China's Hong Kong

The Politics of a Global City

Tim Summers

• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781788213332, 9781788213325
• eBook ISBN: 9781788213356
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica asiatica

In 1997, Hong Kong became a special administrative region of China under the "one country, two systems" framework. In this new edition, Tim Summers brings his analysis of the politics of Hong Kong fully up to date and discusses the ramifications for the city of the mass demonstrations of 2019–20 and the city's intensifying confrontational politics that have culminated in China's new national security law for Hong Kong.

In the process, Hong Kong has lost the sweet spot it occupied for four decades in a world of intensifying economic globalization and decent US–China relations, all the more so after Covid-19. Instead it finds itself at the frontline of US–China strategic rivalry. Summers explores how the city's future will be shaped by the interaction of these global tensions with Hong Kong's polarized local politics and its relationship with Beijing.

1

Hong Kong before 1997

The typical history of Hong Kong begins around 1840. The previous year had seen the outbreak of what has since become known as the first Opium War between China’s Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and Britain. Although prompted by the highly-exploitative opium trade, the conflict was also about wider issues of diplomatic status and representation and the management of trade. British gunboats prevailed against a weak Qing counterpart, and during the conflict British forces occupied the small island of Hong Kong at the mouth of the Pearl River which led inland to the southern city of Canton (today known as Guangzhou), planting their flag in Hong Kong in January 1841. The Treaty of Nanking which ended the first Opium War in 1842 – the first of the so-called “unequal treaties” – included provision for the Qing to cede Hong Kong to the British in perpetuity.

This initial imperial outpost was expanded in 1860 after the second Opium War by the ceding of the Kowloon peninsula, only 20 square kilometres of land which sat across the deep natural harbour from Hong Kong island. At the end of the nineteenth century, a wider scramble among western powers for concessions from the Qing saw Britain expand its colony further, with the addition of land to the north of the Kowloon peninsula and some 230 outlying islands. At over 930 square kilometres these New Territories constitute the vast majority of the 1,100 square kilometres of Hong Kong as a whole (Hong Kong’s boundaries today also encompass 1,650 square kilometres of sea). Under the terms of the Convention of Peking of 1898, the New Territories were not ceded, but leased to Britain for a period of 99 years, and only occupied after brief resistance from the indigenous inhabitants of the area was overcome. With a Royal Order in Council stipulating British rule until 30 June 1997, the future “appointment with China” was set.¹

In contemporary China, the year 1840 has taken on a significance beyond its direct relevance to Hong Kong. This is the year when, in the writing of Chinese history, “modern” Chinese history begins. It is a much-cited date in official Chinese speeches and publications, and its significance for Chinese nationalists (including in the Communist Party) has been as a marker of the start of the “century of humiliation”, China’s subjugation to western powers. The “carving up” of Qing territory by Europeans contributed to the eventual decline of the dynasty. The final blow was delivered by uprisings in Wuhan in October 1911 which spread across China and led to the establishment in 1912 of the new Republic of China (1912–49) – China was no longer an empire but a fledgling nation state. Hong Kong played an important role in this period of Chinese political history, with revolutionary leader and provisional first president of the Republic, Sun Yat-sen, among those who sought refuge in Hong Kong. Others, like the late Qing dynasty reformer Kang Youwei, were stimulated by observing life in Hong Kong to think about different ways in which the nascent Chinese nation-state could work.

For much of its time under British rule, Hong Kong was run as one colony among many spread across the globe. Governors were appointed in London, and until the 1970s came from the colonial service. The largely economic interests of the British residents and companies were paramount, with little space for the indigenous Chinese inhabitants to participate in political or elite social life. The main colonial motivation well into the twentieth century was Britain’s “China trade”, although Chinese contributions to the local economy were significant: a train link from Kowloon to Canton had begun operating in 1910, and wealthy entrepreneurs, mainly from Guangdong, headed to Hong Kong from the 1920s, during the early years of the colony’s industrialization in Hong Kong, which were accompanied by industrial strife. Britain’s China trade was not only carried out through Hong Kong, however, and the British opened a number of treaty ports across Qing territory in the second half of the nineteenth century. Shanghai in particular played a prominent role in the first half of the twentieth century, one which was probably more important for British economic interests in the Republic of China era than Hong Kong.

For China, these were challenging decades, with warlordism and a weak central government under the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), led by Chiang Kai-shek from 1926. An invasion by Japan began in the northeast in 1931, and spread across the eastern seaboard from 1937, prompting Chiang’s government to move inland, ending up in the southwestern city of Chongqing. Hong Kong itself was occupied by the Japanese from December 1941 to August 1945, bringing much hardship to Hong Kong. Its return to British administration after the Second World War was not certain at the time. US President Roosevelt had not wanted to see the continuation of a substantial British empire in Asia, and during the war was sympathetic to the idea of Hong Kong being handed to the Republic of China. His successor Truman was less committed than Roosevelt to this line, however, and with Chiang a relatively weak leader, the British managed to take the Japanese surrender in Hong Kong. For Chiang, the next few years were marked by civil war with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Mao Zedong, a contest which Chiang would lose, leaving him to flee to Taiwan.

For Hong Kong, the immediate postwar period saw one of the most significant proposals for political reform as Governor Mark Young proposed greater representation by the local population and localization of the civil service, drawing on colonial lessons from elsewhere. But after Young was replaced by Alexander Grantham (governor, 1947–57) these ideas were shelved. The local business elite was content with the political status quo, while Grantham was sceptical that local Chinese could be moulded into British subjects, and there was some fear on the part of the colonial authorities that changes could facilitate Chinese communist involvement in local politics. From the late 1940s, Hong Kong had also gained in strategic importance for Britain as a centre for commercial operations in China.

The ways in which China has affected Hong Kong have shifted with Chinese politics over the tumultuous twentieth century, and it was probably subsequent developments in China which did more than the British to shape the next phase of Hong Kong’s history. From 1946, the civil war between the nationalist Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Party prompted an influx of capital and people into Hong Kong. Historian John Carroll comments that between 1947 and 1949, “almost all major firms in Shanghai moved their operations to Hong Kong”, giving a major boost to Hong Kong’s industrial development.² Hong Kong’s population, which had declined from 1.5 million to 600,000 during the war, rose rapidly due to migration mainly from the adjacent Guangdong province, approaching 2.5 million by the middle of the 1950s. Such flows of people and capital southwards into Hong Kong have been a regular part of its history, even as they have fluctuated in intensity and impact.

Less than a year after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on 1 October 1949, the outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula was to have important implications for Hong Kong. Hong Kong suffered both from the United Nations embargo on strategic goods being sold to China, and from the broader US embargo against any trade with China. Some businesses worked their way around these restrictions, and smuggling was rife, but the embargoes also had the effect of pushing a shift in the Hong Kong economy from a reliance on entrepôt trade towards manufacturing. With an influx of capital and labour from China, the Hong Kong economy began to emerge as an important manufacturing and export base, one of the newly-industrializing “tigers” or “dragons” of postwar East Asia.

The Cold War also brought a new political context for Hong Kong and a need to coexist with both the new PRC and the Republic of China on Taiwan. The US retained diplomatic relations with the latter, while the PRC had been recognized by the British in January 1950, although it was to take until 1972 before full ambassadorial relations between the UK and PRC were established. The strategic value to the US of Hong Kong grew in the Cold War, both as a base for espionage and propaganda, and “rest and relaxation” for its sailors, including during the Vietnam War. But Hong Kong required a reasonable relationship with the PRC, and the British were worried about being too close to the US in Hong Kong. For the PRC leadership, Hong Kong was useful potential leverage between the US and UK in this early phase of the Cold War.³

Strategic motivation of this sort informed the Chinese Communist Party’s operations in Hong Kong from the 1920s to the 1960s. From its first presence in Hong Kong in 1924, some three years after the Party’s establishment in Shanghai, the main goal of the Party in Hong Kong was to support its cause across China, and in particular in Guangdong. Thinned out in the 1930s after the first United Front between the CCP and KMT collapsed in 1927, the CCP’s presence in Hong Kong increased again during the war years. After the war concluded, the CCP was initially allowed a presence in Hong Kong and established a branch of the Xinhua News Agency in 1947 (which remained the home for the Party’s work until it was replaced by the Central Government Liaison Office in 2000), although the British clamped down on communist organizations from 1948 when it looked possible the CCP would take control of China. A Chinese request for a foreign affairs envoy office in Hong Kong was rejected by the British in 1955, and following comments from Mao the Party’s Hong Kong Committee moved back to Hong Kong from Guangdong in 1956. From then on, the Party’s goal in Hong Kong was not to “liberate” the colony or target the British, but to facilitate China’s development, and to build a patriotic – as opposed to “socialist” – united front. The policy was to make full use of Hong Kong and plan for the long term.⁴

An early hint of this longer-term thinking came in 1961 with a comment in the Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, that the issue of Hong Kong would be “settled peacefully through negotiations” when conditions were “ripe”.⁵ For the British, the postwar years were also a time when parts of the British empire were beginning to gain independence. The postwar Labour government (1945–51) under Clement Attlee had confirmed its intention to retain Hong Kong. Grantham judged that Hong Kong could never be independent, but that its future lay either as a British colony or being incorporated into China.⁶ The general view was that Mao’s China would not bother Hong Kong if it continued to be useful, as indeed it had been for the communists before they “liberated” China in 1949. Indeed, Hong Kong provided goods and remittances to the PRC after 1949, as well as acting as an important window to the wider world.

Meanwhile, the wider consequences of revolutionary change across China were felt in Hong Kong during the 1950s and 1960s. Entrepreneurs and ordinary individuals continued to escape to the British colony, with the population rising to some five million, particularly during the disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign in China from 1958–61, when Mao Zedong attempted to reorganize society and the economy in a misguided effort to speed up development and move more rapidly to “socialism”. In many ways this laid the ground for the Cultural Revolution, a radical revolutionary turn which began formally in August 1966 and tore apart the bureaucracy and much of Chinese society.

During that period Hong Kong experienced some of its greatest turmoil, greater than during the strikes in the 1920s. This came to a head in six months of violence starting in May 1967, during which dozens died, events which remain controversial today. Provoked by a labour dispute, the riots were “orchestrated by CCP Hong Kong working from the Xinhua Hong Kong office”,⁷ as local leftists imbibed revolutionary zeal from China. Premier Zhou Enlai trod a careful line during this period, but after the British legation in Beijing (the diplomatic presence before full ambassadorial relations in 1972) was torched by Red Guards in August 1967 he was able to take back some control of events in Hong Kong. In spite of the hopes of some leftists, the Chinese leadership stuck to its position on Hong Kong’s status. These events were, however, a critical point for the CCP; after 1967 its “establishment in Hong Kong was largely destroyed by the colonial administration, and the sympathy of Hong Kong people lost”. The result of the riots was “increased legitimacy for the colonial government”.⁸

Although the Hong Kong government judged that the violence was the responsibility of local leftists in Hong Kong (and not Beijing), the episode highlighted that there was a need to improve labour relations and close the gap between the government and citizens. The disturbances of 1967 had followed protests the previous year against fare rises on the Star Ferry across Hong Kong’s harbour, and reflected widespread poverty, low wages, and poor working conditions in Hong Kong. In response, the government introduced compulsory free education (available at primary level by 1971) and improved welfare, describing its more active approach as “positive non-intervention”. However, plans for constitutional reform were shelved, with consultation favoured over elections.

Murray MacLehose arrived as Hong Kong’s governor in 1971, the first to come as a diplomat rather than a colonial officer (the colonial office had briefly become the Commonwealth Office, and was then merged into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office). MacLehose accelerated reforms begun after 1967, expanding public housing, primary education, transport, and the establishment of new towns in the New Territories. The economy grew rapidly (and would grow every year until 1998), with real estate development beginning to emerge as an important industry, increased foreign direct investment, and the emergence of a generation of Chinese entrepreneurs who would come to play dominant roles in Hong Kong’s economy. Politically, the approach remained conservative, with little real localization in government and some official monitoring of various political groups which began to appear locally. For many in Hong Kong, MacLehose is remembered positively, particularly for his decision to take on corruption in the police force and government, with the establishment of the highly effective Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in 1974.

For Hong Kong’s future, however, the British response to events of 1967 had other important implications. Internal British government assessments concluded that Hong Kong would eventually have to be handed back to China, given that Beijing could take Hong Kong if it wanted to, or simply disrupt it to the extent that it could become ungovernable.⁹ This was in the context of British decolonization elsewhere, and the decision to withdraw troops “east of Suez” by 1971, announced in January 1968. The reasons were both financial and strategic, although when it came to Hong Kong, the colony had since the late 1950s been fiscally independent of London, with the exception of the British garrison (whose financing was renegotiated by Harold Wilson’s government in the 1960s, so that the Hong Kong government made a greater contribution).

As longstanding negotiations between Britain and China on the normalization of diplomatic relations finally concluded in 1972, the PRC authorities took the opportunity to set out their position on Hong Kong. Foreign minister Huang Hua described it in 1972 as “a Chinese territory under British administration”, making clear the Chinese position that Hong Kong had always been under Chinese sovereignty and its future was an “internal matter” to be decided when the time was right. The same year, as the PRC had taken the Chinese seat at the United Nations in October 1971, its diplomats requested that Hong Kong be removed from the United Nations’ list of colonies, a request which was carried out with little discussion or opposition.

The society that emerged in Hong Kong by the 1970s was one marked by rapid change, and shaped very much by developments in China, from which Hong Kong had become something of a place of exile, an important feature of its future political culture. Its population was dominated by hard-working immigrants, many of whom had come to Hong Kong after 1945. Its economy, driven increasingly by ethnically Chinese entrepreneurs as well as western businesses, was growing rapidly as a manufacturing and export powerhouse which would become known as one of the four Asian “dragons”. Still a British colony in its political structure, Hong Kong was beginning to face a future under which British influence and power – Kipling’s “pomp of yesterday” – had already declined.

We can see from this brief account that Hong Kong’s history has been shaped by a dynamic combination of global, Chinese and local forces. The nature of these forces has changed over time, as has the way they have interacted. China (or t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the second edition
• Note on transliteration
• Glossary and abbreviations
• Map
• Introduction
• 1. Hong Kong before 1997
• 2. Implementing the handover settlement
• 3. Hong Kong’s economy, globalization and the rise of China
• 4. The Occupy movement and its aftermath
• 5. International dimensions of the Hong Kong SAR
• 6. A year of protest
• 7. Hong Kong’s future
• Timeline: Key dates in Hong Kong’s political history
• Notes
• Index