工業化：由轉口港到世界工廠，再到服務業城市

1. Industry inside an entrepôt: starting from five workers

Hong Kong’s early economy was driven by entrepôt trade, but manufacturing was never entirely absent. In 1850 Hong Kong Island recorded only 5 manufacturing workers; by 1855 the figure had reached 3,491, or 20.0% of the employed population. The jump is a reminder that early “industry” was mostly port-related support work — shipbuilding and repair, rope-making, ginger and food processing — rather than large factories.

In 1898 Jardine Matheson founded the Hong Kong Cotton Spinning, Weaving and Dyeing Company in Causeway Bay with 50,000 spindles. The investment showed that capital, port access and technical conditions for a modern textile mill already existed. What made industry a mass employer was the post-war combination of population, capital and export markets. The shift from entrepôt to manufacturing was layered, not a single replacement.

2. Post-war take-off: textiles, plastics, electronics

On 7 November 1946 Dah Nam Textile Limited was registered, the first spinning mill established after the Second World War. In 1947 transport equipment, textiles and metal products accounted for 30.7%, 19.7% and 11.5% of manufacturing employment respectively — transport equipment still led, reflecting the weight of shipbuilding, repair and the port economy. By 1953 textiles had reached 33.7% and metal products 16.8%, a clear turn towards light industry.

In the 1960s the economy took off: traditional textiles, garment-making and plastics grew alongside newer electronics, watches and toys. The mix was shaped by export markets, quota rules and a large low-cost workforce. By 1971 manufacturing accounted for 47.0% of employment — nearly one in two workers — a share hard to imagine today.

3. Quotas: how export limits shaped industry

In December 1958 the Hong Kong Government signed the Lancashire Agreement with the United Kingdom Board of Trade. Effective 1 February 1959, it required Hong Kong to limit cotton textile exports to Britain to no more than 164 million square yards a year for three years — the first such agreement after Western countries imposed quotas on Hong Kong textiles. A quota looks like a restriction, but it also brought Hong Kong into a predictable trade regime: with quota came export rights, and a market for allocating and transferring them.

From 1974 the Multi-Fibre Arrangement imposed strict textile quotas; at the end of 1983 the United States imposed tighter controls on Hong Kong textiles and clothing, with a mechanism that could be suspended at any time. These external shocks pushed manufacturers to upgrade products, open new markets and move some processes offshore. Quotas did not simply “block exports”; they reshaped factory scale, product mix and regional division of labour.

4. The factory city: Kwun Tong, labour and gender

Industry was also space. In the 1970s about 2,700 factories clustered in Kwun Tong, employing 116,000 workers, mainly in electronics, plastics and garments. The combination of industrial estate, resettlement housing and new town let workers live near factories, while putting pressure on air, transport and community facilities. Hong Kong industrialised through a very dense urban form.

Manufacturing also changed women’s employment. In 1961, 46.1% of employed women worked in manufacturing; the share rose to 58.2% in 1971 and fell to 31.2% by 1991. The curve shows that women entered factories en masse during industrial expansion, but had to shift again as processes moved offshore and services grew. A factory closure was not only an owner’s loss; it rearranged the skills and livelihoods of a workforce.

Dense factories also brought safety, ventilation and sanitation problems. Hong Kong’s factory legislation began with child labour and gradually extended to general factory safety and workers’ health; but how much the law says is one thing, and how often inspectors visit and how heavy the penalties are is another. That gap means the story of industrial take-off cannot be only about output; it must also describe the conditions under which people produced.

5. Relocation and services: the end of the industrial city?

From the 1980s to the 1990s manufacturing gradually moved to the mainland while high-end services such as finance grew quickly. Services reached 84% of GDP in 1996; between 1984 and 1996 their output grew at an average annual rate of 16% at market value. The shift made Hong Kong a service-led city, but it also removed many blue-collar jobs, moving work from production to logistics, retail, finance and professional services.

“Servitisation” did not upgrade every worker. Some moved into better-paid professional roles; others moved into lower-paid, less secure service jobs. Industrial districts also faced vacant factories, rezoning and ageing communities. Those distributional outcomes need district and sector data; this dossier will not cover them with a slogan about “successful economic restructuring”.