This article draws on a wide variety of sources and recent scholarship on citizenship to reconceptualize the Chinese National Salvation movement in the 1930s. Instead of emphasizing partisan manipulation or intellectual advocacy as past research has done, it argues that broadly based civic activism was vital for national salvation. In Hong Kong, where national salvation activism emerged in a time of political repression but developed under forced tolerance by the British authorities, widely shared commiseration with their fellow Chinese became a motivating and unifying force that cut across social and class divides. Built upon traditions of charity by the rich and of anti-foreign protest by the laboring population, civic activities for national salvation in the 1930s had a transformative effect in this British colony and affected developments in Hong Kong for decades thereafter.