[ { "id": 208021, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1977", "page_number": 60, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "44\n\nW. A. REYNOLDS\n\nfacing the Japanese. Consequently it was part of American policy, especially from 1944 onwards, to re-create a united front against Japan and promote agreement on a form of Constitutional Government for China which would include the Communist Party. To this end Chairman Mao Tse Tung was escorted to Chungking in August 1945 by the US Ambassador Patrick J. Hurley. No real agreement was reached in some 41 days of talks and Chairman Mao returned to Yenan in October. Hurley resigned and in November the United States appointed General George Marshall as special negotiator, a truce was signed on January 10, 1946 and all-party Peoples Consultative Conference began*.\n\nHaving set the scene we may consider what this meant on the ground; specifically in terms of medical supplies to the Liberated Areas. These contained between 80-100 million people and perhaps 350,000 men under arms. Apart from supplies purchased and smuggled in from the Japanese occupied areas or captured, no UNRRA, International Red Cross, or other supplies had been allowed through from Chungking since the beginning of 1941, and the medical services were dependent on traditional medicines and drugs derived from available herbs. The situation was therefore very serious.\n\nThe UNRRA charter required that supplies be distributed to those in need regardless of race, religion, and party and UNRRA therefore applied pressure to the Chinese Government, via CNRRA, to allow supplies to go to the Liberated Areas. This pressure finally succeeded in January 1946 at the time of signing the truce and a permit for a total quantity of about eight tons of medical supplies was granted.\n\nDuring the period from the end of 1941 to 1946, the Friends Ambulance Unit, China Convoy, had been responsible for the transport of most of the civilian medical and relief supplies in the\n\n* For those desiring more detail of this period the following give different approaches:\n\nKenneth S. Chern, \"Politics of American China Policy, 1945: Roots of the Cold War in Asia\". Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 91, No. 4 Winter 1976-7.\n\nJohn S. Service, Lost Chance in China. Random House, 1974. Tang Tsou, America's Failure in China, 1941-50. 2 vols, Chicago, 1964.\n\nPage 60\n\nPage 61", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208026, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1977", "page_number": 65, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "A JOURNEY TO YENAN 1946\n\n49\n\nit was mid-winter, the countryside around was bare, brown, and dusty, and many people wore white surgical masks to keep out the fine dust. The hillsides in Yenan and on the way there were all seriously eroded, and there was little sign of the spectacular reclamation work on terracing slopes and damming streams of later years, the result of which can be seen by today's visitors.\n\nOccasions in Yenan\n\nHaving unloaded our cargo, checked the manifests, and visited the hospital, we spent a day servicing the trucks. We were staying at the Guest House, a row of very comfortable caves with a terrace and a courtyard in front. We were in the middle of servicing, with petrol drums and wheels scattered around, ourselves under the trucks greasing and checking, when we were informed that Chairman Mao Tse-tung was coming to see us! The courtyard was rapidly tidied, overalls and dirt removed, and the party went to the ketang to wait. We then discovered that the Chairman had been at the Guest House for some time seeing someone else and had arrived unnoticed while we were under the trucks. We were all introduced and thanked for our assistance and help, to which I replied that this was part of our normal work and not something to earn especial thanks. The impression, which I recorded then, was of great confidence and quiet strength.\n\nTwo or three days later, we were invited to a performance of the well-known opera \"Ta Ming Fu\" (★1⁄2#) part of the \"Liang Shan P'o\" (b) series, which has a very suitable theme. We found ourselves sitting three rows behind the Chairman and other leading Party members, including Marshal Chu Te, all of whom enjoyed themselves as there was a strong cast with some excellent comic character performances. This was, of course, well before the growth of revolutionary opera.\n\nOn one evening, we were entertained by, I think, members of the Lu Hsun Academy of Art (or the Anti-Japanese Revolutionary University). There was a yang ke dance team with a performance extolling improved methods of pest control on crops, some songs, and then dancing for all, mostly folk dances but including some foxtrots and quicksteps played on er hu and pi pa. We were presented with a set of woodcuts by various artists working there, including Zhang Wan, Yan Han, Xia Feng, Gu Yuan, and Weng", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208027, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1977", "page_number": 66, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "50\n\nW. A. REYNOLDS\n\nLiu-Chi. The group we met were lively and interesting, many having been expelled from universities under Kuomintang control. Another evening we were invited to see a film at the American Army Observer Section which was established there under Colonel David Barrett in July 1944. There was also an invitation to mid-day meal with Marshal Chu Te. My memory is that there was not much conversation as Yu Chin-lung found him taciturn, my Chinese was inadequate, and the others were tongue-tied in the presence of the famous soldier. On leaving Yenan we were each presented with a warm woollen blanket of local manufacture (I still have mine) and I was given a painting, which I had uncautiously admired, by the Bureau chief of the Medical Service. I was also presented with a made-to-measure Army uniform complete with cap and badge.\n\nMedical Work in the Border Region\n\nThe day after unloading we were taken to see the hospital named after Doctor Norman Bethune. Plate no. 17 shows the operating theatre. One of the famous 'three constantly read articles' of Chairman Mao Tse-tung is a eulogy of Bethune, delivered on December 21st 1939 soon after his death.\n\nAt the Bethune Memorial Hospital we were shown how supply difficulties had been overcome, including steel dental picks forged from railway line. We asked about medical supplies from the USSR since 1941 and were told that there had been some, perhaps five, plane loads (say 15 to 20 tons). The supplies we had brought included a portable X-ray with a petrol-driven generator.\n\nThe problems of civilian and military medical work in the Border Region are fully described by Margaret Stanley in a current series of articles in Eastern Horizon*. She was a member of the Friends Service Unit (the successor organization in China to the Friends Ambulance Unit) Medical Team 19 which went to work in the area in 1947. She revisited Yenan in 1972 and writes not only of her memories of the medical work but also the contrast between then and now.\n\n* Vol. XVI No. 3, March 1977 & No. 4 April 1977 onwards. There is also a good picture of what life in the Shensi countryside was like to be gained from the accounts given in Gunnar Myrdal's book Report from a Chinese Village. Penguin.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208384, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1978", "page_number": 108, "title": "RAS-1978", "content_text": "92\n\nEUGENE COOPER\n\ninstilling old social forms with new revolutionary content, making them serve new purposes.\n\nThe current premises of the union are in an apartment block in Tokwawan in Kowloon. They occupy a flat decorated with Communist slogans and a picture of Chairman Mao Tse-tung flanked by two Chinese flags. The Federation of Trade Unions runs a small school for children of \"patriotic\" workers in the union headquarters, although the children are not generally those of art-carved furniture workers. The union premises are seldom used by the workers before the evening as they are all off working; thus the flat was made available to the Federation for the operation of the school. Curricular and extra-curricular activities are structured around revolutionary and pro-Peking themes with texts and reading materials published in Peking. Shortly before my departure from Hong Kong this school was discontinued and the teacher, a middle school graduate, went to work in a factory.\n\nOther Federation affiliated unions have also used the union's premises for meetings and other activities such as preparing for the celebrations of October 1, the anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic. The premises are, however, under the control of the Woodwork Carvers' Union, and it is my impression that any such use of their premises by affiliated Federation unions must be agreed to by them.\n\nThe flat serves as a place where workers without means to afford a private apartment in Hong Kong's over-inflated real estate market, and without family in Hong Kong to take care of them, may sleep at night. However, one must be prepared to put up with the regulations, which include lights out and lock up at 11:00 p.m. One worker friend of mine, forced by circumstances to stay temporarily at the union, had a serious falling out with the union because of these regulations. Nevertheless, during the year that I was acquainted with the union, two or three workers made the union premises their more or less permanent dwelling place. There were no bunk beds in the Woodwork Carvers' Union premises, although I observed them built into the walls of other union halls I visited in Hong Kong. Workers just unrolled their bed-rolls across boards which had been laid across the students' desks.\n\nOnce every week or two these same desks were pulled together to form a long table and the officers and activists in the union", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208389, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1978", "page_number": 113, "title": "RAS-1978", "content_text": "POLITICIZATION OF CHINESE CRAFT ORGANIZATION\n\n97\n\nannual membership meeting. I had occasion to be present at such a meeting in May 1973, the proceedings of which deserve description.\n\nThe program began with an address by the Chairman of the union, a Shanghainese who has been the chairman for many years. He addressed the assembly of 7-800 people, workers, their wives and children, standing before a portrait of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, and his speech stressed the accomplishments of the Chinese nation in the recent past. He also touched on the skyrocketing cost of living in Hong Kong at present, a theme dwelt upon again and again during the evening.\n\nNext on the program occurred the swearing in of new officers, who were called out on stage, one by one, turned to face the portrait of Chairman Mao and the Chinese flags and recited \"Serve the People\" in union. There are twelve officers and another seven members of the executive committee. Both the Chairman and Vice Chairman have apparently served more than ten years, and the yearly election, which precedes the annual meeting seems to return the same officers year after year with a few jugglings among the less important officers.\n\nAn address by an official of the Federation of Trade Unions was next on the program. An elderly man, his voice didn't carry and his words were barely intelligible. Background noise from the huge fans, as well as the constant hum of conversation of friends in the audience didn't help much.\n\nThe most important speaker of the evening was the organization secretary, whose speech was clear and concise and who held the audience with his speaking power. He stated that prices, rents and living expenses were so high that an increase in wages was now necessary. Their demand was to be a H.K.$5/day increase in daily wages and a 25% increase in piece wages. Apparently, contacts had been made with the nationalist Camphorwood Trunk Workers Union to inform them of the wage demands so that if they too were going to push for wage increases in 1973, the right hand would know what the left was doing, so to speak.\n\nThe organization secretary's speech was followed in the program rather anticlimactically by the poor vice-chairman, who had a hard time following his colleague's act. There was not very much he could add either in content or eloquence of presentation.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209002, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1980", "page_number": 164, "title": "RAS-1980", "content_text": "132 \n\nNOTES AND QUERIES \n\nIs this mismanagement? It can be called mismanagement by all who are dissatisfied: by ardent Maoists and by the proponents of greater liberalization. Teng Hsiao-p'ing must feel sometimes like a squeezed beancake. He will be criticized by some no matter what he does. \n\nThe reader must be tired of articles that breathlessly give eye-witness accounts of the truth about China. There is no simple truth about China, which is too large and complicated a country. Articles about it often tell more about the observer than the observed; and about those on whom the observer depended for his information. This problem is not unique to China. England is complicated. The United States is more complicated. Russia and China are still more complicated. About Russia it is hard to learn because of the paranoid secrecy emanating from the Kremlin. About China it is hard to learn because of its long history of ups and downs, ins and outs, and the tendency of most Chinese to assume that \"behind the curtain\" much is going on that differs from what is going on in public view... \n\nDuring my whole trip in China I never heard any Chinese bring up Mao Tse-tung. His portrait was still everywhere—though I have heard that it is rarer in Canton. There was a very long line of people waiting to enter his mausoleum in Peking. But no guide—no one at all, in fact—brought up the name of Chairman Mao. I had an interesting experience in Nanking. The local head of the China Travel Service gave our tour-group a banquet in order to make amends for a mix-up about our arrival in his city. At the end of the banquet he proposed a toast to friendship between China and the United States, to future tourism, and so on. Then one of our tour group responded by proposing a toast to Mao Tse-tung. I was watching our host's face. He was at a loss. Then, after a moment's pause, he joined in the toast. If I had been he, I would have responded with a toast to George Washington. \n\nI had very good luck in visiting monasteries and meeting monks when I went to Sian, Loyang, Nanking, Soochow, Shanghai, and Peking. I have described some of what I learned in the Far Eastern Economic Review for August 15, 1980. Let me say here only that my good luck was because China is a free country today in a way that the Soviet Union is not. While my tour group went off in a bus to see the sights, I hired a taxi and visited a monastery. Only on", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209218, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 121, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "THE CHINESE CHURCH, LABOUR AND ELITES AND THE MUI TSAI QUESTION IN THE 1920'S 107\n\nson-in-law of Ho Tung\n\nT. N. Chau, a barrister\n\nLi Wing-tin\n\nSimon Tse Yan, also known as Tse Ka Po\n\nFung Ping-shan, donor of the Fung Ping Shan Library building\n\nat Hong Kong University\n\nChau Yu-ting, a wealthy import-export merchant\n\nYung Tse-ming, compradore of the Chartered Bank\n\nHo Wing, son of Ho Fook, adopted son of Ho Tung and compradore of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank\n\nWong Ping-shuen, and\n\nIp Lan-chuen\n\nWong Ping-shuen advocated a slow approach, \"The time was not yet ripe for drastic action. Conditions in China had to be radically changed before it would serve any useful purpose to legislate on the question\".\n\nThe Secretary of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Ip Lan-chuen, contended that Hong Kong was too close to China to attempt abolition at this time.\n\nLi Po-kwai, the Chairman, vividly portrayed the dangers to the mui tsai if she were released from servitude at the age of eighteen. She would do \"mad and silly things\" which would lead to her downfall.\n\nChow Shou-son spoke out as \"being dead against the Bill\". If left alone the custom would die out in time as had the practice of foot-binding. After making his speech in Chinese, for some reason he shifted to English to conclude it, saying, “It is the opinion of the Chinese community and the Chinese people generally that the system should not be abolished”.\n\nMr. M. K. Lo interjected a moderating tone into the discussion when he reminded the meeting that it would have been better if the Chamber had expressed opposition to abolition sooner and more clearly, instead of keeping relatively silent until the Government had drafted and introduced a Bill.\n\nMr. Wong Kwong-tin objected to the Ordinance because it did not provide protection to the owners of mui tsai and was therefore grossly unfair. He gave a warning to the British Government they should be very careful in interfering with an old Chinese custom which had become an unwritten law.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214368, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1998", "page_number": 226, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "192\n\nfunded for the temple.\n\nA logical progression, though always thought impossible in Mainland China, has been the deification of the late Chairman Mao. In Taiwan we have seen images of Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen on altars, revered as are the scores of historical worthies and heroes, but the thought that one day an image of Mao Tse-tung would grace the altar of a Chinese temple was so far fetched as to be ludicrous. None the less, Reuters printed a picture of a peasant in a rural temple in northern Shansi in early 1996 standing before a life-size image of Mao on the altar. Another sighting, of the small white bust of Mao on a household altar in a village on the banks of a river in the upper reaches of Yünnan province during the summer of 1997, was easily explained. The altar bore no other images and it was through this village and across the village's bridge, during the Long March, that the Chinese Red Army passed leaving behind a strong folk memory.\n\nMao, it must be remembered, was revered as a god in his lifetime, with cadres and Red Guards bowing before his image during the Cultural Revolution, and reporting the day's activities. And it has not been uncommon for taxi drivers in some of the major cities during the late 1980s and early 1990s to carry pictures of Mao suspended from their rear-view mirror as a protective amulet, though this has been more of a gimmick, but the idea of a statue of Mao on the altar in present day China is still astounding.\n\nWhat is less strange, perhaps, is the description of a Mao image being carried at the head of a religious procession in Fukien province, providing \"legality\" for this ritual procession of deities. Posters portraying the main Central political leaders were also borne aloft at the head of the procession.3\n\nNo doubt there have been zealous cadres carrying out the anti-feudal, iconoclastic purges following the party line and, recalling the clue provided in the report on Hupei, it would seem more than likely that the large number of illegal temples and shrines destroyed are in fact the small rural shrines dedicated to the Earth God which farmers have in their fields. By and large, it has been quite obvious that in general people will continue to go to temples to offer prayers and incense, and that temples and the deities will thrive, or possibly simply survive.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 } ]