Let There Be Light: How Electricity Made Modern Hong Kong (Center on Global Energy Policy Series)

__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 the British colony’s postwar economic rise and set in motion far-reaching political and social change. 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. "Electricity was key to Hong Kong's success. Hong Kong had one of the world's highest economic growth rates from the 1940s through the 1980s, due in large part to an ample supply of electricity at a time when most of Asia struggled to power factories, let alone light homes, giving it a ten-year head start on its East Asian rivals. This macro-invention made possible Hong Kong's development from a colonial port of middling importance to one of the world's most important exporters; it played a role in the handover of Hong Kong by Britain to China; and it was central to Hong Kong's emergence as an explicitly anti-Communist Cold War capitalist powerhouse. Let There Be Light is the first history of electrification in Hong Kong and one of the first in East or Southeast Asia. Focusing on China Light & Power (CLP) and its longtime chairman Lawrence Kadoorie, the project follows the company's evolution against the backdrop of Hong Kong's shifting relations with China and Britain through the twentieth century. Mark L. Clifford explores the avowedly laissez-faire Hong Kong's attempt to nationalize electricity companies, as well as the development of civil society in Hong Kong-which took place as the colony struggled to absorb refugees from China's 1949 revolution. Tracing the history of electricity in Hong Kong across tens of thousands of pages of newly available archives, Let There Be Light looks at how electricity shaped various postwar developments in Hong Kong in business, in society, and in politics"-- Provided by publisher