Like many other Hong Kong manufacturers, he set up subsidiary companies outside the colony. Bet-hedging is widely practiced among colony entrepreneurs; the economic climate is unpredictable and no one wants to be caught flat-footed. In the colony, Mr. Tung also runs a firebrick works, a marble plant and a trading company, shuttling daily between his various offices.
He takes a coolly realistic view of tomorrow’s prospects, declaring that the market for enamelware and vacuum bottles in underdeveloped countries will drop when hot running water, electric percolators and refrigerators make his products less useful, or the countries develop their own industries to meet the need. He probably would not be offended if his potential competitors subscribed to this pessimistic outlook.
Mr. Tung’s survival in the 1956 enamelware boom illustrates a recurring weakness in the colony’s economy, the perennial, headlong dash to make a fast dollar. The urge is irresistible, with new industries coming over the horizon and eager money lying in wait for them. At the first sniff of profit, the money swarms into the latest bonanza, fresh companies pop up like dandelions and products flood the market. Older firms slash prices repeatedly to meet each competitive assault; presently, the bottom falls out and half the old and new companies disappear in a welter of bad debts. The frantic cycle has swept through the apparel, film, glove, plastic flower, and enamelware industries without losing any of its momentum or lure. It is often and justly deplored, but in Hong Kong it will always be difficult to find an investor panting to turn a slow dollar.
The race for a quick profit careens along at a perilous pace in the colony’s building industry, where the investor in a large apartment or office building may get all his capital back within four years, or go broke in six months. The industry moved ahead at a moderate $25 million-a-year rate until about two years after the post-embargo manufacturing boom began. Then it took off, reaching a new record of $42,000,000 in 1959. In 1960 it shot up to $69,000,000, and held the steep angle of climb into 1961.
It is the building aspect of Hong Kong’s industrial spurt that strikes every visitor at once. A skyscraper bank building and two hotels, of 600 and 1,000 rooms respectively, are going up in the central business district of Hong Kong Island. There is hardly a square block in the main business area where there is not at least one building under construction.
The transformation of the Tsim Sha Tsui section at the tip of Kowloon Peninsula is even more startling. In the 1920s, it was predominantly a quiet house-and-garden neighborhood strung along both sides of Nathan Road, the main north to south street. The Peninsula Hotel opened at the south end of Nathan Road in 1928 to become the new social center of the colony, and its Peninsula Court annex was added in 1957.
During the 1950s, Tsim Sha Tsui slowly became an area of small hotels and luxury shops catering to tourists. An epidemic of building fever swept over it in 1959, and the place will never be the same again. Three huge hotels—the Ambassador, Imperial and Park—opened in 1961 with a total of 1,025 rooms. Two years later, the 800-room President was to join the Kowloon tourist parade. Tall apartment buildings, reaching almost as high as their rents, and an assortment of compact luxury hotels, sprouted through the thick crust of tourists and shoppers. Guests at the top of the newly opened Imperial Hotel looked down on a scene of general devastation at the opposite side of Nathan Road; dozens of old structures being demolished to make way for larger and more expensive ones.
New hotels opening throughout the colony in 1963 will add 3,368 rooms, doubling its tourist capacity. Many of them will show the familiar marks of speculative building—undersized rooms, insufficient elevator service, thin walls and cracked masonry. The best hotels will stay the course, but the merely flashy ones may be pulled through the same wringer as the overly eager, overnight speculators in other industries.
The construction industry, which employs 160,000 people, roughly estimated, was also active in less speculative projects. From 1957 through 1961, it erected more than 200 factories, many of them on reclaimed land. Government construction on water-supply facilities, land reclamation, and resettlement estates ran just over $40,000,000 in 1960-61, and was scheduled to increase considerably in the next fiscal year.
All of the large new hotels in Hong Kong were built to serve a tourist trade which could scarcely have supported three of them in 1940. For well over a century, Hong Kong had about as much tourist appeal as the islands of Langerhans; and in its early days, the English used to sing a derisive song, “You can go to Hong Kong for Me.” In the popular mind, it was associated with such disagreeable phenomena as rainstorms, typhoons, floods, pirates, malaria, bubonic plague, squalor and poisoners. Most of these scourges have disappeared, but it took travelers many years to forget them. People went to Hong Kong only on government or private business or because, being either rich or retired, they had been everywhere else and wanted to add one more odd-sounding place to their itinerary.