Social reproduction process in colonial Hong Kong: The shifting gender relations of the intra-east Asian economy

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the shift of gender relations behind the reconfiguration of the social reproduction in colonial Hong Kong. To achieve this, the focus is on the cross-border transfer of labor, goods, services, and information in Hong Kong and neighboring areas of East Asia. Firstly, up to the 1950s, Hong Kong’s reproductive sphere attracted the spinster women who had worked for silk filatures in Canton before Japan’s invasion. While these women took care of the everyday needs of the colonial masters and other upper-class families, they formed trans-local and trans-generational sisterhoods in order to sustain their own lives financially and physically. By the 1960s, new waves of Chinese migrant women gradually replaced the spinsters, although they soon turned to the manufacturing sector for better working conditions. Meanwhile, consumerism was encouraging Hong Kong families to introduce home appliances, typically made in Japan. The installment payment system enabled people to realize their aspirations for modernity, which in turn resulted in the reallocation of women’s labor in the reproductive sphere. By critically tracing such historical trajectories, we can understand that colonial Hong Kong’s industrialization and its subsequent economic growth was conditioned in the gendered process of the social reproduction.