Let There Be Light

The remarkable success of twentieth-century Hong Kong was driven by electricity. The British colonys stunning export-driven economic growth, its status as a Cold War capitalist dynamo, its energetic civil society, its alluring urban modernityall of these are stories of electricitys 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 Kongs postwar economic rise and set in motion far-reaching political and social change against the backdrop of Hong Kongs shifting relations with the Peoples Republic of China and the United Kingdom. Clifford examines avowedly laissez-faire Hong Kongs 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 peoples 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.