The Fall of Hong Kong: Britain, China and the Japanese Occupation. By Philip Snow. [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003. xxvii+477 pp. £25.00. ISBN 0-300-09352-7.

Abstract

This title has been used before, but usually with reference just to the conquest of Hong Kong by Japan in 1941, and here the battle for the territory is covered in a mere 20 pages. The main subject matter is indeed the Japanese occupation, but the title may be taken to have double reference because it is Snow's thesis that it was this brief period of less than four years that led inexorably to the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. He argues that the loss of Britain's imperial prestige was exacerbated and set in concrete by the clear message of post-1945 history that it was the Chinese who were the driving power behind Hong Kong and her development. Too weak (sometimes too insensitive) to take full economic advantage from events, the British presided over “an astonishing explosion of wealth. But in the process their own role had become so exiguous that it no longer really mattered, was indeed barely noticeable . . .“ This may be rather too harsh a judgement on the British (who in their ‘second innings’ hung on for more than half a century after all) but Snow is surely right in tracing the beginning of the distant end to the Japanese conquest which drew a line under received truths and cleared the way for the emergence of new attitudes on all sides.The political history of the pre-invasion period from the late 1930s, of the occupation itself, and of the immediate years after British resumption of control in August 1945 is nicely pieced together from a wide variety of sources, and Snow has tried hard to draw on Chinese, Japanese and Eurasian writings as well as on the much greater wealth of British accounts, both official and private. In this striving after balance he has had only limited success, the result still being an Anglocentric history, though certainly not entirely an Anglophile one. The problem is not of his making, but reflects the relatively sparse and unsystematic nature of sources available at present in Chinese especially.