The Law, The Plague and Colonial Hong Kong: The Development of Political Identity in Present Day Hong Kong

Abstract

<p>Human history would be significantly different without contagious disease and epidemics. These unpredictable events have weakened empires, reversed the fortunes of war, facilitated colonial expansion, impacted the development of technology and changed cultural practices. The people who lived during these pestilences, which often struck without notice or reason, availed themselves to any number of hygienic, medicinal and/or spiritual actions to ward away infection, attribute causes and provide meaning for the disease and death that surrounded them. Yet prior to arrival of germ theory, the link between life, death and disease remained subject to fate and a thin thread of contingency.<br/><br/>This article analyses the evolution of colonial state power through an investigation into the Hong Kong colonial government's response to the 1894 Plague and its subsequent reoccurrence in the following decades. The most virulent period of this epidemic was from early May to late July 1894 when plague disease infected 2,679 people, killing 2,485, with a mortality rate of 93.4%.¹ This lethal illness disproportionally afflicted the local Chinese population and led to extensive intervention by the colonial administration into Chinese communities. Prior to the plague, two communities had little contact with each other and lived their lives in accordance with their own mores. This relative insularity was changed as the colonial government used highly intrusive house-to-house disinfecting programs and invested in extensive sanitation, public health, zoning and building regulations to combat the disease. The paper argues that the changes made in colonial state-local Chinese community relationship and the extension of colonial jurisdiction initiated the initial development of a separate Hong Kong identity for the Chinese community and a new form of colonial state in Hong Kong. This new Hong Kong identity and this new colonial state was the progeniture of the post-British Hong Kong state that has been the object of so much political, cultural and ideological contestation today.</p>