Viewed from a distance, this was a scene of early winter. The morning sun shone through a thin layer of fog and reflected a golden hue on the tiled roofs of village houses. On this day, sunlight splashed across the Lake Dongting region, emanating a deceptive feeling of warmth in the incipient chill that had descended with December.

On the embankment by the river, villagers came and went. Children dashed past, laughing as they ran ahead in their play. Despite the constant dust and dirt raised by trucks plying among the nearby villages, the village by the side of the...

The population of Hong Kong rose rapidly from 900 000 in early 1946 to two million in early 1949. The majority of the population were immigrants which totalled over a million people. Of course, within this group of immigrants, some were returnees while some had lived in Hong Kong before World War II and had come back to live in Hong Kong again after the war. But many also came here to escape from the civil war in mainland China. In Hong Kong, the influx of immigrants was not a new social phenomenon. As a migrant society, the fluctuations in...

The title of the lead article in the Hong Kong Annual Report: 1956 is ‘A Problem of People’. The article pointed out:

Looking back over this period, one can say that there is little that has been done that would not have been done differently if one problem had never existed. Finance, education, medical and health services, social welfare, prisons, police, industry, commerce, labour relations, land policy, housing, agriculture and fisheries, political relations — even the law itself — all bear the unmistakable surcharge (in a few cases an almost obliterating surcharge) of this single problem. It is a problem...

The mid-1960s was the watershed in the social development of Hong Kong society. It unveiled a new scene in contemporary Hong Kong.

1966: According to census statistics, slightly over half (53.8%) of Hong Kong’s residents were native born.¹ By the mid-1960s, due to changes in the demographic structure — especially the growth of the generation born after the war — the so-called ‘native born and bred’ became a phrase that had concrete meaning. For a migrant society, this simple social statistical information had quite a specific and significant meaning. A native sentiment — of being ‘native born and bred’ —...

If the 1960s was the transitional period ushering in drastic changes in Hong Kong society, then the 1970s can be described as an era with marked changes in the mentality of Hong Kong people.

Many of the social changes that had been in the process of formation during the 1960s were concretely displayed around the mid- and late 1970s.

The unrest and riots in the mid-1960s stimulated the young, native-born-and-bred generation to consider seriously their relationship with the society. This was a period for the young to search for their roots and to reflect on their identity. While the voices...

Hong Kong society of the 1980s had a dual character. On the one hand, having inherited various self-improvements and social reforms from the 1970s, Hong Kong society continued to further improve and upgrade itself based on changes in the environment and in the needs of society. In this respect, there is continuity in the development and progress of Hong Kong society. But on the other hand, soon after the 1980s began, Hong Kong society had to face the question of the political future of the entire society. The beginning of negotiations on the future of Hong Kong had tremendous impact...

As Henry Dunant has said, ‘But then you feel sometimes that your heart is suddenly breaking — it is as if you were stricken all at once with a sense of bitter and irresistible sadness, because of some simple incident, some isolated happening, some small unexpected detail which strikes closer to the soul, seizing on our sympathies and shaking all the most sensitive fibres of our being’ — what provokes people’s genuine feelings do not necessarily have to be horrendous disasters and tragedies. We all possess a heart capable of expressing sympathies. The question is: How do we turn this...