Colonial Hong Kong
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After a series of Chinese defeats during the First Opium War (1839-1842) at the hands of Capt. Charles Elliot of the Royal Navy and Capt. Anthony Blaxland Stransham of the Royal Marines, Hong Kong Island was occupied by the British on January 20, 1841. The island was first used by the British as a staging post during the war, and while the East India Company intended to establish a permanent base on the island of Zhoushan, Elliot took it upon himself to claim the island on a permanent basis. At the time Hong Kong island had a population of about 6,000 people, mostly Tanka fishermen and Hakka charcoal burners living in a number of coastal villages [1]. The ostensible authority for the occupation was negotiated between Captain Eliot and the Governor of Kwangtung Province. The Convention of Chuenpeh was concluded but had not been recognized by the court of Qing Dynasty at Beijing.
Subsequently, Hong Kong Island was ceded to Britain in 1842 under the Treaty of Nanking, at which point in time the territory became a Crown Colony. As there existed no official contact on the ambassadorial level between the Qing court and the British government until 1860, the governor of Hong Kong also served as the British plenipotentiary in the far east in the early years. The post of governor was established in 1843 and in the same year, a legislative council was established.
The Opium War was ostensibly fought to liberalize trade to China. With a base in Hong Kong, British traders, opium dealers, and merchants launched the city which would become the 'free trade' nexus of the East. American opium traders and merchant bankers soon joined in the trade (See Russell family; Perkins family; Forbes family).
Britain was granted a perpetual lease on the Kowloon Peninsula under the 1860 Convention of Beijing, which formally ended hostilities in the Second Opium War (1856-1858). In 1862, Hong Kong had an estimated population of 120,000.
During the 1890s, an epidemic of bubonic plague broke out in southern China. In the spring of 1894, about 100,000 dead were reported from Guangzhou. In May 1894, the disease erupted in Hong Kong's overcrowded Chinese quarter of Tai Ping Shan. At its height, the epidemic was killing 100 people per day in Hong Kong, and it killed a total of 2,552 people that year. The disease was greatly detrimental to trade and produced a temporary exodus of 100,000 Chinese from the colony. Plague continued to be a problem in the territory for the next 30 years. 1,290 people died of the disease between 1898 and 1900.
A de facto segregation existed between the European minority and the Chinese majority, many of whom moved to the area from southern China to work in its bustling trade. The establishment of the free port made Hong Kong a major entrepot from the start, yet, in no small part due to the inability for the British administrators to communicate with much of the population due to the language barrier, the society became segregated and polarized. Despite the slow rise of a British-educated Chinese upper class, by the late 19th Century there existed a de jure barring of the Chinese on Victoria Peak. The Chinese were seldom active within the British administration of Hong Kong until the 1960s.
The Chinese society had no official governmental help throughout much of the early years, and local, private welfare organizations such as hospitals and missionaries took over as powerful central figures of society. The small number of Chinese elite also had considerable influence during this time.
In 1898, the United Kingdom, concerned that Hong Kong could not be defended unless surrounding areas were also under British control, executed a 99-year lease of the New Territories, significantly expanding the size of the Hong Kong colony. The lease would expire at midnight, on June 30, 1997.
In 1914, despite an exodus of 60,000 Chinese fearing an attack on the colony after the World War I, Hong Kong's population begins its evermore claustrophobic climb - to 530,000 in 1916, 725,000 in 1925 and 1.6 million by 1941.
The role of Hong Kong as a political safe haven for Chinese political refugees further cemented its status, and few serious attempts to revert its ownership were launched in the early 1900s. Both Chinese Communist and Nationalist agitators found refuge in the territory, which did not actively participate in the turmoil in China at the time period when they did not directly cause trouble in Hong Kong. However, the dockworkers strikes in the 1920s and 1930s were widely attributed to the Communists by the authorities, and caused a backlash against the them.
[edit] World War 2 and the Japanese Occupation
- Main articles: Battle of Hong Kong and Japanese Occupation of Hong Kong
The development of Hong Kong was disturbed by the Japanese rule during World War II.
The British, Canadians, Indians and the Hong Kong Volunteer Defense Forces (HKVDF) resisted the Japanese invasion commanded by Sakai Takashi which started on December 8, 1941, a few hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor (which had started earlier the same morning at 03:23 Japan Standard Time). The defensive positions were doomed from the start; the Japanese achieved air superiority on the first day of battle and the defensive forces were outnumbered. The British and the Indians retreated from the Gin Drinker's Line and consequently from Kowloon under heavy aerial bombardment and artillery barrage. Fierce fighting continued on Hong Kong Island; the only reservoir was lost. Canadian Winnipeg Grenadiers fought at the crucial Wong Nai Chong Gap that secured the passage between downtown and the secluded southern parts of the island.
On December 25, 1941 - which has gone down in history as Black Christmas to local people - British colonial officials headed by the Governor of Hong Kong Mark Aitchison Young surrendered in person at the Japanese headquarters on the third floor of (the hotel) The Peninsula Hong Kong. Isogai Rensuke became the first Japanese governor of Hong Kong. This ushered in the three years and eight months of Imperial Japanese administration. The Chinese population who lived through the Japanese occupation simply refer to this period as "Three Years and Eight Months" (san nian ling ba ge yue, 三年零八個月).
During the Japanese occupation, runaway inflation and food rationing became the norm of daily lives. The Hong Kong Dollar was replaced by the Japanese Military Yen, a new currency issued by the Japanese Imperial Army administration. Historians estimate that as many as 10,000 women were raped in the first few days after Hong Kong's capture. The Japanese administration turned the city into a military base, summarily executing many residents suspected of opposing them. According to Philip Snow, a prominent historian of the period, the Japanese cut rations for civilians to conserve food for soldiers, usually to starvation levels and deported many to famine- and disease-ridden areas of the mainland, and even exiled some on uninhabited islands. Most of the repatriated actually had come to Hong Kong just a few years earlier to flee the terror of the Second Sino-Japanese War in mainland China.
By the end of the war in 1945, the population of Hong Kong shrunk to 600,000, less than half of the pre-war population of 1.5 million.
[edit] Post-war colonial Hong Kong
After the end of World War II and the communist takeover of mainland China in 1949, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated from mainland China to Hong Kong. However its position as an entrepot to mainland China was hurt significantly by the United Nations trade embargo against the People's Republic of China as a result of the Korean War. The new immigrants brought with them skills and capital, and others contributed to a vast, cheap labour pool. At the same time, many foreign firms moved their offices from Shanghai to Hong Kong to flee the communists. Hong Kong become a much more significant manufacturing centre as a result.
The ideals of communism impressed many young Hong Kongers in the 1960s. In May, 1967, a labour movement under the influence of the Cultural Revolution in the PRC became violent. Riots followed in the next six months. A famous radio host, Lam Bun (林彬), who openly criticised the movement, was murdered. Leftist agitators in Hong Kong resorted to terrorist attacks by planting real and fake bombs around the city. After the Hong Kong government brought down the labour movement, the communists' web in Hong Kong was broken and the Hongkongers' view of the communists became negative. (Refer to Hong Kong 1967 riots)
In the 1960s, radical free market economic policies were introduced in Hong Kong under Financial Secretary Sir John Cowperthwaite who served from 1961 until 1971. These policies have been widely credited with allowing an economic boom which would transform Hong Kong into a global manufacturing and financial centre.
In 1974, Murray McLehose founded the ICAC, the Independent Commission Against Corruption. The situation was so bad that there was a mass petition by policemen against prosecutions. Despite early police opposition to the ICAC, Hong Kong was quite successful in its anti-corruption efforts, eventually becoming ranked one of the least corrupt societies in the world.
While the opening of the mainland Chinese market and rising salaries drove many manufacturers north, Hong Kong today remains a major commercial and tourism centre. High life expectancy, literacy, per capita income and other socioeconomic measures attest to Hong Kong's achievements over the last four decades of the 20th Century.
