[ { "id": 204502, "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-1962", "page_number": 134, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "BRITAIN AND CHINA\n\n119\n\nBut only once, in September 1950, has Britain voted for a resolution in the General Assembly calling for the admission of Communist China. From June 1951 the British representative has continued to vote in favour of postponement of discussion of the question, even when, on conclusion of the Korean war, the argument that China was participating in aggression against United Nations forces no longer held good. Mr. Luard well brings out, though unfortunately he does not try to explain, the expediency which guided western policies; how one argument was produced after another when the old ones went out of date; how the British government allowed itself to be swayed in this matter by the wishes of the Americans. He does not go into the intricacies of American internal politics, which are at the root of this matter—obviously he could not in a book about Britain and China—but without some understanding of them, Britain's behaviour, somewhat unfairly, seems feeble and misguided. Britain could have done more than she has to influence American public opinion, but to have brought China into the UN against the wishes of numerous Americans would only have devalued the institution in their eyes, and might even have resulted in earlier days in an American withdrawal of funds (upon which the U.N. is very dependent) or even, disastrously, of membership.\n\nSuch a criticism does not affect the discussion of Hong Kong, which is a matter purely for the British and the Chinese. As in the rest of the book, the historical background is only sketched in; the interest is all concentrated on wartime and post-war developments. Hong Kong is unique among British colonies in that since the war it has made no progress towards independence; having narrowly escaped being \"liberated\" by Kuomintang armies at the end of the war, the prospect of a more democratic constitution was shelved when the Communists overran neighbouring Kwangtung. As Mr. Luard points out, the constitution of the Colony remains, in all essentials, exactly what it was in 1843.\n\nAnd this is where the British government's devotion to commercial interests in its relations with China again becomes apparent. Now that Hong Kong has found a new lease of economic life in manufacturing, neither the British nor the Hong Kong government are prepared to do anything which may upset the present favourable climate for investors. It is generally", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205200, "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-1966", "page_number": 156, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "150\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nThe handsome volume has a short preface by James Cahill who wisely cautions the reader to keep in mind that the book \"is not an authority, but a tool.\" He says that anyone “who passes final judgment on the authenticity of a painting according to whether or not the artist's or collectors' seals on it seem to match those reproduced here, without taking into sufficient account of other kinds of external evidence, and without considering all such evidence secondary to the painting itself, will certainly not be using the book as its compilers intended.”\n\nThere are also short appropriate essays by the compilers themselves: C. C. Wang's \"Seals and Authentication,\" in which he too affirms that \"seals are useful only as aids in the work of authentication,\" and stresses that brush work and calligraphy remain the most important factors in judging a painting; and Victoria Contag's \"The Chinese Seal, its evolution, cutting and use, with a note on vermilion ink.\" The book also has separate Chinese bibliographies (with title translations into English) on both Chinese paintings and seals. Painters and collectors included in the volume are listed according to stroke-count, while \"fancy names\" are separately listed alphabetically. Also included are a listing of prominent circles of painters and a useful Publisher's Note and Key to Abbreviations. The latter is especially helpful in that most translated entries in the book are in German. Thus the Key explains to the English language reader the contents of each of the nine lettered entries which follow each painter's name. There is one error, however, in the Key: \"I\", one of the nine letters, in this case signifying \"subject matter,” should be “T” which instead of “I” appears throughout the actual text itself.\n\nThe book is expensive, but beautifully done and an indispensable tool for the specialist,\n\nSTEPHEN UHALLEY, Jr.\n\nCHINESE COMMUNIST SOCIETY: THE FAMILY AND THE VILLAGE, C. K. Yang. Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1965. Part 1: xii, 246 pp. Part 2: xii, 276 pp. Paper. US$3.95.\n\nThis volume contains two studies, The Chinese Family in the Communist Revolution and A Chinese Village in Early Communist Transition, which were published separately in 1959.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205201, "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-1966", "page_number": 157, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n151\n\nThe Chinese Family in the Communist Revolution is a worthy companion to the earlier volume by Marion J. Levy, The Family Revolution in Modern China, Cambridge, Mass., 1949. Levy analyzed the traditional Chinese family as a status-role system, and noted the disruptive tensions and the controls which had maintained the system until modern times. He related changes that were occurring in urban areas to the anti-traditionalist movements of the first three decades of this century, and to the weakening of the traditional controls. Yang gives a brief description of the traditional family, and discusses in detail the movements for change beginning with Kang Yu-wei in 1898 and continuing up to the end of Nationalist rule in 1949. The Marriage Law of the People's Republic of China promulgated in 1950 is contained in an appendix. The author discusses the theoretical origins of the law, and the implications of its implementation are traced through discussions of marriage, widow remarriage, divorce, and inheritance. He goes on to discuss the interrelationships of changes in the family, changes in the economy, secularization, clan disorganization, and the promotion of the state as the new focus of the individual's loyalty.\n\nThe second study, A Chinese Village in Early Communist Transition, is based upon field work (1948 to 1951) by Yang and his students in Nanching, a suburban village near Canton. Information on developments after 1951 came from articles in the China and Hong Kong press. Yang had to leave his field records in China, and the village study was written from memory in 1952. The author carefully distinguishes what could be recalled exactly, what data are approximations, and what press information from other areas of China is used as a basis for conjecture on later developments in Nanching.\n\nThe study is divided into three parts. Part I describes the village during the pre-Communist period, with particular attention given to the family, the economy, and the decentralized village power structure. Part II describes the early impact of Communist rule, through the land reform program, on the economy, on the family, and in the formation of a new power structure in the village. Part III is based upon press reports of collectivization in various parts of China, with conjecture as to the further changes which probably occurred in Nanching after the author's departure.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205638, "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-1968", "page_number": 180, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n175\n\nequally varied. Priests and missionaries; diplomats, consuls, officials and their wives; businessmen; journalists; soldiers and sailors among the foreigners; emperors, Ching officials and literati, Kuomintang and Communist leaders among the Chinese. Chairman Mao has his place (pp 306-308).\n\nIt is easy to choose items to illustrate the striking nature of much of the contents, and to dwell on how well they illuminate the scene. One might mention inter alia the Rev. Timothy Richard's account of a journey made during the dreadful Shansi famine of 1876 (pp 179-181) and of his encounter with a man in a Shantung village who persisted in repeating the official version that England was a revolted tributary (p 182); the description of the filth of Canton's canals and thoroughfares in 1910 (pp 233-234); a French resident of Peking's comments on the passage through his neighbourhood of a tatterdemalion body of troops from the warlord period (pp 286-287) and the striking eye-witness account of one of the outflanking hill marches of the Red Army against Japanese troops (pp 448-489). The cover given to the thirty year period 1917-49 between pp 261-504 half the volume is justified by the material available to the compiler. The chapter of extracts on Red China 1935-45 (pp 413-456), is particularly good. In the midst of such riches it is pointless to recite choice items from one's own reading that might have gone into the work; though no doubt, like this reviewer, readers will be able to suggest alternatives here and there, such is the tremendous outpouring of works on experiences in China up till 1949.\n\n—\n\nThis reviewer recommends the book to a wide range of readers, specialist and general alike; there is something for all in its 500 pages. Its main contribution is to expose the starkness of China's experience and convey some of the misery occasioned for the common people by both natural and man-made disasters over the period. Thereby the essential background to a better understanding of Mao's China and, indeed, of the desperate self-strengthening movement behind the Cultural Revolution is provided in its true perspective and deeper meaning.\n\nHong Kong, 1968.\n\nJAMES HAYES\n\nPage 180\n\nPage 181", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206123, "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-1970", "page_number": 203, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "196\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nBut in a local and a directly utilitarian point of view, the author is encouraged to believe that his work should not be placed as a candle under a bushel. This wealthy and most important Colony stands in the midst of the Sun-on District, and it seems to betoken a feeling in rear of the age, that the topography of the immediate neighbourhood should be a matter of perfect indifference. To the naturalist, the traveller, the sportsman, and the Missionary, the information should be acceptable, to say nothing of its political value. Besides, for police purposes in dealing with the all prevailing evil of piracy, when the subtlety of the Mandarin is considered, the author cannot doubt the value of his work to the British authorities.\n\nHe therefore calls attention to his Map, and solicits the favor of subscriptions to enable him to publish it.\n\nREVD. S. VOLONTIERI, Mission, Apost.\n\nHongkong, 10 May, 1866.\n\nA CASUALTY OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION\n\nBefore the New Territories were leased to Britain in 1898 the villagers on the British side of what became the new border area at the market village of Sha Tau Kok were accustomed to worship in the Man Mo temple (X) there. After 1898 this temple was located on the Chinese side of the Border, but this apparently made little difference to the religious practice of local people thereafter, even after the Communist take-over in 1949.\n\nOne of the images in the temple was that of Tin Hau (A), the Queen of Heaven who is a popular goddess among boat people and villagers near the seashore in the Hong Kong area. The people of three Hakka villages on the British side of Sha Tau Kok, namely Tan Shui Hang, Tong To and Sha Tsui which in 1961 had a total population of around 1,000 persons, were particularly accustomed to visiting the Man Mo temple to worship Tin Hau. When the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution developed in China in 1966 Red Guards singled out temples for particular attention, and it seems that iconoclastic activities also", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206328, "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-1971", "page_number": 145, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "THE DISTRICT WATCH COMMITTEE\n\n139\n\n36 In 1917 there were 31 guilds for employers only (in trades such as silk, sandalwood, wicker furniture and copper), 35 skilled craftsmen guilds (sandalwood workers, masons, tinsmiths, etc.) and 5 guilds with mixed membership (employers and workers). There were also 17 district societies, such as the Heung Shan (Hsiang-shan) resident merchants association and the General Commercial Association of the Tung Kun (Tung-kuan) merchants resident in Hong Kong. See the list of exempted and registered societies in the Gazette, 27 April 1917.\n\n37 Wei Yuk was appointed in 1891 and served until his death in 1929. He resigned several times in order to allow a newcomer to join the Committee but was soon re-appointed. Lau Chu-pak was appointed in 1902 and served until his death in 1922. Sir Shouson Chow was appointed in 1917 and was still a member in 1949, the year of the demise of the Committee.\n\n38 During the years 1929 to 1931 and in 1936 the Committee met four times a year at Government House. Lennox Mills states that members had the right to a guard of the District Watch Force on the occasion of weddings and other festivities'. The Secretary for Chinese Affairs tells us in his report for 1936 that through the kindness of His Excellency the Committee was able to meet the members of the Mui Tsai Commission on the occasion of their first visit to the Colony, 'All members attended and there was a valuable discussion with frank interchange of views'. When the Governor, Sir Henry Blake, left the Colony in 1903 on the day of his departure he inspected the District Watchmen. Clearly, everything was done by the government to give prestige and éclat to the Committee and the force.\n\n19 T. C. Cheng, op. cit., p. 18.\n\n40 Of the Chinese land population in the 1901 census 227,615 returned themselves as natives of Kwangtung Province, 179,296 of this number belonging to the Kwong Chau Prefecture, 28,844 came from Tung-kuan hsien, 28,587 from P'an-yü hsien, and 27,221 from Nan-hai hsien. The situation was substantially the same in the censuses of 1911, 1921 and 1931. In 1911, for example, 311,992 out of 350,418 Chinese in Hong Kong, exclusive of the New Territories, spoke Cantonese,\n\n41 Op. cit., pp. 399-400.\n\n42 Heung Shan, present-day Chung Shan, is the arid county on the west side of the Pearl River, stretching down to Macau. It was the Heung Ha, the Cantonese term for the province, district or village from which each person derives his ancestry, of many prominent Chinese, including Ng Choy (Wu Ting-fang), Yung Wing (Yung Hung), Wong Shing (Huang Shêng), and Sun Yat-sen. Many Chinese merchants in Hong Kong came from this county; for example, Wei Yuk, Ma Ying-piu (founder of the Sincere Company), M. Y. San (before 1941 the largest biscuit manufacturer in China), Tsang Foo, Look Poong-shan (founder of the Bank of Canton). Su Chao-cheng, organiser and leader of the Seamen' Strike in 1922, came from this county; in 1928 Su was elected to the Central Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party. The anarchist, Liu Ssu-fu, was also born there. In 1938 the Chung Shan Commercial Association had a membership of over 4,000 in Hong Kong.\n\n43 In 1905, for example, at least seven members of the Committee were compradores to important western firms; one was manager of a native bank; another of a prosperous pawnshop; a third ran a large export firm. Ho Kai was primarily a financier rather than an entrepreneur. See on this point the Chinese speculator Marie-Claire Bergère, \"The Role of the Bourgeoisie' in M. C. Wright, ed., China in Revolution: The First Phase 1900-1913, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1968, p. 236.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206427, "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-1971", "page_number": 244, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "218\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nIn answer to the review in the Journal of the previous book, one of the authors wrote \"I am impelled to emphasize that we wrote avowedly as dealers. Our objective has been achieved and the work has brought us a substantial volume of business\". Where desire for success prevails over truth, accuracy and scholarship, one gets only gallery patter. The present volume has all the bad points of its predecessor.\n\nPeabody Museum\n\nSalem, Massachusetts, U.S.A., 1971.\n\nF. B. LOTHROP\n\nJ\n\nFAMILY AND KINSHIP IN CHINESE SOCIETY, edited by Maurice Freedman. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1970., pp. XV, 269.\n\nStudents of Chinese society are not able at present to undertake field studies in the Chinese homeland, the People's Republic of China. The last major social investigation was carried out in the vicinity of Canton by Professor C.K. Yang over twenty years ago. Despite this formidable obstacle - the fact that China is closed to direct sociological observation - the study of Chinese domestic institutions by Western and other scholars has quickened rather than slackened. A small group of dedicated social scientists have been active since 1949 in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other areas of Overseas Chinese settlement. Paradoxically, since 1949 much data have been collected, some important hypotheses formulated, and some parts of theory tested. As this volume makes clear, we have learned much about Chinese society since 1949 - at least about the older China now being transformed by political, social and economic developments.\n\nIt is natural, I feel, that the editor of this volume should be Professor Maurice Freedman, whose two major studies of this area - Lineage Organization in Southeastern China (1958) and Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung (1966) — have deeply influenced many other researchers in the same field. Professor Freedman, as the bibliographies appended to his works amply\n\n* A Chinese Village in Early Communist Transition and The Chinese Family in the Communist Revolution (both M.LT., 1959),", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206469, "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-1972", "page_number": 17, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "Gifts from the University of Hong Kong Centre of Asian Studies:\n\nTOPLEY, M.\n\nA conference on religion and ritual in Chinese society. 1971. TOPLEY, M.\n\nTowards the comparative study of Asian medical systems: Burg Wartenstein symposium no. 53. 1971.\n\nWONG, Shiu-hon.\n\n粵劇關漢卿硏究 (A study of the Cantonese opera Kuan Han-ching), 1970.\n\nGifts from the University of Hong Kong Library:\n\nCHEN, Cheng.\n\nLand reform in Taiwan. 1961.\n\nLETHBRIDGE, H. J.\n\nChina's urban communes. 1961.\n\nUNION RESEARCH INSTITUTE.\n\nCommunist China, 1960. 1962. 2 vols.\n\nExchanges from the University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies:\n\nCHENG, C. Y.\n\nThe economy of communist China, 1949-1969. 1971. MAEDA, R. J.\n\nTwo twelfth century texts on Chinese painting. 1970.\n\nSINGER, M.\n\nEducated youth and the cultural revolution in China. 1971.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206874, "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-1973", "page_number": 151, "title": "RAS-1973", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\n145\n\nning among other matters the subjugation of the non-Chinese tribes of the interior.*\n\nAt the age of 71 he was appointed Vice-President of the Board of Civil Affairs in Nanking and later Vice-President of the Censorate. He died in great poverty in 1587 aged 74, his friends defraying the cost of his burial.\n\nIn November 1965 the editor of the Shanghai Wen Wei Pao, Yao Wen-yuan, who was also a left-inclined literary and theatre critic, published an article in which he criticised an historical drama \"The dismissal of Hai Jui\" written by the then Deputy Mayor of Peking, Wu Han. Yao's article was the opening volley in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which created such turmoil in China and purged so many of the senior communist cadres including Wu Han himself. Yao rose quickly and by 1969 was sixth in the leadership of the Chinese People's Republic only to slip to a lower position at the 10th Party Congress in August 1973. Yao, still a member of the Politbureau, is reported to be the son-in-law of Chairman Mao and a close associate of the radical Madame Mao.\n\nWu Han's historical play which cost him so dearly was criticised by Yao as an analogy of Mao's treatment of his \"loyal minister” Peng Te-huai, the Minister of National Defence purged by Mao in 1959. P'eng had been very outspoken in his opposition to two of the things closest to Mao's heart, the Great Leap Forward and the establishment of the People's Communes.\n\nHai Jui is well known to many Chinese as the minister who steadfastly opposed corruption. A legend told to me in Singapore by an elderly Buddhist nun recounted how Hai Jui as a very young junior official had been posted to the Swatow region (Ch'aochow) where a group of tyrannical landowners together with the local magistrate's police runners were terrorizing the people. The legend then told of Hai Jui's fight, first against his local superiors in support of the poor, later against the Prime Minister and finally against the Emperor himself. Hai Jui was forced to commit suicide, she said, to compel the Emperor to take notice of the problems of the masses and for this he was deified by the subsequent Emperor and is now one of the patrons of the Ch'aochow people.\n\nSee, in part, Herbert A. Giles, A Chinese Biographical Dictionary (London and Shanghai, Bernard Quaritch and Kelly and Walsh, 1898) pp. 242-243. Also W. F. Mayers, The Chinese Reader's Manual (Shanghai, American Presbyterian Mission Press, and London, Trübner and Co., 1874) pp. 45-46. Ed.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208376, "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": 100, "title": "RAS-1978", "content_text": "84\n\nEUGENE COOPER\n\n(Sowerby, 1926:2). The full blossoming of manufacture as a mode of production of carved furniture, however, did not have a chance to occur until the industry relocated to Hong Kong after the 1949 revolution.\n\nIn this setting, the traditional pattern of craft organization, which had been manifest in the existence of separate guilds for distinct craftsmen of differing native place, working in different woods, persisted in the structure of the labor force of the post-revolution art-carved furniture industry. In a period of \"manufacture\" which emerged in the 1950s, a variety of trade unions came into existence. Traditional craft boundaries between carpenter, carver, and painter, between rosewood and teak/camphorwood workers, and between craftsmen of different places of origin were all manifest in separate organizations of craft practitioners and remained strong throughout the period of \"manufacture\". Five unions thrived in this period, three among teak/camphorwood workers and two among rosewood workers. The separate crafts out of which the industry developed gave social expression to the synthetic nature of the industry in the form of separate unions.\n\nThe post-World War II development of trade unionism in the Hong Kong-based carved furniture industry is a study of how, in the context of the transformation from labor-intensive craft manufacture to capital-intensive, fully proletarianized industrial production, this traditional craft parochialism became manifest in a politically based polarization of the industry along Communist/Nationalist lines; and how, in this latter context, the Communist Hong Kong-Kowloon Woodwork Carvers' Union emerged as the dominant group in the labor force. It did so by adapting its proletarian message in various ways to the local conditions of its existence, while the conditions of that existence themselves underwent change, giving greater cogency to that message.\n\nThe first union in the carved wood furniture industry was located in the Canton-based rosewood industry in 1922, in a period when Sun Yat-sen and his Kuomintang party, still in alliance with the Chinese Communist Party, were actively engaged in organizing trade unions of a modern type among craftsmen and industrial workers on the heels of the demise of traditional guilds. The Chun Wah Rosewood Workers Union, organized in this context, is still active in contemporary Hong Kong. It followed Chiang Kai-shek", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208380, "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": 104, "title": "RAS-1978", "content_text": "88\n\nEUGENE COOPER\n\nit were triggered initially by a lockout at a plastic flowers factory in Kowloon and fanned by some arbitrary police action taken against demonstrating workers and students. Anti-colonial demonstrations occurred and anti-British sentiment ran high, fueled by stepped up anti-imperialist propaganda radiating from the mainland then in the midst of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. While most carved wood furniture factory and shop proprietors were unlikely targets for anti-imperialist attack, the Woodwork Carvers' Union seems to have taken advantage of the widespread unrest to extract a wage increase from the Merchants' Association at the time.\n\nOne school of thought (with its locus in the Far Eastern Economic Review) maintains that the Peking government was dissatisfied with its compatriots' handling of the 1967 disturbances and called a halt thereafter to revolutionary activity in the Crown Colony. While these claims are difficult to substantiate with any certainty, it is widely admitted in the Hong Kong pro-communist community that Peking was desirous of a stable situation in post-1967 Hong Kong so that it could actively pursue, from its viewpoint, more pressing diplomatic questions like its entry into the United Nations and the liberation of Taiwan.\n\n\"Hong Kong is a historical problem that will be solved at the appropriate time\" goes the refrain. The Hong Kong \"problem\" does not have the status of a \"principle contradiction\" for the People's Republic. Hong Kong continues to remain valuable to the Communist government in terms of the significant amounts of foreign exchange which China earns by marketing its products in and through the port, and also as a place in which trade and diplomatic contacts are still pursued. While such functions may decline as China continues to open up diplomatically and economically, they are still a factor in Hong Kong's historical viability as a colony.\n\nIn any event, in the post-1967 period, industrial peace in Hong Kong was the common desire of the British colonial government and the communist government in Peking. This led to the assumption on the part of the communist Federation of Trade Unions of some rather odd poses in the local adaptation of Mao Tse-tung thought to the Hong Kong scene.\n\nThis was particularly so in so far as the implementation of Mao's thought has entailed a disciplined adherence to a policy of delayed", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208382, "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": 106, "title": "RAS-1978", "content_text": "90\n\nEUGENE COOPER\n\nalso keeps them closely informed of events on the Mainland. Membership in an affiliated union may also facilitate return trips to one's native village in China during New Years and at other times as well, since the Federation provides a link up with Chinese representatives and bureaucracy in Hong Kong.\n\nThe contradiction between the interest of the Hong Kong worker in his own material well being, and the requirement that he subordinate his immediate interests to the long run national interests of Peking, has surely not made life easy for the constituent unions of the pro-communist Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions in their organizing efforts in the post-war Hong Kong setting.\n\nNevertheless, in more recent years, as Peking pursued the resolution of what it took to be \"principle contradictions\", namely admission to the U.N. and the liberation of Taiwan, developments in Hong Kong tended to bear out the appropriateness of their strategy. In 1971, when the Peking government displaced the Taiwan government as the sole legitimate representative of the Chinese people at the United Nations, the political influence that Peking was able to exercise in the political balance of Hong Kong grew enormously at the expense of the Nationalists. Organs of Peking power like the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions gained an enormous legitimacy in the new aura that came to surround the Peking government. Allegiance to the People's Republic, long an obstacle to effective organizing among Hong Kong's largely political-refugee population, became somewhat more of an asset for groups like the Woodwork Carvers' Union. 1971 marked a turning point in the fortunes of their organizing. Indeed one could argue that the relegation of the \"Hong Kong problem\" to the status of a secondary contradiction made a great deal of sense, as the political balance tipped noticeably in favor of the Peking government after 1971 with the resolution of a higher order contradiction, i.e. the seating of the Peking government at the U.N.\n\nThese developments have helped the Woodwork Carvers' Union immeasurably in its attempt to organize an increasingly proletarianized work force according to principles consistent with Maoist ideology, although the apparent contradiction between genuinely class oriented, as opposed to nation oriented, loyalties and its peculiar configuration in Hong Kong remains.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209202, "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": 105, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "# THE CHINESE CHURCH, LABOUR AND ELITES AND THE MUI TSAI QUESTION IN THE 1920'S\n\n## CARL T. SMITH\n\n### Introduction\n\nThe events leading up to the passage by the Legislative Council of Hong Kong of Ordinance No. 1 of 1923, entitled, “An Ordinance to Regulate Certain Forms of Domestic Service\" interested me as an historian of the Hong Kong Protestant Church. It was the first time Chinese Christians in Hong Kong had worked as a group on a social question. Previously individual Christians had written or spoken about public issues, but the organisation of the Anti Mui Tsai Society in 1921 was the first major effort of a large body of Chinese Christians to campaign for social change. Of added interest was the enlistment of the labour unions to support its efforts and the active part women took in the campaign.\n\nDr. Sun Yat-sen in planning the Revolution of 1911 had received the support of secret societies and other groups whose members were from the labouring class. After the revolution some of these elements began to organise as modern labour unions. In the 1920's their desire to express themselves, gain benefits and be recognised as a political force was strengthened by the success of the Russian revolution. Communist organisers were particularly active in Canton. In February-March 1922, the Seamen's Union conducted a successful strike in Hong Kong.\n\nAt the same time that labour was asserting itself, there were efforts by women to change their traditional status in Chinese society. One of the features of the fight against the practice of buying domestic servants was the support given by the Chinese members of the recently organised YWCA under the leadership of Mrs. Ma Ying-piu. The mui tsai question involved the misuse of young girls and the conduct of their mistresses. It was to be expected, therefore, it would attract the concern of enlightened women. Other than the organisation of the wives of the Directors of the Po Leung Kuk (Society for the Protection of Women and Girls) as a committee to visit the Society's Home and check on its management, there was no active participation by women on the side of those who wished to preserve the system.\n\n### I\n\nPage 105\nPage 106", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209465, "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-1982", "page_number": 122, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "100 \n\nW. ALLYN RICKETT \n\nat the operations level consisted almost entirely of hastily trained students or political cadres, amateur in approach and guerrilla in methods of work. Thus, while the Chinese Communists may have had some intellectual appreciation of the need for formal laws and institutions, the slightest excuse in the name of survival was sufficient for a reversion to revolutionary expediency.3 Moreover, Mao Zedong himself, with his hatred for bureaucratization and emphasis on the mass line, was never willing to consider law any more than a mere tool of the revolution, to be used or rejected as changes in the political scene dictated.\n\nThe basic guidelines for the new China were set out in a series of Mao's speeches and writings involving his concept of \"New Democracy,\" culminating in his essay \"On the People's Democratic Dictatorship\" released on June 30, 1949 just before the founding of the new People's Republic. In this latter document in particular, Mao does not mince words; good people belonging to the four classes of the New Democracy (workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie) would be entitled to democratic rights, people belonging to the enemy classes (landlords and bureaucratic capitalists) would be subjected to repression and dictatorship.\n\nWhen Communist forces took over the country in 1948-49, local areas first came under military control commissions. In the cities these brought together \"conferences of all circles\" which formed people's governments beginning at the local level and then expanding upwards. In the countryside peasant associations formed the basic units which were to conduct land reform and form the bases for local governments. As local people's governments developed, powers were increasingly turned over to them by the military control commissions. However, the military control commissions retained power in all cases affecting security through their public security forces. The military control commissions also continued to maintain military tribunals in some areas for trying counter-revolutionary cases as late as 1954. People's Courts were formed immediately following 1949, largely in accordance with the demands of the situation and types of personnel available. In Shanghai, for example, a new People's Court was constituted by giving some 200 former judicial personnel and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209479, "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-1982", "page_number": 136, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "114\n\nW. ALLYN RICKETT\n\nnew laws, can it be said that that there is any more hope now than existed in 1956 that the paper guarantees of the new legal system will prevail? I think there is. This optimism rests primarily on some major changes taking place in the society and in the thinking of the top leadership in the Communist Party. Unlike the earlier reforms, which in respect of the 1954 Constitution were more formal than real and pushed primarily by a small group of profession-oriented intellectuals, the new reforms come from the top and are based on the disastrous experience of the Cultural Revolution. Most of China's present leadership personally suffered from the arbitrary abuse of power at that time and have come to realize the need for a stable legal system. Furthermore, post-Gang of Four China is no longer the China of the past. The prestige of the Party has diminished greatly, the general population is no longer as malleable as it was in the past, and, perhaps most important of all, the rapid modernization and internationalization of the economy require a stable legal system.\n\nIndicative of some of the change taking place in China is the new Constitution adopted on December 4, 1982. In the 1975 and 1978 Constitutions, the Party is clearly recognized as having a special position of power. The 1978 Constitution begins by stating:\n\nThe People's Republic of China is a socialist state of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants. (Article 1)\n\nThe Communist Party of China is the core of leadership of the whole Chinese people. The working class exercises leadership over the state through its vanguard the Communist Party of China.\n\nThe guiding ideology of the People's Republic of China is Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. (Article 2)\n\nAlthough Article 3 goes on to say that all power belongs to the people and is to be exercised through the National People's Congress and local people's congresses, in point of fact the first two articles clearly give that power to the Communist Party and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209480, "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-1982", "page_number": 137, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "115\n\nin practice the Party becomes the state. Furthermore, Article 56 states: \"Citizens must support the leadership of the Communist Party of China.\n\nTherefore any criticism of the Party or its role in the society could easily be interpreted as counter-revolutionary whatever the rest of the Constitution or other laws might say.17\n\nThe new Constitution returns to the 1954 model in that, except for the Preamble, the Communist Party is not even mentioned by name, no longer is the PRC a \"socialist state of the dictatorship of the proletariat,\" but a \"socialist state of the people's democratic dictatorship.\" The significance of this statement is that it is at least a theoretical recognition of the rights of other classes besides the proletariat and thus a weakening of the dictatorial power of the Communist Party. Moreover, Article 5 explicitly states that all parties must abide by the Constitution and the law. Another change which may prove to be of some significance is the more moderate tone taken toward class struggle. According to the Preamble: \"The exploiting classes as such have been eliminated in our country. However, class struggle will continue to exist within certain limits for a long time to come. The Chinese people must fight against those forces and elements, both at home and abroad, that are hostile to China's socialist system and try to undermine it.\"18 According to Peng Zhen, who gave the major report on the draft of the new Constitution to the members of the NPC, this means that \"class struggle is no longer the principle contradiction in Chinese society. This basic characteristic requires a substantial change in the focus of work of the state and its guiding principles.”19 One can only hope this means that at least the repression of the Anti-Rightist movement and factional violence of the Cultural Revolution are things of the past.\n\nNOTES\n\n1 Under the empire the concept of individual rights was non-existent. From 1908 to 1947, China had some 12 constitutions either proposed or adopted, and even though all but one contained some formal listing of the rights of citizens, in each case these rights were carefully restricted by lists of duties and obligations or by the statement that such rights were to be enjoyed only in accordance with law. See Meredith P. Gilpatrick, \"The Status of Law and Lawmaking Procedure under the Kuomintang, 1925-46,\" The Far Eastern Quarterly, X.1 (Nov. 1950), 50.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209716, "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-1982", "page_number": 373, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n351\n\nstudy of revolts, reforms and revolutions in the South East Asian region is of particular interest and relevance for the outside world. This is because the variety of its component races, religions and political systems, before and after the colonial period, are paralleled by the diversity of situations experienced in revolution, reform and revolt. They are as diverse in kind as the very varied social, cultural, economic, historical context will allow, whether in or outside the colonial period, whether the colonial power was French, British or Dutch, whether a communist party was present or not. They are also, they claim, made the more interesting through the variety of \"models,\" outside assistance and influences available to the leaders of its governments and insurgent movements alike.\n\nThe authors state that, out of the total of twelve articles, five study revolts, three reforms and four revolutions. Five of the nine new states are represented (Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Singapore and Vietnam), with the former colonies of French Indo-china making up three quarters. Two articles concern events before 1914, three take place between 1914 and 1945 and four after the Second World War, and three span several of these periods. Neither the early period of colonial penetration nor the contemporary scene have been neglected, though by choice the authors have generally not gone back beyond 1850.\n\nGenerally speaking, the essays illustrate the theme of the Introduction, and they do cover a most diverse and interesting set of events. This is a stimulating collection of essays which will certainly be of value to serious students of South East Asia. Also, they bear out the authors' claim that they have a wider relevance than the region in which they are set.\n\nJAMES HAYES\n\nChinese Festivals Joan Law and Barbara E. Ward, South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, 1982, 95pp, including Bibliography, Index. 85 Colour plates\n\nIt is surprising that no-one produced a book like this long ago. Of course, this superb volume is no less welcome for that. The book consists of a short introduction, followed by brief", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210981, "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-1987", "page_number": 43, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "18\n\nLes yeux fixés au large et les cheveux au vent Nous nous embarquerons pour la Mer des Ténèbres Avec le coeur joyeux d'un jeune passager.\n\nLL\n\nJust as in the old days we would leave for China Our eyes looking out to sea and our hair streaming in the wind We shall sail henceforward for the Sea of Darkness Cheerful and lighthearted as a young traveller.\n\nThis is a major reversal, from the China ‘trip' into the Sea of Darkness. This is a remarkable and prophetic insight on the part of Baudelaire, a poetic formulation which is most relevant to our present-day intellectual crisis. We shall refer to it again a little later.\n\n—\n\n12\n\nAs the nineteenth century went on, as French political involvement in China and Vietnam became more effective, it was not unusual for French intellectuals to visit China and to empathize with her but always as isolated individuals. Such a one was Father Huc,1 a Catholic missionary whose minority voice, uncertain as it was, insisted on the specific values of Chinese culture and habits. China was a source of inspiration for diplomats posted there, such as Eugene Simon, whose book La Cité chinoise is a minor classic modelled on Fustel de Coulanges's standard essay La Cité grecque, and later Paul Claudel, a young consul in Tianjin, expressing his emotions in Connaissance de l'Est, a collection of poems in the Symbolist manner. French visitors to China included naval officers such as Pierre Loti, who had witnessed approvingly another sack of Peking by Western Allied forces after the Boxer Rebellion, or Victor Segalen, poet and archaeologist. Later still, intellectuals turned into revolutionaries, such as the young André Malraux who was involved in the 1926-27 Communist revolution in Canton, and who drew on this experience for his two major novels, Les Conquérants and La Condition humaine. Huc, Simon, Claudel, Segalen, Loti and Malraux had indeed very little in common except that they were somehow marginal figures on the French intellectual scene of their time. Even for those who were later to achieve international fame, such as Claudel and Malraux, China had not been much more than an", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211731, "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-1989", "page_number": 146, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "121\n\nCHEUNG SHAN KWU TSZ (長山古寺), AN OLD BUDDHIST NUNNERY IN THE NEW TERRITORIES, AND ITS PLACE IN LOCAL SOCIETY\n\nThe Plan of the Nunnery\n\nP. H. HASE*\n\nHong Kong has dozens of Buddhist monasteries and nunneries, mostly located in the New Territories. Almost all are recent foundations. The majority were founded by monks or nuns fleeing from one of the three major disturbances to Buddhist life in China in the last 80 years - the 1911 Revolution, and the chaos of the Warlord years which succeeded it; the Anti-Superstition Campaign mounted by the Kuomintang from the mid 1920s; and the Communist Revolution of 1949-1952.\n\nThese monasteries and nunneries mostly share a single common plan, which distinguishes a Buddhist place of worship from the ordinary temple of the traditional village religion. The ordinary temple consists of a windowless rectangular hall, with the altar to the God against one of the short walls, and entered through the opposite short wall. The hall usually has a Tin Tseng (天井), or lightwell, in the centre for the escape of incense smoke. Often two subordinate similar halls are placed one on either side of the main hall, interconnecting by arches.\n\nMost Buddhist institutions are built to a different plan. They are centred on a Buddha Hall (A, 大殿), which is also a rectangle, but one entered through the centre of one of the long walls, and the altar is not against the opposite long wall, but free-standing a little in front of it. These Buddha Halls usually have windows, and do not have Tin Tseng. In large monasteries or nunneries, the Buddha Hall is a free-standing structure surrounded by a portico, placed in the centre of an enclosed courtyard-garden on a raised podium, with the other buildings forming ranges along the edges of the courtyard. The whole complex is enclosed: the monastery or nunnery, unlike the ordinary temple, is\n\n* The author would like to thank those Ta Kwu Ling elders who gave him the information on which much of this article is based, and also the staff of the District Office, North, who assisted in setting up the interviews. He would also like to thank the staff of the District Land Registry, North, for their unfailing courtesy and assistance.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212422, "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-1990", "page_number": 364, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "341\n\ndegradation and contempt. Questions of reform or revolution, democracy or proletarian dictatorship were deeply exercising the minds of those bent on national salvation, personal power, or both.\n\nMen seized on new ideas and later changed their attitudes under the influence of both local pressures and growing familiarity with western political theories. The moves of the major actors rarely seem to have been clear-cut or consistent.\n\nThe aim of the author here, Michael Y.L. Luk (a Senior History Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong) is to trace the thinking of leaders of the Chinese Communist Party and their attempts to develop an agreed ideology. He is also concerned to show how the outcome of these attempts would in time affect the party's whole political destiny.\n\nThis is a book for scholars and students, a dissertation not aimed at the general reader. The interplay of ideas on the part of the activists and theoreticians has its own dense vocabulary, and the writing and presentation are uncompromisingly academic.\n\nHowever Luk fully achieves his purpose. The book records the varying convictions of visionaries and men of action at a crucial time in the history of China and gives a penetrating view of the way men thought and the policies they accepted in those years of warlords, Sun Yat-sen republicanism, and struggling political parties.\n\nTwo influences emerge clearly first, that of the Russian Revolution echoing round the world, and the writings of Lenin on colonialism. Secondly the indigenous thinking of left-wing Chinese intellectuals, notably Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu. Why did the Chinese avant-garde listen to the voice of the Russians and brush aside the teaching of a Dewey or Hu-shih? Almost until the official founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921 it was the Americans who had exercised a major influence. But new universities and hospitals and the YMCA seem to have provided an insufficient answer to the frustrations of Chinese life. Revolution was in the air and it was the Russian experts who moved in to show the Chinese enthusiasts how to organise it.\n\nYet although Marxism-Leninism entered China as a brand-new", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212423, "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-1990", "page_number": 365, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "342\n\nview of the world, its acceptance had been prepared by anarchist and socialist ideas already current since the nineties. Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu were the progenitors of the Chinese Communist movement. Both were university intellectuals. And, as Luk points out, although Chen Duxiu has been portrayed as a determinist who favoured bourgeois leadership and a bourgeois dominated period after national revolution, this view of him is unfounded. He believed in revolution by the masses and saw, early on, the importance of the peasants as a means of achieving it.\n\nLuk awards a relatively minor role to Mao Zedong in the development of party ideology and buries, once and for all, the simplistic idea propagated by some popular writers that Mao's was the first lone voice that revolution was possible only through the countryside. Mao brought the weight of personal knowledge and experience to bear on the question, but there were others, more influential, who thought as he did.\n\nThe greatest difficulty experienced by the Communist party-founders in China was in applying Russian Bolshevik doctrine to a Chinese situation. What did Lenin mean by \"feudal conditions\"? How important was the Chinese proletariat, numbering only a few millions, even though for the Russians its role was crucial? There were many more such questions giving rise to internal contradictions and differences.\n\nThe Communists in China, as we know, joined the Guomindang as a \"bloc-within\" and in 1927 Chiang Kaishek turned on his unwelcome allies and nearly destroyed them. But despite this catastrophic set back the ideologies already developed in the party were largely maintained. According to Luk, Mao Zedong was later to take over all the main ingredients of the revolutionary model of the 1920s. The major difference now was that the CCP, after 1927, was on the one hand more determined to establish itself as an independent political and military force and on the other hand, was by now well aware of the limits of class struggle and willing to adjust its policies accordingly. It is said that, to carry out revolution successfully, both ideology and organisation are indispensable. By the late nineteen-thirties the CCP had developed both these weapons to a formidable degree.\n\nANTHONY LAWRENCE", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212426, "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-1990", "page_number": 368, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "345\n\nCollar, Hugh, CAPTIVE IN SHANGHAI: A STORY OF INTERNMENT IN WORLD WAR II, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1990. xvi + 160 pp. Index. Hugh Collar, unofficial head of the British in Shanghai after the Sino-Japanese War became a part of World War II, wrote an account of the international community under Japanese internment. This is a rambling but often interesting account, edited by Pauline Woodroffe.\n\nAN\n\nLiu Binyan, CHINA'S CRISIS: ESSAYS FROM INTELLECTUAL IN EXILE, translated from the Chinese into English by Howard Goldblatt, Cambridge (Mass): Harvard University Press, 1990. xxv + 50 pp. Index. This volume comprises a series of five lectures given at Harvard in 1988-89 by one of China's most eminent dissidents. Liu, who had suffered for his intellectual principles during the 1950s as well as during the Cultural Revolution a decade later, was expelled from the Communist Party and was banned from publishing. There is a Foreword written by Professor Merle Goldman.\n\nMehrotra, Santosh K., INDIA AND THE SOVIET UNION: TRADE AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, Notes. Bibliography. Index. As the title indicates, this work is about the economic relationship between the Soviet Union and India (an industrialized planned economy and a developing market economy). The period covered is between 1955 and just before the book went to press.\n\nASIAN DEVELOPMENT OUTLOOK 1992, 1992. 313 pp. This study of economic development in the Asian countries containing a large amount of information with useful statistics, was published by the Asian Development Bank and Oxford University Press.\n\nDardess, John W, CONFUCIANISM AND AUTOCRACY: PROFESSIONAL ELITES IN THE FOUNDING OF THE MING DYNASTY, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983. 358 pp. with 1 map. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. Professor Dardess argues that, far from being a 'socially indeterminate category', the body of elitist professional Confucian public servants consciously created a highly centralized state at the beginning of the Ming dynasty, leading to five hundred years of autocracy in China.\n\ndeBary, William Theodore, FIRST ASIAN CIVILIZATIONS: A", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212673, "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-1991", "page_number": 227, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "208\n\nthe photographs on the period between 1956 and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution (Rihoud was again there in 1964 and 1965, and also Rene Rurri) may serve as an example that will encourage purchasing, or at any rate borrowing, this fine book. Of and about these in the context of their time, Professor Spence has commented as follows (pp. 12-13):\n\nThis was truly a time in which revolutionary changes were being attempted by China's leaders, and with the Communist party already close to twenty million people in numbers one would expect dramatic evidence of the new society, or at least of its emerging foundations.\n\nBut as we scan the photographs, we realize how hard such evidence is to capture. Without deep and intimate knowledge of the past realities, how can we truly gauge the depth, the nature or the meaning of the attempted change from the visual record? What we do get here, and often brilliantly or poignantly, is the sense of a country and a people with very little to rely on, where everything is scarce so everything is valued.\n\nThe word poverty seems the wrong one, in the context, for to China's leaders and surely to many of the people themselves after what they had gone through it was survival that was the first priority. Yet the paradox here was that the Great Leap Forward brought not survival but death to millions.\n\nAt other levels, the images speak to us of ordinary things, of children and their games, of the quiet affections of age, of eating as shared relaxation. They speak also, insistently, of organization, of people in lines, of people listed, people marched to orders, people drilled. This the state was proud of, this the state allowed to be filmed, along with the work, the heavy manual work, whether of intellectuals or peasants, backing endlessly at the heavy soil of China with mattocks and hoes, hauling barrows and sacks, pitting muscle against the land. So have farmers the world over laboured, but here the Chinese seem assembled in larger numbers than ever before, and their labour is in a context that is politically orchestrated.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212717, "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-1992", "page_number": 26, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "The Boxer Rebellion in north China in 1900, which involved the massacre of some western missionaries and a siege of the Legation area in Peking, did not reach as far south as Shanghai, though in his curriculum vitae Mesny mentions 'Volunteered for service at Peking 1900'. Unfortunately, we do not know whether his service was accepted or what he did during that period.\n\nThe Chinese Imperial government survived these rebellions but slowly became even weaker as the years went by. Western nations also took full advantage of Chinese imperial weakness until in 1911 the Revolution overthrew the imperial government and established a very weak republic which, after some further thirty or so years of both inner turmoil and invasion by the Japanese, ended with the Communist victory. Mesny lived through the first eight years of the Republic, and though they were stirring times, he must have had many nostalgic memories of his prowess and success in the Chinese imperial army, particularly in the latter days of the suppression of the Miao rebels, and the time when he was a prisoner of the Taipings, features which make his eye-witness accounts of value today.\n\nMesny lived in a China which followed a predominantly masculine routine. The majority of foreigners were either isolated loners or members of small groups in remote parts of China, or they lived in treaty ports, enclaves in which the relative comfort of 'home', friends, and social occasions made life bearable, even though foreign women tended to live circumscribed and artificial lives. However, his accounts lack such intimate detail of his and his family's lives. Despite the autobiographical notes in the Miscellany, not only in segments but selective in the extreme, Mesny remains somewhat of an elusive person, and, as none of his letters appear to have survived, much of his personal life would seem to be largely irrecoverable. His enigmatic snippets about his Chinese family are such that they do little more than fuel guesswork. We still lack an account of Mesny's private life in his later years, one in which we might hear the voices of his wives and children as clearly as those of the senior officers we have been provided in the Miscellanies, of the senior Chinese officers during the Kueichou campaign.\n\nMuch of the raw material provided by Mesny contains stark, bald statements which leave loose ends and strands which we cannot gather together without straying into the realms of guesswork. Regrettably, there would appear to be little chance of ever satisfying our curiosity from...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213016, "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-1993", "page_number": 84, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "63\n\nMore so, the relation between factors of face that belong to individuals or teams with attributes of face that belong to people, nation or government is affirmed in the study. This seems to agree with the proposition posed by King and Myers (1977). These two authors argued that due to the breakdown of the traditional social networks, such as the village, the family and so on, individuals would seek to identify more with the nation, the government or other Chinese as a whole. This identification serves to connect them with a source of face too. That is to say, when an individual gains face, he may extend it to the nation, and in turn, he could also share the face of the nation, her status, honour and so on.\n\nSuch an interflow seems to have roots in the traditional Chinese character of mutual dependence (Hsu, 1981: 114). In the past, this spirit of mutual dependence was found within the family system. The social tie of parents and sons allowed the interchange of status and authority between them. In the light of piety prevalent under Confucian teachings in traditional China, the father is the one to have the upper hand in case the two come into conflict. More so, the father can enjoy the authority derived from the son even after retirement. Likewise, he could enjoy the influence, the honour, the status, the economic resources etc. obtained by the son through his own efforts. This was what happened to the concept of face in the past as has been pointed out in previous studies reviewed earlier in this paper.\n\nBut the communists advocated the party as the vanguard, preached a revolution of the feudal system, the family, and the old social networks etc. After the breakdown of the family and this strong social bond, the father-son relationship needed to be replaced, the family system required a substitute. The era then saw the creation of self-reliant rather than mutually dependent individuals, \"isolated, insecure, purposeless, and therefore perpetually in search of something to which he can belong and for which he can fight\" (Hsu, 1981, 471). In short, the individual under the Communist rule needed to position himself in a new setting.\n\nThe answer to this would be the introduction of another collectivity in which an individual could feel at home with. In the findings of the present study, the fact that face exhibits some collective character seems to signify the existence of such a new collective environment, a new set of relationships in which it works. The interflow of status, honour, influence, power etc. is now being placed in a new social network. Exchange between fathers and sons may still be present, it is hard to prove not, but what is more prominent in the press is an exchange in a new", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213110, "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-1993", "page_number": 178, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "160\n\nChung Ferry. Finally, the Japanese attacked Sha Tau Kok in 1938, 1939, and 1940, before taking it over late in 1940,\n\n41\n\nThese periods of disturbance caused serious problems to the Sha Tau Kok villagers. Their sole desire was to sell their vegetables and firewood, and buy their salt and household goods, but this was, year after year, interfered with by political problems. Sha Tau Kok was rarely - except during the Boycott - the centre of the disturbances, but it was almost always \"in the front line\", full of intrigue, nervous military, and difficulties. A market shop-owner in Sha Tau Kok was executed by the military in about 1935, in an event still a talking point in the villages, probably for being involved with the rebels to the east. An underground Communist cell was established in the 1930s in the market, centred on one of the teachers in the Tung Wo School, with the job of encouraging smuggling of strategic goods to Sha Yue Chung and the guerrillas, and of indoctrinating suitable youngsters, to prepare for an extension of rebel activity to the immediate Sha Tau Kok area.\n\n41\n\nThe elders of the Shap Yeuk continued to function throughout this troubled period as the managers of the market at Sha Tau Kok, but less effectively than before. The strong military presence in the town, the close Government interest in it, and the elders' inability to control the Customs, greatly weakened the Shap Yeuk as the effective local administration. The guns which had been placed by the Shap Yeuk in the gun-towers they had built to guard the bridge were confiscated very soon after the 1911 revolution, and the eastern gun-tower, at the front of the Tung Wo School, was taken over as the military barracks at about the same time. The warlord and Kuomintang administrations were usually unwilling to discuss problems with the local elders - noticeably so compared with the District Officer in the New Territories - and so the elders and their Council declined to having responsibility, effectively, only for those things the officials could not be bothered to interfere with, especially the running of the market night-watch and cleaning services.\n\nBy 1910, the elders were already talking of moving the market over the frontier into the New Territories, with its better security, better villager-administration relationships, and absence of Customs problems. Nothing, however, was done until 1925, when the chaos of the Boycott started to push the market across the frontier. Shops began to be built on the New Territories side of the border street in 1925, and this process", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214300, "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": 158, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "122\n\nhis birth and childhood, and my favourite stamping ground in China Taiyuan, the capital of Shansi province, to his first wife, the daughter of John Mesny, a junior employee of the Chinese Imperial Customs Service, the life of whose elder brother, William Mesny, was the subject of my earlier research [vide.: my paper in the Journal of the RAS HK Branch: Volume 32, 1992]. Sowerby roamed far and wide throughout northern China before serving for a while in France as an officer with the Chinese Labour Corps [vide: my Note on Chinese Labour Corps Graves in England in the Journal of the RAS HK Branch Volume 29, 1989]. He then visited Fukien province and met Caldwell whose book on the Blue Tigers of that province had intrigued me when I was much younger. Finally, I was drawn to Sowerby's life story because he was not only a dedicated member of the North China Branch of the RAS in Shanghai for whom he wrote prolifically and eventually became its President, an honour he held for some five years, 1935-1940 but also because he produced his fascinating bimonthly journal on both everyday and exotic Chinese subjects. Since his death nearly fifty years ago he has faded into insignificance and is forgotten by all but those who happen to come across his books and journals.\n\nArthur Sowerby was an explorer and author who lived through very exciting times, first as the son of a Christian missionary in the Chinese interior at the time of the decline of the Manchu dynasty, through the Revolution of 1911 and the fall of the Manchu dynasty to the War Lord period during which he roamed some of the more remote areas of northern China. This was followed by the crises and struggle between the Nationalists and the Communists, the incursions and eventual full-scale invasion by the Japanese, his incarceration in an internment camp in Shanghai during the Second World War, ending with learning during his latter years in retirement, first in England and then in the United States, of the Communist victory in 1949 and, just before his death, of the Korean War when China sent its \"Volunteers\" to aid the North Koreans against the South Koreans and their allies which included the Americans and British. During the last thirty-five or so years of his life he suffered great pain wracked as he was by arthritis.\n\nIt was said that he could speak Chinese ‘like a Chinese.' There is no reason to doubt this as he must have learned it at his ayah's knee though he appears never to have made any effort to learn to read and write the language. During his life in China, the next forty or so years,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214364, "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": 222, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "188\n\ncults. Popular religion is an amalgam of Chinese peasant beliefs with shamanism and the use of magic. The reason for the interdict on popular religion, apart from the reference to it as \"purely superstition,\" would appear to be because it is not in any way an organised religion with a controlling malleable body and having to obey orders in a chain of control.\n\nIn the first flush of the Communist victory in 1949-1950 temples in a great many places were closed down, taken over and used for community purposes such as granaries, police and even local military barracks, schools or créches, or destroyed. The few that remained, having been allowed to lie unused and untouched, were mostly laid waste during the Cultural Revolution [1966-1976] when the young Red Guards saw it their duty to destroy all elements of old ways. Since the early 1980s more and more religious establishments within Mainland China have opened or, in the majority of places, re-opened. They have been refurbished and new statuary made to replace those destroyed during the early days of communist rule or during the Cultural Revolution.\n\nMany temples have now been renovated and restored to their old glory with statuary created by young artisans guided by the elderly whose memories of the iconographic detail has proved, on the whole, to be comparatively poor. As an example we can see in Kuan Hsien near Chengtu in Szechuan province, the former image of the major local deity, Li Ping, the official who designed and arranged the irrigation system which made the Chengtu plain the major agricultural region it is today. Previously he was portrayed as a standard scholar-official, sitting, dressed in robes and cap but without a unique characteristic. Today, however, he is depicted as a politicised middle-aged man, standing in a Stakhanovite pose typical of the nineteen fifties and sixties. This in no way inhibits devotees today from kneeling before and revering him.\n\nMany of the new images depict dynastic scholars, officials or women, with well formed and not unattractive heads and faces, and swathed in silken robes which conceal a basic frame constructed of slats of wood unlike pre-1949 images the bodies of which were made in the whole. The images of small children usually accompanying the image of maternity goddesses are almost without exception modern children's dolls without their clothes whereas during dynastic times the children were all equally well carved as the major deities. It is worth adding how truly hideous and garish some of the new edifices are.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214463, "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": 321, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "288\n\n[illustration XX].\n\nThe cab driver from Shanghai who took us to Sungkiang had never heard of Ward and we therefore stopped the first old man we saw and asked whether he had ever heard of the American and if so, where had the temple been? Yes, he had heard of an American but knew no more. He recommended that we visited the local government Historical Department. On arrival we disturbed an elderly lady who was taking her mid-day siesta sprawled across her small upright desk. She shot to her feet and ushered us into the office of the Director/Curator who having heard what we were seeking called for a conference. We sat around a large table for a matter of minutes whilst the Director described the problem, - to find the temple dedicated to ‘Hua-de' - as Ward was described phonetically; whereupon he then announced that he knew where it used to be and that we should repair there straight away. He took the elderly lady on his moped and led our cab through the back streets and finally down a narrow tortuous lane until we came to a pair of large iron gates which we entered and found ourselves facing a modern church. We were led first into the offices nearby where it was explained that the priest was out but the young woman on his staff would show us their church. It proved to be a Roman Catholic church built in 1982 containing the statuary and altars one would expect. The decorated ceiling was pointed out as a speciality; meanwhile, a Dutch lady and her husband who were accompanying me were examining the electric fan covers, all beautifully embroidered with grinning cats! A typical Chinese touch. It was explained that the high altar stood over the grave of Ward and that the foundations of the four walls were the original foundations of Ward's temple, long destroyed even before the Cultural Revolution. So, we thought, that was that. But no, the young woman had a request to make. Would we as foreigners please visit their landlord who was causing them some trouble with his high rents, and try to persuade him to be more lenient. It then transpired that the landlord was the abbot of the local Buddhist monastery, which squares the circle. The grave of Ward, a Protestant, revered as a Chinese Confucian hero, with a temple in his honour, now lies under the altar of a Roman Catholic church, whilst the land itself is the property of the local Buddhist monastery in a Communist state.\n\nThe altar table in the temple raised by Chinese mandarins, bore his tablet, ritual candle sticks and incense pot, and was flanked by scrolls", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214972, "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-2000", "page_number": 68, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "24\n\npromised quick liberation from technological backwardness of China and consequently from the dependence on non-altruistic foreign assistance, or so at least hoped young, aware, fierce and idealistic Chinese patriots of the mandarin origin, Han Suyin's father, Chou Yentung, among them. Belonging to the upper class of the Old China's society, a scholarship was rather easily granted to him by the provincial government of Szechuan to study railway engineering in Belgium. He spent ten long years in Brussels (1903-1913), studying and working, and there he met his future wife, Marguerite Denis, and eventually married her in 1908. In Chapter One of The Crippled Tree Han Suyin briefly comments:\n\nWe are all products of our time, vulnerable to history. I was born because there had been, in China, a Boxer Rebellion (as the Europeans called it) in 1900, and because of this event, which the Chinese call the Uprising of the Righteous Fists, my Chinese father, instead of becoming a classical scholar, perhaps a Hanlin Academician, married my Belgian mother.\n\nRe-settlement of the Chou family from Belgium to China was a great disillusionment for both, Marguerite Denis and her young Chinese engineer husband. At that time (which - unfortunately enough - would end with the Communist Revolution only) Chinese were treated in their own motherland as citizens of the second category, by definition inferior to the whites. Han Suyin's great epic cycle on autobiography/history of China gives multiple examples to prove this abhorring and painful truth. The return trip alone was a bitter humiliation for the couple travelling such an enormously long way to the Chinese homeland with their first-born son. In Chapter Eighteen of The Crippled Tree, Han Suyin quotes fragments of her father's memoirs, which describe some details of that event:\n\nWhen we went to collect the tickets [for the English boat], the man in the booking office (tall, blond, low-voiced) said to Marguerite: \"But, madame, you can go in first class if you wish, but not monsieur. It is the rule.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Marguerite, astonished, \"but he is my husband. Of course I shall go with him.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215346, "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-2001", "page_number": 123, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "71\n\nobvious to any Chinese with an ounce of nous. Two years later he wrote a play, Hai Rui Dismissed, purporting to be about Hai Rui. This was seen as a covert attack on Mao Zedong's purge of Marshal Peng Dehuai who had openly blamed Mao for the 1959 famine. The purge of the Peking hierarchy led by Yao Wenyuan, a Communist political writer in 1965 [who was later one of the Gang of Four], is usually seen as the overture to the Cultural Revolution in China, Hai Rui being used as a symbol for Peng Dehuai, Mao's fallen rival.\n\nIn a Hainanese community temple dedicated to the Jade Emperor near Bukit Mertajam in northern Malaysia two images flanked the main deity, on his left hand his Fourth Daughter and on his right Luo Yanhua, about whom nothing more is known other than she is claimed to be a unique Hainanese deity. Her image has not been seen or recorded anywhere else, hand, and aide to the Fourth Daughter.\n\nAlthough Lishan Laomu is primarily a Chaozhou local folk religion cult goddess she is also worshipped widely in Hainanese temples where she is regarded as a Hainanese cult. Lishan Laomu is her more popular title rather than Lishan Shengmu, though considering the ambiguities in legend, title and the initial character, it is open to question whether we might have more than one deity here. Three different characters for Li, all homophones, have been noted. The first means black, the second pear, and the third black horse. The first is the more popular version in central Malaysia and Hong Kong. The second appears to be the character preferred by the Hainanese, and the third has only been encountered in Taiwanese temples. She was referred to in a Saigon Hainanese temple as either Yimei Niangniang 懿美娘娘 or Yide Niangniang 懿德娘娘.\n\nAn elderly lady temple keeper in Kowloon approached the deity and \"introduced\" me to Lishan Shengmu as ‘a foreigner who wished to disperse the mists of his ignorance.' She told me that Miss Fan, a Daoist nun, had been summoned by Tian Hou to Heaven to be trained to become an Immortal and is now a caring spirit known as Lishan Shengmu, the Saintly Mother [or Matron] Lishan.\n\nIn an interesting but typical misconception an odd title of a deity was noted in a temple in Lincoln Road in Singapore where the custodian who claimed to be Hainanese also claimed that all the deities were", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215663, "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-2001", "page_number": 440, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "392\n\nMs. Han did not practice medicine in China in the 1950s or at any other time\n\n*\n\nMs. Leon Comber was a superintendent (not assistant superintendent) with the Malayan police, and acted as assistant commissioner\n\nOn the morning of Sunday, 25 June, 1950, communist forces from North Korea crossed the border into South Korea. The next day, on 26 June, President Harry S. Truman ordered American air and naval forces to go to the assistance of South Korea, and Clement Attlee in the House of Commons expressed support for Mr. Truman's actions.\n\nOn 27 June, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution recommending that all members of the UN furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to meet the armed attack.' The Korean War had begun.\n\nThe unexpected outbreak of the Korean War took all newspapers by surprise but The Times had Ian Ernest McLeavy Morrison, a member of its staff, in the Far East at that time. By August of that year he would be dead.\n\nBorn in Beijing on 31 May 1913, he was the son of the famous Australian journalist, Dr. George Ernest Morrison (4 February 1862-29 May 1920) and a New Zealander Jennie Wark Robin (1889 – 20 June 1923), Dr. Morrison's former secretary who he had married in 1912. Dr. Morrison was known as \"China Morrison\" and was himself a correspondent for The Times during 1897-1912 and later political adviser to the Chinese Government.\n\nHis brother, Alastair Gwynne Morrison was born on 24 August 1915. He ultimately joined the Diplomatic\n\nDr. Morrison and his three sons, Ian, Colin and Alastair, 1917, (Mitchell Library)", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216164, "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-2002", "page_number": 463, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "397\n\nThe result of the Confucian education is supposed to be the formation of a highly virtuous character....The chief energy of those who have taught it has been expended in the endeavour to give it practical effect on the individual, the family, and the nation.1\n\nIn regard to the depopulation at Shek Pik, it is curious how this was repeated at Tong Fuk, another old village four miles to the east, where the 198 persons recorded at the Colony Census of 1911 were survivors of the much larger population of some 700 persons claimed before the onset of disease sometime in the second half of the 19th century. Interviewed in 1971, the elders had been most emphatic about this, on the basis of information handed down by their fathers' generation... 'There was not a single empty or ruined house [before the epidemics struck],' or so they claimed. Later on, in the 1910s, when my oldest informants were then in their teens, the situation worsened again, with two persons dying every day. 'No sooner had we taken out one body for burial, than we had to start all over again.' As at Shek Pik, altered, meaning adverse, fung-shui was blamed for these disasters. 'For we Cantonese, fung-shui is vital,' stressed one of their number.\n\nThe caption to Plate 25, the rebuilt Tianhou Temple at Chiwan, Shenzhen, can be extended here. I omitted to mention the famous well, prominent in the foreground, with adjoining plaque,\n\nAs mentioned in the related text, the temple's long history and cultural importance had not saved it from destruction. By the end of the ten-year period of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) only the foundations survived, and what remained of its historic buildings had been reduced in height and roofed over to provide barrack accommodation for a unit of the People's Liberation Army, still in occupation at the time of my first visit in 1983. The temple's fine stone and wood carvings had gone, along with the many donated fittings and repair tablets that would have been kept within its walls. However, one tradition had survived the decades of Communist ideology.\n\n'This was both the theory and the aim. However, Edkins concluded that despite the intention, 'it has not made them (the Chinese) a moral people. Many of the social virtues are extensively practised among them, but they exhibit to the observer a lamentable want of moral strength. Commercial integrity and speaking the truth are far less common among them than in Christian countries. The standard of principle among them is kept low by the habits of the people.'", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216311, "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-2003", "page_number": 70, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "19\n\nestablished to restore order within the temple's community of resident monks. In 1944 this committee restored the Da Xiong Bao Dian, and the next year, 1945, the Bao Ta. Once the Sino-Japanese War had ended, in 1946 life in the temple returned to a resemblance of its pre-war normalcy. However, the tranquility which existed within the temple for the next three years was suddenly disrupted when the Communist's captured Shanghai in May 1949 and proclaimed the People's Republic in October 1949. With all the disasters the temple had survived over the previous 900 years, the worst was yet to come.\n\nPeople's Republic, 1949-2003\n\nIn June 1949, one month after their capture of Shanghai, the new Communist government took over the temple, and on October 1, 1949, the day celebrating the establishment of the People's Republic of China, the Red flag of the P.R.C. was flown from the top of the pagoda. This unprecedented disrespect shown by the new regime to the temple by flying its flag from the pagoda was only the first in a series of incidents which illustrated the temple's now endangered status. The temple grounds were drastically reduced in size by at least two-thirds when their garden area was seized by the state and converted into Longhua Park in 1954. The temple's halls were temporarily appropriated by the government in January 1956 for a series of meetings held between local government officials and Chinese businessmen to explain and then celebrate the new policy of abolishing private enterprise in favor of a new system of joint private-state companies. The celebration involved a party for 2,000 people which undoubtedly included activities such as smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol which are contrary to the Buddhist faith. This temporary appropriation of the temple by the government for non-religious purposes was herald of worse things to come during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).\n\nIn the summer of 1966 Longhua Temple suffered a devastating series of events over a one month period which destroyed nearly all vestiges of its centuries old heritage. On August 24, 1966 a mob of more than 1,000 Red Guards (Hong Wei Bing) rushed into the temple and in one day destroyed all of the temple's Buddha statues, library of books, treasures, and art work. The next day, August 25, the Red Guards returned with the intention of destroying the Longhua Pagoda (Bao Ta), which we've seen had probably been built in the Northern Song", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216317, "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-2003", "page_number": 76, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "25\n\nYin. While Guanyin has compassionate mercy for those in need, it is Da Shi Zhi who possesses the power to actually carry out her acts of kindness. The San Sheng Dian houses by far the oldest of Longhua's three bronze bells, this one supposedly dating from 1132, which would also make it the oldest historic relic the temple possesses today. The hall itself dates from an 1884 reconstruction, when it was rebuilt to replace an earlier structure destroyed during the Taiping rebel attacks on Shanghai in 1860-1862. The hall was last restored in 1986.\n\nImmediately behind the San Sheng Dian is a walled garden with trees which unfortunately is closed to the public. Inside this walled garden is a fifth main hall, the Abbot's Quarters (Fang Zhang Shi), which is for the private use of the resident monks and their master, the Fang Zhang. It was the only hall which the monks maintained control of during the Cultural Revolution. Normally it is kept off limits to the public and cannot be visited. However, the author was able to steal a glimpse and found that the hall was furnished with rows of large armchairs, and lacked any large statues. Possibly it is a modern day form of the Meditation Hall (Chan Tang). At the far left end of the hall is a small office decorated with framed color photos of the temple's Buddhist leaders posing with Communist Party leaders such as Jiang Zemin.\n\nBehind the Abbot's Quarters is the sixth and final courtyard, and the sixth hall on the central axis, the newly built two-story Scripture Hall (Cang Jing Lou). This modern building holds most of the temple's few genuine relics, including a library of 7,000 Qing Dynasty volumes; a Ming Dynasty gold seal given to the temple in 1598 by the emperor Wanli (1573-1620); a Ming Dynasty gold-plated bronze Buddha statue; Tang Dynasty scriptures; and a copy of the Heart Sutra dating from the year 1098, the fifth year of the Zhe Zong reign (1085-1100) of Emperor Zhao Xu of the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1126). Exactly how these relics survived the destruction of the Taiping Rebellion, the lengthy military occupation of the Min Guo era, and the Cultural Revolution is unclear. Possibly they were donated to the temple sometime later. Unfortunately the public is not welcomed to visit this sixth hall, and the relics are kept hidden from view, although photographs of them appear in a recent pamphlet sold at the temple's bookstore.\n\nHidden in a seldom visited corner of the temple grounds on the east side of the Fang Zhang Shi's walled garden is a smaller garden", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]