post Office when a would-be assassin fired. The scene was captured by a photographer in Union Building opposite as the assailant was wrestled to the ground.
once and 'brushed down his coat... On sitting down again he turned a half- contemptuous, half-sympathetic glance at his assailant.' And the procession continued to the City Hall and the address of welcome. The gunman, Li Hong Hung, turned out to be a man harbouring a grudge against May from his days in the police.
There was no connection between the incident and the growing turmoil on the other side of the border, which had prompted the setting up of a line of military posts there. May was to re-lay the foundations of the system of deportation under wide emergency powers.
218 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
The perennial problem of silver coinage surfaced again devaluation caused by the flood of these coins from the Chinese Mint at Guangzhou. Things came to a head when several public utility companies complained they were losing money by being forced to accept the coins. The tramway company refused to take them, and a public outcry ensued since passengers were forced to use other legal tender and were in effect paying more. The Chinese felt their country was being insulted by the boycott of Chinese coins
―
even if they did bear the name of the now deposed emperor. Such was the new spirit of nationalism. They boycotted the trams. The company appealed to the Governor, and May treated the situation as an attack on his government. In one district of Victoria where the trouble appeared to have started he imposed the provisions of a boycott bill, inflicting a punitive rate on property there. This un-British imposition of collective responsibility for an offence a traditional Chinese measure worked like magic. Within days of the bill's publication the Chinese members of the Legislative Council boarded a tram en bloc, demonstrating to the little world of Chinese Hong Kong 'that tram-riding was fashionable again'.5 The tramway company received a cash handout of $45,000 in compensation. The following year saw the passing without protest of an ordinance forbidding the circulation of foreign coins and notes; and the Guangzhou 20-cent piece and the familiar Banco Marino of Macau one dollar note vanished. By 1919, $26 million in small coins had been withdrawn and demonetized.
Lugard had had the satisfaction of having added, as it were, the piano nobile to the mansion of Hong Kong education with his university: May was confronted with chaos on the ground floor and basement. The Board of Vernacular Chinese Education set up by Lugard had failed to function, perhaps because its tasks were novel, its guidelines vague. Conservative ideas on vernacular schooling now came face to face with ideas from over the border generated by the revolution. A feeling was growing in Hong Kong civil service circles that this might be an appropriate moment to secure control of the hundreds (the number was not precisely known) of vernacular schools, and decide what they should teach and how they might teach it. May con- demned the Board as an ‘absolute failure', and the situation was chaotic. His prescription for the malady was clear cut. 'Perhaps in the dim bye and bye', he told the Legislative Council as he introduced the Education Bill of 1913, 'Government may listen to those who wish for an Education Board ... but [government] considers that it can best deal with this matter with its own strong hand.” Every school was now required to register with the Director of Education, to conform with the regulations laid down, and to submit to official inspection. Whatever thoughts of revolutionary radicalism may have simmered in Chinese scholastic minds, the tight new regulations must have nipped them in the bud.
Hong Kong was in the process not so much of change that was the
―
The First Two Decades of the New Century 219
disorder of the day in China but of its own kind of consolidation. The words of Sun Yatsen, spoken in reminiscence, come to mind: ‘Afterwards I saw the outside world [outside China] and I began to wonder how it was that ... Englishmen could do such things as they had done, for example with the barren rock of Hong Kong... within 70 or 80 years, while China, in 4,000 years, had no place like Hong Kong.'
,7
The first motor car in the colony is said to have been imported by the successful American dentist Dr J. W. Noble, but he may have been forestalled by a Chinese whose name has not survived in this connection. Others soon followed despite the fact that there were only a few miles of motorable road. The syndrome is still apparent today, when thousands of cars capable of speeds of 150 m.p.h. are imported to be driven on roads not one of which is safe for travelling at that speed. By the time of May's return as Governor, streets that had previously known only horse-drawn carriages (long vanished anyway), chairs borne by teams of panting coolies, the bicycle, the rickshaw, and latterly the tram, now had to withstand the more demanding wheels of the internal combustion-engined chariot. A circular road for the island was planned to link the existing stretches, and another was to follow the rickshaw path to Tai Po in the New Territories. On the island, the western road which already reached the Dairy Farm site in Pok Fu Lam continued on to Aberdeen and was to reach Deep Water Bay in 1915 and Repulse Bay two years later; that between the new reservoir at Tai Tam and Tai Tam Gap was finished in 1918. On the peninsula the corniche from Kowloon to Castle Peak was begun in 1917.
Just as in the Western world, the horizons opened up by such develop- ments in Hong Kong were numerous, although they along with their social and infrastructural implications were at the time scarcely considered. It became increasingly practicable for families whose bread-winner worked in town to live in the suburbs. Places of recreation such as beaches and country- side formerly accessible only by boat offered opportunities for leisure and residence. The Repulse Bay Hotel opened on the first of January 1920, its purpose to exploit the fine sandy beach at its feet. The beach at North Point
―
far enough away from town was readily accessible by tram (special trams were laid on in summer, and even military band concerts by moonlight on that long-vanished beach were advertised). The intrepid golfers of the colony had established a course at Fanling in 1889, reached until the advent of the railway to Guangzhou by a bizarre variety of means boat, two-man rickshaw, walking, pony, and chair. The Deep Water Bay course was access- ible only by boat until the coming of the road in 1915, or more adventurously by foot from Aberdeen, or over the gap from Happy Valley — together with a retinue of coolies carrying tiffin.
—
One old Hong Kong landmark fell victim to the motorized age the clock tower at Pedder Street and Queen's Road. It had stood there since
220 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
1863. As early as 1884 a member of the Hong Kong Club, then diagonally opposite, was urging the removal of the structure, suggesting alternative sites for what he saw as a traffic hazard. A year later the same petitioner, M. J. D. Stephens, tried again, remarking that apart from the obstruction to traffic, because of new buildings the clock was barely visible. Ten years later still the persevering Stephens 'ventured' to write to the Director of Public Works about the now acute traffic congestion, suggesting that as the donor of the clock, Douglas Lapraik, now had a stained glass window in the cathedral his memory was adequately perpetuated without the offending clock tower. 'When the time arrives ... the wonder will be how it was not removed before.' Presumably Stephens then gave up in disgust (or perhaps died in the attempt), and the clock tower lasted another 29 years before it fell to the breaker's hammer. Mr Stephens has no memorial.
Governor May, a keen sportsman, in his former capacity as Colonial Secretary had stocked the colony's reservoirs with fish in order 'to keep his hand in with the rod'. As Governor he took up golf and encouraged the development of the Fanling course. He went to the Christmas and New Year race meetings and attended the annual cricket match against the Shanghai Cricket Club, fostering Chinese interest in sport. But race meetings at Happy Valley were more to Chinese taste than cricket, and the sport there was
The disastrous fire at the racecourse in February 1918.
118
The First Two Decades of the New Century 221
gambling. Racing started in the 1840s, quickly becoming popular. In the February 1918 meeting May and his party were witnesses to a disaster there. From the matsheds, some several stories high, in which the wealthier Chinese installed themselves and where the midday meal was cooked, panic-stricken Chinese were seen rushing out as the afternoon racing was about to commence. Then followed an explosion and collapse of the matsheds as fire broke out. In under half an hour about six hundred persons met their death, trapped, burned alive, trampled underfoot. The disaster wiped out approx- imately 0.1 per cent of the population, which stood at the time at something over 561,000.
—
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to over
Since the end of the nineteenth century revenue had gone up, from the 1898 total of $3.62 million to $8.6 million in 1913, and a huge leap $18.6 million in 1918 despite a decline in revenue from the opium con- cession. As well as the public works already noted, the Mong Kok typhoon shelter was finished by 1915 and had already proved its usefulness in a typhoon. The second half of the Tai Tam Tuk waterworks scheme was begun, including a dam designed to hold more than one and a half million gallons of water. It took five years to build and was opened by Sir Henry on 2 February 1918. The Governor remarked in his speech:
• •
When one sees so much fresh water around, one cannot help reflecting what a pity it is that the residents of this Colony do not adopt water as a beverage instead of something stronger. It would surprise some of you people to learn the terrible casualties . . . inflicted upon the civil servants by too free use of alcoholic beverages
Out of every two men who arrive here, whether as policemen, overseers on works like this [reservoir], as Sanitary Inspectors, or as Revenue Officers, not more than one lives and remains in the service to earn a pension. I do not include the upper ranks [of civil servants] for I have no figures to go on.
• •
on.8
The reservoir and other major works (with the exception of the railway to Guangzhou) were financed from public revenue. Conversely, it was left to a group of Chinese to form the Kaitak Land Investment Company Limited to reclaim land in Kowloon Bay, the name Kaitak formed from the names of the directors, Sir Kai Ho Kai and Mr Au Tack, land upon which some time later the first airstrip was built, and which is still the site of the colony's airport.
À facility of a different kind was offered to Hong Kong in 1914 by Mr (later Sir) Ellis Kadoorie. He had heard of the Governor's wife's interest in the welfare of working non-Chinese women, for whom little suitable accom- modation existed. Kadoorie offered $15,000 'for the purpose of erecting a Women's Institute or Hostel ... provided that within two years .
... an equal sum of money be realized'. He eventually donated much more, and the Helena May Institute for Women rose on a fine site on Garden Road a little
222
An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
way up and across the road from the Cathedral. Other generous contributors (oddly enough for an institute for Western women, and benignly) were Mr Ho Kom-tong, Mr Chan Kai-ming, and Mr Lau Chu-pak.
9
Sir Henry's administration was bisected by World War I. In Hong Kong most European nationalities were represented by groups employed there, and with the outbreak of that war, overnight, German business associates and friends became the enemy; and Europeans, formerly classed together by the Chinese, were now seen by them to be divided among themselves. Watched by the Chinese, British merchants and the Volunteers marched their former colleagues and friends to internment. There were similar emotions among the British as they saw German neighbours from the Anglo-French concession at Guangzhou leave to defend the German port, Qingdao (on the Shandong Peninsula), against the Japanese who were allied to Britain in the war.
Japan, anxious to gain further rights in China, presented what came to be termed the Twenty-one Demands to the Chinese government in January 1915 with the request that the contents be kept secret and only published when agreed. Of the five sections, the last was aimed at turning China into a kind of Japanese protectorate. Yuan Shikai, president of the Republic, had no option but to publish the document in the hope of gaining foreign support. But, sadly, China had no real allies. In the end she had to agree to a watered-down version of the demands with the exception of those in the fifth part which was, euphemistically, 'postponed'. The British, allied to Japan and with a fleet thinly stretched in the Far East, could scarcely afford to protest, and most British in Hong Kong appear to have brushed the matter aside. So long as the Japanese did not interfere in the British sphere of interest in China
the whole Yangzi Valley they were not about to stretch themselves on China's behalf.
—
Hong Kong followed with avid interest the daring exploits of the German cruiser Emden, whose movements read like some adventure story as she disguised herself as a Russian cruiser, and contrived in view of the Penang Club to sink a Russian ship in Penang Harbour. The Emden had taken a considerable toll of British shipping including the cruiser Monmouth. There was great relief when the news of the sinking of the cruisers Scharnhorst and . Gneisenau in the Battle of the Falklands was received in November 1914. With the destruction of the German Pacific fleet, including the Emden, Hong Kong slept more comfortably.
Hong Kong people contributed generously to war charities, raising $5 million as a gift to the British government. In 1917 the Hong Kong Defence Corps was formed from the Volunteers and military service became compulsory. British shipping up and down the China coast was taken over by the British government and normal commercial activity virtually ceased until peace returned. Imported goods became progressively dearer but as if in compensation the value of silver rose in relation to gold, trebling or
The First Two Decades of the New Century
223
quadrupling the assets of many a local entrepreneur. But with the war dragging on and British reverses in battle coming one after the other, with the lengthening casualty list, the gloom of Britain settled on the colony. China eventually declared war on Germany on 14 August 1917, her main con- tribution to the Allied cause being the 200,000 Chinese labourers sent to work behind the lines in France at the expense of the Chinese government.
Sentiment in the colony turned very strongly against the Germans as the situation worsened in Europe. In 1917 the British Chamber of Commerce voted that Germans be excluded for a decade from the colony. It was a melodramatic if understandable gesture with not the faintest hope of gaining official support, and the motion was later reversed without acrimony. The spring of 1918 brought no relief from the carnage in France, and the mood of the colony grew darker. In January a gang of youths were trapped as they robbed a tenement in Gresson Street, Wan Chai. Cornered, the armed robbers decided to shoot it out, taking heavy toll of the police. In the following month came a huge conflagration in the Cheung Sha Wan shipyard, and soon after that the racecourse matshed fire shocked the colony. As if to crown a chapter of horrors, an epidemic of cerebro-spinal meningitis ran through the Chinese tenements like those of Gresson Street with the speed and finality of fire. Meanwhile the daily press published the latest casualty figures from France.
In September 1918 the Governor, who had served a continuous term of six years in the colony, left on a brief vacation. He retired the following January, and a joint meeting of the Executive and Legislative Councils was held to pay tribute to him. (This was the second joint meeting in three months, the previous one having been held to celebrate the end of the War.) The occasion was a memorable one with two principal spokesmen, Mr Lau Chu Pak and Sir Paul Chater, voicing what were certainly the sentiments of the majority of people in Hong Kong. It was a highly charged moment, and speeches tended to be emotional: but the character of Sir Henry May was summed up with fair accuracy. ‘Sparing of speech and sparing of smiles', said Mr Lau, but he never spared himself in the execution of his duty to the colony.' Chater had the final word: 'As Governor he made a mark which will be indelible from the colony's history.' He had certainly devoted the greater part of his working life to Hong Kong.
With the ending of the war there ended not only an epoch in world history, but a term in the political, social and commercial history of the colony; and it began to be clear that another and sharply different age was dawning, in East and West alike.
18. Inter-war Years
the Twenties
SIR Reginald Stubbs took up office as Governor in Hong Kong in September 1919. He had visited the colony nine years previously to arrange details of a scheme to pay civil servants in sterling instead of dollars. He was therefore slightly familiar with it. But by now, imperceptibly at first, various emphases in Hong Kong life had begun to alter in the light of changing attitudes in Britain in its post-war mood, and partly in response to events over the border in China; and also consequent on the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and the later Washington Treaties of 1922.
* ME
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The motor car began to be a more visible element in Hong Kong in the 1920s. Looking west in Chater Road in the early 1920s, the tram, the rickshaw, and the handcart are the sole vehicles, with the exception of the one parked car.
Inter-war Years the Twenties
—
225
Britain's financial and commercial position in the world had suffered drastically from the pressures of four years of total warfare. Long accepted presuppositions about her place in the world were severely shaken. The war had eliminated Germany's colonial and commercial clout in the Far East, and for a time Russian influence there was weakened by the Communist revolution of 1917 and its aftermath. But Japan was a rising sun, Britain's chief rival — something that could have been predicted in the wake of the Twenty-one Demands of 1915 which sought to make China a Japanese dependency.
The Washington Naval Limitation Treaty of February 1922, signed by the United States, Britain, Japan, France, and Italy stipulated that battleships and first-class cruisers held by America, Britain, and Japan were to be respectively in the ratio of 5:5:3. Those of France and Italy were to conform to a ratio of 1.75:1.75. This meant that while Japan had her fleet concentrated in the Pacific, the larger fleets of America and Britain were much more thinly spread around the world. Japan was thus the strongest naval power in the Pacific. The treaty was to remain in force until 1936.
For China, the Nine-Power Treaty in the Washington Agreements perpetuated the Open Door policy with its equality of opportunity for foreigners to trade in China, while preserving her integrity as a state. Such provisions were not accompanied with the means to enforce them. The upshot of what was for China a sad and tangled story of international intrigue and big-power rivalry was that she emerged in much the same state of bondage to the treaty powers as she had been before the war.
The re-emergence of Sun Yatsen's Guomindang at its First National Congress in Guangzhou, in alliance with Soviet Russia in 1924, came at a time of endless warlord rivalry and combat. Faced with country-wide warlord depredations and internecine warfare, Marxist ideology seemed to offer hope, its attractions highlighted by the success of the October Revolution in Russia. Marxism was seen to be more attractive than Western democracry, in part because like Confucianism it was not religion-based. And the Chinese saw themselves, like Russia, defeated by Japan. Moreover, the same imperial powers who had forced on China the Unequal Treaties were seen now by the Chinese to be attacking the revolution in Russia. When Western intervention in Russia was defeated, the Chinese were naturally enthusiastic.
Yuan Shikai's aspiration to be emperor at the head of a new dynastic regime ruling from Beijing came to nothing, and no formula was found there for a workable form of democratic government. Sun Yatsen in the south had the capability of inspiring his followers, but his idealism was not matched by a corresponding strength of political leadership. He called for advice from Russia, and received among other advisers Michael Borodin, who was to train party political cadres. Sun hoped, by linking the nationalism of the
226 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
Guomindang to socialist ideas, to make it into a truly revolutionary organization. Under his tutelage efforts were made to harass the Western
powers.
In Hong Kong the effects of these events were felt soon enough. Europeans were not totally unaware of the implications. They sensed, if dimly, the new Chinese pride in being a nation and not just (as formerly) a race.
Confronted in early 1919 with a full-blown strike in Hong Kong, Westerners were slow to understand its cause. In fact the strike was about the price of rice which had risen dramatically, in a city where rice and not bread was the staff of life, in response to scarcity caused by the shortage of shipping and the shortfall in the wheat and potato crops in the West. Westerners had turned to rice. Price rises in other commodities in Hong Kong during the war had not been matched by wage increases; and the threat even to the rice supply was seen by the Chinese as insupportable.
Westerners, seldom great rice eaters, scarcely realized the gravity of the situation for their Chinese employees. The large numbers of engineers and fitters employed by various businesses, faced with rising rents, food costs, and now a shortage of rice, politely asked for a 40 per cent wage increase. Their realization of the potential power they wielded was still embryonic; they requested rather than demanded.
Taikoo Docks, one of the largest employers of skilled and semi-skilled labour in the engineer and fitter categories, had also to face the Hoi Yuen or Seamen's Union which was developing under the eye of the more extreme elements in the political context of the Guomindang. The man behind the action taken by the engineers was Hon Man-wai, an educated man with a command of English and a forceful personality. He had begun his career as a teacher in the engineering faculty of the university. By 1916 he had left and set up his own machine shop, a successful business which he ran for the next four decades. His personality was one considerable asset in potential leadership. Another was the fact of his being self-employed. He was not subject to the threat of dismissal. As head of the Chinese Engineering Institute in 1920, his right-hand man was chief of the meter installation department in the Hongkong Electric Company, Li Cheng, who also had some English.
These two well-balanced activists were a phenomenon startlingly new in Hong Kong. Both were capable, responsible men, sharing views on the need for improvement in working environments, not least those of apprentices who toiled in conditions resembling those in the factories of the early Industrial Revolution in Britain. Hongkong Electric was, however, one of the better employers, and Li Cheng spent his entire 50-year working life in their employ.
At first the employers did not take the request for a 40 per cent wage rise seriously. But soon they were forced to face the fact that it was backed by an organized work-force. At a meeting held to discuss what they could do the
Inter-war Years the Twenties 227
―
employers decided to increase the rice allowance. In the hope that trouble would go away, they had not seized the core of the problem the general rise in the cost of living. In a letter from their lawyer, Lo Man-kam (later an Executive Council member, and knighted for his services), the Chinese Engineering Institute rejected this offer. When the employers ignored the letter deadlock was reached. Employers simply could not credit the fact that they were no longer in a position to control their work-force at will, far less to dictate to the Engineering Institute. It was a shock.
The Secretary for Chinese Affairs, E. R. Hallifax, insisted on a second meeting of employers. At this it was decided to ask the Secretary to negotiate a settlement on their behalf, with the engineers' and fitters' representatives from all dockyards, binding on all other employers of engineers and fitters. Mr Hallifax's prime mistake lay in not realizing that it was with the Institute he ought to negotiate. Austin Coates writes in his book on the history of Hongkong Electric:
What the Europeans had overlooked was that the following day was Ching Ming, the annual festival of remembrance of the ancestors ... At five o'clock closing time, and at various shift changing times, 40 per cent of all fitters in the dockyards, and 25 per cent of the fitters at Hong Kong Electric, politely informed their immediate bosses that they were leaving for their villages to give respect to their ancestors ... Off they all went by night train to Canton.
Several days later, after the festival was over and no one had returned to work, many more fitters in other businesses began to leave also. The major supplier of soft drinks, A. S. Watson, stopped production and hotels lost their engineering staff in charge of boilers and mechanical devices. The docks were silent. Only the telephone and gas services continued operating, although their employees too were asking for a 40 per cent rise.
―
At this point Ho Man-wai did two highly responsible things. He put out a notice explaining the workers' point of view; and he sent to Guangzhou to persuade the workers to return. The success of his organization the Institute had perhaps surprised even him. The workers were not keen to come back. Wages were higher in Guangzhou and the cost of living lower. The Canton Times cautioned: 'If the strike goes on, many will find permanent employment in Canton, and Hong Kong will be the loser of a class of men which have [sic] taken so long to qualify for their avocations, and whose places will have to be filled by untrained and inexperienced men
to the detriment of their employers.' And in Hong Kong itself the editorial opinion of the Hong Kong Morning Herald was: 'The Chinese cannot put up with living in this way any longer, and are compelled to strike for higher wages.' Chinese employers offered to concede the 40 per cent, but the Europeans would not budge. An affiliate of the Hong Kong Institute the Fitters' and
228 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
―
Turners' Guild of Guangzhou then offered to reduce their workers' claim to 37 per cent, and Hallifax urged the European employers to accept this but they declined, the Jardine representative being the most obdurate in refusing to agree. Finally the employers offered 32 per cent, which was promptly rejected. It was now a question of face. The engineers had started the conciliatory process by their offer of 37 per cent, and now it was the turn of the employers to do likewise and raise their own offer. The employers, with ill grace, offered 321⁄2 per cent and settlement was immediately made on 19 April. In a matter of hours the workers were returning from Guangzhou by train.
So ended the first major strike in the colony. Its importance in the history of labour relations in Hong Kong cannot be exaggerated. For the first time Europeans were forced to recognize the needs of the labour force. For the first time they realized that they could not any longer rely on a supply of unquestioning cheap Chinese labour a point of view taken by much of the local press in an attitude unusually at variance with the temper of Western employers. The modern age of labour relations had, belatedly, arrived in the colony.
—
From the European point of view, worse was to come. In 1922 the Chinese Seamen's Union, the Hoi Yuen, influenced by revolutionary nationalism and the newly established Communist Party of China's Labour Secretariat (whose job it was to organize industrial trade unions), came out on strike, joined by 12 other trade unions. At this point Hong Kong experienced its first general strike, the life of the colony being at once paralysed. The Hoi Yuen took its place as the leader of 70 unions in the Hong Kong Federation of Labour, an organization which listed the struggle against imperialism and capitalism among its objectives.
With a general strike on his hands, Governor Stubbs must have felt his appointment was far from a sinecure; and when the thorny legal problem of mui tsai once more raised its head, it must have seemed obvious that a new and abrasive era in human relations in the colony had dawned. This time the question came up with the formation of a Society for the Protection of Mui Tsai, and with the combination of the Anti-Mui Tsai Society and a decision of the left-leaning trade union leaders in favour of its abolition. Winston Churchill, at the time Secretary of State for the Colonies, telegraphed the Governor on 22 February 1922 demanding that he issue a
proclamation immediately, making it quite clear to employers and employed that the status of mui-tsai, as understood in China . . . will not in future be recognized in Hong Kong and ... that no compulsion of any kind to prevent girls over age from freely leaving ... their adopted parents or other employers will be allowed.
In the teeth of the united opposition of the Legislative and Executive Councils
Inter-war Years
the Twenties
229
an ordinance was passed (No. 1, 1923)2 to accord with Churchill's wishes. But it was to remain a dead letter until in the latter part of the decade interest quickened in ‘child slavery'. The Nationalist government in Guangzhou later (in 1927) issued a proclamation emancipating all slaves and mui tsai, and in Hong Kong in 1929 the Governor was instructed to register all mui tsai. The problem, however, proved obdurate. A commission sent out to Hong Kong in 1936, and numerous other measures taken, failed to eradicate the practice. There were still over one thousand mui tsai registered in the colony, and probably many more unregistered. Even in the 1970s, cases were still coming to light.
3
Stubbs' six long years in Hong Kong were among the most socially and politically vexatious in its history to that date. The engineers' and the seamen's strikes were followed by a larger and much longer strike and boycott in 1925–6. In essentials this stemmed from a popular political movement against the privileged status of foreigners in China. The trouble began in Shanghai in May 1925 when an anti-Japanese demonstration developed into a general anti-foreign one; this in turn changed into an anti-British demonstration because of the great preponderance of British commercial interests in China, particularly in Shanghai. The police of the International Settlement, who happened to be British, opened fire on a crowd which they felt was threatening to get out of hand. The incident was exploited by the Chinese. At this time the Guomindang were co-operating with the Communists in fomenting labour unrest in foreign-held settlements, and Hong Kong came in for its share. In the colony the trade unions had de- veloped as a kind of co-operative in such a manner that they were partly trade union, partly under the influence of the Communists, and partly an extension of the traditional Chinese secret societies, their general complexion being nationalist and anti-foreign. The strike and boycott were in large measure politically inspired and concerned the antagonism between the government of Guangzhou and that of Hong Kong. The fact that when a more conservative element gained the upper hand in Guangzhou the two sides were prompt to negotiate a settlement (on 10 October 1926), almost sixteen months after the strike began, makes that point clear.
In the meantime, until the boycott was lifted in October 1926, the position of the colony was grave indeed. A total boycott of British goods was accompanied from 30 June 1925 by the withdrawal of all Chinese workers. The essential services were maintained by volunteers, the armed forces, and by the Hong Kong Volunteer Corps. While the actual strike gradually collapsed, the boycott of British shipping and goods continued.
One noteworthy incident in the strike was the initiative of a well-known Chinese, Dr Co Sinwan (Ts'o Seen-wan) who more or less commandeered an office in the City Hall and publicly called for Chinese volunteers to assist in running services. The response to Dr Co's call was immediate. In three days
An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
―
more
230
he had 500 volunteers, and in the next 20 days about three thousand than were required. The astonishment of the ‘old China hands' was intense. When the strike was at its peak, the Governor made a speech to the Legislative Council in which he declared (without referring to the Russian influence in Chinese politics of the time): 'This is not a strike but a deliberate attempt to destroy, in the interests of anarchy, the prospects and the very existence of the community.'4 He was wrong about anarchy Communist policy. Hallifax referred to the strike when it ended as ‘the failure of the Moscow-Canton attack',5 which was nearer the mark. The general effect on Hong Kong was a new feeling of solidarity, which was precisely the opposite of the instigators' intentions. There are no available figures to show the effect of the boycott on trade, but shipping returns reveal something of the picture (see Appendix 5).
―
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Sir Reginald E. Stubbs (front row, far right) with the members of the Legislative Council and others on the steps of Government House. In the centre of the front row is Sir Claude Severn, Colonial Secretary. Sir Paul Chater stands in the second row to the left (white moustache). Albert and Reuben Sassoon are in the second row to the right of Severn, and the well-known dentist and early motor car owner, J. W. Noble, is in the second row to the left of Severn.
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The East Point offices and godowns of Jardine's, newly built in 1844. Unknown artist, 1844.
The residence of the Lieutenant-Governor, Major-General D'Aguilar. Murdoch Bruce, 1840s.
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Chinese nursemaids with their charges on the Parade Ground. Charles Wirgman, 1856.
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Happy Valley racecourse and the colonial cemetery. Chinese school, late 1840s.
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Spring Gardens, looking east. Murdoch Bruce, 1846.
Sir Boshan Wei Yuk, a wealthy business man. Unknown Chinese artist, early twentieth century.
Hong Kong Races 1858
The Road.
A crowd on the way to the races. Charles Wirgman, 1858.
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A street stall and its patrons, still a common sight throughout south China. William Prinsep, 1839.
Hong Kong coolies in the rain, wearing straw coats. Unknown artist, mid-nineteenth century.
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A view of the north shore of Hong Kong island. To the left are the naval docks and in the centre are the business district and, behind this, Mid-Levels. Serried ranks of tall buildings stretch on to West Point, far right. Frank Fischbeck, 1989.
Almost all arriving and departing cargo in 1924 was still handled by lighters and crew, and by gangs of coolies, most of them still wearing traditional clothing.
The pre-boycott number of British steamers entering Guangzhou harbour in the months of August and Setember 1924 varied between 240 and 160: in the same period of 1925 the number varied between 27 and only 2. Hong Kong's share of the China trade fell to just over 10 per cent and continued below 20 per cent until the Sino-Japanese War.
The colony made a slow recovery. Political upheavals within China reduced purchasing power there, but imports from China still ran high. The pattern of the colony's trade altered considerably in the years immediately after the War and until the commencement of World War II in Europe. The old entrepôt trade with China was diminishing in relation to the growing importance of the total colonial trade. And trade with the western Pacific and with South-east Asian countries was on the increase. The trade figures have to be viewed in conjunction with the changing value of the dollar. In 1919 the Hong Kong silver dollar varied between 5s.2d. and 3s.3d. In 1920 the fluctuation was even wider, and after 1921 the value never exceeded 3s.od. The 1931 trade recession caused it to drop below one shilling.
The need for currency reform brought, eventually, a commission appointed in London. It recommended that Hong Kong should adhere to the silver standard as long as China did, that banknotes should be convertible into silver bullion, and that note issue be in the hands of a Hong Kong Currency Board, as should the silver bullion reserves. The Chamber of Commerce
232 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
agreed with this assessment which seemed to consider that the colony was still very closely linked with China in trade, and that it would be advantageous to retain China's silver standard rather than take advantage of a currency based on gold. The Chamber of Commerce, however, argued that since about two-thirds of the Hong Kong note issue was held in Guangzhou, Government control of currency was not desirable.
The impossibility of Hong Kong as an entity — colonial, administrative, or even social
pursuing a course wholly its own has been encountered previously. Hong Kong was, and today remains, very much a reflector of world currents of the needs of other places in material goods, of the trends in their politics, and even of their social emphasis. At the end of the 1914-18 war, Britain, the ‘land fit for heroes', was in the grip of disillusion and social change. Doctrines such as socialism were hotly espoused and equally vehemently denied and vilified. From the human sacrifice that had been exacted by the most terrible of wars there emerged a bitterness as society did not accord those heroes what was said to be their due. And if the age of nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalism had not vanished, it had cooled in the face of left-wing home truths. Hong Kong, the early Victorian child of just such untrammelled private enterprise that put personal and corporate aggrandizement first, had become the prime Asian example of its success, reflecting in the twenties both the British past and also its post-war com- plexion. Like Britain, it had trouble adapting to the new mood: unlike in Britain that mood came upon Hong Kong society from above and not from the grass-roots, all-classes trauma of human sacrifice in war. It was as artificial in the colony as the fragile British bravado of the 1920s attempts at female emancipation.
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The unveiling of the memorial to the Hong Kong dead of World War I, 24 May 1923.
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In 1920, Bernard Shaw and his wife, on a visit to China, passed through Hong Kong where they were entertained by Sir Robert Hotung. From left to right: Mrs Shaw, Ho Shai Lai (Sir Robert's son), Sir Robert, Mrs Simpson, Shaw, Professor R. K. Simpson of Hong Kong University, Lady Hotung.
The formerly self-assured British view in Hong Kong of the Chinese became a little less arrogant with increasing doubts about Britain's role in the post-war world. The growing financial dominance of the United States and the upsurge of Japan's commercial and naval power were but two of the new factors in world change, in which the colony was the merest pawn.
Stubbs was doubtless relieved when his term of office ended. The boycott was not yet over and he had had a hard time as Governor, politically rather out of his depth when it came to dealing with the complexities and crises induced by the metamorphosis in China. He was succeeded by a man who had every qualification to be called the colony's most intelligent Governor, Sir Cecil Clementi. He had been chosen by the Colonial Office in one of its more rational, even inspired, moments as the man most likely to match the subtly, yet in some ways radically, altered circumstances in Hong Kong. Sir Cecil had begun his diplomatic career as one of that select group of cadet officers from whom much that was worthy in Hong Kong's administrations had come. Arrived in the East, the cadets were expected to gain a mastery of the Chinese language at Guangzhou during their first couple of years. Their task was to
Sir Cecil Clementi, KCMG, LL D.
convert themselves in language spoken and written into Western versions of traditional Chinese gentlemen. Clementi succeeded better than the others in those tasks and was acclaimed by the Chinese for the excellence of his calligraphy. Both he and Lady Clementi were persons of charm and culture, Sir Cecil described by the Bengal poet and savant Rabindranath Tagore after a lunch at Government House in 1928 as 'one of the most cultivated Europeans I have ever met in the Orient'. Others were to react in much the same fashion.
6
An administrator of more than usual skills, Sir Cecil was also (what Stubbs was not) a diplomat of some brilliance. It was through his patient efforts in establishing friendly contacts in Guangzhou at the highest level (thanks to his fluency in Chinese) that normalization of Sino-British relations was achieved in the area. During a visit to Guangzhou, Clementi announced British recognition of the Guomindang as the National Government of China; and this was far from his only diplomatic success. In the decade which followed Clementi's term as Governor, practically every important advance in the progress of Hong Kong may be traced in its initiation to him. To Clementi was due the clearance of the slums those insanitary, inhuman terraces whose sole windows opened on the front and which were built back to back, enclosing a series of airless, windowless cubicles, worse even than the slums of Guangzhou. To Clementi was due the building of Queen Mary Hospital at Pok Fu Lam, opened in 1937, overlooking the Dairy Farm's herds on the airy slopes above the sea. The Shing Mun reservoir, the first major water storage facility in the New Territories, was begun under Clementi.
Inter-war Years the Twenties
—
―
235
The Governor was a man before his time like Hennessy, but infinitely more diplomatic and cautious on the subject of race relations. His acquaintance with Hong Kong, he wrote in 1926, and with things Chinese, extended over a quarter of a century. One of his major worries was that the Chinese and European communities in the colony, in daily contact as they were, moved in different worlds and had no comprehension of each other's way of life and thought. This, he thought, retarded social, moral, intellectual, and even commercial progress. There were few enough people in his or any other time in Hong Kong who thought in this way. And Clementi was too early in the century to be able to effect a rapprochement in any but business relations. It was to require future dire events in the Orient to nudge the process along.
In 1929, on Clementi's initiative, the Hong Kong Flying Club was formed. The year before had seen the arrival of four flying boats from Singapore, but it was to be another six years before Kai Tak was in regular use for commercial planes. By March 1936 the Hong Kong-Penang flight was inaugurated, linking with flights from Britain which terminated there. A year or so later the South China Morning Post was carrying advertisements for Imperial Airways: 'Fly to England for the Coronation ... Hong Kong to London in 10 days. Twice weekly.' In the same year, 1937, Pan American linked Hong Kong to Manila, and it was then possible to fly from the colony to San Francisco in six-and-a-half days. In 1938 Kai Tak airport handled almost ten thousand passengers. The journey to Britain by rail through China, and via the Trans-Siberian Railway through Russia, took 18 days; and by steamer five weeks; but the cost of air travel was still prohibitive. In 1939 the single fare to London was £160, compared to the return steamship fare of £105 first class; and a one-way ticket on the Trans-Siberian was a mere £57. Among other memorable events of the Clementi years was the death of Sir Paul Chater, so long a leading figure in business and in philanthropy, at his baroque residence Marble Hall on Conduit Road. It is open to doubt whether Sir Paul ever realized the mocking connotation which attached to that name as a synonym for the worst in bourgeois pretension, and surely he was ignorant of the next line of that early Victorian music-hall ditty, ‘I dreamt that I dwelt in Marble Halls', from which it came 'With vassals and serfs
at my
side'. Instructions in his will decreed that his death was to be followed by burial within 12 hours. It was presumed that his wish was to avoid public expense, eulogies, and the like. But the stipulation on timing caused near chaos. No radio service was available to inform the numerous persons who should know, and Chater's death at 5 a.m. missed the morning papers. But somehow the Dean of the cathedral got together a service at 1 1 a.m., attended by a large congregation. Flags flew at half-mast, the Stock Exchange opened only to close immediately. And by 5 p.m. Sir Paul's wish was granted, and he was interred.
7
―
I
Chater's home, Marble Hall, No. 1 Conduit Road.
With the passing of Chater the last but one of the grand barons of nineteenth-century capitalism in the colony had gone. His was the style of business on a grand scale which combined the pursuit of personal gain with public service and, latterly, with philanthropy in a thoroughly British nineteenth-century manner. His fortune accrued from many an enterprise which added to Hong Kong's ambience and facilities as did that of his friend and partner Hormusjee Mody who was to die before the next war broke out.
―
19. Inter-war Years
the Thirties
THE month of May 1930 brought the next Governor of the inter-war period, Sir William Peel, who was to serve for exactly five years. It was to prove a time of financial difficulties in a rapidly changing world.
In 1931 Britain had to abandon the gold standard and the policy of free trade, and in 1932 came the introduction of imperial preferences for manufactured goods using a minimum of 50 per cent of material of Empire origin or labour. The system had to be modified in order to be applied to Hong Kong, which was a free port and had almost no raw materials. The colony itself imposed an import licence fee on cars not of Empire make. However, its free port status was not seriously compromised, and it stayed outside the sterling area until 1941.
In 1934, in the face of the sharply rising value of silver caused by heavy United States buying of the metal, China was forced to abandon the silver standard and Hong Kong followed suit, with the result that all silver specie was called in and the export of silver was stopped as a preliminary to an overall reorganization of the currency. The Currency Ordinance of December 1935 spelled out the principle of a managed currency linked to sterling, the note issue backed by gold bullion, and by foreign exchange and sterling securities. The dollar levelled out at 1s.3d. Cupro-nickel coinage replaced silver, and three issuing banks were to furnish notes of $10 and upwards, the government issuing those of smaller denominations.
This was the first time the colony's currency was not linked to that of China. The new situation soon proved advantageous. For the first time its trading ties were stronger with other countries than with China. In 1928 China had at last managed to recover tariff autonomy, severing a long tradition by which the revenue from its customs had been paid into three Hong Kong banks, latterly into the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank only, with the Customs Service itself always headed by a British commissioner.
Housed in its stately pillared halls, domed, with the solid grace of a sturdy Victorian taste, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank continued until 1934 in
4
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In 1935 when China went off the silver standard, shipments of silver arrived by boat in Hong Kong in straw bags which often broke. The silver coins or even ornaments, since it was valued by weight – had then to be boxed and manhandled ashore.
-
the old building, functioning as it had from the inception as one of the greatest promoters of Hong Kong trade and industry. Its comprador during this period was Ho Sai-wing, an adopted son of Sir Robert Hotung. A Eurasian like his adoptive father, his natural father had replaced Robert Hotung as Jardine comprador; and Ho Sai-wing's brothers were compradors of the Mercantile Bank, E. D. Sassoon and Company, and Jardine and Arnold Company.
In Ho Sai-wing's time the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank worked still on old-fashioned lines, the ledger entries being made in Chinese brush instead of pen and ink, the abacus still clicking. The Chief Manager, the grandly named Sir Vandeleur Grayburn, however, in the early 1930s urged the need to build new premises, and 1935 saw the new headquarters opened.
Designed, as had been its forerunner, by the local architectural firm Palmer and Turner, this building conveyed an overall effect of up-to-the-minute modernity inspired by examples in the Paris Exposition des Arts Decoratifs et
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Laying the foundation stone of the new Hongkong and Shanghai Bank which was to open in 1935, the third building to house the Bank.
Sir Vandeleur Grayburn, Chairman of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.
Industriels Modernes of 1925, and by rising skyscrapers in New York. The interior was in art deco style, with what at the time was the largest con- temporary mosaic, consisting of 4 million glass tesserae, and made in Venice to a design by a Russian emigré named Podgoursky. His creation, ‘a pastiche of classical, modern industrial and commercial, Oriental, and Western themes', was intended to reflect the spirit of the thirties. The poet W. H. Auden, in one of his less memorable verses, writing about the colony, refers to the bank:
Here in the East the bankers have erected
A worthy temple to the Comic Muse.
Sir Vandeleur, accused of wasting the shareholders' money, hesitated before finally agreeing to install the then ultra-modern air-conditioning. 'My own impression', he wrote, 'is that air-conditioning ... tends to diminish disease and certainly renders the staff very much more comfortable and more able to do work efficiently.' Little did he know it then, but within a few years he was to suffer imprisonment without a vestige of air-conditioning in the dire conditions of Stanley internment camp under the Japanese; and, weakened by ill-treatment, to die of meningitis. Ho Sai-wing, his chief comprador, also died of the effects of maltreatment by the Japanese in 1946. The 1935 building was to serve the Bank until 1982, when it was demolished in favour of one which the forward-looking Sir Vandeleur would surely have approved of for its use of today's up-to-the-minute architectural style,
The view of Statue Square from the Bank's new headquarters, the statue of Queen Victoria in its domed shrine in the very heart of the colonial city. The three parked cars date the picture to before World War II.
as interpreted by Sir Norman Foster. The new bank building was opened in 1986.
During the whole inter-war period, while most colonies raised revenue by means of indirect taxation in the form of a customs tariff, among other means, Hong Kong, a free port, was unable to do so. Yet colonial expenditure rose in a fairly steady curve. Until the very end of this period it was thought undesirable to introduce direct taxation, partly because to have done so would have stirred the proverbial hornet's nest in the form of fierce opposition from the merchants and every other element of the business community. Revenue was to a very large extent derived from rates, land rents, land sales, licences, postage stamps and estate duties, and taxes on betting.
Colonial revenue showed a quite steady increase, year by year, except during the 1931 slump. The figure for 1921 was $17,728,000, rising to $33,549,000 10 years later, and to $41,478,000 in 1939. War taxation imposed in 1940 boosted the receipts to $70,175,000. Expenditure in these years also increased: in 1921 it was $15,739,000 and by 1939 it had more than doubled to $37,949,000. Military expenditure over the period also rose, from $2,318,654 to over six million dollars; at the same time police costs
242 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
doubled. The cost of the social services rose steeply from something not much over half a million to almost two and a half million dollars. Spending on sanitary services doubled to $1,148,000.
The heaviest item of spending was that for defence, amounting to 20 per cent of the total revenue. In a typical year (1939) claims on the revenue after defence were: 91⁄2 per cent for police, over 10 per cent for public works, 51⁄2 per cent for education, and nearly 10 per cent for sanitation and medical facilities. The remainder something over 40 per cent went on ad- ministration, pensions, and sundry small items. The total revenue in 1939 was $41.5 million and expenditure ran to $38 million figures almost ten
times those of 1901.
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The evolution of the educational system in Hong Kong has been char- acterized as continuing with 'typically British flexibility'.1 The facts would appear to support the interpretation 'muddled pragmatism'. After the ap- pointment of a Director of Education in 1909, little was done until the setting up in 1921 of an advisory body of officials from the Education Department and representatives of the community. At the end of 1921 the system of grants for voluntary (missionary) schools was terminated except for five schools with specially recruited foreign staff under European management. This type of school later increased in number to 12. Monthly subsidies were paid to other schools needing help, provided they had good reports from the Inspectors. Missionary and secular institutions were treated alike.
Only about 10 per cent of the colony's peasant population could read or write. The majority lived in the New Territories and compulsory registration of schools was extended there in 1921. Medical inspection of schoolchildren had begun in the following year, and a school medical officer was appointed in 1926. The breakdown of schools by type showed in 1923 a total of 471 urban schools with an enrolment of 24,000 pupils. Of these, 164 estab- lishments with 9,397 pupils received subsidies. Rural schools amounted to 192 with 4,665 pupils, one half of them subsidized. European children over nine years attended the Central British School, later to be renamed King George V School, in Kowloon – still in being today. The general pattern thus established continued with gradual improvements until the outbreak of · World War II.
Teacher training was carried out at the Technical Institute, and for teachers who would work in vernacular schools, at the Man Mo Temple and the Belilios Public School. New Territories teacher training began at Tai Po in 1925 and on Hong Kong island the Northcote Training College started up in 1939, training teachers for both the Anglo-Chinese and the vernacular schools. On Hong Kong island Chinese boys of well-to-do families went to Queen's College where the demand for places became so heavy that King's College was opened in 1926. A Superintendent of Physical Education was appointed in 1927.
Inter-war Years the Thirties 243
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The university, started with such high hopes, was insufficiently funded a common Hong Kong predicament in places of learning and art. A com- mission recommended government assistance, and this was approved in 1920. A grant of $1 million enabled the university to pay its debts. The university's share in the Boxer Indemnity (money exacted from China following the siege of the Beijing legations) was £265,000, to which the Rockefeller Foundation added half a million dollars in 1922 for the endowment of three chairs, of medicine, obstetrics, and surgery. One further significant gift was the Fung Ping Shan Chinese Library, built and endowed by a Chinese banker of that name, which was later changed to a museum of Chinese antiquities. Female students were enrolled in 1921; and in 1939, tardily, a science faculty was added. But the only honours degree courses were in the engineering faculty which for many years continued to be, as Lugard had wanted, the largest of the faculties. By 1938 the university had 536 students, of whom, commendably, 118 were women. Just prior to the Japanese occupation a new science building opened, while the technical college and the evening institute offered elementary engineering courses and courses on commercial subjects.
The waving of an administrative magic wand over the Sanitary Board, in 1936, converted the former locus of dispute and disrepute into the Urban Council: but since the wand had failed to confer on it any new powers, the exercise was initially more cosmetic than significant. The new council had five official and eight unofficial members, of whom two were periodically elected on a franchise based on the jury lists, and six (three of whom were Chinese) were nominated by the Governor. The council was to remain for the time being almost toothless in a civic situation requiring considerable mastication. Its officials were salaried government servants, its deliberations resulting in by-laws which were subject to the approval of the Legislative Council which retained the real power in questions of public health. The urban areas were divided into 28 districts, each in the charge of a sanitary officer. For all the urgency of past cries, when even this degree of municipal government became a reality, only one candidate was nominated at the first election in 1936. The first contested election was another four years away in 1940, when two opponents from the Portuguese community stood. Electoral enthusiasm was scarcely striking.
In the 1920s there were three types of hospital in Hong Kong: government hospitals sadly inadequate in services and number of beds; mission hospitals; and the Tung Wah hospitals. Government hospitals came under the Medical Department headed by the Director of Medical Services from 1928 on- wards. The incidence of plague had fallen by the early 1920s, but from causes unknown there was a rise in 1922 when over one thousand cases were recorded. But from then on the incidence dwindled rapidly, so that by 1925 plague had all but disappeared from the colony. There were small outbreaks
244
An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
of cholera, while malaria, which had killed off thousands in earlier times, was prevalent only in parts of the New Territories.
A new post of Labour Officer was created in November 1938. Attached to the Secretariat of Chinese Affairs, his duties were to investigate labour conditions in factories and to enquire into trade union activities. In trade disputes he would act as arbiter of wages in relation to the cost of living. He was also charged with applying the Workman's Compensation Act. For reasons unknown, the designation ‘protector of labour', held by the Secretary for Chinese Affairs, was transferred not to the Labour Officer but to the Chairman of the Urban Council, under whom the Factory Inspectorate also worked, thus compounding an already muddled chain of responsibility.
British policy towards devolution of power was, and continued to be in the pre-war years, one of reluctance and caution. A Constitutional Reform Association had been launched in 1917, its aim to promote greater repre- sentation of the public in the Executive and Legislative Councils, and to press the home government to give Hong Kong a voice in deliberating post-war trade policies. The Association did little until after the war, when it proposed changes in the Legislative Council including allowing more Chinese into the Council. All its suggestions were dismissed by the Secretary of State.
No change was made in the principle that official majorities should control both councils. But the tempo of Chinese nationalism over the border, and the increasing disparity between the numbers of Chinese and of British residents slowly brought about a feeling for minor changes. The mid-1920s strikes pushed the process on. In July 1926 the first Chinese member of the Executive Council, Sir Shouson Chow, was appointed by Clementi, following the death of Chater. This brought the number of unofficials to three, with six official members, of whom four were ex officio. Until the Pacific War no further changes were made. The 1931 slump and economic depression in Europe seriously affected Hong Kong, bringing contracting trade and diminishing revenues for two years. No sooner had trade begun to recover in 1933 than open hostilities began in China as the Japanese attacked.
The Legislative Council was augmented in 1929 by the addition of two unofficial members to a total of eight, and also by two official members, to make 10. Of the unofficials two were elected by the Justices of the Peace and two by the Chamber of Commerce; three were Chinese, and the Portuguese community had one representative. The term of service of an unofficial in the Legislative Council had been reduced in 1922 to four years and in the Executive Council to five.
In concert with the variously expressed community desire for fuller representation in the affairs of Hong Kong, there was an increasing demand for more local people to be appointed to senior government posts. In part this was abetted by the need for retrenchment, and a committee of 1932 came out in support of the idea, suggesting that opportunities for the employment
Inter-war Years the Thirties 245
―
of Asians existed in the Medical and Sanitary Departments, which might be filled by graduates from the university. The employment of trained Chinese nurses was suggested. The policy was ardently championed in the Legislative Council by Sir Man Kam Lo, and was accepted by the then Governor, Sir Andrew Caldecott, in 1935. 'Government', said the Colonial Secretary in the budget debate, ‘has fully and frankly accepted the policy of replacing wherever possible European by Asiatic employees.' But it was not until well after the then approaching war that large numbers of Chinese came to occupy senior posts.
Other aspects of the administration were modified, often because of growth, in the inter-war period. The Colonial Secretariat affords an example. By the end of the 1930s the Colonial Secretary was assisted by four cadets in place of the one or two formerly required; sometimes there had been none. The right of direct approach to the Governor was shared by the Colonial Secretary and two others the Financial Secretary and the Secretary for Chinese Affairs, all three holding ex-officio seats on the Legislative and Executive Councils. The Treasury remained under the Financial Secretary's control. It was administered, however, by heads of three sub-departments those of the Accountant General, the Assessor (for the assessment and collec- tion of rates), and the Superintendent of Inland Revenue, who administered revenue ordinances such as stamp and estate duties, entertainment tax and betting tax. In the latter part of 1938 the accounts and stores section of the Public Works Department was made into a separate department under the Financial Secretary.
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The Supreme Court consisted of two judges the Chief Justice and the Puisne Judge, with the occasional appointment of a third. Cases were committed to the court by Magistrates, two in Hong Kong and two in the New Territories, the District Officers acting in the New Territories as Magistrates in their divisions.
During those inter-war years the Police Force was made up of Europeans, Chinese, and Indians. The title Inspector General (formerly Captain- Superintendent) was changed in 1935 to Commissioner of Police. He had under him 12 superintendents, one police cadet, 270 European, 843 Cantonese, and 296 Weihai constables, numerous Indian constables and a special force (including some Russians) of anti-piracy guards. The security system also included numbers of Chinese and Indian watchmen, selected by the police but paid and controlled by private individuals or companies, who also employed private registered watchmen. There was also the useful District Watch Force, working in Chinese areas in some degree of co-operation with the police. The Commissioner of Police was usually head of the prisons and fire services as well. The much-needed new gaol was built at Stanley on the southern coast, but from its inception it was too small.
The remaining major departments of the government were the Audit
246 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
Department (paid locally but reporting to the Auditor-General in London), the Harbourmaster's Department, the Civil Aviation Department, and the Botanical and Afforestation Department. The Postmaster General had charge of broadcasting and telecommunications other than the local telephone service, which was run by private enterprise. On the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939 temporary war departments were set up the Controller of Enemy Property, Controller of Trade, Controller of Food, and Censor and Detaining Officer. In the previous year an Air Raids Precautions Officer had been sent out from London."
2
Sir Andrew Caldecott governed briefly from December 1935 until April 1937, encountering renewed demand for the appointment of more local men to more senior posts in government. But the pace of implementation remained slow. Outside the Medical and Health Department little was done until after the war. Caldecott was succeeded by Sir Geoffry. Northcote who figures among other 'grotesquely famous newspaper-characters the British Ambassador, the Governor, Sir Victor Sassoon', in Auden and Isherwood's book, Journey to a War, revealing how superficial was the judgement of the two young writers. Northcote arrived in November 1937. A year later, with the Japanese just over the border, the first emergency regulations were issued (on 28 September, the day on which, at Neville Chamberlain's urging, the
The Fanling Hunt flourished in the inter-war years, the hounds following the scent laid by trailing a bag of aniseed along the ground prior to the event. Major H. C. Harland, Royal Scots, was a member of the Hunt, which continued to meet until a few days before the Japanese occupation.
Inter-war Years
the Thirties 247
Czechoslovak President Eduard Beneš virtually offered to sacrifice his country to Hitler to ensure peace). The regulations were designed to secure the colony's neutrality in the Sino-Japanese war. Repair and victualling of Japanese and Chinese ships engaged in that war was forbidden. Powers to ban meetings and processions suspected to be seditious, and to impose censorship on Chinese newspapers, were taken. The government assumed powers to control food prices, and later to intern Chinese and Japanese combatants should they take refuge in the colony. Another ordinance of March 1939 required the registration of all European males of 18 to 55, and this was followed by conscription in July 1940. In August 1940 came the Hong Kong Defence regulations, and in September the Defence (Finance) regulations. The first Compulsory Service Tribunal sat on 28 August 1939, hearing 250 cases, but conscientious objectors were few. With the first black- out exercises the colony began to feel the effects of the war, yet such was the prevailing nonchalance that as late as spring 1941 air observers noted that Hong Kong was 'a mass of lights'.
Over all the preparations for the unpredictable future, Sir Geoffry pre- sided. Three months before his retirement, in February 1940, he opened the China Light and Power Company's new power-station at Hok Un (Ho Yuen the Garden of Cranes) in the Hung Hom district of Kowloon. The company had shown itself over the years prepared to invest against higher future demand for electricity, and was now installing new plant with a capacity of 60 MW (the demand in 1940 proved to be only 13.8 MW). Sir Geoffry ended his speech at the opening ceremony with a question which he then, with all the resonance of prophecy, answered: 'What is it that the vision [of the company] foresees? ... Obviously it is to a great manufac- turing future for this town of Kowloon that the China Light and Power Company is looking, and I readily take my stand beside them in that con- fidence.'3 Events of a catastrophic nature were to overtake the prediction but the vision of Kowloon as a great manufacturing centre, then a pipe dream, was to come true.
1
The enterprise of the power company was its response to the tentative industrial growth then just becoming visible. The beginnings of industry went back many years but it had scarcely been a significant factor in Hong Kong's traditional entrepôt economy. In the late 1930s, however, the start of wool- knitting and piece-goods manufacture could be discerned, along with the making of rattan furniture. As goods became harder to find after the begin- ning of World War II in the West, local entrepreneurs set up factories to supply confectionery, biscuits, cigarettes, and perfumes. Other new manufac- tures were leather and rubber-soled footwear, hats, vacuum flasks, torches, and batteries. An economic commission in 1934 had reported a total of 166 factories on the island and 253 in Kowloon, all of them small, the total capital just over fifty-one million dollars. This Commission, unlike the
248 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
Governor when he opened the new power-station a few years later, was pessimistic about the future. The depressed state of world trade at the time and uncertainties within China led it to the conclusion that the industry of Hong Kong could not develop much beyond its present stage except inasmuch as it might form an economic part of the whole industrial development of South China and even to some extent of North China.
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Against the odds enumerated by the Commission, industry did grow, in large part due to the dogged persistence of Chinese business men, as the world depression lifted in the mid-1930s. Exports grew modestly, and established lines knitwear, footwear, rope, cement, preserved ginger and soya products, and electric torches (these last in an Asia for the most part still without electric lighting) all built quite strong markets. New industries arose the manufacture of paints, and the umbrellas essential in tropical rain.
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Not all those enterprises were well founded 1935 saw the closure of 53 registered factories, but also the registration of 60 new ones. A fundamental change in the pattern came at the outbreak of Sino-Japanese hostilities in 1937, when there began a slow shift of mainland Chinese companies out of China. They started to move away from threatened areas to the stability of Hong Kong whose markets, in a period when Japan was increasingly tending to supply its own military needs, and when China's goods were less in evidence, expanded into the South-east Asian area. These new industries included steel-rolling, enamel wares, needle-making and allied small metal manufactures. The war in the West provided scope for others steel helmets, gas masks, water-bottles, field telephone equipment, entrenching and other tools, army radio transmitters. The list soon branched out into bicycles, nails, medicine in tablet form, toothbrushes, and buttons.
The 1938 figure for factory workers stood at 55,000 a total which included only those in registered factories. There were many unregistered. Three years later in 1941 the count was 90,000.
Prior to the war in the Pacific, however, Hong Kong remained what it always had been, a trading centre. Only about 10 per cent of exported goods were of local manufacture. This general picture, one of piecemeal light industrialization, remained unchanged until some time after the end of World War II. There was no government control, no labour relations mechanism for conciliation in industrial disputes or industrial accidents, nor any provision in cases of sickness or old age. Many of the factories were little more than cramped workshops overfilled with outmoded machinery. Working condi- tions were abysmal and only the small scale and absence of heavy industry made the picture different from that of conditions in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
With the start of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, what had become over the years a complex pattern of trading routes with a whole gamut of com-
+
Inter-war Years the Thirties 249
modities traded along them, was slowly but inexorably eroded. The major sea lanes connecting China and the rest of the world were cut at Shanghai, Tianjin, and Qingdao; only Guangzhou and Hong Kong served as the coun- try's outlets and inlets for sea-borne trade. While the colony's share of trade with that part of China not over-run by the Japanese (an area continually contracting) increased, by October 1938 coastal trade with the mainland was virtually at a standstill; for it was at that point that China prohibited all imports from Japan or areas controlled by it. The embargo was withdrawn, however, in June 1939 when it became urgent for China to obtain essential commodities by almost any means. Such goods were shipped to Hong Kong for re-export to Free China once relabelled. China's seaports, all under Japanese control, were once again open to ships from Hong Kong, and momentarily trade revived. The colony took advantage of trade with both Free China and that sector occupied by the Japanese, but as one part of the country after another fell to the Japanese, the merchants began the laborious process of exploring alternative routes for their shipments. This continued until the end of 1941 and the occupation of Hong Kong.
In May 1940, a few months after opening the power-station, Northcote, now ailing, left for home. Spanning the end of that year and part of 1941 a 'military governor', Lieutenant-General E. F. Norton held the reins, appointed to administer the government and tighten defence. His successor, the hapless Sir Mark Young, arrived in September. The Colonial Secretary, N. L. Smith, also left and was replaced by F. C. Gimson, who arrived in Hong Kong on 7 December the night before the Japanese attack on the colony. Both he and the Governor were to be made prisoner for the duration of the occupation.
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20. Invasion and Occupation
HONG KONG on the brink of the abyss was a troubled place. In the two years since the declaration of war with Germany in September 1939 the course of life and business in the colony had altered very considerably, Apart from the disruption of trade and the uncertainties of the international situation — East and West the British in Hong Kong were not slow to discover that they were effectively sealed off from Europe, from the home shores of Britain, for the duration of a war whose length there was no way of calculating. Britain, with its forces necessarily concentrated in the West, was in a weak position in the East, forced to be polite to Japan while at the same time attempting to defend treaty rights in China which the Japanese were in the process of over- running. Japan was in a position of strength. Whatever she did in and around China could be and was, for the most part, done with impunity. Hong Kong people noted uneasily the bombing of HMS Ladybird on the Yangzi in December 1937, and the casual Japanese apology, which contrasted sharply with the payment of an indemnity and the profound admission of guilt over the sinking of the USS Panay in the same attack. It was clear that British power was a vanished dream.
Then came the Japanese violations of the Hong Kong frontier, first in October 1938 and again in February 1939 when Lo Wu on the border was bombed. In June the following year the border was briefly closed by the Japanese in a gesture of contempt for Britain's sovereignty. It was a matter of luck that the colony was not taken by the Japanese in the summer of 1940 that it did not happen was a question of logistics; the supply lines via the Hanoi-Kunming railway and the Burma Road were seen to be more import- ant than that through Hong Kong, and the Japanese turned their attention to them instead of knocking out the colony. Britain had been forced to grovel to the Japanese in signing the Craigie-Arita Agreement in July 1939 in which, after the blockade of the British Settlement at Tianjin, it was agreed that Britain would take no action prejudicial to the Japanese in China. These and other events of a similar nature brought it home to the people of Hong Kong, Chinese as well as Western, that Britain was in eclipse. An editorial in the South China Morning Post on 20 August 1940 summed up popular reaction:
t
Invasion and Occupation 251
‘A poll ... would disclose that the Hong Kong outlook is compounded of reaction, faith, determination, nervous anticipation, evasion and simple fatalism.'
―
The flood of refugees from China which poured across the border prior to July 1938, in flight from the Japanese occupation of China's southern provinces, numbered a quarter of a million cause enough in a city of 1,650,000 people for anxiety. The problems of sanitation and public health, always fragile issues, and even the question of how to provide food and the barest shelter for such an influx, were added and, in the short term, insoluble conundrums.
As far back as mid-1938 the government had proposed setting up three camps for refugees. But soon it became evident that such proposals were ludicrously inadequate. Camps were then hastily organized. The Tung Wah group opened reception centres in their hospitals. But, with overcrowd- ing, conditions were as bad in many ways as in the pre-plague years in Taipingshan. An Immigration Department was set up under a cadet officer, but partly through mismanagement and partly through corruption, this body sparked near panic in the Chinese community over the question of certificates of residence. The cadet officer 'retired' and left Hong Kong one of very few instances when an allegation of corruption was levelled at an otherwise exemplary body of men.
―
Whitehall had issued guidelines on measures to be taken by the colonies in relation to the war, and these were enlarged by the Emergency Regulations of September 1939, which were spelled out from the Secretariat by the Governor acting alone as representative of the Crown, not as Governor in Council. Censorship, the mining of the harbour, powers to requisition ships and aircraft, the defining of areas to be reserved for defensive purposes, the repossession of buildings, measures to prevent a drain of hard currency, and not least the interning of enemy aliens and the liquidation of their property all these had to be done quickly. It proved impossible to control the colony's entrepôt trade, but efforts were made to corner the supply of scarce metals from China used in munitions, thus depriving Japan of such supplies. The anomalous situation of the Hong Kong dollar which circulated in large quantities in the southern provinces of China now under enemy Japanese rule was brought under control in June 1941 by strict exchange measures linking the dollar for the first time with sterling.
—
Starting in 1939, Hong Kong was the first colony to introduce conscrip- tion. Men between 18 and 41 who were fit for active service were allocated to the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps (HKVDC), or to the Hong Kong Naval Defence Force (HKNDF), while others in reserved occupations were given some, training but forbidden to volunteer for the forces without permission.
In this process friendly European nationals volunteered in considerable
252 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
numbers, and the HKVDC was put under a professional soldier and regular army discipline. Men over 55 with military experience were formed into a defence unit under their commander A. W. Hughes, manager of the Union Insurance Society of Hong Kong, and soon came to be known as the 'Hughesiliers' or, more amusingly, as the 'Methusaliers'. Auxiliary police, nursing, fire, and air raid precautions services were formed, the last expand- ing rapidly after the decision not to build public shelters for the populace was reversed in June 1941. Numerous Chinese joined the Volunteers and the British regular forces as drivers and orderlies, while Chinese students with some command of English joined the auxiliary defence services. There were proposals to arm the local Chinese, but British policy was against this in order not to offend the Japanese. The Chinese as a whole stood somewhat apart from all the preparations, leaving it to the foreigners, knowing what happens to civilians who assist armed forces when these forces lose the fight. For the Europeans the threat of a Japanese attack in mid-1940 brought drastic changes, one being the sudden evacuation of women and children 3,474 of them
to Australia. This move proved highly unpopular and was followed, as usual in Hong Kong, by backbiting and accusations of favouritism, racial discrimination (which could scarcely be contested), and of unfeeling bureaucratic inefficiency. The order for this evacuation had in fact come from London. And, true to form, one of Hong Kong's sporadic erup- tions of scandal then came to light in the Air Raid Precautions Department. The decision after all to provide air-raid shelters for everyone meant that now the work had to be done at break-neck speed, and a virtually new organization created almost instantly. Huge sums were involved and the urgency led to graft, especially in the architectural branch of the ARP Department. A commission of enquiry under a Puisne Judge was set up in August 1941 as the result of the discovery that the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation had managed to complete the blacking out of its headquarters in Queen's Road for the total sum of $87 and not the $500 which had been allocated. The Bank, suspecting some irregularity, claimed its $500, duly received it, and reported to the government. The ARP Depart- ment architect was asked to give evidence. When he failed to attend, it was discovered that he had shot himself. Another British official in charge of the many air-raid tunnels being dug into the hillsides was admitted to hospital suffering from severe poisoning.
The commission met in the period between 14 August and 7 November 1941, attracting a blaze of media attention. But its findings were never published. The Judge presiding, P.E.F. Cressal, carried the draft report into internment in Stanley camp a month later, where he died in 1944. The draft vanished: after the war the enquiry was quietly dropped.
In spite of massive preparations by both old and new departments of government in the period before the Japanese invasion, there must be a strong
Invasion and Occupation 253
suspicion that in some ways these operations were hampered by the unusual turnover in the upper echelons of the government just before the fateful attack. A new Commissioner of Police and a new Defence Secretary were appointed in February and April 1941 respectively. The General Officer Commanding the garrison left in August and his successor, Major-General C. M. Maltby, took over. And the Colonial Secretary and the Governor were also new to the colony.
―
Funds to pay for the swarm of emergency measures were derived from emergency war budgets, the money coming from direct taxation on salaries, business and corporation profits, and from levies on property. In October 1939 two budgets were announced the normal one and an additional war budget to enable the colony to fulfil its obligations to the home government as part of the Empire. On instructions from London, income tax was to be considered as the best source of additional taxation revenue. The tax, it was stated, softening what for Hong Kong merchants had always been seen melodramatically as a mortal blow, would be light, and a profits tax was envisaged at a later date. Yield from this source was to be an annual $10 million, of which $7 million (after meeting defence expenditure) would be available as a gift to the United Kingdom.
The outcry was immediate and anguished. Both Chambers of Commerce protested, while all the unofficial members of the Legislative Council condemned the measure. The principal arguments advanced against it were: that flight of capital would result (a possibility); that the Chinese would resent such an inquisitorial tax (probably true); and that all Chinese account books would have to be translated into English (easily circumvented by the employment of Chinese auditors).
The government capitulated. A War Revenue Committee was set up and proposed the imposition of four new taxes: a property tax of 5 per cent of the rateable value; a salaries tax, on the first $5,000 of taxable income, of 4 per cent, and 10 per cent thereafter; a corporation profits tax and a business profits tax of 5 per cent on profits from $10,000 to $100,000, and 10 per cent on profits in excess of that. It was estimated that these new measures would yield six million dollars $2 million to cover the administrative costs of wartime departments, the remaining $4 million to be spent on building ships for Britain. The taxation came into effect on 1 April 1940. In that year the Legislative Council made two gifts of £100,000 each to the British Government. In the Council's budget debate the following year it appeared that the estimated revenue from those new taxes had been correct, but the estimate of expenditure for the war turned out to be $12 million, not the two million dollars anticipated. The rates were then raised from 5 and 10 per cent to 6 and 12 per cent; and while the government continued to threaten full income tax, the Japanese overran Hong Kong before it could be introduced. Questions of the defence of Hong Kong during the inter-war years were
254 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
touched with an aura of unreality in the light of the Washington Naval Limitation Treaty of February 1922, which precluded any extension of the colony's installations. The treaty was denounced by Japan in 1934, with effect from 1936; Hong Kong was no longer bound by its provisions. But it was recognized in the colony and in Britain that Hong Kong could never be a strong base so long as the Japanese, established in Taiwan, could neutralize or even knock it out more or less at will. The garrison was in a tactically no- win situation. Churchill's summing up of the situation in a letter of 7 January 1941 to General Ismay, the British Chief of Staff, was: 'If Japan goes to war with us there is not the slightest chance of holding Hong Kong or relieving it.' Meanwhile it was important to deny the use of its harbour to unfriendly ships. The Japanese occupation of Hainan Island and the Spratlys, and its advance into French Indo-China meant in effect that Hong Kong was surrounded. In his history, The Second World War, Churchill amplifies the statement in his letter: 'I had no illusions about the fate of Hong Kong under the overwhelming impact of Japanese power. But the finer the British resistance the better for all.' Hong Kong was to be fought for not on strategic grounds but pour encourager les autres.
A defence plan had been formulated in 1937 based on holding Hong Kong island and enough of the opposite shore to protect the harbour. Protection from sea-borne attack was to be afforded by artillery on the southern coast. A land offensive was to be confronted by a line of pill-boxes running from Gindrinkers Bay (Tsuen Wan) in the west of the Kowloon peninsula to Tide Cove off Tolo Harbour, and over the hills to Port Shelter. These were to be manned by heavy machine-guns of the Middlesex Regiment so placed to give a connected line of fire. Supplementary light infantry patrols and mobile artillery were to be added. The plan tacitly assumed that the requisite force would be available to man such a line later known as Gindrinkers Line.
With the landing of Japanese troops at Xiamen and at Bias Bay, a fresh look was taken at this plan in 1938. A new one was drawn up which envisaged a limited availability of forces in the colony should war in Europe break out, and only the island being defended. The New Territories were to be the scene of delaying tactics so that military stores, installations, bridges, and public utilities could be removed or inactivated. This was thought to offer about 48 hours delay before evacuation to Hong Kong island. The Gindrinkers Line idea was dropped.
The colony's pre-war naval strength normally consisted of four destroyers. On the eve of the Japanese invasion one of those was not in Hong Kong waters and two others had left for Singapore, leaving only HMS Thracian. There were also four gunboats, eight motor-torpedo boats, and a few smaller harbour vessels.
The garrison consisted of four infantry battalions: 2nd Royal Scots, 1st Middlesex, 2/14 Punjabis, and 5/7 Rajputs. And there were just over four
Invasion and Occupation 255
artillery regiments: two Coastal Regiments of the Royal Artillery, one Medium Defence Battery manning coastal guns, one A. A. Regiment, and the Ist Hong Kong Regiment of the Hong Kong and Singapore Royal Artillery. This last was under strength. A small Royal Air Force flight of three obsolete Vildebeeste torpedo-bombers was accompanied by two Walrus amphibians. The infantry was distributed on the island the Rajputs in the north-east sector, the Punjabis in the south-east, and the two British battalions spread over the rest. Beaches were equipped with pill-boxes, a boom was stretched across Lei Yue Mun, and the beaches and the harbour were mined. In the event of an attack the Punjabis were supposed to operate for some time on the mainland, and then to withdraw to their designated sector on the island. These arrangements having been made, the officer commanding the garrison, Major-General A. E. Grassett, relinquished his post and was replaced by Major-General C. M. Maltby. Grassett, a Canadian, travelled to England via Canada, and while in Ottawa suggested that the government send two battalions to help defend Hong Kong, his argument being that this would assist the forces there to hold out much longer. The proposition appealed to Canada, which was desperately unprepared for war in the Pacific. In London the suggestion was agreed, and the two Canadian battalions,
Major General C. M. Maltby (right), Commander-in-Chief during the defence of Hong Kong here in later years on a return visit with the Governor, Sir David Trench.
seen
256 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
the Royal Rifles and the Winnipeg Grenadiers, were chosen. Both were unprepared for combat due to a shortage of up-to-date weaponry, and required large drafts of raw recruits to bring them up to strength. Intelligence reports suggested that a Japanese attack would be some time in coming, and this, it was argued, would allow time for training in Hong Kong. The Canadians arrived on 17 November 1941. Their heavy equipment did not.
Maltby received news of the Canadian force in October and revised his defence plans. Three battalions were now to be deployed on the mainland, with another three, as before, garrisoning the island. Maltby now thought that the mainland could hold out for about a week instead of the 48 hours previously envisaged. And this was essential to any return to the pre-1938 plan whose principal element was Gindrinkers Line. The Line, partly furnished in 1938, now required a great deal of work to complete. This went ahead, and officers were briefed on the scheme. No troops were sent to posts on the Line in case the Japanese thought an attack was feared to be imminent. No one had many illusions about the Line. Its main weakness was that much of it was overlooked from the vantage point of Tai Mo Shan and from Needle Hill. And it was the first and last line of defence, Kowloon being too near for a second on which to fall back. Another detraction was that the Line was too long to be adequately manned, a problem which Maltby attempted to circumvent in October 1941 by suggesting the recruitment of a battalion of Chinese infantry to man machine-guns. Permission to do this came too late. The battalion would have been the first Chinese battalion in the British Army. On the arrival of the Canadians, Maltby moved the garrisons into position one brigade of three regiments to Gindrinkers Line under Brigadier Wallis, a second under the Canadian Brigadier J. K. Lawson on the island. The total strength of the garrison was now about 12,000 men but other weaknesses were both obvious and inevitable the lack of air support left the General with no aerial reconnaissance, forcing him to prepare for attack from almost any quarter; no pre-emptive strike could be carried out; and the two anti- aircraft batteries were pathetically inadequate against air attack. The naval force was also inadequate to prevent enemy landings.
-
Perhaps the saddest element in the defence of Hong Kong was the effective . betrayal of the gallant defenders, even as they prepared for action, by the almost totally erroneous British intelligence reports upon which they had to depend. Coupled with the fact that every Japanese officer in the attacking forces had maps of all the British defence positions and details of how they were manned and equipped, this doomed the defenders to a fate which their small numbers doubtless dictated, but which made a nonsense of their sustained bravery in action, and which was in the outcome of very doubtful utility. Among many inspired decisions taken during the course of the war, Winston Churchill's insistence on the last ditch defence of Hong Kong must be seen as a spendthrift, heartless command.
Invasion and Occupation 257
One example of the inadequacy of British intelligence was that on the eve of the Japanese attack Maltby estimated the strength of the forces opposing him at three divisions. In fact there were four. Other intelligence estimates put the fighting quality of the Japanese as low, and probably even lower against Western troops than against Chinese. They were said to be ill-equipped, their air force inaccurate in its bombing, the pilots unused to night manoeuvres. Reports of the British military attachés in Tokyo, and of others with first- hand experience of Japanese fighting in China, were passed over. The men of the Hong Kong garrison, on the flimsiest of grounds (to put it mildly), were mostly convinced that the island was impregnable. In 1941 every senior officer was boosting the morale of his audience by the claim that ‘Hong Kong is a fortress'.
Against this cardboard fortress whose weaknesses every Japanese officer knew in detail, the enemy threw an irresistible force. Their 38th division under Lieutenant-General T. Sano comprised the 228th, 229th, and 230th infantry regiments, each having three battalions under Major-General Ito, backed up by ‘mountain artillery, anti-tank guns, field artillery, howitzers, mortars, heavy artillery, engineers, landing craft and [not least] overwhelm- ing air support'.1 This force was protected at its rear from the Chinese, and although it did not outnumber Maltby's force it could call on three more divisions and was outstandingly better equipped. The Japanese were also masters by sea. Almost every detail given by British intelligence about them proved the exact opposite of the truth. Maltby faced an army of well- disciplined men, intelligently led, flexible in tactics and in conquering form. The Japanese from the first took the initiative and despite minor local setbacks kept it for the 17 to 18 days that it took to force the colony's surrender.
―
Winter 1941-2 was one of the darkest periods of the war for Britain and the Allies. Japan planned her attacks on the unprepared base of the American fleet in Pearl Harbor, on Hong Kong, and on the Philippines and Malaya, as simultaneous surprise actions whose sheer daring would gain for her an initial strong advantage. The strategy proved correct almost to the last detail. In Hong Kong insistent Chinese reports had told of Japanese troop movements on the other side of the border, and these had been heeded by Maltby. By the evening of 7 December he had moved his troops into positions both in the New Territories and on the island. The Volunteers were mobilized, the harbour defences manned. The recall of service personnel had been demanded on the radio and even on the cinema screens that evening.
Before dawn on 8 December a signal from Singapore brought news of the invasion of Malaya. Maltby and his staff then entered what was called the ‘battle-box', an underground headquarters dating from 1940, 50 feet below Victoria Barracks in Central. Dawn brought news of heavy Japanese troop movements just over the Hong Kong border. At 7.30 a.m. the order to
N
D
258 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
blow up the frontier bridges went out and roads were made impassable as the Punjabis retired towards Tai Po covering the demolition squads. At 8 a.m., 12 Japanese bombers with an escort of 36 fighters put all five RAF planes and eight civilian aircraft (which were on the ground, at Kai Tak, having no air cover and no warning of approaching enemy planes) out of action. Simultaneously the Japanese crossed the Sham Chun River on temporary bridges. They advanced eastward towards Tide Cove and a vulnerable section of Gindrinkers Line, their regiments making speedy progress. The summit of Tai Mo Shan was occupied from the west and the Japanese were poised to attack the below-strength Royal Scots at the key point of Shing Mun redoubt. In a brilliant and unorthodox move the Japanese descended on the redoubt from above and tossed grenades down the ventilation shafts. Five hours' fighting later it was theirs. The way to Kowloon was open. The
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7. The defensive line (Gindrinkers Line) and the routes of the Japanese attack on Hong Kong. (Source:
Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse, p. 6.)
Invasion and Occupation 259
outcome was never in doubt, but the delaying tactic had to some extent succeeded. By II December the order to evacuate was given, and the speed with which this was carried out seemed to bewilder the enemy, little interference being encountered even as the last troops were ferried to the island in broad daylight on 13 December. The mainland forces survived more or less intact, despite the abandonment of 170 mules, stores, ammunition, and other equipment, reaching the island in fair order. The defence of the mainland had lasted just five days.
The plight of the population of Kowloon was unenviable. No official hint of the planned withdrawal to the island had been given, and they had no clear idea of what was afoot, though no doubt most guessed. By 12 December all ferries from Kowloon across the harbour were crowded, the last chances to cross to the island obviously imminent. The police were withdrawn and looting started, terrorizing those who stayed on. That evening a huge load of dynamite being brought on a barge from Green island to Victoria was accidentally blown up by a shot from a patrolman who had not been told of its arrival. The explosion woke the whole city and blew out thousands of windows, adding to the confusion and fear. Among other explosions was that at the power-station in Kowloon as employees disabled the main turbine. Yet others echoed from the docks as installations there were dynamited.
Chaos reigned on the island. The explosion of the ammunition unnerved people crowded in makeshift accommodation, sleeping in public rooms of hotels. A spate of rumours spread by the Japanese fifth column (barbers, waiters, employees of Japanese businesses) which had for years operated in the colony served further to agitate the population.
Thus began five days of suspense before the Japanese assault on Hong Kong island
an island now completely at their mercy. A Japanese staff officer in a boat, with three European women hostages, crossed under a white flag from Kowloon bearing a demand from Lieutenant-General Sakai which read:
Since our troops have joined battle, I have gained possession of the Kowloon Peninsula despite the good fighting qualities of your men, and my artillery and air force, which are ready to crush all parts of the Island, await my order. Your Excellency can see what will happen to the Island and I cannot keep silent about it. You have all done your duty in defending Hong Kong so far, but the result of the coming battle is plain, and further resistance will lead to the annihilation of a million good citizens and to such sadness as I can hardly bear to see. If your Excellency would accept an offer to start negotiations for the surrender of Hong Kong under certain conditions, it will be honourable. If not, I, 'repressing my tears', am obliged to take action to overpower your forces.2
The offer was declined, as was a further one. Then began the systematic shelling of all military targets on the island. At this point, had it not been for
260 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
Churchill's order, a responsible Governor would have negotiated the surrender. But Sir Mark Young did not have that option open to him. He replied to the second offer from the Japanese:
His Excellency summarily rejects the proposal. This colony is not only strong enough to resist all attempts at invasion, but all the resources of the British Empire, the United States, and the Republic of China are behind us and those who have sought peace can rest assured that there will be no surrender
3
•
•
C
Sir Mark Aitchison Young, Governor from September 1941 to May 1947.
It was starkly apparent to all senior officers that the chances of a long resistance were nil and that in the process bloodshed would be severe, among both combatants and the civilian population. Sir Mark, however, obeyed Churchill's orders. The shelling of Hong Kong began on 12 December and continued on the following day. On the evening of the 15th the Japanese · attempted a landing at Pak Sha Wan but were easily beaten off. The next day shelling intensified and on 17 December another attempt was made by the Japanese to procure the surrender, and again it was refused. In a severe bombardment, the Japanese tried to reduce the coastal defences of the eastern sector of the island. It was plain that it was in this area that they intended to effect a landing. Then, by bombing and shelling Chinese residential areas and the Central district, by dropping leaflets encouraging the Chinese to turn their backs on the British 'exploiters', the enemy attempted to soften up resistance. On 18 December the bombardment increased all along the shoreline from Causeway Bay to Lei Yue Mun, and that night the Japanese
Invasion and Occupation 261
landed at three points, at once surging inland to higher ground. They captured Wong Nai Chung Gap the next day, the defence there cut in two when the enemy advanced downhill to Repulse Bay on the southern shore. The East Brigade was forced back towards Stanley, and despite stubborn and in many a case heroic resistance by pockets of defenders, the courageous, pointless siege of Hong Kong came to a bloody end on Christmas Day 1941 (see Appendix 7).
On that Christmas morning the South China Morning Post carried the headline: ‘Day of Good Cheer', under which, almost incredibly, the following paragraph appeared.
Hong Kong is observing the strangest and most sober Christmas in its century-old history. Such modest celebrations as are arranged today will be none the less lighthearted... There was a pleasant interlude at the Parisian Grill shortly before it closed last night when a Volunteer pianist, in for a spot of food before going back to his post, played some well-known favourites in which all present joined with gusto
4
In and around Stanley village and in other places on the cold hillsides, men were lying unattended, bleeding to death from wounds sustained in the defence of the revellers in town.
It was then, on Christmas Day, on the advice of General Maltby (who had in fact advised it 24 hours earlier) that the Governor announced the surrender. With the General, he crossed the harbour, white flag flying, and offered unconditional surrender to Lieutenant-General Sakai. The Japanese newspapers reported that 'the historic meeting between victors and van- quished was conducted in a nice spirit'. And this was later confirmed by General Maltby whom Sakai permitted to stay with his men. Churchill, writing long after in The Second World War, concludes:
Every man who could bear arms ... took part in a desperate resistance. Their tenacity was matched by the fortitude of the British civilian population [he fails to mention the Chinese]. On Christmas Day the limit of endurance was reached and a capitulation became inevitable. Under their resolute Governor... the Colony fought a good fight. They had won indeed the 'lasting honour' which is their due.
And, he might have added, on his orders by their action the war against Japan was carried not one inch forward. Sir Mark was taken prisoner and sent to Wusong in China, and later transferred to Taiwan where he remained until the end of the war. 'I would say generally', he was to write after the war was over, 'that the treatment which I experienced at the hands of the Japanese during my captivity was almost invariably inconsiderate, that it was frequently objectionable, and that it was on occasion positively barbarous.”5
262 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
It was just a century since the British had taken Hong Kong: now they had lost it. Almost overnight most of that century's achievement vanished. The rule of law, the municipal amenities such as water, gas, electricity, food supply, currency stability, public transport, and the postal service ceased and with them the raison d'être of the colony's existence, trade and commerce. Almost overnight Victoria followed Kowloon into the limbo of occupation's woes: normal life was suspended. With that the population began the long years of makeshift, of near starvation, of ragged existence. But the human spirit is protean in its capacity to fend for the human body. Without gas and electric power to cook the rice, a start was soon made on stripping every vacant building of its combustible material; doors, window frames, even staircases and parquet flooring, were torn out; paper, too, vanished in heat and smoke under the cooking pots, and much of the record of those past hundred years of turbulent administration and equally rumbustious trading disappeared as the rice was cooked. The streets of Wan Chai wore a dilapidated air, the tin helmets of Chinese who had been in the armed or other services lay cast away for fear of Japanese reprisals if they were to be discovered indoors. In the absence of motive power, enterprising former employees of the tramway company hitched a couple of bogies to a wooden platform, and themselves to the makeshift vehicle hauling passengers for a few cents along the now disused tracks of the fortunately level route through the city.
The weary remnants of Maltby's gallant army, young and old, were rounded up by the Japanese and marched off to one of the most barbaric of prison camps, in Kowloon at Sham Shui Po. All the British civilians men, women, and children were sent by truck to Stanley camp on the island's southern peninsula where the existing prison was located, with a school, a small hospital, and the assorted dwellings of the personnel who ran those facilities before the occupation. Conditions were primitive in the extreme, food appalling and inadequate in quantity, discipline harsh and arbitrary, and the death rate as incarceration went on very high. Some military prisoners were transferred to Japan to camps as barbaric as that at Sham Shui Po, others were lost en route as the Americans sank the boat conveying them. . The Chinese and neutrals not imprisoned subsisted as best they could in conditions as daunting to the body and spirit as may be imagined in a sub- tropical city shorn of virtually all its amenities. And there, in the decaying urban shambles, in the dastardly camps, all were to remain those who survived that long ordeal for three years and eight months until the Japanese defeat and surrender. Until the liberation of Hong Kong.
The half-life of the camps has its literature; but the miseries and endurance of the majority the mass of Chinese have no such memorial to life under the Japanese boot. There is not even a casualty list of those killed by Japanese shelling and bombing. Little of substance has been written of the deprivations
大亞
大亞
.:.
February 1942. A group of the colony's bankers being marched to work from the quarters where the Japanese confined them.
European prisoners in Stanley camp, 1945.
!
264 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
of the Chinese people, endured for as long as the foreigners endured those of the camps. Large numbers of Chinese left for China in the slender hope that there they might find means of life better than in Hong Kong
an exodus encouraged by the Japanese whose inept and brutal 'administration' failed to feed the population who had all unwillingly joined the vaunted 'Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere'. There were prominent Chinese who attempted to alleviate the sufferings of their compatriots by intercession with the conquerors, but their efforts came to little. Japanese conquest was aimed solely at Japanese aggrandizement, and amounted to simple rapine ruthless and cold. The worst aspects of Western colonial expansion pale into insignificance by comparison.
The end was slow in coming for all those who survived in Hong Kong. On 29 August 1945 Rear-Admiral Harcourt sighted the China coast. On the following day his flotilla was in turn sighted by the internees. in Stanley camp around II a.m. (and doubtless by thousands of Chinese at the same time). A communiqué was issued to the effect that the Admiral had arrived. One of his first duties was to visit Stanley camp where he was greeted with intense jubilation. One of the Royal Marines who was present described the inmates as 'walking skeletons'. He failed to mention the plight of the half-starved Chinese whom he must have seen in quantity on the roads as he passed through the island on his way to Stanley.
30 August 1945. HMS Swiftsure passes North Point after entering the harbour following the Japanese surrender. Admiral C. H. Harcourt landed from Swiftsure at the naval dockyard in central Victoria.
21. Rehabilitation and Transformation
THE Hong Kong which the liberators found at the end of August 1945 and which the internees rediscovered after almost four years of incarceration was a shambles. The tattered remnant of its population, fallen through hunger- attrition and Japanese emigration policies by about a million from its pre-war 1,600,000, was in rags, creeping about in a drab city mouldering from the years' neglect. The Japanese had capitulated on 14 August.
Hong Kong people crawled out of the ruins of Japanese occupation dazed, demoralized and destitute, to return to a city that had ground to a halt under alien administration. The population had dwindled to about 600,000... and there was hardly a heartbeat left in the city. Yet as the internees struggled out of Stanley [camp] and the flag went up, first on the Peak on August 18 and then all over, the most obvious thing to do was to set up house again and go back to work. And so within hours of the gates of Stanley being opened, the first small signs of new life appeared. The trams were running [if fitfully] on August 20, followed soon by the ferries. And from then on it never looked back.1
In the broadest sense this was true. But there was an infinity of things to be done. As far back as November 1942 it had been recognized in London that the best way to resume the administration of liberated areas when the time came was to set up a military occupation. Each liberated area was to have a Chief Affairs Officer who would take responsibility under the military commander until such time as a civil government could take over once more. A small staff was set up under the Civil Affairs (Military Planning) Unit of the War Office. The move was agreed with the Americans. But in 1944 the Americans put a different construction on the agreement whereby, were any territory to be liberated as a result of a Japanese surrender (and not as the result of an Allied operation) an American force commander would take over. American opinion and that of President Roosevelt ran strongly against the continuance of colonialism and in favour of building up China as a world
266 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
power. In 1942 the President stated on the subject of Hong Kong: '... let's raise the Chinese Flag there first, and then Chiang Kai-shek can next day make a grand gesture and make it a free port. That's the way to handle it."2
The absence of a realistic appreciation of the situation was perhaps less apparent then than it is now. Chiang was never a man of the grand gesture, most especially when it concerned the idea of a free Chinese port where customs revenues could not be gathered. Both the Americans and the British had signed a treaty with Chiang's nationalist government in January 1943, the British treaty returning to China the International Settlements at Shanghai and Xiamen and concessions at Tianjin and Guangzhou. But on the question of the New Territories, raised by Chiang, Britain made it clear that they formed part of the colony and that she was surrendering ‘all existing treaty rights relating to the system of Treaty Ports in China',3 which did not include the New Territories.
Among its problems the Planning Unit needed to recruit personnel with experience of government in the colony. But as most of those were imprisoned, this was hard to achieve. N. L. Smith, a former Colonial Secretary, and D. M. MacDougall, a senior civil servant who had escaped from the colony a few hours after the capitulation, were appointed to the Planning Unit. All members were given army rank. The inner core of eight were all former Hong Kong civil servants.
Thanks to the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, victory over Japan came sooner than had been expected, and the Planning Unit was far from prepared on 30 August 1945 for duty in the newly liberated colony. MacDougall, Chief Civil Affairs Officer, and a staff of nine reached Hong Kong on 7 September, the remainder arriving later.
, 4
In the colony the Colonial Secretary, F. C. Gimson, who had spent the occupation in Stanley camp, left it immediately on the Japanese surrender. A directive from London of 17 August instructed him to assume responsibility for administration. The guidelines were the immediate restoration of British sovereignty and administration until a force commander arrived to set up the Military Administration. On 27 August Gimson replied that he had already done this. 'I have taken up residence in a building near the Hong Kong Bank With me are all members of the Executive Council as well as other senior Government officials Gimson weathered the storm until the arrival of Rear-Admiral Harcourt with the British flotilla on 30 August. Harcourt then assumed the office of Commander-in-Chief, Hong Kong, and head of the Military Government, temporarily retaining the Gimson administration, and Gimson himself as Lieutenant-Governor. The question then posed itself: in the circumstances, was a military administration necessary? Gimson was against it. But when the advance guard of the interim civil government staff arrived there was less urgency for his presence and that of his colleagues
all of whom sorely needed leave.
-
14.
F. C. Gimson, Colonial Secretary from 7 December 1941 to 6 September 1945.
The Military Administration was established by proclamation on 1 Sep- tember 1945. It was to last eight months until the restoration of civil govern- ment on 1 May 1946, and during this period most of the problems of getting the colony working again were tackled. Harcourt was to say that the real work of rehabilitation had of course to be done by the Chinese, now given their freedom, food, law and order, and a stable currency. Freedom yes. Food, in very small quantities — rationing continued into the 1950s. Law and order was easier to ensure, for on the whole the Chinese wanted only to be left alone to build or rebuild their businesses and make much-needed money. The currency was indeed stabilized, by various means.
The term Military Administration was something of a misnomer, for the administration was in the hands of pre-war government officials whose natural leaning was to replicate the way in which the pre-war departments had been run.
After the euphoria of liberation the realities of a city resembling nothing so much as a typhoon-battered junk, dismasted, rudderless, in still doubtful weather, and with a starved crew, began to take mournful shape. Some idea of the magnitude of the tasks ahead appears in the policy directive issued to MacDougall from London. This required the establishment of a police force and military courts, and of camps for the relief of the distressed; the control of the influx of civilians; the provision of medical facilities and sanitary measures; the restitution of essential public services; the establishment of currency, fiscal, and banking arrangements; and the control of prices and wages. Given the state of affairs in Hong Kong, these instructions must have seemed like an order to remove the Peak with pick and shovel. A further brief adjured MacDougall, the Civil Affairs Officer, to be mindful of the long-term objectives, which would involve him in: reorganization of courts, police,
17
3
The Japanese Admiral signs the surrender with the Japanese Commissioner for Foreign Affairs (in short sleeves) watching.
and prisons; rehabilitation of commerce and industry, and agriculture and fisheries; reconstruction and redevelopment of public and private utilities including postal and air services; reorganization of the hospitals and the public health and sanitary organs; reorganization of the educational system; and, finally, preparations to transfer the administration to a civil government. Reading between the lines, it is possible to discern 'the germs of the social welfare policy which was to be a major part of British colonial policy in the post-war years'. A reflection of the Beveridge Report in Britain can be faintly descried, a strange accompaniment to the government's old-fashioned aims of individual responsibility and minimal government interference. Mac- Dougall's instructions included the statement: 'Programmes of departmental activities should form an integral part of a general plan for social welfare, based on the ascertained needs of the community and so constructed as to give proper weight to the requirements of both urban and rural areas. The fellow-feeling, the humanity induced in the West by the horrors of war, inspired in even the most conservative breast some inclination towards socialist practice, and such measures were to make a brief appearance in diluted form in Hong Kong.
16
Rear-Admiral Harcourt delegated by proclamation much of his power to MacDougall as Chief Civil Affairs Officer, who was then made responsible to the Colonial Office in London. By mid-November he reported that only 18
郎
INSTRUMENT OF SURRENDER.
Ne,
Major General Umekichi Okada and Vice
Admiral xultaro Pijita, in virtue of the unconditional
surrender to the Allied Powers of all Japanese Armed
Forces and all forces under Japanese control wherever
situated, as proclaimed in Article Two of the Instrument
of Surrender signed in Toko Bay on 2nd September, 1945,
on behalf of the Emperor of Japan and the Japanesc
Imperial Headquarters, do hereby unconditionally
surrender ourselves and all forces under our control
to Rear Admiral Cecil Halliday Jepson Harcourt, C.3.,
and undertake to carry out all such instructions
C.B.E.,
as may be given by him or under his authority, and to
issue all necessary orders for the purpose of giving
effect to all his instructions.
陸
Given under our hands this
16th
day of
September, 1945, at Government House, Hong Kong.
岡
侍
In the presence of
On behalf of the Government
of the United Kingdom.
On behalf of the Commander-in-Chief,
China Theatre.
The instrument of surrender. The Japanese signatures remain legible but the British ones have faded.
per cent of his staff had arrived. The result of this shortfall was the employment of Chinese and Portuguese personnel in positions of consider- ably more responsibility than those to which they could have aspired in pre- war days. MacDougall paid generous tribute to their performance: 'It can hardly be denied that they thereby established credentials which it would be difficult for any future government to ignore.”
The Union Jack is raised in the gardens of Government House, signalling the return of British rule.
First priorities included the repatriation of prisoners of war and internees, the settling of affairs related to the camps, and the demobilization of Hong Kong's armed forces and Auxiliaries. Medically serious cases among those to be repatriated left on the hospital ship Oxfordshire while other groups boarded various liners, a small number going by air. By the end of 1945 a total of 2,557 persons had departed, leaving only 340 remaining temporarily to assist the administration, or occupied with their own affairs. Of all the prisoners from the camps only 120 stayed on in the colony without departing on leave.
During the occupation the Japanese, in an effort to maintain law and order, had given limited police powers to the proprietors of certain gaming houses and their staff. From a force of 321 regular police there were available only 98 officers of the rank of inspector or above, but both Chinese and Indian constables came slowly back to work when it was made clear that their service under the Japanese would not be counted against them. Most were in poor shape, fit for part-time duties only. Students were then recruited and a Police Training School opened; but the degree of malnutrition to which the police, in common with the populace at large, suffered made training slow. So slow that one local wit described the Police Training School as ‘a convalescent home’.
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Ordinary courts were suspended and a Standing Military Court set up in two separate divisions, dealing mainly with criminal cases, the civil aspect of the law being in effect for the time being in abeyance.
It was obvious that the question of the currency would have to be dealt with at once and effectively, and the authorities were forced to recognize the Japanese yen until a supply of dollars could be obtained. Lord Kadoorie, then Mr Lawrence Kadoorie, recalls how in an effort to get back to Hong Kong after wartime internment in Shanghai, he had reached Kunming in Yunnan Province but could go no further because planes were forbidden to take civilian passengers. By a certain amount of guile and with the help of the American army, he ended up in GI uniform, travelling as freight, on a Hong Kong-bound RAF plane, seated on stacks of banknotes the desperately needed new currency for Hong Kong. This was on II September. Two days later the Japanese yen were withdrawn and notes of the three note-issuing banks (the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, the Chartered Bank of India, Australia, and China, and the Mercantile Bank of India) became legal tender.
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The fundamental of Hong Kong life and livelihood its trade had somehow to be resuscitated. The intention was for the government to handle all trading for six months and then to hand over to private enterprise; but the eagerness of the Chinese community to resume trading overcame government scruples, and on 23 November private trading was again permitted, although under licence in order to conserve hard currency. The first ocean-going private freighter entered harbour by mid-December. The process of revival was assisted by the closure of the Shanghai International Settlement, many companies based there moving down to Hong Kong.
Another huge problem was food supply. With one hundred thousand Chinese returning to the colony every month, the plight of the populace in terms of food was both severe and threatening. It was estimated that 80 per cent suffered from some degree of malnutrition. Food shortages were aggravated by scarcity of money to buy what was available. The government itself was responsible for feeding members of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps and their families, and also for approximately twenty-five thousand destitute persons who ate at government rice kitchens. Those destitute also had somehow to be housed. The solution, as envisaged by the Planning Unit in London, had been to set up a large number of camps. In the event only about ten thousand Chinese destitute were so housed and fed, with the help of charitable societies formed for this purpose.
By the end of 1945 the population figure stood at about 1 million 400,000 more than at the end of the occupation and the situation looked desperate. The Chinese Nationalist Government remained adamant that it would not accept immigration controls, but eventually an agreement was reached under which food was made available to Hong Kong in return for
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free entry to the colony. In sober fact, the Hong Kong authorities had no means to control immigration at this time. Rice was rationed and restricted to bona fide Hong Kong residents; so too were sugar and flour.
An acute shortage of accommodation prevailed, with 60 per cent of European and 15 per cent of Chinese housing damaged in varying degrees. A landlord and tenant ordinance was introduced to freeze rents at pre-war levels. Such conditions precluded the return of European women and children, which was forbidden for half a year; only men performing essential services were allowed to return.
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The rapid population increase, coupled with malnutrition, and poor public health standards due to neglect in the occupation, had lowered the health of the people. The town was infested with rats, tuberculosis was reaching the proportions of a scourge (and remained so for many a year to come); and neither trained personnel nor supplies of any medical materials were due before the following year. Fortunately the water supply system was in fair order, and by mid-November supplies stood at 25 million gallons daily. A single daily train plied between Kowloon and the Chinese border by early September and the service to Guangzhou was resumed on 14 November; but a sign of the times the pre-war fare of one dollar now stood at $15.70. The scuttling of many ships in the battle of Hong Kong, together with Allied bombing before liberation, had left 30 wrecks in the harbour and one at Holt's Wharf; and there were tugs and lighters sunk beside piers and quays. Only three wharves were in use and there was not a single workable crane. A committee of Far East shipping companies looked after shipping on behalf of the administration. Public utilities were soon operating on a restricted basis, but lack of suitable fuel and damage to plant limited the electricity generating capacity. Gas, telephone, and tramway services resumed in stages, and the Taikoo Dock and Holt's Wharf returned to private ownership in March 1946. The Hong Kong and Yaumati Ferry Company ran all ferries, the Star Ferry Company having lost all its vessels. In February 1946 these were raised from the harbour and repaired. The first private civilian car arrived in February 1946. Hong Kong island boasted six buses and Kowloon another like number and lorries with bench seats fitted
became the familiar means of transport for some time.
All the ills of a place that had survived the torture of enemy occupation were manifest in Hong Kong. The bitter recriminations of one group against another, of individuals against fellow citizens about the thorny question of who 'collaborated' (and what constituted 'collaboration') surfaced as they did in France and elsewhere. The psychological wounds of occupation bulked as large as physical injury and malnutrition. Blackmailers and extortionists appeared like leeches, preying on human frailty under duress during the occupation.
With the cost of living by December 1945 still 500 per cent above that of
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1941, labour unrest took over. Wages had not remotely kept pace with soaring prices. In November a permanent Labour Board issued a table of hourly rates for various grades of workers, offered rehabilitation allowances, and set down a cost of living adjustment pegged to the cost of 10 items of food and fuel. The Nationalists exploited this situation, sending delegations. to stimulate unrest, until the Guangdong authorities were asked by Hong Kong to appoint an official to control them. The Communist press, however, showed restraint. The situation was hardly ameliorated when in October the Chinese Nationalists wanted to assemble their forces on Hong Kong soil, to depart on American ships for Manchuria as the Japanese evacuated that area. The suspicion was that the objective was perhaps a more permanent stationing of Nationalist troops in the colony.
The Military Administration continued until May 1946 when the Governor, Sir Mark Young, returning to Hong Kong on 30 April 1946 — the first Governor to arrive by air was sworn in the following day. It was a colourful and moving ceremony at Government House as Admiral Har- court's flag was lowered. In the main hall the 83-year-old Sir Robert Hotung read an address of welcome in Cantonese. The hall, indeed the whole structure of Government House, was dramatically different from the place that Sir Mark must have recalled from four years previously, the most prominent alteration being the Japanese-style tower added to what was a greatly changed main building. The Japanese Governor, General Rensuke Isogai, had decided neither to live nor to work there. Instead he chose the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, living in the chairman's flat on the eighth floor. Later on he moved with his family to a European villa on Repulse Bay Road with a view of the sea. Isogai felt, however, that for reasons of prestige something must be done to rehabilitate the crumbling Government House. To this end he brought a man called S. C. Feltham, the designer of Fanling Lodge, out of Stanley camp. But in the end he settled on a relative, Seichi Fujimura, an architect with the South Manchuria Railway Company. Fujimura produced drawings incorporating Isogai's demand for a structure having something of traditional Japanese architecture, and also symbolizing Japan's military presence, suited to the dignity of later Japanese governors.
In the hall Isogai had placed a life-size wooden samurai in Tokugawa armour and a tiger which had been shot in Stanley in 1942. The animal had been stuffed by one of the Dairy Farm's butchers taken out of Stanley camp for the purpose. (It was supposed at the time that the animal came from Guangdong Province, but more probably it had been freed by its owner, the keeper of a circus performing in Causeway Bay, just prior to the Japanese invasion.)
Sir Mark Young arrived equipped with what was styled the Colonial Office's 'new angle of vision', defined in 1943 as the British Government's intent to guide the colonial peoples on the path to self-government, providing
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as far as possible the economic and social conditions favourable to its realization. As a first step in Hong Kong, Young legalized the new civil government by passing three ordinances through all their stages in the Legislative Council on 1 May 1946. This done, the Governor turned to his brief, containing its Utopian profession of liberal principles in the conduct of colonial affairs, outlining its application to the affairs of Hong Kong and looking forward to affording residents a greater share in the management of their affairs 'the fullest account being taken of the views and wishes of the inhabitants' were his words.
Representative bodies were approached and individuals asked to give their opinions. But — and this remained true of the response to such opportunities to speak out until the mid-1980s reactions proved lukewarm. There seemed to be an innate reluctance on the part of Hong Kong people of all stations in life to join in political debate. The mass of the people seemed content to be governed as they had been, provided always that the government kept its fingers out of the individual's affairs. Some response was, however, received. On this shaky basis the Governor announced his proposals in August. These became known as the 'Young Plan'.
The plan envisaged a 48-member Municipal Council, one-third to be elected by non-Chinese voters and the remainder elected by Chinese and non- Chinese institutions equally. The Council was to have limited functions in urban areas, while the New Territories would be administered separately. The Legislative Council was to include seven official and eight unofficial members with the Governor having an ex-officio as well as a casting vote enabling him to hold a balance between the two sides. The new Municipal Council was to nominate two unofficial members, and other institutions four, leaving the existing nominating bodies with one member each as before.
The plan met with a generally favourable reception. In July 1947 it was approved with minor alterations. Sir Mark had by this time left the colony (in May), and it fell to the next Governor to clothe the concept in details, a process which occupied the next two years. In June 1949 three bills embodying the plan made their appearance. It was a sadly belated appearance, doubtless necessitated by the complexity of the details which had to be debated and decided. By that time the concept of what Hong Kong was and might become had begun to alter radically, not from internal pressures but, as so often in the past (and in the future), from the pounding of waves originating outside its shores.
By the middle of 1949 the Guomindang forces had reached the verge of collapse. Hordes of refugees from the mainland were seeking Hong Kong's peaceful little dot of land in ever increasing numbers. And it was in part those refugees, with the business expertise and the manufacturing skills and equipment which some of them brought to the colony, who had begun to change its complexion. On 22 June the Legislative Council debated the issue
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and a motion was carried delaying the implementation of the Young Plan. The Secretary of State for the Colonies announced in October 1952 that the time for such constitutional changes was not ripe. And there ended the Young Plan, a lone attempt to democratize Hong Kong, relegated to the status of a footnote in the colony's history.
Had the government or the people of the colony at that time possessed the gift of seeing into the future, their excitement would surely have known no bounds. For there, in Hong Kong, in the meeting of those hundreds of thousands of refugees from the horrors of civil war in China, all eager somehow, anyhow, to make for themselves a new life, lay the seeds of the future. In the incubator of the seething territory with its free port, its status as an international entrepôt, with a germinating industrial potential, lay an answer as astonishing as any to the opportunities and hazards of
the times.
Out of that chaotic era, out of the concerted human will to survive and prosper, out of accidental factors such as a world hunger for consumer goods, and out of the huge influx of human skills and experience, a new Hong Kong was to emerge as much to the surprise of its inhabitants as to that of the world in general. The metamorphosis was traumatic. It was industrially and socially revolutionary within a capitalist framework. It took place more rapidly than any similar process elsewhere in the world.
The Legislative Council, resuscitated in May 1946, consisted of nine official and seven unofficial members. In 1951 one more unofficial was added and there were then four Chinese and one Portuguese unofficials. By 1953 there were only two European unofficials. Appointments to the Council were made annually from 1951, and three-yearly in 1953. The Executive Council was also revived in 1946, enlarged in May to seven official and four unofficial members. The following year it was revamped and the number of officials and unofficials was made equal with six each, the unofficials being three Chinese, one Portuguese, and two British.
The Urban Council was also revived with five official and six unofficial members, the election of members being indefinitely postponed. This stimulated the birth of the Reform Club in 1949 and the Civic Association in 1955. In another species of reform, localization in the upper ranks of the civil service was brought out again and the dust accumulated since 1932 brushed off. Posts in the Education, Police, Railway, Medical, and Public Works Departments were opened to local men, the action gaining some strength from the recommendation of the 1947 Salaries Commission that no expatriate should be appointed to a government position if a qualified local person was available. The first Chinese cadet was appointed to an administrative-class post in 1946 and a local man attained the position of head of the Medical Department in 1952. By 1951 over 10 per cent of the administrative and senior professional officers were locally recruited. The 1947 Salaries
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Commission recommended that a 200 per cent rise in salary be allocated for the lowest grades of civil servant, a 30 per cent increase for those earning $1,000 a month, and a 20 per cent increase to those on salaries above $1,500 a month.
Within the administration several new departments were set up Labour and Mines, Transport, Information, Statistics and Planning, and Social Welfare. Expansion in the judiciary gave that department a Chief Justice, a Senior Puisne Judge, six Puisne Judges, eight District Judges, and 11 Magistrates. As important at a later date was the comparatively easy victory of the Hong Kong administration in the long struggle to gain financial autonomy, free now, apart from a consultative obligation, to utilize its revenues in whatever ways it deemed most appropriate. This decision, together with freedom for the administration, was announced by Sir Robert Black in the year of his arrival, 1958. Britain's sovereignty remained but as a general rule was to be exercised only in the control of external relations. The localization policies meant that to jump ahead a little by 1971, of the 2,874 professional and administrative civil servants, 1,609 were local people a little under 56 per cent. This trend has continued ever since, although not in an even manner.
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The Colonial Office was probably not unpleased to leave Hong Kong to wrestle with its own financial affairs in the immediate post-war period. The colony had a large deficit in London, money spent for war purposes. The estimate of revenue anticipated in the 11 months to July 1947 was thought to be a little over $51 million while the probable expenditure looked like being in the region of $167 million. Tax was raised accordingly on those perennial cash cows, liquor and tobacco, and also on stamp duty, water, meals in restaurants, and on sweepstakes. Government financial pronouncements took on an aura of panic for some time. But, in the face of bankruptcy and to the government's evident surprise, recovery went much faster than anyone could have anticipated. The revenue figure turned out to be higher than had been predicted, at $81 million, while expenditure had shrunk to a manage- able $85.5 million. Hong Kong was showing signs of that intense creative vitality which was later to characterize it.
The vociferous anti-income tax lobby, ever active, was side-stepped in 1947 by a technicality. A tax on personal income was not introduced, but in its place four taxes were announced on property, profits, interest, and salaries. The Chinese community exploded in an uproar and petitioned the Governor, calling on him personally at Government House, and cabling the Colonial Secretary. Three unofficials of the Legislative Council voted against the budget in the vain hope that direct taxation would not become a permanent feature of the fiscal system. The budgeted surplus for 1948–9 was estimated at well over one million dollars a calculation which turned out to be nothing short of a laughing matter when the actual surplus attained
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the heady altitude of $35 million. The resurgence of the battered colony could scarcely be described as anything less than exuberant.
On 26 February 1946, as if to mark the end of the painful chapter of defeat, occupation, and disruption of life, the Japanese war memorial which had been erected atop Mount Cameron was blown up, watched by large crowds of delighted people.
Sir Alexander Grantham, who succeeded Young in July 1947, had previously served 13 years in Hong Kong as a cadet officer. He knew the colony better than Young and was now to serve 10 years as Governor the longest term of any. His concept of what Hong Kong needed in recovering from the war was strong government with a strong emphasis on the laissez- faire policies which had been at the heart of its livelihood from the beginning. This was especially pertinent within the general picture of events in surrounding countries. The People's Liberation Army was in control in China, taking the first steps to eradicate the worst evils of the decayed post- dynastic past; a bitter war raged in Korea in which East and West were heavily involved; and a civil war was in process in Indo-China, another in Malaya, and yet another in Indonesia. Instability, rising nationalism, and the gradual dissolution of exhausted colonial regimes characterized much of the Orient. Hong Kong appeared as almost the only place where no upsurge of dire anti-colonial feeling had yet taken place. The administration, accordingly, thought it prudent to encourage the population in getting on with its business with as little interference as possible. By 1948 it was apparent that this formula was working well. The government had in fact little to offer except a rice supply and a stabilizing influence on prices of food and necessities. Wise for the moment, it allowed people to find their own ways out of the slough of post-war problems. While the food situation remained fragile, and rationing was much disliked, they were accepted as necessary evils. Piece by piece the food trade was handed back to private enterprise, the last area being the meat trade which, with the continuing shortage of refrigerated shipping, was delayed until July 1957. The Hong Kong government also operated price and exchange control, the dollar being linked to sterling. No attempt was made to control the free market in other currencies.
By all yardsticks the revival of trade was remarkable. In 1946 the volume (excluding officially sponsored cargoes) was 50 per cent of the pre-war volume, and more than double in terms of value (because of the steep rise in costs since the war), China being the largest importer and exporter; 1947 saw exports reach $1,200 million and imports reach over one and a half million dollars. At this point trade began again with Japan. The total trade figure for 1948 leapt to $3,659 million, and 1949 saw a 30 per cent rise to $5,068 million. This strong upward trend continued apart from a period during the Korean war when the United Nations imposed an embargo on
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trading with China, which was supplying Communist North Korea. This caused a temporary slump. As industry expanded in the 1950s the increasing emphasis came to lie with domestic exports and less and less with the old entrepôt trade.
Such figures for the expansions of trade and local industry necessarily involved the banks, whose function in the colony had always been intimately linked to trade. At the time of the Japanese occupation the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank had transferred its head office to London, the move being effected by means of an Order in Council of 13 January 1943 in which the transfer was back-dated to 16 December 1941. In 1943 Arthur Morse assumed control of the bank under an order of the Colonial Office. At the end of the occupation another Order in Council (20 June 1946) passed all its stages in the legislature in a single session, and made it possible to call an annual general meeting - something that in the absence of enough directors to form a quorum had not been possible since the war. This permitted the general manager to become a director of the bank, and Morse became its Chairman.
Morse was a remarkable banker. With outstanding courage, he envisaged the role of the bank in the revival of Hong Kong's trade as a crucial one, and acted accordingly. Most traders had lost all their stocks, which in effect meant that each had to start from scratch. What was obviously neeeded at once was plant and the materials for reconstruction: equally obvious was the fact that companies could not acquire these until their internal positions were clarified and the situation of each company regularized and legal again. Morse, however, committed the bank to offering advances by opening confirmed credits which guaranteed payments to shippers while in fact, legally, no one but the bank itself could be called into account for the money; an extremely bold, unorthodox move at a time when there was no solid reason to suppose that trade would revive rapidly. Indeed there was scarcely an assurance that the colony would even remain British when Morse made his move.
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After the war Hong Kong did its best to maintain a friendly relationship with China if only for its own sake dropping pre-war restrictions on immigration, and giving the Chinese Maritime Customs the right to collecting stations in Hong Kong and to patrol its waters. Significant assistance was offered to China in setting up her Gold Yuan currency, and the colony, which at the time could hardly afford the gesture, in 1948 sent 10,000 tons of rice on loan to Shanghai where food shortage was acute. The Japanese had removed the boundary stones marking the border of China and the New Territories, so British officials met their Chinese counterparts to replace them by mutual agreement.
With China's civil war ending, the Guomindang fleeing to Taiwan, and with Communist armies over the border, Hong Kong residents were
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understandably nervous. The new ruling force was still an unknown quantity. Britain did the only thing she could in the circumstances to minimize the possible effects on Hong Kong she recognized the new regime in China in February 1950. This action was not greeted with any particular enthusiasm in Beijing, nor was it followed by many other countries in the near future.
The new situation of the colony of Hong Kong at this juncture, two years into the 10-year term of Grantham's governorship, was evident to all. The turbulent, aggressive events surrounding Hong Kong on all sides took a different and, it seemed at the time, extremely threatening aspect, fired in most cases by the heat of nationalism, a force inimical to the very existence of the colony. But, as if to balance this alarming situation, the first springing of a very energetic industrial growth was plainly visible in Hong Kong; and in the developed world, equally visible, was a hunger for goods of all kinds which the ravages of the war had eliminated or made scarce. Hong Kong had, at least potentially, most of the answers a vast supply of willing labour, a leavening of skilled, experienced, well-funded Chinese and other industrial- ists and entrepreneurs ready to equip and re-equip themselves for the production of whatever the world wanted to buy. Hong Kong was a free port, its monetary system was stable, and it held firm to a policy of min- imal government interference with business. These characteristics, with the enormous enthusiasm of the millions of displaced Chinese eager to make a new and better life for themselves, were to prove the foundation of the remarkable industrial, commercial, financial, and social changes which were to come. The page turned on the past. A new chapter of a qualitatively different nature was beginning.
T
22. Population, Housing, and Education
It must be unique in the annals of urban growth for a city to add in the space of just over five years 1,760,000 new inhabitants. When Hong Kong was liberated from the Japanese there were no more than 600,000 people left in it; by the end of 1950 it was estimated that the population stood at 2,360,000. The problems posed were of even greater magnitude.
The source of the metamorphosis which was then about to begin, the origins of what was to be the driving force, lay in the struggle for power in the civil war in China. The turmoil there, whose massive first statement, the Taiping Rebellion a century earlier, was eventually suppressed, signalled the inevitable demise of the Qing dynasty. The end came through the depredations of the Western powers, and was hastened by Japanese conquest; and clinched by the establishment of an unconvincing republic and by the civil war in which the Communist armies triumphed.
One effect of these terminal throes, an incidental product, was the endowing of Hong Kong at precisely the right moment with the commodity it required people. From the millions of harried, displaced, destitute people of China, from its threatened industrial élite, and from their skilled and semi-skilled work-force, the colony began to be populated to an extent never previously envisaged. It was no El Dorado, but for them it repres- ented hope.
As a base for Britain to watch over her Eastern interests Hong Kong had lost relevance there were no longer any to oversee. The colony now had to be defended for its own sake. Hong Kong, however, was to prove that apart from its defence (its integrity was in the event not at stake) and its foreign affairs, it now had little need of the parent country.
From time immemorial the twin gratifications of making money and achieving success in society have formed the addictive magic of capitalism. Whether it be running a fleet of merchantmen, or selling noodles, money and success are the reward. In this the British and Chinese understood each other
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very well. Napoleon's comment about the English being a nation of shopkeepers could well have been expanded to include the Chinese. In its broadest sense shopkeeping involves nearly all the processes involved in other businesses. In Hong Kong the government had few peasants to contend with. It was a colony of city-dwellers, and the basis, the motive power which in a couple of decades was to transform the colony into one of the twentieth century's economic miracles, resided in the tacit mutual understanding of those Chinese and British shopkeepers on a commercial level. Their contact was seldom intellectual, as it was often enough in India, nor was it straightforward military occupation as in Gibraltar. The common interest was business, the two races completely understanding each other only in this sphere. And within Hong Kong's British society there never existed the acute class distinctions that divided British society in India into the ruling civil service and army élite, and the 'boxwallahs' those in business and trade. No such stratification was feasible in Hong Kong since the whole raison d'être of life was 'boxwallah' trading, supervised by a civil service which had no loftier ideas than to do just that. Individual governors and other civil servants from time to time affected to despise the merchants. But they were never the best rulers.
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The essentials in the making of the new Hong Kong were the sheer numbers of Chinese and their ability to work long hours, for themselves or for others, and generally to apply themselves and their families to the fullest extent in the process of making money.
In the appalling conditions in which most of the newly arrived work-force were obliged to live (and often to work), owing to the lack of appropriate available accommodation, the firm government expectation was that when the course of events in China had settled down the flood of humanity would reverse itself and return to China. This proved totally inaccurate. No such movement showed the slightest sign of taking place. On the contrary, the immigrants showed every sign of settling in the colony and making whatever they could of a new way of life in its comparatively stable conditions.
Britain now found herself saddled with a deeper moral commitment to Hong Kong. In response the Labour government in office in 1949 sent 30,000 troops to the colony to avert the slight possibility that the all-conquering Communist armies might attempt to take Hong Kong back to the bosom of the motherland. Had that happened, the government in London would have come under heavy fire in the then impending general election. The force stationed in Hong Kong could not have stemmed a determined Chinese take- over there is no certain evidence that such a move was contemplated and there were difficulties in keeping such a large force in a colony still metaphorically licking the wounds inflicted by the Japanese occupation. This was recognized by the Cabinet Defence Committee in 1952, and in April 1954 it was decided to reduce the garrison. The ships of the Royal Navy left
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for Singapore. In 1958 the Royal Naval Dockyard closed, and Britain's armed forces in the East shifted to South-east Asia and the defence of Sarawak and Sabah.
Among the major problems facing the Hong Kong government in the late 1950s were, first, housing, and second, education.
The immigrants lived how and where they could. Roof-tops sprouted improvised huts in danger of being blown away in typhoons. Shanty towns grew up on hillsides on the outskirts of the town wherever a trickle of water ran down a ravine, from where it was tapped, collected, and carried to those pitiful shacks for cooking and washing. Ingenious methods of collection were invented, coloured plastic tubes tethered at the source were strung out overhead like some artist's ‘happening', to reach individual huts and groups of huts in festoons over the scrub. Sanitation was either absent or primitive, a hazard to public health. But in Hong Kong there was nothing very unusual in that. In town, every stairway in Chinese areas of Victoria and Kowloon had its restless sleepers with their little bundles of possessions clutched to them through the night. Every street where the pavements were wide enough had its clutter of lean-to shelters of cardboard, tar-paper, old corrugated iron, cocooned into some semblance of a dwelling where families were raised, and whose sanitation was the nearest public lavatory no matter how far away. Not surprisingly the incidence of violent crime rose alarmingly, and by 1950 the government was forced to impose a quota for immigrants.
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Shek Kip Mei in December 1953 after the blaze. The homeless return to search in the rubble of their homes.
The first resettlement housing built in Hong Kong was at Shek Kip Mei and housed those made homeless by the 1953 fire. The photograph was taken in 1958.
On Christmas Day 1953 the inevitable happened. The sprawling agglomer- ation of squatter huts in West Kowloon called Shek Kip Mei caught fire in the evening and, as flames and sparks flew in the cold dry winter air, soon the whole area was a swirling mass of flame the biggest and most disastrous conflagration in Hong Kong's history. For the people of the ghetto now vanishing in smoke it was a night of terror as 50,000 lost their homes and (most of them) their meagre possessions.
The fire was a disaster which no government could tinker with. There had to be large answers as soon as possible in the shape of housing for the homeless thousands. The remarkable, courageous, and prompt response was the first of the massive rehousing programmes which have continued right up to the present day. The gravity of the situation led rationally to a long hard look at the whole question of housing for the mass of Hong Kong people, a tricky subject only nibbled at in the past. Despite all that had occurred, and all the sanitary and housing ordinances since the black years of plague and fire in the nineteenth-century slum of Taipingshan, house design for the Chinese in the colony had not advanced far. The pre-war population increase between 1937 and 1940 of 500,000 had provoked the construction of some new accommodation, but resulted in more crowding in existing housing and some degree of squatting. But with the massive return of the population after the Japanese defeat and the huge influx as China changed hands, the problem began to take on threatening dimensions. The picture of Hong Kong was by then one of pandemic squatting. Even with new
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migration virtually arrested in 1950, the city still had to find room for a natural annual increase of something like one hundred and twenty thousand. Most of this multifarious population (other than squatters) was housed in structures whose design, in essentials, had hardly altered since the turn of the century. In these stews there can hardly be a kinder description of them generations of Hong Kong Chinese had been born and lived out their lives, sleeping in tiny cubicles in two- and three-tier bunks. An ordinance in 1955 was aimed principally at altering the basic shape of sites for the construction of tenement buildings, permitting access to living units from a corridor instead of through other people's living space. It also stipulated that housing of 10 or more floors must have lifts. The old walk-up government tenements of anything up to 10 floors now gave way to taller buildings with lifts.
Yet some of the new blocks such as those built at Shek Kip Mei to rehouse those whose homes were lost in the 1953 fire were little better than the old. A government report of 1963 records:
faced with an initial heavy outlay of key money and with maximum rents, and encouraged by the ... demand by others for accommodation, the new occupants of premises designed to comply with minimum Buildings Regulations requirements partitioned [them] off into cubicles ... It was not unknown for 60 to 70 persons to be living in a three-room flat."
Many buildings were constructed to nine storeys so as to avoid the regulation which dictated that a 10-storey structure must have a lift.
This was the general type of building, high blocks with lifts, which the government, via the Housing Authority set up in 1954, built after Shek Kip Mei and the 1955 ordinance. Later developments (growing affluence and new ideas on community housing) resulted in profoundly modified designs as the rehousing programme evolved and became more sophisticated. A new ordinance of 1966 resulted in buildings generally constructed on square sites, entry to each apartment being from a central core containing lifts. The rising expectations accompanying rising incomes forced improvements in style and finish, and such new blocks now offer Western-style apartments in complete and happy contradistinction to the insanitary dormitories of the old
tenements.
Hong Kong's record between then and now in housing and rehousing the population is a subject for justifiable pride. If it took a century in coming to pass, at least the results equal or surpass similar schemes elsewhere. The task was, and still is, a colossal one, but the solutions are viable and humane.
In 1961 the government started building another type of housing to cater for low-income families living in overcrowded and sub-standard premises. The Housing Authority then began to produce dwellings for families of moderate means living in unfavourable conditions. These schemes all set
Population, Housing, and Education 285
a limit on the family income as a means of selecting suitable tenants. An ordinance of 1973 established a new Hong Kong Housing Authority which is responsible for the co-ordination of all aspects of public housing.
In public sector housing by 1984, rented and owned accommodation housed 2.4 million people, representing more than 44 per cent of the population. Another one million were scheduled to be housed before the end of the decade. The Housing Authority programme is constructed so as to produce 215,000 flats over the next few years to 1991, comprising 158,000 public rental flats, 32,000 home ownership flats, and a further 25,000 flats built for sale under arrangements with private developers in the Private Sector Participation Scheme.
The whole appearance of the New Territories, where most of these schemes are located, has radically altered in the post-war years. Until the early 1960s comparatively little change had taken place. Tai Po was still a large village, Yuen Long a smallish one. It was still possible to drive between the villages of the area (those to which a motor road existed) in rural, even rice-paddy terrain, in which in season the lychee and the lungnan trees were laden with fruit, and where Hakka women in the fields wore their distinctive black- valanced hats. The fashion among young Chinese for making country excursions in groups was still in its infancy, and the country was quiet and seemingly sparsely peopled. The fishing fleet still went out in junks under sail although most had auxiliary engines. Many country people still wore the traditional sam fu (smock and baggy trousers) of shiny black cotton. Rice- threshing could still be seen in village squares, and an occasional bride was borne to her wedding across the fields in a red-decorated palanquin, closed except for a small aperture through which her fan-shaded face occasionally peered out, men sounding gongs accompanying the little procession. The two great dams at Plover Cove and High Island were still in the future. The exodus of the younger people from the villages and from isolated islands had already begun, most of them making for Chinese restaurants in England; others to factories in Kowloon. Today there is scarcely a village where the old life continues. Tai Po is a large high-rise town, as are Yuen Long and the formerly charming village of Sha Tin. Others are rising; still more are planned.
In the development of private housing there is a similar story to tell. Several large new high-rise estates have been built on Hong Kong island, including Taikoo Shing estate and later the Kornhill estate on the eastern part of the north shore. Similar developments are sited on the southern shores and slopes where, in the public sector, some of the earlier housing estates were built. The 100-year-old Dairy Farm at Pok Fu Lam, gradually nibbled away in favour of accommodating people rather than cows, finally closed in its centenary year, milk now coming from a larger farm just over the China border. That waterfall so gratefully used by seafarers in the nineteenth century and before
Sha Tin seen from the hills above the Lower Shing Mun Reservoir in 1961 before the new town was begun.
as a source of pure water, is now overlooked by one of the first public sector housing projects the towers of Wah Fu estate.
Naturally the southern exposure of the island long ago attracted the more affluent, and such bays as Deep Water, Repulse, and Stanley were colonized in the 1920s, their shores dotted with large villas. In 1963, the first high- rise tower was completed in the centre of Repulse Bay, and today the once verdant slopes all around support a solid, uninviting phalanx of luxury blocks, as do other favoured places. Lantau island has its purpose-built colony of luxury houses and there are several others of large extent in the New Territories.
The industrialization which provided the finance by which Hong Kong's public housing achievements were made possible started, as we have seen, in a fairly unsophisticated manner, with family-run small businesses producing goods urgently in demand post-war. But quite soon the types of manufacture which Hong Kong was called on to produce required the use of increasingly sophisticated plant. While to some extent the workers in such factories did not need to be more than semi-skilled, increasingly large numbers of employees did in industry, in the supporting banking field, in engineering, statistical, insurance, clerical, and other sectors of the overall picture.
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H
An aerial view of part of the new Sha Tin town in 1987, taken from a point similar to that of the opposite plate. Tall residential blocks are the latest design for resettlement housing.
Generally speaking, adequately qualified applicants have been available as these opportunities arose, and in the right kind of numbers, so it would appear that educational opportunities in Hong Kong have been in the main satisfactory, and have been grasped.
While the first post-war educational policies were directed to the rehabilitation of a shattered system, later efforts had to be directed, reflecting the generally liberal post-war climate of the West, to education of all children to the limit of their capacity to learn. At that time it was not foreseen that, starting in the early 1950s, Hong Kong would metamorphose from entrepôt to industrial giant, and vocational training was not then geared to that end. By the end of the Japanese occupation only a few thousand children were attending school, and the standard of what they were being taught and of the teaching was hardly adequate. Numerous school buildings were in ruins, classroom furniture had long vanished to heat the cooking pots, and what textbooks were available were too expensive for all but a tiny minority of parents to afford.
In Chinese tradition the road to success in life had always been through education. The existence of the Imperial Civil Service Examinations throughout centuries of history there - contrasting with their introduction in
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formed the central educational
288 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong Britain only in the nineteenth century concept in Chinese minds. In Hong Kong the thirst for education manifested itself almost from the beginning of the colony.
By the end of 1946, 52,000 children were attending primary school, but only 1,205 were in secondary schools in urban areas. This compared poorly with the 78,151 and 14,109 respectively at the outbreak of hostilities.
Government spending on education in 1947 was nine million dollars, about half devoted to subsidization of schools. This was woefully short of what was required since something like six thousand children were still without education; 1948 saw the opening of a Technical College (derived from the old Trade School), and the Central British School was renamed King George V School, open to all children with an adequate knowledge of English. While primary education revived rapidly, secondary was slower with, in 1948, only two-thirds of the numbers of the pre-war period. Ex- penditure on education went up to $13 million in 1948, yet only just over half of the estimated quarter of a million children were attending school. The system, still prevalent today, of one school building serving as two primary schools, accommodated in morning and afternoon sessions, resulted from a shortage of school buildings.
Not until 1971 was the goal of free primary education for all those who wanted it achieved. In that year the total enrolment in all kinds of schools reached 983,495 pupils. A start was made then on enforcing attendance at primary schools. The government began to organize a three-year course of secondary education for all on a fee-paying basis in 1971.
The 1960s and 1970s saw advances in teacher training, and a curriculum development committee got down to work; the Hong Kong Certificate of Education examination was reorganized to permit greater flexibility in the choice of available subjects, and an educational television service was provided for primary schools and extended to secondary institutions at a later date. The 1974 White Paper stated the ultimate objective of a school place for all children who wanted secondary education, and was in effect a blueprint for educational advance in the following decade. The target was nine years of general education for all by 1979, a goal subsequently brought forward by one year. The White Paper of 1978 had as its major target the provision of subsidized senior secondary places for about 60 per cent of the 15-year-old population in 1981, set to rise to over 70 per cent in 1986. The education of teachers was further strengthened, and the curriculum further diversified and enriched.
The seventies saw great emphasis placed on balanced development. To achieve this in practical and technical education five technical institutes were built, offering a wide range of disciplines. The Hong Kong Technical College turned into the nucleus of the Hong Kong Polytechnic which, by the begin- ning of the eighties, offered places to about 26,000 full-time and part-time
Population, Housing, and Education 289
students. A continuous link was established in vocational education through- out the secondary school system, leading to a technological outlet in tertiary education.
In late 1981 a Secretary for Education was appointed, thus recognizing the crucial importance of education in the future development of the territory, and in that year a $320 million programme was announced, its aim to improve the standard of the English and Chinese languages in schools and in the community at large.
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By 1981 there were over 1.4 million children in school in Hong Kong 27 per cent of the population. Offsetting this was a generally held opinion that the slow rise in the numbers of students at the two universities might endanger the future of the territory's economic and social prosperity and development. (It may be noted in passing that about this time, and more insistently after 1984, the use of the word 'colony', without any official pronouncement on the matter, came to be replaced by the word 'territory', in genuflexion to the coming absorption of Hong Kong into the Chinese state.)
The general educational situation was investigated by a Panel of Visitors led by a former Director-General of the British Council, Sir John Llewellyn, which carried out a review between April 1981 and November 1982. They probed into all the relevant factors affecting education since the war and up to the present. The eventual report, a sympathetic document bearing the marks of a deep understanding of the special conditions in the territory and its struggle for educational facilities, made the point: 'We try to be practical in our commentary ... We prefer to point to desirable directions [which education might take] rather than to prescribe treatment for immediate ills.' The Panel identified five important areas. It recommended the universal teaching of children in Chinese in the 'formative years accompanied by formal teaching of English as a first foreign language: this would lead progressively to genuine bilingualism in the senior secondary years'. A second recommendation was for improvement in the 'capacity and com- mitment' of teachers. The criticism was that the language facility of teachers fell short of the recommended bilingual proficiency needed for effective teaching in that context. A third comment stated: 'Examinations dominate the Hong Kong education system, to its detriment.' The Panel pinpointed the need to relieve the strains caused by this and to improve the curriculum by making it 'more relevant to the development needs of the students'. A fourth aspect was the tremendous pressures 'from students, parents, and industry' for variously streamed education, revealing the need for greater diversity of educational opportunities available beyond Form VII, ‘so this pressure can be relieved and individuals encouraged to choose from more varied provisions related more closely to their interests, to the requirements of the labour market, and to the community generally'.
290 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
The Panel's fifth suggestion was:
the need to build up a standing capability to conduct research, to analyse and formulate policy options, and to plan developments. This impinges on the com- munity, the professions, the bureaucracy, and statutory policy-making bodies. The governance machinery needs to be thoroughly overhauled.2
In due course much of the action recommended by the Panel was included in government policy.
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By 1984 there existed four main types of secondary school Anglo- Chinese grammar schools, Chinese middle schools, technical schools, and pre-vocational schools. The first had an enrolment of 375,673 pupils and offered a five-year course leading to the Hong Kong Certificate of Education examination, the medium of instruction being mainly English. Satisfactory results in this examination allowed pupils to enter a two-year course leading to the Advanced Level Examination for admission to Hong Kong University. The 63 Chinese middle schools accommodated 36,841 pupils instructed mainly in Chinese, English being a second language.
Secondary technical courses claimed 21,571 students in 22 schools. Qualifying students were then able to continue their studies at the Hong Kong Polytechnic, or the Hong Kong Technical Teachers' College.
Pre-vocational institutions were government-aided secondary schools providing a general education and introducing students to a wide range of technical skills on which future vocational training could be based. In 1984 13 such schools provided 10,039 places.
Three post-secondary colleges were in operation, and various types of special education were available to meet the needs of handicapped children. On the whole, Hong Kong responded well to the requirements of a population whose numbers were rapidly increasing. The growth of a very large and well-to-do Chinese middle class resulted in a commensurate demand for greater sophistication in education, with all that this entailed. There can be few communities in the world whose government and educational authorities have been faced with such an explosion in numbers, in financial clout, and in expectations for their children, in such a short time. The figures speak for themselves: in 1939 there were over 92,000 children in schools of all kinds. In 1984 the figure had risen to 1,377,432; this, despite the virtual wiping out of the whole educational system in the Japanese occupation.
The University of Hong Kong in the post-war years faced a formidable problem in rehabilitation. Loss of staff and equipment was serious, but by good fortune most of its library survived. The Senate had continued to hold meetings in Stanley camp during the occupation, while some of the students had moved to Lingnan University at Guangzhou where they had continued
T
The façade of the original buildings of Hong Kong University.
their studies facts recognized in 1946 when the government voted $20,000 towards its rehabilitation. In Hong Kong the decision to reopen the university was made in July 1946, but no official action was taken until March 1948 when the Secretary of State endorsed the need for a university in Hong Kong. In fact the university was already functioning by then. Financial provision, however, was left, once more, to local generosity. Once again the university was 'condemned to that indigence which had dogged its fortunes'3 since it was founded in 1912.
Anticipating the Colonial Office's tardy decision, the university had held matriculation examinations and the first classes began in October 1946 with 109 students of whom 31 were female, in arts, science, medicine, and engineering. This act of faith was to be justified when Sir Robert Hotung donated $1 million for the building of a women's hall of residence, and the government granted a capital sum of $4 million, and increased its annual grant to $1,500,000.
arts,
Pre-war enrolment had stood at 400 students. By 1970 there were 2,283, and by 1984 that number had risen to 7,000 studying in nine faculties architecture, dentistry, education, engineering, law, medicine, science, and social sciences. Competition for places at Hong Kong University, mirroring
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292 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
competition for other educational facilities in Hong Kong was, and still is, intense. In 1984, for the 1,618 places available at Hong Kong University there were 15,000 applicants. The arguments in favour of a third university seemed compelling.
The Chinese University was formed in 1963 with three autonomous colleges New Asia College (founded in 1949), Chung Chi College (founded in 1951), and United College (founded in 1956)
as a self- governing corporation drawing its income chiefly from government grants. The campus occupies a fine site of 110 hectares on a hilltop near Sha Tin. The university has arts, business administration, science, and social science faculties offering bachelor degrees, and a faculty of medicine runs a five- year course of two years pre-clinical studies and three of clinical work. Further courses were inaugurated in 1984-5. Both Hong Kong University and the Chinese University offer extra-mural curricula.
The Hong Kong Baptist College, founded in 1956, runs courses in a similar range of studies. A Vocational Training Council was set up in 1982 to advise on measures to be taken to ensure a comprehensive system of technical education and industrial training suited to the future needs of Hong Kong. By 1984 there were five technical institutes in operation and three more planned, among a growing number of other bodies offering technical education of various kinds. Demand, however, continues mostly to outstrip the facilities for its satisfaction. But the general picture of Hong Kong education is a lively one in almost all spheres, with opportunities for recreational activities being continually upgraded.
23. Growth of an Industrial Giant
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WHEN the war in Asia was over two of the basic essentials of Hong Kong's traditional trade a supply of marketable commodities and adequate shipping to carry them were both seriously depleted in the Orient and world-wide. Moreover some of the principal items in the entrepôt trade such as foodstuffs and textiles were among those in shortest supply and soon to be subjected to international allocation. Acute shortage of food, raw materials, and machinery for manufacturing was partly assuaged by an immediate post- war reallocation of stocks concentrated by the Japanese in various places in South-east Asia; and it was involvement in this that first brought a demand for the colony's entrepôt facilities, and later brought a rapid growth of business, in 1946. The last available pre-war figures (1939) show imports at $594.2 million and exports at $533.4 million. The 1946 figures reached $935.5 and $756.6 million respectively.1 But the upsurge was not to be long sustained, and Hong Kong was soon again at the mercy of factors outside her control.
Trade with China, still under the Nationalists, and embroiled in civil war, was conditional on the antiquated process of using armies of coolies to load and unload at her ports (to which she forbade foreign entry). And the position was further complicated by the Chinese trade imbalance of US$412 million in 1945 which made it imperative for her to export more, and to introduce a system of licensing imports. In 1946 this was done, and categories were established; essentials such as raw materials for industry and manufacturing machinery were allowed entry with little formality, while most consumer goods were prohibited. In Hong Kong this had the effect of arresting the boom of the first nine months of 1946.
One important development was China's decision to export most of her textiles through Hong Kong, and it has been suggested that the experience thus gained in the colony may well have helped the growth of Hong Kong's own textile industry in the late 1940s.
294 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
As 1946 drew to an end, conditions in China became more disturbed, the civil war expanding with consequent disruption of life. Rampant inflation, restless movements of frenzied people seeking food, security, and a livelihood, together with labour unrest in the main centres, all contributed to the breakup of a bedraggled economy as the Nationalists suffered defeat after defeat and as the influence of the apparently unstoppable Communist armies waxed.
Stringent restrictions on imports meant that cargoes destined for Chinese ports were refused entry, and the colony's warehouses became the dumping ground of goods consigned originally to Shanghai, Tianjin, or other ports. The less securely financed of the colony's merchants failed, one after another, leaving trade largely in the hands of those bigger firms with which it had been for decades before the war. It was into this troubled commercial scene that there erupted a flood of Chinese from over the border: whole businesses and their manufacturing equipment arrived without notice and strove to set up in what seemed to them a blessedly stable environment.
In the last years of the 1940s China's share of Hong Kong trade fell sharply, its place quickly taken by the South-east Asian countries. With the Hong Kong merchants' ability to provide textiles from China in a textile- hungry hemisphere, opportunities opened up for trade in new markets in the Middle East as well, and also with East and South Africa. When the Communists finally became the masters in China in 1949, the flow of exports dried up. The South-east Asian, Middle Eastern, and African markets for textiles virtually fell complete into the hands of the colony's merchants and newly arrived manufacturers.
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The Communist revolution in China sealed off that country from virtually any contact business or other which the new regime did not wish to entertain. Shanghai port was closed by the stationing of guardships at the estuary of the Yangzi, while the blockade of Taiwan made shipping in that quarter a hazardous venture. All trade, such as it was, with central and north China was routed via Tianjin and Qingdao, and exports from Shanghai came by rail via Guangzhou to Hong Kong. The period was also marked by the illicit export of goods via Macau. High-value goods from south-east China such as bristles and tung oil (used in paint manufacture) were chiefly carried by air, a means increasingly employed in trade at the time. The first train-load of export goods from China after the Revolution arrived in March 1950. But this traffic was suspended at the beginning of the Korean war in June 1950. The confused situation posed a challenge to Hong Kong merchants who continually varied the routes and the methods by which they acquired goods from China for export, but while trade with China dwindled to a trickle it was Hong Kong which monopolized it. The inflated prices of those years give the impression of a much greater volume than was the case, and by the first years of the 1950s a large number of merchant ships lay idle in Hong Kong harbour.
Growth of an Industrial Giant 295
The advent of the Korean war, in which China backed the Communist North Koreans, dramatically altered the picture. Chinese government agencies began buying on a large scale, and to pay for what they were buying the export of produce restarted. Import licences were freely issued by China and, to the relief of Hong Kong's merchant community, the stocks in their godowns were quickly cleared. The goods in demand by the Chinese were those to support the war petroleum and its by-products, rubber and manufactured rubber goods, vehicles and spare parts, industrial chemicals, machinery, and electrical appliances.
Hong Kong found itself in the position of the Chinese government's chief supplier and warehouse, on which it could draw on demand. In 1950 the tonnage of goods handled in the port leapt by 29.3 per cent, and the total value of trade by 48 per cent to $2,434 million.
But one more drastic change in the pattern of trade was to follow. In December 1950 the United States placed an embargo on the supply of strategic goods to China because of its participation in the Korean war, this to be followed in 1951 by the embargo placed for the same reason by the United Nations. American goods imported by Hong Kong fell by about 50 per cent, as did the colony's exports of Chinese goods to the United States. The Chinese reacted by allowing exports only to the value of imports. The entrepôt business of Hong Kong came effectively to an end.
Such, then, were the principal factors which were to affect Hong Kong during the 1950s and after: the decline in the entrepôt trade; the post-1949 influx of population and manufacturing facilities (labour, capital, and machinery); and the new Chinese government's policy of trading with other Communist countries rather than with its traditional suppliers.
Among that flood of humanity arriving in Hong Kong were men and women, both young and energetic, with an urge to get ahead in life by the use of their intelligence as well as their labour. Others were Chinese already established in life, who brought their considerable capital resources with them among these the Shanghai textile industrialists whose entrepreneurial skills were now put to use in Hong Kong. At this time, too, there was an influx of capital and business skills from the West and from South-east Asia the colony being seen as the most politically and economically stable place in the Far East.
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Yet other things were working in favour of industrialization. As a British colony the territory enjoyed Commonwealth Preference and membership of the sterling area. While these two factors may not strike the contemporary observer as important (and they have long been abolished), in the aftermath of the war and in the period of doldrums following the embargo on trading with China they had a certain value. Membership of the sterling area made for stability in the Hong Kong dollar; Commonwealth Preference sharpened the competitive edge of products in certain markets.
296 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
The clinching element in the rise of industry was the laissez-faire capitalism which had been the spring on which Hong Kong had several times in the past rebounded from slump to boom. Government non-interference and the absence of official meddling, economic liberalism and the absence of foreign exchange controls, its status as a free port all these made Hong Kong an
attractive place to set up manufacturing.
It was at this point that there began to form a unique entity which can best be termed an industrial colony. From the start in 1841, Hong Kong had been unique in that it existed as a colony solely because the colonizers needed a secure base from which to expand their illegal trade in opium to China. More or less fortuitously it developed into one of the great entrepôt cities of the world, and so remained until the Japanese war. The war over, there occurred a second birth in different guise. Both manifestations of this strange colony existed without the semblance of material resources. Success came to the first with the opening of China to Western goods, and to the second, a century later, with the virtual cessation of that process due to internal Chinese events
which, incidentally, provided the manpower for its success.
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As much as numbers, this manpower had a quality not possessed by the Chinese sojourners the overseas Chinese in Malaysia and Singapore, who are from many provinces of the motherland. The Hong Kong Chinese were and are virtually all Cantonese, speaking one version of the Chinese language, the Chiu Chow speakers and others being in such a small minority that they are forced to communicate in Cantonese. The Cantonese of Hong Kong, although not a homogeneous population there are rich and poor, peasant and urban people are unique in forming 97 per cent of the total population, more than was ever the case in any other overseas Chinese community in the Orient.
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The growth of a manufacturing economy in Hong Kong, for every resident of the colony over the past thirty years, has been a visible, inescapable matter. In the mid-1950s an observer standing on one of the piers in central Victoria (by that time rarely so called in preference to the simple term Central), and looking over the harbour to the north-east, saw the shores of the Kwun Tong area as a virtually empty landscape of green scrub, with one or two small ship-breaking yards. A textile factory and a cotton-spinning mill began operation there at around that time, surrounded by open country. Standing at the same vantage point in 1984, three decades later, one saw that the green hills in the background had been gouged out and presented the raw wound of a vast quarry face, beneath whose ochreous scars there had risen a close- packed industrial area from which every trace of the natural landscape had long disappeared. Intervening between this and the viewer was the long extrusion of the airport runway at Kai Tak, built since the 1950s out into the harbour, serving what has become one of the world's busiest airports.
The industrialization of Hong Kong is an urban epic of perhaps unequalled
Tuen Mun, one of the huge new industrial towns which have sprung up since the 1960s, partly constructed on reclaimed land. What had been villages changed in a matter of a few years into large towns of hundreds of thousands, housing intensive industrial activity.
proportions. In a world still stumbling out of the ruins of the most disastrous war in history, Hong Kong was in the position to supply many of the manufactures that austerity and sheer lack of materials and manpower in that war had made scarce. It was also in the position of a débutante, unfettered by older-generation ideas, willing to equip itself for the exploitation of new processes and the utilization of new materials and the satisfaction of new appetites.
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Plastics were enthusiastically taken up by industry, and as they evolved in sophistication, gradually usurping the place of traditional materials, Hong Kong industry kept abreast of developments and explored the markets. One early product which came to be called in Japan (where the colony discovered a big market) 'Hong Kong flowers' was precisely that. But the fashion passed, as did another which was supplied by Hong Kong, the Western craze for wigs, which for a few years kept some factories running 24 hours a day.
Statistics demonstrate dramatically (in keeping with the actual process) the upsurge in the colony's economic activity in the 20-year period of its transformation into a world industrial and financial centre of mammoth proportions (see Appendix 8).2
Looking at some of the figures for 1984, the total gross domestic product
298 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
had risen to $178,071 million (from $2,489 million in 1949), the total exports to $137,936 million, and imports to $153,955 million; the gross domestic product per capita also rose, to $33,197. The numbers employed in manufacturing in 1984 were 904,709 persons and the number of manufac- turing establishments was 48,992. Workers' wages in manufacturing had shot up to $91 per day. In the money and banking sector total deposits in 1984 were $296,103 million and total loans $286,277 million. The revenue of the territory in 1984 reached $36,194 million while public expenditure was $32,338 million.
The activity of the stock exchanges, of which there were four until they were unified in the mid-1980s, by 1980 had almost reached the peak attained in 1973 before the oil crisis (see Appendix 9). By 1984 the figure for total turnover had reached $48,787 million, and the Hang Seng Index ended that year at 1,200.38 (31 July 1964=100).
In terms of the contribution of different economic sectors to the gross domestic product, the manufacturing industry has taken first place for many years, in 1983 contributing 21.9 per cent and in the following year 24.6 per cent.
The vast change in society in Hong Kong is signalled by the figures for money spent on the social services. In 1949-50 their share was 16.7 per cent of revenue; in 1984-5 the total rose to 35 per cent ($13,199 million). The percentages for other government functions in that year were: community services 9 per cent, general services 40 per cent, economic services 3 per cent, and security services 13 per cent.
To deal efficiently with the export of Hong Kong's massive product, and equally to take in its volume of imports, by 1984 the territory had con- structed the largest container port in Asia the third largest in the world, soon to become the largest.
The rise of the banking and financial services sector was equally surprising. In 1984 there were 140 licensed banks in operation, the numbers still rising steadily year by year, their assets in 1984 standing at $903,568 million, a figure which was soon to increase dramatically.
The rapid rise of tourism as a factor in Hong Kong's economy contributed over fourteen billion dollars in 1984 and the numbers of visitors rose to 3,500,000 (up by 12.9 per cent on the previous year). As many new hotels opened and further attractions were added to those already drawing tourists to Hong Kong, the figures looked promising for further increases.
In the past two decades the whole character of Hong Kong has altered radically. The sapling has become a great tree, almost overnight. While a walk around central London or Paris today certainly affords a different feeling from the same stroll two decades ago, the change is largely composed of an accumulation of small details. The place has been smartened up, might be one way of putting the facts. In Hong Kong a stroll through the principal
The waterfront in 1960.
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When completed in 1962 the City Hall buildings were soon to be joined by the Mandarin Hotel (under construction, right of centre) and by the Hilton Hotel, under construction on the corner of Garden Road. The cricket ground behind the graceful old Hong Kong Club was still in use.
4
The panorama of Hong Kong and its harbour in 1988.
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thoroughfares in the last year of the eighties reveals scarcely a building which was standing twenty years ago. One or two 'historic' piles remain the old Supreme Court building, the tower block of the City Hall, new and very modern it seemed in 1962 and now dwarfed by all of its neighbours. Of the major buildings lining the streets of Central three decades ago only the Supreme Court and the Bank of China's old building still remain all else has disappeared and the fabric of the city's centre is in reality a new construction.
The achievement of the early 1970s, a desperately needed amenity, was the completion of the first cross-harbour tunnel for motorized traffic, opened in 1972. By 1984 the tunnel had proved hopelessly inadequate for the rapidly rising number of vehicles using it, and another crossing under the eastern harbour opened in the last year of the eighties. This decade also saw the completion of a highway built above a further reclamation of the coastal waters of the harbour, linking the business district of Central with Chai Wan to the east. About the same time a highway linked the Kowloon peninsula with the China border, and vast improvements were made in the road system of the New Territories, in response to the needs of the new towns with their large populations and growing industry.
In the sixties and seventies a huge effort was made to provide Hong Kong with an adequate water supply. Plover Cove reservoir came first, completed
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Growth of an Industrial Giant 301
in 1968, the sea drained from the cove after a barrage was built between a narrow peninsula and the village of Tai Mei Tuk along the coast from Tai Po. Later came High Island reservoir, similarly formed and adding another great libation. It has not, however, in the end proved possible to provide adequate water supplies for Hong Kong from within its boundaries. The major supplies come by pipeline from China which sells Hong Kong more than half of the 750,000 million cubic metres consumed annually in the territory.
Water shortages became acute in the early 1960s, and the queues formed as they had done in former days only the receptacles differing (see p. 199).
More ambitious than any of those investments and developments was the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) which was begun in 1975 and took 14 years to complete at a total cost of over twenty billion dollars. This highly efficient underground railway, air-conditioned, clean, fast, and connecting huge centres of population, transports vast numbers of people daily which it would not be possible to transport on the roads. During its construction the old Kowloon-Canton railway (KCR) was modernized, double-tracked through- out, and electrified. The MTR and the KCR are integrated at Kowloon Tong
302 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
station, effectively forming one system. The influence of these expanded and new transport facilities has been profound. New patterns of traffic and population movement have emerged. What were to all intents and purposes two separate cities, Hong Kong and Kowloon, have merged in a way which could never have been achieved when their sole connecting links were ferries across the harbour.
The first of the new reservoirs constructed to supply the needs of a rapidly rising population and growing industry was formed at Plover Cove in 1968.
The ferries still run, and the harbour, diminished by extensive reclamations on both sides since the last war, is probably more alive with boats of all types and sizes than at any time in its history. Long gone are the junks, but multiplied as if by spontaneous generation are the ferries linking numerous parts of the territory. Joining conventional vessels are hovercraft that make their swift way up the yellow waters of the Zhu Jiang to Guangzhou and other centres, and the skimming hydrofoils and jetfoils plying every few minutes between Central District and Macau, where that old city has in the past twenty years wakened from its Rip Van Winkle slumbers. Now crowded with new hotels, the mecca of Hong Kong's compulsive gamblers, Macau is experiencing a reawakening, in large part a reflection of Hong Kong's expansion.
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humu
The construction of the Mass Transit Railway, Hong Kong's Underground or Metro, disrupted life for some time.
In Hong Kong also gambling is still a passionate preoccupation with the man in the street. The old racecourse in Happy Valley, during the past few decades equipped with huge grandstands, still functions. The new course at Sha Tin in the New Territories, larger, with even bigger stands and amenities, opened in the mid-1980s and draws crowds whose wagers form the wealth of the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club. The Club is the largest financial benefactor of Hong Kong, annually donating hundreds of millions to an array of charitable organizations whose needs would otherwise have to be met from the public purse. Hong Kong, it seems, prefers to lose its money by gambling rather than by the surgical incision of income taxation.
304 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
In the seventies and eighties Hong Kong has acquired a cultural life, something which it all but lacked before. The occasional visiting theatre companies of the past which entertained the Western population, and the performances of Chinese opera enlivening Chinese festivals, were almost all the art to be discovered in the territory, historically speaking. With post-war internationalization and a rapidly enlarging affluent society came art in its various forms. The visual arts, slow starters because of the long-acting delicious drug of Chinese traditional painting, made an electrifying break- through to the present in the late 1960s when a handful of younger artists developed into painters of stature pioneering new styles. The influence of one man of genius, Lui Shou-kwan (Lui Shoukun), founded a school from which its adherents branched off in their own directions in due course, so that by the first years of the seventies Hong Kong was the leader in contemporary Chinese painting. The catalyst was the impact of Western art and, no less, Western styles of life as surely as black African rhythms had proved the mainspring in the jazz revolution in America and later the whole world.
The formation of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra and of various Chinese groups playing old and new Chinese music added a dimension previously lacking in the territory, as did the formation of a resident theatre company playing in Cantonese and English, and a fledgling ballet.
The beginnings, the almost furtive infiltration of appreciation and practice of contemporary arts in Hong Kong, may be traced to the opening in 1962 of the City Hall with its large and smaller auditoriums, affording a home for music and theatre, and for the less commercial aspects of the cinema. Slowly other venues opened, the Arts Centre with theatre and art galleries came in the seventies, the Academy for Performing Arts a decade or so later. In 1972 the South China Morning Post began to print regular reviews of art exhibitions and was followed by other publications. Magazines devoted to, or noticing, the arts in major features slowly multiplied as the impact of television was felt. Art exhibitions, once a rarity and mostly of determined parochiality, are now plentiful. Some at least of the work of modern and contemporary artists from the West, from Japan, and elsewhere is shown quite frequently, and large commercial companies have in the past decade begun to patronize the arts in a meaningful way. The phrase 'cultural desert', once heard with depressing frequency (and accuracy), is no longer apt.
Culturally, Hong Kong has, superficially and some depth down, interna- tionalized. But the infusion of Western modes and philosophies in the arts has at best produced a series of variants which bear a singularly Chinese flavour. Culture, if not readily transplantable, is almost infectiously adaptable.
Hong Kong, in the decades of its gigantic explosion in population and productivity, has become a place quite unrecognizable from its pre-war self. Not only is its raison d'être basically a different one, but it has become an intensely metropolitan place, a city in which a curious and not unpleasing
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Growth of an Industrial Giant 305
form of sophisticated Chinese life flourishes. It has a core of diamond hardness as have all great cities, different in quality from the feeling of Chinese Singapore, infinitely more worldly than any city of China itself. The atmosphere is a combination of Chicago, Detroit, and New York, with special intensity lent to it by the dominant Chinese inhabitants, beavering away at their absorbing quests of making money and enjoying themselves. These aspects are combined also with a certain European ambience. Hong Kong exudes success in the manner of a sophisticated magnate, somewhat nouveau riche, a little parvenu. But in its boisterousness and in its riches, it is a wonderfully alive and exciting city to live in.
24. Corruption and the ICAC
ONE of Hong Kong's urgent problems in the decades since the war, a problem mirroring to an extent and in a Chinese manner those of cities such as Chicago which showed the same rapid development and access of riches, has been how to moderate the results of the arrival and redistribution of wealth that tumbled like summer rain into the community. The events of the post- war years have been turbulent, in part as ever because of pressures from outside the colony, but as acutely from the rapid social changes taking place within.
Conflict between the British and the Chinese had often centred on their differing concepts of law. The laws of China, customary, unwritten, were intended like those of other nations to establish and maintain harmonious human relations in a society with sufficient means of material survival. Those of Britain, with the same aim were, however, written. The conflict resided as much in the difference between the two civilizations as revealed in their laws as in the laws themselves. The British concept of the absolute right of people to trade reflected a powerful free society: the Chinese concept that trade was a privilege granted by an emperor reflected a largely self-sufficient society which had always lived under authoritarian rule. The responsibility for an unlawful act was to the British that of the person who committed it: to the Chinese the responsibility was the same, but should the culprit not be discovered, then his family, village, or association bore the responsibility and had to pay the penalty.
In Hong Kong, the only urban place where the British had ruled a homogeneous population of Chinese, the two concepts of law came frequently into conflict. It seemed that the differences between the two civilizations were only reconcilable if aspects of one or the other succumbed. This did not happen in any important way until some time after World War II.
At the core the disparity between Chinese customary law and British written law lay to a large extent in the absence in Chinese tradition of the slightest tendency towards a democratic process. Democratic ideas were, after all, quite as foreign to the Chinese as socialist ones (and doubtless
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Corruption and the ICAC 307
Confucian principles as a foundation for law would be found uncomfortable to live with in a Western country). The fact that Britain had a history of democracy in theory and practice (if rather recent in the latter), and that China had a very long history of Confucian imperial rule in theory and practice, were the constructs of their differing histories and environments. The world's greatest achievements have occurred under democratic, Confu- cian, and several other types of law. No people or nation has a proprietary right to sole possession of the attributes of civilization.
Chinese society had long been ordered by a Confucian concept termed 'filial piety', meaning respect for persons, especially older males. Hence sons (and all female members of a family) respected and obeyed the father; and the father paid respect to his father and elders; and so on up the pyramid of officialdom to the semi-divine emperor. The emperor bowed only to the gods, and all Chinese were regarded as his spiritual children (we may note the word 'children') the ‘seed of the dragon'. The principal system of advance- ment was via the civil service examinations from among whose successful candidates there emerged the administrators of the future, with whom under imperial guidance all authority and means of government lay.
In practice, the focus of all real authority was the local magistrate who administered justice, settled disputes on the basis of customary law and Confucian ethics, and had to be petitioned in regard to most requests of a serious nature. The omniscience, the Confucian benevolence supposed to characterize all holders of office, who in turn were answerable to a chain of higher authorities, was often more theoretical than real. Magistrates were pitiably ill paid, and this, with 'human nature', led to what became an institution in itself the exaction of higher taxes than was permitted, the magistrate creaming off a percentage before remitting the taxes to the imperial treasury.
Hence, as every Chinese knew from childhood, to reach the ear of the magistrate with a request, it was necessary to offer a sweetener to one of his clerks. This was not thought of in the British sense as bribery, nor as gaining an unfair advantage. Life with its problems had to be lived by all and the wheels of authority had to be oiled.
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Hong Kong law was British law with certain modifications, and was respected perhaps as much in the breach as in the observance. We have seen numbers of instances of Westerners in breach of the law venal policemen paid by illegal gambling houses are matched by the equally venal Ďuddell in his double dealings, and by crooked lawyers. In essence it was the conflict of ideologies and its exploitation by both British and Chinese that led, after scandals had racked the colony, to the setting up in 1974, at the instigation of the then Governor, Sir Murray MacLehose, of the Independent Commission Against Corruption the ICAC. This Draconian body was at first viewed with dire suspicion, seen by some as a governmental Gestapo or secret police.
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308 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
But, with its brief to deal without fear or favour with rich and poor, high and low, official and ordinary citizens residing in Hong Kong, it has in the intervening years come to occupy a position of cautious acceptance and some respect."
The post-war upsurge in corruption in Hong Kong on all levels and on a grand scale was in some degree a response to the opportunities offered in a thriving city, with a more or less booming economy, and an absence of official interference in the ordinary affairs of its citizens. Public opinion among the Chinese did not sharply define the subject. The possibility of argument between moralists (corruption is a sin) and fundamentalists or pragmatists (oiling the wheels assists harmonious movement) is a topic of endless debate. Samuel Pepys, Secretary of the Admiralty and president of the Royal Society in the latter part of the seventeenth century in London, was highly thought of in his time as a good civil servant. Everyone knew he lined his pockets, but it was also known that he was not extortionate in so doing. Time and place come into the equation. Hong Kong lacked a Chinese mandarinate in the traditional sense, and it also lacked an élite in the British one; it lacked therefore the sanctions of traditional authority. These con- siderations are not advanced as an 'excuse' for corruption but as elements in its rise and spread. Sir Hercules Robinson with his cadets had attempted to inject an artificial élite into the civil service, with generally favourable results few cadets fell by the corrupt wayside. But for the rest of the community the 'Aristocracy of the Moneybag', to recall Carlyle's damning phrase – Hong Kong society, Western and Chinese, did not lend itself easily to Western rigidity on moral matters. Merchants are by nature pragmatists, as are many Chinese.
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April of 1966 saw events which had no precedent in the colony. The first was the appearance of a lone protester garbed in black, who sat in the Star Ferry concourse on the 4th of April from 9 a.m. until the last ferry had departed. On his clothing was written in white: 'Hail Elsie! [Elliot, Urban Councillor] Join hunger strike to block fare increase. Democratic'. This referred to the ferry company's request for a rise in fares of both first and second class accommodation on the cross-harbour run. The government had allowed a 5 cent increase on the first class fare and none on second class. The youth was seen by most people as a crank. On the second day of his ‘hunger strike' he was arrested for obstruction. He played no further part in the story. But what he had achieved (with the incautious assistance of the media) was a focus on the ‘youth problem' which was in part a product of the 1960s permissive society phenomenon in the West, and in part a reflection of the so- called Cultural Revolution in China.
There followed three nights of rioting in Kowloon where startled tourists and citizens alike could scarcely believe their eyes as youths rampaged up and down the 'Golden Mile' of Nathan Road. Not one of these rioters was really
Corruption and the ICAC 309
protesting about a fare increase
few would ever have travelled first class but it seemed they were motivated, initially at least, by a fear that rising prices were not being properly compensated for by wage rises. There was, too, a certain communal unease at this time, possibly stemming from the failure of the Canton Trust Bank the previous year (1965) in which its 114,000 depositors recovered only 25 per cent of their savings. This had been followed in the February of that same year by the spectacle of the large Hang Seng Bank running into difficulties. The crisis of confidence had been eased by the intervention of the government and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank which had stepped in and taken over the Hang Seng. Yet another factor in the violent reaction to what was hardly a life-threatening situation may be seen in the Chinese memory of the appalling period when, in its terminal phase, the Nationalist government of China failed to avert the complete collapse of the currency and an untold number of people lost all they had.
The second night of demonstrations saw more rioting in Kowloon and the stoning of police by crowds of youths swelled by others who appeared to join in when they saw the 'fun' becoming more promising. By 8 April the police were in control; 1,400 youths were arrested, one rioter was killed; looting had been severe.
An official enquiry was held, in dramatic circumstances, with the Commissioners led by the Chief Justice, Sir Michael Hogan, seated under the floodlights on the stage of the City Hall Theatre, the audience seated as if attending a play. The tangled, bungled travesty of a procedure which unfolded during the hearings of this ill-conceived Commission need not concern us in detail here. A few facts tell the story. Elsie Elliot, an Urban Councillor, renowned for her support of the 'little man' in his troubles in a new, brash city society, was subjected to harsh and harassing questioning on her alleged part in 'inciting' some of the original demonstrators, which was not proven. She was also brought into the equation by the police who virtually accused her of being a common troublemaker. Certainly she was, on her own admission, a tireless writer of protesting letters to the police on behalf of hundreds of ordinary Chinese, who had no recourse other than to her good offices in their attempt to right wrongs done to them. But the side- effect of her persistence in citing police corruption brought to an acute stage the course of the Enquiry, with the suspicion hovering in the minds of most that the police were 'gunning' for her because she was not only a thorn in their flesh but, more seriously, a potential danger to them.
The Commissioner of Police, Henry Heath, an old-school policeman, was largely distinguished by a fierce loyalty to his force. In them he could see no (or at least hardly any) evil. He was almost comically out of his depth in terms of what constituted the possible bases for the concept of corruption. When Mrs Elliot accused the police of specific cases (on the evidence of a police source which she would not identify because of probable reprisals), the Enquiry
310 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
reached a climax. She was, as all now acknowledge, merely restating the knowledge of the ordinary person of the colony on the extent of police corruption; but her official audience refused to credit her. Her statements (rightly, as it turned out) were seen by the police as threatening a very lucrative way of life. The time was not ripe for these revelations; it was only later that it all came out.
The Enquiry censured Mrs Elliot, Sir Michael sentencing her (because there was nothing to which he could legally send her for trial) 'to the bar of public opinion where she must meet the censure and repudiation of all those right- minded people who believe in the freedom of the innocent from the taint of unwarranted suspicion and in the principles of frankness and fair dealing in the affairs of men'.
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In the history of judgements and in the affairs of Hong Kong men in the light of what was to be uncovered in the near future these words must be seen as appalling flummery. The Enquiry proved nothing except that police corruption was to continue.
All unintentionally, the Enquiry had opened a can of worms. The ordinary person, reading its proceedings in the daily press, saw then the obscene wriggling, and smelled the stench which is said to emanate from corruption. The Commissioner of Police had admitted that there was some corruption in the police force 'but not the worst' in relation to that in other departments of government. He also stated that the police needed bribes to pay off their informers!
The Enquiry was obviously baffled about the cause of the riots, stating (in 2,400 pages) that they were not caused by 'political, economic, and social frustrations'. Lethbridge, wittily and appropriately, quotes Auden's lines:
The situation of our time Surrounds us like a baffling crime.2
Once more Hong Kong had excelled itself in a scandal of monumental proportions. Worse was to follow. In due course the whole devious process of the enforcement of law and order came like some carbuncle to a head for all to see. There was an intermission before the crisis and lysis of the last act.
The events of the intermission were largely a reflection of the ongoing Cultural Revolution across the border in China. On 6 May 1967, not long after the conclusion of the Enquiry, a dispute took place between workers and management at the Hong Kong Artificial Flower Works at San Po Kong. In the context of a tense situation the dispute was inflated by the interested parties to absurd proportions. A fever of violence overtook the colony, and for six months clashes occurred between throngs of hysterical demonstrators, egged on by agitators and activists of various persuasions. Large numbers of them were involved, becoming progressively more aggressive under what was
at
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Demonstrators in May 1967 chanting and waving the Little Red Book outside Government House.
evidently a well-organized leadership. Mobs rampaged through the streets in defiance of police orders, causing considerable apprehension amongst the populace. Those who could afford to do so left for safer places, taking with them their valuables.
The climactic pitched battle between a chanting, screaming, Red Book- waving Maoist mob and the police came as the former attempted to move up Garden Road towards Government House, intent on holding an anti- government demonstration there, as they had previously done. They were stopped by police on the corner by the Hilton Hotel. Provoked by the dangerously aggressive crowd, the police launched a classic baton counter- action, arresting numbers of them before they melted
away. A game of cat and mouse was then started by the mobs, confronting the police in areas such as Wan Chai where its narrow streets and lanes served as escape routes. The mob would attack, and move away partially or wholly, causing the police to follow, only to reappear on the flank or even at the rear down some other street. The formerly passive police role had necessarily to becòme an active one involving raids on suspected premises and searches in which incriminat- ing documents were discovered.3
In the face of this acute threat to life and limb, and to the government of Hong Kong, police action was generally applauded. Demonstrators who
312 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
attempt to stab out the eyes of policemen and are caught in the act by cameras are not likely objects of much public sympathy. The police, overnight, turned into heroes. As a force they carried out their duties in exemplary fashion, and numbers of individual officers acquitted themselves with great courage. Criticism of the force, which had been simmering in the wake of the riot Enquiry, died a natural, if temporary, death. Some senior policemen displayed conspicuous gallantry in various episodes during raids on Com- munist premises. The Chinese police, who were portrayed in the left-wing press as 'running dogs of the Imperialists', also distinguished themselves in episodes requiring a like courage. The police were, for perhaps the first time in their history, popular figures.
When the confrontation was over the death toll was 51: of these, 15, in- cluding Chinese children, were killed in a bomb explosion; 10 were police officers. Over two hundred persons were wounded, several severely. Hong Kong business men set up a fund to help the further education of policemen's children; Her Majesty The Queen honoured the Hong Kong Police Force with the prefix Royal; and the Governor, the imperturbable Sir David Trench, went on playing his rounds of golf at Fanling within hail of the border and the gesticulating masses beyond it. Cricket, which had been played on the most valuable piece of sports ground in the world in the heart of Central, under the bemused gaze of Communist workers in the Bank of China adjacent, also went on as usual with the stone-throwing, yelling mobs periodically charging round the perimeter. It was a splendid, late, vintage demonstration of that nineteenth-century heyday-of-the-British-Empire spirit. But the end of the confrontation came not so much as a result of stern British action in the colony, as from the Chinese over the border issuing orders to cool the ardour of their supporters in Hong Kong.
Meanwhile, engaged in crowd control and in making deterrent raids, the police had no time to attend to the more usual forms of law-breaking. Crime flourished as never before. The Triad societies had collaborated with the police during the Maoist uprising not wishing to see their lucrative territory taken over by leftist puritans. When calm returned they were found to be more deeply entrenched in crime, and more involved as spies and informers with the police than before.
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The real nature and extent of what was afoot in the miasma of corruption that hung about the colony was aired initially in an article written in 1970 by an often aggressive custodian of public morality, Leo Goodstadt, in the Far Eastern Economic Review. It was headlined: 'Squeeze is a way of life in Hong Kong'. The thought was hardly new. But its accuracy and its public expression were disturbing to the ordinary Westerner and also to the police. The Chinese assumed that government departments were in some degree corrupt; but for the British, whose heads were half-hypocritically, and in some cases actually innocently, buried in the sand of unknowing and
1
Corruption and the ICAC 313 reluctance to credit such unsporting practices, the shock administered by the publication was deeply unsettling. Why, they asked, did the government allow such a state of affairs to come about, and how could they have let it continue to such alleged proportions? The Governor, Sir David Trench, on television in the late 1960s, failed to make any reply to the question put to him. His successor, Sir Murray MacLehose, was more frank, in October 1973 agreeing that corruption had been ‘on a more extensive scale than I had realised'.
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In the ensuing period the various aspects of the problem loosely named corruption began to become evident. Corruption, at base, is essentially a concept that springs from the democratic idea. In corrupt practice you and another the contact are conspiring to gain an advantage (whether monetary or other) which is not available legally in that society. In a society where the law or the custom does not prohibit such transactions, at least when they are of a petty nature, then the transaction is not precisely corrupt. Hence in the mind of those brought up in such a society the society of Pepys's time in England, of China down the dynastic ages, and most assuredly in late Qing times corruption is a concept which is much more vague, not generally thought of as affecting the ordinary man in the street, but rather an affair of high places. This is not the case in a developed democratic society. In Hong Kong the majority of the populace belonged to a non-democratic tradition, but the tiny minority of Westerners, specifically the British since it was they who ruled, were brought up to regard corruption as reprehensible. In Hong Kong large numbers of otherwise 'respectable' persons had from the initiation of the colony lived and worked in corrupt dealings of one kind and another the opium trade being one socially tolerated example. Hence the police force, mostly Chinese, and its higher officers, both Chinese and British, had in theory divided views on the subject. In practice a small number of the British content of the force viewed corruption as anathema, another section as one of the perquisites of office in the Orient where (they would aver) corruption was a way of life. These men had long participated in that alleged way of life.
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To eradicate corruption from such a force presented a problem of appalling complexity. It involved Chinese reactions to the possibility of being deprived of a healthy source of extra income regarded as normal ‘perks', similar views on the part of the bribe-taking British officers of whatever rank, and the isolation of the few uncorrupt policemen in the force.
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The knowledge of widespread corruption was not new
the 1946 Pennefather-Evans investigation4 had delineated it, and Duncan MacIntosh, the next Commissioner of Police, avowed that 'he had never seen such widespread corruption anywhere else'.5 This was in 1946. The question can was how to set police to catch police, and the Anti-Corruption Branch established within the CID and given autonomy in 1952 failed to do much
314 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
about it. In the 1960s, as everyone knew, it was necessary only to have $400 in cash in order to obtain a driving licence the ability to drive was irrelevant.
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