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The Fall of Hong Kong: Britain, China, and the Japanese Occupation | 
 enlarge | Author: Philip Snow
Publisher: Yale University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 952228
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 524
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.1 x 1.4
ISBN: 0300103735
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5425
EAN: 9780300103731
ASIN: 0300103735
Publication Date: July 11, 2004
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Product Description
On Christmas Day 1941 the Japanese captured Hong Kong, and Britain lost control of its Chinese colony for almost four years, a turning point in the process by which the British were to be expelled from the colony and from East Asia. This book unravels for the first time the dramatic story of the Japanese occupation and reinterprets the subsequent evolution of Hong Kong.
“Magnificent. . . . The clarity of mind Snow brings to his labor of storytelling and contextualizing [is] amazing.”—John Lanchester, Daily Telegraph
“Beautifully written, with many telling anecdotes.”—Lawrence D. Freedman, Foreign Affairs
“Very good. . . . [Provides] a much more nuanced picture than has appeared before in English of life among Hong Kong’s different communities before and during the Japanese occupation.”—Economist
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Great history of Hong Kong during the Second World War November 27, 2006
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 October 4, 2005
0 out of 9 found this review helpful
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" or the need for Inquisitions and autos, da fe.
We need to encourage the Chinese in their wise and rather unmilitary foreign policies, where the juncture between British and Chinese domination was in 1997 a party in Victoria Park and not a bloody mess. We need also not to be smug about the return of barbarism as perhaps Hong Kongers were in the 1930s, for Iraq shows us it's always on the menu.
America's Henry Kissinger has recently stated it quite brutally. In addition to accepting without thinking Clausewitz' dictum (war is a continuation of policy by other means because unlike the actual Clausewitz, the statesman doesn't have to endure the physical rigors of the field anymore), policy under globalization has come to mean for each country the lessening of respect for sovereignity of other nations, which just happens to undergird international law, in the name of the more powerful country's "vision", a polite label for greed and fear.
In this context, both military history and Snow's political history usefully remind us of how this makes places like Hong Kong a bloody mess overnight, in a way that Americans see only on TeeVee.
Lessons beyond the history of the colony October 8, 2003
19 out of 19 found this review helpful
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.
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