[
    {
        "id": 206761,
        "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": 38,
        "title": "RAS-1973",
        "content_text": "32 \n\nA. J. S. LACK \n\nhad died the reaction of the Chamber of Commerce to the Governor's suggestion was not perhaps what one might have imagined. \n\nOn 27th September 1906, Mr. E. A. Hewett* the unofficial member of the Legislative Council appointed by the Chamber of Commerce rose to comment upon the budget proposals for the year ahead, and in the course of his speech said— \n\nWith regard to the typhoon shelter, your Excellency referred to the necessity for this which is admitted by all and went on to suggest the Chamber of Commerce might see their way to suggest the means of raising funds, I am sorry to say the Chamber of Commerce do not see their way to meet your Excellency's suggestion. For many years it has been strongly urged by all those interested in shipping that tonnage and light dues should not be levied for the purposes of general revenue. \n\nHe claimed that in 1897 Mr. Chamberlain, the then Secretary of State in reply to a telegram from Sir Wilfred Robinson, “practically admitted that in future light and tonnage dues were not to be raised for such purposes.\" He then said, \n\n\"the shelter benefits all classes of the community and should be borne by the Community and not by the shipping section, we all depend on the native craft, the merchant and the house owner as well as the ship owner and the refuge here is just as much a benefit to the merchant and the house owner as to the ship owner. Consequently, it would be manifestly unfair to ask a portion of the community to raise a large sum of money for the benefit of the whole Colony.\" \n\nMr. Hewett then questioned various sites which had been proposed for a typhoon shelter and raised the possibility of the Colony incurring a loan to pay for it. Then he went on to say that he did not suppose that even had there been a shelter it would have had any effect in avoiding the great loss of life which had occurred on 18th of the month. He considered that a few boats in the immediate vicinity might have gone into the refuge, but it would not have benefitted the native shipping at large. \n\n* Edbert Ansgar Hewett, listed in Who's Who in the Far East as Superintendent, Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, b. 1860, member of the Shanghai Municipal Council 1897-1901 and its Chairman in 1900-1901. Chairman of the Hongkong Chamber of Commerce since 1903.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 209404,
        "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": 61,
        "title": "RAS-1982",
        "content_text": "39\n\nAs in Europe in the first half of the 19th century, it was not deemed advisable to grant the vote to all and sundry. The fear of democratic tyrannic majority rule, after the experience of the French Revolution, still worked its influence on political thinking about the franchise. If only voters had some \"respectable\" background in most cases to be measured by their payment of taxes or rates they could be expected to vote in the \"right\" way. Moreover it was argued that the government of the land should be left to those who had a real stake in it, again measured financially. In view of this train of thought it is not surprising to find that in Shanghai similar opinions prevailed.\n\n10\n\nAccording to the 1845 and 1854 Land Regulations only landowners (incidentally: legally the ground could be rented only, but to all practical purposes it was owned) could take part in the decision making process at the Public Meeting. Originally this was a very natural development because most foreign residents owned land in the new settlement. Gradually this changed and more and more foreigners rented houses on which they had to pay a housetax which did not carry with it a right to vote. Soon after the approval of the 1854 Land Regulations in July, however, there was a short upheaval at a Public Meeting held on November 10, 1854. At that meeting a resolution was moved and passed which read: \"That in addition to the qualifications for Votes now in use the payment by any Foreign resident of fifty dollars annually, or upwards, towards the Dues or assessments levied by the Municipal Council, shall entitle the individual or firm so contributing to one vote at any General Meeting (...)\".20 This motion was probably induced not so much by the house renters, but by the payers of wharfage dues, the revenues of which in the budget of 1854-55 were estimated at $14,000 out of a total of $25,000 (against $2,000 landtax, $3,000 European housetax and $5,400 Chinese housetax),21 Chinese housetax). Although the resolution was passed unanimously, it was not approved by consul Alcock, whose main argument, expressed at the Public Meeting of November 24 was that if the franchise was widened on this basis \"its application in any impartial or equitable spirit would involve the introduction of several thousand Chinese voters, to the swamping of the present small fraction of Foreign renters, in whom all power was now without dispute vested\".22",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 209415,
        "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": 72,
        "title": "RAS-1982",
        "content_text": "50\n\nJ. H. HAAN\n\nfunction very well and in 1925 there were fresh cries for Chinese representation.\n\nThis time the direct cause was the May 30th incident and as a result of numerous Chinese protests, demonstrations and strikes which took place at that time, the Municipal Council understood that the Chinese could no longer be barred from membership.\n\nIn 1927, for the first time in the Settlement's history, three Chinese took their seats on the once exclusively foreign Shanghai Municipal Council and three years later their number was increased to five.\n\nAll members were chosen by the Chinese Ratepayers Association, mostly from industrial and commercial circles so that the Chinese members came from the same business background as the foreign members.\n\nThus the electoral basis for Chinese differed materially from that for foreigners, which was understandable from the foreign point of view, for direct election would have meant that eventually the Council would become Chinese dominated. Besides, it suited most Chinese guilds and other business circles which were not used to open voting procedures, but preferred to be represented on an indirect functional basis. Moreover, it should be borne in mind that in the neighbouring Chinese Greater Shanghai Municipality, established in the same year of 1927, there also was an appointed Municipal Council.\n\nThe elections\n\nIn contrast to most governments and municipal councils in other countries, the Shanghai Municipal Council tenure of office was for only one year. Until 1865 the Councils were elected at a Public Meeting which was held especially for that purpose, as well as to discuss the budget (first introduced in 1854) and other financial and municipal matters. In the early years the months in which these electoral meetings were held varied, some being convened in January (1856, 1857, 1859), some in February (1858, 1860), March (1849, 1855, 1862), April (1863, 1864), May (1852), June (1851), July (1854) or August (1850). The",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 209421,
        "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": 78,
        "title": "RAS-1982",
        "content_text": "56\n\nJ. H. HAAN\n\nthe fact that so many foreigners came from countries in which one form or another of representative government was part and parcel of the political structure, in Shanghai it was hard to speak of democracy apart of course from the Chinese having practically no official say in it.\n\nIn the very early days there was a real form of direct democracy in the Settlement. There were few people, few enough to make this kind of democracy feasible; nearly all were land-renters and there was a widespread feeling of doing something positive when introducing representative government into part of the Chinese empire.\n\nSometimes there were fierce clashes between the land-renters and the Municipal Council, as in 1852 when the Municipal Council even decided to resign because a Public Meeting had rejected their drainage plan, a decision which was only reversed when another Public Meeting repealed the rejection;55 or in 1854 when a large number of renters objected to the expense of police barracks and the increase in taxation, and the newly established Municipal Council was threatened in its very existence; or in 1864 when the whole budget was rejected and a new one had to be drafted.57\n\nDiscussions at these meetings were often very spirited affairs, with letters to the editor appearing in the columns of the North China Herald.\n\nGradually, however, the meetings seem to have become \"cut and dry affairs\"; sometimes debate became more heated, but lethargy prevailed, as became clear when the very important proposal to restrict Child Labour came up for discussion in April 1925, when not even the quorum to make a decision binding was present.\n\nOne of the defects of the system was that it was not really a representative one. There were in the 1930s over 3500 rate-payers with the right to attend Public Meetings. If every one of them had wished to make use of this right, the meeting would have been turned into a complete Babel.\n\nAny person speaking at a Public Meeting was only speaking for himself, and it was difficult to be clear as to whether he had",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212719,
        "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": 28,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "13 \n\nimposes upon readers. He had joined the large skirmishing force led by General Liu Ho-ling, commander of the Ko-i Force of the Szechuan Army Corps and Mesny's immediate chief, to harry the Miao tribesmen. Mesny remarks that upon retiring the General and Mesny came under fire from a Miao ambush with hundreds of bullets whizzing close to them. Mesny quickly dismounted and soon cleared the wood [in which the ambushers were hidden] and the enemy fled leaving their dead and wounded. Some ten lines further on, after an anecdote about a splendid prize that he had captured, an eight foot long Miao rifle, he explained that the Miao-tzu had lost more men in and near that wood than they had all day as Mesny had laid an 'ambuscade' for them with two companies of General Liu's guards. If one bears with Mesny's usual hyperbolic claim that he had laid the successful ambush, one is left wondering what he was doing, alongside the General, when they fell into the ambush, which Mesny would appear from an earlier paragraph to have foiled alone with great success.\n\nAt another point in the narrative, when General Liu goes off leading a local attack, he leaves Mesny behind because 'the Commander-in-chief needed Mesny's advice more than he, General Liu, did.' Liu was defeated, 'badly' says Mesny, and one can sense the schadenfreude. Mesny added that one of the battalion commanders had commented that General Liu would appreciate Mesny's abilities better in future! It is not hard to imagine General Liu becoming more and more irritated by this young foreign whippersnapper who always knew best. General Liu has only to leave Mesny behind and, as luck would have it, be defeated.\n\nHis lengthy and often involved autobiographical essay in his Miscellanies only cover the period from 1861, when he was 19, to 1870 and the end of the first campaign in Kueichou to suppress the Miao tribesmen's rebellion, when he was still only 28. From 1870 on we are dependent upon the copious and varied snippets in his Miscellanies, both long and short, until the final publication of the Miscellanies in 1905 when he was 64. Dr Tiedemann of SOAS, University of London, has discovered that Mesny wrote at least a dozen letters from Kueichou from May 1872 to February 1874 published in the Shanghai newspaper, Shanghai Budget and perhaps even more in the Celestial Empire, the paper which took over the Shanghai Budget in 1874. No copies of these papers appear to be available though we can surmise that they probably covered Mesny's activities during that period. From 1905 until his death fourteen years later, in 1919, we have to rely on his obituary, admittedly",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x",
        "rank": 0
    }
]