The sixteenth book in the Royal Asiatic Society’s Hong Kong Study Series traces the development of political and constitutional conventions, rules that augment or diminish the power of various offices and actors, against a wider backdrop, including the evolution of Hong Kong society and the ebb and flow of power between: the Colonial Office; the Governor, “the man on the spot”; Hong Kong’s Civil Service; and various Hong Kong actors, official and unofficial, expatriate and Chinese.

In this fascinating book, Gavin Ure fleshes out the impact of political figures and how their actions, and inactions, various imperial or Hong Kong...

Who made policy in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong? Was it Hong Kong’s Governor and his senior civil servants? Or was it the British government through the Secretary of State for the Colonies (hereinafter the “Secretary of State”) and Colonial Office officials? How much influence did leading locally domiciled Chinese, Portuguese and Indian and British expatriate businessmen and professionals wield? This book explores the different political factors and forces that lay behind some of the major policy issues which arose in the forty years between 1918 and 1958. It considers the extent to which the Hong Kong government...

The Hong Kong government was a bureaucracy. Its members, Hong Kong’s civil servants, formed part of a hierarchical organisation. Many of them made a full career in government service. They included professionals who worked in one department or a range of departments and generalists who were posted to different departments to administer and lead them. They were all answerable to the Governor who, in this period, had also previously worked in a colonial bureaucracy, either in Hong Kong or in another British colony. He was answerable to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, a politician in London and a...

The 1920s saw increasing pressures for social change in Hong Kong. These pushed and nudged government towards increasing its reach by adopting new legislation. This was not change led or embraced wholeheartedly by a progressive government; rather, it was change taken hesitantly by a sometimes reluctant one. Tentative initial steps brought slow and, at times, unsteady change.

Change did not happen in isolation. Hong Kong’s society and economy continued to grow and develop. Its population increased from 625,000 in 1921 to 850,000 in 1931.¹ This influx occurred against a backdrop of political instability and uncertainty in China after the 1911...

Pressure for change accelerated towards the end of the 1930s. Change was still a slow and tentative process. Hong Kong’s society and economy continued to grow and develop. Its population increased from 850,000 in 1931 to an estimated 1.64 million in 1941, boosted by the estimated 750,000 refugees who entered Hong Kong between 1937 and 1939 to escape the Japanese forces invading China.¹ Hong Kong had also been affected by the Depression of the 1930s and this caused budgetary concern in Hong Kong. The unofficials were so concerned about it that they pushed the government to set up a Retrenchment...

The British Crown Colony of Hong Kong was captured by the Japanese army on Christmas Day 1941. British civil government was restored on 1 May 1946 in a form very similar to that of the pre-1941 government. So were many of its policies and personnel. This was not what the Colonial Office had envisaged in 1942. It had concluded then that a restored Hong Kong government should be different in both form and substance. This desire for change had later to be sublimated to wider pressures and constraints. The US and Chinese governments had pressed for Hong Kong’s return to...

The need to win support from politicians is an integral part of a democratic system. In the closed political world of post-1945 Hong Kong, however, this kind of support might have been thought barely necessary. It has already been seen how malleable local views could be or how a Secretary of State could even disregard them. It has also been shown how a Governor with strong convictions, such as Northcote, could persuade unofficials to support proposals they would probably have preferred not to. After 1945, this became a more important part of the political process. Why was this so? This...

In May 1946, on his return to Hong Kong, Young stated publicly that it was British and Hong Kong government policy to introduce changes to allow “the inhabitants of the territory ... a fuller and more responsible share in the management of their own affairs”.¹ Six years later, the Secretary of State announced the time was “inopportune” for major constitutional reform.² In the interim, the Hong Kong government had presented four different proposals to the Colonial Office. Why was there such prolonged consideration? Why were there so many different proposals and what were their origins? Whose policy was reflected in...

The exasperation and frustration in Creech-Jones’ remarks was palpable. He had been asked about Hong Kong’s housing policy by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Colonial Office official responsible for Hong Kong had told him, perhaps not very tactfully, that Hong Kong’s policy was to leave housing to the private sector. For Creech-Jones this only “confirm[ed] what the Archbishop told me”, although what that was remained a mystery even to his senior officials.¹ Just over one year later, however, Creech-Jones’ successor had issued detailed and comprehensive directions to Hong Kong on what housing policy it should adopt. It was instructed...

The Shek Kip Mei fire on Christmas Day 1953 left upwards of 60,000 people homeless. Four months later, a decision had been taken to resettle them into permanent multi-storey accommodation provided at public expense. Within a year, it had become government policy to rehouse all cleared squatters in this manner. This marked a major shift in policy. Prior to this, the Hong Kong government had never seriously contemplated the provision of permanent subsidised housing for squatters. Sites for temporary resettlement had been provided which allowed squatters to erect their own hunts. How had to seek the Secretary of State’s approval...

Britain’s formal granting of financial autonomy to Hong Kong in 1958 had the air of an important turning point in relations between the two governments. Officials in both governments knew, however, that Hong Kong had been exercising de facto financial autonomy for several years beforehand and that the Colonial Office had done nothing to stop it. How had the Hong Kong government come to exercise such autonomy? The controls instituted in 1948³ had, after all, set out which matters needed the Secretary of State’s approval and on which issues he was to be consulted. Had Hong Kong sought such autonomy...

There was no clear linear progression in the development of the Hong Kong government’s autonomy. There were too many variables for this to have happened. There were moments when it was able to exercise a degree, even a high degree of autonomy, and others when it was not. Much depended on the circumstances of the time, the political pressure that was brought to bear and how those in authority responded to it. The exercise of autonomy was as much the result of changing political pressures as it was of the personalities and the beliefs of the principal actors involved, in...