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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!

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.

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!

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.

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!