Hong Kong pivot

Commodity trade

By the 1860s, visitors to Hong Kong knew they had arrived at a Chinese city, and that character continued as the Chinese proportion of the population stayed around 95 percent through the 1920s; their in-migration and natural increase powered its population growth (fig. 6.1). Because Hong Kong operated as a trade and financial center, businesses in those sectors signified its status as a metropolis. The number of non-Chinese provide a crude indicator of those workers for the foreign group. Between 1861 and 1901, that number rose almost sevenfold from about 3,000 to 20,000, and then stayed at that level until 1931 (fig. 6.1). These counts, however, overstate the actual number affiliated with trade and finance because they include dependants, government officials, and military personnel. Fewer than a third of the non-Chinese worked in foreign firms, implying that about 6,000 were employed in trade and finance by the start of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, this group mostly comprised upper-level managers and office workers because the Chinese supplied the laborers. The number of Chinese traders and financiers ranged from about 500 to 1,000 in 1871 to over 3,000 by 1881 and 1891.