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terms in Hongkong's housing vocabulary. (3) The "cubicle" ten feet or so square is often the home of a family of six. ens of thousands of homeless "street sleepers" have been a municipal problem for many years, without perceptible improvement.
Attempts at Denationalization
Hongkong was one of the first objectives of the new Chinese nationalism in 1924-27 and its administration has never recovered from the shock. Since then many efforts have been made, unsuccessfully, to denationalize its people and create a particularist physchology linked with loyalty to the British crown. In official dealings in the Chinese language the residents must describe themselves not as Chungkuo Jen, like the other people of China, but as Hua Jen, which is supposed to have a racial rather than national connotation. Government schools teach all higher subjects in English, ignore Chinese culture and political history, and produce, at best, competent bilingual clerks and monolingual (English) lawyers, doctors, engineers and junior civil servants.
The general strikes that tied up the colony in the early 1920s have left a heritage of fear or labor. The leading workers' organizations of the time, ranging from the seamen's to the barbers' unions, have been proscribed ever since as "illegal secret societies." A paternalistic government Labor Office exists and arbitrates disputes.
As a byproduct of British democracy at home, many of these phenomena have been carefully described and often denounced in official Commission of Enquiry reports. But colonial realities and the power of local "interests" have prevented any remedies. The young civil servant coming out from England full of reforming zeal and changing, within a few years, into a defender of the status quo or automatic functionary escaping after office hours into cultural studies, is a typical and repeated symbol of this contradiction. (4)
In
(3) The Annual Report of the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Hongkong, published by the Colonial Office in London, uses the following identical words to describe the typical Hongkong tenement in all issues from 1927 through 1938: "The usual frontage of each house is fifteen feet .... and a depth of thirty-five feet, while each storey consists of one large room' with a native type kitchen in the rear. This room is separated by thin partitions seven feet high into three cubicles, each of which may accommodate a family. A latrine is built at ground floor level, one to each house irrespective of the number of occupants, and is common to all The houses are divided by scavenging lanes six feet wide."
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(4) Edmund Burney in his Report on Education in Hongkong, published on behalf of the Government of Hongkong by the Crown Agents for the Colonies, London, 1935, describes school premises as "usually inadequate and sometimes abominable." He points out that graduates of Hongkong schools know neither Chinese nor English and pours scorn on institutions he visited in which Chinese boys were "being taught not without some detail, about the religious wars in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries" but nothing about China. One of his major criticisms is the insufficient expenditure of primary schools, which are "all that the poorer Chinese can afford, and the government is giving least help to those who are least able to help themselves." For a description of Hongkong's economy and economic policy, see Report of the Governor's Commission to Into the Causes and Effects of the Present Trade Depression in Hongkong, 1934-35.
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