page_title: History of Hong Kong (1800s–1930s)
section_title: Politics
hierarchical_section_title: History of Hong Kong (1800s–1930s) / Politics
caption_attribution_description: English: View of the premises of the two-storey Military Commissariat from Queen's Road. The 2 identical 3-storey buildings are the main Royal Naval Dockyard buildings. The entrance to the Dockyard is located between them. Taken c.1894, author unknown
context_page_description: Hong Kong (1800s–1930s) oversaw the founding of the new crown colony of Hong Kong under the British Empire. After the First Opium War, the territory was ceded by the Qing Empire to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland through Treaty of Nanking and Convention of Peking in perpetuity, with additional land was leased to the British under the Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory, Hong Kong became one of the first parts of East Asia to undergo industrialisation.
context_section_description: One observer summed up the decades as "politics, propaganda, panic, rumour, riot, revolution and refugees". The role of Hong Kong as a political safe haven for Chinese political refugees further cemented its status, and few serious attempts to revert its ownership were launched in the early 20th century. Both Chinese Communist and Nationalist agitators found refuge in the territory, when they did not actively participate in the turmoil in China. However, the dockworkers strikes in the 1920s and 1930s were widely attributed to the Communists by the authorities, and caused a backlash against them. A strike in 1920 was ended with a wage increase of HKD 32 cents.
  Ambrose King, in his controversial 1975 paper Administrative Absorption of Politics in Hong Kong, described the colonial Hong Kong's administration as "elite consensual government". In it, he claimed, any coalition of elites or forces capable of challenging the legitimacy of Hong Kong's administrative structure would be co-opted by the existing apparatus through the appointment of leading political activists, business figures and other elites to oversight committees, by granting them British honours, and by bringing them into elite institutions like Hong Kong's horse racing clubs. He called this "synarchy", an extension of John K. Fairbank's use of the word to describe the mechanisms of government under the late Qing dynasty in China.
  When modern China began after the fall of the last dynasty, one of the first political statements made in Hong Kong was the immediate change from long queue hairstyles to short haircuts. In 1938, Guangzhou fell to the hands of the Japanese, Hong Kong was considered a strategic military outpost for all trades in the far east.  Though Winston Churchill assured that Hong Kong was an "impregnable fortress", it was taken as a reality check response since the British Army actually stretched too thin to battle on two fronts.
caption: Naval Dockyard buildings (centre), Queen's Road, 1894
exif: {}