Tag: British Empire

How and Why a Fresh Start to the Study of Hong Kong History Is Being Made

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By Vaudine England.

A dear friend and colleague from a past journalistic life — educated, erudite and well-informed — delighted in saying: ‘I hate history!’ Why bother with stories of days gone by when so much is happening, right now? she asked. She would only allow tales from the past if they carried direct relevance to the here and now; it was not a bad discipline after all.

So when the idea for a new, revitalised and freshly funded approach to studying Hong Kong’s history came up, it seemed worthwhile. Because if there was ever a time when the history of Hong Kong should be looked at anew, it is now.

Thanks to funding from the Hatton Trust, the Hong Kong History Project was established in January 2015. It is based at Bristol University under Professor Robert Bickers, with a link to HKU’s history department, and aims to stimulate new research into many aspects of Hong Kong’s under-covered past. It fundings young Hong Kong students’ PhDs, and has begun a series of international seminars of experts on Hong Kong to see where the gaps are and where fresh work should be focused.

It also has a website: hkhistory.net, which carries a Bibliography on Hong Kong Studies, and regular ruminations on aspects of Hong Kong’s past. This is only the beginning. With more funding hoped for, and a growing critical mass of scholars and writers turning their attention to post-Occupy Hong Kong, the project has legs and will run.

Dr Ron Zimmern of the Hatton Trust said: ‘Hong Kong is what it is today as a consequence of its history. The 100 years since 1850 was a formative period, where many individuals and families contributed to its success, and one where much remains to be researched and discovered.’

But why bother with history here, and why now? Because it is ‘contested’, as academics love to say. Amid the current battle for hearts and minds, we are being bombarded with new versions of Hong Kong’s history, directly linked to notions of what might or might not be our future.

From the north comes the mantra that Hong Kong ‘has always been a Chinese city’, or is ‘just a Chinese city’. The tale is of humiliation by rapacious Westerners and the resurgence of Chinese pride through the communist victory of 1949, culminating in the joyous return of Hong Kong to the motherland. The old-fashioned British narrative wasn’t much better. It would have defended the British empire in all its wonders to behold, its allegedly beneficent pursuit of ‘free trade’, its brilliant contributions of justice, faith and charity.

The problem for post-1945, and particularly for post-1949 Hong Kongers is that there have been few versions of history in the popular imagination that steer a path between these two dead ends.

There is a Hong Kong history, about, by and for Hong Kongers, but it struggles to be heard as old imperialisms joust over past humiliations and conquests. It lies in the details of Hong Kong’s actual lived pasts, its peoples and families, the conflicts and compromises of communities.

Carl Smith made a start on this when he set to work collating index cards on every person of the China Coast, not only the foreigners but all the varied Hong Kong people who made this place their home. Who actually were the people of Hong Kong, why and how did they get there, how did they get ahead, how did they live together. After Carl Smith came Dr Elizabeth Sinn, still the doyen of Hong Kong history, and scholars such as Christopher Munn, Jung-fang Tsai, John Carroll, Tak-wing Ngo and more.

Great stories languish untold from our past, and special individuals, such as Daniel Caldwell the British interpreter who actually married his Chinese love, instead of just keeping a concubine; or Sir Hormusjee Mody, the Parsee millionaire who made the University of Hong Kong a reality; or Ng Akew, the ‘protected’ woman who became a property-owning businesswoman; or Mr Belilios, the Jewish eccentric who commuted by camel and founded schools for girls. The list of incredible Hong Kong characters could go on and on.

Lots of ordinary people built daily lives of compromise in neighbourhoods such as Taipingshan or Shek Tong Tsui that were home to South Asian seamen and Chinese pig-traders, to Muslim Malay traders, Irish policemen and Australian ship pilots. This was a rich world far more interesting and diverse than simple ideas of a British colony, or a Chinese city. Hong Kong was also a haven for the Philippine independence government in exile under Aguinaldo in the 1890s, an inspiration and source of funds for republican revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, and would soon save the life of Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh when France wanted his head in the 1940s. It has long been the channel between South East Asia and China, for people and wealth in both directions.

Leading Eurasian figures and some Chinese had joined the motley mix of Baghdadi jews, Scots, Bombay Parsees, English and Irishmen and Calcuttan traders in the highest councils of government as well as trade by the early 20th century. After Ng Choy came names such as Robert Kotewall, Lo Man-wai and Shouson Chow. The mixing had been there from the start in trade, in sport and at the freemasons lodge. Now it was sanctified by government. Dynasties were beginning to emerge, as were divisions, within the Chinese and Eurasian communities and, perhaps least understood, within the world seen from the outside as ‘British’.

The more one attempts to define that word, the harder it becomes. Sir Paul Chater was simply the biggest man around town from the late 19th and into the twentieth century. He devised the Praya Reclamation scheme which created the Central Business District and then did the same for Wanchai (Praya East). He co-founded Hongkong Land, the Hongkong and Kowloon Wharf and Godown Company, Hongkong Electric, the Jockey Club, and more. He was chairman of the Hong Kong Club and knighted by the Queen. Yet in the 1920s, when Governor Cecil Clementi was lunching with him, the Governor’s ADC Charles Drage (later working for British intelligence) referred to Chater in his diary as ‘that coloured magnate’.

The so-called British hong, or trading company, Hongkong Land had, for the first full half century of its existence, no Englishman on its board of directors. There was always one Scotsman from Jardines, but every other figure — for 50 years — was Parsee, Jewish, Armenian or Eurasian.

In 1940, the Hong Kong government suddenly ordered all ‘British’ women and children onto ships to be evacuated via Manila to Australia. But what about the wives of Portuguese, Eurasian or Chinese volunteers in the Hong Kong Regiment? Many had British passports but were somehow not British enough. Assumptions about colour are not enough to explain this; it was about identity in the broadest sense, suddenly squeezed into a bureaucratic straitjacket. This, incidentally, is the subject chosen by the first Hong Kong History Project beneficiary in Bristol, Vivian Kong.

When Hong Kong faced the Japanese invasion in World War Two, Eurasian, Chinese, and Portuguese Volunteers fought heroically for Hong Kong. They saw their own communities divided between those who fled to Free China in Chungking as resistance fighters, and those who stayed in Hong Kong to later face charges of collaboration for leading Chinese community relations with the occupying Japanese power. Names such as Kotewall and Chow were later exonerated by the British, who stressed they had asked their local colleagues to deal with the Japanese for the benefit of occupied Hong Kong. British colony though it was, people of many races and nationalities chose to fight and died for it. Britain for all its faults did leave behind a more open society; arguably, from recent events, this is more revolutionary, its impacts only beginning to mature.

So was the colonial era all completely bad? Surely the verdict is mixed. (Its postal boxes are rather cute too.) Is Hong Kong just a Chinese city? Not exactly that either.

So here’s another version of our history: this place became a city because foreigners came, along the trading routes linking Europe, Eurasia, east Africa, the Malabar coast, through the spaghetti junction of South East Asia, to China and beyond. World trade linked those adventurers to Chinese intermediaries, in Canton and other coastal centres. A couple of decades later, more respectable Chinese come to Hong Kong to get a life in this polyglot town. They came to escape unrest and distress on the mainland. They still do. Then, the Free Port, and the freedom to live relatively untrammelled lives in more secure surroundings was key. They came because Hong Kong was not China.

Fast forward to the 1980s-90s, which the writer/investigator Stacy Mosher called that ‘golden period when Hong Kong was no longer a colony and not yet an SAR – when it was a “territory” in which the native-born had recently become the majority, and had come to think of themselves first and foremost as “Hong Kong people”.’

That’s when a lot of Hong Kong parents were getting together to start having some of the children who are now winning district council seats under a yellow umbrella.

Now say history doesn’t matter.

***

This article originally appeared as ‘Great Stories Languish Untold from Hong Kong’s Past’ in The Correspondent (January-Februar 2006), 33-35.

Lethbridge Onward

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By Vaudine England

Lethbridge’s article, ‘The Yellow Fever’, had concluded with an image of how the different, mostly non-Chinese peoples of Hong Kong interacted, or not:

‘The full flavour of the European community is to be savoured at a gala occasion… at the City Hall. Then the various layers, tier upon tier, are exhibited in the foyer: befurred and bejewelled Continentals, leading matriarchs, gilded youths and bright young girls back from Swiss finishing schools — the whole range from taipan to pong paang. It is only then that one notices the heterogeneity and subdivisions of the European community and the fact that once dispersed each group goes its separate way and will rarely coalesce with others again. There are many social circuits in Hongkong — few connect. If they are brought together, it is by crisis or ritual…’

As within such groups, so it was between this and larger, other groups.

That clear delineations existed between different racial groups in Hong Kong has been and remains clear however. More than 98 percent of the Hong Kong population has been, and remains, Chinese. Within that term are of course many further variations, between Cantonese, and many other Chinese sub-groups and languages. As Professor Bickers notes in his Scramble for China, diving deeper into the divisions within shows that once the Treaty Port system and British extra-territoriality was established, some Chinese chose to take British papers for practical benefits. Many Chinese living elsewhere under British rule, especially in South East Asia, followed the opportunities under British rule back to the the Chinese mainland. They faced not only prejudice but exclusion at the hands of their fellow ethnic Chinese, and could sometimes leapfrog those compatriots by virtue of British rule.

Beyond the Chinese, since 1841, substantial groups of Europeans, Indians, Portuguese, Malays, Americans and others have co-existed, along with a growing Eurasian community. Within each of these groups, divisions exist too. Even to this day, some expatriate British people believe their experience of Hong Kong — privilege on the Peak, government housing, servants, boarding school and holidays in the East — is the universal expatriate experience. Instead it was and is perhaps the minority. Through the tales of the ordinary lives, a far richer story would emerge.

At some point in any study of Hong Kong’s racial and cultural mix, that idea of ‘melting pot’ has also to be tackled. While busy looking at Eurasians, the clearest example of cross-cultural mixing available, the melting pot idea seems to work. (Within the Eurasian community too existed virulent divisions and competition between leading figures and families, which have affected how its history has been written to this day.)

Beyond that small group however, does the mixing idea hold? Stephen Fisher in his 1975 thesis is quite firm: ‘Hong Kong has never been, and never will be, a melting-pot of these ethnic groups’ (p. 9).

Instead, the model is that of the plural society, first and best espoused by J.S. Furnivall in his Colonial Policy and Practice in 1948. This is where distinct ethnic groups maintain their own ethnic identify, cultural traits and social institutions. While co-existing alongside each other, they do not integrate with each other. To this day, debate is fast and furious on whether this is a good or bad thing – should we all try (pretend?) to be just like each other or able to become just like each other, to fulfil some ideal of universal culture? A kind of political correctness is sometimes attached to having friends of many colours or cultures, regardless of how deep or sincere is the link.

Furnivall had no such illusions in an earlier era. Surveying what he called the ‘medley of peoples’, including indigenous, Indian, Chinese and European, in colonial societies of Burma and Java, he wrote:
‘It is in the strictest sense a medley, for they mix but do not combine. Each group holds by its own religion, its own culture and language, its own ideas and ways. As individuals they meet, but only in the market place, in buying and selling. There is a plural society, with different sections of a community living side by side, but separately, within the same political unit. Even in the economic sphere there is a division of labour along racial lines’ (1948, p. 304).
Fisher says Smith’s contribution to the definition was in the primary role he gave to institutions in forming those separate communities, and in further clarifying that ‘in a plural society, the political rule or rather domination, is exercised by a culturally distinct minority’ (Fisher, p. 12).

SOURCES:

Bickers, Robert. The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914. London: Allen Lane, 2011 (and Penguin 2012).

Lethbridge, Henry. ‘The Yellow Fever’. Far Eastern Economic Review (2 May 1968).

Fisher, Stephen F. Eurasians in Hong Kong: A Sociological Study of a Marginal Group. PhD Thesis, University of Hong Kong, 1975.

Furnivall, J.S. Colonial Policy and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948.

Furnivall, J.S. Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944.

Smith, M.G. The Plural Society in the British West Indies. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965.

Kaori Abe’s City of Intermediaries

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Dissertation Reviews has posted a review of Kaori Abe’s fascinating doctoral dissertation, The City of Intermediaries: Compradors in Hong Kong from the 1830s to the 1880s. Take a look at:
http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/12498.

Kaori is currently Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University. She completed her PhD in the Department of History at the University of Bristol under the supervision of Prof. Robert Bickers.

Also be sure to also take a look at her recent article in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society: ‘Intermediary Elites in the Treaty Port World: Tong Mow-chee and His Collaborators in Shanghai, 1873–1897’.

On Grenville Alabaster’s ‘Some Observations on Race Mixture in Hong Kong’

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By Vaudine England

Just two serious articles were published on the subject of Eurasians in Hong Kong in the 20th century. A bold claim – and one on which I’d be delighted to be proven wrong!

The first came in 1920, from the Hon. Sir Challoner Grenville Alabaster, OBE, Member of the Legislative Council. This China-born former British Consul in China was the interpreter who accompanied Ye Mingchen throughout most of his imprisonment and exile by the British. A lawyer, he moved to Hong Kong where he was Acting Attorney General no less than four times before achieving the full post in 1931 until 1946. He was also acting Chief Justice in 1937. ‘In 1942 he was one of the three senior government officials who instructed Robert Kotewall to cooperate with the Japanese occupying forces in order to protect Hong Kong residents.’ A survivor of the Stanley Internment Camp during World War Two (perhaps thanks to the sunglasses he wore perpetually), ‘his meticulous and allegedly rather bureaucratic personality [meant] he was not universally admired.’ (Source: DHKB pp1-2.)

Alabaster’s ‘Some Observations on Race Mixture in Hong Kong’, warning of the onset of a race problem in the wake of China’s republican revolution, has long outlived the sunglasses. Published in the (albeit now defunct) Eugenics Review, he expressed surprise at the lack of any laws ‘bearing upon the problem of race mixture, certain laws declaring marriage between certain races invalid or a punishable offence, or at least certain decisions as to the degree of blood making a particular person a member of one race or of another.’ There were laws granting privileges to or discriminating against Chinese, regarding will validation, and registration of persons, and even laws requiring the Registrar of Companies to decide what might properly be described as a Chinese or non-Chinese business partnership. But nothing about Eurasians.

‘If a reason is sought for the absence of any such legislation, it will probably be found in the fact that until as recently as 1911 the Eurasian problem did not exist; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that before that year classification could be effected easily without too close an inquiry into a person’s pedigree.’

What he meant became clearer as he described Eurasians of Hong Kong before 1911 as falling into roughly three groups – Portuguese, Chinese or British. After 1911, he believed, rising Chinese nationalism and the greater education of more Chinese in Hong Kong would change definitions radically, faster.

Generalising Eurasians in Hong Kong

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Continuing their espousal of the Eurasian ‘problem’, two authors writing in 1955, Thompson & Adloff, lament the small size of Eurasian communities and their lack of cohesion which leaves them in a weak bargaining position; despite being stable and smart, unity and strength has remained elusive to the group as a whole. The only answer available to these Eurasians is to integrate locally as quickly as possible, they wrote.

Thompson & Adloff then take a closer look at the legal, educational, professional and social position of Eurasians in South East Asia.

For example, laws of 1854 and 1892 in the Dutch East Indies allowed all descendants of Europeans on the father’s side to be legally classified as Europeans. This opened up educational prospects and thus access to higher levels of economic and social achievement. Before World War Two, the heads of four of the eight government departments and the commander in chief of the army were all Indo-Europeans. In 1912 an Indo-European League was formed. The Hague Agreement of August 1949 gave Eurasians (estimated to number about 100,000) two years in which to make up their mind about whether to stay in now independent Indonesia or go to the Netherlands. A government survey commissioned by the Netherlands in 1952 concluded, among other points, that it was inadvisable to bring uneducated, poorer Eurasians out of Indonesia; however, the Dutch government would provide aid to this majority of people advised to stay put.

Brief surveys follow, of Eurasians in Malaya, Burma/Myanmar, the Arakan States (of now Burma/Myanmar), the Malays of South Thailand, and the Ambonese (of Indonesia). In Malaya, despite widespread prejudice, some Eurasians became distinguished lawyers, engineers and journalists; many of the late 19th century Queen’s Scholarships went to Eurasians. Between the two world wars, Eurasians were present on Singapore’s Legislative Council (as they were in Hong Kong). ‘Their social status, however, did not show an analogous improvement, though the Eurasians clung to their British names, spoke English as their mother tongue, and were practically all Christians’.

The point for students of Hong Kong history is — how did the situation for Eurasians in Hong Kong compare?

No parallel to the Dutch laws of 1854 and 1892 are apparent in Hong Kong. It seems there was no clear delineation in law regarding educational, medical and other legal rights for Eurasians in Hong Kong, despite a range of social limitations, prejudices and practices. (Any corrections to this statement would be gratefully received!)

A detailed legal survey simply of this question would be a large contribution to scholarship on Eurasians in Hong Kong. A second step would be a detailed survey of the colonial papers (CO129) for any reference to Eurasians, any studies or social surveys or commissions related to their existence.

Other topics for comparison would include military service: Thompson & Adloff note how Eurasians constantly joined volunteer military detachments, in Malaya, in Singapore, (and, as we know, in Hong Kong). But in Singapore the Eurasian company was disbanded in 1909 (after only eight years) and permission to re-form was a long time coming. After World War Two, Eurasians in Singapore and Malaya agitated to join the British Army and, once in, found they were paid less than their European counterparts. Points of comparison are obvious there. Random memoirs and specific war histories have paid well-deserved tribute to particular groups of Eurasians who identified so strongly with then-British Hong Kong that they laid down their lives to defend it. A systematic comparison with their formation, their actions and their standing in Hong Kong compared to other British colonies would however be illuminating.

Another topic is efforts by Eurasians to organise themselves. Recreational groups were plentiful, but a Eurasian Review, started in Penang in the 1930s lasted only about a decade. That is a decade more than anything comparable in Hong Kong however. There was even an All-Malayan Eurasian Conference held in 1940. Individual Eurasians continued to achieve prominence and public responsibility after World War Two. But Thompson & Adloff’s primary point throughout is that as a community, the Eurasians of South East Asia had to assimilate locally or be doomed.

That seems like another good subject for comparison with Hong Kong, and an interesting assumption of the 1950s to test against the realities of today.

REFERENCE:
Thompson, Virginia, and Adloff, Richard. Minority Problems in Southeast Asia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1955.  (Chapter 3: Indigenous Minorities – The Eurasians.)

Generalising Eurasians in Asia

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By Vaudine England

Looking at how other colonies’ histories have tackled the topic of Eurasians gives useful clues to how researchers might tackle Hong Kong’s Eurasians.

An early effort looking at South East Asia was Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff’s Minority Problems in Southeast Asia, of 1955. This states baldly that all Eurasians under colonial rule ‘have faced the same handicaps, reacted to them in identical fashion, and displayed similar communal characteristics’ (p. 135). Can such a sweeping statement be true? It goes on to say that all Eurasians are city dwellers and white-collar workers. As a group, they have been ‘snubbed’ ‘and only a handful among them has been able to surmount the obstacles which the color bar has placed in their way’ (p. 135). The authors place the ‘irresponsibility of their European fathers’ alongside the barriers erected by the European community as a whole  as the major impediments to Eurasian advancement. Those barriers were real, with some jobs, residential areas, schools, clubs, even hotels closed to them.

Of course these authors were writing in 1955, the year that the Non-Aligned Movement first met in Bandung, Indonesia, when the issues of post-colonisation were of pressing daily importance across South East Asia. As is often the case in scholarship about Eurasians, the focus is largely on the sprawling Dutch East Indies, and on the impact of the diaspora from a crumbling China. Those major historical forces, with ramifications around us to this day, have their echo in Hong Kong of course, but can also be useful to highlight what makes the Hong Kong situation unique.

Still, in Thompson & Adloff, here are too many generalisations. Another one on offer is the allegedly striking contrast between the product of an (Overseas) Chinese father and a native Malay/Indonesia/Burmese, which they judge as most likely to be successful, and the product of a European and native mother which they judge to be invariably less successful. Apparently the injection of Chinese other-ness brought a physical stamina and pride in heritage to the mix, unavailable to offspring of European fathers!

Overall, Thompson & Adloff paint a somewhat tragic picture of a people forever stuck in between. Above them in social and financial status are the Europeans with whom they identify; below them are the ‘native’ Asians whom they allegedly despise: ‘While they have received less from the Europeans than they feel is their due, they have enjoyed in Asian eyes a privileged position as regards employment and standard of living’ (p. 136).

However, the survey marks key changes affecting Eurasian communities of South East Asia. Prior to World War Two they retained a privileged role as often the only (half) native people who had become proficient in the European colonialist’s language (Dutch, English, Portuguese, French). They could thus take higher positions in the colonial bureaucracies and business worlds. They mostly identified as Europeans and were strongly loyal to the European power even though they knew they would never have equality with wholly European friends and colleagues. During the war, those Eurasians identifying or identified as European suffered disproportionately at the hands of the Japanese across South East Asia.

As empires fell, through war and decolonisation, the privileged position enjoyed pre-war now evaporated. Unless they had worked to maintain fluency in local languages and norms, they lost out in the brave new post-colonial tropical world. They then faced invidious choices – to stay or go; and if to go, then where? Often the dream was the European ‘homeland’ which they had never seen; only the Netherlands offered any kind of assistance to their Eurasians, the Indos, with many others left in limbo. Wrote Thompson & Adloff: ‘the Eurasians are a rootless, frustrated, and divided minority — foreigners in the land of their birth, yet unable to move elsewhere’ (p. 136).

Reference is made to the idea of a homeland for Eurasians, such as the Jews found in Israel. This may sound very odd to a modern ear, but an attempt was made by Indonesian Eurasians (or ‘Indos’) to settle in New Guinea, on the far eastern edge of Indonesia. This apparently failed due to lack of agricultural skills and finance. Others thought of migrating to Brazil.

How much do these generalisations, experiences and ideas apply to the specific experience of the Eurasians of Hong Kong?

REFERENCE:
Thompson, Virginia, and Adloff, Richard. Minority Problems in Southeast Asia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1955.  See: Chapter 3 – ‘Indigenous Minorities – The Eurasians’.

East Meets West: Where Do Eurasians Come From?

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By Vaudine England

For a place which has so often been so eulogised for being such a marvellous meeting of East and West, the detail of the most intimate connections between east and west is surprisingly uncovered. Fiction has largely carried the burden of revealing aspects of the Eurasian existence. Richard Mason’s The World of Suzy Wong is the obvious example, and Han Suyin’s Love Is a Many-Splendoured Thing. But where are the histories of Hong Kong’s real Eurasians?

Several important family memoirs have been produced. Peter Hall, the former company secretary of Hongkong Land took this furthest with his In the Web, followed by Eric Peter Ho’s Tracing my Children’s Lineage. Irene Cheng and Jean Gittins both wrote family memoirs. Vicky Lee has investigated the writings of three Eurasian women and reflected on what it means to be Eurasian. These are all interesting works, but none can be called a history of the Eurasians of Hong Kong. So far, just one thesis has been done on the subject – back in 1975! This was Stephen Fisher’s survey of Eurasians as a marginal group. He is more sociological than historical and of course time has passed. Many more family papers are now, hopefully, available for consultation by serious researchers. With, too, the diminishing stigma attached to being of mixed race, it is hoped more will feel able to talk about and discover more Eurasian history.

In the meantime, where could one begin to consider such a history? Defining the word might help. Dictionaries cite its earliest use from India in the late 18th century and early 19th centuries; many of the same dictionaries say it now refers more to American-Asian than to European-Asian mixtures. In Hong Kong parlance, it can also refer to the mixture of two different Asian races, such as the Kotewall family which was a mixture of Parsee and Chinese.

In Britain’s Indian empire, confusingly, it was the British who had lived a long time in India, often generations, who proudly called themselves Anglo-Indians, and so this term was not available for use by literally mixed race Anglo-Indians until permission was granted in the early 20th century. Instead, they were called ‘half-castes’, ‘East-Indians’, ‘Indo-Britons’ and ‘Eurasians’. Richard Symonds, in his Eurasians Under British Rule, divided the history of Eurasians in India into three periods: until about 1785 they were able to assimilate with the British and suffered no discrimination; from the 1790s to 1835 they were excluded from government service as either British or Indians; from 1835 until the end of British rule there in 1947 they were seen as Indian for purposes of employment but British in terms of education and defence, employed mostly in intermediate positions in central government services, the railways, telegraphs and customs.

Symonds refers to the sole comparative study made of people of mixed race under the British and other empires, namely Half Caste, by Cedric Dover, published in 1937. This was an angry polemic by an Anglo-Indian biologist and entomologist of Calcutta, written partly to combat then-current fascist theories of race. A vast literature exists on the mixed race people of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). There is almost nothing about mixed race people under British rule, in all its variations.

Symonds also makes important points about how the caste of Indian women marrying East India Company men was replaced with their husband’s standing in the company. This meant that some Eurasian offspring married British aristocracy; mixed blood trails can be traced into the prime minister’s office on three occasions. In Calcutta, an Upper Orphanage was established for the Eurasian children of British officers and a Lower Orphanage for those of other ranks. But later restrictions on offspring from the orphanages against gaining higher education in Britain radically affected their chances of employment.

The early 20th century was perhaps the worst time to be Eurasian in India, writes Symonds. A new moralism decreed mixed race children to be the product of ‘vice’; in practical terms, doors to education and employment were successively closed. These Eurasians looked with envy across to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) where the Burghers, as Eurasians were called, were much more integrated with the Dutch. A foreshadowing of British talk during Hong Kong’s 1922-25 strikes and boycotts — when support from the local elite’s Eurasian leaders was needed to restore stability — is heard in the 1810 wish of the British in Ceylon to conciliate the Burghers as much as possible in order to consolidate British rule.

Attitudes towards Eurasians were contingent upon time and place; categories and definitions were neither fixed nor certain. The British might have been peculiar in the hedging about of their mixed race subjects with varying restrictions over time. As Symonds notes: ‘It is interesting that the British, themselves hybrids, should have placed so much emphasis on race in the style of rule’, (p 41).

One theme here which emerges across any historical survey of race in empire is that of how ideas about it changed during the course of empire. In those rampant early days of explorers and swashbuckling entrepreneurs, cohabiting, if not marrying and starting families, with local women was considered the ideal way to move in on a new society. Portuguese, Dutch, French and British all enthusiastically engaged with the local populations they intended to trade with, convert or exploit. Divisions and the breaking into hierarchies involving race as well as religion and class, seemed to come when government bureaucracies became more involved in the colonial enterprise in the mid-19th century onwards. As any reader of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities can cite, the emergence of nationalism as an idea from the late 19th century on would dramatically affect notions of self and harden divisions along ethnic and other lines.

To my mind this must give cause to consider so many post-colonial blanket assumptions. That the British empire was founded on racism, for example, could do with some re-examination. Given the wide variations between colonies within that empire (in their founding, construction, management and much more), it seems logical that the role of race and thus the place of Eurasians within each colony might also differ markedly. That we even know now what people meant about race then, and which ‘then’ we are talking about, are also assumptions that need testing. Definitions we impose now may not have been how people saw themselves then. Nor are all modern ideas about race and tolerance necessarily the most advanced or progressive ideas over time.

REFERENCES:

Allen N.J., Gombrich, R.F., Raychaudhuri, T., and G. Rizvi (gen. eds). Oxford University Papers on India, Volume I, Part 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Chapter 3: Eurasians Under British Rule, by Richard Symonds, pp 28-42.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso Books, 1991.

Cheng, Irene. Clara Ho Tung: A Hong Kong Lady, Her Family and Her Times. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1976.

Fisher, Stephen F. Eurasians in Hong Kong: A Sociological Study of a Marginal Group. PhD Thesis, University of Hong Kong, 1975.

Gittins, Jean (Hotung). Stanley: Behind Barbed Wire. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1982.

Hall, Peter. In the Web. Wirral: Hurst Village Publishing, 1992 (2012).

Hall, Peter. In the Web. Birkenhead: Apprin Press, 2012 (earlier editions 1992, 1993).

Han Suyin. Love Is a Many-Splendoured Thing. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952.

Ho, Eric Peter. Tracing My Children’s Lineage. Hong Kong: Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Hong Kong, 2010.

Ho, Eric Peter. ‘The Welfare League, The Sixty Years 1930-1990’. A pamphlet held by HKU Library Special Collections (HKP 361.763 W46 zH). The Welfare League was formed specifically to provide aid and welfare to Hong Kong’s Eurasians and was thus a first public statement of the existence of a mixed race community.

Lee, Vicky. Being Eurasian: Memories Across Racial Divides. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004 (also, her PhD HKU 2001).

Mason, Richard. The World of Suzy Wong. London: Collins, 1957.

Race Memory Puzzles in China, Japan War Histories

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By Vaudine England

This week (on 3 September) the Chinese government has decreed a special one-off public holiday (and vast military parade) to mark what it calls China’s victory over Japan 70 years ago. As with all anniversaries, a plethora of frantic re-writings of history is now underway to mark this moment. One can debate if it really was China or the impact of Hiroshima that defeated Japan, and the argument over whether it was China’s communists or nationalists who fought most, suffered more, are most responsible for the victory, will rumble on.

This blog looks back at a supposed racial impact of the war, specifically of the ignominious defeat of the British followed by Japan’s occupation of Hong Kong. Both then, and more recently, the view has been expressed that Japan’s appeal to the Asian populace for the overthrow of Western imperialism was attractive, and encouraged versions of collaboration among particularly Eurasian as well as Chinese Hong Kongers.

A gentle look at the first point comes in Asia for the Asiatics, by Robert Ward, published by the University of Chicago Press just before the war ended. Ward had been a consular officer for the United States, stationed in Hong Kong, and was interned for six months before being repatriated. He witnessed the early efforts of the Japanese to establish an empire in Asia ‘for the Asiatics’.

This was, according to Ward, a calculated, brutal and systematic process, of which the initial outbursts of rampant disorder, rape and looting was an integral part. Ward claims this had the effect (and so Ward assumes the intention) of forcing the local Hong Kong elite into submission. Leading figures such as Shouson Chow and Robert Kotewall, members of the Li (Bank of East Asia) family, and others did consent to take roles in committees set up by the occupying Japanese powers. No doubt they did so for self-preservation but it is also on record that departing British senior civil servants had specifically asked Chow and Kotewall to deal with the Japanese to help feed the people.

Ward’s primary concern was to consider what the post-war landscape will be in East Asia, after this idea of Asia for Asians has taken hold. Writing in 1945, he doubted that the brutality and subjection imposed by the Japanese would entirely neutralise the power of the pro-Asia ideal.

The overwhelming fact for many writers, then and since, has been the shaming collapse of the white man, of white power, seen in Japan’s rapid takeover not just of Hong Kong, but other British colonies such as Malaya, Singapore and Burma. These defeats would leave a residue, the impact of which would change post-war Asia forever.

All this was true, of course, but it is interesting to examine now the extent to which the collapse of British military power in the East did Not mean an end to British rule in Hong Kong, nor to Western impact and roles in East Asia’s post-war development. It is also interesting to note that, according to many Hong Kong people’s recollections, the brutality of Japanese rule did in fact fatally damage that ideal of Japan-led Asia for the Asians.

Perhaps race was simply less of a defining characteristic for people struggling to survive than some theorists would accept.

A more dramatic version of the view that colonial racism met its nemesis with the Japanese can be found in Gerald Horne’s Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire, published in 2005 by New York University Press. Amusingly, reviews from the United States academic community laud this book as a radical retelling of the war, an unflinching survey of race and empire, and a fabulous study which shows where global history can go. At the same time, a detailed, calm and considered blog by a member of the community of people apparently so oppressed by Horne’s British colonialists — the Eurasian historian Brian Edgar — shows how full of holes the Horne thesis is.

According to Horne, the Japanese were appreciated, admired, and supported by the majority of Hong Kong’s population, at least at first, for Japan’s overturning of white supremacy. Several ideas seem to be involved here — that the British empire was founded (solely) on racism and thus that Hong Kong was too, and that British assumptions of racial superiority produced a vast and violent discriminatory universe of abuse and exploitation of the ‘non-pure’. On such ground, a fertile appeal of Japanese inversions of white rule could be imagined.

But as Brian Edgar points out, the detailed realities of daily life made Horne’s thesis ‘dead in the water’. Yes, Eurasians faced discrimination, but from the Chinese as well as from the British. Yes, some Eurasians were discriminated against at work but others were among the colony’s richest people. Edgar goes on to point out various pockets of Hong Kong life which were ‘relatively race-free’, some intellectual and some in sports; I would add most of business was multi-cultural too. But of course white racism existed — the argument is over whether this made Eurasians (and some Hong Kong Chinese) vulnerable to Japanese ideology and rule. As Edgar notes, Horne fails to cite one single Hong Kong Eurasian who was not part Japanese who can be proven to have joined the Japanese after Christmas Day 1941. On the contrary, people like the young (Eurasian) women, Phyllis Bliss and Irene Fincher escaped and Irene even married the race enemy, a British policeman who was working with the Chinese resistance. One fascinating case, Laurence Kentwell, is the subject of research by Baptist University’s Catherine Ladds, and he is an exception to every theory.

Edgar then tackles the case of Sir Robert Kotewall and laments that Horne has clearly failed to take note of British exonerations of the Executive Council member’s work under the Japanese. According to Edgar, Kotewall did shout ‘Banzai’ several times at public meetings but otherwise did little but ‘hedge’ while trying to help poor Chinese get fed. Tony Banham, author of the excellent http://www.hongkongwardiary.com/, regards Kotewall as ‘selfless’ and the charges of collaboration unfounded.

As Edgar notes, one has to be careful about jumping to conclusions. Amid the hoopla of a Chinese Communist Party-organised exercise in creating nationalism today, it is even more interesting to discover where the historical record makes clear not a nationalist narrative, but the nuance.