The consumption of radio broadcast technologies in Hong Kong, c.1930–1960¹

Abstract

This article uses previously under‐exploited quantitative and qualitative primary sources in Hong Kong, the US, and the UK to chronicle how radio broadcast technologies extended in a Less Developed Country. As incomes were rising and the price of radio receiving sets was falling, demand‐side forces were strong in Hong Kong. Yet, these forces alone cannot explain the pattern of diffusion observed. Innovations accelerated the take‐up of radios. The liberalization and de‐regulation of radio broadcasting provided pre‐requisites for these supply‐side shifts.

Projecting Britishness to Hong Kong: the British Council and Hong Kong House, nineteen-fifties to nineteen-seventies

“…programme entitled ‘Round the British Commonwealth in half an hour’. Another broadcast discussed three ‘British films which will be coming to Hong Kong, I hope, in the not too distant future’. In 1953, the council sponsored a series of four films as a background to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth.…”

Review of periodical literature published in 2004

“…By contrast Higgins’ analysis of the misrepresentation of Australasian meat in Britain in the late nineteenth century suggests that misleading indications of origin appear to have exercised a limited effect in constraining growth because price was always the more important factor influencing consumers’ expenditures. For a very much later period, Clayton argues that the diffusion of information technology in Hong Kong was determined by innovation, in conjunction with prevailing political and social conditions. The concept of identity, normally reserved for consumer products, is extended to cultural pride and urban identity in Stobart’s discussion of the building of Burslem's town hall in 1761, and is developed by Mort and Ogborn, who report on a long‐term project dealing with the transformation of metropolitan London, 1750–1960.…”