1950s in Hong Kong

Unrest in China also prompted businesses to relocate their assets and capital from Shanghai to Hong Kong.

Together with the cheap labour of the immigrants, the seeds of Hong Kong's economic miracle in the second half of the 20th century were sown.

However, the People's Liberation Army were ordered to stop advancing at the border and Hong Kong remained a British colony.

Hong Kong was a valuable trade centre at the mouth of China and hoped that by retaining this connection doing business with the new government in Peking would be easier.

Debates did take place during the 1950s at the British Parliament in Westminster in which it was discussed that Hong Kong would have to be handed back to China if the colony's entrepôt trade could not be maintained.

The problem was further compounded with a flood of refugees from mainland China[2] who were able to cross due to the lack of border controls until June 1951.

At the end of the Japanese occupation, the Government of Hong Kong held a monopoly on the purchase and distribution of food and raw materials including rice and cotton yarn.

Many mainlanders would cross the border to Hong Kong and establish illegal huts on rooftops and the edges of mountains.

[5] The integration of different groups from China and original tenants of Hong Kong would also create a society in which everyone had to wrestle with the overwhelming number of language dialects.

[6] The curriculum made it crucial that students did not feel associated with Hong Kong or China in any national sense.

[5] An internal government paper in the period indicated about 34 schools in the urban area were actually classified as controlled by the Communists, including 24 in the New Territories.

[6] The early industrial centres produced materials such as buttons, artificial flowers, umbrellas, textiles, enamelware, footwear and plastics.

The Governor did not want to regulate the Hong Kong Stock Exchange even though it had become a serious problem in financing the fast-growing economy at the time.