Pretty straightforward challenge - Have Hong Kong hold out with help from any possible quarter.
It was already game over by 1938, with the fall of Guangdong to the Japanese.
If the Chinese could still hold out Guangzhou with Allied help and supplies, Hong Kong might still have a chance,
but by 1941, it was a lonely, isolated port surrounded by Japanese forces just waiting to move in.
To try to save Hong Kong would be to devote disproportionate resources that could otherwise be spent protecting even Malaya (which is actually a lot more defensible, despite the fuckups by the British).
Remitonov I think you're probably right
Ah, well it was Guangzhou the city that fell, not the whole Guangdong province.
ah, well yes
Yes completely surrounded on land by Japanese occupied territory
This statement though again focuses exclusively again on the British factor, not the Chinese factor. Singapore was easier for Britain to enforce and had an initially friendly hinterland. However, Chinese forces were active in the Guangdong hinterland no more than 100 km away from Hong Kong.
I'd like to make a plug for this book.https://tinyurl.com/Clash-South-China. Interestingly, it asserts that long after Japan seized Guangzhou City and Guangzhou Bay, surrounding Hong Kong by land, the city and its ports still continued to be used for large-scale transshipment operations to other, smaller ports that were still Chinese controlled in Guangdong province, and that this continued until the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong itself.
Also, it introduces a geopolitical rationale (besides it being a water travel version of the Burma Road) for British and even Canadian reinforcement of the territory at the last minute. It was seen as an important outpost to reinforce to signal a determination to keep *both* China and the USSR in the fight, and to prevent Japan from intervening against the USSR.