John Cowperthwaite's experiment
The 1950s kicked off a half century of tremendous economic growth in Hong Kong, thanks in large part to those refugees from mainland China. Most arrived with nothing and needed jobs. Many turned out to be entrepreneurs, and the colonial government wanted to help them set up shop, according to Steve Tsang, the director of SOAS University of London's China Institute.
"So they basically introduced the most user-friendly system in the world for companies to [get] registered and just get on with business," he said. That meant getting rid of red tape so people could easily start their own companies.
This "user-friendly" system was just one cog in the colonial government's unabashedly non-interventionist economic plan. British officials pursued a host of laissez-faire policies and let exchange rates be determined by market forces, at a time when much of the world was tying rates to the US dollar and gold.
All that made Hong Kong something of an outlier globally and laid the foundation for the city's "free market, wheeler-dealer kind of reputation," said Catherine Schenk, a professor of economics and history at Oxford University.
No one embodied this reputation more than John Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong's Financial Secretary from 1961 to 1971. Cowperthwaite was so opposed to government involvement in the economy that he often refused to collect simple economic statistics, arguing that any data would end up being used as an excuse to intervene.
