Hong Kong and Macau_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 14th Edition) - Andrew Stone [8]
The colony’s population continued to grow thanks to waves of immigrants fleeing the Chinese Revolution of 1911, which ousted the decaying Qing dynasty and ushered in several decades of strife, rampaging warlords and famine. The civil war in China kept refugee numbers high, but the stream became a flood after Japan invaded China in 1937.
Hong Kong’s status as a British colony would offer the refugees only a temporary haven. The day after Japan attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, its military machine swept down from Guangzhou and into Hong Kong.
Conditions under Japanese rule were harsh, with indiscriminate massacres of mostly Chinese civilians; Western civilians were incarcerated at Stanley Prison on Hong Kong Island. Many Hong Kong Chinese fled to Macau, administered by neutral Portugal.
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THE ROAD TO BOOMTOWN
After Japan’s withdrawal from Hong Kong, and subsequent surrender in August 1945, the colony looked set to resume its hibernation. But events both at home and on the mainland forced the colony in a new direction.
Soon after the surrender of Japan, a civil war broke out in China between the Communists and the Nationalists. When the Communists came to power in 1949, many people were sure that Hong Kong would be overrun. But though the Chinese government continued to denounce the ‘unequal treaties’, it recognised Hong Kong’s importance to the national economy.
The turmoil on the mainland unleashed a torrent of refugees – both rich and poor – into Hong Kong. The refugees brought along capital and cheap labour vital to Hong Kong’s economic takeoff. On a paltry, war-torn foundation, local and foreign businesses built a huge manufacturing (notably textiles and garments) and financial services centre that transformed Hong Kong into one of the world’s great economic miracles.
However, trouble flared up in the 1950s and ’60s due to political and social discontent. Riots broke out in 1957 after local officials took down the Nationalist flag in a squatter area. In 1966 a one-man hunger strike against the price rise of ferry tickets soon escalated into days of widespread urban unrest in Kowloon.
In 1967, at the height of the so-called Cultural Revolution, when the ultraleftist Red Guards were in de facto control in China, Hong Kong’s stability again looked precarious. The pro-communist groups in Hong Kong turned a labour dispute into an all-out ‘anti-colonial movement’. Demonstrations, strikes and riots rocked the colony, and the violence soon mushroomed into bombings and arson attacks.
Hong Kong’s economy was paralysed for months. The riot came to an end in December 1967, when Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai ordered the pro-communist groups to stop.
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A SOCIETY IN TRANSITION
After ‘a testing time for the people of Hong Kong’, as the Hong Kong Yearbook summed it up at the end of 1967, the colonial government initiated a series of reforms to alleviate social discontent and to foster a sense of belonging to Hong Kong. In the next decade the government introduced more labour laws, and invested heavily in public housing, medical service, education and recreational activities for youth. In the early 1970s, the construction of the first three ‘New Towns’ – Sha Tin, Tsuen Wan and Tuen Mun – commenced, marking the start of a massive and unprecedented public-housing programme that would, and still does, house millions of Hong Kong people.
Although Hong Kong’s stock market collapsed in 1973, its economy resumed its upward trend later in the decade. At the same time many of Hong Kong’s neighbours began to mimic the colony’s success. Just as their cheap labour was threatening to undermine the competitive edge of Hong Kong manufacturers, China began to emerge from its self-imposed isolation.
The ‘Open Door’ policy of Deng Xiaoping, who took control of China