Success of University
in Hong Kong.
the
Partial failure of larger aim.
(a) Its poverty.
(b) Chinese
Nationalist feeling 1923/31).
3.
The extent
of the success of the University in
meeting local needs has been demonstrated to the Committee by repeated urgent requesta from Hong Kong for its early reopening. The Committee received has urgent pleas from the Commander-in-Chief, Hong Kong, from the Chief Officer of the Civil Affairs Administration and from Sir Mark Young shortly before his departure from the United Kingdom to take up his Governorship in the Colony. Messages of associations of old students in Hong Kong and Shanghai have expressed loyalty to the University and hopes for its reconstruction on ampler lines. As for the bonds between British and Chinese students and staffs, it may be affirmed that the survival in internment of a large proportion of the British teachers of the University is in no small measure due to the persistence and courage of groups of old students who, in spite of Japanese, managed to maintain an intermittent supply of food and money. By 1939 the University had becose an organisation closely integrated with the social life of the Colony. There is sufficient evidence that it loomed large, and was regarded as a symbol of the vitality of a relatively sail community.
4. But as a "vehicle for the establishment of good relations" the University had not fully achieved the aims of its founders. A measure of initial success was arsested by the impossibility of adequate staffing and finance during the war years 1914 - 1919. The University had been started with no clear conception of the cost of even a small sodern University; in the war period local funds went elsewhere, and the Government was unable to give adequate help.
À crisis arose in 1921 and 1922 which were years of depression. An attempt to raise money by a general local appeal failed and the University had to be restored by a large grant from the Colonial Treasury. At a later date the Goverment found itself able to increase its grant, but between the years 1921 and today the University has never been solvent, much less in a position to develop adequately to meet even local demands, except perhaps in Medicine and, later, in Chinese studies.
.. second obstacle was the growth, especially in the years after 1923, of intense nationalist feeling in China. During one period this took the form of an acute antagonism against Great Britain, and herein Hong Kong was the chief sufferer. It is worth record- ing, however, that in the long continued strike which