This paper analyses an aspect of Post-war British administration of Hong Kong from geographical perspective of space, manifested in the development project of an industrial new town in Kun Tong, drawing on various unpublished Government policy documents. The success in Post-war economic development of Hong Kong did not owe so much to the popularly believed 'laissez,faire', but more to subtle but delibetate initiative of the Colonial Government to canalise the operation of market economy into the trajectory desirable to the British Colonial Administration. Employing space, a scarce commodity appropriated from the indigenous Chinese when Hong Kong was colonised to the sole ownership of the British Crown, as a strategic policy variable, the Colonial Government intervened in the economic and social processes to manage the Colony. In Post-war Hong Kong this spatial policy emerged in 1952, when the Colonial Government engaged in project to produce industrial sites in Kun Tong, on the north-eastern shore of the Victoria Harbour, with an intent to support the Post-war export-oriented industrialization to replace the Pre-war economic base of entrep6t trade with China. At that time, the Colonial Government was compelled to rectify the failure of the squatter policy of late 1940s, which had intended to segregate away the destitute squatters, who were believed to pose threat to the security of the Colony, to Ngau Tau Kok, where a 'tolerated' settlement for this category of squatters was created. The segregation simultaneously meant, however, remoteness to job opportunities, mostly concentrated in the existing urban areas of Kowloon Peninsula. Without much economic incentive to move to Ngau Tau Kok voluntarily, the Colonial Government had to somehow create economic draw; or the Colonial administration would have had to resort to its dominant political power to remove the squatters forcibly, which would have ruined the image of the British rulers themselves among the Chinese, who had suffered from the forcible evacuation by the Japanese military administration in less than a decade ago. Situated in the vicinity of Ngau Tau Kok, on a reclaimed land, Kun Tong was supposed to attract the space-hungry Chinese entrepreneur class with sites where the squatters resettled could work to produce exportoriented commodities. Accordingly, the Chinese entrepreneurs persistently demanded, and the Government had initially planned, to lease the industrial sites with private treary at low price, in order to fulfil the aim of the long-term industrialisation and squatter segregation policies simultaneously. This idea, nevertheless, faced fierce opposition from the Finance Committee of the Legislative Council, the bastion of the ruling-class coalition of the Colony, many of which members were the expatriate British capitalists, or the 'land-owner class' of Hong Kong. They demanded that the land be leased at a price at par with what the normal procedure of auction would fetch, to maximise the revenue of the Government from land sales. After lengthy struggle between the Chinese entrepreneur and British landlord classes, the former was ultimately forced to surrender and the sites prepared in Kun Tong were put for lease by auction. As expected, the realised prices were initially much higher than what the private treaty would have fetched. Nevertheless, the bids soon began to wane due to a zoning regulation imposed on each site, where only a plant of a particular industrial sector was allowed to build, based on the provision of industrial policy then. In order to attract higher bids, the zoning constraint was later lifted with success. This Government land policy, together with loss of comparative advantage of Kun Tong against other resettlement industrial sites closer to the ciry centre, triggered speculative behaviour among the Chinese. Situated remotely with least amenity and poor transport linkage to the existing urban area, most sites in Kun Tong were left idle, and there was even a case where an original owner attempted to resell a site at a price 70% higher than he had originally paid. Most of the Chinese entrepreneurs rather relied on the premises built by Government catering to the resettlement of squatter industries, located closer to the city centre, where a large pool of labourers was readily · available and linkages with other industrialists easily established. After all, as a Government official aptly commented, the Kun Tong project failed in terms of industrial or social policy, but was indeed successful in terms of the policy where space was treated as a 'resource' which bore fruit of revenue from land lease, to the benefit of the Colonial administration. It was at Kun Tong in the 1950s, therefore, where the policy of Post-war Hong Kong Colonial Government to treat pristine space as a source of revenue was initiated.

アジア政経学会

1997-12

Japanese(jpn)

journal article

VoR

00449237

AN00011139

アジア研究

44

1

1

40

010a Journal Articles　=　雑誌掲載論文

https://hdl.handle.net/10086/28862