Ruqian Liu

Order and Disorder: the Governance of the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong during the late 20th Century

Introduction

Order and disorder: the governance of the kowloon walled city in hong kong during the late 20th century. Discover the complex governance of Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City (late 20th century). This paper debunks its "lawless" myth, revealing local self-governance and British HK government interaction.

Abstract

Due to the high crime activity resulting from the historical legal disputes over the sovereignty between China and Britain, the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong was often regarded as a place without law and governance. This paper seeks to discover the nature of the governance mechanism of the Kowloon Walled City while dismantling the above claim. The Kowloon Walled City had the Neighborhood Welfare Association serving as the bridge for communication with the British Hong Kong government, which then also provided basic support and services for sanitation. In addition, many of the past scholarship argued that the Kowloon Walled City as without law and governance, other than the legal dispute, was also due to the intense gangster activities conducted by the triad, mainly the Sun Yee On. However, during the 20th century and before the establishment of the Hong Kong Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), areas under the British Hong Kong government governance were also undergoing the same situation. In this sense, with self-governance from the local Neighborhood Welfare Association, a certain level of intervention from the Hong Kong government, and the fact that gangster activities were a widespread phenomenon, the reality of  Kowloon Walled City was not according to the popular imagination. 

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