In the early days of the trams, people expressed various fears about how popular attitudes might interfere with their smooth operation.  For the most part, these fears came to nothing, but there were a few issues.

On the one hand, there were worries that Europeans would refuse to ride trams together with Chinese, thus forcing the Company to choose between the revenue from first class and third class passengers.  (An intermediate second class was originally planned, but abandoned when people concluded that it did not serve any particular market.)  For the most part, this turned out to be untrue.  The one genuine problem attributable to racial prejudice was that, in the early days, there was no set-up for trams to turn around at the end of the line; the conductor would simply move to the back end of the westbound tram, which would become the front of the eastbound tram.  But this meant that some 3rd class seats going in one direction became 1st class seats in the other; there were Europeans who objected to that, saying that they did not want to sit where supposedly “unhygienic” people had just been sitting.  This problem, and some others, were solved by creating loops for trams to turn around.

A more serious problem was that the gauge of the tram lines happened to be the same as that of many of the carts pulled by men carrying goods through the streets, and going along the rails was easier than going along the pavement (since there was less friction between the wheels and the rails).  This had the potential to interfere with tram traffic, and even when it didn’t it caused extra wear and tear on the track.  A city ordinance issued in 1916, at the Company’s request, not only prohibited driving carts on the tracks, but insisted that all carts built in the future had to have a different gauge than the trams’.

There were a number of accidents caused in early years by passengers getting off the trams abruptly, between stops, and then falling.  English newspapers ridiculed people for this behavior, with some going so far as to say that it showed that many Hong Kongers did not have a sufficiently “modern” mentality to use mechanized public transport.  But in fact, this behavior disappeared quite quickly as word got around of the injuries it could cause.

Finally, some people expressed fear that the city’s ricksha pullers, who already lived very difficult lives, would be further impoverished by the trams, and might resort to violence to block the competition.  But this never happened in Hong Kong – unlike in Beijing, where ricksha pullers did riot against an expansion of the city’s tram system in 1923.  (As it turned out, some rickshas remained in use in both cities for many more years.)

Before the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912, Guangdong province had a mint that was nominally under Beijing's control, but in fact ran more or less autonomously. It minted coins that were supposed to correspond in value to the Mexican silver dollar (which was the global standard for silver coins); so did Hong Kong, and theoretically these coins should have been of equal value. The mainland coins were not legal tender in HK, but lots of shopkeepers and merchants accepted them, anyway -- both for convenience and because the HK mint never produced enough currency for the population's daily needs. The Tramways and the Star Ferry were two of the bigger firms that accepted these coins, collecting thousands every day.

But in fact the Guangdong mint cut corners, so its coins had about 5% less silver in them than HK coins. This meant that it was profitable for people to use Guangdong coins in HK whenever they could get away with it, hoard HK coins, and then take them to Guangdong to be melted down and re-minted into 5% more dollars than they had had before. This had been going on for years.  It created a small loss of earnings for the Tramways and a nuisance for the HK government (because the drain of good coins from HK to Guangdong exacerbated currency shortages). The company had periodically asked the HK government to stop the influx of these coins; the government replied that the coins were already not legal tender, so the company should just not accept them. And so the status quo continued.

In 1912, with the fall of the Qing, the new government in Guangdong became more independent of the central government than before; it continued printing underweight coins, and was also running a considerable fiscal deficit, which it was trying to get HK merchants to finance. The HK government opposed this, and also seemed concerned that the new Guangdong government was too politically and socially radical; in this context, Hong Kong officials became more vocal about encouraging HK merchants to stop accepting mainland coins. (It’s also possible that the new Guangdong government, given its financial problems was underweighting the coins even more than before, but this is not clear.) So on November 18, the Company suddenly instructed all its personnel to stop accepting these coins.

This infuriated many people, especially poor people – many of whom used the trams to commute to work, since it was the cheapest form of transport other than walking. Not only did they lose the chance to pay with underweight coins (which some employers provided for this purpose); because Hong Kong had a perpetual shortage of its own small coins (since the government didn’t mint enough), people who couldn’t use mainland coins often couldn’t find small coins to pay with at all. Moreover, many people felt that the Company’s unwillingness to take mainland coins that they had long accepted was an insult to the new Republican government, and to China in general – in fact, the “insult” issue played a much bigger role in public sloganeering and explanations of people’s anger than whatever economic hardship the rejection of these coins caused.  Calls for a boycott of the trams emerged almost immediately. The company and some workers tried to keep the trams running, but in some cases these trams were surrounded by angry crowds; stones were thrown at passengers, workers, and the trams themselves. (There were over 1,000 people in one such crowd, on November 25).

The Company did not budge, however. It kept the trams running, though during the end of November, December, and early January, they were generally almost empty and required police protection. Meanwhile, the government stepped in by passing a Boycott Ordinance that put tremendous pressure on the protestors, in two ways. First, the Ordinance made it a crime to commit “any act calculated to persuade or induce any persons not to make use of or occupy any moveable property in any lawful manner, or not to work for any persons in a lawful manner”: wording so broad that it not only covered throwing rocks and blocking the tram tracks, but even peaceful speech in favor of the boycott. Second, it empowered the government to declare any area of the city to be a “boycott area,” and place a special tax levy on that area – essentially a collective fine upon the residents of a designated area. (Some of these funds could be used to reimburse any person or entity that had been harmed by the boycott – a measure obviously designed to encourage the Tramway Company, other firms not accepting mainland coins, to not give in to the protests). On January 4, Governor May declared most of the areas along the trams’ routes to be boycott areas, and gave them 12 days to solve the matter before the special levies would begin. Chinese merchants in these areas, who would have paid most of these costs (and many of whom were already being hurt by the boycott) began to press for an end to the boycott, while also persuading the Company to make a largely symbolic concession by selling the merchants slightly discounted tram tickets that they could the use to lure back riders. By the end of January, the boycott had petered out, and in early February, the Boycott Ordinance was suspended.

Originally, the Company was headquartered in London, and many early investors were British, but by 1914, it was re-organized with its Board of Directors meeting in Hong Kong.  Complete lists of shareholders survive for most of the 1920s, by which time the overwhelming majority of shares were held by people based in Hong Kong; about a third of these people were ethnically Chinese, and they owned about 40% of all shares. (Some shares were also owned by institutions, but individuals predominated.)   About 10% of shares in this privately held firm changed hands in a typical year, through a combination of purchases, gifts, and inheritance.

In 1921, for instance, the company’s 280,000 shares were held by 568 individuals and institutions, for an average of roughly 500 shares each.  This represented a substantial amount of wealth; it was equal to about 3 years’ worth of earnings for an unskilled manual worker.  So most  of the owners were wealthy, and the occupations that they listed for themselves were mostly ones like “banker,” “lawyer,” “engineer,” or “merchant.” There were also some retirees and widows, who probably came from similar families.  But there were some small shareholders with 10-50 shares, and these included a few with very different occupations, including “maid servant” “amah,” “blacksmith,” and “stevedore.”

The biggest institutional investors in the company were the French Catholic mission in Hong Kong, the Dominican mission, and the company that ran the Peak Tram. Some of the famous individual investors included:

• Sir Robert Hotung, said to be the richest man in Hong Kong, and a major financial backer of the revolutionary leader (and first president of the Chinese Republic) Sun Yatsen/Sun Zhongshan. Hotung was also a director of Tung Wah Hospital, of Hong Kong Land, and various other charities and businesses.
   
• Joseph Whittlesey Noble became the majority owner of the South China Morning Post in the early 1900s, rescuing the company from bankruptcy and re-orienting it towards Chinese (rather than British Empire) news.  Noble was originally a dentist from the United States; for a brief period he was the dentist to the Qing Imperial family in Beijing, and was richly rewarded.  He then moved to Hong Kong, and though he did open a dental clinic there, he soon shifted his focus to business and investing. In addition to SCMP, he was also a major investor in Dairy Farm, Hong Kong Electric, China Light and Power, and other important Hong Kong firms.  In 1921, he was the biggest individual investor in the Tramways, holding about 5% of the shares.
   
• Sir Paul Chater was an Armenian businessman from Calcutta who came to Hong Kong in 1864 and became one of the city’s leading entrepreneurs.  He was one of the two founders of Dairy Farm and was also a founder of the Hong Kong Electric Company. He played a major role in the Praya Land Reclamation Project, which eventually created about 60 acres of new land along the waterfront in Central. Another of his property ventures was founding the real estate company Kowloon Wharf and Godown, which later became Wharf Holdings, Ltd. Almost 90 years after its founding, Wharf became the owners of Hong Kong Tramways, operating the company for 35 years (1974-2009). Chater also served for 34 years as Chairman of the Board of the Hong Kong Jockey Club.
  
  Thirty-five years after he came to Hong Kong from Calcutta, Chater sponsored five young Armenians who also came from Calcutta to Hong Kong – on the same boat he had travelled on back in 1864. All of them started out as postal inspectors – jobs Chater seems to have arranged for them -- but then left the post office to go into business. At least two of them later became substantial investors in the Hong Kong Tramways themselves: Mackertich Cyril Owen and Tigram Matthews Gregory, who became one of Hong Kong’s biggest diamond merchants.

Other prominent Hong Kong residents who had substantial holdings in the tramways included Chau Siu Ki, Chairman of the Board of the Tung Wah Hospital charities, and Hon Tsz Ng comprador for the National Bank of China, also a board member for Tung Wah Hospital, and a member of LegCo.

The surge in Hong Kong’s population after WWII ended produced a serious shortage of space in schools, and poorer children were the most affected. Many better-off children were in private schools, and also often in less crowded neighborhoods. Union leaders reached out to other influential figures in Hong Kong society for help in establishing schools for workers’ children. Among those who responded positively were Ronald Owen Hall, Sir Chau Tsun-nin, Lo Man-kam, and George She, also known as George Samuel Zimmern.

• Hall was the Anglican Bishop of Hong Kong, and a noted advocate of social reform.  Early in his career, he had met Chinese Christians who were involved in the YMCA social reform movement, and who also believed strongly that Chinese Christian institutions should be run by Chinese and supportive of China’s struggles against imperialism; Hall sympathized with their views, and with the Chinese Revolution in both its Nationalist and Communist phases; he was appointed as bishop of Hong Kong in 1932.  When the Japanese occupied Hong Kong in 1941, Hall was evacuated, and served as bishop of Kunming, in Nationalist-ruled Yunnan province. While there, he dealt with a shortage of qualified clergy by appointing Li Tim-oi to a remote parish: Li thus became the first female ordained Anglican priest anywhere in the world.
   
• Chau Tsun-nin was the son of wealthy Hong Kong merchant, and graduated from Oxford with degrees in both law and literature.  He began work in Hong Kong as an attorney, but soon moved into banking and insurance, and then later into other fields as well, serving as a director of the Hong Kong Telephone Company, Hong Kong Power and Light, a Hong Kong shipyard, a Guangdong bank, a department store and other firms. He was for many years an unofficial member of both the Legislative and Executive Councils, serving longer in that capacity than anyone else, and also took on major administrative roles in the post-war government. He was also associated with a number of Hong Kong hospitals and other charitable organizations, and was honored as a Commander of the British Empire.
   
• Lo Man-kam was the son of a comprador for Jardine, Matheson, and studied law in London before returning to Hong Kong.  In 1920, during a wave of strikes in Hong Kong, he served as legal advisor to the Chinese Mechanics Institute, which had helped to organize the strikes, and was involved in negotiating a settlement with employers.  However, during the Hong Kong strikes that grew out of the May 30 Movement in 1925, which took an explicitly anti-colonial stand, Lo joined the Hong Kong Volunteer Defense Corps, which helped the British keep order.  Lo later served on both the Legislative and Executive Councils, and was involved in efforts to end racial segregation in Hong Kong and to expand social services. He took a more ambivalent position on efforts in the late 1940s to expand self-government: efforts which were colored by both the world-wide movement towards self-government in the aftermath of World War II and by fear of the advance of the CCP on the mainland. (The specific proposals that emerged from those efforts were ultimately shelved by the British cabinet in London.) In addition to his involvement in educational reform, he was chairman of the board of Tung Wah Hospital, and of the Hong Kong Society for the Protection of Children, and a member of the University Council at HKU, among other roles, and was honored as a Commander of the British Empire.  His brother, Lo Man-wai, was a director of Hong Kong Tramways; the two brothers had been law partners when they first returned to Hong Kong in 1916.
   
• George She studied law at Oxford and worked as a barrister, school headmaster, Anglican priest (later in life), and social activist; he was a canon of the Anglican church and a close ally and friend of Ronald Hall.  He was heavily involved in trying to provide housing and education for the poor, helping to found both the Hong Kong Housing Society and the Street Sleepers Shelter Society, as well as a number of the schools for workers’ children.
   
• Li Xiaxiang, who was head of the school for tramway workers’ children, had a dramatically different kind of life story. She was born in 1920 to a large, poor family in Hong Kong; her father soon went to seek work in Southeast Asia, and was never heard from again. When she was about 4 years old, her desperate mother sold her as a bondservant to a wealthy merchant. She ran away at age 9 and began working in a factory; determined to get an education, she switched to working as a seamstress at night while attending school during the day. In 1937, when she was in middle school (and at the top of her class), she joined a student society dedicated to providing relief for victims of Japanese aggression on the mainland; through that work, she encountered CCP activists, and joined the Party in 1938. Soon thereafter she was sent to do underground work on the mainland; there she met and married the CCP military leader Huang Jingwen, who commanded troops in both Vietnam and southwestern China during the war. After the Japanese surrender, the Party sent Li (and her daughter, born in 1943) back to Hong Kong, where she soon became director of the school for tramway workers’ children, while carrying on other work for the CCP at night.  She was evacuated back to the mainland in 1952  and was reunited with her husband in Harbin, after he returned from fighting in the Korean War.  She later became head of a school for the children of soldiers in Heilongjiang, and eventually served on the provincial Party committee, as well as in various other party roles.  She died in 2012.
   

The reasons for the strike were intensely debated, both publicly and privately. Most people in Hong Kong seem to have believed that the strike was originally a pretty straightforward wage dispute — wages were already quite low in 1945, thanks to the disruption of wartime and occupation, and then fell much further behind when prices soared in the late 1940s.  Most people sympathetic to the  workers stressed these relatively apolitical issues.

People on the other side stressed the role of the Communist Party in encouraging the strike – especially the role of communist activists who had been sent from the mainland to work in Hong Kong.  Communists were heavily involved in the Hong Kong Teachers’ Welfare Association – a union organization based in the New Territories – and in the Education Advancement Society: a movement to establish new schools for workers’ children (including one for the children of tramway workers) which was a collaboration of unions and other social activists (including the Anglican archbishop). The Society worked cooperatively with the government from its founding in 1946 through about the middle of 1948.But with the increased success of CCP forces on the mainland in their civil war with the Nationalists (1946-49) and the general intensification of Cold War tensions, suspicions that the CCP was also trying to subvert the government in Hong Kong grew.  The arrival of Alexander Grantham, a staunch anti-communist, as the new governor of Hong Kong in 1948 coincided with a crackdown on pro-communist schools, curricula, and teachers: Grantham urged that even singing and drama clubs which performed pro-communist material should be shut down. London hesitated to give Grantham’s government all the expanded powers that he asked for, but eventually did, and a number of schools were closed by the government for political reasons over the next few years. However, Grantham’s moves to close the schools for workers’ children in particular sparked a counter-movement to protect these schools, with considerable elite as well as labor support, and some of them survived.

Grantham was equally insistent that the labor movement was full of CCP influence that should be firmly resisted. When the tramway lockout and strike began in December, 1949, he insisted that the wage dispute was a mere pretext, and that the real purpose of this action was to disrupt essential public services, making Hong Kong vulnerable to a take-over from the mainland; he stuck to this point of view years later, when he published his memoirs.  But British officials more generally were divided, with debate over the true nature of the strike reaching all the way up to the Cabinet in London, and also playing out daily in the Hong Kong press.

In retrospect, it is hard to doubt that the core of the dispute was the wage issue, rather than any political cause. But there were many CCP sympathizers in the labor movement, and they became increasingly important as the strike went on.  Most workers were not being paid during the strike/lockout. Some also lost their eligibility for the subsidized rice rations that the government was providing to workers in key industries during this highly inflationary period – because, as the government’s Commissioner of Labour explained, they were not working. With many workers thus desperate for help with daily expenses, assistance from others became increasingly important (though the company did supply some rice to locked-out workers). Some help came from left-leaning groups within Hong Kong—both workers in other unions and better-off “progressives,” including many independent professionals. But there were also support campaigns organized in Guangdong that delivered food and other supplies to the Hong Kong strikers, and activists who came to assist their picketing and other activities. This, of course, further entrenched the belief among groups hostile to the strikers that they were – willingly or not – being used by the CCP for its political project.

In the last phase of the strike, the alignment of at least some of the workers with the CCP became more overt. Beijing made its first official public statement in support of the strikers on January 25 (roughly one month into the work stoppage). The next day, a South China Morning Post reporter announced that a large pro-union crowd (which he estimated at over 5,000), after successfully extracting a promise from the company that they would not hire a non-union job-seeker who had just left company headquarters, had celebrated by dancing the yangke, a North Chinese peasant song and dance that had been adapted by CCP propaganda troupes as a form of victory celebration.  (Because this was not a dance form common in South China or Hong Kong, people who knew how to do it were presumed to have learned it from CCP-sponsored events.)  The same reporter was then taken to visit the Tramway Workers’ Union headquarters, where he said he saw a large portrait of Mao Zedong on the wall and various other signs of pro-CCP sentiment.  A few days later, after the January 30 clash between union supporters and police, a meeting of about 1,200 representatives of various Hong Kong unions decided not to call for a general strike, as some people had feared it would. But the meeting did ask the Federation of Trade Unions to formally request that Mao Zedong take (unspecified) action against the Hong Kong authorities and their “fascist” police tactics.

No action followed, and the strike ended on February 9-10. The increasingly radical tone of its last two weeks did, however, make it easier for the government to justify deporting 38 pro-union activists to the mainland, while the CCP quietly repatriated a number of its underground members from Hong Kong to the mainland. One of those repatriated was Li Xiaxiang, who had been head of the school for tramway workers’ children, and was married to a general in the Communist armed forces; she later headed various schools affiliated with the army in Heilongjiang.