Hong Kong by Jan Morris

Author:Jan Morris [MORRIS, JAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78106-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-02T05:00:00+00:00

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Nevertheless buying and selling, even speculating and servicing, are no longer the chief functions of Hong Kong. Since 1950, when the United Nations clamped an embargo upon trade with Communist China, Hong Kong has turned itself into one of the world’s great manufactories.

There were industries in the territory before. There were the traditional fishing, quarrying, shipbuilding and farming industries. There had long been industries making joss-sticks. In the nineteenth century Hong Kong preserved ginger was patronized by Queen Victoria herself, and was consequently to be found on all the most fashionable English dinner-tables. Sugar-refining flourished for a time, cloths and cottons were made, the Do Be Chairful Company were well-known makers of rattan furniture. There was a wolfram mine in the New Territories – once the miners had been persuaded the earth-spirits would not be angered, they made themselves an underground town, complete with shops, houses, markets, cafés, bars and even brothels. After the Second World War Hong Kong went in for cheap and nasty toys, and for electric torches, a speciality it has retained. The victory of the Communists in the Chinese civil war expelled to Hong Kong a powerful group of Shanghai manufacturers, who often brought their work forces with them – sometimes even their machinery – and established in the territory a vigorous textile industry.

But it was the Korean War embargo that sealed the development. Chinese Hong Kong, in particular, heeded the example of those astute and adaptable newcomers from Shanghai, who had been driven out of one profitable society, and had shown themselves determined not to be impoverished in another. The first sign of changing philosophies was the sudden emergence of an artificial flower industry, a trade until then dominated by the Italians; thereafter factories of all kinds erupted, especially in Kowloon, which now dramatically burgeoned.

To start with they were mostly hole-in-corner affairs, in lofts and backyards, in ramshackle warehouses, frequently in squatters’ huts and sometimes even on board sampans. Hong Kong industries then were often Dickensian: sweatshop workers labouring terrible hours for miserable wages, small children assembling toys or picking at fabrics, makeshift machinery improperly protected, squalid conditions, ruthless methods, fantastic production levels and enormous profits.

It was an ugly thing to see in the enlightened 1950s. Though its exploiters, like its exploitees, were nearly all Chinese, the Hong Kong Government was repeatedly anathematized, in the House of Commons at Westminster as in the pages of newspapers around the world, for its slavish devotion to laissez-faire – for years it even declined to produce proper industrial statistics. But at however high a social cost, temporarily deprived of one function Hong Kong permanently acquired another.

Gradually that explosion of productivity was brought into some sort of order, and Hong Kong industry began to conform with international norms. Factory conditions became less awful, wages more humane, the exploitation of children less blatant. The ad hoc nature of it all gave way to more contemporary organization; by the 1970s Hong Kong industry was relatively respectable, and the colony was no

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