Hotel, New Victoria Hotel and the King Edward Hotel. Finance In 1864 the first large scale modern bank Hong Kong Shanghai Bank would be established turning Hong Kong into the focal point of financial affairs in Asia. Its chief manager, Sir Thomas Jackson, has a statue in Statue Square. The bank first leased Wardley House at HKD 500 a month in 1864. After raising a capital of HKD 5 million, the bank opened its door in 1865. The Association of Stockbrokers would also be established in 1891. Resources In December 1890 the Hongkong Electric company went into production with help from Catchick Paul Chater. It was the first step in allowing the transition of gas lamps to light bulbs. Other companies like Jardine Matheson would launch the "Hong Kong Land Investment and Agency company Ltd" accumulating a wealth as large as the entire government's total revenue. (See also China Light and Power.) Politics One observer summed up the decades as "politics, propaganda, panic, rumour, riot, revolution and refugees". The role of Hong Kong as a political safe haven for Chinese political refugees further cemented its status, and few serious attempts to revert its ownership were launched in the early 20th century. Both Chinese Communist and Nationalist agitators found refuge in the territory, when they did not actively participate in the turmoil in China. However, the dockworkers strikes in the 1920s and 1930s were widely attributed to the Communists by the authorities, and caused a backlash against them. A strike in 1920 was ended with a wage increase of HKD 32 cents. Ambrose King, in his controversial 1975 paper Administrative Absorption of Politics in Hong Kong, described the colonial Hong Kong's administration as "elite consensual government". In it, he claimed, any coalition of elites or forces capable of challenging the legitimacy of Hong Kong's administrative structure would be co-opted by the existing apparatus through the appointment of leading political activists, business figures and other elites to oversight committees, by granting them British honours, and by bringing them into elite institutions like Hong Kong's horse racing clubs. He called this "synarchy", an extension of John K. Fairbank's use of the word to describe the mechanisms of government under the late Qing dynasty in China. When modern China began after the fall of the last dynasty, one of the first political statements made in Hong Kong was the immediate change from long queue