Social control and political order: Decolonisation and the use of emergency regulations in Hong Kong

Abstract

The prime concern of the HK government after the Second World War was to re-establish and consolidate colonial law and order in the face of the Communist threat. Emergency power became an important tool of the government, and was used to exert political order, and also to regulate economic and social activities in the 1950s, through to the 1970s. Despite repeated pressure from the UK government to incorporate the emergency power into local laws, the draconian emergency laws were only finally amended in 1995, in order to ensure its consistency with the Hong Kong Bill of Rights Ordinance, in the last phase of decolonisation in Hong Kong.