Crossed Paths: Labor Activism and Colonial Governance in Hong Kong, 1938–1958 by Lu Yan (review)

Historians have a good understanding of labor history in prewar Hong Kong. We now understand how, from the late nineteenth century, Hong Kong workers espousing anti-colonialism threatened the colonial order and how, in 1925–1926, a general strike cum boycott crippled the economy and culminated in state repression of worker organizations. Lu Yan picks up the story in 1938. Complementing unacknowledged work by sociologists, her account begins with the appointment of a new progressive labor official, Henry Butters.¹ She argues Butter’s influence as a reformer was fleeting. From the late 1940s, the administration “abandoned” its “reformist objective,” “remoulding” Hong Kong’s legal framework with laws that clamped down on free collective bargaining; agents of the government used “brute force” to suppress labor movements (335). After 1948, when labor organizations had to register with the state, the colonial state became “the chief perpetuator” of Hong Kong’s “enduring pattern of industrial subjugation” (327).

Yan argues that the government’s hard line was, in hindsight, misguided because Hong Kong workers were not revolutionaries. They joined working-class movements because unions articulated a “defensive nationalist appeal” and showed “effective leadership” (338). Group loyalty built on prewar foundations when hundreds of Hong Kong–based Chinese workers joined organizations promoting resistance to Japan. Union actions were “inclusive,” involving skilled and unskilled workers, men and women. By the late 1940s, collective action to secure improved labor conditions became the “new norm” (165). Yan’s project tackles a critical period, between 1946 and 1950, when the number of days lost to strike actions was higher than for the subsequent long period of relative industrial peace, circa 1950–1966.² Yan does not follow the approach of sociologists examining long-term patterns of industrial relations and showing how they aligned with structural forces.³ Crossed Paths focuses on the politics of activism, on the role of historical contingencies—individuals and events.

To account for repression, Yan details the attitudes of progressive labor officers, such as United Kingdom labor expert Ken Baker, and his reactionary colleagues—notably Major H. F. G. Chauvin, an intelligence officer, and Brian Hawkins, a “staunch and skillful defender of the old regime”; under Hawkins, the administration resorted to “divide and rule,” “counterbalancing one group of unions against the other” (200). The state honed its strategy of repression during a 1949–1950 tramway workers’ dispute, a watershed event.

In 1949, unions representing utility workers, led by the Tramways Workers Union, demanded a special allowance to compensate for rises in prices. The colonial administration perceived these activities as politically inspired. The official narrative of the time [End Page E-22] was as follows: as “the general strike threat developed” and as communist “sympathisers” arrived from Canton, garrisoned Commando troops moved into police headquarters, Royal Marines were put on standby to guard the docks and to run the utilities, including telephone, energy, and postal services.⁴ The first wave of historical revisionism questioned this official account.

According to Steve Tsang,⁵ leftists “infiltrated” the Tramways Workers Union, which then responded to a call by the CCP-aligned Federation of Hong Kong Trade Unions (FTU) for a “spearhead” to regalvanize calls for a general strike. Although Governor Alexander Grantham responded “with strength,” he allowed the strike to take its “natural course.” When a tramways union leader introduced “political issues” into a speech, the police “warned” the union. When union leaders did not comply with this warning, the police removed a loudspeaker and a riot followed. The police controlled the riot within an hour, later deporting the chief picket, the chair of the union, and “an adviser from Canton.” Tsang’s findings are measured: that the government had a “bias” toward the company; that it erroneously viewed the demands of strikers for a 33% pay rise as unreasonable—when the consensus in Hong Kong was that workers had a “genuine grievance...