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no passport and little money
Travel documents were not legally required for entering Hong Kong until 1923, and the requirement that was imposed in that year did not apply to “persons of the Chinese race.” A law allowing for Chinese people to be excluded if they lacked required documents was first passed in 1940, as the Japanese invasion of the mainland caused an enormous number of people to flee to Hong Kong; however, that law was not tightly enforced. (The influx of people was, however, ended by the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong in December, 1941; in fact it was reversed as huge numbers of people fled the city.) During the Chinese Civil War, refugees again arrived in huge numbers, with and without papers. After 1949, the British government tightened its enforcement of immigration rules considerably -- though at first there was an exception for people from Guangdong – and for the first time imposed universal registration requirements to stay in the city; Chinese control of exit also became much stricter, though it lapsed during certain moments of crisis, allowing for large scale immigration to Hong Kong in those years. Officially, Britain claimed the right to deport people who entered the city without proper documents (which for some categories of people included visas), but its willingness and ability to do so fluctuated over time, especially since the P.R.C. was not always willing to receive mainland citizens whom the British wished to deport. A 1971 reform strengthened the rights of those who had been in HK for at least 7 years (no matter how they had originally entered), while tightening enforcement against some other groups.
