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The Institute for the Study of Con..ct
No one in 1842 could have imagined that Chinese would flow into Hong Kong in such numbers and with such impetus and energy that they would change the original concept of the settlement utterly. Eventually the place became not a British trading post serviced by Chinese labour but a Chinese industrial com- munity serviced by a British administration. The influx of people on such a scale--the population (today estimated at about five and a half million) increased from near-zero to more than 85,000 in the first 17 years of the Colony's existence-in turn made nonsense of all initial beliefs about the adequacy of building land and fresh water.
The territorial additions—consisting of the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 and the New Territories in 1898, the first seven times as small as the area of the island, the second over 12 times as large—have eased the pressure on land resources for short periods, as have massive reclamations from the sea, the levelling of hills and the terracing of mountains. But land shortage has been a continuous problem, to the same degree, perhaps, that the compactness of the territory has proved a consistent advantage.
The need for fresh water also has always outstripped the resources immedi- ately available. Successive programmes of reservoir building on the Island and then in the New Territories, culminating in the carving of two capacious storage areas out of the sea, kept shortages within just-tolerable bounds. But periods of restricted supply recurred until the late 1960s when China agreed to provide a regular supply of piped water from Guangdong Province, a source that now accounts for about a third of Hong Kong's consumption.
The harbour and the people emerge outstandingly as the real and only resources of the Colony. Allowed and encouraged to interact in an ambiance such as a small but stable administration has provided, they have fuelled the engines of growth and produced a forward momentum which has proved unstoppable even if interrupted by intervals of faltering and uncertainty. This conclusion is reinforced if, for purposes of this survey, the 140-year duration of Hong Kong's existence is divided into three periods: 1842 to 1900; 1900 to 1950; and 1950 up to today.
Historical background
For Hong Kong, as for the mercantile powers of the West, the last six decades of the 19th century were essentially the era of the China trade, when the ports of a reluctant empire were prised open for commerce. Much of this commerce was unsavoury, disreputable or in varying degrees illicit. Opium continued to enter China by way of Hong Kong as it had entered by way of Canton. Salt was another if smaller item of contraband, and in 1868 the British Minister to Peking described the Colony as "little more than an immense smuggling depot". As regards goods shipped out of China, one lucrative commodity consisted of coolies, transported in appalling conditions to lands where their conditions of labour approximated to those of slaves.
If it would be wrong to withhold all judgement on these enterprises, it would be facile to subject them to the standards, tout court, of today, under which many Chinese both on the mainland and in Hong Kong and many European as
Prospects for Hong Kong
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well as British merchants would alike stand condemned for their respective roles in such traffic. "Desperate people do desperate things", as a governor of Hong Kong said in 1979 in another context (speaking of the Vietnam refugee crisis); and the mid-19th century was in various respects as desperate a time for Hong Kong as it was troublous and humiliating for China.
The early years saw a struggle for survival. The inrush of people, which raised the population to 120,000 by 1861, caused severe problems of housing, public health and law and order. Fever was rife, as was piracy, and there were repeated alarms that the home government might disown and abandon the colony as insolvent and unviable. The remarkable thing is that Hong Kong contrived not only to survive but also to grow. Nor was the growth confined to entrepôt and to the banking, broking and multifarious other services which supported, and subsisted on, the harbour and its shipping: long before the turn of the century the rudiments of an educational system had come into being, and communal concerns had widened to find some room for reform and social advance as well as survival and profit.
By the start of the next half-century (1900–1950) Hong Kong had turned away from reliance on the opium trade as a mainstay of the entrepôt economy. During this period trade with China began relatively to yield ground to trade generated by regional and other growth and a more varied pattern of both imports and re-exports began to emerge. Hong Kong was not only becoming more respectable; it was widening its commercial options. In addition to ship- building and the processing of cement, there were sporadic though abortive attempts at textile manufacture.
Hong Kong continued to prosper and develop, but less dramatically and against a background of disturbance and upheaval. The 1914–18 war, which dampened trade, was followed by labour unrest in the Colony in the 1920s and by the impact of Japanese expansionism and militarism on China in the 1930s-a portent of the disaster and desolation which were to befall Hong Kong when it was invaded and occupied by the Japanese. Population figures tell the stark story: a total of 1·6 million inhabitants in 1940, a mere 600,000 in early 1945. But a further figure illustrates Hong Kong's capacity to recover: by the end of 1950, the Colony was on its feet again, with a population of 2.36 million.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s the Colony hoped for some respite to give time for war wounds to heal. Instead, the Chinese Civil War and the proclama- tion of the People's Republic led to a surge of immigration on a scale never experienced before. And this fearsome pressure was compounded by the announcement, in 1951, of the United Nations' (in effect, an American) embargo on trade with China.
These adversities, each of which on its own threatened to cripple the economy, inspired instead a defiant solution that changed the face of Hong Kong. Capital raised in the Colony and skills that had moved there from Shanghai made it possible to channel the flood of potential labour into textile manufacture—a move that set Hong Kong on its path as a provider of clothes, plastic products and electronic goods to many parts of the world.
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