Category: Early Career Scholars Network

One of the Centre’s mission is to nurture a new generation of Hong Kong historians.

A Early Career Scholar Network was created under the Hong Kong History Centre in June 2023. It intends to help create a community of Hong Kong historians and offer a platform for face-to-face interaction and academic exchange among young scholars. Research students and fresh doctoral graduates working on socioeconomic, political and cultural history of Hong Kong and its global relevance are welcomed. We usually meet thrice a year (February, June and October) with participants taking turn to present their works in each meeting. Financial support is provided for attending these sessions.

Please write to Prof. Ray Yep, Research Director of Hong Kong History Centre, at rekmy@bristol.ac.uk, if you are interested in joining this Network.

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In this post, we would like to introduce Alex Cheung, a member of the Network.

Alex Cheung is a PhD student in Bristol. In the note written by him below, he shares with us his reflections on his academic journey and current project on experience of migration.

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It is not easy to trace the exact moment I developed an interest in history, but I still remember the younger me always getting fascinated by history stories on TV, in books and video games. When I was studying history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, I was first introduced to the field of Hong Kong history. I also realised history is not just about remarkable events; it is closely relevant to ordinary life. Back then, I ​was particularly​ interested in urban history and planning history – whereas Hong Kong is described as a laissez faire city, the government and merchants had always been shaping the landscape of the city. During my MPhil study, I wrote a thesis ‘Town Planning of New Kowloon and Colonial Governance in Hong Kong, 1898-1941’ and explored how the colonial government planned and developed part of the New Territories (the government named it as ‘New Kowloon’) after the lease of the New Territories in 1898. I argued that the Hong Kong government did not simply copy the model of urban planning from Britain and other colonies. It negotiated with property developers over issues including public health, property speculation and terms of New Territories leases. Through this process, it introduced into the colony various practices of urban planning.

​​Having​ completed my MPhil thesis, I started rethinking whether the people merely passively lived in urban space as designated by the government and merchants. I developed greater interest in understanding the lived experience of urban dwellers and individual agency in history. When I drafted my PhD research proposal, I once conceived of studying the daily life of Chinese tenement dwellers in the early twentieth century. However, I gradually noticed the mobility of lower-class population of Hong Kong – they came from different places to Hong Kong and they stayed or left for different reasons. Living in Hong Kong was only part of their life. As I sought to explain the relationship between urban life in Hong Kong and experience of migration, I formulated my current research project, which is tentatively titled as ‘Seeking Home in the Colonial Port: Migration and Settlement of Chinese Workers in Hong Kong, c. 1900-1941’. In this research, I examine everyday experience of the working classes in dwelling and working in the port city and moving across borders. I also analyse how the colonial government and public discussed and dealt with associated problems. Apart from notions like race and class divisions, perceived differences between local residents and outsiders also complicated these discussions. Encountering these discursive and practical differentiations, lower-class migrants lived in an unsettled condition and resorted to migration as their tactic. 

In search of the experiences of lower-class migrants and attitudes of the government and local society towards them, I will examine ​a​ variet​y​​ ​of sources. Apart from understanding officials’ perception and decision-making process through the colonial archive, I will also utilise newspapers and magazines to reconstruct how ordinary life was like. I will particularly pay attention to reports on police and court cases. In these cases, ordinary people were arrested and prosecuted for all sorts of crimes and offences. At the same time, they also left written records of their ideas and actions through interrogations of the police and the court (despite these records were usually written from the perspective of the interrogators). Apart from textual sources, I will also study the urban environment and details of life in old photos.

Highlighting labour mobility can help us understand the complicated relationship of the working class and Hong Kong. Like port cities all over the world, Hong Kong emerged amidst the growth of global trade. People from different places came to seek fortunes, rendering the boundary between locals and outsiders constantly in flux. We usually stereotyped the workers in Hong Kong before the Second World War as passer-by. They saw mainland China as home (or to be more precise, saw villages in southern China as home), temporarily stayed in Hong Kong for work and would return to their native villages for retirement and death. Such a narrative emphasised that they were bound to return to their home villages and downplayed how their experiences in Hong Kong affected their decisions of leaving or staying. Enduring inequalities in the colonial power relations, people living in Hong Kong once adopted different tactics to struggle for existence. 

Returning to the present, many Hongkongers are migrating overseas and moving between different places more frequently. Despite the historical context varies through time, the mobility of Hong Kong residents is common in past and present. I hope my research can facilitate understanding of the experience of migration and stimulate thinking about opportunities and restraints inherent in it. 

Chinese tenements, the typical type of accommodation for working-class population in colonial Hong Kong (photo from the National Archives, London, CO 129/450, p. 381H (16th December 1918).

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回溯甚麼時候開始對歷史產生興趣並不容易，但還記得小時的我總​對​電視、書本、電子遊戲等各種媒介接觸到的歷史故事着迷不已。直至我在香港中文大學修讀歷史本科時，開始接觸到香港史，同時認識到歷史不只是各種重大的事件，更是與大眾的日常生活切身相關。當時我對城市史、城市規劃史尤其感興趣——香港常被形容為一個自由放任（laissez faire）的城市，但政府、商人卻一直在形塑這個城市的景觀。為此，我在碩士時期撰寫了論文〈新九龍城市規劃與香港殖民管治，1898-1941年〉，探討殖民政府租借新界後，將其中一部份（政府將之命名為「新九龍」）規劃和開發為市區的過程。香港政府並非直接套用英國及其地殖民地的城市規劃模式，而是​就​本地的公共衛生、房地產投機、新界地契條款等問題與地產商協商，在這過程中引入各種城市規劃的實踐。 

完成了碩士論文後，我開始反思，大眾只是被動地按照政府、商人設定的方式在城市空間中生活嗎？我更加希望了解城市居民的生活經驗、個體在歷史中的角色。我在草擬博士研究計劃初時，曾構想研究二十世紀初唐樓住客的生活史，但逐漸注意到當時香港底層居民的流動性——他們從不同地方前來香港謀生，又因各種原因而留下或離去，在香港居住只佔他們生命的一部份。我希望闡明香港的城市生活與移民經驗的關係，因此逐漸訂定目前的研究計劃，暫名為〈在殖民地港口尋覓家園：香港華工的遷移與定居，約1900-1941年〉。在這研究中，我會關注勞工階層移民在港口城市居住、工作、跨境遷移等日常生活的經驗，以及殖民政府及公眾如何討論或處理相關的問題。除了種族、階級之分以外，分別本地人與暫居者的觀念，都使這些討論更形複雜；面對這些話語和實踐上的區分，底層移民處於一種無法安頓下來的狀態，亦以遷移為他們的生存策略。 

為了追尋底層移民的經歷、政府和本地社會如何看待他們，我會考察多種不同的資料。除了透過殖民地檔案了解官員的想法和決策過程、政府和平民的互動之外，我亦會運用報紙雜誌重構普通人的生活，其中特別留意各種案件的報導。在這些案件中，普通人因犯大小罪行而被捕、檢控，同時亦在警察或法庭的審訊下留下了有關他們的思想、行動的文字記錄（儘管這些記錄多以審訊者的觀點記載）。文字記載以外，我亦會考察​​舊照片中的城市環境及生活細節。 

關注工人的流動性有助我們理解工人階層與香港這座城市的複雜關係。像世界各地的港口城市，香港因全球貿易增長而崛起，吸引不同地方的人前來尋找機會，使本地人與外來人的界線持續變動。對於二次世界大戰前來到香港的工人，我們一般認為他們只是過客，以中國大陸為家（更準確地說，以華南地區的農村為家），在香港暫居和工作後便回鄉老死。這樣的說法強調他們必然會回到家鄉，忽略了在香港的際遇如何影響他們的去留、他們如何作出選擇。面對殖民地的權力關係造成的種種不平等，在香港生活的人曾採取的不同策略掙扎求存。 

回到當下，不少香港人移居外地，更頻繁地往返不同地方。具體的歷史脈絡不盡相同，但香港居民的流動性卻是古今相通的。我希望我的研究能促進理解不同歷史時空移民的經驗，思考其中面對的機會和限制。 

On 26th October, we had our second meeting of Network of Early Career Scholars on Hong Kong History. An enjoyable afternoon with Nathanael Lai (University of Cambridge) investigating loans, textbooks, and the Cold War in 1950s Southeast Asia and Hong Kong; Clara Cheung (University of York) tracing the “cultural representations” of Hong Kong and Malaysia in the Commonwealth Institute in London in the 1960s-70s; Allan Pang (University of Cambridge) illustrating the flow of historical knowledge and the colonial response in Hong Kong, Malaya, and Singapore in the 1950s; and Doris Y. S. Chan (Nanyang Technological University) looking into the transfer of Chinese educational knowledge, teachers and students between Hong Kong and North Borneo from around 1950s to early 1960s.

You can find the abstract of the presentation here.

It is always great to meet new friends and exchange ideas. We intend to meet regularly and if you are based in the UK and want to be part of this network, Please write to Prof. Ray Yep, Research Director of Hong Kong History Centre, at rekmy@bristol.ac.uk. The next meeting will probably be in late February or March. 

One of the Centre’s mission is to nurture a new generation of Hong Kong historians.

A Early Career Scholar Network was created under the Hong Kong History Centre in June 2023. It intends to help create a community of Hong Kong historians and offer a platform for face-to-face interaction and academic exchange among young scholars. Research students and fresh doctoral graduates working on socioeconomic, political and cultural history of Hong Kong and its global relevance are welcomed. We usually meet thrice a year (February, June and October) with participants taking turn to present their works in each meeting. Financial support is provided for attending these sessions.

Please write to Prof. Ray Yep, Research Director of Hong Kong History Centre, at rekmy@bristol.ac.uk, if you are interested in joining this Network.

——

In this post, we would like to introduce Phyllis Chan, a member of the Network.

Phyllis Chan is a PhD student in Bristol. In the note written by her below, she shares with us her reflections on her academic journey and current project on nationality and identity. This Chinese version is translated by the Centre staff. 

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As cliché as it is, I have been interested in history as far as I can remember. The obsession started with mummification practices in Ancient Egypt (which was a bit too morbid for my grandparents) and continued through school, where it was always my favourite subject. I then went up to Cambridge to read history. I developed a real fascination of the construction of race, identity, and empire while earning my BA.

In my third year I intended to write my dissertation on the rehabilitation of concentration camp victims in Central Europe, but my Director of Studies rather bluntly told me I did not have the requisite languages required. It was then I started to look closer to home, and ended up writing on ‘The ‘Eurasian’ in the British Far East, 1930-1950’, comparing the historic communities of Eurasians in Hong Kong and in Singapore. I had initially become interested in this subject when attempting to write a novel. When researching my thesis I began to move away from an interest in writing fiction to writing history because I realised that the maxim ’truth is stranger than fiction’ had a lot of resonance. Uncovering and presenting the stories of real people is a different kind of challenge to inventing plausible ones, but it’s something that eventually attracted me more.

In looking at the lived experiences of being of mixed-race Eurasian descent, I found many instances of discrepancies between state perceptions, and people’s own views of themselves (whether by the British or the Japanese). As an example of how perceptions can vary wildly, I once found in a war crimes investigation in which three different statements described one woman as ‘European’, ‘Chinese’, and ‘Eurasian’. This one example really condensed the reality of race as a volatile, constructed category, and so dependent on the similarly unstable perception of what people look like, or are meant to look like. I further explored this pattern in my MPhil thesis on the colonial census in Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements between 1880 and 1941.

The experience of empire and cosmopolitanism in Hong Kong had a very real impact on the way people saw and presented themselves. While previously I focused on the former (i.e. self-identity), I am looking more closely at the latter for my doctoral studies. This is due to an issue I had previously ran into in my research. Ordinary people in Hong Kong around the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rarely left accessible writing on the nuances of how they felt about their identities. What they did leave, however, are their imprints on surviving British colonial documents.

In my project, ‘Ambiguous Nationality: British Subjects of Chinese Descent, 1879-c.1960’, I investigate the reasons for and ways in which individuals from Hong Kong of Chinese descent claimed British nationality. While in theory English common law gave all subjects born within British territories equal legal footing and rights of mobility across the empire, this was not true in reality. Many such subjects had to assert their rights to sceptical colonial officials, and controversial cases often involved consular officials across China as well as the Colonial and Foreign Office in London.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The materials I will use in my project are predominantly colonial official correspondence referring to cases of ambiguous nationality. In the early part of the period (1880s to 1920s) these were usually to do with ethnic Chinese attempting to claim extraterritoriality in the treaty ports. Later, cases were more varied, as more people sought to apply for passports to travel abroad. The postwar period especially saw a range as border controls were instituted between Hong Kong and the mainland. I aim to analyse these cases in a way that uncovers the agency of the individuals concerned, and the ways they articulated their claims. I will contrast this with the official logic and biases of the government to unpack the tensions at hand. 

Today we live in the age of the nation-state, where most people live in a state in which the main criteria for membership is being part of a certain nation. This is so normalised that we forget that, as John Darwin has pointed out, this is a relatively short-term trend in human history. Before the Second World War many people lived in multiethnic empires, where their citizenship did not necessarily correspond to their nationality – even if they had a sense of what ’nation’ actually was. Today, nationality is rarely ambiguous, and many countries cooperate internationally to prevent what is known as ’statelessness’. This was not the case in the period I am looking at. 

With a growing number of Hong Kongers moving to the UK under the BNO visa, there has been an increase in interest in the history of Hong Kong, its people, and British nationality. I hope that my research will encourage people to think of nationality and citizenship as less binary and one-dimensional as they may seem.

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雖然有點陳詞濫調，但從我有記憶開始我就對歷史感興趣。這種情迷始於對古埃及木乃伊製作方法的探究（這對我的祖父母來說有點過於恐怖），並一直持續到上學，歷史總是我最喜歡的科目。後來我去了劍橋大學讀歷史。在獲得學士學位的過程，我對種族、身份和帝國建構的深深著迷。

在學士第三年，我原本打算寫關於中歐集中營受害者的康復，但我的研究指導相當直接地告訴我，我缺乏所需的語言能力。於是，我開始更仔細地研究自己的家鄉，最終寫了名為《英國遠東的「歐亞混血兒」，1930-1950》的論文，比較香港和新加坡歷史上的歐亞混血兒社區。我最初對這個主題感興趣是在嘗試寫小說的時候。在研究論文時，我開始從寫小說的興趣轉向寫歷史，因為「真實比虛構更奇幻」（Truth is stranger than fiction） 這句話對我來說太有共鳴。揭示和呈現真實人物的故事與創造合情理的故事，是截然不同的挑戰，但最終歷史更吸引我。

在研究混血歐亞裔生活經歷時，我發現許多時候國家視野與人們如何看待自己之間有不少差異（無論是英國還是日本政府的觀點）。舉一個國家視野大幅差異的例子，我曾在一份戰爭罪行的調查中找到三種不同的陳述，分別將一名女性描述為「歐洲人」、「中國人」和「歐亞混血兒」。這個例子真實地凝煉了種族作為一個不穩定、建構類別的現實，而且這取決於同樣不穩定，關於人們外貌如何，或外貌應該如何的觀念。我在我的碩士論文進一步探討這種模式，研究了1880年至1941年間香港和海峽殖民地的殖民地人口普查。

香港的帝國和國際經驗對人們看待和呈現自己的方式產生非常實在的影響。雖然之前我專注於前者（即自我認同），但在博士研究，我更仔細地研究後者。這源自於我在過往研究中遇到的問題。十九世紀末和二十世紀初的普羅香港人很少留下他們對自己身份微妙感受，而又可供查閱的文字記錄。他們留下的，是在流傳下來英國殖民地文件上的印記。 

在我的研究計劃——《模糊的國籍：中國裔的英籍人士，1879年至大約1960年》，我調查了來自香港的中國裔聲請英國國籍的原因和方法。儘管理論上英國普通法賦予在英國領土內出生的所有人民平等的法律地位和在帝國範圍內的流動權，但實際上並非如此。許多這樣的人民必須向懷疑他們的殖民官員主張自己的權利，而具爭議性的案例通常涉及中國各地的領事官員和倫敦的殖民地及外交部。

我的計劃將主要使用殖民地官方往來通信，這些通信涉及模糊國籍的案例。在這段時間早期（1880年代至1920年代），這些案例通常涉及中國族裔試圖在條約港口聲請治外法權。後來，案例變得多樣，因為更多人嘗試申請護照出國旅行。戰後時期明顯更多這些案例，因為香港和中國大陸之間實行邊境管制。我打算分析這些案例，揭示個體的能動性以及他們表達主張的方式，將其與政府的官方邏輯和偏見對照，去理解兩者的緊張關係。

今天我們活在民族國家的時代，大多數人生活在一個必須成為某個民族才得以被視為成員的國家裏。這已經成為常態，以至我們忘記了，正如John Darwin指出，這在人類歷史裏是個相當短暫的趨勢。在第二次世界大戰前，許多人生活在多民族帝國中，他們的公民身份不一定對應到他們的民族身份——即使他們大概也對「民族國家」有一定理解。今天，國籍很少會模稜兩可，只且許多國家也在國際間合作，以防止所謂的「無國籍狀態」。但在我研究的時期卻並非如此。

隨著越來越多香港人透過BNO簽證移居英國，人們對香港歷史、香港人以及英國國籍的興趣也愈來愈大。我希望我的研究能鼓勵人們減少以看起來理所當然的二元和單向角度視考國籍與公民身份的問題。

On 8 June, we celebrated the launch of our Network of Early Career Scholars on Hong Kong History, with the first meeting held in Bristol. We were well fed with great ideas from inspiring presentations by Patrick Hao (University of Oxford) delving into Sino-British relations and democratization in late colonial Hong Kong; Gary Wong (University of Leeds) introducing how Hong Kong was being exhibited at the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley, London, 1924-1925; and Gray Sergeant (London School of Economics and Political Science) who is investigating the Hong Kong Working Group and the Making of an Anglo-American Misunderstanding, 1957 – 1961. Florence Mok (Nanyang Technological University) zoomed in to share her experiences of developing her doctoral work into a book.  

You can find the abstract of the presentation here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is always great to meet new friends and exchange ideas. We intend to meet regularly and if you are based in the UK and want to be part of this network, please contact us at hkhistory-centre@bristol.ac.uk. The next meeting will be in October.