This book is a study of urban community and social unrest in the British colony of Hong Kong from 1842 to 1913. It explores the evolution of a Chinese community under the leadership of a commercial elite and the changing social structure and relations between elite and populace in a society under alien rule. It investigates the relationships between the Chinese community, colonial authorities, and Chinese officials in Canton. Such relationships were often characterized by both harmony and conflict, cooperation and antagonism. This study particularly aims to examine the nature and patterns of social unrest in the colony from its earliest years to the time of the Chinese republican revolution. During this period social unrest took various forms-labor strikes, street riots, boycott movements, rowdyism, and other acts of civil disobedience. Often imbued with anti-foreignism, popular unrest gradually acquired a nationalistic overtone in the late nineteenth century. Chinese antiforeignism in Hong Kong was finally transformed into popular nationalism, which found full expression during the republican revolution of 1911.

This book will shed some light on the complexities and Janus-faced nature of nationalism in China in modem times.