Cold War Hong Kong

In Hong Kong the rules of the global Cold War were often suspended. Or perhaps it is fairer to say that the territory epitomized to the ultimate degree many of the ambiguities and contradictions of the Cold War, a confrontation that, however fierce its rhetoric, was usually characterized by pragmatic caution, at least where the major powers were concerned. The story of Hong Kong during the Cold War reinforces a growing body of scholarship on the period that suggests that, while situating the history of post-1945 Asia in “a globalized Cold War context,” one must also remember that Asia “had its own internal dynamics and trajectories, and it evolved in ways that were not entirely the making of the big powers.”

Afterword Cold War Hong Kong

Hong Kong was and is, as Prasenjit Duara points out in this volume, a place that escaped from the boundaries and constraints of the nation-state, one with the potential to trigger novel and perhaps hybrid institutional arrangements, tailored to its own circumstances, that might ultimately provide models for an increasingly globalized and interdependent world, one where the ways that states functioned were being adapted to meet changing demands. Neither a state nor even perhaps a genuine colony, it had the scope to devise creative solutions to whatever problems it might encounter. Cold War developments sometimes proved significant in this respect. Peter Hamilton argues that when, during the mid-1960s, Tsim Sha Tsui in Kowloon developed into a rather seedy red light district full of rowdy bars and down-market businesses catering to visiting US military personnel on R & R from the Vietnam War, this prompted both Hong Kong elites and ordinary people into organizing to protest against this transformation. In so doing, Hamilton believes, they brought into being a new kind of community activism, one that set political precedents for the future of Hong Kong....

Hong Kong as an International Tourism Space

After 1945 globalization and mass tourism were mutually reinforcing developments. A traditionally free travel space, Hong Kong was part and parcel of the globalization of tourism. Major international and regional airlines operated in and through Hong Kong; new hotels sprang up whilst the older ones expanded in size; and the city became the ’shopping paradise’ of the world. For Americans, whether businessmen, leisure travelers, or military personnel on rest and recreation, Hong Kong was one of the most desirable destinations in Asia, second only to Japan. Yet the globalization of American tourism was a highly politicized process. Due to its strategic location, Hong Kong became embroiled in the geopolitics of the Vietnam War and the political spillover of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In the mid-1960s, Beijing repeatedly protested against what it claimed was the US Navy’s use of Hong Kong as a “base of aggression” against North Vietnam. Meanwhile, in 1967 left-wing elements in Hong Kong carried out their own Cultural Revolution-style struggle against the authorities. Sandwiched between American demands for ’R & R’ facilities on the one hand, and the Chinese protests and local Maoist challenges on the other, the Hong Kong government had to deliberate on the future of American tourism.

Hong Kong and the Cold War in the 1950s

Despite periods of internal agitation and international tension, in the 1950s the British did not fear the imminent loss of Hong Kong, which they believed was of value to the Chinese Communists as it stood. Still, the British were never complacent. During times of tension in East and Southeast Asia, British defense planning for Hong Kong went into high gear, but the inescapable reality was that Hong Kong could not be held without American air cover. The divergent British and American approaches to recognition of the PRC and ROC made matters murkier. Actions by both Chinese governments caused multifarious problems that threatened to divide the British and Americans. Despite entreaties from Colonial officials in Hong Kong to rein in the Americans and their Nationalist allies, throughout the 1950s British policy makers usually placed greater emphasis on preserving harmonious Anglo-American relations. As the British balanced competing interests, while always bearing in mind the goal of retaining Hong Kong, the course they steered to accomplish this often appeared more contradictory and vague than it did clear and decisive. However confusing the tactics, the objective remained the same.

Prologue Cold War Hong Kong

For Hong Kong, the Cold War was a distinct and crucial period in its own evolution and in its relations with China and the rest of the world. Without the global clash of ideologies, the city might well have failed to win and keep the key nodal position it attained in those years. Economically, intellectually, socially, and culturally, the Cold War years were crucial in ensuring that Hong Kong became a unique and cosmopolitan metropolis. Hong Kong, whatever its limitations—and it could at times be parochial, inward looking, and self-obsessed—was set on the path to become one of the world’s greatest and most vibrant cities, a city that would play a key role in the modernization of Greater China, especially the mainland, even as it developed a sense of specifically Hong Kong identity. From its outset, Hong Kong has been unique. During the Cold War and in many ways thanks to the demands, challenges, and opportunities arising from that conflict, already established social, economic, political, and administrative patterns of behavior within Hong Kong were intensified and adapted, transforming the territory. Run initially by British officials but increasingly by local Hong Kong recruits to the civil service, a hub not just for economic networks of capital and governmental exchanges of every variety but also for transnational intellectual, political, and social interchanges at every level, Hong Kong was one of a kind, its essence almost undefinable. Hong Kong developed its own voice, one that, perhaps muted in the immediate aftermath of the 1997 handover and the Asian economic crisis, is once more becoming ever more discernible. Its greatest contribution to China’s modernization may yet lie in the future....

Hong Kong as a Global Frontier

This chapter has sought to track the dual sense of the frontier that Hong Kong has represented, particularly since the end of the Second World War. Under certain conditions, peripheries can become dynamic and creative spaces, in part because of their peripheral or threatened status and in part because they are bubbling cauldrons of the world’s cultures. Over the last half-century, different Hong Kong groups have crafted many innovative strategies for survival and prosperity from these circumstances, representing a kind of ’strategic liminality.’ We have seen these strategies operate in the realm of economics, finance, education, cinema, and, most recently, civic activism.

Crisis and Opportunity

This chapter confirms the findings of previous scholarship concerning the complicated international politics that surrounded the Chinese refugee problem in Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s volatile political status-as a British colony on the doorstep of Maoist China-led Hong Kong’s British rulers to impose strict limits on the degree to which the US was allowed to exploit the propaganda value of the refugee crisis in Hong Kong. Given these constraints as well as ARCI’s limited success in achieving its other major goal-that of resettling large numbers of Chinese refugee intellectuals in places and occupations where they could play a politically useful role-one is left to ponder whether ARCI had any lasting significance beyond its impact on the lives of the individuals and families who were resettled overseas under its auspices, which was significant and often dramatic.

The American Cold War in Hong Kong, 1949–1960

During the early Cold War years, the United States came to regard the British colony of Hong Kong as an outpost of its own in terms of relations with the People’s Republic of China. Sharing a border with New China, Hong Kong became an arena for both the Cold War between East and West and the conflict between Communist and Nationalist Chinese. By its very existence, it served as an intelligence and propaganda vector for the US Far Eastern containment policy, sometimes at considerable cost to Hong Kong itself. The existing scholarly literature on US policies toward Hong Kong during the 1950s largely focuses upon top-level Anglo-American negotiations, with little consideration of the role of Hong Kong per se as a regional pivot in making and waging the Cold War. This chapter examines those factors that enabled the colony to succeed in surviving the ideological confrontation, while arguing that over time the significance of Hong Kong to American Cold War strategy steadily increased. It scrutinizes in detail US propaganda institutions and programs in Hong Kong that appreciably influenced the overseas Chinese in East and Southeast Asia.

Hong Kong’s Enduring Global Business Relations

By the late twentieth century, Hong Kong had entered the public and private consciousness as one of the world’s greatest business centers. In the background looms its mysterious past as a port in the “Orient,” a place of intrigue, trade, shipping, and smuggling of drugs and gold. This chapter develops the argument about the social networks of capital, and it is integrated with an interpretation of Hong Kong’s rise as the decision-making, management center of Asia from the 1840s to the early twentieth century. Then, the city’s transformation during the Cold War era is examined, and this sets the base for interpreting Hong Kong’s current position as corporate management and business services center of the Asia-Pacific. The discussion of several recent examples of the city’s enhanced integration with mainland China points to possible trends that may impact the city’s future. Finally, an examination of threats to Hong Kong since 1950 highlight how the city’s political-economy has maintained resilience under uncertain conditions.

Hong Kong’s Twentieth Century

Viewing Hong Kong from the perspective of its global setting is an exceptionally fruitful exercise. Hong Kong is one of the few places in world history that came into being on the edge of an irresistible globalization process that is still continuing. It is a story of growth and change shaped by a modern empire. The British Empire, at its height for most of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, was the most physically global entity in the world. This volume recognizes that, while taking the long view to bring the story beyond the era of empires down to the present when dramatic changes are taking place in Asia, especially in China. It is a good moment to look back and outline some of the ways that Hong Kong has responded to those changes....