Let There Be Light

How Electricity Made Modern Hong Kong
Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-0-231-20169-8
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 312 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 151 mm x 228 mm, Gewicht: 468 g

Reihe: Center on Global Energy Policy Series

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Clifford, Mark

Fachgebiete

• Technische Wissenschaften Energietechnik | Elektrotechnik Energieverteilung, Stromnetze
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte
• Technische Wissenschaften Energietechnik | Elektrotechnik Elektrotechnik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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
Photographs follow chapter 4

Über Autor(innen)

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 two English-language papers in Hong Kong, 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.