Hong Kong Scouts in World War Two, 1930-1945: Dual Loyalty and Common Enemy

This study reviews the development of Hong Kong Scout Movement in the later interwar years and the period of Japanese occupation, when Scouting grew strongly and became indigenized just before the war and then was prohibited during Japanese occupation. In these years, nationalism from nearby Republic of China mattered greatly, first to be avoided as "politics" and then, as Japan became common enemy of Britain and China, to be embraced as "patriotism" and appropriate dual loyalty. While "to convert", "to educate", and "to rule" were important motives for various interest groups in supporting the youth movement in other years, Scouting's citizenship training in this turbulent era increasingly meant preparing native Chinese boys "to fight" and to defend the threatened colony. Though the Battle for Hong Kong was brief in the face of numerically overwhelming enemy forces, many older Scouts fought valiantly as volunteer soldiers and over one thousand younger ones served courageously in the Despatch Corps, living up to high expectations of the authorities and the community. Scouting was outlawed in occupied Hong Kong, but had continued clandestinely inside the internment camps. More importantly, former Scouts, interned or outside, acquitted themselves well in occupation, some with supreme sacrifices worthy of the ideals of the movement, re-affirming the value of this type of citizenship training.