The Fall of Hong Kong: Britain, China, and the Japanese Occupation

by Philip Albert Snow and Philip Snow

Book Overview

On Christmas Day 1941 the Japanese captured Hong Kong and Britain lost control of its Chinese colony for almost four years. The Japanese occupation was a turning point in the slow historical process by which the British were to be expelled from the colony and from four centuries of influence in East Asia. In this powerful narrative, Philip Snow unravels the dramatic story of the occupation from the viewpoint of all the key players - the Hong Kong...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300103735
• ISBN13: 9780300103731
• Release Date: July 2004
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 524 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Exciting, detailed and researched

As a professional writer I can be especially critical on an author who does not do his homeworks or leaves imagination at home. This historically detailed book is a must for any reader who is interested in the history, prewar culture and military blunders of WWII Hong Kong. It is a must read.

A must read for all Hong Kong history buffs

Like the other reviewer, I thought the cover photo did the book a slight injustice, as did the sub-title. When I bought the book a couple years ago, I, too, thought it was a military history of Hong Kong during WWII and the Japanese occupation. But as I got into the book, I realized it included a whole lot more. I don't normally read military histories, but have been reading about Hong Kong for 20 years and picked up the book because it dealt with the territory. I loved Snow's ability to tell the story of 20th century Hong Kong from the perspective of all the players: the Cantonese, Japanese, British, Indians, Eurasians, and Nationalist and Communist mainland Chinese. He shows the good and bad of all these groups and adds colorful characteristics of some of the more eccentric players, like the one-legged General Chan Chuk of the Nationalist army. Before I read this book, I had no idea that Britain's return to HK after WWII was basically a stroke of luck. If there hadn't been a brewing civil war on the mainland, or if Roosevelt had not died before the end of WWII, HK would have been returned to the mainland upon the Japanese surrender. I also learned that for a time just after the war, the British wanted to completely change HK society, doing away with the apartheid state that existed before the war. With the appointment of Grantham as governor (who ironically has a secondary school in HK named after him), most of those reforms were pulled back and not re-introduced until years later. I would have liked to know more about the Indians after 1952, when they were kicked out of the police force. I know that most of the security guards in banks and gold shops in present day HK are Sikh, but always thought that they had retired from the police before the handover. From "The Fall of Hong Kong", it would seem unlikely that these guards were ever in the force. I also would have liked to learn about the other European communities in Hong Kong before and after the fall, like the Jews and Russians, but Snow hardly mentions them. Nonetheless, I found "The Fall of Hong Kong" to be the most comprehensive history of modern Hong Kong.

Great history of Hong Kong during the Second World War

Philip Snow's The Fall of Hong Kong paints a vivid picture of Hong Kong society in the leadup to the Japanese occupation of 1941-1945. The failure of the British to cultivate the loyalty of the Hong Kong Chinese in the years prior to the war weakened their ability to defend the colony against the Japanese. However, the Japanese also failed to capitalize on Chinese resentment against the British; their doctrine of "pan-Asian solidarity" was belied by their brutal treatment of the Hong Kong populace. Snow asserts that the common suffering of the Chinese and the British during the years of occupation introduced new feelings of solidarity, which in turn lead to the introduction of key social reforms in the years following the occupation. Snow does an excellent job of showing how tenuous was the British hold on Hong Kong in the immediate aftermath of the war. The United States and the Nationalist Chinese both wanted Hong Kong to be returned to mainland China after the war. Most interestingly, Snow points out that Communist partisans in the New Territories played a key role in deterring a Nationalist takeover of Hong Kong in 1945. A fascinating and highly-readable account for anyone with an interest in the history of Hong Kong (and China more broadly).

A political analysis

Caution: the khaki cover and exciting illustration of the jacket of this book may make the prospective reader think it's military history. It's not, instead it is much more in-depth as a political analysis of the way in which the sudden disaster of the fall of Hong Kong irretrievably changed the colony into a more tolerant and far more Chinese place, ready for the 1997 hand-over. The story does need to be written of the last stand of the misnamed Winnipeg Grenadiers, a Canadian unit of the defence who despite the implications of their being "British" grenadiers were completely unprepared for front-line combat. Indeed, a movie-maker like Australia's Peter Weir (Gallipoli) needs to tell the story, which Snow rightfully downplays, of what it is actually like to be seconded to a doomed offense as in Turkey, or an equally doomed defence of Hong Kong, in BOTH CASES to assuage the vanity of a highly overrated Winston Churchill. The story of defeat, occupation, and retaking is a series of gaps in time which as Snow shows mean breakages and breakdowns in daily life, which policy-makers systematically ignore. Americans, for example, fancied no fissure between Saddam Husayn's rule in Iraq and a democratic "handover" to the right sort of chaps, and under their feet opened what opened under the Japanese in 1941, and, to an extent, under the reoccupying British in 1945: the irruption into daily life of the Hobbesian substructure. In Baghdad this was an interesting combination of high-level opportunists and lowlife, and it parallels the story Snow tells of the way in which elements of the Triad gangs entered and left governance depending on the convenience of the Japanese and British. It's in other words and in another register Tommy this and Tommy that and Tommy go away and the use of the underclass in uniform and out to satisfy the vanity of comfortable men. It's also the confusion in the public mind of representation with the things represented. The transition was less from Britannia to Nippon and back again than Britannia to chaos to Nippon and back again, where the chaos, and being bombed and starved by friendly fire (Americans based in the Phillipines both bombed Hong Kong and interdicted rice shipments) is the reality from which most people never recover. The West needs to learn from China about reluctance to use military force. Snow is puzzled by Chou En-Lai's restraint over the issue of Hong Kong because it is the Western statesman who doesn't eat with chopsticks and has had a tendency to bite off more than he can properly digest. In the West, the British showed the most restraint in their long-passed Empire, coupled with a systematic tendency to annoy Asians. This can be exagerrated: until recently, the British were proud of the relative quiet of Basra but this quiet is now known to be illusory. But in contrast to the American and the Spanish empires, the British empire was free of ideological preaching, whether about "democracy and markets"

Lessons beyond the history of the colony

In this well-researched and well-written book, Phillip Snow traces the history of the British Colony of Hong Kong, with the intent to show why Britain ultimately returned the colony to China. His thesis is that the Japanese occupation, a brief period of 3 years 8 months, out of the more than 100 years that the colony was in British hands, was the critical watershed which made British relinquishment inevitable. Britain's prestige and authority were mortally wounded by the loss of Hong Kong and the other colonies in South East Asia to the Japanese. This weakened position set in train a chain of events that ultimately lead to 1997. The story is a fascinating one. Snow also traces the waves of reform and repression that Hong Kong's rulers have pursued over the years. He argues that the periods of liberalism were driven by outside events and calculations, rather than a sincere concern for the welfare Hong Kong's citizens, but gives credit to the efforts and the truly liberal figures in each of the administrations, pre-war British, Japanese, and post-war British. Snow is at some pains to give the benefit of the doubt to each of these regimes, and the work is fair and even-handed. Although the Fall of Hong Kong was clearly written for the British audience struggling to come to terms with the substantial end of their empire, it should be of great value to the Hong Kong Chinese, who are also struggling to understand their history and place in the world. However, it would also be very useful to any students of empire, as phases of liberalism and oppression, enlistment and alienation of the society's elites, by both the Japanese and British, give excellent lessons to anyone contemplating ruling another nation with a different culture. Finally, it is an excellent survey of the 20th Century history of Hong Kong, which will be invaluable to any student of the period. This work and its extensive footnotes should stimulate a mini-boom in research on the period.