Let There Be Light: How Electricity Made Modern Hong Kong

by Mark Clifford

Overview

The remarkable success of twentieth-century Hong Kong was driven by electricity. The British colony’s stunning export-driven economic growth, its status as a Cold War capitalist dynamo, its energetic civil society, its alluring urban modernity—all of these are stories of electricity’s transformative power.

Let There Be Light is a groundbreaking history of electrification in Hong Kong. Mark L. Clifford traces how a power company and its visionary founder jumpstarted Hong Kong’s postwar economic rise and set in motion far-reaching political and social change against the backdrop of Hong Kong’s shifting relations with the People’s Republic of China and the United Kingdom. Clifford examines avowedly laissez-faire Hong Kong’s attempt to nationalize electricity companies and the longer-term implications of debates over the power supply for citizen activism and the development of civil society, government involvement in tackling housing and other social issues, and state controls on private businesses.

Clifford explores the effects of electrification on both grand politics and daily life. In the geopolitical struggle of the Cold War, Hong Kong became an explicitly anti-Communist showcase of production and consumption. Its bright lights and neon signs stood in contrast to the darkness and drabness of neighboring China. Electricity transformed people’s everyday lives, allowing children to study at night, streets to be lit, and shops in a self-consciously commercial mecca to stay open late.

Offering new perspectives on twentieth-century Hong Kong, Let There Be Light reveals electricity as a catalyst of modernization.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231554213
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	07/18/2023
Series:	Center on Global Energy Policy Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	36 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Mark L. Clifford is president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation and the former executive director of the Asia Business Council. He was a director of Next Digital, publisher of the prodemocracy Apple Daily newspaper, and editor in chief of Hong Kong’s two English-language newspapers, the South China Morning Post and The Standard. His books include The Greening of Asia: The Business Case for Solving Asia’s Environmental Emergency (Columbia, 2015). Clifford lived in Hong Kong from 1992 to 2020.

Table of Contents

1. Private Light and Colonial Power
2. In the Beginning: China Light & Power, 1900–1940
3. War, Occupation, and New Possibilities, 1941–1946
4. “The Problem of People,” 1947–1958
5. Electricity as a Political Project, 1959–1964
6. “Die-Hard Reactionary” in the Expanding Colonial State, 1964–1973
7. “Intelligent Anticipation” for “1997 and All That,” 1974–1982
8. Sing the City Electric
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Beautifully written and rich in fascinating detail, Let There Be Light tells the history of China Light & Power—a company that shaped modern Hong Kong. With scholarly rigor and a journalist’s flair for storytelling, Clifford chronicles the central role a company and its people played in building one of the world’s great cities. An impressive achievement and essential reading for anyone interested in electricity markets, Hong Kong history, or the relationship between businesses and governments more broadly.

David Sandalow

An insightful and vivid history. Mark Clifford challenges the conventional view of Hong Kong as a laissez-faire state. He shows instead the complex and successful collaboration between its government and its most important industry—electricity. At the center stands Lawrence Kadoorie—a colonial British capitalist at the door of communist China, a Jewish entrepreneur in a city riven with antisemitism. This is a valuable history of business and of technology—and of Hong Kong’s and China’s rise.

Jonathan Kaufman

Let There Be Light is a cultural, business, and political history of the world’s single most indispensable technology—electricity generation—in a great city that it helped create. This elegantly written, deeply researched, and thoughtful book offers, in microcosm, a global vision of development, finance, and state engagement with the economy.

Thomas W. Laqueur