Author: viviank

HKHP Interviews: Ray Yep, City University of Hong Kong

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We are honoured to have Prof. Ray Yep, Associate Head of the Department of Public Policy at City University of Hong Kong, to be our interviewee this week. 

A political scientist by training, Prof. Yep specialises in the study of the political economy of China’s reforms, the late colonial governance of Hong Kong, and contentious politics. His book on the ICAC 靜默革命：香港廉政百年共業, edited volume Negotiating Autonomy in Greater China: Hong Kong and its Sovereign before and after 1997, and the co-edited volume with Robert Bickers, May Days in Hong Kong: Riot and Emergency in 1967, provide us new perspectives in understanding late colonial Hong Kong. 

Active in rendering community services, Prof. Yep has also served as a member of the Advisory Council for Environment, the Strategy Subcommittee of Sustainable Development Council, and the Central Policy Unit. Currently he is also the Research Director of Synergy Net (a local policy think tank), a member of Policy Advocacy and Research Committee of Hong Kong Council of Social Services.

HKHP: How did this all begin? (Your research interests, your career, or your life in Hong Kong, etc.)

RY: Not sure if I have really started my career as a historian. I am a political scientist by training. My doctoral work is on political economy of rural reforms in contemporary China, and I am still researching on land reforms and local finance in mainland China today. It is Gary Cheung’s book on the 1967 Riots published 13 or 14 years ago sparkled my interest in history. I found his work exciting and was hungry for more. I hoped there would be more scholarly works available but unfortunately there was not much academic attention to this issue. Then, I thought, “ok. Maybe I should try to do something myself”. Next thing I know is I have been buried in the archives at Kew almost every summer since then.

HKHP: What needs to be further explored in Hong Kong studies?

RY: I am probably not qualified to answer this question. Personally, I am always interested in understanding how the British Empire really worked. Was there a coherent and proactive strategy in London in regulating colonial development? And how did the colony defend and pursue her agenda?  I think the relationship is very much a product of ceaseless bargaining and negotiation and the colony’s subordination depicted in the constitutional documents like Letter Patent and Royal Instructions may not uncover the whole picture.     

HKHP: How do you see Hong Kong’s place in the study of history?

RY: I always believe that Beijing’s idea of governing Hong Kong after 1997 is very much based on her perception of colonial autonomy before the Handover. If we study Basic Law carefully, we can find many provisions are almost identical with the arrangements in colonial years. For examples, the Central People’s Government has the right to invalidate Hong Kong laws, to appoint key officials in local administration and to make laws for SAR. All these were parts of the Royal Prerogatives of the Queen under colonial order. So, for Beijing, the high degree of autonomy bestowed upon the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region is simply “Letter Patent/Royal Instructions 2.0”. That is, she would regard herself even more generous than the British as not only did she choose not to impose any new restraint on Hong Kong; but she even granted more freedom that was not allowed in colonial time to the SAR. For example, the right to set up the Court of Final Appeal in the territory, and the policy of not sending officials to serve in HKSAR Government. And probably because of this self-image, she finds the “ungratefulness” of the Hong Kong irritating and incomprehensible. However, this self-perception of being a generous and tolerant overlord is very much based on her misguided understanding of Hong Kong-London relationship. On paper, Hong Kong’s autonomy was rather circumscribed as there was basically no limit on Queen’s power. However, in reality, the colony was not completely impotent in defending her cases and interests. Nuanced understanding of the colonial past is thus imperative to the appreciation of the dynamics of unfolding of the policy of One Country Two Systems.     

HKHP: What do you think would be the biggest challenge facing Hong Kong studies? How can we solve it?

RY: There are two issues. The first one is language. When you write Hong Kong history, you always feel obliged to make it as accessible as possible for the local audience because this is their story. Whereas the majority may be able to read English, you can sense a big drop in interest when the material is not published in Chinese. But we all know about the “perish or publish” culture in academia today and most Chinese journals are not considered as creditable outlets by University management. I don’t see any easy way out. I suppose senior local scholars who are immune to tenure pressure should take the lead in writing in Chinese. The second issue concerns politics. There seems to be a growing number of works on Hong Kong that appear to be more like advocacy materials rather than scholarly pieces. We all have our ideological disposition and preference, but we just have to be more conscientious and professional in reading and writing history. We should be aware of the difference between propaganda and scholarship.   

HKHP: Could you please share with us your favorite quote/person/book that you came across while doing primary research?

RY: “A history that dwells only on divided pasts denies us the just inheritance of what we have always shared, namely a capacity to ‘live together in societies sufficiently harmonious and orderly not to be constantly breaking apart,” wrote David Cannadine. A timely reminder for those who are writing history of Hong Kong.

HKHP: What are you working on now?

RY: I am working on the governorship of Murray MacLehose at the moment. I focus on three episodes: attempt to settle land lease beyond 1997, Vietnamese Boat People crisis, and political reforms in late 1970s. The three issues represents a variation of London’s response in terms of priority, economic concerns and strategic calculation. I see these as window to the understanding of the dynamics of colony-London interaction and the nature of colonial governance.

 

Edward Vickers on the History of Education in Hong Kong

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This week we have Dr. Edward Vickers of Kyushu University reflecting on the History of Education in Hong Kong. 

The History of Education in Hong Kong – a bibliographical note
by Edward Vickers

The politics of education in Hong Kong has attracted headlines in recent years, especially since the 2012 controversy over plans to introduce a new Moral and National Education school subject. The resulting furore launched the political careers of several student activists who went on to lead the 2014 ‘Umbrella Movement’. But intense public disputes over educational issues are nothing new in Hong Kong. Education has long been a site of tension and conflict between advocates of competing visions of Hong Kong’s identity. At the same time, schooling has had a crucial role to play in shaping local political consciousness – as members of the current generation of student activists have themselves testified.

Despite education’s significance for Hong Kong’s social and political development, historical research in this area has been relatively sparse. The pioneer in this field was the late Tony Sweeting, for thirty years a member of the University of Hong Kong’s Faculty of Education. His 1993 monograph, A Phoenix Transformed, analyzed the colony’s post-war educational development, tracing the halting progress from classic colonial laissez faire (i.e. minimal provision) in the 1940s to the universalisation of primary and junior secondary schooling by the 1970s. This book was accompanied by two large annotated collections of educational documents dealing respectively with the pre- and post-1941 eras (1990; 2004).

Sweeting showed how the transformation of the schooling system, and its relationship with the colonial government, paralleled Hong Kong’s own transition from a low-maintenance colonial trading post (pre-1941) to a semi-autonomous city-state (by the 1970s). The main determinant of that transformation was the huge influx of refugees from the mainland during and after the Chinese Civil War of the late 1940s. Their permanent settlement broke the pattern of (largely male) transient labour migration up to the 1930s, and facilitated Hong Kong’s rapid emergence as a manufacturing hub largely cut off from its Chinese hinterland. All this implied new demands for provision of schooling, as well as different approaches to managing the system and designing curricular content. In his monograph Hegemonies Compared (2002), Ting-hong Wong adopts a different slant on the educational history of roughly the same period, focusing on the interactions of the colonial (and post-colonial) state and the Chinese-medium private schools sector. Wong compares Hong Kong with Singapore – another largely Chinese-populated British colonial outpost, but more ethnically plural and exhibiting a very different post-war political trajectory.

While Sweeting took the Japanese occupation (1942-45) as the key rupture in local educational history, research in this area has mostly been conducted in the shadow of another political transition: the colony’s transition to Chinese rule. For this reason, much work has focused on the relationship between schooling and political socialisation. Paul Morris has investigated the contemporary history and politics of the school curriculum, notably in a 1995 monograph, The Hong Kong School Curriculum (revised and republished in collaboration with Bob Adamson, 2010). Much of his work has dealt with the curricula for citizenship/civics (e.g. 1991) and related subjects (Morris, McClelland and Wong 1997).

A crucial feature of the school curriculum, and one that remains highly charged politically, is the issue of language. Throughout the post-war period, the majority of secondary schools claimed to offer ‘English-medium’ instruction – in response to parental demand rather than colonial diktat. The history of the role of English has witnessed controversy between scholars who emphasise the intrinsically ‘colonial’ nature of the language in the Hong Kong context (e.g. Pennycook 1998), and others who stress the significance of local agency in long-running debates over medium of instruction (Sweeting and Vickers 2007). Far from being resolved with the departure of the British in 1997, these debates have taken on a new dimension with the growing use of Putonghua (Mandarin) for teaching Chinese language and literature at primary level.

While calls from officials and pro-Beijing elements for schooling to promote patriotism have intensified since 1997 (see Vickers 2011) – sparking resistance amongst the very youngsters at whom ‘national education’ is aimed – the local school curriculum has long embodied a strongly chauvinistic vision of Chineseness. Indeed, post-war Hong Kong, like Taiwan, served as a refuge for scholars exiled from Mao’s China precisely because of their attachment to a traditionalist vision of ‘Chineseness’. During the 1950s, some of these were co-opted by the colonial authorities to help localise curricula for Chinese language, literature and history. These subjects had previously been taught using textbooks produced on the mainland, but the Communist (CCP)-Kuomintang (KMT) Civil War had led to the local circulation of rival texts – all highly politicised and infused with anti-colonial nationalism. With street fighting in Hong Kong between rival KMT and CCP supporters, and British jitters concerning Communist infiltration, the colonial authorities sought to ‘depoliticise’ the curricula for these ‘Chinese subjects’. This story, and its implications for the vision of ‘Chineseness’ taught to generations of Hongkongers, is recounted in a fascinating article by Bernard Luk (1991).

By the 1970s, the culturally chauvinist but politically neutered agenda of the ‘Chinese subjects’ was increasingly in tension with an ostensibly liberal ethos animating other parts of the curriculum. Although the implications of ‘colonialism’ for its educational development have been (and remain) profound and far-reaching, late twentieth-century Hong Kong was far from being a typical colony (if such a thing ever existed). Rather than promoting popular identification with some anachronistic, pseudo-imperial ideal of global Britishness, the colonial authorities (out of eminently self-interested motives) sought to reinforce an apolitical sense of cultural Chineseness. However, simply slapping the ‘colonial’ label on the pre-1997 curriculum has been a favoured tactic of elements keen to legitimate the post-1997 ‘national education’ drive.

The aim of investigating the implications of ‘colonialism’ for Hong Kong’s school curriculum animated the early research of Edward Vickers (the present author) from the late 1990s. Vickers had taught in a local secondary school, and observed first-hand the tensions noted above. His doctoral thesis, the basis of his monograph In Search of An Identity (2003 / 2005), analysed how and why official conceptions of History as a school subject had changed since the 1960s. Benefitting from access to an array of official documents, supplemented by interviews with curriculum developers past and present, Vickers discussed the implications for curricular change of Hong Kong’s post-1960s political, cultural and social transformation. The central theme of his study related to the pressures on curriculum developers resulting from the emergence of a strong sense of local distinctiveness during this period alongside increasing pressure, during and following the transition to Chinese rule, to ramp up patriotic education. Vickers’ study was paralleled and complemented by Flora Kan Lai-Fong’s history of the separate subject of Chinese History (2007). As Luk argued, Chinese History had long been a vehicle for transmitting or preserving a traditionalist sense of cultural ‘Chineseness’, but Hong Kong’s transition saw the subject thrust to the fore of efforts to introduce far more overtly politicised patriotic instruction.

Such efforts have been redoubled in the aftermath of the 2012 abandonment of Moral and National Education. The story of that failed project is recounted by Morris and Vickers in a 2013 article that analyses the historical context for both the official project and popular resistance to it. The 2012 controversy and the subsequent 2014 protests arguably helped spawn a new phase in Hong Kong’s political evolution, with the emergence of unprecedented forms of nativist sentiment amongst local youth (Veg 2016). However, the 2012 pattern of official over-reach and popular street protest, followed by a government retreat, was far from unprecedented, as Morris and Vickers showed. Perhaps, though, the protests of 2012 and 2014, by virtue of the tougher official stance they provoked, will come to be seen as marking the end of the road for what might be termed the Hong Kong model of informal street democracy. With their backbones stiffened by directives from Beijing, local officials have in recent years appeared far less sensitive to their lack of electoral legitimacy, and less inclined to back down in the face of popular protest.

This essay cannot claim to be a comprehensive overview of research on the history of education in Hong Kong. For example, while the landmark work of Tony Sweeting is noted, no systematic attempt has been made here to scope the literature relating to the pre-1941 period. One significant contribution to research on that period is Peter Cunich’s A History of the University of Hong Kong, 1911-1945 (2013).

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the history of education is a relatively neglected aspect of research into the Hong Kong past. Moreover, what research does exist is often overlooked, in part because an artificial disciplinary gulf between ‘historians’ and ‘educationalists’ often leaves scholars ignorant of work conducted by those outside their own field (a failing which the present author doubtless exhibits here…).

Among the issues in Hong Kong’s educational history that deserve more scholarly attention is the role of schooling in exacerbating, reproducing and legitimating the extreme inequality that has been a consistent feature of local society (see Morris and Sweeting 1995) – but which has become more acute in the post-retrocession period. How social inequality has been related to the structural and ideological features of the schooling system, and how and why Hong Kong differs in this respect from other East Asian societies, is a question that should concern historians – not least because of its importance for understanding the tensions that wrack local society today.

 

Readings:

 

Peter Cunich (2013). A History of the University of Hong Kong, 1911-1945. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Flora Kan Lai-fong (2007). Hong Kong’s Chinese History Curriculum from 1945: Politics and Identity. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Bernard Luk Hung-kay (1991). ‘Chinese Culture in the Hong Kong Curriculum: Heritage and Colonialism,’ Comparative Education Review, 35/4, 650-668.

Paul Morris (1991) ‘Preparing pupils as citizens of the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong: an analysis of curriculum change and control during the transition period’, in G. Postiglione (ed.) Education and Society in Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 117–45.

Paul Morris and Anthony Sweeting (eds). Education and Development in East Asia. New York: Garland (see especially Introduction, and ‘Hong Kong’ chapter by Sweeting).

Morris, P., McClelland, J. and Wong, P. (1997). ‘Explaining curriculum change: Social Studies in Hong Kong’, Comparative Education Review, 41 (1), 27-43.

Morris, P. and Adamson, B. (2010) Curriculum, Schooling & Society in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: The Hong Kong University Press.

Paul Morris and Edward Vickers (2015). ‘Schooling, politics and the construction of identity in Hong Kong,’ the 2012 “Moral and National Education” crisis in historical context,’ Comparative Education, May 2015, 305-326.

Alastair Pennycook (1998).  English and the Discourses of Colonialism. London: Routledge.

Anthony Sweeting (1993). A Phoenix Transformed. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.

Anthony Sweeting (1990). Education in Hong Kong Pre-1841 to 1941: Fact and Opinion. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Anthony Sweeting (2004). Education in Hong Kong 1941 to 2001: Visions and Revisions. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Anthony Sweeting and Edward Vickers (2007). ‘Language and the History of Colonial Education: the case of Hong Kong,’ Modern Asian Studies 41/1, 1-40.

Sebastian Veg (2016). ‘The Rise of Localism and Civic Identity in Post-handover Hong Kong: Questioning the Chinese Nation-state,’ The China Quarterly, vol. 230, 323-347.

Edward Vickers (2003 / 2005). In Search of An Identity: the politics of History as a school subject in Hong Kong,1960s-2002 (Routledge 2003; revised and updated paperback published in 2005 by CERC/HKU Press).

Edward Vickers and Flora Kan (2005). ‘The Re-education of Hong Kong: Identity, Politics and History Education in Colonial and Postcolonial Hong Kong,’ in Vickers and Jones (eds.), History Education and National Identity in East Asia. London and New York: Routledge: 171-202.

Edward Vickers (2011). ‘Learning to love the Motherland: “National Education” in Post-retrocession Hong Kong,’ in Muller (ed.) Designing History in East Asian Textbooks. London and New York: Routledge, 85-106.

Ting-hong Wong (2002). Hegemonies Compared: State Formation and Chinese School Politics in Postwar Singapore and Hong Kong. New York: RoutledgeFalmer.

 

Introducing Tamara Cooper

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Tamara Cooper is a PhD Candidate in the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry at the University of Wollongong in Australia. 

Her research focus is on the British Women’s Missionary Movement and its involvement in debates on the trafficking in women and children in China and Hong Kong during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her wider research interests include histories of imperialism, empire, religion, and women’s history.

I stumbled into the study of missionaries during my honours year. Previously I had completed a small research project on the connections between globalisation, orientalism, and imperialism during the Opium Wars as part of my undergraduate degree. I was wanting to expand on these themes in my honours research but was interested in adding the element of gender. I was primarily interested in examining ways in which the different cultures of the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ interacted with each other in the 19th Century. In my quest to add the element of gender to my research I stumbled upon a book called ‘Pagoda Shadows’. It was written by an American Baptist missionary called Adele Fielde. Upon my discovery of this book, my honours thesis became an examination of Fielde’s work in China and how this was part of a larger cultural imperial project.

My PhD thesis continues this theme of examining the work of missionaries, except this time it jumps between China and Hong Kong. In this thesis, I examine how the British women’s missionary movement intervened in and interacted with the trafficking debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one of the central questions of the thesis is to what extent did the missionaries intervene and what was the nature of this intervention. By examining the work of a number of women missionaries from various missionary societies I have found that missionaries were less inclined to join formal protests led by advocates in the British metropole, and instead relied upon evangelisation and conversion as a means of intervention.

The late nineteenth century is an interesting time for the women’s missionary movement, particularly in China and Hong Kong. It was at this time that missionary societies started actively recruiting women, specifically single women, into the movement. Due to the gender segregation of Chinese society and culture, the missionary movement was not able to succeed without the contribution of women. Single women were of a particular value as they were without the responsibilities of the married woman missionary, whose duties within the family often left her without enough time for evangelisation, or so the argument went. This active recruitment of single women into the missionary movement had another effect: it professionalised and legitimised the single woman missionary. The turn of the twentieth century saw the numbers of women missionaries equal that of male missionaries.

I chose to include Hong Kong as a case study in my thesis primarily because of the mui tsai controversy of the 1920s and 1930s. Briefly, the controversy was a dispute over the employment of young girls as domestic servants called mui tsai. Those against the employment of mui tsai argued that it was akin to slavery, while others argued that it was an act of charity that saved the young girls from a life of neglect. My research is not focused so much on which side was right but rather what the missionaries were doing during this debate.

In the Church Missionary Society (CMS) archives, held at the University of Birmingham, I came across the papers of the Victoria Home and Orphanage, a rescue centre that had been established in Hong Kong by CMS missionaries. The home, or school, was founded in 1888 by Mrs Mary Ost and her husband Reverend John Ost, who had been sent to Hong Kong in 1881 to take up the post of vicar in the church of St Stephens. In the home’s first annual report, Reverend Ost reported that one of the primary functions of the home was to facilitate the rescue of young girls who he believed would otherwise be forced into a “life of immorality”. The Osts only ran the home until 1892, when they were transferred to the society’s mission in Pakhoi (Beihai). Following the departure of the Osts, the home was run by Miss Agnes Hamper, a single woman missionary who was sent to the home at the end of 1888. From 1892 onwards the home was run by missionaries who were single women.

While the home operated as a school, its intended function was as a rescue centre for young girls. Some of the stories of the girls who were rescued by the home were featured in the home’s annual report; however, the most telling record of the girls who were rescued and brought to the Victoria Home comes from a list of inmates, or students, for 1898. The handwritten list contains details such as each girl’s name, her age, who brought her to the home, when she was brought to the home, and who admitted her. It also contained details about why girls were brought to the home; which in turn revealed information about how missionaries intervened in trafficking beyond just running rescue homes. While a fair number of the girls were brought to the home on behalf of the Registrar General, there were a number who were brought to the home by missionaries, including members of the Church Missionary Society.

There are two stories of young girls included in this list that I found particularly interesting, the stories of Wong Mui and Wong Kui. In June 1897, Miss Hamper admitted Wong Mui, aged twenty, to the home. Wong Mui had been described as a slave girl who worked in Pakhoi and had been rescued by missionaries of the CMS before being brought to the home. In April of the following year, Hamper admitted Wong Kui, aged seventeen, to the home. Wong Kui had been sold to San Francisco where she had been rescued by Presbyterian missionaries who returned her to Hong Kong. Wong Kui only stayed at the home until she was married.

The Victoria Home ran until 1935 when it merged with the neighbouring Fairlea School also run by the CMS. The Fairlea school had previously been run by the Female Education Society. In 1899 the Female Education Society was disbanded. Upon its disbandment, all of its properties and missionaries were absorbed into the CMS. This move ensured a continued relationship between the two schools. When the Victoria Home and Fairlea School merged, they became the Heep Yunn School, an Anglican Day and Boarding School for girls. The Heep Yunn School still operates as an Anglican school in Hong Kong.

While the Victoria Home undoubtedly had a lasting impact, on the lives of the girls it took in, I believe that its most intriguing legacy is that of the colony’s missionary women. Throughout the home’s history, it was run almost entirely by women. These women maintained control over the home in the face of the overwhelming male leadership of the CMS. The home’s interactions with other rescue organisations in Hong Kong reveals a network of female leadership within the wider missionary community. A network that was, I believe, symptomatic of the increasing influence and power that women were coming into within the missionary movement.

 

HKHP Interviews: Christopher Munn

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The Project is delighted to have Dr. Christopher Munn to be our interviewee this week. A former administrative officer in the Hong Kong Government 1980-1992, and a staff member of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority 1998-2010, Dr. Munn has published extensively on Hong Kong History. In particular, his book Anglo-China: Chinese People and British Rule in Hong Kong, 1841-1880 sheds light on how colonial governance affected the lives of people in early British Hong Kong, and how they in turn sought to shape colonial rule.

Dr. Munn has also co-edited with May Holdsworth the Dictionary of Hong Kong Biography, a collection of more than 500 biographies of lives spanning the whole of Hong Kong history, and one of the most well-received publications to researchers working in the field.

 

HKHP: How did this all begin? (Your research interests, your career, or your life in Hong Kong, etc.)

 CM: I came to Hong Kong in 1980 as a fresh history graduate from England to work for the Hong Kong Government. After a decade or so of interesting work I wanted to continue my education. For certain romantic reasons I also wanted to be in Toronto. I therefore studied for an MA and then a Ph.D. at the University of Toronto under Timothy Brook. I picked Hong Kong as a thesis topic mainly out of interest but also because Hong Kong in the 1990s was a hot topic. Toronto turned out to be a good place for this because it is a centre of British Empire studies. It also has a strong Hong Kong connection and excellent libraries, including a Hong Kong collection built up by Peter Yeung, who had earlier helped build up the Hong Kong collection at HKU. I did much of my research in Hong Kong and was fortunate to be selected as a Toronto-HKU exchange student, so that I was able to spend a whole year back in Hong Kong working under the guidance of Elizabeth Sinn. 

HKHP: What needs to be further explored in Hong Kong studies?

CM: The field is in excellent shape. It has received an enormous boost from initiatives such as the Hong Kong History Project. I often find it surprising how much has been written, even though a great deal of research remains unpublished. There are now also some excellent general histories by Steve Tsang, John Carroll, Tsai Jung-fang and others. I wish there were more longitudinal studies of special topics over the full span of Hong Kong’s history of a city. For example, we have no comprehensive economic history of Hong Kong. Nor is there a general demographic history of the city, despite the role that movements of people have played in politics, economics and identity. And what about some scholarly histories about corruption in Hong Kong, or about important institutions such as the governorship or the Executive and Legislative Councils? It would also be good to see more comparative studies on Hong Kong and other colonial or Chinese cities. This is difficult to do well, but it is good to see some movements in this direction.

HKHP: How do you see Hong Kong’s place in the study of history?

CM: Hong Kong has a large population with a distinct history driven both by its own dynamics and by external forces. It was the last British colony to be decolonized and one of a handful of former colonies to be given a special status within a much larger country. Its history is packed with interesting events, personalities and controversies. It surely deserves to be studied as a place in its own right. However, it is also interesting to see Hong Kong’s history in the context of modern Chinese and world history, and in comparison with the history of other colonies and the metropole. Just through examining aspects of Hong Kong’s legal history in my recent research I have been struck by how much its development has been influenced by processes, personalities and experiences in other colonies.

HKHP: What do you think would be the biggest challenge facing Hong Kong studies? How can we solve it?

CM: The same challenge which faces all historians: finding, reading, understanding and interpreting the sources in as balanced a way as possible. Another challenge is to make Hong Kong interesting and relevant to people who have no direct experience of the city. 

HKHP: Could you please share with us your favorite quote/person/book that you came across while doing primary research?

CM: In my research I have been looking at cases in the Hong Kong courts. Most of these cases are sad rather than amusing but occasionally some bizarre disputes arose, often involving visiting performers. In a case in 1912, for example, an army officer sued ‘the Great Raymond’, a world-famous escapologist, after he had refused to honour his offer of £100 to any member of the audience who could extricate himself from a pair of locked handcuffs. The army officer had beaten the challenge, but the Great Raymond claimed that the handcuffs were not properly locked. The officer won the case and donated his winnings to charity.

Another case was about two mermaids and a monkey. This was an action in 1890 by a German showman to recover $100, being the cost of two ‘dried mermaids’ he had entrusted to a Chinese painter to produce pictorial advertisements for some sort of semi-aquatic show. The showman had also insisted that he, along with a monkey appearing in the show, be included in the pictures and had supplied the monkey to give sittings: ‘the trouble of getting these accessories to harmonise was considerable,’ the painter told the court. The painter refused to return the dried mermaids when the showman, not happy with the paintings, declined to pay the price agreed on. During the hearing the paintings and the mermaids – concoctions sewn together from various dead animals (Barnum’s museum had a similar specimen) – were laid on the table in court and a great deal of evidence was given in German and Chinese. The judge concluded that the pictures were not bad considering the unpromising subject matter, and he found for the painter.

HKHP: What are you working on now?

CM: I have recently finished writing a history of the Hong Kong Judiciary, from 1841 to recent times. I have also been working with May Holdsworth on a book on the history of the Central Police Station complex and have helped Elizabeth Sinn edit a book on cultural encounters in Hong Kong history, which will be published soon. Earlier this year I began work on a history of the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong, planned as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations in 2019.

[CFP] Postgraduate Workshop at the University of Bristol, January 2018

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Call for Papers

Challenges in the study of Hong Kong History: Postgraduate Workshop at the University of Bristol, January 2018

The Hong Kong History Project at the University of Bristol is pleased to announce that the second Postgraduate Workshop will take place on January 11-12, 2018. The workshop welcomes postgraduate students and early career scholars working on Hong Kong history and related disciplines in the UK and overseas, and provides an opportunity to network and the share ideas. Participants will be invited to give a twenty-minute presentation on the theme of challenges facing the study of Hong Kong’s history. This can include issues relating to archives and sources, as well as broader challenges around differing historical approaches and interpretations. This will be followed by question and answer sessions.

Candidates are invited to submit a 200-word statement briefly outlining their area of research and motivation for attending the workshop, along with their Curriculum Vitae. Please submit all applications to Catherine Chan (Catherine.Chan@bristol.ac.uk), Gemma O’Neill (Gemma.ONeill@bristol.ac.uk) and Katon Lee (Katon.Lee@bristol.ac.uk) by November 24, 2017. Accepted participants will be notified by December 1, 2017. Two nights’ accommodation in Bristol and some meals will be provided. Although priority will be given to history postgraduate students and recently completed PhDs, applications from other disciplines will be considered provided an appreciation of history is shown.

HKHP Interviews: Mark Hampton, Lingnan University

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Our second interviewee is Prof. Mark Hampton, of the history department at Lingnan University. A resident of Hong Kong for almost eleven years, Prof. Hampton has published widely on British media and culture, including the recent book Hong Kong and British Culture, 1945-97.

 

HKHP: How did this all begin? (Your research interests, your career, or your life in Hong Kong, etc.)

MH: For about twenty years now, I have been a historian of British culture, and Hong Kong is just one of my areas of interest within this broader field. The two main reasons that I took my interest in British cultural history in the direction of the British in Hong Kong are, 1. in 1996 while conducting research in Manchester, I met a young woman from Hong Kong who piqued my interest in Hong Kong (“Reader, I married her”), and 2. I was fortunate enough to be able to move to Hong Kong in 2007 to take a position at Lingnan University, after spending the first several years of my career in the United States. Upon moving to Hong Kong, I quite naturally took advantage of the opportunity to move my interest in British cultural history into the arena of Hong Kong studies.

HKHP: What needs to be further explored in Hong Kong studies?

MH: I’m not sure I’m the best person to ask, given that I approach Hong Kong studies from a firmly British cultural perspective, which is obviously limiting. But my sense is that there is still a lot more to learn about Hong Kong from the vantage point of its inhabitants who are neither Chinese nor Western: in other words, its Asian ethnic minorities. People like John Erni and Gordon Matthews have done important pioneering work, but I think there is much more to be done in this area.

HKHP: How do you see Hong Kong’s place in the study of history?

Hong Kong is interesting as a city that is simultaneously an entry point into studies of globalization, of Chinese history, of British imperial history, of Hong Kong’s role as an exemplar of neo-liberalism and a place for what Davidson and Rees-Mogg call “the sovereign individual” to assert his or her sovereignty. Some of the infrastructure projects of the second half of the twentieth century offer interesting case studies in urban planning that would be of interest to any urban geographer. Hong Kong is a liminal place—in the 19th century what John Carroll evocatively calls the “edge of empires”, and in the later 20th century, a contact zone between China and the world. Basically, for 19th- to 20th- century historical studies, there are few cities that offer entry points into as many different fields of historical enquiry as Hong Kong does.

HKHP: What do you think would be the biggest challenge facing Hong Kong studies? How can we solve it?

MH: To me, the biggest challenge is that as Hong Kong studies develops, and more scholars—especially, but not only, those based in Hong Kong — devote their professional careers to Hong Kong studies, it can tend to become myopic. I think my answer to the previous question points us to the best antidote: the more different perspectives are brought to bear on Hong Kong, the better off “Hong Kong studies” will be. I think it would be a good thing if we have scholarship on Hong Kong being conducted not only by people who devote their careers to scholarship on Hong Kong, but by people interested in Chinese history, British history, global history, financial history, international cinema, and any number of other topics that go well beyond “Hong Kong studies”.

HKHP:  Could you please share with us your favorite quote/person/book that you came across while doing primary research?

MH: I’m afraid my favorites are not from my studies in the history of Hong Kong, but things I encountered in British journalism and cultural history: from the great Guardian editor, C.P. Scott: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred”. In terms of books, I’m a big fan of Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922) and, before that, R.A. Scott-James’s The Influence of the Press (1913). Between them, I think they were instrumental in establishing Anglo-American media studies. Keeping it strictly to Hong Kong: as I worked on post-1945 British culture and Hong Kong, I found Richard Hughes’s Borrowed Place, Borrowed Time (1968) and James Clavell’s Noble House (1981) to be among the most interesting—and especially interesting that Clavell—an Australian who became a US citizen—was as concerned about promoting British culture as anyone who ever wrote about Hong Kong. Hughes, of course, was also Australian.

HKHP: What are you working on now?

MH: I am working on several projects: one on British radicals and reformers in Hong Kong from the 1840s to 1990s; one on the film theory of Michael Balcon, a major film producer in mid-twentieth-century Britain; and one on discourses of “whiteness” in post-1945 Britain and the United States. In addition, I am general editor of a six volume Cultural Histories of Media from antiquity to the 20th century, under contract with Bloomsbury, and I am co-editing the 19th-century volume.

Introducing Loretta Lou

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Loretta Lou is a sociocultural anthropologist with an interest in environment, health, and science, technology & society (STS) studies. She has recently received her DPhil in Anthropology from the University of Oxford, where she now works as a Postdoctoral Researcher for the Forum on Health, Environment and Development (FORHEAD) at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies. In this post Loretta tells us about her research on Hong Kong’s green living movement and how she became interested in the history of the ‘Clean Hong Kong Campaign’ during her study of green living.

I have been following the development of ‘green living’ in Hong Kong for almost 10 years now. My interest in the subject dates back to 2008 when I was studying for a master’s degree at the University of Edinburgh. The master’s programme I enrolled in is a research programme that prepares students for PhD study. Although I wasn’t sure about doing a PhD at that time, my time in Edinburgh did get me thinking about ‘green living’ as a potential research topic. After completing my master’s degree, I went on to work as a public health researcher for the NHS before accepting the offer to do a DPhil at the University of Oxford.

In Hong Kong, ‘green living’ is promoted as a kind of ‘good living’ that is beneficial to both human and the Earth. It is a grassroots movement that encourages people to take personal responsibility for themselves, the environment, and the community they live in. Green living first caught my attention when I noticed that there is an increasing demand for ‘green’, ‘natural’ and organic commodities in Hong Kong. But as I investigated further, I realised that consumption is only a very superficial aspect of ‘green living’. Admittedly, the spectrum of ‘green’ in Hong Kong is very broad. While for some people green living means a visit to the farmer’s market every Sunday, for others it’s a way of life of social, political, and spiritual significance. Knowing that there is more to the story, I decided to study the implications of green living for self-nature relationship, social dynamics, and political mobilisation through ethnography.

During fieldwork, I was intrigued by the fact that people who practise green living in their lives don’t fit neatly into the ‘well-off middle class’ box. They seem to have different priorities than the Greens’ in the West. In fact, the Greens in Hong Kong come from all walks of life. The one characteristic that they share is they are looking for change, more precisely, hope. Unlike previous studies that focus predominately on the mobilisation strategies and lobbying tactics of environmental NGOs, my research focuses on the personal story of individuals. What motivates people to ‘go green’? Why are some people more committed to environmentally friendly practices than others?

Of course everyone has their own story. But I am particularly fascinated by the life history of (Simon) Chau Siu-Cheung, a leading figure of Hong Kong’s green living movement. Originally an Associate Professor of Translation at Hong Kong Baptist University (1989-2005), Chau chose to retire early so that he could focus 100% on the promotion of green living. Since he came back to Hong Kong after obtaining his PhD in Scotland in 1984, he’s been an ardent advocate for recycling, organic farming, alternative medicine, and what he calls ‘spiritual renaissance’. In the past 30 years, Chau has founded many influential green groups, including Green Power, Produce Green (the first organic farm in the city), The Vegetarian Society (first of its kind), Club O (a.k.a. Green Living Education Foundation), and most recently, Greenwoods.

Although Chau is the ‘trend-setter’ of Hong Kong’s green living movement, he wouldn’t have founded all these groups without the help and support of other people, mainly the intelligentsia at that time. Until the green living movement gained momentum in the early 2000s, many of Hong Kong’s green groups were run by the expats. For instance, both Friends of the Earth and the World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF) were established by Western businessmen and the upper-middle colonial class. The Chinese used to call these environmental NGOs ‘gweilo club’ because they were so isolated from the Chinese community. In view of this, Green Power (est. 1988) is really an exception as it was founded by local people who were born and bred in Hong Kong. It was the first environmental organisation that had made serious efforts to localise global environmental discourses for the Hong Kong Chinese. Under Chau’s leadership, Green Power also managed to mobilise more local people to participate in the green movement, even though the majority of them were overseas educated middle class people.

There is no doubt that the intelligentsia at that time was aware of the global appeal for sustainability. But was this awareness alone enough to get the Hong Kong Chinese to go green? This explanation assumes a simple theory of cultural diffusion, which has been proved problematic by many anthropologists and historians through different case studies. In searching for a different explanation of how green living has taken roots in Hong Kong, I decided to look farther back into history by tracing the genealogy of the green living movement through two distinct endeavours to promote ‘modern living’ in Hong Kong. The first one being the government’s efforts to transform Hong Kong into a clean cosmopolitan of modern hygienic standards. I borrow Ruth Rogaski’s concept of ‘hygienic modernity’ (2004) to demonstrate how cleanliness and weisheng have become key notions through which Hong Kong established herself in the 20th century Asia. Focusing on the ‘Clean Hong Kong’ campaign in the 1970s, I discuss how this campaign has successfully forged a sense of community while instilling a rudimentary understanding of waanbao (protecting the environment) into the minds of Hong Kong citizens.

What I found most interesting is that the idea of ‘protecting the environment’ (保護環境) is constantly changing. For example, protecting the environment in the early 1980s simply meant ‘keeping Hong Kong clean’ because Hong Kong is your home. To protect Hong Kong’s environment, you put everything in the bin. But by the late 1980s, the intelligentsia was no longer satisfied with the kind of environmental protection that only aimed at creating a hygienic urban environment. In the wake of a growing sense of community, Green Power wanted to introduce Hong Kong people to the idea of sustainability—a difficult concept for a city that was known as ‘a borrowed place living on borrowed time.’

When I presented this sub-project at the University of Bristol, I was very surprised when Professor Robert Bickers told me that my presentation had brought back his childhood memories in Hong Kong. Three months later when I presented the same paper at the University of Brighton, Dr. Harriet Atkinson said the same thing to me. It’s amazing to know that the Clean Hong Kong Campaign is not only the collective memory of the Hong Kong people, but also many expats who have once called this city their home.

Introducing Nele Fabian

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Nele Fabian is a PhD candidate in Chinese History at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Faculty of East Asian Studies, in Germany with a thesis on the “Social and Cultural Dimensions of Waste Treatment in Chinese Cities in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”. Her research focuses on modern Chinese environmental history, urban social history, and the history of insurances in China. In this post Nele kindly shares with us her way into the fascinating history of waste management of Hong Kong, and her thoughts on how waste management transformed HK’s social sphere and urban environment.

I was born and raised in Germany, and educated in Chinese History and Philosophy at Ruhr University Bochum. My strong interest in the history of Hong Kong was created during my MA studies at Bochum; out of my motivation to explore Chinese environmental history I stumbled into an archival reading class in environmental history where I came across some fascinating 19th century primary material on British fire insurance along the China coast which primarily reported on Hong Kong and Shanghai. Intrigued by my findings on how both cities were infrastructurally and socially transformed in the quest for safety from fire, I dedicated my MA thesis to this topic and became fascinated by Hong Kong’s historical uniqueness and social complexity. My research touched on a variety of topics besides the history of modern insurance in China, most of which I have since stayed true to. They include the perception of and reaction to urban environmental danger, transformation of the natural sphere through urban expansion, urban public administration and infrastructural development, and urban spaces of encounter between Chinese local and ‘Western’ cultures.

My PhD thesis is still oriented towards this framework but focuses on the history of waste management in Chinese metropolises. In this context I compare my major case study, Hong Kong—again—to Shanghai but additionally also to Chengdu in order to understand the relations and differences between ‘Western’ (or ‘Western inspired’) waste regimes that were executed within a Chinese urban context, and primarily ‘Chinese’ solutions to urban waste problems and their resulting environmental complications. Hence, the Chengdu case study, while Shanghai serves as a hybrid example.

Throughout my investigation of the Hong Kong case I have found that an analysis of its history of waste treatment has direct implications for the present, since the Hong Kong region has relied primarily on intense land use for waste disposal throughout most of its history. The relative absence of relief through more sustainable approaches—which could have grown historically, but in fact did not or hardly did—today shows serious consequences as landfill space is quickly diminishing, thus the government of Hong Kong SAR now faces a far overdue reorganisation of a long established waste management routine. Although the problem of limited space for waste disposal and its possible consequences for Hong Kong’s society and natural resources was foreseen as early as the 1950s, both the British Colonial Government and the Government of Hong Kong SAR have sustained a relatively passive stance towards a possible future waste crisis, which I seek to explain historically in my thesis. To present a broader historical perspective, my Hong Kong related research covers waste management solutions and their implications for the Hong Kong society throughout the whole colonial period. Methodically, I integrate archival documents from the Hong Kong Public Records Office and The National Archives in London as well as a variety of historical local newspapers in both English and Chinese language. I have completed five months of research in Hong Kong thanks to the kind help of Professor John Carroll at HKU’s Department of History, and will go back for more backup data collection in early 2018 before I hope to submit my thesis in late 2018.

Introducing Katon Lee

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This week we have Bristol’s very own Katon Lee sharing with us his journey into the fascinating world of suits and tailoring in Hong Kong. If you know anything about suit making/tailoring that you think Katon would be interested to hear about, please get in touch with him – he’ll be happy to hear from you!

Born and raised in Hong Kong, I consider this small city to be my native home. My attachment to Hong Kong aroused my curiosity to study its history. Interested in social and cultural histories, I first examined the winding process of establishing women’s inheritance rights during my MPhil at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. With this project, I examined the social and legal transformations of post-war Hong Kong under colonial influence.

My MPhil experience inspired me to further study the power of colonialism in shaping Hong Kong. While scrutinizing historical photographs of activists fighting for human right, it came to my attention that Chinese male activists dressed in suits. I began to wonder when and why Chinese men forfeited their traditional Chinese long robes in exchange for western attire. After completing my MPhil, I turned my attention to the changes in dressing traditions in Hong Kong, with an aim to highlight the impacts of colonialism on the cultural transformations of a Chinese city. In my current project, I work on suits in Hong Kong with Prof. Robert Bickers and Dr. Su Lin Lewis at the University of Bristol, aiming to use suits in Hong Kong as a case study to examine the colonial transformations of a Chinese city.

The sources I engage with in this project are wide-ranging. Apart from textual material such as governmental archives and newspapers, I also pay attention to visual sources, including photographs, pictorials and films. More importantly, I interview around 20 tailors and tailoring businessmen (and intend to interview more!), in hopes of collecting their first-hand experiences of producing and selling suits in Hong Kong. With the use of rich historical sources, I hope that my study of suits in Hong Kong can present a new perspective to understand Chinese modernity.

If you have any interest in my project, or want to share any view on it, or want to talk about your family’s tailoring business, or just want some recommendation of places to make good suits, please don’t hesitate to contact me (katon.lee@bristol.ac.uk). I’m more than willing to chat with you.

HKHP Interviews: John Carroll, HKU

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We are delighted to announce that our Blog is starting a new series! In this series, we ask the same set of six questions to scholars with a common interest in Hong Kong from different disciplines.

Our inaugural interviewee is Prof. John Carroll, Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong. Prof. Carroll spent his childhood and teenage years in North Point and Causeway Bay before he moved to the US for his undergraduate study. Author of Edge of Empires and bestseller A Concise History of Hong Kong 香港簡史, he has reorientated the study of Hong Kong history to stand between the history of China and British imperialism.

 

HKHP: How did this all begin? (Your research interests, your career, or your life in Hong Kong, etc.)

JC: It was an accident – and I do mean an accident. Although I was raised and educated in Hong Kong, I never had any interest in its history. It wasn’t taught in my primary or secondary school, and we never went on any field trips. I think I visited the Hong Kong Museum of History, then in Star House, exactly once. When I began the research for my PhD thesis back in the early 1990s, Hong Kong was the last place on my mind. I was interested in Western missionaries in China and treaty-port culture in Shanghai. At some point I decided to read a bit about Hong Kong. The more I learned, the more interesting it became. The rest, as they say, is history.

HKHP: What needs to be further explored in Hong Kong studies?

JC: I don’t think there’s any particular “missing link”. No two people will ever agree on what is most important about any place or period. But, speaking of people, those who need to be incorporated much more thoroughly into Hong Kong history are the South Asians. How such vibrant communities with roots dating back to Hong Kong’s earliest days as a colony have been so overlooked is truly baffling. In terms of periods, one that could use more work is the 1950s.

HKHP: How do you see Hong Kong’s place in the study of history?

JC: When I started my PhD research many years ago, I wanted to use the case of Hong Kong as a way to understand certain issues in modern Chinese history, such as the rise of modern capitalism, state and society, and Sino-Western cultural encounters. Then I started to see it as a way of understanding colonialism. Now I see it mainly as a place on its own terms, and with its own unique characteristics.

HKHP: What do you think would be the biggest challenge facing Hong Kong studies? How can we solve it?

JC: The biggest challenge is the language gap. Walk into any major bookstore here and you’ll see a huge body of work that many people will never be able to read. Some of the best material on Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s is in Chinese, and why shouldn’t it be? Imagine trying to understand France without reading French. And it’s not just a matter of reading: can we really understand a society without understanding its pop culture and – of course – its slang? I grew up immersed in Hong Kong pop culture and slang, and it’s still hard for me to get by. Another problem is that, at least at the university level, historical research is usually framed by nation. Except perhaps here in Hong Kong, no one gets a PhD in Hong Kong history: it has to be in Chinese history or British imperial history. And, except perhaps in Hong Kong, academic jobs are never in Hong Kong history. I can’t imagine that ever changing.

HKHP: Could you please share with us your favorite quote/person/book that you came across while doing primary research?

JC: The most interesting person I’ve ever come across while doing primary research is James Innes, a fiercely libertarian Scottish trader who arrived in Canton around 1825 and died in Macao in July 1841 during the Opium War. He didn’t survive long enough to live in Hong Kong, but he certainly would have made the place even more interesting if he had. I don’t think I would have liked him very much, but he would have been a fun person to share a glass or two of Scotch whisky with. He once publicly threatened to shoot Captain Charles Elliot, superintendent of British trade in China, “through the head, or heart, by a well practised rifle.”

HKHP: What are you working on now?

JC: I’m trying to finish two books on the British in Canton before the Opium War. One is about communities, people (including James Innes), and institutions. The other is about the knowledge of China produced by Britons who resided in or travelled through Canton. And I’ve just started research for another book on Hong Kong, which looks at how from 1949 to 1997 local authorities tried to promote tourism in Britain’s only Chinese colony, and by the 1990s its only significant colony.