The story of Hong Kong, one of the most densely populated places on Earth, can’t be separated from its international situation.
By Matthew Wills
Hong Kong, with its 7.5 million people spread out across 400 square miles, is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. In 1945, after four years of Japanese occupation, there were only 600,000 people living there. What happened?
The short answer is that World War II depopulated Hong Kong. A British crown colony, Hong Kong was invaded on December 8, 1941. This was the same day as Pearl Harbor attack, only across the dateline. “As a result of either voluntary escape or forced expulsion by the Japanese occupiers, as many as one million Chinese left for the mainland,” writes the historian Chi-Kwan Mark about this period. (“Hong Kong” is both the name of an island and the whole administrative area of Hong Kong, part of which is on the mainland of China, so it’s conventional to refer to the rest of China as the “mainland.”)