Although Hong Kong got off to a shaky and unpromising start as a centre of imperial activity, by about the 1870s it had become a significant entrepot port with warehousing, shipping services and banking as its staple activities. Despite the virtual absence of manufacturing, by 1911, the year the Manchu dynasty fel the population had reached almost half a million.
6
Throughout the period up to the Second World War Hong Kong remained of less importance to British economic activity in China than Shanghai in which, though not a colony, Britain had extraterritorial "rights". British investment in industry tended to go to Shanghai rather than Hong Kong. In Hong Kong a classic colonial régime mainly operated in order to ensure optimum conditions for free enterprise: this involved both providing a modicum of "law and order" for commercial interests and vigorous repression of the working class. A major strike by seamen, who were joined by dockworkers and others in the service industry, in 1921-22 resulted in victory for the strikers in spite of energetic manoeuvrings by the colonial régime. The seamen's strike was soon followed by an even more menacing development in 1925-26: a boycott of British goods, followed by a general strike, involving more than 50,000 workers, for 16 months. Among other dangers for the British autho- rities was the fact that the Hong Kong strike was directly linked to events in China and indeed was co-ordinated with activities in Canton. It thus represented joint action by the Chinese proletariat inside and outside the Colony against British imperialism and was only brought to an end not by any success on the part of the British authorities but by the machinations of the right wing of the Kuomin- tang (Nationalist) movement, headed by Chiang Kai-shek, in Canton. For
years after this the Hong Kong Government did not publish trade figures, in order to conceal the extent of the workers' victory in disrupting Hong Kong's commercial activity. In 1927, following on the Communists' major setback at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek in Shanghai, the colonial régime ordered a crackdown on the Hong Kong proletariat; the Hong Kong branch of the Seamen's Union was closed down and working class resistance largely smashed. As the nature of the class struggle within China shifted from the town to the country, and, in particular, after the Long March moved the centre of the armed struggle into remote areas far from Hong Kong, so did the tempo of working class activity in Hong Kong, as in the rest of the Treaty Ports, slow down.
The major development as regards Hong Kong's commercial future was the decision taken at the Ottawa Conference of 1932 to grant the Colony Imperial Preference. This laid the basis for Hong Kong's post-World War II export drive into Commonwealth markets when the Colony went into manufacturing on a big scale.
Apart from the tumultuous changes in China itself (which, paradoxically, had less military effect), the main change in the Far East was the rapid growth in Japan's power after the First World War. Britain, like the US and France, decided to try to form a stable alliance with Japan and as part of this overall arrangement agreed to limitations on bases for capital ships (battleships and aircraft carriers). In return for Japan promising not to build such a base in Taiwan (then a Japanese colony), Britain undertook not to build one nearer Japan than Singapore and the US no nearer than Pearl Harbour. Hong Kong was thus precluded from be-
10
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.