Decolonization on the Horizon: Social and Economic Renewal in Postwar China and British Hong Kong

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

How might a European colony in Asia survive the worldwide imperial retreat after World War II, and how might a war-ravaged country insure its future autonomy? For political and economic leaders as well as social activists in the 1940s, the possibility of decolonization presented either inspiration or threat. As the Japanese Army withdrew from China and Hong Kong, the futures of both places were uncertain. Even though decolonization was not carried out in either place then, the idea stimulated resistance and animated plans for postwar reconstruction. In the process, elites in China articulated new visions of the national economy, while official and local activists in British Hong Kong attempted on reforming the colonial practice.

This interdisciplinary panel explores efforts that decolonization generated in postwar China and British Hong Kong. It investigates three cases of endeavors by government officials, leading industrialists, and organized labor on social and economic renewal. Ray Yep analyzes the colonial state’s anti-corruption program in Hong Kong that led to the colony's first Prevention of Corruption Ordinance. Anne Reinhardt examines the effort by Luo Zuofu, a leading shipping entrepreneur, to gain autonomy in sectors of China’s economy formerly dominated by foreign interests. Lu Yan takes the case of the extraordinary cooperation between Hong Kong's Labour Department and the colony's Chinese labor activists, which enabled the upsurge of postwar labor movement. Together these cases demonstrate that, once decolonization became a global force in world politics and culture, paths to the future could and had to be reimagined.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Yan Lu, University of New Hampshire

Chair

• John Carroll, University of Hong Kong

Individual Presentations

• Early Anti-corruption Efforts in Colonial Hong Kong: Scandals and Commissions of Inquiry in the 1940s - Ray Yep, City University of Hong Kong

• Imagining Decolonization: Lu Zuofu in the Postwar Years, 1945-1949 - Anne Reinhardt, Williams College

• Unusual Partnership: Postwar Labor Activism and the Colonial State in British Hong Kong, 1946-1948 - Yan Lu, University of New Hampshire

Discussant

• John Carroll, University of Hong Kong