Made in Hong Kong : consumer product as industrial heritage : the case of the Red-A product line as Hong Kong’s postwar light-manufacturing industrial heritage

Abstract

As unlikely as it now seems, most Hong Kong citizens worked in factories between the end of WWII in 1945 and the mid-1980s. While almost all the household and consumer goods the citizens use today are imported goods, the prior generations usually used affordable Hong Kong-made goods, like homewares and toys in the last century. The “made in Hong Kong” label was once world-famous and it represented good quality and the city’s reputation. The “made in Hong Kong” industrial products become rare and valuable over time which will become a relic from the city’s manufacturing past. These humble industrial products are also part of cherished childhood or collective memory for many who grew up in Hong Kong. Connection of a place to people could lie in the things that they see and even the tangible objects they have used. Cultural significance is embodied in the place and related objects, in this dissertation, the objects are the made-in-Hong Kong products. Preserving these products helps offer an understanding of the past and the present and which will be of value to future generations of Hong Kong and the world. M+, a new international-scale museum, was planned and built in the 2010s in Hong Kong where it collects a selection of Hong Kong-made products and tries to construct, and revisit the historical and narratives of design, including Hong Kong industrial products. When these iconic industrial products can significantly tell the story and cultural identity of Hong Kong, Antiquities and Monuments Office (AMO) focuses on built heritage, while the Intangible Cultural Heritage Office (ICH Office) pay most attention to non-industrial heritage. The objective of this dissertation is to provide a case that illustrates the tangible moveable elements and intangible aspects of Hong Kong’s industrial heritage which may have contributed to Hong Kong’s industrialization effort and changes of the society. The research is to investigate the history of the Hong Kong-made industrial products as a part of industrial heritage in Hong Kong. In particular, the research focuses on a representative product of Hong Kong’s early light-manufacturing industrialization as the vehicle to examine Hong Kong’s changing social and economic circumstances leading to the emergence of light manufacturing industrialization that began in the 1950s, and in turn, constructing a collective memory and cultural identity of Hong Kong’s industrial heritage. The scope of the research is to document one of the most iconic products of Hong Kong’s early light-manufacturing industrialization in terms of its intangible and tangible aspects. The product chosen is the famous plastic product brand “Red-A,” which has now celebrated 70 years of on-going history.