In enforcing the Comprehensive Certificate of Origin regulations, the
Commerce and Industry Department directly supervises the raw material
supply and the finished products of the factories; in some cases, it
seals the goods after examination and keeps them under surveillance until
they are exported. Severe legal and administrative penalties are slapped
on manufacturers or dealers who are caught falsifying a Comprehensive
Certificate of Origin. The colony government protects the validity of
the certificates to insure trade relations with its biggest customer,
and because it gives the colony a monopoly on certain goods for which
Red China would otherwise have the market sewed up. The most vociferous
critics of the Comprehensive Certificate of Origin are American tourists
who recoil from it as if they had been handed two sets of income-tax
demands for the same year.
With the road clear for industrial expansion, the response was
overwhelming, and more than half the growth came in six light industries.
Between 1948 and 1958, the six light-industry groups showed these
increases in employment: garment-making, 20,000; metal products, 13,000;
cotton spinning, 11,000; cotton weaving, 9,000; plastic wares, 8,000; and
rubber footwear, 3,000.
At the end of 1961, registered and recorded industries employed a round
total of 272,000 persons, with 42 percent of these workers concentrated
in two categories; textile-making with 69,000, and garment-making with
45,000. Metal products were third in line with 28,000. Shipbuilding and
ship-breaking employed 13,000. Plastics, non-existent until 1947, had
separated into two major industries, plastic wares and plastic flowers,
with each employing around 13,000 workers. Food manufacturing, printing
and publishing, rubber products, machinery, electrical apparatus and
chemicals were the other leaders. In the metal-products line, just one
of its many specialized products, the manufacture of flashlight cases,
employed more than 6,000 persons.
The success of Hong Kong’s light industries is typified by three of its
leaders in plastics, textiles and metal wares. The Three Ts—H.C. Ting, P.
Y. Tang and John Tung—were prosperous Shanghai industrialists when the
Chinese Communists closed in on them. Each one managed to reestablish
himself in Hong Kong as the head of a major industry. Together, they
represent one of Red China’s unintentionally generous gifts to the
colony—the exodus of capital and management skill. A whole new complex
of tall, modern buildings in the North Point section of Hong Kong Island
called Little Shanghai is a monument to this newly arrived capital.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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