Tag: Second Sino-Japanese War

Guest blog: Kwong Chi Man on the Battle of Hong Kong spatial history platform

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Dr. Kwong Chi Man is an associate professor in the history department of Hong Kong Baptist University. He specializes in the military and naval history of modern East Asia, particularly from the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) to the 1970s. He has published Eastern Fortress: A Military History of Hong Kong, 1840–1970 (coauthored, Hong Kong Book Prize 2019) and War and Geopolitics in Interwar Manchuria. His works can also be found in Modern Asian Studies, War in History, and Journal of Military History. In this post Dr Kwong introduces the newly launched Battle of Hong Kong platform, whose development he has directed.

The Battle of Hong Kong (8-25 December 1941) was one of the first battles of the Pacific War and was the most significant military engagement between two regular armed forces that took place in Hong Kong in its modern history. The Japanese forces of around 35,000 strong faced a garrison of 13,500 consisting of British, Indian, Canadian, and local troops. In eighteen days, the two forces fought in the New Territories, Kowloon, and Hong Kong Island. The garrison suffered 3,445 casualties (KIA, WIA, and MIA) and the attacking force 2,218. Around 4,000 civilians were killed and wounded. Hong Kong then entered a period of Japanese rule that lasted for three years and eight months.

The spatial history project “Hong Kong 1941” uses geographic information systems (GIS) to build an interactive web map about the Battle of Hong Kong and a database of British military installations in Hong Kong during the Second World War. It offers an easy-to-use historical database for educators, tourists, and conservation professionals. I have been Principal Investigator of the project, working since 2011 with my research team, studying the Hong Kong battle since 2011, collecting first-hand data from the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, Australia, and other places. The interactive web map of the Battle of Hong Kong can be accessed here.

There have been numerous studies on the Battle of Hong Kong in 1941; in recent years, more primary sources are available in the form of the memoirs of those who had experienced it. However, it has been a challenge for researchers to show the spatial and temporal dimensions of the battle and their relationship with the events, the people’s experience, and the war ruins that still exist in Hong Kong. The spatial history project “Hong Kong 1941” tries to tackle such challenge and aims to bridge the gaps that existed between the British and Japanese accounts to offer a more clear view of the battle and to show the diverse experiences o the combatants and the civilians during the eighteen days of fighting. It also serves as a platform where stories often overlooked by war narratives are exhibited in conjunction with the major events.

The web map contains the following layers of data:

  1. Unit disposition: the map divides the Battle of Hong Kong campaign into 51 “time-steps”, each showing the positions and status of the units on both sides. The data granularity is down to platoon/squad/individual artillery pieces.
  2. The location of various military structures: including coastal defence batteries, anti-aircraft batteries, pillboxes, headquarters, shelters, medical posts, communication lines, demolition points, pre-arranged artillery targets, etc. The data granularity is up to individual buildings (such as individual pillboxes).
  3. Faces of War: the stories of those who had experienced the battle.
  4. Objects of War: objects and artefacts related to the battle, such as weapons, vehicles, military aircraft, vessels, personal equipment, and others.
  5. Images of War: photos taken during the period.
  6. Units: information about the units on both sides participating in the battle.
  7. A list of Hong Kong combatants: personal information on 1,600 Hong Kong residents from different ethnic groups and backgrounds who participated in the battle.

This is an on-going project and the research team will issue regular seasonal updates and irregular hotfixes. The mobile version, which will be fitted for screens of the mobile devices, will be available in weeks. We welcome any feedback (please contact our Facebook page, our Instagram, or email us) and would like to invite the viewers to share with us original historical materials and stories.

Contact details for the Battle of Hong Kong platform:

 

Introducing Vivian Kong

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Born and raised in Hong Kong, Vivian Kong moved to Bristol to take up the Hong Kong History Project Doctoral Studentship in 2015. After the completion of her BA and MPhil degrees at the University of Hong Kong, she embarked on her PhD study of the pre-war British community of Hong Kong at the University of Bristol under Professor Robert Bickers.

Her interests in studying the Britons there originate from her MPhil research on the evacuation of British families from Hong Kong in 1940. While examining the public response towards the compulsory policy, Vivian noticed that many Britons there had already developed a local identity in Hong Kong, which contributed to their nostalgic comments about their lives there and reluctance to leave the city despite the threat of a Japanese invasion. She became interested in how they identified themselves and how their experience living there affected the way they perceived Britishness, and how they viewed British subjects of Asian descent in Hong Kong.

By reconstructing the lives of Britons in pre-war Hong Kong and their interactions with other communities there, Vivian’s doctoral research aims to explore the relationship between colonialism and Britishness. She is eager to examine how Hong Kong Britons’ colonial experience shaped their view of imperialism and Britishness. She is also interested to see how Britishness was defined by different communities in the colony, and what Britishnesss meant for them. While using a variety of written sources such as official documents, newspapers and memoirs, Vivian also employs oral histories in her research. She is currently recruiting former residents of Hong Kong who spent their childhood in pre-war Hong Kong to participate in her research.

Combining her research with public engagement has always been an important aspect of Vivian’s work. She has a blog hk1940evacuation.wordpress.com where she shares the findings of her MPhil research, and in the future, her PhD research. The blog has put her in touch with not only surviving former residents of Hong Kong who were willing to bring in their insights and stories, and readers who wish to find out more about their family histories, but also interested readers hoping to learn more about an untold aspect of Hong Kong history.

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.