[ { "id": 205058, "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": 14, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "A PLEA FOR A REGIONAL APPROACH TO CHINESE HISTORY:\n\nTHE CASE OF THE SOUTH CHINA COAST Based on A Lecture Delivered on 4th April, 1966\n\nJOHN J. NOLDE\n\nEver since men such as Thucydides, or Ssu-ma Ch'ien, began to collect, analyze, and interpret historical documents, they have been, from time to time, vexed by a series of nagging questions: How valid and authentic are the documents I have used? How closely does the portrait I have painted of the past correspond to the real world of the people who lived in that past? Have I, in fact, really described what was \"going on\"?\n\nOr to put the question the other way: Is there not always a danger that the historian may be led by his documents to create a picture of the past that is far too broad and general to have any relevance for the people living at that place and at that time? I wonder, for example, whether the studies of the coming of the Varangians to Russia in the ninth century have much to do with the lives and loves of the people then living along the Russian river system; or whether detailed analyses of the political structure of Renaissance Italy have much to do with the way the average Italian really lived. In short, if \"history is man's memory of what men have said and done\", to use Carl Becker's phrase, with what accuracy does the historian's tale reflect what was actually said and done? Is not the historian's view of the past not always in danger of being distorted by the zeitgeist of his own era (as Becker again would have it), and that what he may think important was of little consequence to those living at the time?\n\nI don't doubt that the certain Big Events are important, especially in terms of the extent to which they explain the general course of history, why the stream of history seemed to run in one direction and not another. Furthermore, I would be the first to agree that such events as the Pelopponesian Wars or the French Revolution did dominate the life and thoughts of the peoples living in those places at that time. But is this always, or even usually, the case?\n\nThe author is Dean of the College of Arts and Science at the University of Maine.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "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": 209409, "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": 66, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "44\n\nJ. H. HAAN\n\nand above I have already mentioned the swamping number at the Public Meeting of March 12, 1866.\n\nOne more danger which could well have appeared was the so-called plural voting system. This meant that each person was given more votes according to the acreage of land he possessed or the amount of taxes he paid. In several other foreign concessions in China, plural voting was part and parcel of the established administrative structure; as, for instance, in the British concessions at Hankow, Kiukiang, Canton, and Tientsin, as well as in the Russian and German concessions at Tientsin.31\n\nIn Shanghai, however, it was never practised, and in article XIX of the Land Regulations 1869, it was explicitly stated that no one should have more than one vote (apart from proxies).\n\nEarlier, it had already been rejected at a Public Meeting of May 25, 1852, but ten years later, an attempt was made to introduce it. At the Public Meeting of November 30, 1863, Mr. E. M. Smith moved a resolution which would have allowed plural voting.32\n\nThe text of the motion was published in the North China Herald of November 21, and the following week, a fiery letter to the editor from “Civis” appeared in the columns of the paper, in the following terms: “Just, however, as the slave-holding planters of the Cotton states of America felt the necessity of dominant power in the Federal Government, so the principal landholders in this settlement, true to the instincts of a monopolising class, are convinced that their influence to be secure must be paramount, and relying upon the specious boldness of a few and the moral apathy of the many, they propose a revision of the constitution which will place the Municipal power in the hands of a plurality of votes according to extent of Mowage or direct taxation\n\nand it was his opinion that “in the guise of much-needed reform, a coup d'état of no ordinary boldness is in contemplation.”3\n\nMaybe this sharp opposition contributed to the defeat of Mr. Smith's proposal, for at the meeting of November 30, the motion was not even seconded and therefore could not be voted upon.\n\nWith these details about voting qualifications in mind, we might well ask: how did they work out in practice; in other", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211256, "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": 317, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "292\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nPamela Atwell, British Mandarins and Chinese Reformers: the British Administration of Weihaiwei (1898-1930) and the Territory's Return to Chinese Rule, Hong Kong, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 302 + xxiii pp. Appendices, Notes, Bibliography, Glossary (with Chinese characters), Index.\n\nThe year was 1898 and the sun was setting on the Ch'ing dynasty which had ruled the Chinese Empire since 1644. China's defeat by Japan in 1895 had revealed its weaknesses once more to the world. Foreign powers sought to take advantage of the vulnerability of the Ch'ing government to intensify their demands for territorial and economic concessions. The Powers rushed, or \"scrambled\", to attain their objectives before others could get to them first.\n\nIn one respect, the Powers had the support of Chinese officials, who, implementing traditional Chinese policy of using barbarians to control barbarians, sought to achieve a balance of power in China. By 1898, the Russians built a naval base at Port Arthur while the Germans established their presence over the province of Shantung. In April 1898, the Chinese government leased Weihaiwei to Britain. Weihaiwei, at the tip of the Kiaochow Peninsula in northern Shantung, was then occupied by the Japanese. It was hoped that, from this vantage, the British would be able to counter Russian and German strength in North China, and all of them would keep out the Japanese.\n\nThe British stayed at Weihaiwei until 1930, when it was returned to Chinese administration. During the interim, the Kaiser and the Tsar had collapsed and China had gone through the Boxers uprising, a series of reforms, a revolution that toppled the Ch'ing dynasty, a period of disunity and warlord rule, and, finally, the establishment of the National Government at Nanking led by Chiang Kai-shek in 1927. The rise of Chinese nationalism increased demand for rendition of all foreign concessions in China, including Weihaiwei.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212216, "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": 158, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "135\n\nPolice Station, and were allocated various districts to patrol. We worked in pairs. Sometimes a regular French policeman accompanied us, in addition to several Chinese constables of the French Police Force. We would walk along as the spirit moved us; and on arriving at a cross-roads would take up a position in the middle of the street, cock our pistols, and stop all cars to look inside them. The idea of this was to catch kidnappers, as they usually carried off their gagged victims by car. One day we stopped a large car, only to find the venerable Mr. Yu Ya Ching in it. He was the senior of the five Chinese representatives on the Municipal Council. I do not know who was the more astonished, he or we! On another occasion when we looked into a car we found a complete thuggery of Russian gunmen; there is a large White Russian community in Shanghai, a survival of the Russian revolution, and many of the men were engaged by rich Chinese as bodyguards. They looked ugly, as if they were more used to holding people up themselves than being held up. The next car turned out to contain the puppet Mayor of the Chinese Municipality, who durst not venture abroad without a heavy escort. All passed off with mutual compliments. In my time we fortunately never ran into a real gangster: I have difficulty in hitting a haystack even with a snug little weapon, let alone with so heavy a piece of ancient ironmongery.\n\nUntil about 10 p.m. a heavy traffic would continue in the Avenue Joffre, the main highway on our beat. Sometimes, when we went out on bicycles, a form of sport to which I had been unaccustomed for at least a quarter of a century. I found it rather tricky moving in patrol formation amidst the traffic. If we came across an obstreperous drunk, we would turn tactfully in the opposite direction. It at least gave the Chinese some confidence to see armed foreign patrols out at night, a confidence which, I fear, may have been exaggerated. Sometimes we would stand at the corner of the street, at about the time the cinemas came out, and watch our families go home; and, when the time was up, we might go into that little bar on the ground floor of the Cathay Mansions for a bottle of \"Ewo\" Beer.\n\nAt the police station the French Municipality provided sandwiches, crumbly French rolls split in half, buttered, and holding a slice of ham, which we would munch, while our leader made his report. Then early in the morning we would go home, feeling we had earned our sleep.\n\nThe cinemas of Shanghai are as luxurious as any in the world.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "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": 212857, "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": 166, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "151\n\na handful, because efforts had to be made in order to make sure that there would be enough male Jews to constitute a daily Minyan.\n\nThis community was by far the most prominent of the three groups of Jewish residents in Shanghai. They were among the first foreign traders in the metropolis, bearing names that included Sassoon, Kadoorie, Ezra, Abraham, Solomon, Rahmin, Moses, and Gubby, families still active in Hong Kong today, and were a part of the international mercantile community in the Far East at that time, enjoying business and personal links with the close-knit Jewish communities in Hong Kong and Bombay. At first they traded in raw cotton and general goods, then took over the opium trade. In time, in Shanghai as well as in Hong Kong and Bombay, they branched out into real estate, banking, shipping, warehousing, insurance, hotels, utilities, and other industries, gaining power and influence locally as well as in international commerce. The names of 38 prominent Sephardic Jews were found among the 1932 list of 99 members of the Shanghai Stock Exchange.\n\nAshkenazi Jews\n\n6\n\nImmediately following the completion of the trans-Siberian Railroad and the pogrom in Russia in 1905, a number of Russian Jews moved to Manchuria through Siberia, with about 300 filtering down to Shanghai. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, more than 10,000 Jews emigrated to Harbin. Apparently at that time the Chinese government had been contemplating expelling the Jews from Manchuria. In the mid 1920s when White Russians and Japanese interests began to spread in Manchuria, many of the earlier immigrants moved southward to Tianjin and Shanghai, swelling the total Jewish population in Shanghai to just under 2,000.\n\nThe Ashkenazi community of Jews in Shanghai, mostly Russian but by then joined by stragglers from Lithuania as well, increased to more than 1,000 after 1924. They were not exactly embraced by the Sephardic community of Shanghai. The Ashkenazi were not princes of commerce, but small businessmen who engaged in the import and export of such items as wool, bristles, and fur. The Chinese in Shanghai remembered Jewish salesmen going from house to house, carrying rugs for sale. The Ashkenazi Jews were also professionals; physicians and lawyers, for instance; and, above all, musicians.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 } ]