Decolonization Deferred? The Re-establishment of Colonial Rule in Hong Kong, 1942–45

Hong Kong is unique in the annals of British decolonization. As John Darwin has argued, it was the ‘deviant’ which broke all the rules of colonial disengagement. It experienced neither profound constitutional change, nor the emergence of an assertive indigenous nationalism which demanded selfrule for its inhabitants. The end of British rule brought ‘not sovereign independence but reabsorption’ into the political entity ‘out of which it was originally carved’. ¹ In fact, the last fifty years of British administration witnessed unprecedented political stability and economic growth which made Hong Kong’s egress from empire doubly unusual. William Roger Louis has reinforced this thesis. He contended that the ‘critical phase’ for Hong Kong was the immediate post-war period of 1945–49, when British resolve to defend it was unstinting. As civil war engulfed China, the colony provided a secure environment for both European and Chinese investors from which to continue their operations in the region. The expulsion of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government from mainland China in 1949 by Mao Tse-tung’s Communists further enhanced Hong Kong’s political status. The onset of the Cold War in Asia made Hong Kong an important bastion from which to defend Western democracy from the onslaught of communist expansionism. As the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, told his Cabinet colleagues in 1949, Hong Kong would become, if need be, ‘a Berlin of the East’. ² Leaving commercial enterprise and geopolitics aside, the value of Hong Kong, maintains Robert Bickers, was measured in terms of British prestige and self-confidence. Hence, its ‘freakish survival’ as a British possession after the Second World War turned upon Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s unyielding imperial pride. ³ Yet this incisive observation fails to take into account the complex and, at times, tortuous wartime discussions which occurred not only within Whitehall, but also between Britain, China and the United States over the future of this imperial pearl.