The ‘mayor of Hong Kong’ whose fight for child education forever changed the way the city’s young learn
- Today we continue our series on veteran Hongkongers whose personal history has been interwoven with that of the city since the second world war. In this Lessons from the Past report, Gary Cheung features former chairman of the defunct Urban Council, Hilton Cheong-Leen, who fought for compulsory education and constitutional reform in the 1960s and 1970s
More than 60 years later, Hilton Cheong-Leen still vividly remembers the poor condition of schools on the rooftops of resettlement estate buildings in Shek Kip Mei in Kowloon.
“The sheds was made of metal,” he said. “In the summer, when you walked up, you could feel the heat coming through, and that was the main impression which led me to feel we all must join together to get as many as possible of our young schoolchildren into schools.”
From that moment on education became a top priority for Cheong-Leen, who was elected as a member of the Urban Council – the partially elected municipal council in Hong Kong – in 1957. At the time, urban councillors were the only elected representatives in the colony, while all members of the Legislative Council were appointed.
“Young people should be given an option to move up in life, but they need to have knowledge, and the only way to get knowledge is to be given the opportunity to have a good education, not only at primary level but even beyond that,” Cheong-Leen said.
Shortly after he was appointed to the Legislative Council in 1973, he made a speech advocating nine years of free and compulsory education, something which is taken for granted today. It did have an impact, because it was followed up all the way to Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In 1978, the Hong Kong government introduced compulsory education for the first time.
He also called for banning child labour in factories and restaurants in Hong Kong. In a speech delivered at an Urban Council meeting in January 1966, he said: “We are concerned that restaurants are permitted by government to employ young children to work from 6pm to 2.30am as toilet attendants seven days a week, simply because these children can be paid only half what an adult has to be paid.”