The transition from empire to republic did not end China’s internal turmoil, and for many years afterward its political disturbances were felt in Hong Kong. Piracy flourished in the waters around the colony; one band of corsairs set fire to a steamship, causing the deaths of 300 passengers. Brigands and warlords preyed on southern China, sometimes making forays across the colony’s border to pounce on villages in the New Territories. China was torn by political struggles during the 1920s, and these provoked strikes within the colony and Chinese boycotts of Hong Kong goods. All through this period, refugees poured across the border in unending lines.
The worldwide depression of the 1930s brought a sharp drop in colony trade, but the government created jobs for thousands with road-building and other public works.
Japan opened its war against China in 1937, and within a year Hong Kong was bursting with the addition of 600,000 refugees. Poverty and overcrowded housing offered ideal conditions for epidemics of smallpox and beriberi which killed 4,500 persons in 1938. Still, the total population climbed to 1,600,000. Government refugee camps housed about 5,000 people; another 27,000 regularly slept in the streets.
Emboldened by victories in China and an alliance with Nazi Germany, the Japanese militarists launched their “Greater Far Eastern Co-Prosperity Sphere” by attacking Hong Kong, Pearl Harbor and the Philippines on December 7-8, 1941. Crossing the Chinese border at Lo Wu in the New Territories, two Japanese divisions supported by overwhelming air power invaded and conquered the colony within three weeks. They proceeded without pause to loot its warehouses and strip its factories of machinery for shipment to Japan.
The Japanese imprisoned the remaining British residents and raped and pillaged at will. By torture, starvation, and main force they drove a million Chinese residents from the colony and maintained a merciless control over the survivors by propaganda, intimidation, imprisonment and the use of Chinese fifth-columnists.
With their smashing victories in the Philippines, East Indies and at Singapore, the Japanese should have found it comparatively easy to unite Asiatics against the whites who had once lorded it over them. But they suffered from the same compulsion as the Germans; at a time when they had a chance to win allies among the people they had conquered, they botched it by senseless cruelties. When their firecracker-like string of victories had burned out, they had gained no friends, but instead had earned millions of new enemies.
Nearly four years passed before the Japanese were beaten into unconditional surrender and the British rulers returned to Hong Kong. Their return had a kind of spectral quality as the British Pacific Fleet, commanded by Rear Admiral C. H. J. Harcourt, steamed through Lei Yue Mun pass, gliding under the silent muzzles of Japanese guns emplaced along the mountainsides with their crews standing at attention beside them.
This was on August 30, 1945. The British went ashore to find thousands of their countrymen and other Allied prisoners gaunt and starving in prison camps. Many had been crippled and deformed by torture. Others had been killed in Allied bombing raids on Hong Kong. Seven large and seventy-two small ships had been sunk in the harbor, 27,000 homes had been destroyed. The fishing fleet was in ruins and the fishermen were in rags. Nine-tenths of the surviving residents were dead broke, while a few collaborators and black-marketers had accumulated fortunes. Livestock had virtually disappeared. Millions of carefully cultivated trees, planted to check erosion and retain the run-off of tropical rainfall for drainage into the reservoirs, had been chopped down to provide firewood. Schools were almost entirely suspended. Railroads and ferry lines were in an advanced stage of disrepair. Disease and crime had reached their highest rates in many years.
The British, who are inclined to procrastinate in the solution of small crises, can be indomitable in the face of major emergencies. Within six months after reoccupying the colony they had restored its government and society to working order. Six years after the British return, the colony was more prosperous, more congested, and more progressive than it had ever been before.
Nationalist China was driven from the mainland in 1949, and a new Communist state took its place. Britain promptly recognized Red China as the ruling power on the mainland, but relations between the Chinese Reds and Hong Kong were strained by Communist-caused disturbances in the colony and shooting “incidents” at sea and in the air. There was no apparent danger of war, however. In 1951, the colony’s trade amounted to $1,550,000,000, the highest point it had ever reached.