Building Colonial Hong Kong

Speculative Development and Segregation in the City

Cecilia L. Chu

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780429796784
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Architecture
• Thema: Urban Planning & Landscaping

In the 1880s, Hong Kong was a booming colonial entrepôt, with many European, especially British, residents living in palatial mansions in the Mid-Levels and at the Peak. But it was also a ruthless migrant city where Chinese workers shared bedspaces in the crowded tenements of Taipingshan. Despite persistent inequality, Hong Kong never ceased to attract different classes of sojourners and immigrants, who strived to advance their social standing by accumulating wealth, especially through land and property speculation.

In this engaging and extensively illustrated book, Cecilia L. Chu retells the 'Hong Kong story' by tracing the emergence of its 'speculative landscape' from the late nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century. Through a number of pivotal case studies, she highlights the contradictory logic of colonial urban development: the encouragement of native investment that supported a laissez-faire housing market, versus the imperative to segregate the populations in a hierarchical, colonial spatial order. Crucially, she shows that the production of Hong Kong's urban landscapes was not a top-down process, but one that evolved through ongoing negotiations between different constituencies with vested interests in property. Further, her study reveals that the built environment was key to generating and attaining individual and collective aspirations in a racially divided, highly unequal, but nevertheless upwardly mobile, modernizing colonial city.

Awarded 2023 Best Book in Non-North American Urban History by the Urban History Association.

CHAPTER 1 Framing Colonial Urban Development

When the late Qing reformer Kang Youwei first visited the City of Victoria, Hong Kong in 1879, he was impressed by the ‘elegant buildings of the foreigners, the cleanliness of the streets, and the efficiency of the police’ (Kang, quoted in Esherick, 2007, p. 7). A few years later, Wang Tao, another prominent reformist writer exiled to Hong Kong, praised the British administration for its governing capability, particularly for instilling order and civility in this prosperous, thriving colony (Wang, quoted in Wong, 2000, p. 225). Like Kang, Wang was also in awe of the sophistication of the European houses and their meticulously cultivated gardens, but was appalled by the horrendous conditions of the crowded tenements where many Chinese labourers lived. He also noted the disproportionately high rents that were charged for these poorly built dwellings, and the chronic housing shortage that had become emblematic of the city – a situation that Wang alleged to be the most extreme on earth.

In the decades that followed, similar descriptions of Hong Kong were reiterated by countless local and foreign writers: a booming colonial entrepôt where European merchant princes dwelt in palatial mansions; a ruthless migrant city where Chinese labourers shared bed spaces in subdivided tenements.¹ But narratives of these sharply contrasting urban scenes – the scenes of a divided city where Europeans and Chinese lived separate lives – were not always meant to highlight social discrepancies, but more often were deployed as colourful backdrops for telling the success stories of the ‘great emporium of the East’. In these stories, contrasting images of built forms, landscapes and peoples were regularly juxtaposed as symbolic references for the colony’s burgeoning commerce and growing prosperity. As boosters of British trade lauded the government’s laissez-faire approach to the economy, Chinese merchants congratulated themselves for their growing role in advancing Hong Kong’s economic standing. Meanwhile, Mainland reformers such as Wang and Kang saw a model of development that they could appropriate for their own nation-building projects.² Despite their criticisms of the horrendous living conditions of poor labourers in the Chinese quarter, they were clearly attracted to the ‘modern elements’ in the European district: clean and wide streets, well-constructed buildings, and other urban improvements that were viewed not only as evidence of progress, but also as necessary conditions for enabling progress to happen. In line with reformers in Britain and elsewhere, a well-maintained urban order was widely believed to be the means to bring about moral order. The promise was an urbanism that produced ‘civilizing effects’, predicated on a kind of thriving capitalist economy established under British rule, and one that could also be adapted by non-Western nations.

It should be noted that these aspirational accounts, which resonate with many descriptions of Hong Kong at the time, largely omitted mentioning the social tensions and urban problems persisting in the period, where reports of crime, riots and boycotts, and disasters such as fires, disease outbreaks, and the collapse of houses regularly dominated local news. But it was also apparent that, as indicated in recent historiographies, the Hong Kong of the late nineteenth century was a considerably more stable and governable place compared to the early decades of colonial rule. This was in large part thanks to the emergence of a new class of Chinese elite whom the colonial government could trust to help mediate its relationship with the native population (Carroll, 2005; Sinn, 2003; Law, 2009; Smith, 1985, 1995; Chan, 1991; Lethbridge, 1978). One aspect shared by these new local leaders, including merchants, compradors, government workers and many building contractors who came to take part in the booming construction business, was their common interest in speculation on land and property (Smith, 1985, 1995). Despite experiencing various forms of discrimination in a colonial situation, they strived to accumulate economic capital, most commonly through housing investment and, over time, were able to amass substantial wealth and advance their social and political standing. By the 1880s, over half of the property holdings in Victoria had come under the control of Chinese owners. Along with their European counterparts, they invested in the different types of building needed by the young colony. The most notable of these was the tong lau (唐樓), Chinese houses that became a favourite investment choice, in particular due to their potential for generating high-rental returns through sub-division as tenements.

This book is a study of the forms of colonial development and emergence of a distinct urban milieu in Hong Kong between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Long hailed for its laissez-faire credentials and market freedom, Hong Kong offers a unique context to study what I call ‘speculative urbanism’, wherein the colonial government’s heavy reliance on generating tax revenue from private property supported a lucrative housing market that enriched a large number of property owners and rentier lords. This was also a period in which the propertied class became incorporated more tightly into the colonial governing regime. A consequence of the rapid urban growth and increase of private property ownership was the alignment of interests between Chinese and European landlords, who often came together to contest legislation that affected their shared prospects, such as taxation, rent control, the regulation of building standards and provision of urban services (Chu, 2012; 2013a). Although British officials were keen to improve the conditions of tenements, which they often deemed unsightly and unhealthy, their efforts were hampered by the administration’s stringent budgetary constraints and longstanding concerns that too many building regulations would drive away private investment capital and lower tax revenue. Meanwhile, the continual influx of Chinese immigrants and rapid spread of tong lau near the centre of town prompted anxieties among European residents, who felt threatened not only by the risks of contracting diseases from the ‘inferior natives’ who were now living on their doorstep, but also by the possibility of losing their properties to wealthy Chinese speculators. As in other European colonies, these anxieties led to new calls for the creation of ‘European reservations’ where Chinese people were prohibited from residing and purchasing properties. But such proposals were resisted by some as a violation of ‘universal property rights’, which the British had long hailed as a cornerstone of colonial capitalism and key to their strategy of co-opting and empowering the Chinese propertied class under indirect rule.

Figure 1.1. An illustration published in the British press, showing the thriving port of Victoria, 1887. (Source: The Graphic, Mary Evans Picture Library)

Figure 1.2. A view of the Victoria Harbour from the Mid-Levels, 1880s. (Source: Illustrated London News, Mary Evans Picture Library)

The ongoing debates over the competing demands to encourage native investment in a laissez-faire housing market on the one hand, and to segregate the populations to protect the health and privilege of Europeans on the other, underscore a fundamental contradiction of colonial development. As noted by Patrick Joyce (2003) in his discussion of the emergence of a ‘liberal governmentality’ in India, while colonialism was entwined with the construction of cultural difference, there was always an underlying strand of universalism at play within the logics of urban development (Joyce, pp. 248–249). Such universalism was most evident in the arenas of private property, the rule of law, the liberty of the individual, and education in Western knowledge (Metcalf, 1994). While the British insisted that a majority of their colonized subjects had yet to reach the threshold of ‘civilization’ – a claim that was used to justify colonial rule in the name of its ‘civilizing mission’, the emphasis on promoting universal human progress inevitably instilled a degree of tension between authority and liberty. In Hong Kong, as in other colonies with a small and transient European population, this tension was played out in the numerous ways in which native property owners sought to contest discriminatory legislation against them by appealing to the universal principles of capitalism, in particular the obligations of governing authorities to guarantee market freedom and property tenure while ensuring that the rights of all British subjects be protected regardless of their race.

Colonialism and the Liberal Strategies of Exclusion

Critical historians have long dismissed the liberal rhetoric of market freedom and juridical equality by highlighting the illiberal practices of exclusion, oppression and violence carried out under colonial rule. Nevertheless, apologists for empires have sought to vindicate colonialism on the basis of its having disseminated the liberal institutions of free trade, private property and the rule of law that became the foundation of the modern global economy and ‘good government’.³ The incongruity between the ‘culturalist critiques’ of colonial violence and institutional endorsements of empires are rooted in the different political positions and analytical frames of the writers. But as noted by Onur Ulas Ince (2018), it is also a result of insufficient attention to the operation of the imperial economy and how its inherent contradictions had driven liberal intellectuals to generate new claims that legitimated the rule of difference (Pitt, 2005). Implicit in such ‘liberal strategies of exclusion’ – to use the term of Uday Mehta (1997) – was the argument that liberal rule was not practicable for those who do not display the attributes of a ‘mature subjectivity’. From this point of view, despotism was seen as a legitimate form of government for colonized people provided that ‘their improvement be taken as the “end”of governing and the means justified by actually effecting that end’.

Ince’s call for more integrated analysis of the politics and economics of colonialism resonates with Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper’s reminder that all universal claims are necessarily bound up in particularistic assertions (Stoler and Cooper, 1997; Cooper 2005; Stoler, 2007). Therefore, a key question in the study of empire should be how a grammar of difference was continuously recrafted as people in the colonies contested European claims to superiority. Colonial regimes, it is emphasized, were neither monolithic nor omnipotent, and ‘colonized people were capable of circumventing and undermining the principles and practices on which extraction or capitalist development was based’. In a similar vein, Eugene Irshick (1994, 2003) argues that knowledge of a colonial culture is always produced through a dialogic process that involves all its constituencies, each of which played a role in constructing that knowledge and rewriting its histories. This is not to downplay the existing inequality and exploitation present in a colonial situation. But more attention to co-options and dialogues – not just antagonisms and conflicts – is necessary because both were essential components in the production of the colonial discourse. The need to attend to contingencies and nuances is further elaborated by David Scott (2005), who points out that the most important question in deciphering colonial relations is not about whether native people were included or excluded in particular policies, but in understanding the introduction of new ‘political games’ that both the colonizers and colonized were compelled to play if they were to wield political influence.

Building on the insights of Ince, Stoler and Cooper, Irschick, Scott and others, this book contributes to recent scholarship in colonial urbanism that embraces the complex forces at work in the shaping of the colonial built environment. My investigation rests on four related arguments. First, despite the authoritarian nature of colonial rule, the construction of the urban landscape was not a straightforward, top-down process, but one that involved continuous negotiations between different constituencies. These included the native propertied class, who prospered under the colonial land system and played a key role in sustaining the colonial governing order. Second, although social structures in the colonies were predicated on a hierarchy that differentiated the ‘colonizers’ from the ‘colonized’, this pre-sumed dichotomy has obscured the internal stratifications wit...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Framing Colonial Urban Development
• 2 A Dual City in the Making: Accumulation and Segregation in Nineteenth-Century Victoria
• 3 Combatting Nuisance: Urban Improvement and the Colonial Conundrum
• 4 Remapping Forms and Norms: From ‘Insanitary Properties’ to Modern Housing
• 5 Constructing Enclaves: A New Era of Suburban Development
• 6 The Housing Crisis and the Making of the Modern City
• Afterword: ‘Old Hong Kong’ and the Present City
• Abbreviations and Notes on Romanization
• Bibliography
• Index