Zoning Fairyland: childhood, race and the contest over planning in Hong Kong, 1870-1940

Abstract

This paper examines the role of children, the family and ideals of white conjugality in the struggle between public and private interests for the right to plan the colonial city. Focusing upon Hong Kong, a British Crown Colony from 1843 and a free port, this paper challenges the notion prevalent in historical literature that ‘Victoria’ (the port city around which this colony developed) was the product of a laissez-faire approach to planning before 1940. Rather, it shows that from the 1870s as Victoria grew rapidly and the economic power of the rising Chinese business elite outstripped that of their white equivalent, the European community-in-exile repeatedly petitioned the colonial government to introduce urban planning with a view to shoring up white racial authority. Greater wealth allowed Chinese elites to acquire residences in formerly ‘European’ areas of central Victoria, a move which expatriates found inimical to white prestige. As this contest intensified into the twentieth century, the European merchant elite struggled to find grounds upon which arguments that the use of public powers to implement racial residential zoning could be justified. These arguments ran counter to both views then prevailing of a more ‘morally-informed’ imperialism and the explicit disavowal in Hong Kong of distinctions of race or creed in the use of public resources, given that the majority of ratepayers were by the late nineteenth century Chinese. Since Hong Kong was a Crown Colony, lacking its own municipal authority, the success or failure of the European lobbyists rested on their ability and that of their allies within the colonial government to convince the London government of the validity of their claims. To the eventual success of the campaigners, the issue of protecting white children against the tropical environment was crucial. Powerful, sentimental portrayals of white children as degenerated by this milieu emerged at the forefront of demands to utilise public planning to secure racially segregated spaces in Hong Kong. Sections of the business and administrative elite bound visions of vulnerable white childhood into petitions for the introduction of exclusive, racially-segregated residential zones. It was on this basis that approval for the introduction of modern planning techniques, zoning the colonial city in the service of ideas of racial difference, was secured from the home government. This paper examines the difference that issues of race and age made to the contest between public and private interests over planning in Hong Kong from the 1870s into the interwar period, highlighting the cultural significance of childhood.