Category: Uncategorized

Introducing Thomas M. Larkin

viviank on

Sorry that it took us a while to resume our publishing routine! This week we have Bristol’s very own Thomas M. Larkin to tell us his fascinating research. Supported by the Augustine Heard Studentship within the Hong Kong History Project at University of Bristol, Thomas works on Anglo-American relations in 19th century China, and aims to find out how trade competition between the two communities influenced the development of Hong Kong society.

 

 

Thomas Larkin

I sort of side-stepped into the study of Chinese history. York University, where I completed my BA and MA, has a strong multidisciplinary community of scholars focusing on South and East Asia, so I was spoiled for choices on what to study. I was originally drawn to Edo-period Japan and the Dutch trade at Dejima. I was gently nudged by my professors, however, into the study of China. This new focus quickly developed into a wide range of interests, spanning from the early Qing Empire to the rise of the Chinese Communist Party. Identifying just one topic to focus on within such a vast timeframe has been the real challenge.

 

The choice was made a bit easier by my undergraduate experiences. In the course of my studies I had to opportunity to take a year in Hong Kong. Like many before me, I became swept up in the distinctly Hong Kong culture, food, and aesthetic. I inevitably met a number of expatriates during my brief time in the city. Each time I felt the urge to ask what has become a nagging question whenever I see expatriates in any part of the world to this day: “How and why did you end up here?” This fascination in the origins and legacies of expatriate communities has expanded more broadly into an interest in how cultures interact and selectively borrow from each other, and how prejudices and socio-cultural hierarchies are developed, maintained, or transcended.

The Augustine Heard Studentship at the University of Bristol has offered the perfect opportunity to explore some of the themes outlined above. My topic, investigating nineteenth century Anglo-American (and to an extent Sino-American and Sino-British) relations in the Pearl River Delta, addresses the ways distinct expatriate communities interacted in Canton and Hong Kong in a shifting regional and global context. The project aims to understand the ways expatriate communities were shaped by their uniquely cross-cultural experiences, and how they conformed to or deviated from the political, cultural, and social norms of their home countries. The stipulations of the studentship necessitate the use of the Augustine Heard archives at Harvard University, and as such I hope to demonstrate that commercial entities such as a company can provide windows into the social histories of places of contact such as Hong Kong.

The purpose of the Augustine Heard Studentship is to promote the study of Anglo-American relations in China, making use of the Augustine Heard records in the Baker Library Special Collections at Harvard Business School. This is a vast (almost too vast) archive of material containing the business records of the American company Augustine Heard & Co., the Forbeses, and the various captains, free traders, and partners associated with the firm. The collection holds thousands of records from the family and their associates, touching upon everything from orders for tailored pants from a favourite shop in Boston to gunboat diplomacy and trade with Hong Xiuchuan and the Taiping. The company operated in Canton, Hong Kong, Japan, and many of the treaty-ports in China, and the Heard brothers were first-hand witnesses to just about every major event in 19th century Chinese history. Continued work with these archives has the potential to augment our understanding of Sino-Western interaction, offering a fresh perspective to a narrative typically approached through a British lens.

By studying a company like Augustine Heard & Co., we gain crucial insight into the ways commercial practices influenced societal norms. The most visible of company employees were the partners, who occupied an elite place in society and tended to spend lavishly. But China-trade companies were also made up of clerks, accountants, compradors, shroffs, and coolies. They employed captains, sailors, architects, builders, pilots, and supercargos. Their Western employees brought their families over, kept mistresses, formed strategic business ties (or rivalries) and generally became an integral part of the social fabric of Hong Kong. The study of a company, not as an empirical unit of commercial success or failure, but as a system peopled by individuals of various ethnicities and classes, reveals the ways society and culture in a place such as Hong Kong were at least partially the products of these seemingly impersonal entities.

Katon Lee looking for interviewees for HK suit culture, 1950s-80s

viviank on

一則來自英國布里斯托大學歷史系博士候選人李啟雋（Katon Lee）有關口述訪問的信息：

您好！我正埋首於有關1950至80年代香港華人西裝文化的研究。如果您（或您的親朋好友）知道有關香港裁縫、裁縫商店的故事，或曾在港訂造西裝，我誠邀您與我分享您的寶貴故事。我現身處香港，可與您在港見面傾談，如不方便會面，亦可透過Skype以網上訪問。

如對我的研究有任何疑問，歡迎發電郵至katon.lee@bristol.ac.uk。期待您的分享和回覆！

This week we have a message from Katon Lee, history PhD student at the University of Bristol, seeking oral history interviewees for his research:

Hi all, I am currently doing a project about Hong Kong suit culture. My project aims to use suits as a case study to reveal the reshaping of Chinese society and culture under colonial influence from the 1950s to the 1980s. I would definitely love to hear from you if you (or your family and friends) know anything about tailors and tailoring businessmen or have any experiences of buying suits in Hong Kong, particularly from the 1950s to the 1980s. We could arrange a face-to-face meeting as I am currently in Hong Kong for research, or a Skype meeting if you prefer going online. If you have any questions about my research project, please feel free to contact me via katon.lee@bristol.ac.uk. I sincerely look forward to your precious and fascinating stories!

 

Vaudine England on writing a company’s history

viviank on

BY VAUDINE ENGLAND

At first glance, a history of a company best known for selling building products, especially sanitary ware, might seem a little dull. This was not a big name like Jardines or Swires; not even Dodwells or Gibb Livingston. This was Arnhold & Company. Looking back at the nineteenth century you won’t even find such a firm, but you will find Arnhold, Karberg & Co, and indeed, they are direct relatives, one growing out of the other.

 

This gives the first hint of an interesting story — who were Mr Arnhold and Mr Karberg and what happened to them? And why did the company have to change its name? In fact, it changed at least four times over its existence, depending how you define the word ‘change’, and that’s not including the brief period it was publicly listed as i-Onyx.

Luckily, this company has a current patriarch, Michael Green, who was personally enthusiastic about all the ups and, more importantly, the downs of the company. He has told a fantastic story, unafraid of exposing failings or crises, and personally encouraging the discovery of much that was not known about his company’s past.

What makes Arnholds fascinating is that it has lived through interesting times. Arnholds, Karberg & Co was founded in Hong Kong in 1866, with a branch office in Canton opened a year later. The young men involved came from Northern German and Danish Jewish families and already had experience working in silk from Canton. They soon expanded to Shanghai and beyond, and diversified beyond silk into manufacturing machinery and products, bringing part of Europe’s industrial revolution eastwards.

Then World War One began, and being a German company in British Hong Kong suddenly became impossible. All German firms were liquidated, and Germans interned, often breaking up close friendships and ruining lives. From 1914 to 1918, Harry and Charles Arnhold, sons of the firm’s founder Jacob Arnhold, were busy ducking and weaving, desperately trying to find ways to save the business. They managed it — although some of their competitors never quite forgave them for their clever dealing — only to be taken over by Sir Victor Sassoon in Shanghai.

Again, those interesting times intervened — the bombing of Shanghai by Japan in 1937, the onset of expanded war by 1941, internment of the Arnholds and many others, and the slow death of all foreign firms in China after 1949 and the flight back to Hong Kong. By then, a bright young engineer called Maurice Green had risen through the ranks enough to be able to get control of the flailing firm in Hong Kong in the 1950s, and Arnholds has been run by the Green family ever since.

How does one find out what actually happened in places which have been dragged through such revolutionary change that few records survive? The answer in this case was the London Metropolitan Archives near Roseberry Avenue in London, and of course the National Archives at Kew. That’s after spending time in the Carl T. Smith Collection, and tracking down long-forgotten descendants by knocking on deserted doors in deepest Sussex.

For me, the realities of a trading company on the nineteenth century China Coast required a crash course on Treaty Ports. Beyond all that faded grandeur of large old mansions and godowns in far-flung towns, it was necessary to learn what was actually traded (I’m still not absolutely certain what strawbraid is), how it worked in all its very many variations, and how the conditions and personalities in these places changed over time. Just as it takes only a bit of colonial history reading to find out how vastly different each colony was from the next, so too with treaty ports.

There remains a wealth of business history to be done with these and other little-used resources. Using a company as a red thread which one follows through a range of strange places and events is yet another way to tell history. In this case, it meant that a cold case file could be opened and, for now, closed, having told the firm’s owners many things about their company and its interesting times that they never knew. Hopefully others will explore the many more old firms and families whose daily lives and travails help illuminate the past.

 

HKHP Talk: ‘A System Apart? Hong Kong’s Political Economy from 1997’

viviank on

‘A System Apart? Hong Kong’s Political Economy from 1997’ by Simon Cartledge
1 February 2018, 6-7 pm
Venue: LT2, Arts Complex, University of Bristol

Since 1997, Hong Kong’s economic growth rate has dropped sharply, inequality has increased, and corruption has found its way to the highest levels of government. These changes can in good part be attributed to the city’s ‘pro-business’ constitution, which has held back change and led to the rise of anti-establishment, localist opposition.

Drawing on the arguments of his book, A System Apart, traces the interplay of Hong Kong’s economy, society, politics and relations with the rest of China over the last twenty years – and where this leaves this leave the city today.

Biography

Simon Cartledge is the founder of Hong Kong-based publishing and research company Big Brains and a former Editor-in-Chief, Asia for the Economist Intelligence Unit. He has lived in Hong Kong for more than twenty-five years.

For further details, please see here.

Introducing Kaori Abe

viviank on

Kaori Abe is a former postdoctoral fellow of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and has a PhD in History from the University of Bristol. Her main research areas are the history of Hong Kong, modern China and the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Don’t forget to check out her book Chinese Middlemen in Hong Kong’s Colonial Economy, 1830–1890 if you’re interested in her fascinating research on compradors in Hong Kong!

I was not planning to research the history of Hong Kong when I started to write my undergraduate thesis at the International Christian University of Tokyo. At that time, I had just returned to Japan from a year abroad programme in Hong Kong.

I enjoyed my stay in Hong Kong, as it was my first time living abroad. Dorm, or hall, life was particularly memorable. I had the opportunity to study, live, and socialise with local students. These students, the young elite of Hong Kong, were good at adopting new technologies, informal and formal networking, learning different languages, and organising activities and societies.

The culture, society, and people of Hong Kong fascinated me. However, I knew that I was too passionate about these things to conduct research related to Hong Kong. An effective researcher should be able to observe and analyse his/her research subject from a neutral perspective.

Therefore, I submitted my research proposal on another area of modern Chinese history to my undergraduate supervisor. My supervisor looked over my research plan, returned it to me, and said, ‘Your proposal looks okay, but is it really the topic you’re interested in?’ I told him that I was interested in the history of Hong Kong, but I did not want to do research on it, because I could not be objective. My supervisor answered, ‘It’s fine. It’s OK to choose a topic about which you are passionate and emotional’.

This was the beginning of my now ten-year career as a Hong Kong history researcher. After completing my undergraduate course in Japan, I moved to the UK, studied the history of modern China and British Empire, and read a PhD in History at the University of Bristol under the supervision of Professor Robert Bickers. Last year, I published the book Chinese Middlemen in Hong Kong’s Colonial Economy, 1830–1890 (Routledge, 2017), which was based on my PhD dissertation on compradors in nineteenth century Hong Kong.

Compradors (買辦 maiban in Chinese) were Chinese middlemen working with foreign institutions and individuals in nineteenth and twentieth century China. The opening of treaty ports in China after the end of the Opium War in 1842 provided new business opportunities in the Chinese market for foreign companies. Similarly, this opening also provided economic opportunities for Chinese individuals interested in foreign markets and foreign companies. Many foreign firms in China hired local Chinese agents who were able to speak English or other European languages, as well as having business skills and a wide commercial network with other Chinese merchants. These individuals were often hired under the occupational title of ‘comprador’.

In the history of Hong Kong, compradors played key functions in the establishment of social institutions including the Tung Wah Hospital and the Po Leung Kuk (the Society for the Protection of Women and Children), together with other leading figures of the local Chinese community during the late nineteenth century.

Why did I focus on compradors? Firstly, compradors, in some ways, resembled the young students I met during my exchange programme in Hong Kong. Like the students I met, compradors embodied many attributes of the contemporary Hong Kong business elite. Present-day attributes of the Hong Kong business elite, such as the intermediation of Sino-foreign business, family-run companies, corruption, and philanthropy, could all be seen amongst compradors in nineteenth century Hong Kong.

There is also a lack of comprehensive research on compradors in Hong Kong. Many preceding works on the history of Hong Kong mention famous compradors such as Robert Hotung, financial magnate and Eurasian comprador to Jardine, Matheson & Co., and Kwok Acheong, comprador to the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company and successful shipping merchant. These preceding works highlight that compradors constituted an important component of the Chinese elite in late nineteenth century Hong Kong. However, existing research has not fully explained why and how the compradors became indispensable economic middlemen by the 1870s and 1880s.

Through researching compradors in nineteenth century Hong Kong, I found that the comprador system was much more diverse than I had originally thought. For instance, some compradors worked for the colonial government and were different from commercial compradors. Most research argues that compradors were influential Chinese economic middlemen serving foreign companies, not official institutions. The diversity of compradors in Hong Kong prompts another question: ‘Who were the compradors in modern China?’, which suggests that further research is necessary. There should be more research into compradors operating in South East Asia and East Asia, outside of China.

Conducting research on intermediaries also enables us to understand the histories of nations, empires and cities from fresh perspectives. The voices of marginal actors, like compradors and local ‘collaborators’, has been silenced or labelled ‘unpatriotic’ in national histories. Focusing on knowledge exchange, and the movement of people and commodities, transnational and global history highlight the trans-national and trans-regional networks of overseas Chinese merchants and workers, whose narratives are not included in national histories. Similar to transnational and global history, the history of intermediaries also provides a voice to local, marginal actors who had previously been granted less attention and reveals the social, economic, and cultural realities that had been masked in national histories.

My next research project will focus on the decline of the compradors in twentieth century Hong Kong. My book analysed how compradors rose in Hong Kong, though it did not explain how they gradually lost their significance during the twentieth century. I will investigate what happened to compradors during the rise of Chinese nationalism, communism, and the decline of the British Empire, along with Japanese imperial expansion and the growth of the United States.

I’m also interested in the careers of shipwrecked Japanese sailors in nineteenth century China. The records on these individuals are sparse, but I am interested in how they worked with British merchants, missionaries, and diplomats in the Pearl River Delta, both before and after the end of Japan’s closed-door (鎖国 sakoku) policy.

Edward Vickers on the History of Education in Hong Kong

viviank on

 

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.

 

HKHP Interviews: Christopher Munn

viviank on

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

viviank on

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.

Introducing Nele Fabian

viviank on

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

viviank on

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.