Chapter 7

The Great War and

Chinese Nationalism

Even though its fortune was much more closely tied to events in East Asia,
as part of the British Empire Hong Kong found itself at war with Germany
when the assassination by a Serb of the heir apparent of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo in June 1914 provoked
a general war in Europe. While Hong Kong did play its part in supporting
the British war efforts, the Great War was largely a European affair with
only limited impact on life in this East Asian imperial outpost. Geography,
as well as strong economic, social and other ties with China, meant even in
the course of the war, Hong Kong was more immediately affected by
developments in China than by the fortune of the Allied Powers.
The Great War coincided with a period of important changes in China,
where the stability and cohesion of the young republic reached breaking
point despite the steady rise of Chinese nationalism. The initial unity
that followed the end of the Manchu Dynasty was achieved at the cost
of a deal between leaders of the revolutionary movement and Yuan Shikai,
the most powerful figure in the service of the last Emperor. Indeed,
Provisional President Sun Yat-sen of the Republic of China handed over
this supreme office to Yuan as a price for securing the latter’s allegiance
and ensuring the abdication of the Emperor. The republican experiment
was derailed a year later when Yuan attempted to build a dictatorship by
assassinating the leading advocate for parliamentary politics, Song
Jiaoren. 1 Song was the parliamentary leader of the Kuomintang, which
was formed by veterans of the Tongmenghui and had just won a landslide
in the first parliamentary elections. 2 His murder provoked Sun to organise
the so-called ‘Second Revolution’, which was quickly suppressed by Yuan.
Whatever his personal intentions, Yuan made an attempt to restore a
monarchy with himself as Emperor in 1915. Seizing the opportunity of
the Western powers’ preoccupation with the War, Japan tried to impose
upon China the infamous ‘Twenty-one Demands’ that would have reduced
China to a protectorate of Japan. 3 Although Yuan managed to resist the
most damaging of the Japanese demands, his monarchical attempt
discredited him. 4 The collapse of his monarchy in 1916 destroyed the
authority of the central government and allowed regional military leaders
 THE GREAT WAR AND CHINESE NATIONALISM 85

to seize control of their own domains. 5 This marked the beginning of

the warlord era, a state of affairs that was not nominally brought to a
close until 1928, when the successful Northern Expedition from Canton
led by General Chiang Kai-shek, a follower of Sun, re-established a
credible national government.
The failure of the republican experiment, the imperialist ambitions of
the Japanese and the sense of helplessness and anger among the
intellectuals, students and labour activists converged to produce a
powerful outburst of nationalism in China. This exploded spectacularly
in the form of the May Fourth Movement, which was a response to what
Chinese intellectuals and students saw as the unfair treatment of China
at the Versailles Peace Conference and the incompetence of the Chinese
government in negotiating the peace treaty in 1919. 6 China had joined
the Great War on the side of the Allied Powers in 1917 and contributed
nearly 200,000 labourers to ser ve as non-combat auxiliaries in the
battlefields of Europe, suffering no less than 2,000 fatal casualties. 7 This
notwithstanding, at Versailles China was treated not as a fellow victor
and ally but an inferior country. Its legitimate claim to restore its sovereign
rights over the former German Concession and naval base at Jiaozhou in
Shandong province was ignored. Instead, the Allied Powers gave the old
German privileges in Jiaozhou to the Japanese as spoils of war, in line
with secret agreements they had reached with Japan during the war. The
public display of indignation and protest among the urban elite of China
that followed dramatically accelerated the rise of nationalism in the
country, and led to a few major incidents in the 1920s with significant
implications for Hong Kong.
The behaviour of the Allied Powers also compared badly with the
apparent generosity of the Communist regime that seized control of
Russia towards the end of the Great War. In July 1919, the Soviet
government announced that it unilaterally gave up the privileges in China
inherited from the old Tsarist regime, though this news did not reach
China until the following March. 8 This grand gesture ‘invoked immediate
enthusiasm in China and provoked a dramatic interest’ in the Communist
ideology. 9 It also encouraged some political leaders, particularly Sun Yat-
sen – whose attempts to secure support from the Western countries had
repeatedly met with rebuff – to explore seriously the prospect of help
from the Soviet Union. 10
The province of Guangdong was caught up in much of the main drama
that unfolded in China. It was one of the most important territorial bases
that the Kuomintang had. A Cantonese himself, Sun relied heavily on
the province to continue his struggle to entrench republicanism in China.
The control of Canton, the provincial capital, changed hands several times
in the 1910s and 1920s. It reflected the rise and fall of various warlords
and Sun, who sometimes cooperated with and sometimes intrigued against
each other. In the middle of the 1920s it also became a major centre for
the Chinese Communist Par ty or CCP (w hich had joined Sun’s
Kuomintang in a united front) to recr uit, train and organise their
86 A MODERN HISTORY OF HONG KONG

supporters. 11 Canton was therefore a hotbed for activists of all kinds.

Whatever their individual political persuasion, most of them were also
deeply nationalistic, which made them not particularly well disposed to
the British colonial regime south of the border.
Hong Kong found itself sucked into the whirlpool of politics in China,
and Guangdong in particular, in this period. Sometimes this was the result
of involvement in Guangdong affairs by certain sectors of Hong Kong’s
Chinese community. More often it was caught up in the rapid rise and
spread of Chinese nationalism that swept across China but did not stop
at the Sino-British border. This was partly because the border was a porous
one and the Chinese population of Hong Kong identified themselves
and their future more with China than with the British colony. It was
also partly because Hong Kong was one of China’s main gateways to the
West, the port through which numerous Chinese sailed to the West. Those
who acquired Western ideas about the rights of individuals, labour unions
and other modern concepts did not merely bring them to China but to
the working people of Hong Kong too.

The Impact of the Great War

When the Great War started, the British community in Hong Kong greeted
it with the same patriotic fervour that prevailed across the British Empire.
Few expected the long drawn out, painful, horrific and unprecedented
scale of slaughter that the War turned out to entail. Hong Kong called
up the locally raised Hong Kong Volunteer Corps to take over most of
the garrison duties so that the regular forces could be freed for service
in Europe. 12
With Germany now the enemy, the colonial government needed to
deal with the existence of the sizeable German community. It numbered
342 out of the Western civilian population of 5,248 by the 1911 census,
and was the second-largest Wester n community after the British
themselves. On the outbreak of war, women and children of German
nationality were made to leave while men of military age were interned.
They were joined by other German nationals sent from Jiaozhou after it
fell into Allied hands. The internment camp was guarded in such a relaxed
manner that internees were given tools to build an earthen stage for a
theatre hut, but they promptly dug a 180 feet tunnel for a mass escape. 13
The attempt failed, and the three men who got away were arrested before
they could cross into China.
Any concern of a German attack disappeared once the China squadron
of the German Navy left its base in Jiaozhou to rejoin the main fleet and
was subsequently destroyed in the First Battle of the Falklands. By
November 1914, what remained of German military power in China was
eliminated when an Anglo-Japanese force, including HMS Triumph which
sailed from Hong Kong, captured Jiaozhou. 14 The security of Hong Kong
never came under any threat in the course of the War.
Hong Kong’s main contributions to the war efforts lay in the support
it gave to Britain. Patriotism among the expatriate British population led
 THE GREAT WAR AND CHINESE NATIONALISM 87

to 579 out of a total of 2,157 men volunteering for military service outside
the colony. 15 In addition, Hong Kong not only paid the normal military
contribution but also made a further financial contribution of $HK10
million, roughly equivalent to the total government revenue for the year
1914. 16 Included in this contribution was $2 million raised from a seven
per cent special charge on rates paid by property owners, most of whom
were Chinese. Individual Chinese also made donations, of which the best
known was Robert Hotung’s gift of two Vickers fighter aircraft. 1 7
Although the Chinese community’s support of the war effort should not
be confused with the patriotic response of the expatriate Britons, it was
nevertheless a reflection of the appreciation the better-off Chinese had
for the British administration.
The economy of Hong Kong did not suffer directly from the war.
Even though its non-Chinese population fell from 20,710 to 13,600, its
population as a whole increased steadily and rapidly, rising from 501,304
in 1914 to 598,100 in 1919. 18 In terms of economic growth, Hong Kong
benefited rather than suffered, not least because of expansion in business
and other economic activities among the local Chinese. The redirection
of British shipping from Hong Kong and China to support the war gave
the local Chinese g reater scope to expand into modern shipping,
particularly in light of the growth of traffic between Hong Kong and
Canton. 19 The rapid development of a modern Chinese banking sector
also roughly coincided with the war. Although the first modern Chinese
bank, the Bank of Canton, was founded in 1912, three others came into
existence between 1914 and 1919, including the largest of them all, the
Bank of East Asia. 20
The continued expansion of the economy did not mean Hong Kong
was insulated from some of the economic disruptions that came to a
head when war finally ended. Severe inflation had occurred as a result of
the shortages caused by wartime disruptions and the rapid increase in
population, which pushed up rent and the price of various commodities
while wages remained static. 21 This rise in the cost of living without a
compensatory increase in wages put a serious strain on the working
people, with the low-paid labourers being hit the hardest. A manifestation
of this problem was the rice riots of 1919. They broke out as prices shot
up following the failure of the rice crop in Thailand, restriction of exports
in Indo-China and India, as well as an unexpected upsurge in demand in
Japan. 22 The fall in living standards among the Chinese working class
created serious social tension and laid the ground for a period of labour
unrest and social changes after the end of the Great War.

Labour Unrest
The first wave of labour unrest was a 19-day strike organised by the Hong
Kong Chinese Engineers’ Institute in March 1920, which had been
established only six months earlier. Since members of this union were in
fact skilled workers who worked mainly as mechanics in dockyards, public
utilities and manufacturing industries, they could not easily be replaced.
88 A MODERN HISTORY OF HONG KONG

They were among the best paid of Chinese workers and occupied a
relatively strong bargaining position in demanding a pay rise to offset
the effect of inflation. 23 After their repeated requests for a 40 per cent
wage increase were rejected, they staged a strike and 9,000 left Hong
Kong for Canton, where the cost of living was lower and the government
under Sun Yat-sen helped them by providing lodging and food for the
duration of the strike. 24 Within three weeks their employers, mostly
expatriate-owned enterprises and the colonial government itself, agreed
to meet most of their demands. It meant a pay rise of 32.5 per cent for
those who earned less than $HK100 per month and a 20 per cent rise for
those earning more, and the strike ended. 25
It was the first large-scale strike organised by a modern labour union
in Hong Ko n g. It had the ef fect of inspiring other s to f ollow.
Consequently, carpenters, bricklayers, cabinet-makers, and other skilled
workers organised strikes the following year. 26 According to one account,
between 1920 and 1922 a total of 42 strikes for better wages occurred. 27
This wave of labour unrest reached a high point with the seamen’s
strike of 1922, which has been described as ‘the most successful labor
movement ever organized by Chinese workers against unfairness and
exploitation’. 28 Despite the implied political overtone of this assessment,
like most of the strikes of this period, it was driven primarily by economic
motives. Organised by the General Union of Chinese Seamen, it was
launched to demand wage increases of between 10 and 40 per cent and
to reform the system for recruiting seamen. The seamen felt justified in
the first demand because their wages had remained static while the cost
of living had gone up significantly. In 1922, a Chinese seaman on average
wage was paid a monthly income lower than the basic expenditures
required to support himself and his family while his Caucasian colleagues
were paid several times more and were given a wage increase of 15 per
cent. 29 Their second demand was essentially to seek redress for a system
of recruitment that allowed the middlemen, the recruiting agencies, to
charge exorbitant fees for arranging for them to work on ships. 30
The strike started with 1,500 seamen on 13 January 1922 after the
Union’s requests for pay rises were rebuffed for a third time. It escalated
as mediation efforts by the government failed. By the end of the month
over 10,000 seamen had left Hong Kong for Canton where they received
a sympathetic reception. The situation got more serious as sympathy
strikes by transpor t workers also star ted, and striking seamen in
Guangdong were sent by their union to stop fresh food from being
shipped to Hong Kong. Further attempts at mediation by the established
leaders of the Chinese community, like the Board of Directors of the
Tung Wah Hospital, failed. 31
The government, under Sir Reginald Stubbs (Governor, 1919–25),
reacted in a heavy-handed manner. Stubbs completely misread the
situation and misunderstood the nature of the strike. Even after it ended,
he continued to think it was politically inspired and ‘organised from
Canton with the sympathy of Sun’. 32 He proscribed the Seamen’s Union.
 THE GREAT WAR AND CHINESE NATIONALISM 89

This provoked the union to call for a general strike in Hong Kong, backing
it up with intimidation. 33 As a result, before February ended a total of
120,000 workers, more than one-fifth of the total population, had joined
the strike and turned the usually bustling and noisy harbour into a
remarkably quiet port full of stranded ships. 34 In order to pre-empt an
exodus to Canton, whose support enabled the strikers to continue their
struggle, the colonial government suspended train services to Canton.
This backfired. Striking workers left on foot, leading to a dramatic
escalation. The police opened fire and killed five strikers in the town of
Shatin on 3 March when they tried to stop the exodus. Outraged by the
perceived brutality of the police, sympathy strikes spread very quickly
and practically paralysed Hong Kong. This left the government and the
shipping companies with little choice but to back down. 35 A compromise
was reached two days later and the seamen returned to work on 6 March,
ending eight weeks of strike.
The seamen secured pay rises of between 15 and 30 per cent, in contrast
to their original demands for 17 to 35 per cent, and a lift of the ban on
the Seamen’s Union, though the recruitment system was not changed.
Although strikes by other unions continued for a short time, they generally
ended with a round of wage increases averaging about 30 per cent. 36 By
any standard, this was a major achievement, both for the union and for
organised labour in Hong Kong. Indeed, it taught the local working men
that ‘unity among themselves was the most powerful bulwark for the
protection of their interests’. 3 7 This lesson proved to be of g reat
significance three years later when organised labour confronted the
colonial authority head on for the first time and as part of a general
political and nationalist movement in Guangdong.
The failure of the Chinese elite, drawn mainly from the merchants, to
mediate also revealed the gulf between them and the workers. This
incident showed that the government’s nineteenth-century practice of
leaving the local Chinese elite to keep stability and order within the
Chinese community had failed. Hong Kong society had changed so much
that the government had to deal directly with its working-class Chinese
population. It sought to prepare for such disruption of social order and
prosperity by increasing the size of the garrison and compiling a register
of expatriate citizens who could be called up to perform essential services
if required. It also kept the Emergency Regulations Ordinance (1922),
which was rushed through the Legislative Council in one day, when the
strike was deteriorating fast in February, to arm the Governor in Council
with sweeping powers to ‘make any regulations whatsoever which he may
consider desirable in the public interest’. 38 The strike prompted the colo-
nial government to keep a more watchful eye over its Chinese population.
The strike ‘was essentially an economic struggle for better wages’,
though Chinese Communist writers claim it carried ‘political meaning in
struggling against imperialism’. 39 The reality that the strike was about
improving wages was reflected in the settlement. Governor Stubbs was
wrong to consider it politically motivated and led by the Communists. 40
90 A MODERN HISTORY OF HONG KONG

The actual role played by the CCP was a negligible one. Although a couple
of key leaders of the strike, notably Su Zhaozheng and Lin Weimin, were
more hardline than were the leaders of the earlier mechanics’ strike and
would join the CCP later, they did not have close contact with it in 1922.
In any event, the CCP was only formed in Shanghai in 1921 and the
‘Communist movement in Guangdong was still in its infancy and had
certainly not yet extended to Hong Kong’. 41
In comparison, the Kuomintang authorities in Canton under Sun played
a more active role. They provided as much as $100,000 to support the
strikers, and made available temples and other public buildings to house
them. 42 Vital as these were in enabling the striking workers to sustain their
struggle, neither the Kuomintang nor the government in Canton was
involved in directing the strike. It was not linked to the rise of nationalism
in urban China that followed the May Fourth Movement of 1919. With
this strike being the largest and most successful one organised by a modern
Chinese labour union, it is more accurate to say the seamen’s strike inspired
both the Kuomintang and the CCP than the other way round.

The Rise of Chinese Nationalism

In China, modern nationalism emerged forcefully in the latter half of
the 1890s after the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–5). The shock of China’s
defeat by what it had hitherto regarded as an inferior, and the scramble
for concessions that followed, had an impact on Chinese intellectuals
and the politically aware residents of coastal regions that surpassed any
humiliation China had suffered from previous Western imperialist
encroachments. This defined the context in which Western-educated
individuals like Sun Yat-sen started the revolutionary movement. Its real
appeal up to 1911 was based on nationalism, though democracy and
advancing people’s livelihood were formally the other two main compo-
nents of the revolution’s ideology. 43 At the popular level, the xenophobic
Boxer Rebellion of 1900 also showed ‘unmistakable signs of an emerging
Chinese nationalism’. 44 However, the place where a kind of proto-
nationalism of the Chinese people first found expression was Hong Kong,
where the Chinese had earlier and greater exposure to Western ideas. 45
The Chinese working men of Hong Kong appeared to show what
Governor Sir George Bowen described as ‘popular nationalism’ in a strike
against working on visiting French warships that culminated in three days
of riots in the course of the Sino-French War (1884–5). This war was
fought as the Chinese Empire attempted to defend its suzerainty over
Indo-China, which was being colonised by the French. What led Bowen
to make his assessment was the perceived contrast in the reaction of the
local Chinese population compared with that during the Second Anglo-
Chinese War (1856–60), when the British and the French apparently had
no difficulty recruiting porters and collaborators in Hong Kong. 46 In 1884,
according to Bowen, as news of the Sino-French conflict spread, ‘Chinese
artisans, coolies, and boatmen refused all offers of pay to do any work
whatsoever for the French ships’. 47 Be that as it may, it is too simplistic
 THE GREAT WAR AND CHINESE NATIONALISM 91

to portray this incident as a straightforward outburst of nationalism

among the Chinese working people of Hong Kong.
The anti-French riots that broke out in October 1884 at the end of a
month-long boycott were the result of several factors working together.
To begin with, the Chinese community in Hong Kong had become much
better informed thanks to the introduction of a Chinese-language press.
As the press reported news of the Sino-French war, it ‘helped to rouse
national awareness among the populace’. 48 The Chinese authorities in
Canton also promised awards to those who sabotaged the French war
efforts and enlisted members of the secret societies or the Triads to help
organise this campaign and intimidate the non-strikers. Consequently, a
significant number of workers refused to work on the French naval ships
that came to Hong Kong for repair. Riots broke out, because the colonial
government was heavyhanded in dealing with the strikers. It imposed a
fine of five dollars, about a month’s income for the average labourer, on
the first ten boatmen who refused to work for the French, and thus raised
the fear among others that their livelihood might be harmed in the same
way too. 49 What finally provoked the riots was that the police fired on
striking workers when the latter threw stones at them. 50 Although the
riots were not simply an expression of nationalism, there were sufficient
nationalistic elements to suggest that an incipient Chinese nationalism
of some kind was beginning to come into existence.
At the turn of the century, the Chinese in Hong Kong had genuinely
subscribed to the nascent Chinese nationalism. When various groups in
Guangdong organised boycotts against the Americans (1905–6) and then
the Japanese (1908), they by and large responded to the appeal of their
compatriots and took sympathetic and supportive action. 51 In the case of
the anti-American boycott, it was over US discrimination against Chinese
immigrants, manifested in periodic acts to exclude Chinese immigration
and the abuse of Chinese immigrants by American officials. The anti-
Japanese boycott arose as the Chinese authorities, which intercepted a
Japanese freighter, Tatsu Maru II, for smuggling contraband arms and
munitions into Guangdong, capitulated to unreasonable Japanese demands
to apologise and to compensate for the costs of the cargo intercepted. 52
The support that various sectors of the Chinese community of Hong Kong
gave to their Chinese compatriots demonstrated that they too shared the
sense of nationalism, which was rising rapidly as a key political force in
China. This was spectacularly demonstrated and reaffirmed by the jubilation
with which the Chinese community of Hong Kong greeted the collapse of
Manchu power and the rise of the Chinese Republic.
Hong Kong’s Chinese community generally responded in a similar way
when external events again provoked major outbursts of nationalism in
China, as it did on the occasion of Japan’s imposition of the Twenty-One
Demands in 1915 and the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. In 1915,
after the severity of the Japanese demands was leaked by President Yuan
Shihkai’s government, Chinese students and dockworkers in Hong Kong
responded to a campaign to boycott Japanese goods in coastal Chinese
92 A MODERN HISTORY OF HONG KONG

cities. They staged sympathetic protests and some even threw stones at
Japanese shops. 53 In 1919, Chinese merchants in Hong Kong led a boycott
of Japanese goods and a promotion of Chinese products. Chinese-language
schools also helped to spread the message by using the boycott as an essay
topic for students. 54 On the whole, Hong Kong followed Canton in
supporting the anti-Japanese movement, though the intensity of feeling
and actions taken were weaker. While Chinese merchants, particularly those
involved in the modern retail sector, seized the moment to combine
patriotism and their business interests, the more established leaders of the
local Chinese community were less actively involved. Those at the top, like
the two Chinese unofficial members of the Legislative Council, were closely
associated with the colonial regime and had vested interests in maintaining
the stability and order of the colony. The entrenchment of Chinese
nationalism among the local Chinese would prove to be a major force that
the colonial government had to face when another incident in China
provoked another massive outburst.

The Canton-Hong Kong Strike and Boycott

In 1925, Hong Kong was caught up in the first major confrontation
between Chinese nationalism and British imperialism, and found itself
engulfed in a general strike followed by a boycott of 16 months, organised
and supported by the Kuomintang-dominated government in Canton,
which had admitted into its ranks members of the CCP in a united front
the previous year. Although leaders of the seamen’s strike like Su
Zhaozheng and Li Weimin again played an active role in starting this new
general strike, its nature was fundamentally different from the previous
strikes. In 1925, Su and Li acted more as members of the CCP, which
they had joined after the seamen’s strike, than as union leaders. 55 The
new general strike was driven not by economic but by political forces.
The origin of the strike-cum-boycott was labour unrest at a Japanese-
owned cotton mill in Shanghai, where a violent confrontation between
labour and management led to the death of a Chinese worker, Gu
Zhenghong. 56 On the day of the memorial service for Gu, 30 May, his
colleagues were joined by other protestors, including a large number of
students. They marched inside the International Settlement, which was
under the jurisdiction not of the Chinese authorities but of the British-
dominated Municipal Council in Shanghai. Political demonstrations were
illegal there. After some serious confrontation between the police and
the demonstrators outside the Louza police station, a small detachment
of policemen under the command of a British Inspector fired on the
demonstrators when it appeared that the crowd would storm the station. 57
The shootings not only killed nine and injured dozens more, but also
provoked the greatest outburst of Chinese nationalism directed against
the British. The Japanese were spared partly because many of the leading
Chinese felt their country could not take on more than one imperial power
at a time, and partly because the labour unrest that led to Gu’s death had
also resulted earlier in the death of a Japanese. 58
 THE GREAT WAR AND CHINESE NATIONALISM 93

On the day after the shootings, strong reactions among the unionists,
students and the general public in Shanghai were adroitly steered by Li
Lisan and his comrades in the CCP into forming a General Trade Union
to lead a general strike. 59 When the strike started the following day, there
was further bloodshed, as individual or small groups of police officers
found themselves in situations where they felt justified to open fire for
their personal safety, causing more fatalities. A crisis quickly developed:
74,000 industrial workers in the International Settlement had gone on
strike by 4 June, and naval personnel from 22 foreign warships had to be
deployed for security duties two days later. 60 The number of strikers rose
to between 100,000 and 150,000 later in the month. 61
Indignation over the shootings reverberated in other major Chinese
cities. Massive demonstrations against imperialism, focusing on the
British, were organised elsewhere. Before the end of the month, one of
these demonstrations turned into another major shooting incident in
Canton and took the protest movement to a new level with direct
consequences for Hong Kong.
In Shanghai itself, where the Chinese part of the city was under the
control of warlord Zhang Zuolin, who was keen to end the confrontation
with Britain and the foreign powers, tension was slowly eased and
compromises eventually reached among various involved parties. The
general strike ended in Shanghai in late September after the General Trade
Union was disbanded, and most strikes were called off, except by seamen
involved in supporting a parallel boycott against Hong Kong. 62
What happened in Shanghai turned out to be merely the prelude to a
long-drawn and bigger movement. This was the transformation of an
outpouring of Chinese nationalism into a general strike in Hong Kong
and a boycott against this British colony imposed by and directed from
Canton. The Kuomintang authorities in Canton officially sponsored this
combined operation, while its Communist partner actively orchestrated
and directed it. In an important sense, the Communists worked as the
hand inside the glove of the left wing of the Kuomintang, headed by
Liao Zhongkai. Liao was the key architect of the united front, director
of the Kuomintang’s wo rkers ’ de par tment, head of the finance
department of the government in Canton and, until his assassination that
August, the most important patron of the Communists within the
Kuomintang. 63 Whatever successes the Communists achieved in the 16
months of strike and boycott against Hong Kong, as one of the Commu-
nist leaders of the event, Deng Zhongxia, rightly admitted, ‘without the
financial support of the Kuomintang the strike would have collapsed
within a week’. 64 In the first full year of the strike and boycott, the total
fund administered by the Strike Committee was about five million Chinese
silver dollars, of which 2.8 million came directly from the Kuomintang
government in Canton, which also provided further support by putting
many properties at the disposal of the committee and the strikers. 65
Although it had fewer than ten party members and only thirty Youth
League members in Hong Kong in May 1925, the CCP was highly
94 A MODERN HISTORY OF HONG KONG

successful in exploiting the strong anti-imperialist nationalism that

Chinese workers in Hong Kong shared with their colleagues in major
Chinese cities. 66 This was partly because in this period Britain ‘stood as
the chief representative of the Treaty Powers’, which made it ‘inevitably
the main object of attack’. 67 Hong Kong was targeted because it was the
ultimate symbol of British imperialism in China. The CCP did not at
first realise the intensity of the public reaction and only called for a one-
day strike in Guangdong and Hong Kong. 68 However, it adroitly moved
to make the most of the strong anti-imperialist and nationalist sentiments
of the Chinese working men in Hong Kong after the scale of public
support became known. It was only after the party’s original modest goal
was surpassed by the outbreak of a massive strike that it saw ‘a golden
opportunity to expand their following’ and turned to ‘strikers from Hong
Kong as the greatest potential source of new members’. 69
On 19 June, under the influence of the Communists, seamen, tramway
workers and printers started what quickly became a general strike in
Hong Kong. Over the following three weeks, the strike spread to its
height and involved some 250,000 workers, out of a total population
of 725,000. 70 Although most chose to strike, some were intimidated
into doing so, and most strikers left Hong Kong for Canton where they
received an enthusiastic reception. 71 The seven demands which the
strikers made were: support for the 17 demands made by the strikers in
Shanghai; political freedom; equality before the law; introduction of
popular elections; enactment of labour legislation; reduction of rent;
and freedom of residence. 72 Except for the reduction of rent, which
was arguably an economically motivated demand, the rest were all
politically driven. The time lag in Hong Kong’s reaction to the original
incident in Shanghai was due to the existence of a war between the
Kuomintang authorities and two local warlords, which prevented both
the left wing of the Kuomintang and the Communists from taking
effective action to instigate the general strike. 73
What really caught the imagination of the ordinary working men in
Hong Kong and Guangdong was another major shooting incident that
occurred in the foreign concession of Shamian in Canton on 23 June,
three days after the Canton sympathetic protest started. Marching in
Shamian that day were not only workers, students, military academy cadets,
Kuomintang members, Communist leaders like Zhou Enlai and others
from Canton, but also the striking workers from Hong Kong. While the
precise sequence of events and who fired the first shot cannot be
established beyond doubt, shots were fired by both British and French
sentries as well as by Chinese demonstrators. They left scores of Chinese
and one Frenchman dead and many others, including eight Europeans
and one Japanese, injured. 74 This new incident pushed anti-imperialist
and anti-British sentiments to ‘fever pitch’. Inspired also by the
experiences of the seamen’s strike of 1922, striking workers from Hong
Kong were organised into pickets to stop food and other essentials from
being shipped to the British colony. 75 A formal trade boycott against Hong
 THE GREAT WAR AND CHINESE NATIONALISM 95

Kong was introduced on 6 July by order of the Strike Committee, headed

by one of Hong Kong’s first members of the CCP, Su Zhaozheng.
Hong Kong was quickly paralysed, though its expatriate community
and the still quite sizeable Chinese population who stayed behind showed
indomitable spirit which enabled them to endure much economic and
other for ms of hardship. Two days after the strike first started, the
government called out the Volunteer Defence Corps and then invoked
emergency powers. Troops were posted at key points, naval ratings were
deployed to man the cross-harbour ferries and civilian volunteers were
recruited to maintain essential services and serve as special constables. 76
They did not stop the strike, which picked up even greater momentum
after the Shamian Incident. By early July, Hong Kong was ‘like a ghost
town’, where upper-class expatriates used to domestic servants had to do
their own housework, including disposing of their own nightsoil, either
‘by burying it in their garden at a depth of no less than two feet’ or at
sewer manholes ‘opened between 5.30 and 7.30 each morning at
convenient points throughout the colony’. 77 The comfort and luxury of
old colonial Hong Kong that its expatriate and Chinese upper classes
were used to were largely replaced by volunteer work by almost everyone
concerned and an unprecedented degree of cooperation between some
better-off Chinese and the British authorities. The ultimate demonstration
of the willingness of some local Chinese to support the government was
their joining of not only essential services like the ambulance service
but also the Volunteer Defence Corps. 78
Once the boycott was institutionalised in July, Hong Kong’s economic
lifeline was severely restricted. Its previously flourishing entrepôt trade
with Guangdong collapsed, land value tumbled, government revenue fell
drastically, food prices rose six fold, share values dropped 40 per cent in
just over three months and the bankruptcy court was handling 20 cases
every day by September. 79 The scale of losses in trade was reflected by
the drop in import and export in the first calendar year of the strike. The
value of imports into Hong Kong had fallen from £11.67 million in 1924
to £5.84 million in 1925, while its exports dropped from £8.82 million
to £4.71 million in the same period. 80 As for shipping, Hong Kong on
average cleared 210 ships carrying 156,000 tons a day in 1924, but for
the year starting on 1 July 1925, the daily average fell to 34 ships and
56,000 tons. 81 The local economy was ‘devastated’ as it suffered ‘total
economic losses at either $HK2million per day or even £5 million a week’,
while ‘British exports to China and Hong Kong’ for 1925 dropped ‘one-
third from 1924’s total value of £29 million’. 82 Although the figures quoted
above cannot be relied on absolutely, as Governor Stubbs ordered
statistics not to be kept during the strike, they provide an indication of
how severe the economic costs were.
In confronting this first ever and, by any measure, serious challenge
to their imperial position in Hong Kong, the British and the colony were
unfortunate in having Stubbs as Governor. His ability to understand the
political situation in Guangdong and the politics of Chinese nationalism
96 A MODERN HISTORY OF HONG KONG

was demonstrated in the way he handled the strike. When the Shanghai
shootings first happened, he thought they would have little effect on the
overwhelmingly Cantonese workers in Hong Kong. Even after the Hong
Kong strike started, he still dismissed it as the work of the Communists
and did not see the rising tide of Chinese nationalism at work. 83 He thus
resorted to heavy-handed measures when faced with an inherently very
difficult and highly delicate situation. By invoking emergency powers,
Stubbs introduced censorship, gave police officers wide powers to search
and detain suspects and attempted to intimidate the strike organisers in
Canton by trying to cut off the food shipped there from Hong Kong. 84
These measures backfired. The last in particular was at least partly if not
largely responsible for provoking the Strike Committee to institutionalise
a boycott against Hong Kong, putting the crisis on a longer-term footing
than originally envisaged by its instigators.
All the schemes that Stubbs devised to end the strike-boycott by
unseating the Kuomintang government in Canton failed. 85 These included
an operation, never authorised by London, to give $HK100,000 to help
warlord Chen Jiongming stage a coup d’état in Guangdong to set up a
government friendly to Hong Kong. This ended up as a costly mis-
adventure. Other proposals Stubbs had, such as a naval blockade of the
Pearl River, bombardment of the Boca Tigris forts at its estuary or joint
military actions against Canton in collaboration with anti-Kuomintang
northern Chinese forces, were all overruled by the British government. 86
The replacement in November of Stubbs with Sir Cecil Clementi
(Governor, 1925–30), a Cantonese-speaking former cadet with a good
understanding of the Chinese people and their politics, was an
improvement. However, there was little that Clementi could do to end
the confrontation, which had by then already entered its fifth month and
outlived the Shanghai strike. A general pattern had set in and an attempt
by Hong Kong’s Chinese merchants to broker an amicable solution was
already a failure.
Clementi at first took a more accommodating approach and managed
to engage in useful dialogue with senior leaders in the Kuomintang
government. 8 7 However, the rising cur rent of nationalism and the
complexity of the political situation in Canton frustrated his démarche.
After all, it was a time when the Kuomintang government was preparing
itself to launch the Northern Expedition to unify the country and leaders
of the Kuomintang were still working out a succession to Sun Yat-sen,
who had died earlier in March. 88 These preoccupations restricted the scope
for anyone in Guangdong to reach a compromise with the British. As
one of the Kuomintang’s top leaders, Wang Jingwei told Clementi in
December that anyone in government in Canton who sought to end the
strike-cum-boycott without first securing a large ransom payment from
the British to pacify the strikers would be committing political suicide. 89
Clementi then tried to combine conciliation with toughness when
dealing with Canton in 1926. On the one hand, he tried to maintain a
dialogue with members of the Kuomintang government, either directly
 THE GREAT WAR AND CHINESE NATIONALISM 97

or through the British Consul General in Canton. On the other hand, he

was adamant in protecting the dignity and prestige of the colonial
government. He was prepared to use gunboats to back up his policy and
underline the strength of his position. 90 Although he was much more
skilful and diplomatic than his predecessor, he was not able to end the
strike-cum-boycott until the political situation in Canton changed
sufficiently for the Kuomintang authority there to end its support for
the Strike Committee.
Clementi was also much more astute and effective in waging the
political and pro p ag anda campaign ag ainst the strikers than his
predecessor. In countering the propaganda and intimidation used by the
Strike Committee to ensure the support of the ordinary Chinese in Hong
Kong, he did not merely rely on the heavy-handed tactics of Stubbs.
Press censorship, sponsorship of a new anti-strike and anti-Communist
newspaper, the Gongshang Ribao, employment of dubious characters to
counter intimidation and other emergency measures introduced by Stubbs
continued. However, Clementi also sought to win the hearts and minds
of the wealthy merchants and the Chinese population at large by taking
concrete measures to cultivate loyalty.
When the Board of the Tung Wah Hospital got into serious financial
trouble as a result of their acting on Stubbs’s request to finance Chen
Jiongming’s ill-conceived coup, Clementi used public funds to bail them
out and save them from a major predicament. 91 This was a bold step, as
Clementi must have guessed the Colonial Office would consider the Tung
Wah venture ‘scandalous’ though it would have no choice but back him
up and ‘hush up’ the matter. 92
Above all, he demonstrated to the Chinese population his confidence
in them by appointing for the first time an ethnic Chinese person, Sir
Shouson Chow, to be one of the two unofficial members of the Executive
Council. 93 It was a bold step in the midst of a crisis caused by Chinese
nationalism challenging British imperialism. The Executive Council was
roughly equivalent to the Cabinet, to which two unofficial members of
British origins had been introduced only in 1896. 94 Clementi’s rationale
was that showing ‘confidence is one obvious way of encouraging loyalty’
and Chow’s appointment was meant to ‘afford clear proof of the intention
of this Government to frame its policy in close co-operation with leading
Chinese of Hong Kong’. 95
Chinese merchants and capitalists large and small in Hong Kong
generally supported the government because they had vested interests to
protect, and they were financially the most exposed to the harmful effects
of the strike-cum-boycott. They were the most heavily involved in the
entrepôt trade with Guangdong and were most vulnerable to the trade
boycott. Chinese shops in Hong Kong also suffered badly from the
departure of workers in large numbers and the dramatic fall in business
that resulted. Chinese-owned banks, which generally had smaller capital
than British banks and were overwhelmingly dependent on their Chinese
clientele, were substantially more exposed to withdrawals by their Chinese
98 A MODERN HISTORY OF HONG KONG

depositors and were thus hit hard by bank runs. As an indication of how
suddenly Chinese-owned banks faced a cash flow problem, in the first
three days of the strike in June 1925, $16 million were withdrawn from
these institutions and taken out of Hong Kong before this was stopped
by the government’s emergency measures. 96 Chinese banks suffered two
bank runs, had to close for business for a week and could reopen only
after receiving $6 million dollars in loans from the Hong Kong and
Shanghai Bank and the Standard Chartered Bank. 97 Their financial
situation was alleviated only after it became known that the British
government had provided a £3 million trade loan to Hong Kong. 98
The fact that the strike-cum-boycott was mainly directed by the
Communists also reduced its appeal to the merchants, particularly after
the initial furore surrounding the shootings in Shanghai and Canton had
subsided. Unlike their counterparts in Guangdong, who in fact greatly
benefited from the boycott after suffering some initial losses because
much of China’s former trade with Hong Kong was diverted to Canton,
Hong Kong’s Chinese businessmen were the biggest losers. 99
It was therefore unsurprising that leading merchants who were also
leaders of the Chinese community supported the Board of Tung Wah in
trying to play a constructive role in seeking a settlement. 100 Chairman Ma
Zuichao explained the rationale by saying that ‘the Tung Wah was a
charitable organisation in Hong Kong which had hitherto avoided
involvement in national or political affairs’ but the strike ‘has already
lasted two months, and has had a grave impact on all trades and businesses’
and the Board would ‘like to save the community from this awful fate’. 101
The Tung Wah’s efforts, like similar attempts by other leading Chinese,
to broker a settlement failed. The Chinese merchant community of Hong
Kong was also prepared to pay what was in effect a ransom to end the
boycott, but even this would not satisfy the Strike Committee, which
wanted to humiliate the colonial government. 102 Given the political nature
of the strike and the boycott, a solution could not be found until the
political situation in Canton changed.
There was political jockeying in the government in Canton, where the
delicate balance of power between the right and left wings of the
Kuomintang after Sun Yat-sen’s death in March 1925 shifted in the course
of the year and eventually led to the rise of Chiang Kai-shek. Although
Chiang was made Commander-in-Chief of the National Revolutionary
Army when the Kuomintang proclaimed a national government in Canton
in July, he still only ranked fourth in the Kuomintang hierarchy. 103 His
status rose quickly when his senior leftwing colleague Liao Zhongkai was
murdered in August, and another, Hu Hanmin, leader of the right wing,
was implicated and had to leave Canton. In March 1926, Chiang exiled
his other senior colleague, Wang Chingwei, to Siberia after implicating
Wang in a plot to kidnap him using a gunboat – the Zhongshan – which
was under the command of a Communist officer. 104 By launching a pre-
emptive strike, Chiang not only ousted Wang and thus everyone senior
to him in the party leadership, but also disarmed the pickets of the
 THE GREAT WAR AND CHINESE NATIONALISM 99

Communist-dominated Strike Committee. 105 However, he still needed

Soviet military aid and the support of the Communists to play a balancing
game of power politics in order to consolidate his position in Canton. 106
He therefore returned the arms confiscated from the Strike Committee’s
pickets, though he did manage to curb the power of the Communists
within the united front.
It was only after Chiang launched the Northern Expedition in July
and the army under his command successfully reached the Yangtze River
in early September that he could afford to lose the support of the
Communists. Even then he was not in a position to purge the Communists,
a move he could not made until after his forces took Shanghai five months
later. Once his forces reached Wuhan, where there were considerable
foreign interests, Chiang showed that he was keen to avoid provoking
foreign intervention and assured the foreign powers that his forces were
under strict orders not to provoke any incident. 107
Once Chiang had made his position in the Kuomintang almost
indispensable, as his army headed towards Shanghai at the beginning of
Se ptember 1926, the political situa tion within t h e K u o m i n t a n g
government changed. It was by then politically desirable to ensure the
Kuomintang government would not get entangled in further confront-
ations with the British by the Communist-dominated Strike Committee.
To Chiang and most of his colleagues in the Kuomintang, Chinese
nationalism had a new priority – the reunification of the country rather
than anti-imperialism. 108 The CCP, for its part, functioned in this period
as the China branch of the Comintern or Communist International. 109 It
was under orders from Joseph Stalin to continue cooperation with the
Kuomintang and not sustain the boycott against Hong Kong lest it should
provide an excuse for the British to intervene against the Northern
Expedition. 110 The time had finally come for the boycott to be ended.
In the meantime, for much of 1926, Governor Clementi continued to
seek an end to the boycott by negotiations, which were at times backed
up by the threat or actual use of force to put pressure on the Canton
authorities. The negotiations proved tortuous. In early September, just
as the Kuomintang forces were engaged in the bloody siege for Wuchang,
the last round of negotiations appeared to have reached a dead end and
Clementi made a show of force. Royal Navy gunboats were deployed on
4 September to clear strike pickets from the steamer wharves in Canton,
which was achieved without one shot being fired as the picket boats
dispersed upon arrival of the British ships. 111 Followed one day later by a
separate and unrelated incident in Wanxian on the Yangtze, in which
British gunboats bombarded the town in an operation to rescue two
British merchant ships seized earlier by the local warlord, the show of
force in Canton appeared like a warning shot for more vigorous British
military intervention. 112 Negotiations soon resumed between the British
and the authorities in Canton, which led to a compromise, namely that
Canton would impose an additional 2.5 per cent surcharge on the import
tax, which the British tacitly agreed not to challenge. The boycott was
100 A MODERN HISTORY OF HONG KONG

formally lifted on 10 October 1926 by order of the government in Canton,

the same day that Wuchang fell to the Kuomintang.
The strike and boycott were essentially a politically inspired and
externally directed movement against British imperialism. Hong Kong
suffered badly mainly because it was the bastion of British imperialism
in Chinese eyes. It was also partly because Governor Stubbs’s ineptitude
removed any possibility of a relatively quick settlement. The event was a
landmark in the modern history of Hong Kong, as it represented the
highpoint of Chinese nationalism as a force in the British colony.
Although the CCP was clearly responsible for instigating and bringing
about the strike at first and in instituting the boycott, they managed to
do so only because they were championing the cause of Chinese nation-
alism. 113 Workers in Hong Kong responded to the initial appeal and reacted
strongly to the Shamian shootings not because they found Communism
appealing but because they were at least as affected by the rising tide of
nationalism as their compatriots were elsewhere in major coastal Chinese
cities. Once Chinese nationalism was redirected from anti-British
imperialism to reunification under the Kuomintang in China after the
launch of the Northern Expedition, the original anti-British nationalism
in the Hong Kong region lost its momentum, if not its raison d’être.
The tremendous importance of the strike-cum-boycott to the rise of
the Communist movement in China should not be taken to mean the
Communist cause was particularly appealing to Hong Kong’s working
class. It was true that the party numbered only 1,000 across China in May
1925, but that expanded to 30,000 at the peak of the boycott in July
1926. 114 It was also true that the Hong Kong strikers who went to
Guangdong provided fertile ground for the party to expand. However,
the party did not manage to build up an effective network of Hong Kong
cadres for organising labour, still less a revolution in the colony. Although
Hong Kong became an important base for the CCP for coordinating its
activities in southern China after Chiang Kai-shek’s purge of Communists
from within the Kuomintang in the spring of 1927, the primary value of
Hong Kong to the CCP was its relative safety as a base for operations on
the Chinese mainland. 115
What the strike-cum-boycott did for Hong Kong was to complete two
processes already started by the labour unrest of the early 1920s. The
first was to reinforce the transformation of the Chinese population of
Hong Kong from sharing a basically docile and inward-looking attitude
preferring to avoid any dealing with government to a more outward-
looking approach that made demands on government and society more
generally. The second process was the corresponding change in the
attitude of the colonial government towards its Chinese population. The
demonstration of support to the government by some better-off Chinese,
in contrast to those who took part in the general strike, highlighted the
diversities in the Chinese community. Instead of taking its Chinese
population for granted, as had happened in the nineteenth century,
Clementi accepted the need to deal with them directly on a daily basis. 116
 THE GREAT WAR AND CHINESE NATIONALISM 101

Once the idea that Chinese working men were able to organise themselves
to defend or even assert their rights sank in, those in government and
also in the judiciary acted on this recognition and gradually changed the
arbitrary way that many working-class Chinese had routinely been treated
in the previous century.
The government of Hong Kong also learned the impor tance of
maintaining good relations with the government in Canton, not least to
avoid having to deal with similar challenges in the future. Although
Clementi was prepared to use force to back up his policy towards Canton
in the course of the boycott, he preferred to pre-empt the need for such
eventualities by keeping on good terms with Canton. This mirrored the
general shift in British policy towards China, itself the product of a policy
review, the need for which was highlighted by the crises in Shanghai and
Hong Kong, and reinforced by the Northern Expedition. The British
objective in this exercise was to find a way to protect British nationals
and properties in China without appearing weak, and thus they devised a
new policy to divert the focus of Chinese nationalism away from the
British Empire. 117 The spirit of this new policy was encapsulated in a
memorandum issued in December 1926, by which Britain undertook ‘to
consider in a sympathetic spirit any reasonable proposals that the Chinese
authorities, wherever situated, may make’ on matters that affect Chinese
national rights, and to promote this among the great powers. 118
 Chapter 9
Japanese Invasion
and Occupation

The centenary of the British occupation, 1941, was a landmark in the

modern history of Hong Kong in more than one sense. It was the first
time that its survival and continuation as a Crown Colony came under a
serious threat, as it faced a full-scale invasion by the Japanese Empire.
Even though its defence was poorly prepared and organised, its garrison
put up a gallant though short fight. Thus began the ordeal of Japanese
occupation that lasted three years and eight months. For the first time
since Elliot claimed Hong Kong for Queen Victoria, the British were not
the lord and master but prisoners and internees. Japanese rule did not
last but the impact of Japan’s successful invasion destroyed the myth of
the invincibility of the British Empire. Pax Britannica was reduced from
the basis of Hong Kong’s security to a relic of history. The clock could
not be turned back. In the meantime, both the expatriate British and the
Chinese of Hong Kong did what they could to resist the Japanese. The
British government also put together a small team in London to plan and
work for the restoration of British sovereignty at the end of the war.
There was a recognition among the planners that while Britain must
restore its jurisdiction over Hong Kong, British rule would be different
from what had prevailed before the war.

The Battle of Hong Kong

When Japan invaded China in July 1937, Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler
had already reoccupied the Rhineland in breach of the Versailles Peace
Treaty and the Spanish Civil War had been raging for about a year. The
British armed forces were in no state to fulfil its worldwide obligations in
imperial defence and meet the rising challenge being posed by a rapidly
rearming Germany at the same time. 1 This was due in large part to the
British government’s strategic assumption during the inter-war period that
there would not be a general war for ten years. 2 The neglect of its defence
consequently ‘placed the British Empire in a position of the utmost danger
by the later 1930s’. 3 This explained Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s
view following the Japanese invasion of China that ‘to pick a quarrel with
Japan at the present moment’ was ‘suicidal’, because if Britain ‘were to
120 A MODERN HISTORY OF HONG KONG

become involved in the Far East the temptation to the Dictator States to
take action whether in Eastern Europe or in Spain might be irresistible’. 4
Even before the Second World War started in September 1939, British
defence planning already worked on the basis that in the event of a war
with Japan, ‘delaying action was the best to be hoped for’ in Hong Kong. 5
This was because the military admitted that problems of ‘effective defence
of Hong Kong’ against Japanese air assault were ‘virtually insoluble’. 6
The situation grew worse when war started in Europe and the Royal
Navy became fully occupied in keeping the sea-lanes open for Britain.
By then, London had reluctantly considered Hong Kong expendable. 7
Although staunchly against giving up any British territory, Winston
Churchill, who took over as Prime Minister in May 1940 at the critical
time of the Dunkirk evacuation, accepted that Hong Kong would fall to
the Japanese and that the peace conference would deal with its future. 8
To minimise losses there, Churchill preferred to reduce the garrison to a
nominal size but refrained from doing so in order not to undermine the
prestige of the Empire and China’s will to resist and to tie down a large
number of Japanese forces.
Hong Kong’s defence in the summer of 1941 consisted of four regular
infantry battalions, of which two were Indian, the reinforced battalion-
strength Volunteers, four regiments of artillery, a flight of three obsolete
Wildebeeste torpedo bombers, two Walr use amphibian planes, four
destroyers (three would be away and one in dry dock when Hong Kong
came under attack), four gunboats, a flotilla of eight torpedo boats and
the local naval reserve. 9 Churchill allowed this force to be reinforced
because Canada offered two infantry battalions. After their arrival in
November, three weeks before hostilities started, they brought the total
strength of the defence force to just over 10,000. The Canadian battalions
had not yet completed their training, did not have all their equipment
and were not combat ready. They were sent partly because they were not
ready for service in Europe where the best-trained units were earmarked.
They did not have time to know the terrain or train with the rest of the
defence force before they saw action. They went to Hong Kong to deter
the Japanese, encourage Chinese resistance and boost British prestige
and morale in Asia. 10 There was no expectation that they could enable
this exposed imperial outpost to be held indefinitely, though a handful
of general officers and policymakers indulged in the wishful thinking
that the reinforced garrison could hold out for at least four months. 11
The arrival of the Canadians led British commander Major General
Christopher Maltby to change the defence plan, which had previously
focused upon the defence of the island but not the mainland. Maltby
now deployed one of his two brigades on the mainland. The basic thinking
was to hold the invaders in a prepared defence line, the Gin Drinker’s
Line in the southern part of the New Territories for a week before
withdrawing to Hong Kong island, where the garrison would make a
strong stand. 12 On the island, troops were again deployed for static
defence of prepared positions. There was no mobile reser ve of a
 JAPANESE INVASION AND OCCUPATION 121

meaningful size that could be sent quickly to counterattack and destroy a

Japanese landing force. The involvement of the local Chinese in the de-
fence was largely limited to about 450 who volunteered to join the local
defence forces and a larger number in essential services, such as air raid
wardens or auxiliary firemen. 13 The large pool of Chinese manpower was
not utilised to any serious extent. The defence plan was unimaginative.
By the summer of 1941, the British had reached an understanding with
the Chinese government under Chiang Kai-shek to coordinate their
respective military operations in the event of a Japanese attack on Hong
Kong. 14 The main agreement was that, once hostilities started, the Chinese
Army would attack the Japanese forces from their rear to relieve the
pressure on the British garrison. 15 The British also explored the possibility
of cooperating with the Chinese Communist guerrillas, who operated in
the vicinity of Hong Kong, though no agreement was reached as the
Communists thought the British ‘lacked sincerity in the common defence
against the Japanese’. 16
Poised to attack Hong Kong was the 23 rd Corps of the Japanese Army
under Lieutenant General Sakai Takashi, who was also given overall
command of the air and naval units in support of the assault. The actual
invasion force was Lieutenant General Sano Tadayoshi’s battle-hardened
38 th Division, which was generously reinforced by two brigades and six
battalions of artillery, tanks, and other logistical units. They were supported
by 63 bombers, 13 fighters and 10 other aircraft, as well as a light cruiser,
three destroyers, four torpedo boats, three gunboats, two ancillary ships
and five naval aircraft. 17 The invasion force as a whole was well over 20,000
strong and had a considerable edge over the motley assortment of the
multilingual and multiethnic British defenders. 18 The Japanese forces also
enjoyed the benefit of having the Corps headquarters assuming overall
command, the confidence that Sakai could call on the two other divisions
of the Corps deployed in Guangdong to reinforce or block any Chinese
relief efforts if necessary and the advantage of having been put together
and trained together for this specific operation for over a month. 19
The Japanese also had superb intelligence about Hong Kong’s defence,
which they had gathered over a long period by placing their agents to
work as waiters, barmen, hairdressers, masseurs and prostitutes to service
British officials and military officers. 20 This included, for example, a naval
commander who, for seven years, worked as a hairdresser and patiently
listened to conversations among his British patrons, including two
governors, senior army officers, the commissioner of police and the head
of the special branch. It meant the Japanese had ‘a full and accurate survey
of the whole defensive position’ before the invasion started. 21
At 8am on 8 December, a clear and sunny morning, four hours after
the United States Navy base at Pearl Harbour in Honolulu came under
the most devastating attack ever mounted against the USA, Japanese
bombers effectively destroyed British air power in one attack. Although
two of the Wilderbeestes in fact escaped damage, they were never
deployed against overwhelming odds and were themselves destroyed by
122 A MODERN HISTORY OF HONG KONG

the British before the airport was evacuated. 22 The battle for Hong Kong
had started with the Japanese gaining complete air supremacy within the
first five minutes. Two days later, the Japanese breached the Gin Drinker’s
Line at the Shing Mun Redoubt. Maltby concluded that unless he withdrew
his brigade from the mainland immediately he would not be able to hold
the island for long. Thus began the best-organised operation of the battle,
under which the British disengaged from combat and evacuated their
forces across the harbour with relatively little loss. 23
The second and much more intense phase of the battle started under
cover of darkness late at night on 18 December, when six Japanese
battalions successfully crossed Victoria Harbour at its eastern side, after
an unsuccessful attempt three days earlier. This was the beginning of the
end but much hard fighting was waged by the defenders on the island.
Although Hong Kong’s defenders were inadequately trained and poorly
prepared they gave an honourable account of themselves, which differed
greatly from what happened in Singapore or Malaya. The resolute
leadership of Sir Mark Young, who took up the governorship on 10
September, and Maltby’s tenacity, despite his other inadequacies as a
general, left their marks. They saw to it that Hong Kong’s completely
outclassed defenders followed Prime Minister Churchill’s order to resist
with utmost stubbornness ‘in spirit and to the letter’. 24 They put up a
gallant though badly organised fight for 17 days, and did sufficient damage
to the Japanese 38 th Division to delay its redeployment to the Dutch East
Indies. 25 Some units also demonstrated such courage, resolution and daring
against overwhelming odds that they deser ved to earn, in Churchill’s
words, the ‘lasting honour’ that was their due.
There was, for example, the stand of the ‘Hughesiliers’, a unit of the
Volunteers, at North Point power station the night the Japanese crossed
the harbour. The ‘Hughesiliers’ consisted of four officers and 68 men,
all over 55 or too old for service but volunteered to serve under their
commander Lieutenant Colonel Owen Hughes, a former member of the
Legislative Council. They were, like 70-year-old private Sir Edward Des
Voeux, mostly taipans or seniors in British hongs and were deployed at
the power station to keep them out of the front line. 26 On the night of
the engagement, 36 of them were on duty under Major John Patterson
(Chairman of Jardine and member of the Legislative Council), and they
were reinforced by technicians of the power plant and a small number
of soldiers from the Middlesex Regiment who drifted there following
the tide of battle elsewhere. The power plant happened to be in the way
of one of the advancing Japanese columns. They came under fierce attack
at 1:00am on 19 December and denied the power plant to the Japanese
until 4:00am. They did not surrender and give up their position until
they ran out of ammunition the following afternoon. 27 They halted the
advance of a Japanese column for as long as was humanly possible.
There was also the charge of the motor torpedo boats (M.T.B.s) when
the Hughesiliers were making their last stand. The Japanese were pouring
across the harbour in small craft to consolidate their ‘beach head’ on the
 JAPANESE INVASION AND OCCUPATION 123

morning of 19 December. Six boats of No. 2 M.T.B. flotilla under

Lieutenant Commander George Gandy were organised into three waves
to speed across the harbour from west to east to disrupt and if possible
stop the crossing. 28 They attacked in pairs in broad daylight, though the
Japanese dominated the harbour, both by superior artillery and machine-
gun fire on the north shore of the entire harbour, additional fire from
the south side of the harbour, from North Point to the east, and from
the air. The first wave, which enjoyed the benefit of surprise, disrupted
the Japanese landing, though one boat was badly damaged. 29 The second
pair charged courageously but met with concentrated and accurate fire,
which sank one and severely damaged the other. 30 Since the Japanese had
by then stopped sending any more landing craft into the harbour, the
British naval commander ordered the third wave to abort. It is not clear
whether Lieutenant D.W. Wagstaff, commanding M.T.B.26, did not receive
the order or chose to ignore it. 31 His boat charged into a maelstrom of
fire and bombs and was sunk with its last Lewis gun still firing off North
Point, more than halfway across the harbour. 32 Whether the charges of
the second and the third waves were heroic or, like the charge of the
Light Brigade in the Crimean War, foolhardy, they had the effect of
stopping the Japanese reinforcement of its forces on Hong Kong island
for the rest of the day. 33
Britain’s new ally, China, did try to keep its promise. On the day the
Japanese attacked Hong Kong, Chiang Kai-shek declared war on Japan –
until then the Japanese invasion was resisted without either side declaring
war. On the following day, he ordered three corps under General Yu
Hanmou to march towards Hong Kong. 34 To relieve the Hong Kong
garrison, he planned to launch a New Year’s Day attack on the Japanese
in the Canton region. However, before the Chinese infantry, which had
no motor transport, could get into position to attack, the Japanese had
shattered Hong Kong’s defences.
The end came on Christmas Day. By then, one of Maltby’s two brigade
commanders, Canadian John Lawson, had already been killed. Organised
defence had been reduced to pockets of resistance, some of which were
out of contact with headquarters, and the Japanese were about a mile
from Army and Navy Headquarters as well as from Government House.
That morning, Young sent his Christmas message to what remained of
the defenders in a language resembling Churchill’s own. He urged them
to ‘hold fast for King and Empire… in this your finest hour’. 35 He also
rejected for the third time an offer to surrender, and intended ‘to add
another twenty-four hours to the credit of the account’. 36 At 2:00pm
Maltby checked with the Middlesex Colonel commanding the front in
the central pocket and was told that in an hour or so useful military
resistance would no longer be possible. Maltby telephoned Young with a
recommendation to surrender an hour later. 37 Young asked Maltby to
check the situation again and was informed that the remnants of the
Middlesex battalion could hold out for another half an hour at most,
with the remaining posts manned by remnants of the Punjabi battalion
124 A MODERN HISTORY OF HONG KONG

lasting a maximum of two more hours. 38 After checking with the naval
commander who confirmed Maltby’s assessment and who, like Maltby,
assured Young that they were personally prepared to defend and perish
with their respective headquarters, Young decided further resistance could
no longer justify the costs involved. At 3:15pm, he accepted Maltby’s
advice in order to reduce further heavy loss of life and to avoid provoking
the Japanese to brutalise the civilian population in attempting a repeat
of the 1938 Nanjing Massacre. 39 Darkness descended on this outpost of
‘the empire where the sun never sets’.
The human cost of the battle was high. The British suffered casualties
amounting to 2,232 killed or missing and 2,300 wounded, while the
Japanese reported 1,996 killed and 6,000 wounded. 40 The losses of the
civilians, who suffered from Japanese brutalities, sustained bombardment
and systematic looting by gangsters following the retreat of British forces
and police, cannot be reliably estimated.

The Destruction of Imperial Invincibility

The myth surrounding the might of the British Empire ended when Young
became the first British governor to surrender a colony to an enemy after
the end of the American War of Independence in 1782. The battle of
Hong Kong was in any event greatly overshadowed by the Malayan
campaign and, above all, by the surrender in February 1942 of Singapore,
the symbol of British imperial power in the East. 41 Hong Kong fell because
its defenders were outnumbered at least two to one, vastly outgunned on
land, in the air and at sea and outmanoeuvred. In Malaya and Singapore,
138,708 British ser vicemen were defeated and captured by 50,197
Japanese, who suffered, in comparison to the 17-day Hong Kong
operation, merely 9,824 battle casualties over the ten weeks of the
campaign. 42 The Japanese victory and the British defeat in Southeast Asia
were nothing short of spectacular. They caught the imagination of Asia. 43
The Japanese humiliated the British Empire and in the process
destroyed the myth of the superiority of the white race. As a result, even
long-time supporters of the Empire, such as the Secretary of State for
India, Leo Amery, lost heart. He admitted that ‘we were on the eve of
very great changes in the relation of Asia to Europe’ and it is doubtful
‘whether in the future empires like our Asiatic empire’ could subsist. 44
The destruction of the supposed invincibility of the British Empire
had practical implications for its claim over Hong Kong, as the colony
lay inside the Allied powers’ China theatre, which covered the whole of
China, Indo-China and Thailand. 45 On US President Franklin Roosevelt’s
initiative, Chiang Kai-shek became supreme commander of this theatre
in January 1942. 46 This arrangement was primarily a gesture to Chiang
and at this stage was largely academic with regard to Hong Kong. Indeed,
it was not clarified whether Hong Kong, as a British territory, was within
Chiang’s command. Nevertheless, Chiang was justified in considering it
within his theatre. A shadow was cast over its long-term future as a
British territory.
 JAPANESE INVASION AND OCCUPATION 125

As the shock of the rapid collapse of the Allied defences in Southeast

Asia sank in, responsible officials in both the British and Chinese
governments began to think about Hong Kong’s future. Now that the
myth of British invincibility had been destroyed, the nationalistic Chiang
pondered whether he could use the wider war to end, as soon as possible,
the ‘unequal treaties’ to which China had been subjected since the 1840s. 47
Consequently, he instr ucted the Chinese Ambassador to Britain,
Wellington Koo (Gu Weijun), to explore the British attitude towards Hong
Kong. 48
In London, the Colonial Office was the first to reflect on – and
recognise the implications of – Britain’s failure to defend Hong Kong
for any length of time. 49 While Britain had no illusions about the difficulty
of defending the colony, its rapid fall was a major blow. When David
MacDougall, a cadet officer of the Hong Kong government, joined the
Colonial Office after a daring escape to China on the day the colony fell,
he immediately raised an alarm. He reported that all Chinese officials he
met in China, up to the vice-ministerial level, assumed that Hong Kong
would be returned to China after the war. 50 The Colonial Office accepted
that ‘the arrangements existing before the Japanese occupation would
not be restored’. 51
The question of Hong Kong’s future became the subject of an intense
internal debate within the British government in June 1942, which was
when the Foreign Office took an active interest. The head of its Far
Eastern Department, Ashley Clarke, initiated the debate after he visited
the USA, where he engaged in lengthy discussions with State Department
officials. His US colleagues, particularly Stanley Hornbeck, expressed
strong pro-China and anti-British Empire sentiments. This troubled Clarke
deeply, 52 for he believed that the US would reject the restoration of the
status quo ante in Hong Kong. He thus urged the British government to
prepare itself to give up Hong Kong ‘in order to maintain the really
important things’. 53 The Colonial Office officials, led by Assistant Under-
Secretary Gerald Edward Gent, considered Clarke’s view ‘defeatist’. 54
With the help of MacDougall and the blessings of his senior colleagues,
Gent produced a policy paper to pre-empt an unacceptable one being
put forward by Clarke. 55 The Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord
Cranborne, strongly supported Gent. 56 The issue was eventually referred
to the War Cabinet, which preferred to avoid giving up Hong Kong.
Churchill felt that ‘questions of territorial adjustment could not be
considered now and must be left to be raised at the peace conference’. 57
The issue of Hong Kong’s future, disguised in the form of the future
of the leased New Territories, did come up when Britain negotiated with
China in late 1942 to end extraterritorial and other privileges it enjoyed
in China. 58 It became the sticking point preventing an agreement to be
reached. A compromise was eventually devised. It was for the Chinese
Foreign Minister to inform the British ‘that the Chinese government
reserves its right’ to raise the issue of the New Territories lease again
‘for discussion at a later date’. 59 Britain formally acknowledged the Chinese
126 A MODERN HISTORY OF HONG KONG

position. 60 What this meant was that Britain accepted for the first time
that there was a ‘Hong Kong problem’ – a problem the Chinese could
raise after the victory over Japan.

Occupation and Resistance

Although the spectacular defeat of Britain and the other Western
imperial powers in Asia by Japan shattered once and for all the myth of
the superiority of the white race, it did not enable the Japanese to build
up a Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. The Japanese made two
basic and interrelated errors. To begin with, they not only wished to
dominate the region to achieve ‘economic self-sufficiency’ but also to
‘satisfy a psychological craving – the recognition of Japan’s ethical and
cultural superiority… to play the part which the Chinese had once played
in the great days of the Celestial Empire… when China was regarded…
as exemplar and fountainhead of civilised life’. 61 The Japanese tried to
achieve this primarily through the use of force. They did not understand
that China could have done so in the past because she was so vastly
richer and more powerful than all her neighbours that she could afford
to be overly generous to them and thus earned her place. It was a
position Japan did not enjoy and could not afford in the 1940s. The
second mistake the Japanese made was a failure to recognise ‘freedom
for Asia’ par ticularly if only achieved by the iron fist of a new
hegemonic power, even if it was Asian, ‘was not enough, that each
national movement demanded its own freedom’. 62 The Japanese never
intended to trea t other Asians as equals or g enuine par tner s. 6 3
Consequently, even though they technically liberated many Asian peoples
from Western imperialism, they could not secure, with a small number
of exceptions, their loyalty and support. They tried to pacify their new
empire by repressive measures. This meant Japanese occupation in Asia
was brutal. Hong Kong was no exception.
In its incar n a tion as the Ca ptur ed Ter ritor y of Hong Ko n g ,
Lieutenant General Isogai Rensuke took over from Sakai and became
Governor in February 1942. While the Japanese Prime Minister General
Tojo Hideki deemed Hong Kong ‘strategically vital for the defence of
the Greater East Asiatic Sphere’, its future status was not settled. 64 It
was intended that it would be administered as a Japanese territory but
its retrocession to China as part of the post-war arrangement was not
ruled out. 65 As long as the war went on, Hong Kong’s first and foremost
function was to support the Japanese war effort. 66 This underlined
Japan’s occupation policy.
Although real power in occupied Hong Kong continued to rest with
the military, a civil administration was set up and local collaborators were
recruited to give the administration credibility and reduce the need for a
sizable gar rison. For this purpose, two councils were set up with
established local Chinese elite being recruited, cajoled or forced to serve.
At the top was the four-member Chinese Representative Council chaired
by Sir Robert Kotewall. Below that were the 22 members of the Chinese
 JAPANESE INVASION AND OCCUPATION 127

Co-operative Council under the chairmanship of Sir Shouson Chow.

Kotewall was a member of the Executive Council prior to the occupation
and Chow had served in the same capacity from 1926 to 1936. They were
authorised to collaborate by the Secretary for Chinese Affairs R.A.C.
North, Attorney General Grenville Alabaster and Defence Secretary J.A.
Fraser in January 1942, as the British were no longer in a position to act
on behalf of the local Chinese. 67 Although Kotewall was not as enthu-
siastic a collaborator as his two colleagues on the Representative Council,
Chen Lianbo and Liu Tiecheng, and his loyalty to the British Crown was
eventually accepted after the war, his apparent willingness to collaborate
caused serious misgivings upon the Japanese surrender. 68 The same did
not apply to Chow and, indeed, to a number of others like Li Shu-fan
and Man-kam Lo, who had served against their own wishes on the Co-
operative Council. 69 The two Chinese councils were in any event meant
mainly to make Japanese rule easier for the Japanese and to help monitor
the views of the Chinese community. 70 They were not powerful or
influential organisations like the Executive and Legislative Councils under
the British.
Given Hong Kong’s place in Japanese strategic thinking and the logistics
involved in feeding a population of over 1.5 million after its economy
was broken, the Japanese assiduously worked to reduce the population.
This was achieved by requiring all who did not have residence or
employment to leave. Although this policy was odious, with brutal tactics
employed to ensure its implementation, it was highly successful. By
February 1943, the population had dropped to 969,000, falling further to
5–600,000 by the time the Japanese had surrendered in August 1945. 71
Those who stayed behind suffered considerable hardship under a reign
of ter ror. They had to suffer from the arbitrar y and bloodthirsty
behaviour of Japanese soldiers and their terror-instilling military police,
the Kempeitai. Japanese sentries regularly and harshly punished and
occasionally even shot or beheaded any passing Chinese who failed to
bow in the required manner. 72 Some also frequently raided Chinese homes
and took whatever they wanted. 73 Such behaviour reinforced the image
of terror created by atrocities the Japanese committed during the battle,
of which the most infamous was the St Stephen’s College massacre in
Stanley. This happened on the last day of the battle, when 56 British
wounded, two doctors and seven nurses were murdered in cold blood in
this wartime medical station. Even more terrifying to the local community
were random atrocities committed against them, as some civilians ‘were
used for bayonet or shooting practice, or for jujitsu practice, being thrown
heavily a number of times, and bayoneted when unable to move’. 74
They also had to endure great shortages in all kinds of commodities,
including rice. This was caused partly by Tojo’s directive to find and export
all valuable material kept by the British in this wealthy colony for use in
Japan. 75 This resulted in the shipping from Hong Kong to Japan of the
colony’s large reserve of rice, among other valuables like vehicles and
machinery. The result was a severe shortage and dramatic price increase
128 A MODERN HISTORY OF HONG KONG

for this the most basic of essentials for the local community. 76 The
situation deteriorated further as the tide of the war turned against Japan
and its navy could no longer secure the sea-lanes. According to one
account, for much of the occupation between 300 and 400 corpses were
routinely collected everyday from streets, though the highest recorded
was 721. 77 How many of these died of starvation or privation cannot be
ascertained. Whatever sympathy the Japanese gained from the Chinese
in removing their British colonial masters was quickly destroyed and
replaced by fear and hatred. The Kempeitai instituted a reign of terror
by publicising its methods of torture and places for execution. Some of
their favourite methods of torture were pumping water into a victim until
it came out from other parts of the body or pulling off nails from fingers,
both techniques regularly applied to anyone deemed to have committed
minor offences like violating currency control. 78
As for the British, the Japanese sought to destroy their presence by
renaming streets and places, removing old records, replacing the currency
when possible, changing the school curriculum by substituting Japanese
for English and humiliating them in front of the Chinese. 79 British
prisoners of war were kept mainly in the former army barracks in Shum
Shui Po, while most of their officers were kept in the smaller Argyle
Street Camp in Kowloon. Although a small number of the prisoners were
able to escape, including Lieutenant Colonel Lindsay Ride of the
Volunteers, most prisoners remained in their camps or were sent to Japan
to work. Life in the camps was harsh, with food being kept to near
star vation level and any able bodied men put to arduous work on
construction projects like extending the local airport. 80
British and other Allied civilians, numbering about 2,500, were interned
in Stanley next to the local prison on the southern side of the island.
Conditions there were marginally better than in the POW camps since
the internees were not required to supply manpower for work parties.
The collapse of British power had different effects on the internees.
Some Britons continued to indulge in racism and blamed the presence
of Eurasians for the inadequate food, though it was often the Eurasians
who secured extra food from their relatives in the city and sometimes
shared it with others. 81 Others used their ingenuity and resourcefulness
to produce additional food. A notable contribution in this respect was
made by Geoffrey Herklots, a botanist at the university and an authority
on local flora and fish. There was also Franklin Gimson, who arrived to
take up the office of Colonial Secretary the day before the Japanese
attacked and showed himself to be remarkably far-sighted and reflective.
In Stanley, Gimson had to work hard to restore the reputation and
credibility of Hong Kong officialdom, both in tatters as a result of the
rapid collapse of the defence. 82 Above all, he had to battle the old
establishment view, put strongly by Secretary for Chinese Affairs R.A.C.
North, against introducing self-governing institutions to the people of
Hong Kong as a whole. 83 In contrast, Gimson tried to persuade the others
that ‘in future the Chinese will have to play a bigger part in Hong Kong
 JAPANESE INVASION AND OCCUPATION 129

and that the Europeans will have to rely on their co-operation more than
they have done in the past’. 84
Hong Kong’s resistance efforts were made mainly in parallel by two
groups, though some cooperation did exist between them. On the one
side were the British efforts to which young Chinese of Hong Kong like
Francis Yiu-pui Lee and Paul Ka-cheung Tsui volunteered and made
important contributions. They were carried out by the British Army Aid
Group (BAAG), set up and commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Ride, the
best-known escapee from Shum Shui Po. On the other side were the
Chinese guerrilla efforts carried out mainly by Communist partisans.
After his escape in January 1942, Ride persuaded the British military
representatives and the Chinese government to allow him to set up a unit
to help others escape from Hong Kong, for which he was to recruit from
members of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and particularly from
among those who had served in Hong Kong. 85 The BAAG operated in
close liaison with the SOE but it also coordinated its work with the
Chinese government and had limited contact with Communist partisans
operating in and around Hong Kong. 86 In addition to its function in
rescuing Allied personnel, including airmen shot down and essential
workers trapped in occupied Hong Kong, the BAAG developed a major
role in intelligence gathering. It enabled the British to secure not only
regular military intelligence but also valuable information on the situation
in Hong Kong, including the loyalty of prominent individuals. 8 7
Altogether, the BAAG helped 139 POWs, 33 American airmen, 314
Chinese in British armed services, and 1,400 civilians to escape and rejoin
the war effort. 88
Although technically part of the escape and evasion organisation M.I.9
and coming under the command of the Director of Military Intelligence,
General Headquarters in New Delhi, the BAAG primarily represented
Hong Kong’s resistance efforts. 89 Its agents and runners were mostly
ethnic Chinese even though most of its officers were expatriate British.
This was the first organisation in which expatriate Britons, Chinese and
other nationalities of Hong Kong served together without a clear and
unbreakable racial divide, where ethnic Chinese like Lee and Tsui were,
among others, commissioned as officers. Both rose to the rank of captain.
Indeed, Tsui’s war record was an important factor in his selection as the
first ethnic Chinese cadet after the end of the war. In the resistance efforts
of the BAAG, old colonial Hong Kong was beginning to give way to one
that promised to be different.
The other main resistance was waged by Chinese Communist guerrillas,
who were formally organised into the Hong Kong and Kowloon or the
First Independent Group of the East River Column under General Zeng
Sheng in December 1943. 90 The group was in fact formed in February
1942 with local residents Cai Guoliang as commander and Chen Daming
as political commissar and armed with 30 machine guns and several
hundred rifles left by defeated British forces. 91 Its strength numbered
about 400 between 1942 and 1945. 92 The group operated mainly in Sai
130 A MODERN HISTORY OF HONG KONG

Kung, its stronghold, and in Sha Tau Kok, Taipo, Yuen Long and Lantau
Island, though a special pistol unit operated in the urban areas of Hong
Kong and Kowloon. 93 Its first task was to rescue various prominent
Communist and leftwing individuals who were stranded in Hong Kong. 94
It also developed a role for helping Allied escapees and downed airmen
to evade their Japanese pursuers, a role which was often shared or
coordinated with the BAAG and accounted for the safety of 89 individuals
including Ride. 95 In addition, the Communist cadres used the resistance
efforts to recruit supporters particularly from among the young and
educated people of Hong Kong. 96

Wartime Planning in London

After the initial shock and problems associated with the collapse of British
power in East Asia had sunk in, the Colonial Office started to examine
what the future held for the British Empire there. The first issue for
Hong Kong concerned its post-war status, since the British government
had conceded that the Chinese government had a right to raise the future
of its New Territories after the defeat of Japan. 97
At the beginning of 1943, Colonial Office thinking was that Britain
must try to avoid giving up sovereignty over Hong Kong. Should that
prove impossible, it would negotiate with China and treat Hong Kong
as Britain’s contribution to a general settlement for a new order in the
Far East. 98 The Colonial Office insisted that, in such a situation, Britain’s
contribution must be matched (though in still undefined forms) by China
and the USA. 99 Though official British policy separated sovereignty over
Hong Kong proper from that over the New Territories, officialdom dealt
with the two together in internal deliberations.
The following summer, Assistant Under-Secretary Gent produced a
paper to argue that Britain should retain the New Territories or keep
Hong Kong proper if it could not hold on to the New Territories. 100 In
the event of the latter, he suggested Britain use the early end of the lease
to negotiate with China for joint control over the airport, reservoirs and
other parts of the infrastructure in the New Territories essential for Hong
Kong’s wellbeing. This was the first time in internal discussions that
British officials had seriously proposed examining the possibility and
implications of keeping Hong Kong proper without the New Territories.
Nothing came of this initiative, since the Foreign Office, which was still
inclined to use Hong Kong as a bargaining chip to secure other more
important British interests, refused to take part.
In the meantime, Gent made what arrangements he could within the
authority of the Colonial Office to strengthen Britain’s ability to recover
Hong Kong. He proceeded to create a civil affairs staff for Hong Kong
even before the armed forces were ready to accommodate such a unit in
their organisations or, indeed, to plan an operation to recover the
colony. 101 Thus, a Hong Kong Planning Unit was created under the wing
of the Colonial Office. It was initially put under a recently retired Colonial
Secretary of Hong Kong, Norman Smith. From 1944 onwards, it was
 JAPANESE INVASION AND OCCUPATION 131

headed by David MacDougall, the cadet who had escaped from Hong
Kong. By setting up the Unit at such an early date, Gent tried to build up
an implied acceptance at an official level that Britain would return to
Hong Kong at the end of the war. 102 It also provided Britain with the
human resources, the core of a civil affairs staff, it needed to take over
the administration of the colony as soon as it could be liberated.
In addition to helping the Colonial Office work out specific policy
directives on policing, education, prison, financial policy, immigration,
Chinese Affairs and other matters, the Hong Kong Planning Unit
embarked on a study of constitutional reform in May 1945. 103 Several
proposals, ranging from reforming the Executive and Legislative Councils
to establishing a new municipal council, were discussed though no
conclusion was reached before the Japanese surrendered in August. In
general, Gent felt ‘there should be an extension of democratic forms in
the new era’. 104 With Gent providing a guiding hand, the ‘Colonial Office
wanted a bold approach’, prefer ring measures that would provide ‘a
sufficiently wide range of functions to attract responsible Chinese to
serve on’ the new or reformed councils. 105 Gent had taken to heart the
lessons he learned defending Hong Kong as an imperial possession after
the destruction of the veil of imperial invincibility.
The fortunes of war affected Britain’s attitude towards Hong Kong.
In 1944, China suffered a major reverse when it lost more than half a
million troops to the Japanese offensive known as Operation Ichigo. 106
In contrast, the British counter-offensive in Burma, which was assisted
by the Chinese, was making steady progress. Britain’s successes in the
war and the prospect of instability and weakness in post-war China
hardened its attitude towards Hong Kong. In November, the deputy
prime minister and leader of the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, declared
in the House of Commons that Britain intended to return to Hong
Kong. 107 The British government’s attitude hardened further when the
US Ambassador to China, Patrick Hurley, visited London in April 1945.
In response to Hurley’s suggestion that Britain should return Hong Kong
to China, Prime Minister Churchill emphatically stated that it could only
happen ‘over my dead body’. 108 With the backing of the Prime Minister,
the Colonial Office won the upper hand in its bureaucratic battle against
the Foreign Office over Hong Kong’s future.
The planning undertaken in London suddenly assumed urgency in July.
Although the Americans in China, under Lieutenant General Albert
Wedemeyer, had started planning an operation to liberate south China
earlier in the spring, including the Canton–Hong Kong region, the British
were not informed. 109 Until July, the British worked on the premise that
‘nothing whatever has been settled’ with regard to the manner of Hong
Kong’s liberation and ‘no decision [was] likely for a considerable time’. 110
At the Potsdam Conference, the Americans told them Wedemeyer’s plan. 111
The prospect of the regular Chinese army reoccupying Hong Kong
in the near future galvanised the British into action immediately. The
idea of launching a British attack to liberate Hong Kong was considered
132 A MODERN HISTORY OF HONG KONG

but dismissed, because there were ‘insufficient British forces available

at present to oust the enemy’. 112 The consensus reached was that Britain
should attach a civil affairs unit to the Chinese invasion force. In the
event of Chinese irregular forces retaking Hong Kong, it was agreed
that the SOE would send in a British civil affairs unit in a clandestine
operation mounted outside China. 113 Such options were available thanks
in no small part to Gent’s earlier initiative to establish the Hong Kong
Planning Unit. The Unit was put on standby for incorporation into the
armed forces as civil affairs staff. Its head, MacDougall, was the first
to be commissioned and was given the rank of brigadier.
The British felt they were working against great odds. They felt certain
Wedemeyer was ‘personally opposed to’ their forces in China trying to
recover Hong Kong. 114 This assessment was correct, because ‘Wedemeyer
regarded British intentions and plans as incompatible with American
policy in China’. 115 Nevertheless, the Colonial Office explored every
possible option to enhance the restoration of British sovereignty in Hong
Kong. It arranged with the Admiralty to set aside ‘two or three suitable
fast moving fleet units to be so placed, if Japanese capitulation looks
possible, that they may steam at once for Hong Kong under sealed orders
on given signal’. 116 It also instructed the BAAG to smuggle a message to
Gimson instructing him ‘to restore British sovereignty and administration
immediately’ in the event of Japanese capitulation in Hong Kong. 117
British officials were driven by the belief that the recovery of Hong
Kong was very important for British ‘prestige and future relations with
China’. 118 There was also a feeling that, ‘once in occupation [of Hong
Kong], a Chinese force of whatever nature might prove difficult to extrude
by ordinary diplomatic means’. 119 By then, the Foreign Office had come
a long way from Ashley Clarke’s 1942 position. In July, it modified and
adopted as its own the position paper on Hong Kong that Gent had
originally prepared in 1943. In the new circumstances, the Foreign Office
sought to recover Hong Kong, including the New Territories, on three
grounds. 120 These were:
• British enterprise and good government had built a barren island
with a few thousand inhabitants into one of the world’s great ports;
• with the removal of extraterritoriality and a probability of unsettled
conditions in post-war China, Hong Kong was more important
than ever as a base for British merchants and industrialists
operating in China; and
• having lost the colony to the Japanese, it was ‘a point of national
honour… to recover it, and restore it to its normal state of order
and prosperity’. 121