Introducing PGRs/ECRs – Page 3 – Hong Kong History Centre

Introducing Rodney So

viviank on 5 July 20175 July 2017

Rodney So has just submitted his MPhil thesis to the History Department of the Lingnan University of Hong Kong. In this post, Rodney explains to us how he became interested in Hong Kong’s fight against corruption, and talks about the challenges he faced in writing this history:

I am in my second year of MPhil in history at Lingnan University, awaiting my viva in the coming summer. My first encounter with Hong Kong history happened in the second year of my undergraduate study at the University of Hong Kong, when I took a course taught by John Carroll about museum and history, in which I came across with materials about post-war Hong Kong history. I was fascinated by the idea of the emergence of the civic identity shared among the local Chinese. And that was the time when I started to contemplate for a research about the fight against corruption, which played an important role in building the civic identity.

The major focus of my ongoing MPhil project is to find out the political and social context which compelled the colonial government to introduce anti-corruption measures throughout the twentieth century up to the 1970s. It sounds peculiar, but the syndicated corruption was a balanced system which fitted in Colonialism in Hong Kong. The collusion between local triads, the rank and file was, on one hand, a lucrative business providing illegal entertainment which were favourable to local Chinese. On the other hand, it serves as a cost-effective system to maintain public order, which was the essential element for commercial activities to flourish. The syndicated corruption within the Police Force cramped the Force in doing anti-corruption investigations, which allows corruption to embed in various government departments. Despite the distaste of the English speaking circle in Hong Kong towards widespread dishonesty within the colonial administration, they were rather apathetic to sustain a cry for eradication. In the 1960s and 70s, they had bigger worries, such as the Sterling exchange issue and the negotiation about British entry to the EEC. James Fellows’s PhD thesis demonstrates the series of negotiations between the colonial government and the British government to prevent the British entry to the EEC and how it affected the business interest of textile merchants in Hong Kong.

The interesting point is that my research findings contradict to what I expected to find. It was only in the final phase of my research that I realised there has been so many misinterpretations, sometimes deliberately done, by the social media and the PR department of law-enforcing units on this topic. Also, doing research on such a sensitive topic is also, unfortunately, more difficult than I expected, in terms of the availability of sources. I was restrained by the limited primary sources on understanding more about the details of police corruption and scandals. Thus, most of the sources I used in the research are official government documents composed by the Colonial Office and the colonial government. They are useful to analyse the strategy composition of the ruling circle when faced with political predicament. However, I regret that I could not do more, due to the lack of sources, to tackle the question about the discourse of corruption among local Chinese.

Are you also an ECR/postgraduate hoping to let the wider community know about your work on Hong Kong history? If you’re interested in contributing, please write to Vivian Kong (vivian.kong@bristol.ac.uk) for more details!

Introducing Gemma O’Neill

viviank on 2 June 2017

Gemma O’Neill started her PhD at the University of Bristol last September. Here’s Gemma telling us why she decided to put her career on hold to find out how manifestations of a political identity of Hong Kong emerged as early as right after the Second World War. Gemma’s also looking for interviewees who are willing to share with her their experiences of life in late colonial Hong Kong. Please get in touch with Gemma by writing to go16186@bristol.ac.uk if you’re interested!

I came back to academia after ten years of working on China and East Asia, first for BBC Monitoring (part of the BBC World Service) and for the last six years in the research section at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I’ve always had an interest in non-European languages, and after an undergraduate Chinese history module piqued my curiosity, I applied to take an MSc in Chinese and International Relations at the University of Sheffield. But first, I packed my bag and headed off to teach English for a year in Wuhan, central China, to check if I was making the correct decision. Ten years later, including a year studying even more Chinese in Nanjing, and a period heading up the political team at the British Consulate in Guangzhou, I think I did.

My interest in Hong Kong goes back to childhood wonderings about how this far-flung, unfathomably neon city could possibly be British, but it was only during the 2014 universal suffrage protests that my work really developed a Hong Kong element. I set myself an objective to learn as much as possible about how Hong Kong’s colonial past it affects its future, and in so doing decided to put my career on hold and do just that. I applied to the University of Bristol, and to my absolute delight, was accepted.

My topic was inspired by curiosity towards the myriad localist and self-determination groups that came onto the radar in the period running up to the 2014, and beyond. I want to understand the origins of these movements, and to look deeper into the manifestations of a separate political identity that was emerging in Hong Kong from the end of the Japanese occupation until the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984. In particular, I hope to uncover new ways of understanding how society organised itself, politically and administratively, in the Kowloon Walled City, which lay beyond the constraints of formal government.

My project is going to be quite challenging, as I am based in the UK yet intending to focus on the activities of the Hong Kong Chinese, rather than on top-down British policies. To help with this, I have been learning Cantonese and will be taking an intensive course in Hong Kong this summer. I hope that this will help me gain access to a much richer range of sources, including anyone who would be willing to share their experiences of life in late colonial Hong Kong.

Introducing Zardas Shuk-man Lee

viviank on 22 May 201722 May 2017

Our guest writer this week is Zardas Shuk-man Lee, PhD student at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Before her PhD, Zardas completed an MPhil degree with HKU. Her MPhil research was on film censorship in cold war Hong Kong, and yet for her PhD she explores another South East Asian country – Malaya. So we gave Zardas the task of telling us why this switch of topic, and whether she sees any connection between the history of Hong Kong and Malaya. Here’s Zardas fulfilling this task:

I am a year two Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I received my B.A. and M.Phil. degrees (in History) at the University of Hong Kong. When I was an undergraduate, I noticed that many authors of my favorite books either are teaching in the U.S. or received their graduate education there. I also intended to attend more courses before writing my Ph.D. dissertation. Thus, I decided to study at UNC, where there are many amazing scholars in different departments working on Asian, transnational, and global history.

For my M.Phil. research at HKU, I worked on the history of film censorship in Cold War Hong Kong from the late 1940s to 1970s. Through film censorship, my thesis explores how the international Cold War politics and the relationship between the Colonial Office and Hong Kong government shaped the nature of local policy. My thesis also discusses how the censorship authorities in Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements copied policies of each other while occasionally contradicting each other. It is the imperial network between Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements that fascinated me the most. I am not explaining here why I am interested in the network since that would require a psychoanalysis of myself.

Bearing networks in mind, I moved on to study a British scholar-official in Malaya—Victor Purcell—for my M.A. thesis in UNC. Purcell underwent cadet training in Hong Kong and Guangdong in the early 1920s. He was an official of Chinese affairs in various parts of Malaya and the Straits Settlements from the 1920s to 1940s. In the interwar, he traveled to central and southern China for his PhD dissertation. Since the late 1920s, Purcell had been publishing a number of works on Chinese in Southeast Asia, which are still widely cited nowadays.

My M.A. thesis, which I am now editing the final draft, explores how Victor Purcell produced knowledge towards “Chinese” subjects within and beyond the British Empire. My thesis centers upon two issues: what did it mean to Purcell to be a colonial official in British Malaya and what epistemic condition enabled Purcell to think that he was different from typical “Orientalists” even though he was working within the structure of colonialism?

The more I read Purcell’s works, the less I become interested in colonial bureaucracy. The more I interact with people inside and outside the academia in the U.S., the more I am aware of how important it is to study the subalterns in the American/European empires. I have now turned to the Malayans with whom Victor Purcell did and did not interact. I am interested in studying the social imaginaries of the Malayans before the Bandung moment—how the people attempted to transcend the ethnic division (Chinese, Malay, Indian, and so on) made up by Europeans and British colonizers, and how the Malayans struggled against the British Empire. I would reconstruct the networks of anticolonialists that stretched across Malaya, Singapore, India, and some other places from the pre-WWI period to the mid-1950s, and how those networks contributed to anticolonialism in Malaya. While my focus is now on Southeast and South Asia, Hong Kong is still in my mind. After all, nationalists and anticolonialists, such as Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam and Sun Yat Sen of Republican China, had been based in Hong Kong, for example.

Technically, Hong Kong was part of Southeast Asia in the British colonial administration. Government officials from Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, and Borneo often came together and discussed policies. My M.Phil. thesis shows that the governments copied and pasted (with little editing perhaps to avoid plagiarism?) the policies and censorship guides of each other. The connection among Hong Kong and the other British colonies in Southeast Asia was not limited to elite politics. For instance, scholars have been studying the circulation of goods and popular culture, and migration of workers, women, and children from places via Hong Kong to/from Southeast Asia.

Here, I would offer one more example of Hong Kong’s connection with Malaya. Last year, in the National Archives of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur, I was waiting for the photocopy of some files, which made me feel a bit bored. Since the archives has digitalized a good amount of archival materials, I randomly input keywords into the search engine and wanted to see what would come up on the computer screen. The keywords included “Cantonese,” “Chinese,” “Hong Kong,” “schools,” “teachers,” “censors” and some bizzare words that I avoid to disclose here. In any case, when I read the files regarding teachers and schools, I found that middle school teachers from Hong Kong worked in Malaya, perhaps in some sort of exchange program with political agenda. I didn’t have time to go through every page of the files, but I suspected that the teachers from Hong Kong and Malaya might be part of the forces containing nationalist (Kuomintang) and communist influence in British colonies. In short, the connection among British colonies in Southeast Asia, including Hong Kong, was wide-ranging and it deserves more investigation.

It’s been more than fifteen years since historian Tony Ballantyne proposed the concept of “webs of empire” in his Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire. His works, the scholarships on empires in recent two decades, and the works in the fields of transnational and global history have been pushing me to (re)consider the position of Hong Kong in the world.

Introducing Chris Wemyss

viviank on 4 May 2017

This week we have another Bristolian to be a guest writer. Chris Wemyss is now in his second year of PhD at University of Bristol. Chris has been asked way too many times why he’s interested in Hong Kong (of all places!), and why he’s spending three months in this former British colony. He, therefore, decided to explain all these in this blog post:

Born in London, I lived there until I was eighteen, departing to study for a BA in History and Politics at the University of Southampton. My burgeoning interest in History quickly took me to the University of Warwick for an MA in Global History, and on to Bristol for my PhD studies supervised by Professor Robert Bickers and Dr Simon Potter. My fascination with Hong Kong materialised during my undergraduate degree, lying at the intersection of my interests in the British empire, China, and transnationalism. Empire is often seen as distant in the British consciousness, a project pursued by a very different nation, long ago. But in the case of Hong Kong, just twenty years have passed since its formal connection to Britain ceased – an event that occurred during my lifetime, although I was too young to understand the magnitude of the event. Even so, the very recent imperial past in Hong Kong remains fascinating to me, and has inspired my PhD research.

My project looks at British people whose lives became intertwined with late-colonial Hong Kong. I investigate the reasons that brought many different Britons to the territory in the 1980s, the myriad of employment options avaliable to them, their social lives in the city, and how all of this was altered by the 1997 handover. The continued presence of many Britons from this period in Hong Kong forms a visible reminder of the colonial past, but it should not be assumed that things simply carried on as they did before. Changes that occurred in the British community can illuminate the wider themes of British domestic history, decolonisation, globalisation, and migration.

I have recently been in Hong Kong for three months, conducting oral interviews with Britons. This trip, and my research, was made possible with the support of the Worldwide University Network, the Hong Kong History Project, and the Keil Scholarship.

Introducing Bobby Tam

viviank on 19 April 201720 April 2017

In the spotlight this week is Bobby Tam, an MPhil at HKU’s History Department. Bobby’s research explores a ‘dark’ topic: death in early colonial Hong Kong! Here’s Bobby telling us about his very intriguing research:

During my undergraduate study as a history major in HKU, I had the opportunities to learn a wide range of social and cultural history. Death is one of the many social cultural topics that I have developed my interest in. It is also a personal topic that could easily be related to us all. I always like discussing death with others either intellectually or casually. When I was deciding my undergrad dissertation topic, I originally thought of developing a very cultural-oriented study on death, focusing on people’s perception of death and the dead in history. There were indeed classic cultural historical works that studied such topic in details, but strictly focusing on the European context. However, that kind of history was very abstract; it would be difficult for me to gather evidences and generate arguments for this cultural or even emotional historical topic, even if I just focused on the single context of colonial Hong Kong.

With the suggestion of my supervisor, I shifted my research focus on the dead body itself. Looking at how dead bodies were managed and their socio-cultural implications would be a much more concrete topic while my interests in death was not compromised. I briefly studied the management of the dead in early colonial Hong Kong for my undergrad dissertation. I decided to fully explore this large topic of death management in a more comprehensive manner for my MPhil research. Thus, ‘Managing death in early colonial Hong Kong’ is my research topic now. My study will cover the period from 1841 up to the early twentieth century. I utilize colonial government documents, English and Chinese newspapers, maps, church documents and travel diaries as sources. Colonial government documents provide me knowledge about laws regulating death management, development of cemeteries and mortuaries, records of mortality etc. I could gather different people’s opinions on these death-related laws and policies from newspapers. Travel diaries provide me insight into people’s ideas on death spaces and death practices. Church documents provided information about the management of cemeteries. I will also explore other sources from non-governmental bodies like Tung Wah Hospitals and missionaries organizations.

There has been quite a few works that touched upon the topic of death management in early colonial Hong Kong: detailed cemetery studies that derived histories from tombstones, institutional history on associations like Tung Wah Hospitals and medical history on the frequent disease outbreaks throughout the 19th and early 20th century. While these works surely shed light on my research, I think a comprehensive study dedicated to the management of death in early colonial Hong Kong is yet to be written. I hope my work could be comprehensive in the sense of looking both into the physical management of the dead body (keeping, transferring and burying the dead) and the cultural memorial practices for the deceased. Although my focus would be the on the physical management side, cultural practices would always be within my discussion as physical death management was inevitably linked with cultural beliefs and practices. My research thus could start from empirical evidence to more abstract ideas on cultures and emotions, fulfilling my original interests in cultural history of death.

I wish my work could also contribute to the history of early colonial Hong Kong itself, facilitating understanding of the colonizers’ mentality, the colonized’s agency and power relations within the colonial society. Death management in a colonial society dictated by the colonial state certainly raised the issue of segregation. My topic deals with the complex question of segregation, exploring through the lens of races, classes and cultures. Other common themes in early colonial Hong Kong history are also incorporated into my research. The dichotomy of ‘Western Modernity’ including public sanitation, medical advances and affective emotions to the dead versus ‘Chinese cultural practices’ that were deemed as superstitious, backward and lack of affection was a key theme in my study. This can further lead me to analyze the colonial ‘Orientalist’ discourse on the Chinese death practices. I could often see links of how the colonizers’ policies on death management and such ‘Orientalist’ discourse reinforced each other.

Looking ahead, just as many other postgraduate students, I am uncertain about where my research would lead me to for my future career. I do hope this research opens me up not just to history of death or Hong Kong history, but also to wider colonial history and social cultural history as I believe my interests are wide-ranging.

Introducing James Fellows

viviank on 6 April 2017

This week we have a freshly minted Dr. to tell us about his way into Hong Kong history. James Fellows just finished his PhD on issues of free trade in Hong Kong and decolonization at Lingnan University in Hong Kong a few months ago. Here is James generously sharing with us some of his research findings and his future research plan:

I stumbled into Hong Kong history by way of my research into an incident in British-Chinese diplomacy. For my MA thesis, which I completed at the University of York, I started by investigating Britons in China during the Cultural Revolution. In doing so, I learned of the case of Anthony Grey – a Reuters journalist who had been imprisoned in Beijing from 1967 to 1969. Although his arrest was a diplomatic matter for the Chinese and British governments, I discovered that his imprisonment was in retaliation for the arrest of communist journalists in Hong Kong, for their alleged part in the 1967 disturbances in the colony. The Hong Kong government were therefore embroiled in the issue, and it became not just a matter of negotiation between Britain and China, but between the British and Hong Kong governments. British diplomats stationed in China urged concessions for the sake of Grey, but the colonial government – having been given complete autonomy to handle the disturbances – were unwilling to overturn the arrests. The British government, under strain to secure Grey’s release, pressured Governor David Trench to reduce the sentence of a jailed journalist in Hong Kong, following indications from Beijing that this would bring Grey’s freedom.

The thesis, which became a journal article, ultimately used the case as a means to understanding colonial autonomy, and the nature of Hong Kong’s relationship to Britain at a time when the empire was unwinding. This was an area of enquiry I wished to continue with. With a background also in economics, I formed an interest in Hong Kong’s postwar textile industry, and how its success brought a protectionist backlash as countries scrambled to defend their own industries from what they deemed as unfair competition from Hong Kong – they argued through sweatshop labour and the mislabelling of goods produced across the border. I felt the topic was underexplored, given the importance of the textile industry to Hong Kong’s postwar economic boom, and the fact that quotas became a consistent feature of the colony’s postwar experience. Of particular interest to me was the fact that Britain was the first to impose restrictions – albeit using a “voluntary” agreement – from 1959. My PhD thesis, which I recently finished at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, uses the textile restrictions, along with other issues such as British attempts to enter the European Economic Community from 1961, as a means for exploring the relationship between trade and decolonisation from the 1950s to the 1980s. I argue that the divergence of Hong Kong’s and Britain’s economic interests, and the autonomy sought by the colony to safeguard their own interests in response, showed that imperial ties weakened even as Hong Kong remained politically subordinate to Britain.

As decolonisation is not always a tangible process or one reflected in policy changes, but also in the attitudes of colonial officials or others with authority, I was keen to analyse the rhetoric surrounding these issues. This is also led to the tracing of how certain narratives regarding Hong Kong’s economy and its governance proliferated and became entrenched. Hong Kong’s government and business groups employed public relations initiatives and commercial diplomacy in attempts to reduce barriers to trade, and maximise access to export markets. Their efforts produced conceptualised images of Hong Kong, including the fundamental importance of free trade to Hong Kong’s economic wellbeing and political stability. Yet these narratives also served to legitimise the colonial government: the colonial government’s commitment to economic and social non-intervention – with a few key exceptions such as refugee resettlement – is posited as having underpinned Hong Kong’s success not only as a trading post, but also as a manufacturing base.

The final chapter of my thesis is an investigation into the how the pending expiry of the New Territories lease was approached in Hong Kong. I argue that China’s market reforms and Hong Kong’s role in the economic transformation of Guangdong were highly pertinent to how the issue of the lease expiry was approached, and that economic reorientation towards China combined with Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy made the prospect of a transfer of political power less dramatic than it may have otherwise been. The issue of Hong Kong’s economic integration with mainland China, which has accelerated since 1997, is one with a great deal of contemporary relevance; some in Hong Kong have pointed to the social consequences of this process for Hong Kong residents, and its implications for Hong Kong’s autonomy in relation to Beijing. It is this area that I hope to do further research. If given the chance I hope to investigate the spread of Hong Kong’s cross-border economic flows from the 1980s onwards, as a means to understanding both the transition period and the importance of these developments to current issues for Hong Kong.

Introducing Justin Wu

viviank on 26 March 201726 March 2017

We are happy to have a young scholar across the pond to be our guest writer this week. Justin Wu is now doing his PhD with the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Here’s Justin telling us about his academic background and current research interests:

My interest in academic work started not in the field of history but psychology. When I began my undergraduate study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, I was interested in cultural differences, stereotypes, and human motivation. By chance, I enrolled in a modern history course to satisfy a humanities requirement, yet I realized that the study of history actually touched upon these aspects but in a drastically different way. I continued to pursue both disciplines and completed my BS degree, double majoring in psychology and history.

I began my Ph.D. study at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, USA, in 2014, focusing on modern East Asian history. My research interests include nationalism, identity formation, and social movements in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and China in the twentieth century. I completed my MA thesis in 2016. My thesis looked at how a growing sense of Hong Kong identity emerged among the college student population in the late-1960s, with the Cultural Revolution and the 1967 Riots in the background. For my Ph.D. project, I turn to anti-Japanese sentiments in the 1970s. I hope to explore the conception of Chineseness through anti-Japanese rhetoric among the (broadly defined) ethnic Chinese population in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States.

Introducing Catherine Chan

viviank on 7 March 2017

Sorry that the blog has been a bit inactive for a while! But the wait is finally over – we are delighted to announce that the blog is starting a new series of posts introducing young scholars in the field. We thought it’d be a great idea to know more about new studies being done on Hong Kong history, and in the next few months the blog will act as a platform for PGRs/ECRs to showcase their work. If you’re interested to contribute, please write to Vivian Kong (vivian.kong@bristol.ac.uk) for more details!

This week we have Bristol’s very own Catherine Chan, the Project’s second beneficiary, to tell us about what leads to her interest in the Portuguese community in colonial Hong Kong.

I was born in Hong Kong and although I have no memory of it, took my first plane ride to Manila at forty-days old and grew up in the middle of coconut trees, pandesal and OPM (Original Pinoy Music). Moving to Hong Kong at the age of fifteen, I completed my BA and MPhil degrees in History at the Hong Kong Baptist University. I currently reside in Bristol where I am a PhD student at the University of Bristol under the Hong Kong History Project. Supervised by Robert Bickers, my thesis focuses on the Portuguese community in colonial Hong Kong, specifically on questions of administration, race and identity.

Growing up in two very different Asian cities has certainly sparked my interest in identity formation and mixed-race communities. Manila always will contain pieces of my laid-back childhood and schizophrenic Filipino, Taiwanese and Fukien education. Hong Kong was initially a challenge linguistically and culturally but my experience there has made me who I am today. I constantly find myself caught between two worlds (and now, perhaps three) and the Portuguese in my thesis similarly existed in multiple worlds situated in Lisbon, Goa, Macao and Hong Kong and later Osaka and/or Manila. In Hong Kong, they straddled between the Asian and European worlds and some fought in challenging the color bar set by the British administration. The Portuguese experience sheds light on identity negotiation. It reminds us that simultaneously, identity is race, culture, memories and policies; spaces, places, smells and sounds; assurance, self-doubt, confidence and conflict. As a melting pot and a flourishing port city, Hong Kong offered quite an urban space for racial debates and identity reconstruction during the colonial period.

Hong Kong is at present in a scramble to find a collective identity. This has led to a rapid deconstruction of Hong Kong history and a re-interpretation of historical events and of architectural heritage. I believe it is equally crucial to understand both the city’s past and its contemporary imaginations of ‘Hong Kong.’ Like identity, there should always be an accurate past to forge a new and hopefully, stronger identity. With my current and future projects, I wish to contribute to Hong Kong’s search for an identity, particularly in preserving the past as a foundation in understanding ‘Hong Kong’ and its recent transformations. I look forward to writing for the Hong Kong History Project and exchanging views with readers from all around the world.

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