When 19-year-old Kwong Ming was caught in Queen's Road Central with a neon sign in his possession, he admitted lifting it from a shop entrance. With no inquiry into motive, English-language reports on this 1947 larceny case repeated the magistrate's ruling: Kwong was expelled from Hong Kong because 'shopkeepers must be protected from such thieves'. Postwar Hong Kong was still recovering from the Japanese Occupation, which left the British colony's electricity system impaired, and suspended the use of neon just 15 years after its first neon factory opened. Commercially valued and symbolically charged, neon roused passions, perils and desires. Damage, either infrastructural or to a single sign, could have led to the theft, but fear over the Communist challenge to mainland Nationalist rule transcended compassion.
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