This article examines colonial statecraft and state-society relations in a pivotal period for Hong Kong. Using historical methods and archival evidence, it overcomes the limitations in existing research, which is often theoretically driven and reliant on published sources. The article reveals that the Hong Kong masses were made structurally invisible by the Movement of Opinion Direction (MOOD), a polling exercise introduced by the reformist colonial state. The public were unaware that their views were disseminated to policymakers and that they affected policy formulation: this was covert colonialism. The article investigates confidential MOOD reports generated by the Home Affairs Department from 1975 to 1980, demonstrating why and how the colonial administration constructed public opinion. By disclosing what these secret files reveal about changing public attitudes towards the colonial government, the United Kingdom and the People's Republic of China (PRC), the article also provides new insights into public receptions of the state's reforms and potential threats to the colonial regime in the 1970s.

This article offers a longer perspective on the origins and effectiveness of reforms of colonial governance in Hong Kong. It shows that the colonial state shifted from increasingly ineffective indirect rule to using a covert bureaucratic opinion poll, Town Talk, to assess public opinion. The article argues that this bureaucratic device increased the organizational capacity of the colonial state and, in so doing, enabled a constructed form of ‘public opinion’ to influence policy formulation in a state-controlled manner without democratization. This mechanism was used as an imperfect substitute for representative democracy. These reforms enhanced a ‘non-political’ sense of citizenship among the Hong Kong Chinese but failed to bridge a communication gap between an unelected government and the people over whom it ruled.

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This article explores an understudied aspect in Asia's Cold War history: how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used Hong Kong as a Cold War pivot to produce and disseminate left-wing literature for overseas Chinese living in Southeast Asia. It argues that the CCP's expanding cultural influence can be attributed to the Party's commercial acumen. Operating within a permissive colonial regulatory regime, the CCP expanded its control of local and regional markets for left-wing printed materials. The content of CCP literature was inevitably propagandistic – that is, shaped by the changing demands of the Chinese government's foreign policy and by a need to attract foreign remittances and accommodate socialist transformation at home. Hong Kong's emergence as a pivot in propaganda wars that were global in scope created tensions between the United States and Britain, and led governments in Southeast Asia to strengthen state controls on imported communist media. As such, this article makes an original contribution to Hong Kong colonial history and deepens our understanding of transnational dynamics within Southeast Asia.

Using declassified colonial and British records in Hong Kong and London, as well as memoirs of former leftists and newspapers, this article explores the strategies the Hong Kong colonial government employed in a propaganda campaign to garner political support of the rural population in the New Territories, a porous land frontier during the Cold War. It also analyses the varying political orientations of migrant farmers, who often had received economic benefits from both the colonial government and the leftist organizations. This article reveals that the colonial government established the Vegetable Marketing Organization (VMO), a state-owned enterprise, to first nationalize the vegetable wholesale market in the immediate post-war period, and subsequently used it to combat increasing political influence and anti-government activities of the communist-controlled Society of Plantations. Despite the improvement of the livelihood of immigrant farmers, the VMO Scheme failed to out-compete the Society economically, which was ultimately eliminated by draconian measures. Through studying the agrarian politics and economic contestations in Hong Kong’s rural area, this article provides a lens on how the Cold War was played out at a village level in East Asia.