Collaborative Colonial Power
A new series on socio-economic and cultural changes in Hong Kong
HONG KONG CULTURE AND SOCIETY
Series Editors
Tai-lok LUI Department of Sociology,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Gerard A. POSTIGLIONE Faculty of Education,
The University of Hong Kong
Panel of Advisors
Ambrose KING The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Alvin SO The Hong Kong University of Science
and Technology
Siu-lun WONG The University of Hong Kong
Other titles in the series
The Dynamics of Social Movements in Hong Kong
edited by Stephen Wing-kai Chiu and Tai-lok Lui
Consuming Hong Kong
edited by Gordon Matthews and Tai-lok Lui
Toward Critical Patriotism: Student Resistance to Political Education in Hong Kong and China
Gregory P. Fairbrother
At Home With Density
Nuala Rooney
Changing Church and State Relations in Hong Kong, 1950�V2000
Beatrice Leung and Shun-hing Chan
Collaborative Colonial Power The Making of the Hong Kong Chinese
Law Wing Sang
Hong Kong University Press
14/F Hing Wai Centre 7 Tin Wan Praya Road Aberdeen Hong Kong
c Hong Kong University Press 2009
Hardback ISBN 978-962-209-929-6 Paperback ISBN 978-962-209-930-2
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue copy for this book is available from the British Library
Printed and bound by Caritas Printing Training Centre, Hong Kong, China
For Oi Wah and Yu On
Contents
Series Foreword ix Acknowledgements xi Introduction: Coloniality and Hong Kong Chineseness 1
I Collaboration and Institutions
1. Social Fabric of a Collaborative Colonialism 9
2. Cultural Coloniality: The English Language and Schooling 31
3. Pedagogy of Imperialism: Indirect Rule and HKU 57
II. Hong Kong In-Betweens
4. Double Identity of Colonial Intelligentsia: Ho Kai 79
5. Chinese Cultural Nationalism and Southern Localism 103
6. Cultural Cold War and the Diasporic Nation 131
III. Lingering Colonialism
7. Indigenizing Colonial Power and the Return to China 151
8. Northbound Colonialism: Reinventing Hong Kong Chinese 177 Conclusion: Re-theorizing Colonial Power 199 Character List 211 Notes 215 Bibliography 225 Index 261
Series Foreword
M
ost past research on Hong Kong has been generally aimed to inform a diverse audience about the place and its people. Beginning in the 1950s, the aim of scholars and journalists who came to Hong Kong was to study China, which had not yet opened its doors to .eldwork by outsiders. Accordingly, the relevance of Hong Kong was limited to its status as a society adjacent to mainland China. After the opening of China, research on Hong Kong shifted focus towards colonial legitimacy and the return of sovereignty. Thus, the disciplined study of Hong Kong was hindered for almost half a century, and the richness of a society undergoing dramatic economic, social and political change within the contemporary world was not suf.ciently emphasized.
The unfolding of culture and society in Hong Kong is no longer con.ned by the 1997 question. New changes are shaped by local history as much as by the China factor. Rather than being an isolated entity, Hong Kong is an outcome of interaction among local history, national context, and global linkages. An understanding of the future development of Hong Kong requires sensitivity to this contextual complexity.
The volumes in this series are committed to making Hong Kong studies address key issues and debates in the social sciences. Each volume situates Hong Kong culture and society within contemporary theoretical discourse. Behind the descriptions of social and cultural life is a conceptual dialogue between local agenda, regional issues, and global concerns.
This series focuses on changing socio-economic structures, shifting political parameters, institutional restructuring, emerging public cultures, and expanding global linkages. It covers a range of issues, including social movements, socialization into a national identity, the effect of new immigrants from the Mainland, social networks of family members in other countries, the impact of the colonial legacy on the identity of forthcoming generations, trade union organization within the shifting political landscape, linkages with
Series Foreword
Southeast Asian societies, Hong Kong��s new role between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland, the transformation of popular culture, the globalization of social life, and the global engagement of Hong Kong��s universities in the face of national integration.
Gerard A. Postiglione Tai-lok Lui
Series General Editors
Acknowledgements
T
his book represents a development of research initially undertaken toward my PhD dissertation in Cultural Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney (2002). I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Stephen Muecke for his academic supervision and intellectual guidance over the years. Without his friendship and assistance this study could not have been completed. I would also like to thank Professor Meaghan Morris, who has read drafts of this work and has provided incisive comments and constructive suggestions at the crucial stage of the project. Their intellectual breadth, earnestness and invaluable patience have strengthened my interest in cultural studies scholarship. This work owes much to both of them. I am also deeply grateful to receive helpful comments from the anonymous reader engaged by Hong Kong University Press.
Colleagues at the Department of Cultural Studies of Lingnan University have given me generous support and counsel in one form or another during the writing of this work. Special thanks are due to Stephen Ching-kiu Chan, Hui Po Keung, Lau Kin Chi, and Chan Shun Hing, whose friendship and collegiality contributed invaluable encouragement for me to persist in .nishing the work. I would also like to extend my appreciation to Lingnan University which granted me a study leave from April to August 2001 and without which the completion of this study would have been impossible. My heartfelt gratitude is given to Chung Hsiu Mei who offered every kind of friendly help in order to facilitate my completion of this research in Sydney.
Thanks must also go to the group of researchers involved in the Programme for Hong Kong Cultural Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1994�V1997. The stimulating discussions held in those workshops with Ip Iam Chong, Hung Ho Fung, Tam Man Kei, Lo Sze Ping, and Mirana May Szeto, among others, inspired my interest in Hong Kong cultural studies.
I also wish to thank the librarians of Chung Chi College Library, the Hong Kong Collection of the United College Library, the University Library at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Fischer Library at the University of Sydney, for their excellent guidance in locating materials useful for this book. I am also grateful for the support received from the friendly staff in the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, during my stay as Visiting Fellow there in summer 2005.
No words can express my gratitude to my family. Their caring support and staying power over the years were indispensable for the completion of this project.
Some sections of Chapter 7 appeared in different form in Kuan-Hsing Chen (1998) (ed.) Trajectories. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 109�V 121 under the title ��Managerializing Colonialism��. An earlier draft of Chapter 8 appeared in Positions. East Asia Cultures Critique, 2000, 8, 1, pp. 201�V233 under the title ��Northbound Colonialism: A Politics of Post-PC Hong Kong.�� Some sections of Chapter 1 appeared in an article in Human Rights Global Focus, 2006, 3, 1, pp. 5�V14, under the title ��The Legacies of Collaborative Colonial Rule in Hong Kong��.
Introduction: Coloniality and Hong Kong Chineseness
B
ritish imperialist forces captured Hong Kong in 1842 and ruled the place as both a free port and a colony until recently. However, in both popular and academic discourses, people have almost forgotten Hong Kong��s status as a colonial entity. Liberal-modernist historiographies of Hong Kong usually tell a romanticized story about the growth of Hong Kong, characterizing it as a utopia of laissez-faire economics �X a narrative that, highly sympathetic to colonial rule, embraces the depiction of Hong Kong as a ��barren-rock-turned-capitalist paradise�� (Endacott 1964; Woronoff 1980; Ngo 1999: 120). It is said that Hong Kong was a desolate island before the British came but that, thanks to the benevolent governance and good policy of the colonial state, the barren rock has been transformed into a capitalist metropolis. This liberal-modernist narrative peddles the Hong Kong success story and operates under the presumption that Hong Kong is an economic entity on its own. Screened out from this narrative are, .rst and foremost, the effects of more than 150 years of colonialism in Hong Kong, and this select screening of information renders Hong Kong colonialism nothing more than a set of liberal frameworks within which capitalism was able to .ourish. Moreover, this same narrative treats the colonial state as, for the most part, a non-interventionist power: the British never exploited Hong Kong economically, and Hong Kong remained not an imperialist-dominated terrain but a neutral arena where both Western and Eastern cultures could intermingle.
Ironically, most of the Marxist historians, who, in the past two decades, have come from mainland China, and who are writing about Hong Kong��s pre-1997 history, also like to join the liberal-modernists in unre.ectively attributing the growth of the colony to the free-market economy that .ourished under British colonial rule. Rapidly churned out before 1997 as ideological justi.cation of the moment of ��return��, their writings are never hesitant in making the patriotic proclamation that Hong Kong had belonged to China since time immemorial. They rush to identify a few British misdeeds, criticizing some of the old racist measures and praising mainland China��s contribution to Hong Kong (Yu and Liu 1994; Liu 1997). As their political task was only to legitimize the ��return�� of Hong Kong to China under the ��one country, two systems�� policy, their anti-British and pro-China assertions cannot go any further than a highly selective and super.cial treatment of colonial history. What have turned out are examples of expedient eclecticism that have transplanted the liberal-modernist narrative of Hong Kong, .aunted in its apologetic defense for British colonialism, upon a positioned Chinese nationalistic frame.1
Drawing upon the same liberal-modernist framework, all these historical writings tell time and again almost the same miraculous success story of Hong Kong. Despite the interruptions of the Japanese occupation and of Chinese revolutions and civil wars, Hong Kong stands out as a model case of capitalist development, with its own formula for initiating the momentum of free-market growth (Endacott 1964; Miners 1981; Rabushka 1973, 1979).
Bringing Colonialism Back In
Despite the popularity of this Hong Kong success story, there is, however, little evidence lending support to the assertion that Hong Kong exhibited self-generating capitalistic growth animated by the sheer entrepreneurial spirit of a new China-based bourgeoisie (Choi, A.H. 1999). Nor does rigorous factual substantiation underlie any assertion that Hong Kong economic growth was autonomous, independent of regional political and economic formations. Getting beyond these unfounded assertions, recent revisionist historiography has shifted focus onto the important role of the colonial state, of its relationship with local society, and of the emergence of a regional economic network. Ngo Tak Wing and Alex Choi, for instance, argue against the widely held notion that Hong Kong was ruled by a neutral administrative state that upheld the principle of non-intervention (Ngo 1999; Choi 1999). They also question whether it is tenable to depict Hong Kong society as atomistic, its people as apathetic, and their mentality as functionally .t for bureaucratic colonial governance (e.g. Lau 1982). Put together, the revisionist historiographies of Hong Kong challenge these somewhat hackneyed perspectives and take the view that Hong Kong society cannot be understood independently of colonialism. The historiographies begin with the assumption that Hong Kong was a sui generis colonial city and then propose to conduct a thorough investigation of the colonial system. By treating colonialism as primarily a form of politically imposed rule, the historiographies highlight the active interventions of the colonial state and, in this regard, identify different strategies of rule for the maintaining of governance. For example, it has been shown that, refusing repeated calls for industrial upgrades, the colonial state privileged pro-British trading and banking interests (Choi 1999; Ngo 1999); similarly, Munn regards the criminal justice system as a means by which the colonial state and the ruling Europeans could police the lower class Chinese inhabitants (Munn 1999, 2001). In short, the authors of these historiographies re.ect on the colonial state, re-read Hong Kong��s past, and from it, reconstruct the changing political rationalities of British colonialism in Hong Kong. According to these revisionist historiographies, Hong Kong is less laissez-faire than it seems to be. Also, the British presence in Hong Kong was never guaranteed with harmony and success to the extent that can warrant placing it as an exceptional case within a long colonial history that featured brutal domination and .erce resistance.
While I very much agree with these attempts to revisit Hong Kong��s colonial past, particularly with regard to their contribution to found a critical intellectual project of Hong Kong studies in de.ance of the hegemonic liberal-modernist story, I would also like to underscore the need to look further than revealing the political dimension of colonial rule. As a political critique of colonialism is premised on a narrow conception of power, which con.nes one��s attention to uncovering the changing strategies of colonial rule, it tends to treat colonial power as no more than an instrument for the willful domination of the colonizers over the colonized. What is missing is a perspective that can reveal how colonial power exists and operates as an impersonal force through a multiplicity of sites and channels, through which the impersonal forces may still linger in the absence of a discernable colonizer. Failing to conceive of colonial power as a network of relations, a political critique of colonialism may run the risk of perpetuating a monolithic, universal de.nition of colonialism that can account for neither related transformations nor spaces of possible resistance.
Malleable Coloniality and the Constitution of Chineseness
The urgent need to develop a critical intellectual project that can go beyond a mere political critique of colonialism is also prompted by the fact that narratives of their colonial pasts bear heavily upon how Hong Kong people��s self-identi.cation and how the Chinese in Hong Kong conceive of their Chineseness. In the nineties, when everybody was taking an interest in observing the .nal chapter of British imperialism and the handover of Hong Kong��s sovereign power from Britain to China, the notion of Chineseness was thoroughly interrogated by the emergent cultural studies scholars. For example, informed by a diasporic perspective, Rey Chow tried to re-imagine the .eld of Chinese studies (presumably, in America), saying that ��Chineseness can no longer be held as a monolithic given tied to the mythic homeland but must rather be understood as a provisional, ��open signi.er����. (Chow 1998b: 24) Conceiving Chineseness in its plural forms, which could only be re-evaluated in what she put as ��the catachrestic modes of its signi.cation��, Chow called for an investigation into the very forms of the historical construction of Chineseness. Echoing Chow, Ien Ang (1998) went one step further by pushing the limits of the diasporic paradigm in not just pluralizing Chineseness but in allowing the rejection of Chineseness as de.ning one��s ethnicity, arguing for a more contextualized assessment of the ��differential politics of Chineseness��. Inspired by both Chow and Ang��s critiques of Chineseness, Hong Kong cultural studies, especially in its period of rapid emergence in the nineties, bolstered cultural criticisms of all kinds against looming Chinese nationalism. Criticizing the essentializing tendencies manifested in those Chinese nationalistic discourses, diasporic cultural studies passionately argue for a kind of post-colonial politics which can engage battles on two fronts: that is to say, they try to safeguard Hong Kong as a space for identi.cation where both British colonialism and chauvinistic Chinese nationalisms can be held in check.
However, the limitations of diasporic critiques of Chineseness in offering a critical perspective for post-1997 cultural politics are also obvious. On the one hand, generally delegitimizing anti-colonial critiques done under the banner of Chinese nationalism may risk short-circuiting re.ections on the colonial experiences Hong Kong has undergone. On the other hand, overstretching the methodological principle of anti-essentialism may also impede cultural resistances that attempt to af.rm a distinct cultural identity for Hong Kong. For example, people may need to look beyond the diasporic anti-nativist critiques to .nd justi.cation for the now growing interest in preserving Hong Kong��s heritage and collective memory. For, the ethics of unanchored cosmopolitanism, which is often embedded in the diasporic anti-nativism, contribute little to substantiate the wake of historical consciousness among Hong Kong citizens, let alone to lend support to the social efforts in defending against the globalist developmentalist ideology��s encroachment on local cultures and communities. Failing to offer a located intellectual project, the ambivalent posture of this type of ��post-identity�� politics is also attributed to its inability to offer a vantage point to critically retrieve or re-appraise Hong Kong��s colonial past. In short, what is missing from these cultural studies on Hong Kong is precisely a serious consideration of Hong Kong��s historical past in general, and colonialism in particular, which gave shape to the present self-representation and identity of Hong Kong Chinese.
Another dif.culty, which prevents scholars from giving the colonial experiences of Hong Kong adequate and thorough treatment in their efforts to deconstruct Chineseness, involves their tendency to conceptualize national or sub-national identities as standing in opposition to colonialism. It is a kind of implicit binary framework onto which even the anti-nativist deconstructive efforts are still clinging. That is to say, even when Chineseness is interrogated by post-colonial critics, it is still treated as something dissociable from colonialism and colonial history. The methodological error involved here is that both nationalism and colonialism are taken out of the regional historical contexts in which they were indeed deeply interwoven. Hence, a genuinely critical post-colonial approach can only be possible if it can depart from the narrow ��ethnic�� conception of Chineseness, which takes Chinese as referring only to certain pre-existent belongingness. On the contrary, the continuous process of how Chinese identity was constantly disembedded and reintegrated, within the sites and channels where colonial power effectuated, creating mosaics of Hong Kong culture, has to be understood. To discern in every turn of these long processes how pervasive colonial power (either that of the British colonizers or that of other Western powers) can be is very important since it conditioned how Chinese identity has been received, perceived, and experienced. Because those interconnected forms of colonial power always functioned in establishing discursive and non-discursive possibilities and boundaries for different forms of Chinese subjectivity to be constituted and negotiated.
By simultaneously engaging with issues of the pervasiveness of colonial power and the contestable identity of Hong Kong Chinese, this book tries to go beyond either describing Hong Kong culture as of a hybrid kind or documenting the existence of collaboration already highlighted by some Hong Kong historians. Instead, in order to subvert the residual conceptual binarism in postcolonial cultural studies, the book attempts to give Hong Kong Chineseness and colonial history a proper treatment in which their interfacings will be laid bare. In this light, this book seizes upon collaboration as a key to found an extended analytical framework within which to grasp the power formation of Hong Kong. It is not to argue that Hong Kong is the only place where colonial rule relied on collaboration but the existence of pervasive collaborative relations is taken as providing a convenient but often-neglected access to understanding the irregularly shaped cultural landscapes of Hong Kong. This book will account for the large variety of interests and forces involved in order to show the mobility and the variability these colonial cultural forms (i.e. colonialities) manifested.
Given the rapid recon.guration of power politics in the post-1997 era, I would consider that the stake is high concerning whether we can intellectually grasp such malleable but enduring colonialities. For it bears on whether we can avoid being trapped methodologically by an anti-imperialist logic, which often operates in complicity with nation-state. Throughout this book, several guiding questions inform my investigation of Hong Kong��s coloniality:
Historically, how did this colonial-power formation come about? (Chapter 1)
What were the main cultural institutions involved in the power formation in the early colonial period? (Chapters 2, 3)
How did this power formation operate not just as a political superstructure that the British imperialist state imposed on the native Chinese but also as a site of cultural production collaboratively constituted by the British and the Chinese? (Chapters 3, 4)
How did this particular colonial formation interact with the emerging project(s) of Chinese nationalism and the Chinese nation-state(s)? (Chapters 4, 5)
How did this formation give rise to the con.guration of Hong Kong as a new political and cultural entity? (Chapters 5, 6)
Finally, how did this con.guration of culture and power continue to in.uence the self-understanding of the people living within the con.guration �X self-understanding that set the scene for cultural politics in Hong Kong right up to the eve of its return to China? (Chapter 7, 8)
Part I (Chapters 1 through 3) of the book focuses on the emergent formation of collaborative colonialism in the early colonial era: from the First Opium War (1840�V1842) to the 1911 Republican Revolution. I will closely inspect cultural and educational institutions and their roles in the collaborative-power formation. Part II (Chapters 4 through 6) will deal with the cultural politics of Chineseness in Hong Kong throughout the Republican period, the Cold War, and the years leading up to 1997; I will examine different modes of Hong Kong��s in-between state to demonstrate the dynamics around the contested cultural and political constitution of Hong Kong Chineseness. Part III (Chapters 7 and 8) examines the ideological and cultural transformation that occurred prior to the sovereignty handover in 1997 and probes into the degree to which colonialism is still a lingering presence in Hong Kong. The conclusion will deal with the theorization of colonial power and re.ects upon certain methodological issues involved.
I Collaboration and Institutions
1
Social Fabric of a Collaborative Colonialism
A
Victorian saying went like this: by acquiring Hong Kong, Great Britain had cut a notch in the body of China as a woodsman cuts a notch in a great oak he is presently going to fell. As a ��notch,�� Hong Kong, seized by the British navy in the First Opium War (1840�V1842), has possessed a value that can never be measured in terms of territorial conquest. The British sought a place where they could establish an independent commercial and military base free from the bureaucratic Qing government and the Cohong system that restricted foreign trade to be conducted in Canton only. Hong Kong was chosen for its offshore location despite it being only a sparsely populated, geographically barren island. The goal of the British imperialists was to establish their own judicial system with which to govern the activities of their merchants, under the military protection of the British navy (Endacott 1964a, b, c; Norton-Kyshe 1971). It was out of these concerns that Britain was determined not to make Hong Kong just another Macau, the tiny peninsula that the Portuguese of.cially governed but which the Chinese government kept running as their own. In contrast, the British exercised truly colonial control over Hong Kong, which stood as a model for subsequent treaty ports.
The West��s defeat of China in the First Opium War dealt a heavy blow to the pride of the Qing Empire and to the Chinese gentry; the surging nationalist movements thereafter all considered the war a historic humiliation for China and insisted on claiming that the annexation was forced upon the Chinese by what they saw as an unequal treaty. There is no doubt that Britain accrued enormous bene.ts from its possession of this tiny treaty port; however, for more than a century after its cession as a war indemnity (at least until the 1980s), successive Chinese governments were equally reluctant to make the reclamation of Hong Kong a national priority. Therefore, although Chinese nationalist rhetoric always complained about ��the loss of Hong Kong��, the Chinese had an important stake in Hong Kong too.
However, Chinese interests in Hong Kong have never been adequately theorized in the present dominant paradigm of Hong Kong studies, which seldom goes beyond describing the place��s peculiarity. Works of this trend always begin with the authors�� professed fascination with Hong Kong, a fascination that smacks of a certain exoticism and that usually concerns Hong Kong��s uninterrupted prosperity and protracted political stability; then, the political analyses will discuss the geo-strategic expediency of the place; the sociologists will rant about Chinese political apathy; the economists will make a big fuss about Hong Kong��s ��nearly-perfect�� market (e.g. Lau, S.K. 1982; King 1972; Rabushka 1979). These studies invariably assume Hong Kong to be a unique entity and try to unlock its presumed mystery. They share among themselves a tendency to abstract Hong Kong from its historical and spatial contexts, in particular its colonial milieu. They either treat Hong Kong colonial rule as an exception or turn colonialism into an entirely positive factor, if they do not totally neglect its presence. All in all, they propose a paradigm of Hong Kong exceptionalism and thus try to get around the serious theoretical challenges that require rigorous scholars to give Hong Kong colonialism its due regard. By treating the Hong Kong colonial government as exceptionally benign, or Hong Kong��s markets as exceptionally perfect, or Hong Kong Chinese as exceptionally acquiescent, these researchers have seldom probed into Hong Kong colonialism as colonialism. In short, these researchers treat Hong Kong colonialism as a mere historical contingency. Consequently, Ackbar Abbas��s (1997) characterization of Hong Kong culture as one of ��reverse hallucination�� �X in the sense that onlookers are ��not seeing what is there�� �X proves to be highly perceptive. Most of these scholarly works examine the colony while attempting to explain away Hong Kong��s colonialism.
The cost of such intellectual expediency is dire, I must say. In concrete terms, the exceptionalist paradigm always misses opportunities not only to take up Hong Kong particularities as contradictions inherent in its colonial rule, but also to take those alleged anomalies as epistemological challenges to the respective paradigms of the concerned disciplines. For example, few researchers therein would make use of Hong Kong as a vantage point from which they would examine either the theoretical and the empirical problems of colonial studies or, in terms of the whole Asian political economy, the hegemonic consensus between the colonizer and the colonized. Nor have these researchers thoroughly discussed the in.uences of this particular colonial formation on China and on Chinese nationalism.
However, recent exceptions to this trend are evident in the contributions made by scholars such as John Carroll (2005), Christopher Munn (2001), Hui Po-keung (1999), and Stephanie Po-yin Chung (1998), each of who follows a unique path toward a revision of the Hong Kong studies paradigm. Some of these scholars raise attention to collaboration, a dimension relatively neglected in the aforementioned Hong Kong studies; for example, John Carroll (2005) highlights the collaboration between the British colonists and the Chinese elite, accounting therein for the rise of Hong Kong��s Chinese elite into a full-.edged bourgeoisie by the late nineteenth ce ntury; Christopher Munn (2001) also takes advantage of the angle of collaboration but stresses the coercive ways of colonial governance in the .rst three decades after cession. These scholars present and explore new materials and analytical concepts to redirect approaches to Hong Kong studies. Indeed, any interested scholars can mobilize new resources from the research that has been emerging since the late seventies, when studies began to draw attention to the historical emergence of an Asian regional economy. For example, migration studies have revealed the great signi.cance of Southeast Asia��s rapidly developing coastal cities for the formation of a regional trading network that long pre-dated the Europeans�� arrival (Chang, P. 1991; Reid 1996; Mackie 1989; Brown 1994; Wang, G. 1981, 1991). These studies shed light on the development of Hong Kong and, it is reasonable to argue, open up new perspectives for the study of contemporary China (Steinberg 1987; Tate 1979). Glimpses of these new pictures will enable us to see that, before European expansion into the region, Chinese merchants (particularly those from the southern provinces like Amoy and Swatow) indeed occupied dominant economic positions. They actively participated in both tribute and private trade between China, Java, Siam, Malacca, and the Ryukyuan Kingdom. As sojourning merchants or settlers, they established close commercial relationships among these port cities and controlled the vast trade networks of South China, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. Long before the Opium Wars, many coastal Chinese were already in close contact with Europeans as a result of the latter��s trading in commodities such as tea, porcelain, silk, and foodstuffs (e.g. Jansen 1992; Carroll 1997, 1999; Hui 1999). With commercial activities manifest in the coastal Chinese regional networks, in Southeast Asian economies, and in the European-dominated New World, a class of elite transnationals arose around Hong Kong and exercised considerable economic clout (Mackie 1989; Wang, G. 1981a, b, 1991; Uchida 1959).
Colonialism as Con.gured by the Local and the Regional
The rise of European power in the Southeast Asian region went hand in hand with the Europeans�� collaboration with the Chinese. The militarily stronger Europeans, who arrived in full force only in the late nineteenth century, soon realized the importance of encouraging the regional trade that was .rmly controlled by the Chinese. The Europeans had to rely on the Chinese business networks to expand economically and politically into the region, particularly as the European powers tended to destroy indigenous trading communities in the region (Hao 1970; Brown 1994; Reid 1990). According to Hui Po-keung��s account, the advantage of the Chinese over the latecomer Europeans lay in the former group��s ability to speak local languages as well as their familiarity with domestic customs and business practices. According to Hui, the Europeans chose Chinese merchants as collaborators because
The overseas Chinese �K were ��lost children�� of their imperial court and
a marginal trading minority in Southeast Asia. Not only did they present
no serious political or military threat, but also the colonial powers saw in
them a means to de.ect anger that might otherwise be directed against
the colonial power, and to control anti-colonial movements centered
in conquered peoples. While the loss of independence for indigenous
states meant that indigenous traders lost military and political support
for their trading activities, as well as access to key trading commodities
such as pepper and weapons for long distance trade, the Chinese, by
contrast, were regarded as suitable partners.
(Hui 1999: 32)
The overall effect of nineteenth-century European colonial expansion on this region was the inclusion of Chinese merchants in the newly arisen global networks; yet the dependence of the Europeans on the Chinese also helped boost the ability of some Chinese merchants to dominate intra-Asian trade, including trade with China��s hinterlands. The role of these Chinese collaborators became even more prominent as late-Qing imperial policy monopolized Chinese trade and restricted Chinese merchants�� trade with Europeans to a few coastal ports. Without the help of the Chinese collaborators, the Europeans would hardly have been able to reach China��s vast inland market. Among all the European competitors, the British distinguished themselves owing to their more effective and successful use of Chinese networks (Carroll 1997, 1999).
Robinson (1972) considers the Chinese-European collaborations as only part of a wider process that inaugurated an ��external or informal stage of industrial imperialism,�� in which ��Ottoman rayahs, Levantine traders, Chinese Mandarins, Indian Brahmins and African chiefs�� were gradually turned into Europeanized collaborators by ��free trade and Christianity�� (Robinson 1972: 126�V130). He focuses on the collaborative systems between Europeans and non-Europeans in order to uncover the ��non-European foundations of European imperialism,�� which prepared for a distinct stage of Europe��s expansion. In short, identifying the existence of collaborative colonial formation can have a signi.cant theoretical effect on our understanding of the global history of imperialism and colonialism.
My purpose here is, however, much more self-consciously limited, for it concerns the features of the distinct regional and local power formation that resulted from collaboration in Hong Kong. Such a local perspective is important for Hong Kong studies because it will help put in place a series of new questions seldom raised. Crucial among them are questions concerning the usual images that Chinese nationalist historiographers present and that portray Chinese as occupying a subordinate position in the face of Western superiority. One adverse consequence of this victim narrative is its .ip side: chauvinism. For example, China subsumes Hong Kong under the conventional East-West paradigm, from which the conventional modern Chinese nationalist historiographical tradition derives. Consequently, whatever happens to Hong Kong becomes simply a sideshow compared with China��s national-revival struggles. Such a China-centered narrative would af.rm Hong Kong only as the margin and China only as the center and would, by neglecting the complex regional historical dynamics, perpetuate both the narrow political de.nition of colonialism and the barren focus on Hong Kong exceptionalism.
At any rate, the regional perspective can help to make a better sense of one crucial irony that Stephanie Po-yin Chung has succinctly described: ��As a British colony, Hong Kong ironically had been ��colonized�� by settlers from South China�� (Chung 1998: 21). The irony has to be understood in at least two senses: .rst, it was the colonization of Hong Kong that made possible the large-scale settlement of Chinese in Hong Kong; second, some Chinese were indeed active upholders of the British colonial enterprise. Yet, the fact that some Chinese bene.ted from British expansion might not be that surprising if we take a regional perspective to consider the long record of collaboration between Chinese and British powers all over Southeast Asia. The British conquest of native places, accompanied by a huge in.ux of Chinese settlers, had indeed become the normal pattern throughout the eighteenth century and the .rst half of the nineteenth century.
Opium and Coolie; Building and Contracting
During the massive rise in Britain��s opium sales to China, most Chinese merchants who joined the British in commercial affairs did so as opium traders (Beattie 1969; Trocki 1990, 1999; Brook and Wakabayashi 2000). During the war with China, the collaboration of Chinese merchants with the British ranged from supplying the British navy to spying for pro-British military purposes.
These collaborators played an important role in the Opium Wars �X so much so that Captain Charles Elliot, the British superintendent of trade, argued that the British crown had an obligation to retain Hong Kong ��as an act of justice and protection to the native population upon whom we have been so long dependent for assistance and supply�� (CO 129/1, Elliot to Auckland, June 21, 1841, quoted in Carroll 1999).
Apart from trading in opium, overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia actively supplied the British with labor for projects such as housing construction. According to Carroll, it was Chinese contractors, builders, and laborers who usually undertook, at that time, the major construction works in the European colonies. Right after the cession of Hong Kong, quite a number of Chinese .ocked there to help the British literally build the new colony (Carroll 1999, 2005: Ch. 1; see also Smith 1985: 114�V116). Although some British of.cials still perceived Hong Kong as a barren rock several years after the cession, Hong Kong experienced, with the help of the Chinese, a historic building boom during its .rst decade. Not only did the Chinese of the Canton region .ock to Hong Kong to build a colony for the British, but some even returned from other Southeast Asian European colonies to help with the British colony��s coastal projects. After all, the returning migrants considered the coast their home country and earned their fortunes in Hong Kong as property speculators. According to Hui, this fast and highly opportunistic in.ux of Chinese labor and capital into Hong Kong was just one case among many that constituted the common pattern of overseas Chinese merchants�� movement into and out of China. These migrant Chinese merchants established residences in all of Southeast Asia��s important port cities and moved wherever European expansion led them (Hui 1999: 31). The few thousand original inhabitants of Hong Kong, who were scattered in a few villages on the island, might well have attached the label ��intruders�� to these droves of Chinese coming from elsewhere to help the British. Thus Lethbridge writes, ��A new settlement of overseas Chinese had been created, which in many respects had more in common with any Chinese community in Southeast Asia than with imperial China itself�� (Lethbridge 1978).
While collaboration between the Chinese and the British was driven by pro.t, for some overseas Chinese settlers, the prospect of material gain did not adequately explain their enthusiasm. These other settlers hoped to use the British occupation to reverse their fate as socially marginalized persons. For example, prominent among these collaborators were Loo Aqui and Kwok Acheong, well-known Chinese opium smugglers, and Tam Achoy, a contractor who came from Singapore, to where he had earlier migrated illegally. Loo and Kwok were both Tanka (boat people), a group that had long been outcast by the inland Han Chinese (Smith 1985). For more than a thousand years, the Tanka had been treated as uncivilized people or sea pirates and had been discriminated against by the landed people (Ward 1954; Kani 1967; Hayes 1977; Hung 1997). Denied the same rights as landed people, they were prohibited from taking the civil service examination (ke ju), owning landed property and marrying inland inhabitants. As a .oating population who were not self-suf.cient, Tanka had to trade with landed Han people and to participate in all sort of legal and illegal trading and smuggling activities at sea. Together with other overseas Chinese merchants, they formed the backbone of the Chinese who collaborated with the British to colonize Hong Kong. Collaboration with the Westerners brought to them not only economic gain but also advancement in political and social status. In return for their help, the British granted them land, and they were able to speculate on property and became rich (Carroll 1999). To reverse their fate of political exclusion, some of those successful under the British rule assumed the function of leaders of the local gentry, equivalent to traditional literati. The difference, as I will later show, was only that, under British rule, they did not have to take the civil service examination and earn imperial degrees in order to acquire the status of Chinese gentry.
In the very .rst decades of this relationship, both Europeans and Chinese got rich through land speculation or opium trade, although it was not the British government��s original intention to make Hong Kong a new colony whose chief function would be to accommodate the infamous business. Government ministers in London tried to control, through legislated prohibitions or heavy duties, the export of opium from the island �X at least until legal trade in opium was agreed to by the Qing government. Commonly bandied about by promoters of the Opium Wars and the new colony was the claim that, with the opening of a more general commerce with China, British merchants would quickly see their dependence on opium shift to a healthier preoccupation with developing British manufactures. However, for much of the remainder of the century, the shipment of opium to China continued to be a vital part of the colony��s economy (Trocki 1990, 1999; see also Brook and Wakabayashi 2000; Miners 1983). It is estimated that three-quarters of the entire Indian opium crop was passing through Hong Kong by the late 1840s (Munn 2000: 107); and Davis, the second governor of Hong Kong (1844�V1848), reported soon after his arrival that almost every person possessed of capital who was not connected with government employment was employed in the opium trade. Munn describes the relationship between opium and Hong Kong as follows:
The opium trade and Hong Kong are so obviously intertwined that it is hardly possible to consider the early history of the colony without some reference to the drug: the colony was founded because of opium; it survived its dif.cult early years because of opium; its principal
merchants grew rich on opium; and its government subsisted on the
high land rent and other revenue made possible by the opium trade.
Early Chinese traders came to the colony to deal in opium; the drug
became standard currency for remittances from Chinese living in
Hong Kong to their native places on the mainland; pirated or disputed
consignments of opium dominated many judicial proceedings; and
opium balls cluttered the colony��s numerous pawnbrokers�� shops.
(Munn 2000: 107)
In fact, the continued growth of the opium trade in the 1840s actually held back the development of regular trade between England and China. Some people thought that the cession of Hong Kong would additionally bene.t the British there by attracting trade previously carried out under Canton��s monopoly; however, the opening of several treaty ports at the same time along the China coast, ironically, rendered the new colony a less than ideal place for regular legal trade. Except as an opium depot or as a military base for the widely predicted second Sino-British war (1858�V1860), Hong Kong had little to offer. If not for its role as a safe warehouse for the goods coming in from the illicit opium stations scattered along the coast, the British would have abandoned the colony before the end of the 1840s. The ��poppy lords�� did not allow any such abandonment to happen, as they always assumed that Hong Kong would be dedicated to the opium trade and had invested heavily in land and in buildings (Munn 2000: 107�V 8). The boom of the 1850s helped con.rm Hong Kong��s status as the chief base for opium smuggling into China. By 1880, about 45 percent of opium .owing into China was smuggled through Hong Kong. This incarnation of the opium business lingered on for the rest of the nineteenth century and only ended in 1909 (Munn 1999).
What really pushed Hong Kong away from its status of being just an opium depot was the island��s reception of the second wave of Chinese immigrants driven by economic crises and wars. The so-called free trade that the West imposed on China led to the opening of treaty ports such as Shanghai, Ningpo, Foochow, and Amoy, and its in.uence was deeply felt in southern China; Guangzhou (Canton) became the hardest-hit place (Hao 1986: 14�V33; Tsai 1993:21; Ng 1983). The better-armed, swifter foreign vessels that entered the Chinese coastal trade drove many Cantonese junks out of business, and industrial products imported from foreign countries caused serious economic strain and dislocation among local handicraft industries (Feuerwerker 1969). Adding to the economic hardship was the Taiping Rebellion, which started in 1850 in neighboring Guangxi and rapidly spread to Guangdong and other southern provinces. The turmoil, which lasted for almost two decades, triggered an exodus of Cantonese; they .ed the disorder on the Mainland for the relative order and security of Hong Kong. A large surplus of labor was then available in the coastal regions; many of these potential laborers tried to immigrate to Southeast Asia, sometimes to join secret societies, bandit gangs, or pirate groups (Tsai 1993). The enormous pressure to emigrate from China created for Hong Kong not only a massive in.ux of population but also an opportunity to thrive on another business: coolie trade (Campbell 1923; Arensmeyer 1979; Sinn 1995; Yen 1985). James Legge (of the London Missionary Society) described the 1850s as the ��turning point in the progress of Hong Kong�� (Legge 1971). Between 1855 and 1900, almost 1.8 million Chinese emigrants embarked at the port of Hong Kong (Sinn 1995; Coolidge 1909; see also Tsai 1993). The high tide of colonial expansion in this period created a huge demand for contract laborers who would work on the large-scale rubber plantations and in the tin mines in Southeast Asia, on the construction of railroads in North America, and in the gold mines of North America and Australia. The Hong Kong economic base then broadened through the derived demand for transportation, shipbuilding and ship repairing; coolies�� remittances to their families in China also boosted Hong Kong��s .nancial sectors (Mei 1979; Tsai 1993: 26; Yen 1985). As a result, coolie trade, after the opium trade, became another mainstay of the early colonial Hong Kong economy.
Segregated Rule and the Formation of the Chinese Community
The of.cial colonist rhetoric harped on the idea that Hong Kong should be ��the great emporium of the China trade��; Governor John Bowring (1854�V1859) vowed to make Hong Kong ��a model of British good government.�� Imagined by the colonists to be an Anglo-China, Hong Kong was supposed to play the role of ��a living exhibition of European civilization, a meeting point between east and west, where the manners, institutions and technologies of both cultures would engage each other in a productive and bene.cial way�� (Munn, 2001: 2). However, the chaotic situations that arose during the colony��s .rst decade rendered the above political and cultural visions no more than empty words or colonialist cliches. One important factor that underlay the lack of a stable colonial project concerns Britain��s and the Qing government��s disagreement over the colony��s political status, particularly with regard to whether Qing of.cials in Hong Kong could exercise their power to the extent that Qing of.cials in Macau did (Ting 1989). The Qing government explored every means by which it could maintain its power over the Chinese population, and in the case of Hong Kong, such maintenance would symbolize the Qing Emperor��s sovereignty rights over the island. However, the British Colonial Of.ce was .rm in marking Hong Kong off from the Macau model, insisting on the Of.ce��s claim to indivisible sovereignty under which the British colonial government could exercise full administrative and judicial powers. Rounds of diplomatic tussles before and after the signing of the Treaty of Nanking (1842) left many controversial issues unresolved so that they sprang up time and again for more than a century. Yet all the British colonial governments generally maintained what Captain Elliot had proclaimed on February 2, 1841:
The natives of the island of Hong Kong and all natives of China thereto
resorting, shall be governed according to the laws and customs of
China; all British subjects and foreigners residing in, or resorting to, the
island of Hong Kong, shall enjoy full security and protection, according
to the principles and practice of British law.
(Norton-Kyshe 1971: 4�V6)
However, Elliot��s principle lacked operational details. During the .rst few years that the Treaty of Nanking awaited recti.cation by the British parliament, and while details had to be negotiated with the Chinese Government, Elliot��s principle was a matter of .erce debate among different quarters on the British side. Many people questioned the viability and the practicality of such an approach, which placed Hong Kong people into different categories. Some suggested that the of.cial treatment of permanent Chinese residents should differ from the of.cial treatment of temporary Chinese residents; others proposed that, if the Qing��s administrative or judicial power were to remain in place, as the Qing government had been insisting, Hong Kong should allow Chinese residents to choose whether to be a Chinese subject or a British subject; still others considered whether it was possible, in Hong Kong, to have Chinese magistrates who would handle jurisdictional matters concerning Chinese (Endacott 1964b: 27�V35; Munn 1999: 47).
In 1844, Governor John Davis showed his determination to exert British sovereign rights over Hong Kong by refusing the attempts of Qing of.cials to intervene into certain criminal cases involving Chinese residents within Hong Kong. Yet he also tried to realize the indirect-rule principle by framing an ordinance whose scheme, modeled after traditional Chinese local policing, would have created unpaid and elected local Chinese ��peace of.cers,�� (Paouchong and Paouken) to assist police in maintaining peace and order (Endacott 1964a: 57). Davis�� successor, Samuel Bonham (1848�V1854), in 1853 suggested setting up some kind of limited local Chinese self-government system by hiring paid peace of.cers (tepos) to settle civil disputes among the Chinese (Endacott 1964a: 84�V85). Nevertheless, all these schemes for an institutional mechanism in which local Chinese could build up a certain degree of self-rule eventually failed. Munn observes that the British colonists in the early decades failed to establish stable and serviceable political links with any leadership of the Chinese community comparable to what the British had practiced in Singapore (Munn 2001: 2). As a result, the colonial government generally left the Chinese community much to itself, although historians are wrong to generalize that period as paradigmatic of British indirect rule in Hong Kong. Munn argues that an overemphasis on the autonomy of the Chinese community masks the fact that the British of.cials were quite unable to govern the unruly Chinese community and, therefore, always resorted to direct and top-heavy governments through political and legal measures. A strong indicator of that coercive direct rule over Chinese natives was indeed the maintenance by the early colonial regime of one of the largest police forces in the British Empire.
The indirect-rule principle was not easily applicable in Hong Kong, as it was in other British colonies. In 1844, the Colonial Treasurer expressed his uneasiness about the dearth of ��respectable�� Chinese leaders in Hong Kong and attributed this dearth to the policy of the hostile Chinese Government. He wrote,
It is literally true that after three years and a half��s uninterrupted settlement there is not one respectable Chinese inhabitant on the island �KThe policy of the Mandarins on the adjacent coast being to prevent all respectable Chinese from settling at Hong Kong; and in consequence of the hold they possess on their families and relatives this can be done most effectually. At the same time, I believe that they encourage and promote the deportation of every thief, pirate, and idle or worthless vagabond from the mainland to Hong Kong�K. No Chinese of humbler class will ever bring their wives and children to the colony. The shopkeepers do not remain more than a few months on the island, when another set takes their place; there is, in fact, a continual shifting of a Bedouin sort of population, whose migratory, predatory, gambling, and dissolute habits utterly un.t them for continuous industry, and render them not only useless, but highly injurious subjects, in the attempt to form a colony.
(Endacott 1964c: 96�V8, quoted in Smith 1985: 111)
Samuel Fearon, the Census and Registration Of.cer, worried much about internal law and order. He wrote in 1845,
The arrival of the British .eet in the harbour speedily attracted a considerable boat population, and the pro.ts accruing from the supply of provisions and necessaries at once raised many from poverty and infamy to considerable wealth. The shelter and protection afforded by the presence of the .eet soon made our shores the resort of outlaws, opium smugglers, and indeed, of all persons who had rendered themselves obnoxious to the Chinese laws, and had the means of escaping hither. In course of time the demands for labour, for the public and other works drew some thousands to the island, the majority of whom were Hakkas or gypsies; people whose habits, character and language mark them as a distinct race. Careless of the ties of home and of those moral obligations, the observance of which is deemed absolutely necessary to the preservation of the national integrity, uneasy under the restraint of law and unscrupulous of the means by which they live, they abandon without hesitation their hearths and household gods, their birthright and their father��s tombs, to wander, unrespected, whither gain may call them. The unsettled state of the Colony, and the vast amount of crime during its infancy afford abundant proof of the demoralizing effects of their presence.
(CO 129/12, 24 June, 1845, quoted in Smith 1985: 108)
Regardless of any bias or racial arrogance that characterizes these remarks, they seem to con.rm what the Chinese authorities predicted in the Canton Register in 1841: that under British jurisdiction, the island would become even more popular with social outcasts; that ��Hong Kong will be the resort and rendezvous of all the Chinese smugglers��; and that ��Opium smoking shops and gambling-houses will soon spread; to those haunts will .ock all the discontented and bad spirits of the empire�� (Canton Register 23 February, 1841; quoted in Smith 1985: 107). In fact, apart from the international trade in opium and coolies, open gambling houses and brothels were the only local businesses that the ��new rich�� of Hong Kong were likely to establish.1 But the most important factor for this dearth of ��respectable�� Chinese leaders in Hong Kong concerns the fact that the majority of the Chinese population in Hong Kong then were male immigrants or sojourners attached to no local village. The British could not secure the cooperation of village elders simply because there were extremely few village elders in the colony. In fact, the immigrant population soon took over the native villages, thus rendering it dif.cult or useless for the colonial government to co-opt the traditional local leaders.
The (Self-)Making of the Colonial Hong Kong Chinese Elite
Hong Kong lacked a well-de.ned local Chinese community that possessed strong local leadership; in this absence, the British idea of dual administration soon evolved into a constitutionally centralized, but operationally self-limiting, governance. The colonial government kept almost autocratic power in the hands of the governor; Chinese residents were subject to crude coercive measures such as nightly curfew, elaborate registration schemes, and other surveillance and policing practices. Tensions between the Europeans and the Chinese were quite pronounced, especially in the mid-1850s, when a series of incidents led to the Second Opium War (1856-1860). Ernst Johann Eitel, a missionary and secretary to the governor, wrote in the 1890s of an ��unbridged chasm�� between the Chinese and the Europeans (Eitel 1895). The effective segregation of the two communities from each other had a long-lasting impact on the colonial regime, one of which was its failure to devolve governmental power to the municipal level. For example, the central colonial government had to levy rates for police pay because any devolution of power on the part of local bodies would, according to conventional wisdom, easily trigger con.ict between Europeans and Chinese. In this light, early colonial Hong Kong appears to have operated under an informal segregated rule rather than under conventional indirect rule.
However, the spatial separation of the two communities resulted from their mutually practiced segregation. The separation eventually created a new foundation for a more stable indirect rule, as a new type of collaborative relationship gradually took shape. Chinese war collaborators such as Tam Achoy and Loo Aqui rapidly amassed their wealth through opium trade and through the land granted by the British; a Chinese class of ��new rich�� gradually evolved, and its members were invariably interested in land and property speculation. Also, as the colonial government wanted to reserve the more valuable waterfront properties for the Europeans, the Chinese were encouraged to relocate in speci.ed areas that were quite separate from the waterfront. The concentration of Chinese in the exclusive zone called ��Chinatown�� near Tai Ping Shan enabled local Chinese leadership to grow independent of British governmental processes (Evans 1970; Chan 1991). Former war collaborators gradually became local leaders because they were wealthy enough to donate money to notable charity services; moreover, the close association of these individuals with powerful secret societies conferred on them signi.cant political clout among the Chinese.
One of the landmark events delineating leadership status in the Chinese community �X one that also transformed the ��unrespectable�� Chinese to ��respectability�� �X was the building, in 1847, of the Man Mo Temple by Loo and Tam; the place later functioned not only as a religious site but also as a social center from which the Chinese exercised a certain informal self-government (Lethbridge 1978: ch. 4; Ting 1989). Generally not regarded by the British as respectable persons, and regarded by the Qing government as traitors, the founders of the temple nevertheless formed the .rst generation of Hong Kong Chinese community leaders whose main political function was to mediate between the colonial government and the Chinese.2 The temple also functioned as an unof.cial link between the Hong Kong Chinese and the Canon authorities. As described by Eitel, Man Mo Temple ��secretly controlled native affairs, acted as commercial arbitrators, arranged for the due reception of mandarins passing through the colony, [and] negotiated the sale of [Qing��s] of.cial titles�� (Eitel 1895: 282).
In traditional rural China, the elite, or gentry, usually served as intermediaries between the local people and governmental authorities; the government recruited them from the ranks of scholars, who normally obtained degrees from the imperial examination system. A person who excelled in the examination would receive an appointment to a government of.ce, and such an appointment translated into the opportunity to accumulate economic wealth. As a member of the gentry remained a member of his village, local leaders and governmental bodies usually maintained close connections with each other. However, Hong Kong farmers had produced few, if any, scholars or literati; Hong Kong Chinese .shermen did not have kin ties with the gentry. Therefore, the colonial administration could not simply build relationships with the ordinary Chinese on the basis of an old gentry class. However, the economic growth of the 1850s and the 1860s for the opium trade and the coolie trade created favorable conditions for the emergence of this small group of Chinese elite, which comprised contractors, merchants, compradors, government servants, and Christian employees of missionary groups (Smith 1985). Mixing with the newly immigrated wealthy merchants from Canton, the gentry gradually transformed themselves into part of the new elite Chinese or, in John Carroll��s description, the .rst local bourgeoisie (Carroll 2005). Their emergence opened up the possibility that a new pattern of collaborative colonial relationships would take shape. After the mid-1860s, the legal system in Hong Kong functioned with fewer and less pronounced discriminatory measures among races; also, under the more ��humanistic�� governorship of Sir Richard Graves MacDonnell (1866�V1872), a new partnership between the Chinese elite and the colonial authorities became possible. The landmark signifying the stabilization of indirect rule through these locally grown elite began with the establishment of Tung Wah Hospital. The new form of collaboration is nicely encapsulated in the title of Sinn��s book on this institution: Power and Charity (Sinn 1989).
Philanthropy as Collaborative Institution
Tung Wah Hospital was established in 1872; it was the core institution of the new form of collaborative colonialism. Its establishment was to address the Chinese needs for welfare and medical services. As many of the poor in early colonial Hong Kong were sojourners from mainland China, death on their journey to Hong Kong created a problem because traditional Chinese custom insisted on burial in one��s place of origin. In 1851, the colonial government granted a piece of land to the Chinese for them to house the ancestral tablets of those deceased who did not have families in Hong Kong. The frequent abuse of this unregulated place by moribund Chinese prompted a subscription campaign that called for the establishment of a properly run Chinese hospital. The founding directors of the hospital were all prominent Chinese .gures �X mostly either compradors working for the European companies or merchants from guilds such as the Nam Pak Hong (Nam Pak Hong 1979). Some other directors were self-appointed Kaifong (street committee) leaders whom one analyst described as a group of ��civic-minded, status-seeking and paternalistic citizens�� (Lethbridge 1978). However, though set up initially as a philanthropic enterprise, the hospital��s functions were never purely medical. It dispensed Chinese justice as well as Chinese medicine, and was encouraged by the government to give advice on various government policies. As the institution developed, it also started to settle minor civic disputes, manage temples, and build schools; occasionally, it petitioned the government, calling for the redress of grievances. The colonial government, happy to see the directorate act in ways that helped manage the Chinese, even allowed the Registrar-General, who had been trained in the cadet service and equipped with a good knowledge of the Chinese language, to participate in their work �X in short, the colonial government gave the hospital a quasi-of.cial standing.3
The hospital was indeed a bizarre and slightly odd version of the structure of gentry rule, the existence of which, in Hong Kong, was rather rudimentary at the time of the arrival of the British. Yet, it followed the previous exemplary hybrid organization, the District Watch Committee (founded in 1867) in mixing Chinese and British traditions. During Governor John Pope Hennessy��s rule (1877�V1883), the in.uence and the authority of the hospital reached new heights: the directorate of the hospital began to act as though it had inherited the magisterial function of the traditional petty Mandarins. Moreover, the hospital��s unconstitutional status enabled the hospital to assert itself, culturally and politically, far beyond what the British had anticipated. Lethbridge records that ��at the formal opening of the Hospital in 1872, the full committee, some 70 or 80 in number, were all dressed in the Mandarin costume, some even with peacock��s feathers attached to their buttons�� (Lethbridge 1978: 61). Similarly, in 1878, during a visit by the governor, 300 in.uential native residents from all classes of the community were present, and some 50 or 60 of them were in Mandarin costumes, some of which sported blue buttons, some crystal, and some gold, while a few had the additional honor of wearing the peacock��s feather (Lethbridge 1978: 61). In the Qing dynasty, buttons and feathers on Mandarin costumes signi.ed a detailed of.cial ranking. It was dif.cult to tell whether those people wearing Mandarin costumes had acquired these signi.ers in a regular way or an irregular way, or whether they wore them as sheer masquerade.4 Yet, the costumes were effective in signaling both to the colonial authority and to the local inhabitants that the wearers were somehow endowed with an effective magisterial power within the Chinese community. Rather than display an alien colonial rule imposed on the Chinese, the presence of a British governor in such ceremonies only reinforced the perception of the continuity of sheer imperial power, whether British or Qing. Though authorized by no one to do so, the new Hong Kong Chinese elite was eager to play this role. Such highly ritualistic practices demonstrate that the hospital��s directorate, and thus the rising Hong Kong Chinese elite, were keen on imagining themselves to have gained social advancement in very Chinese terms under British colonial rule.
If the role of self-imagined gentry that this new elite played under the British legislation was merely symbolic and ritualistic, such gesture, however, facilitated their real attainment of status in China. In real terms, the directorate interested itself not only in the general welfare of the Chinese population within Hong Kong, but also in the neighboring Chinese provinces. The hospital��s active participation in activities that organized Hong Kong and overseas Chinese and that, for example, raised money for .ood relief in China gradually earned the hospital some formal recognition from the Chinese emperor. Such activities also gave the hospital further access to formal bodies of power within the Chinese government. Zhang Zidong, the famous reformist of.cial, at one stage made use of Tung Wah��s connections in order to reach, and to collect information from, the increasingly in.uential overseas Chinese communities. He sent instructions to the hospital in Hong Kong as if to a part of a Chinese administrative department (Sinn 1989: 137�V149).
In the late 1890s, all this ostentatious display of political clout seemed to be sidestepping British sovereignty in Hong Kong, creating enmity on the part of the European community. This enmity erupted as a serious scandal, in which some Europeans accused the hospital of being a secret society and of subverting the colonial government, so the governor conducted a formal investigation to mollify the critics of the Chinese elite. Although the fairness of the investigation was in doubt, Tung Wah��s directorate was vindicated. And although the Hong Kong government retreated a bit in their recognition of Tung Wah��s special status after this event, the directorate continued to assume the role of Hong Kong��s gentry class (Sinn 1989: 150�V156).
A person��s self-assumption of, and re-enactment of, the role of gentry, was signi.cant in the Hong Kong context, as it simultaneously resurrected and turned around the cultural and political con.guration of traditional Chinese local rule. Rather than gain their gentry status through exhibited excellence in Chinese classics, as was typical in the imperial examinations, this elite stratum manifested its ability to gain access to an imperial power representing not the Qing Emperor but the British Crown. British colonial of.cials, especially those who were concerned with Chinese affairs, were content to see a body that could help attend to ��Chinese�� matters in ��Chinese�� ways. Although Governor Arthur Edward Kennedy (1872�V1877) turned down the aggressive hospital directorate��s proposal for a Chinese Municipal Board that would function as a separate governing structure for Chinese, the hospital still attained an important status in advising the government concerning anything Chinese, and posed as the single Chinese voice under British colonial rule (Eitel 1895: 507).
The hospital directorate��s assumption of such a role as surrogate gentry re.ected ingrained cultural aspirations as much as political calculations. Chinese of.cials had assigned the label traitor to many subsequently successful businessmen, either because they had left China at a time when the imperial government prohibited emigration or because they had helped the British in successive foreign intrusions. Now, however, these businessmen played the role of the gentry class and obtained recognition from both of the imperial powers. To compensate for their lack of cultural leadership (a lack that was evident in their unfamiliarity with traditionally praised excellence in Chinese classics), members of the new gentry class set themselves regular ritual observances identical to those of the literati-magistrates in imperial China: members of the new gentry attended the Man Mo Temple to participate in the spring and autumn sacri.ces to Confucius. They also set up Confucius learning societies, built schools to teach Confucius�� teachings, and boasted that Confucian teaching gave them Chinese identity (Lethbridge 1978: ch. 3; Sinn 1989).
Fondness for Confucianism and a more general inclination toward traditionalism were phenomena particularly prominent in the late-nineteenth-century overseas Chinese community. Parallel cases could indeed be found in Southeast Asian colonies such as Penang and Singapore. This overseas Chinese traditionalism later found itself at odds with the more iconoclastic and revolutionary mood throughout mainland China at the turn of the century. However, in the 1870s, traditionalism, for this Hong Kong Chinese elite, was still signi.cant in real terms: defense of the interests of the elite within a patriarchal system whose location was more and more in.uenced by Western ideas. This state of affairs leads us to the story of the Po Leung Kuk, a sister institution of Tung Wah Hospital.
Patriarchy in Collaborative Colonialism
When, in the New World, the widespread abolition of slavery came to fruition in the late nineteenth century, the demand for cheap labor there skyrocketed. This demand, in turn, spurred great demand for cheap labor from China. There were only a few merchants in Hong Kong who did not have a hand in this pro.table coolie trade. As mentioned before, the selling indentured labor was a core business that triggered early colonial Hong Kong��s economic development. The lucrative nature of the business, however, provoked abusive practices, such as kidnapping and the use of false premises to lure emigrants; it was reported that massive irregular forced emigration occurred all over the coastal regions of China. International pressures mounted to stop forced emigration, but the Qing government remained ineffective in regulating the emigration (Irick 1982; Yen 1985; Tsai 1993: ch. 4). Britain was also compelled to restrict the coolie trade among its colonies in order to stamp out kidnapping and other criminal practices therein. The Hong Kong Chinese elite were eager to exhibit their good intentions by helping the colonial government root out the illegal sale of human beings. Volunteering to expose cases of abuse in the emigration trade, the elite not only presented themselves as cooperative but took the initiative in such affairs, as well. Tung Wah Hospital soon shouldered the related responsibilities by employing two detectives who would report and stop crimes related to emigration; the hospital also the coordinated efforts, however limited in real terms, made by both the British government and the Chinese government.
As concerns about human rights gradually rose, international pressure was mounting and calls to prohibit servitude eventually came to include the sale of girls for prostitution. The inclusion of this particular trade in prohibited forms of servitude posed a signi.cant threat to the Chinese patriarchal practice of buying girls from poor families and bringing them up as domestic servants: that is, the mui tsai system (Haslewood 1930). Hong Kong��s Chinese elite (most of whom were also Tung Wah directors) proposed the establishment of the Po Leung Kuk (Hong Kong Society for the Protection of Women and Children) to protect these victims from the rampant, abusive emigration trade. The elite asked for the authority to employ detectives, offer rewards for arrests, and return victims to their homes. However, with the exception of its protection services, including the very controversial practice of ��marrying off�� their clients, the Po Leung Kuk constituted an in.uential lobby that sought to ameliorate the impact of the new ��sale-of-girls�� ordinance. The society organized a series of London-bound petitions that opposed the ban on the mui tsai system (Smith 1981; Sinn 1989: 113�V117). In short, the society defended Chinese custom, invoked Captain Elliot��s proclamation concerning segregated rule, and advocated legal exemptions for the wealthy who chose to practice mui tsai. The society put forward the argument of ��cultural preservation,�� interpreting mui tsai as a normal ��social custom�� that was far from being abusive. Refusing to admit that mui tsai is a form of child slavery, the society wanted only to distinguish legal sales from illegal sales. With their strong in.uence on some government of.cials and their well-entrenched positions in Hong Kong��s power formation, the Po Leung Kuk held out against the strong pressure of anti-mui tsai campaigners from Britain and Hong Kong societies for decades (Smith 1981, 1995). It was only after many long and hard struggles, which brought pressures to bear from the Colonial Of.ce, the League of Nations, Christian societies, missionaries on the ground, unionists, and women activists, that the abolition of the mui tsai system came to pass in the 1920s.
The mui tsai struggles demonstrate very well the rather reactionary face of indirect rule in Hong Kong, insofar as social reforms and the incessant quest for progress were growing rapidly in China around the turn of the century. Nevertheless, the conservatism of the colonial Chinese elite obtained protection under the colonial system, even though campaigners�� efforts kept coming from both the local society and the colonial home country. The complicity between the Chinese and the British elements in the early collaborative colonial regime would not have been possible without the help of certain individual governors such as Kennedy and Hennessy, who favored the Chinese elite in exchange for their support in matters such as fund-raising projects related or unrelated to Hong Kong welfare. For example, Hennessy, an Irishman, was on very good terms with Hong Kong��s Chinese businessmen, for they were particularly more generous in contributing to the Irish Relief Fund than were Hong Kong��s Europeans (Sinn 1989: 119). This close collaboration between the Chinese elite and the localized British colonial of.cials in Hong Kong dominated both the form of political power on the island and the ways to interpret Chinese cultural values. The collaboration was a form of political power in which actors could exploit charity work and charity institutions as a scaffold for the actors�� exercise of social power in the name of cultural differences.
Man Mo Temple signi.ed the unruly period of early segregated rule; however, quasi-of.cial charity institutions such as the Po Leung Kuk and Tung Wah Hospital were characteristic of the collaborative colonialism that took root in colonial Hong Kong. These institutions, although eclipsed by colonialist pro-active interventions of the twentieth century, laid down the basic parameters according to which collaboration between the British colonizers and the Chinese elite functioned. Shuttling along the frontier between two empires, the Hong Kong Chinese elite af.rmed for themselves a distinct identity by securing a social and political status that had been unimaginable under past Chinese rule and by consolidating a bi-culturalism based upon rei.ed notions of both Western and Chinese cultures. Carroll observes that the remarkable growth of the elite translated into the gradual emergence of a full-.edged bourgeoisie of Hong Kong (Carroll 2005, ch. 4).
However, I would like to qualify Carroll��s observation. There is little evidence that a Chinese bourgeoisie, possessing its own class consciousness, characterized Hong Kong��s social landscape at that time. The Hong Kong Chinese elite, in the late nineteenth century, chose to play the role of a surrogate gentry that mimicked the roles played by their counterparts in mainland China. David Faure (2003) also cautions against the substitution of the word elite for the word gentry as they carry overlapping but still distinct connotations respectively in British cultural contexts and in traditional Chinese cultural contexts. To Faure, if a gentry shares in its locality��s Chinese dynastic governmental power, then the gentry legitimated dynastic rule. In the case of Hong Kong, the relatively complex composition of the island��s elite made any such legitimation problematic, if indeed the legitimation was not merely an effect created by scholars who con.ated the western conception of elite with the Chinese conception of gentry. I would also maintain that the imaginary resurrection of traditional social roles by Hong Kong��s Chinese elite, reveals a lot about the political culture and the legacies of this hybrid class in power. On the one hand, they rose to prominence because of their wealth; on the other hand, they sought of.cial recognition from the colonizer, as mainland Chinese gentry did from the emperor. Such a re-enactment of the traditional gentry role could not have been possible without a particular colonial situation in which the colonizer, to facilitate its governance of the colonized, had to allow for the collaborative Chinese ��re-invention of tradition��. The cultural implications of the Chinese re-invention of patriarchal institutions in the name of philanthropy are profound because Hong Kong, by consolidating the surrogate-gentry��s power to preserve cultural conservatism, divorced itself from the iconoclastic and progressive challenges of the modern Chinese nationalism represented by the May Fourth Movement (1919) in China.
The legacies of this collaborative colonial formation in Hong Kong can still be found in much later eras, not only in the city��s conspicuous lack of a politically progressive bourgeoisie but also in its weak civil society. There is no class project of the bourgeoisie leading the society in the course of social reforms. The elite is, instead, easily prone to collaboration or even to collusion with whatever government is in power. They behave as if they are always in need of seeking recognition from the previous imperial authority or colonial master. At any rate, Hong Kong��s powerful class of Chinese has never developed a political project that would lead to autonomy for that same class; in other words, the Hong Kong Chinese elite do not build their social power in civil society, an arena separate from or even in opposition to the ruling government. What contemporary Hong Kong has inherited from its colonial past may be Chinese tycoons rich in wealth; but they are not a strong bourgeoisie. They carry with them the lingering patriarchic values, associated conservative ways of life and the tradition of making collusive relations between governmental power and ��civil society�� organizations. Because, in Hong Kong��s long colonial past, practices of collaboration always pre-conditioned the growth of Hong Kong��s bourgeoisie as much as for the civil institutions that usually embody the pervasiveness of colonial power. Therefore, what is at stake for the Hong Kong Chinese elite��s legacy of collaborative practices is not so much the close partnership between the Chinese ruling elite and the European ruling elite as the quasi-governmental nature of most civil institutions in Hong Kong.
Collaboration is a key that can take us to look beyond a spurious dichotomy between the colonizer and the colonized and to recognize in early colonial Hong Kong the agential power of the Chinese gentry-elite, but it would be a glaring error not to consider how they bore the colonial imprints. For it is in this early phase that we see how the development of an autonomous bourgeoisie, like it happened in Europe, was both facilitated and thwarted in Hong Kong because Hong Kong��s development of collaborative power was premised precisely on a colonial milieu. To get to the collaborative as well as to the colonial nature of the power formation, I would argue, is the key approach by which we can understand Hong Kong��s political culture then and now.
2
Cultural Coloniality: The English Language and Schooling
P
oet and educationalist Chris Searle once wrote that ��the English language has been a monumental force and institution of oppression and rabid exploitation throughout the 400 years of imperialist history�K It was made to scorn the languages it sought to replace, and told the colonized peoples that mimicry of its primacy among languages was a necessary badge of their social mobility as well as their continued humiliation and subjection�K The English language itself was the language of the master, the carrier of his arrogance and brutality�� (Searle 1983: 48). Amidst Hong Kong��s post-1997 ��mother-tongue�� education controversies, educators in Hong Kong who insist on using Chinese as a medium of instruction in schools might not all agree with Searle��s passionate and radical view. But most of them regard the shift from a system that had privileged English to a system that emphasizes Chinese as an essential step in marking the end of colonialism in Hong Kong. Indeed, Hong Kong Chinese have two widely held beliefs concerning the dominant status of the English language: one takes the British colonizers�� decision to make English the of.cial and dominant language of Hong Kong as a necessary condition of the imposed colonial rule; another upholds functionalism: the dominance of the English language is attributable to its commercial value. These two commonsensical beliefs lend support to different sides of the language-of-instruction debate: the former supports a nationalistic view calling for the recti.cation of the power asymmetry after British colonial rule ended in 1997; the latter maintains that even if colonialism were not there, the Chinese would still attach greater value to English language education. Apparently, these two views take completely different stands on the ��decolonization�� of language; both are indeed variants of the same constellation of colonial discourses: they either crudely simplify Hong Kong��s colonial relations or simplistically conceal Hong Kong��s colonial asymmetry.
Recent studies present a far more complex picture concerning the relationships between the English language and colonialism in general. For example, Pennycook (1998) traces the connections between the long history of colonialism and the English language by inspecting different discourses adhering to English as a language. He warns that to characterize colonialism according to simple stereotypes of a colonizer��s oppression and exploitation of a colonized people indeed draws attention away from the constant cultural and micropolitical operations of colonialism, although the complexities of related issues co-exist with the daily presence of very simple dichotomizing. My analysis, in this chapter, follows Pennycook��s lead by grasping both the complexity and the simplicity of the connections between the English language and colonialism in Hong Kong. But my focus limits itself neither to colonial discourses in a narrow sense nor to Hong Kong per se; rather, it pits the colonialism-English relationships against the complex formation of collaborative colonial power in both Hong Kong and China. I want to show that the privileged status of English-language education in Hong Kong was more likely to stem from irregular changes in policy and societal orientations than from an ingrained imperialist imperative; and I should add that this privileged status is not, and never was, attributable only to commercial demands. Rather, there were many historical nuances of English use and English education: there were various ways English might facilitate imperialist domination, but there were also moments when English was used as an instrument for social differentiation among the Chinese. I treat these nuances as instances of Hong Kong��s layered coloniality. And, by the term layered, I mean a coloniality that transcends the usual colonial binaries and that has a great bearing on the problematic formation of Hong Kong identity.
Proselytizing with the Power of Warships
Departing from the old approach of segregated rule, Hong Kong��s colonial government, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, took substantial measures to intervene in the realm of education. Contrary to the liberal myth that the colonial authorities in Hong Kong consistently took a laissez-faire approach to the social and cultural affairs of the local Chinese society, introduction of comprehensive school supervision in Hong Kong proceeded at a pace faster than in the British homeland. To understand the emergence of these active interventions, we need to go a long way back to trace (1) how Christian missionaries developed problematic relationships with the colonial government;
(2) how proselytizing education gave way to secular education; and (3) how the English language facilitated the efforts of the elite Chinese to sustain their racial and social distinctions.
Protestant evangelical activity in China can be dated back to 1807, when the London Missionary Society sent Robert Morrison to China (Latourette 1929; Ride 1957; Cohen 1978). At that time, such activities violated the Qing decree that, issued in 1724, prohibited Christianity. Thus, it was common for missionaries to establish their bases in Southeast Asia, where there were a large number of Chinese migrants (Harrison 1979). The missionaries learned Chinese there, established publication houses, and trained Chinese clerics. This training included English language studies. Of course, the missionaries never set out to work exclusively on the fringes of China: they considered all of China their .nal destination. Chinese of.cialdom��s hostility to Christian evangelism in China posed a problem for the missionaries, but advances made by British merchants, armed with the military power necessary to force China to accept free trade, also bene.ted the missionaries�� evangelical works, if not any related pro.t-seeking (Miller 1974). To carry out their missionary work, the missionaries became increasingly involved in the political and military endeavors of British political and commercial interests.1
The Treaty of Nanking, by which the Qing government ceded Hong Kong to Britain, was signed in 1842 after the humiliating defeat of the Chinese navy in the First Opium War. Although Christian circles in Britain generally expressed outrage at this war fought in the name of the infamous opium trade, they soon reacted with jubilation to the treaty because they believed then that the military and diplomatic victories would soon pave the way for Christians to have freer access to Chinese soil and to Chinese souls �X a belief that materialized only after the Second Opium War (Beattie 1969; Lodwick 1996). For these Christian circles, God had displayed his power and majesty by bringing good out of evil. For example, Elijah C. Bridgeman stated,
The agency in the great moments is human; the directing power divine.
The high governor of all the nations has employed England to chastise
and humble China. He may soon employ her to introduce the blessings
of Christian civilization and free intercourse among her millions.
(The Chinese Repository, 1842, 11: 628)
When James Legge stated that the treaties between China and Britain ��gave a great impulse to the Chinese Mission,�� he was representing far more than himself (Legge 1859). Indeed, many Protestant denominations, as well as the Roman Catholic Church, rushed in through the open door, scrambling to participate in the evangelization of the Empire.
Most of the missionaries who had been either working in the Chinese communities of Southeast Asia or living in Macau .ocked to Hong Kong before moving on to other treaty ports in China; some missionaries, however, stayed in Hong Kong, where they established local churches. The underlying aim of the missionaries�� educational work was mainly to train clerics who would eventually spread the Gospel in China. To continue this work, the missionaries set up many missionary schools and seminaries in Hong Kong.2 And as soon as they began their work on the island, the missionaries suggested to the colonial government that it issue both grants of land and .nancial assistance to schools. Governor John Davis (1844�V1848), who was a staunch advocate of religious education, supported the missionaries, but the Colonial Of.ce in London decided to start a grant scheme that would aid Chinese village schools but not the missionary schools. Many people considered this policy to be symptomatic of the British government��s unwillingness to implicate itself in the sensitive religious rivalries in which different congregations had already managed to enmesh themselves (Ng 1984: ch. 2). Thus, the missionaries obtained no .nancial aid from the government; instead, the government granted them administrative power, in the form of a seat on the new Education Committee (Lobscheid 1859; Ng 1984: 26�V31). This committee oversaw all educational matters and, in effect, controlled all of Hong Kong��s Chinese village schools; thus began an era when churchmen gained formidable dominance over the educational scene in Hong Kong.
In the missionaries�� home country, citizens expressed increasing concern over public responsibility for education and challenged church dominance in education. In contrast, churchmen dominated early colonial Hong Kong education, almost rendering it a domain of religion.3 Through the power to distribute grants and then to supervise the schools, the Education Committee pushed Bible study into the village schools �X Bishop Boone��s Catechism and the Bible were featured prominently on the list of required textbooks (Lobscheid 1859: 25�V28). Under strong pressure from these churchmen, the Bishop of Victoria became the chairman of the Education Committee and, thus, the overall superintendent of schools. In short, the state not only permitted churches to dominate the institutionalization of Hong Kong education but also did so when many secularists and religious dissenters were challenging religious education in Britain (Wong 1996: 50�V52). It was hoped by Governor Davis that the village schools would eventually be placed in the charge of native Christian teachers who would have been ��led up by the Protestant missionaries�� and who would thus be ��afforded the most rational prospect of converting the native population�� of the island (quoted in Eitel 1895: 247); however, English teaching neither suppressed nor replaced the study of Chinese classics. Chinese Hong Kong students studied both the Bible and Chinese classics in vernacular Chinese. Even later, when James Legge introduced the teaching of English in a few government schools, the students did not particularly welcome English. Religious education did not take root as well as had been expected, and many missionary schools were soon closed down. The dismayed churchmen found that Hong Kong was not a place bearing much resemblance to other Chinese parishes, although they hoped to .nd in Hong Kong a Chinese society where the Gospel would .nd a home in the Chinese soul.
Ever since the sixteenth century, when the Jesuit Matteo Ricci started his missionary work in China, the missionary activities of different Christian sects generally converged on a common proselytizing strategy for China: to preach to the gentry (Gu 1991).4 However, the absence of a locally rooted Chinese gentry class in early colonial Hong Kong posed a huge stumbling block for this traditional wisdom. Even the Morrison Education Society or James Legge��s London Missionary Society, which were successful in bringing the .rst Chinese converts to Protestantism, could not keep many Chinese Christians active in religious work (Wong 1996: 64�V67).5 Most often, the students who attended missionary schools turned out to be translators, compradors, or other middlemen operating between the British and the Chinese, thus making civic use of the English learned in missionary schools. In this regard, the in.uence of religious education was felt not so much in transformed Chinese souls as in transformed political and economic structures throughout Chinese society.
James Legge: Accomodationist or Secularist?
The irrelevance of Christian teachings to the local Chinese brought about a decline of missionary schools in the 1850s. The Arrow Incident of 1856, which led to the Second Opium War, aroused afresh the enmity between China and Britain. Locally, a ��bread-poisoning�� panic re.ected the atmosphere of native hostility toward the Europeans (Tsai 1993: 52�V53). Yet, the repeated defeat of the Qing navy by the British had established a triumphalist con.dence among the colonial establishment in Hong Kong. It was in this context that James Legge initiated a program of educational reform that had far-reaching effects. Overshadowed by his image as a versatile scholar, James Legge��s input in Hong Kong��s education has never been systematically explored. In the discussion below, I try to link his theological ideas and his Sinological scholarship with his educational endeavors, insofar as they were all intertwined with each other.
James Legge started his missionary life in Malacca, teaching at the Anglo-Chinese College established by the London Missionary Society. He spent the next three decades working in Hong Kong and Southeast China, serving as a pastor, working for the colonial government, and producing massive translations of, and commentaries on, the traditional scholarly classics of China. After retiring from service in Hong Kong, he became the .rst Professor of Chinese at Oxford University and, as a Sinologist, established for himself lasting fame (Wong 1996). Reminiscent of Jesuit predecessors such as Matteo Ricci, Legge adopted a proselytizing strategy that was unique among those of his contemporaries. In an atmosphere charged with British imperial pride, Legge ran against the grain by taking an explicitly acccommodationist stance. That is to say, a major part of his legacy as a scholar evolved from his attempts to accommodate the Christian faith to the classical traditions of the Confucian elite. To this end, he translated English-language works into Chinese and Chinese-language works into English, thereby bringing the Bible to Chinese readers and the Chinese classics to Westerners. His theological position sprang from his speci.c claim that there was an ancient form of monotheism in the Chinese traditions.6 For him, if the dominant Chinese literati could conclude that what they got from Christianity was not alien but a reminder of their own canonical past, the whole of China could easily be Christianized. However, Legge��s view was a minority position among the missionaries at that time. Even the colony��s government of.cials were suspicious of the Chinese propensity to accept the divine mission. For example, in discussing the Chinese in Java, Governor John Bowring stated,
It will not be easy to eradicate from the mind of a Chinaman [sic] his
exalted notions of the greatness of his country, and the superiority of his
country��s learning, literature and institutions, to those of any portions
of the outer world.
(Pomerantz-Zhang 1992: 16 n.31)
Legge was isolated for his accommodationist views, which won him the pejorative term of Leggism (P.ster 1990, 1991, 1993, 1998).7 But for his voluminous work, to which he made a life-long devotion, and for the high praise that he often reserved for the ancient Chinese classics, Chinese writers have often portrayed him as a Sinophile, a scholar who possessed a rare genuine respect for Chinese culture. However, the Sinophilic .gure of James Legge, which became particularly strong after he retired de facto from missionary work in 1867, often overshadowed or even obscured assessments of his earlier missionary work and of his services in the colonial government.8
In his scheme, brought up to the Board of Education in 1860, James Legge included several highly controversial proposals. In opposition to the prevalent church dominance, Legge instead suggested a thorough secularist approach, which drew hostility from religious circles.9 Eitel, who was Inspector of Schools, strongly opposed the reform and described the whole move as ��a non-conformist liberation scheme, which preferred secularism to Episcopalianism�� (Eitel 1895: 392). Yet, with the support of Governor John Bowring and Governor Robinson (1859�V1865), who also opposed religious education, Legge��s secularism .nally gained the upper hand. Another factor that emerged thereafter was the priority of English education and government control. Legge developed an audacious and concrete plan according to which several schools were combined together within the perimeter of Hong Kong��s metropolis and would establish Central School, where students would learn English. In prioritizing English language teaching, Legge turned against the village schools, which, despite their increased numbers and their expanded student enrolment, had been complaining about their poor quality (Ng 1984: 47�V54). In the report, he denigrated the whole vernacular education system as suffused with an atmosphere of low moral tone; he also complained about the indifferent attitude of the poorer classes toward school education. He targeted traditional Chinese pedagogy, which he accused of overemphasizing recitation and memorization and of being stubbornly averse to change. Frederick Stewart, the headmaster of Central School, whom Eitel described as Legge��s disciple, was even more candid in painting a bleak picture. He stated in a report in 1866 that ��it seemed rather impossible at present to make the Chinese feel a greater interest in the education of their children. The parents consider they are doing the government a favor by sending their children to its school�� (Stewart 1866: 139). In short, British experts characterized vernacular Chinese education as almost totally hopeless.10
As I mentioned earlier in the chapter, Britain witnessed an almost simultaneous movement that called for state responsibility in popular education (Curtis and Boultwood 1966; Curtis 1967; Wardle 1976). But Legge did not make a similar effort to amass popular support for education from the Chinese: he established a novel centralized form of English education for Chinese children in Hong Kong. He claimed that his plan would make Central School a ��model school�� so that ��an in.uence would go and tell those in the villages��. Obviously, however, Hong Kong��s sparsely populated villages could possess no resources in emulation of the leading model, and consequently, the decline of the village schools was inevitable (Ng 1984: 47, 70�V77). At any rate, while Britain��s drive toward secular education in Britain strengthened populist-egalitarian ideals, Legge��s vision for Hong Kong emerged as statist, elitist, and prejudicial against the vernacular. James Legge the policy-maker of education, has posed some dif.culty for historians who admire James Legge the Sinophilic scholar-missionary, and who .nd it inconvenient to reconcile the two apparently opposing images. For example, the renowned Hong Kong educational historian Ng Lun Ngai-ha argues that ��the view and attitude of Legge could be well compared with those of the British Orientalists in India, as both shared a ��healthy appreciation of the indigenous culture����; but when it comes to Legge��s education program, she declares that Legge was a ��pragmatist�� who ��saw the commercial value of knowledge of English to the Chinese�� (Ng 1984: 41; my emphasis). In a similar vein, Stokes calls Legge a ��realist,�� although, unlike Ng, she does not agree that English had commercial value then. She writes,
The middle-class Chinese, men of substance who could afford to pay
for schooling, living in Hong Kong, seemed to have little interest in
Western learning. Nor had the ��cash value�� of learning the English
language yet become obvious to the super.cial observer.
(Stokes 1962: 12)
If Stokes is right when she states that the Chinese lacked enthusiasm for English-language studies by that era, one should not automatically conclude that James Legge��s ��pragmatism�� re.ects either his capitulation to Hong Kong��s commercial orientation or his betrayal of his own missionary goals or educational ideals. To be sure, the all-too-common stereotype of Hong Kong as a city driven only by commercialism begs the very question of why, in the .rst place, the English language gained dominance there. I am afraid that the provisional label of either ��pragmatist�� or ��realist�� for Legge might be .tting the stereotype of Hong Kong much better than giving a true portrait of Legge.11 Moreover, I would venture to say that Ng��s dif.cult interpretation in her otherwise brilliant and useful chronicle of Hong Kong educational development may result from her perhaps too-rigid application of David Kopf��s (1969) Orientalist-Anglicist typology, which categorizes colonial .gures in India according to their attitudes (appreciative or disdainful) toward the native cultures.
Orientalism or Anglicism?
In the mid-eighteenth century, Orientalists and Anglicists started debating with each other over how education resources should be spent: whereas the Orientalists argued that the colonial governments in the British colonies should devote more resources to Oriental education for natives, the Anglicists advocated English teaching because they thought that Oriental knowledge was inferior, confused, and outdated. A line of colonial historiographies, like Kopf��s, treat the debates as maps of two antagonistic approaches toward colonial rule over natives. Pitted against each other, the Orientalists appear as learned scholars who possessed both profound ��Oriental knowledge�� and sympathy for the natives, while the Anglicists come across as arrogant Britons who believed in the superiority of Western civilization. Thomas Macaulay, who was a British colonialist serving in the Supreme Council of India, declared that English education in India should create ��a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect,�� and writers frequently quote this bold pronouncement as epitomizing Anglicist self-conceit (Macaulay 1835: 249).
However, Gauri Viswanathan, in Masks of Conquest (1990), her celebrated study of English education in India, goes to pains to point out that there was, in fact, much more in common between the Orientalists and the Anglicists than most historians have been prepared to admit. She argues that ��it would be more accurate to describe Orientalism and Anglicism not as polar opposites but as points along a continuum of attitudes towards the manner and form of native governance�� (Viswanathan 1987: 30). Even when the Orientalist-Anglicist debates were at their height, the point of contention had never been whether one could respect the ancient culture of the colonized native Indians. Indeed, to the two camps, the Oriental knowledge was always part of ��a precise and meticulously de.ned scheme of administration��; it was a kind of ��useful�� knowledge in the hands of colonial administrators, who wanted to establish a more diffuse network of hierarchical relationships between the colonial of.cers and the colonized natives (1987: 8). In this regard, Warren Hastings, Governor-General of India (1774�V1785), writes that
Every accumulation of knowledge, and especially such as is obtained by
social communication with people over whom we exercise a dominion
founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state: it is the gain of
humanity.
(Letter of Hastings to N. Smith, quoted in Viswanathan 1987:
6, my emphasis)
Colonial administrators like Hastings developed an interest in Oriental knowledge, and this interest derived from their understanding that knowledge of the natives could reinforce the authority of the colonial state; later, for Lord Wellesley, Governor-General of India (1798�V1805), the legacy of Oriental knowledge became an attractive cultural program, as it could be ��useful and objective�� and could serve a form of colonial governance that would rely not on direct rule but on rule through various local functionaries. According to these administrators, they could not create such a new governing structure by simply imposing an alien one on the natives. Rather, if a new political society was to grow, traditional native culture had to provide the soil in which that growth would occur. Viswanathan comments on this belief:
Anglicism was dependent upon Orientalism for its ideological
programme�K Orientalist scholarship undertaken in the name of ��gains
for humanity�� gave the Anglicists precisely the material evidence they
needed for drawing up a system of comparative evaluations in which
one culture could be set off and measured against the other.
(Viswanathan 1987: 7)
Pennycook (1998) also takes the view that both Anglicism and Orientalism were equally complicit with colonial governance. Furthermore, he criticizes the simplistic belief according to which any colonialism that exhibits pronounced Anglicist bigotry must have, as its archetype, Anglicism: thanks to this belief, ��modern day liberals, leftists, and conservatives alike are able to distance themselves easily from colonial complicity�� (Pennycook 1998: 93). I am afraid that easy condemnation of caricatured Anglicism and an over-investment in Orientalist sympathy are just two sides of the same coin. Therefore, I think that the scholars who praise James Legge for his Sinophilia risk concealing the coloniality of which Legge��s Sinological-Orientalist scholarship was indeed a part.
As a matter of fact, James Legge was almost a century after Hastings and Wellesley. The late nineteenth century witnessed an even closer relationship between Oriental knowledge and the expansion of European empires, so that the rapid growth of Orientalist scholarship was much more internationalized and institutionalized. In his inaugural speech to the Second International Congress of Orientalists held in London in 1874, Samuel Birch explicitly linked the ��spread of civilization�� to the ��advance of ��Oriental knowledge��.�� At the same time, Birch considered this advance of Oriental knowledge to be dependent on the Empire��s own advance because it provided the scholars with ��improved facilities of access�� and provided scholars with an ��immense quantity�� of new materials and texts to analyze (quoted in Girardot 2002: 147). In 1892, Max Muller openly trumpeted the divinely given role of England to stand at the ��centre of the whole world,�� for England knew not only how to conquer but how to rule as well, having realized Alexander��s dreamed of marriage between the East and the West. He declared that for there to be a peaceful relationship between ��the rulers and the ruled,�� there needed to be an ��intimacy of knowledge��; he also declared that Oriental scholars should shoulder the role of ��bold generals�� in the coming battle for human understanding and for human unity by marshalling ��historical facts�� (quoted in Girardot 2002: 483).
In The Victorian Translation of China (2002), Girardot��s biographical study of James Legge, especially of his later life, the author tries carefully to distance Legge from this increasingly imperious, entrepreneurial, and militant Orientalist scholarship that drew much from Max Muller��s type of comparative science of religions; Girardot tries to characterize James Legge as a cautious pilgrim, a ��hyphenated missionary-scholar and Sinological-teacher,�� an exemplary model of the difference between judgmental, power-oriented Oriental-ism and the more sympathetic Orientalist.12 Nevertheless, such a �X now conventional
�X focus on James Legge as mainly a Sinophilic scholar should not obscure the fact that before he retired as an academic in Oxford, he was indeed part of the colonial knowledge-power nexus that made instrumental use of his Oriental knowledge about Chinese culture and that was particularly evident in the cadet service, where he offered to train Hong Kong colonial of.cials (Lethbridge 1970; Wong 1996: 42�V43). As a matter of fact, many other governors and colonial of.cials, such as Henry May (1912�V1918) and Cecil Clementi (1925�V1930) (whom I discuss in Chapter 5), were cadet trainees at the beginning of their colonial careers and were all well versed in Chinese affairs (see also Eitel 1877). For this reason, it is no coincidence that many missionaries and colonial of.cials were amateur Sinologists: they contributed scholarly papers to journals such as The China Review; they formed the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, which was housed in the Supreme Court building; and they elected some of Hong Kong��s governors to the branch��s presidency (Hayes 1985).13 This interlocking of missionaries, Sinological studies, and colonial administration was an important part of Hong Kong��s coloniality. In point of fact, James Legge��s famous translation of Chinese classics was published under the sponsorship of Joseph Jardine and John Dent, the largest opium merchants of the time.
In regard to his Sinophilia, Legge felt nothing but pride for what he thought was his contribution to the incorporation of China into a ��higher�� civilization. Along with other contemporaneous churchmen, Legge made an association between his Christian beliefs and the British imperialist project by interpreting China as the Sinim, the term that appears in Christian scriptures (Isaiah 49: 12).14 P.ster explains how Legge��s Protestant evangelism integrated itself neatly with the West��s ��civilizing mission��:
It was motivated by the postmillennial theology he advocated. It
claimed that Christian emissaries would become images of ��higher��
civilization to the ��heathen,�� and so would be used by God��s spirit to
effect a more complete and massive conversion of all peoples, including the
traditional Chinese, to Christian faith and civilization.
(P.ster 1998: 80, my emphasis)
Decades of Legge��s evangelical missionary work in Hong Kong brought with him many frustrations; however, he was still proud of the colonial joint venture between the missionaries and the colonial force. In a public lecture delivered in 1872, just a year before he left Hong Kong for the last time, he said that he still felt the thrill of ��Britannia standing on the Peak�� and looked down ��with an emotion of pride on the great Babylon which her sons have built�� (quoted in Girardot 2002: 54).
It is evident that if Legge��s accommodationism set him apart from the other Orientalists, who were committed totally to Oriental-ism, then we must not confuse him with Matteo Ricci, whose Jesuit accommodationism was based on a genuine respect for China as an equally great civilization. In contrast to Ricci, who had dressed like a Confucian scholar in order to gain access to sixteenth-century China��s literati scholars, Legge never adopted Chinese dress, completely preferring English styles, whether of clothing, worship, or architecture (P.ster 1998). Indeed, the aggressive evangelism that characterized Legge��s early career as a missionary did not allow for many Ricci-styled cultural encounters of equals and turned Legge into a tragic .gure whose later life, in particular, was streaked with much frustration.
Education for Enlightenment and Government
With the colonial knowledge-power nexus now in view, we can re-examine Legge��s legacies relative to Hong Kong education. Quite alienated from Hong Kong��s missionary community, Legge had to turn to the secularist governors to .nd support for his proposed educational reform. The overarching ideas of his plan pertained not only to Hong Kong but indeed to all of China, insofar as these ideas constituted a careful and visionary consideration of the overall political situation of post-Second Opium War China. The years 1860�V1861 were an important landmark in both the history of modern China and the history of Hong Kong. While Legge was preparing his scheme for establishing a new educational system that would promote English education in Hong Kong, the Taiping rebels at Nanking defeated Qing forces. Nevertheless, with the help of Western armies, the Qing forces suppressed the rebellions and, within six years, had completely wiped out the opposition. Just prior to such a devastating blow, the Qing imperial authorities had been unable to refuse the West��s demands at the Convention of Peking (1860), by which the Chinese government ceded the Kowloon Peninsula to the British, who incorporated it into Hong Kong��s jurisdiction. The Treaty of Tientsin was signed in 1858 together with the agreements made at the Shanghai Tariff Conference to give the British and the Americans control over the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service. These two diplomatic agreements provided the British with a number of favorable conditions and facilities that enabled the colonial power to widen its commercial activities in China (Bredon 1909; Wright, S.F. 1950). It would be unreasonable to assume that Britain would not focus on Hong Kong as an extension of British activities in China. Indeed, Legge��s euphoric mood was re.ected in his presentation to the Legislative Council:
This plan makes the teaching of English a more prominent part of the education in the Government Schools than it has hitherto been. But I beg to submit to you that it ought to be so. It ought to be so in this
Colony where the administration of Justice is conducted in the English language. It ought to be so, that an in.uence may go forth from the Island, which shall be widely felt in China enlightening and bene.ting many of its people.
(Minutes of the Legislative Council Meetings (special summons) on March 23, 1861; quoted in Ng 1984: 78, my emphasis)
The British colonial government administered justice in the English language, a state-of-affairs that was not con.ned to Hong Kong. Under the principle of extraterritoriality in the territorial concessions, foreign laws were soon to be practiced in some Chinese coastal cities, thereby restricting Chinese jurisdiction. Therefore, Legge should have said that it was the extension of British juridical power to both Hong Kong and China that made the English language both necessary and enlightening at the same time, although the precise meaning of the word ��enlightenment�� in the nineteenth century did not mean so much in a person��s moral transformation through literature as old Anglicists in India had believed. Hong Kong students of Chinese ethnicity who strove to enlighten China needed more than knowledge of the language. Central School also taught them other subjects that were integral parts of the Maritime Customs examinations (Ng 1984: 78).
The Taiping Rebellion promoted the rise of Han of.cials in the Qing imperial hierarchies. Han generals such as Zeng Guofan, whose own armies obtained support from regional Chinese militias and foreign mercenaries, led the forceful suppression of the rebellions. These successes prolonged Qing dynastic rule for the next .fty years. However, the Western mercenaries and weapons that the Han generals employed marked only the beginning of foreign involvement in late-imperial Chinese political affairs. The Tung-Chih Restoration, launched soon after the Taiping Rebellion had subsided, obtained assistance from foreign powers in many different ways (Wright, M. 1966). In a series of reforms known as the Western Affairs Movement (yang wu yun dong), the reformist of.cials adopted Western scienti.c knowledge, military technology, and training techniques for diplomatic personnel; the motto of this campaign concerned China��s ��self-strengthening,�� the requirement that China ��learn from the West in order to subdue the West�� (yi yi zhi yi). The establishment of translation bureaus and the building of new foreign-language and technology schools signi.cantly affected the cultural and intellectual landscape of imperial China. (I assess the ideological effects of the yang wu yun dong in Chapter 4). However, such initiatives did not instill in the of.cials any wish to step beyond the importation or the imitation of foreign knowledge, foreign institutions, and foreign technologies; nothing about either the old political structure of the imperial government or China��s traditional beliefs or culture found its way into the reforms.
The colonial establishment in Hong Kong held high hopes for the unprecedented imperial restoration program. Although the curriculum reform of Central School had incited some disquiet about spending Hong Kong money on training ethnic-Chinese boys to serve in Mainland China, Governor Hennessy, Inspector of Schools Eitel, and other of.cials were fully supportive of the policy (Ng 1984: ch. 5). Even Stewart, who was the .rst principal of Central School and who saw the need to maintain vernacular education, held the view that such spending would guarantee lasting bene.ts for the British government. Their vision reached far beyond a narrow study of Western technology, as conceived by Chinese bureaucrats and Chinese literati. Their opinions were echoed in the local press. A leading newspaper, Hong Kong Daily Press, expressed this opinion:
It is wonderful that the large majority of the Chinese clerks and employees in the Imperial Maritime Customs Service have been pupils at the Central School. It may be a direct loss to the Colony for a time, but it will be a great indirect gain in the future, and the Central School is most freely employed in turning out embryo Chinese of.cials capable of speaking English, imbued with progressive ideas�K This English-speaking contingent of Chinese youths will, we hope, ultimately prove to be the channel by means of which the reign of progress may be inaugurated and reforms introduced into China.
(Hong Kong Daily Press, April 3, 1884, my emphasis)
According to this conviction, the students�� ability to speak English correlated directly with their possession of progressive ideas. This conviction drove the Hong Kong equivalent of Macaulay to put into action the Anglicist dream of producing ��a class of persons, [Chinese] in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.�� Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, those in the colonial establishment felt no need to conceal this type of imperial vision. Eitel, a known critic of secular education, expressed clearly his view in his Europe in China,
Europe��s destiny is to govern Asia. Marching at the head of civilization, Great Britain has commenced her individual mission in Asia by the occupation of India and Burma, the Straits Settlement and Hong Kong. By .fty years of handling of Hong Kong��s Chinese population, Great Britain has shown how readily the Chinese people fall into a .rm European regime, and the rapid conversion of a barren rock into one of the wonders and commercial emporiums of the world, has demonstrated what Chinese labour, industry and commerce can achieve under British rule.
(Eitel 1895: iv�Vv, my emphasis)
As a German-naturalized English missionary, a Sinologist, a private secretary to Governor Hennessy, and an inspector of schools in Hong Kong for more than two decades, Eitel did not hide his imperialist arrogance when he divulged the intention underlying the help the British offered to reform the Qing government. Indeed, this whole new approach to China was a result of careful calculations. In 1860, Sir Frederick Bruce, the British minister in China, had warned that a breakdown of China��s government would have disastrous consequences for British non-territorial interests (Ng 1984: 82). The late-Victorian imperial idea was de.nitely not con.ned to territorial conquest. In 1850, a writer in the Edinburgh Review illustrated this point:
It is a noble work to plant the foot of England and extend her spectre by
the banks of streams unnamed, and over regions yet unknown �X and
to conquer, not by the tyrannous subjugation of inferior races, but by
the victories of mind over brute matter and blind mechanical obstacles.
A yet nobler work it is to diffuse over a few created worlds the laws of
Alfred, the language of Shakespeare, and the Christian religion, the last
great heritage of man.
(Edinburgh Review, 62/XCI/1850,
quoted in Eldridge 1973: 238, my emphasis)
Therefore, the end of the nineteenth century was a period in which many British were contributing reform ideas to colonial matters and were serving as advisors or instructors, if not holding of.cial positions, in the modern institutions set up by of.cial Chinese bodies �X and all this while Shakespeare was being taught in Hong Kong Central School (So 1950; Bennett 1967; Spence 1969; Fairbank 1978: ch. 10).15 Droves of missionaries came to China to set up their own schools. And the Inspectors-General of Chinese Imperial Customs came from Britain or America not only to administer the laws of Alfred in coastal cities�� territorial concessions but also to recruit English-speaking Chinese boys from Hong Kong in this regard.
While ��learning from the West�� became a new political motto among the reformist of.cials within the Qing bureaucracy, it also opened venues through which Hong Kong English-educated persons extended their in.uence along the China coast. As part of the previously mentioned Western Affairs Movement, economic reforms helped foreign .rms open branch of.ces in treaty ports and helped Hong Kong��s English-educated elite obtain positions in the of.ces of several self-styled reform-minded Qing of.cials (such as Li Hongzhang and Zeng Guofan, where the newly-hired elite served as personal advisors and held sway over their own private bureaucracies. (I return to this issue of think-tank intellectual politics in Chapter 4.) As knowledge of the West increasingly became valuable as cultural capital, it also constituted the basis for a new stratum of Chinese elite whose in.uence was not con.ned to Hong Kong (So 1950; Bennett 1967; Chung 1998).
From Multiculturalism to Elitism
So far, I have been tracing the idea of English education in Hong Kong and have done so in the context of late-nineteenth-century British imperialism. However, if we take Central School merely as an institution constituted, from the start, as a full-.edged governmental agency seamlessly incorporated into the imperial state��s project to subjugate China, we will risk misreading the ideological con.guration of collaborative colonialism in Hong Kong. At least for James Legge, convictions concerning ��higher�� civilization (the expanding British commercial and political power) mingled with a wish to ��bridge the gulf�� of animosity that existed between the two races and that .ared up time and again between the two Opium Wars (Stokes 1962: 14).
As an institution carrying out the imperial mission, Central School not only conveyed the idea of British superiority but also acted as the .rst genuine crucible for an amalgamation of the two races. In fact, it acted as a miniature multicultural society, somewhat breaking down the racial segregation of the earlier years. True to its founding philosophy of secularism, Central School made Bible study optional during the .rst few years (Stokes 1962: ch. 2). Even Central School��s classes that taught Bible studies did so in Chinese translation. Likewise, English was not a compulsory subject at the school, since its founding fathers believed that the Chinese students would eventually learn the language willingly (Stokes 1962: 23). What was foreseen was that the rapidly increasing ��cash value�� of English-language competence would induce a rapid turnover of students. Increasingly, even a rudimentary knowledge of English was enough for boys at the school to seek jobs in business houses. And even those Chinese masters who were able to teach some English were always engaged in part-time jobs in commercial .rms.
However, commercialism was not the sole factor underlying the growth of English-language education; the expansion of Hong Kong��s colonial government substantially added to the growth after Governor Bowring complained in 1860 that the schools did not train civil servants competent in English. Eventually, English was made compulsory in 1865, when James Legge proposed to make Central School directly responsible to the governor; the change effectively turned the school into a government department. Yet, even when English-language instruction became the school��s major goal, the Chinese language remained a core subject (Ng 1984: 65�V68). With Governor MacDonnell��s approval, Central School soon changed from a school that took in only ethnic-Chinese male students to one that opened its doors to male students of all nationalities. Central School maintained both its multiracial composition and (until 1889, when Chinese-language subjects became optional) its dual emphasis on English and Chinese. Nevertheless, the composition of Central School��s students exhibited diversity in terms of background and age. For example, married men were often found studying with adolescents (Stokes 1962: 27). As an alumnus of Central School phrased the issue during a dinner speech,
[Central School] has always been the meeting ground of boys of all
nations and religions; though Chinese boys have predominated, yet [sic]
there have been quite a number of Indian, British, Portuguese, Japanese
and other boys. These boys, in their daily intercourse, have come to
understand and appreciate each other��s point of view and outlook on
life, and have acquired a sense of give and take and a knowledge of
mankind in all its races, religions and beliefs which cannot but make
for success in the great world beyond the school.
(Quoted in Stokes 1962: 17)
Central School��s second headmaster, Batson-Wright, spoke of having male students who, together, accounted for up to twelve nationalities. According to Stokes�� reckoning, each male student was obliged to follow the social or religious customs of his race �X Moslems had to leave classes during Ramadan, Chinese students at Ching Ming and many other festivals, Jews were absent from school at the Feast of Tabernacles, and so on (Stokes 1962: 28). This multicultural achievement was hardly inconsequential in early colonial Hong Kong, as racial discrimination there and elsewhere was severe. According to Crisswell and Watson��s report (1982), even in a language school for police that taught Indian and Chinese of.cers to speak English and British of.cers to speak Chinese, the more advanced Indian and Chinese students were not allowed to sit with the European of.cers, for the latter felt that their status would be lowered in the eyes of the Indian and the Chinese (Crisswell and Watson 1982: 53). Therefore, the additional merit of Central School��s secularism comprised its multicultural characteristics, which bred a degree of inter-racial friendship and tolerance. However, in the end it could not escape the state-church contest for power.
The 1870 Forster Education Act in Britain marked the beginning of Britain��s formal recognition of state responsibility for popular education �X .ve years after Central School in Hong Kong had become a state institution. In response to the policy change in the home country, and under the direction of the secularists, Governor Kennedy and Headmaster Frederick Stewart of Central School proposed a controversial new grant-in-aid system. It was such a new system that it reignited the animosity between advocates of secularism and advocates of religious education (Ng 1984: 54�V59). The initial draft of the grant codes required secular instruction in the stipulated subjects for four consecutive hours daily. Quite a number of Protestant denominations, together with Roman Catholics, strongly opposed the proposal. In the very heated quarrels that followed, anti-secularists attacked Central School for its ��godless education�� (Stokes 1962: 31).
The defenders of Central School appealed to the fact that the school had a student body of mixed nationalities, so that compulsory religious instruction was not possible. The dispute dragged on for several years until the arrival of anti-secularist governor Hennessy shifted the balance of power in favor of the churchmen. Central School then became the target of a different criticism
�X a criticism that concerned the quality of the students�� English-language pro.ciency. After a ��thespian�� investigation into a hyped-up scandal about ��the poor standard of English�� at Central School, the Chinese language became an optional subject, so that the school could devote more teaching hours to English-language instruction (Stokes 1962: 35�V41; Ng 1984: ch. 4).
Hennessy was famous for his purportedly pro-Chinese stance, and the signi.cance of his intervention into this issue of language education was far-reaching; it also epitomized how the whole new governing strategy of collaborative colonial rule increasingly relied on Macaulay��s Anglicist approach. He plainly wrote in his dispatch to London that ��we should have here an English-speaking Chinese community�� and he thought the Chinese ��would [not] care much for any loss they might have as Chinese subjects in the country�� (CO/129/181/p. 8). His suggestion to cut Chinese-language teaching hours was echoed by E. R. Belilios, the wealthy merchant and educational philanthropist who said, ��I don��t see why the English government should encumber itself with the teaching of Chinese�� and ��the English government should anglicise its subjects��. It is interesting to note that Wu Tingfang, the .rst Chinese Legislative Council member appointed by Hennessy, also supported the cutting of Chinese-language teaching hours: Wu thought it was ��a waste of time.�� (Pennycook 1998:
113) In 1878, the high-pro.le intervention of Hennessy ended in an all-parties Education Conference, at which the colonial government laid down a policy that privileged English and that was unreservedly elitist. The Grant Codes were modi.ed in 1879 and the secularist requirements relaxed; also, the victory of the churchmen resulted in setting the government��s primary goal to strengthen English-language instruction (Ng 1984: ch. 5). Frederick Stewart resigned, partly to protest the policy-based marginalization of Chinese-language subjects at Central School. The missionaries were happy, from then on, to share with the government the mission of providing elitist education to the emerging ethnic-Chinese upper class (Ng 1984: 69, n. 20). The policy of giving priority to the English language, although in principle a feature at all government schools, was totally unrealistic for the majority of vernacular schools, which now received the designation ��district schools�� and whose student bodies consisted mostly of members of the poorer classes. The district schools�� subsequent decline was inevitable.
Apparently, these controversies were reminiscent of the Anglicist-Orientalist debates in China; but here in Hong Kong the whole saga was indeed a tussle between the churchmen and the secularists, couched in terms of English-language standards. The net result was the establishment of a predominately English-language education system that undermined the vernacular language; the system was in place until 1911, when Governor Lugard (1907�V1912) formed the Board of Chinese Vernacular Primary Education in response to the political unrest in China (see Chapter 3).
Indigenizing Elitist English-language Education
Throughout the debates, the churchmen exhibited the triumphalist mood characteristic of those Anglicists in India; however, we should be cautious not to treat the asymmetric status between English and Chinese as -resulting simply from the British colonialists�� imposition of the English language on the Chinese. Indeed, even Wu Tingfang, the only Chinese Legislative Councilor, did not raise any oppositional view to defend for the vernacular education. What he left was a scornful remark that Chinese-language teaching was a ��waste of time��. Ironically enough, it was Frederick Stewart, an Englishman, who stood up to protest the marginalization of Chinese-language subjects at Central School. Yet, it is hardly a surprise if one understands that it was a collaborative colonialism that governed Hong Kong: if Governor Pope Hennessy could take a staunch Anglicist stance but hold, simultaneously, a pro-Chinese political strategy �X which made him infamous to other Western colonists in Hong Kong �X Wu Tingfang should not be an embarrassment to the Chinese insofar as he was a Chinese councilor who opposed the teaching of more Chinese-language courses. Both of them upheld something that seemed to be incongruous with their respective ethnic belonging. Yet, it was perfectly understandable because both of them needed each other in a collaborative colonial formation. Hennessy was in need of the help of the Chinese collaborators as much as the Chinese wealthy classes wanted to assign a privileged status to English-language education. To establish and maintain the superiority of English over Chinese in the context of the Western Affairs Movement, the Anglicist policy served the best interests of the Chinese wealthy class, although it meant further relegating the Chinese vernacular to an inferior position, a trend that most co-opted Chinese community leaders did not care to reverse.
The efforts of these emerging Hong Kong-based Chinese elite to defend English-language instruction amounted to a highly class-conscious act in which the English language was used as much as a vehicle for imposing cultural domination of one race on another as a cultural capital effectuating class segregation within the same dominated race. No evidence can prove the truth of such willful acts of class segregation among the ethnic Chinese than the 1902 petition that a number of prominent Chinese community leaders �X among them, Ho Kai, a famous ��Chinese patriotic reformist thinker�� whom I further discuss in Chapter 4 �X drafted in order to establish an exclusive new school for the well-to-do (Ng 1984: 87, n. 71; Baker 1996: 7�V11). This petition resulted in the establishment of St. Stephen��s Boys�� School founded in 1903. The petition stated, in part:
The Queen��s College [Central School] and the Belilios Public School are excellent Government institutions in their way, but the exceedingly large number of pupils attending these schools and the paucity of English teachers, and the indiscriminate and intimate intermingling of children from families of the most various social and moral standing, render them absolutely undesirable as well as unsuitable for the sons and daughters of respectable Chinese families.
(Report of the Committee on Education 1902, Enclosure No. 2, my emphasis)
The signatories of the petition meticulously laid out how the Chinese could attain social mobility through English-language learning:
The want is now increasingly felt of a school at which such a thorough knowledge of English could be obtained as would enable boys to leave school at a suitable age, and on proceeding to England to at once enter on the special course of study prescribed for the profession which might have been selected for them by their parents.
(Report of the Committee on Education 1902, Enclosure No. 2)
The letter ended in a direct appeal to a sense of pride in the British imperial idea, which could hardly be reduced to the material instrumentality of the English language:
It is at present a constant complaint that, having received an education in the Government Schools, the Chinese have failed to assimilate to any extent English sympathies and ideas, and are ever backward in responding to the call of public duties. But we are con.dent that thorough education on the lines, which we now suggest, will soon remove all cause for such complaint. Such an education will not only endow our young men and women with more open minds and greater public spirit, but will result in the more cordial co-operation of the British and Chinese nations and closer intercourse between them. An excellent system of public education is one of the best forms of national investment. In commercial and industrial ef.ciency, in a higher level of civic duty, and, above all, in the wider diffusion of moral culture and religious feeling, the nation is amply repaid for what it spends.
(Report of the Committee on Education 1902, Enclosure No. 2, my emphasis)
The Chinese signatories of this petition identi.ed themselves as the ��upper classes of the Chinese residents in this Colony.�� But a similar petition, signed by a group of Europeans calling for a separate English School for Europeans explains in a more elaborate, more racist language:
The education of the European children suffers very much from the fact that Europeans and Asiatics are mixed, and the European child had to be educated side by side in the same class with large numbers of Asiatics�K But the Chinese boys in the schools are numbered by thousands, large numbers of whom, be it noticed, come from the mainland, and are in no way connected with the Colony; and the ordinary standards of truth, honour and morality amongst the masses of the Chinese people undeniably differ very widely from our European standards�K Constant contact with Chinese, both in class-room and play-ground must affect the formation of the character of the European boy.
(Report of the Committee on Education 1902, Enclosure No. 2, my emphasis)
Elsewhere in the petition, the European signatories stated clearly that the source of ��moral contamination�� was ��the mainland�� and that ��our most respected Chinese fellow-residents have recently started a school for their own children, because they do not think it desirable that they should be thrown into constant contact with the boys in the Queen��s College [named previously as Central School]����.
Historical studies of colonial Hong Kong have often focused on racial discrimination, highlighting the con.icts there between the Chinese and the Europeans. And yet, one need only juxtapose the Europeans�� petition with the Hong Kong-based Chinese elite��s petition to recognize that the two radically distinct demographic groups �X the colonizers and the colonized �X were in agreement as to Hong Kong��s instituting of segregated education. The ��other��, of the Hong Kong-based Chinese elite, was the ��mainland Chinese��; and the European contingent��s other was the ��mainland Chinese,�� as well. In other words, Hong Kong��s two privileged communities �X the well-off natives and the foreign colonizers �X shared the same lexicon for ��character formation�� according to the British Empire��s very ��English sympathies and ideas��. Governor Henry Blake (1898�V1903), in his explanation of this dispatch to the Colonial Of.ce, explained the Chinese petition:
The better classes of Chinese are quite as anxious as any European to
preserve their children from contact with children of a lower class,
intimate communication with whom would be prejudicial to their
moral character.
(Report of the Committee on Education 1902, Enclosure No. 2)
Gone, at the dawn of the twentieth century, was the multiculturalist era of Central School, when Hong Kong educators had encouraged a racially and ethnically diverse student body to study the egalitarian teachings of both English and Chinese. James Legge��s dream had been to bridge the gulf between the two races. By the early 1900s, this dream had ceded place to a reality in which Europeans and some elite Chinese, out of concern for moral character, argued for educational segregation. The only distinctiveness we can .nd in the Chinese petitioners�� appeal was their .rm belief that the proper means to exclude the moral other �X that is, the Mainlanders �X was segregated education conducted in the English language. This language came to embody a new cultural or even moral capital.
Western imperialism in the late nineteenth century was characterized by the imperialists�� .rm belief in racial superiority and their denial of the subjugated people��s .tness for self-government. As illustrated by the Chinese petitioners�� explicit linking of ��moral culture,�� ��religious feeling,�� and ��public duties,�� discourses about morality were never dissociated from political leadership and government, at least in the context of late-nineteenth-century imperialism. As the racially subjugated, the elite Chinese would not let up in presenting for themselves a strong argument in response to the concern of self-government. And, for the British colonists, the aspiration of the Hong Kong elite Chinese would only re-af.rm Anglicist con.dence in the assertion that the English language is an effective vehicle for rigorous leadership-oriented moral education; moreover, this aspiration would re-af.rm Anglicist con.dence in the Hong Kong colonial government��s decision to substitute this brand of moral education for religious education, which was put in place by Governor Hennessy and had held sway in the previous decades. Thus, Governor Henry Blake approved the request to establish an elite Chinese school and explained his approval to the Colonial Of.ce:
If we can secure the attendance of the children of the Chinese upper
classes, many of whom will, if the school succeeds, come down from
China, and some of whom will probably form part of the of.cial class of
the future, the consequence may be far reaching and the bene.ts to this
country may amply repay the small outlay that the scheme demands.
(Report of the Committee on Education 1902, Enclosure No. 2)
Europeans and elite Hong Kong Chinese alike, placed their hopes on this ��of.cial class of the future�� that would ��come down from China.�� What was in Governor Blake��s mind could not possibly have been ordinary immigrant Mainlanders, but chosen children of the Chinese upper class. This fact, in itself, illustrates a new collaborative relationship wherein the Europeans and the elite Hong Kong Chinese aimed not just to govern the small colony of Hong Kong but also to incorporate a much bigger China into the British grand imperial blueprint. The report explains, at length, that many residents in Hong Kong did not consider themselves Hong Kong citizens because ��many still preferred to send their children back to China for education��. On these premises, the report��s conclusion .rmly rejects the idea that Hong Kong would ��supply education to all the children within its jurisdiction��. Yet the deeper rationale for this rejection of universal education surfaces when the document states that it would be more practical for Hong Kong��s colonial government ��to enlighten the ignorance of the upper classes of Chinese�� than ��to force new ideas on the mass of the people�� (Hong Kong Government Gazette, April 4, 1902: 518).
In the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, many people sensed that there was a much wider crisis in the English-language education of the other British colonies.. Some of them attributed this perceived crisis to the tactless imposition of English-language education onto natives by the British colonies. Critics of this educational trend blamed the much-reported crisis on Anglicists such as Macaulay (whom I will discuss in the next chapter). In contrast to this uproar across the British colonies, the British colonists in Hong Kong saw no such danger in their differential provision of English education to a selected stratum of Hong Kong Chinese (Chirol 1910), because Hong Kong was the place where British colonial politics was translated into class politics of China. The collapse of the tottering Qing Empire was in sight. And the increasingly aggressive Hong Kong Chinese elite, who attempted to in.uence the future development of China, strengthened the British colonists�� belief in the superiority of the English language. They looked forward to educating the future of.cial class of China.
However, Hong Kong��s educational system, which privileged Hong Kong Chinese elite and marginalized all other Chinese residents, resulted in a slightly ironic outcome. As long as Hong Kong remained wed to the Anglicist belief that the English language is a vehicle for moral cultivation, and as long as the British colonists endorsed the Hong Kong Chinese elite��s demand for exclusive access to English-language education, the English language remained an indiscernible set of sounds and scribbles for Hong Kong��s wider Chinese community. And the irony is this: the cultural segregation between the privileged Chinese and the marginalized Chinese generated tensions that increasingly superimposed themselves on the existing racial cleavage between the Europeans and the Chinese. In serving as a class marker much more than as a facilitator of cultural communication and thus of homogenization, the English language failed to unify colonial Hong Kong into a monolithic entity that would stand in contrast to the other, mainland China. Rather, the other emerged from within Hong Kong: the other was the poor, immigrant Mainlander class. Therefore, in contrast to many who assert a distinct Hong Kong identity was already in place in the colonial days, my assessment is that the absence of an initiative to make English a common language among all Hong Kong residents ironically pre-empted Hong Kong��s development of a distinct identity of its own. The children of Europeans and the wealthy Chinese no longer mixed with each other in schools although they all received English-language education; the wealthy Chinese had their children equipped with a cultural capital that further aggravated their unequal status compared with the poorer Chinese who were always the new immigrants.
Whether Hong Kong has historically developed a cultural identity of its own is a cause of concern for historians. Those who stressed the ethnic ��Chineseness�� of Hong Kong people always denied the existence or the extent of such a Hong Kong identity before the 1960s. In contrast, Carroll (2005, ch. 4) takes the view that a distinct Hong Kong identity was already fully in place by the late nineteenth century, when the Hong Kong Chinese elite were beginning to function as a full-.edged bourgeoisie. Many other scholars also draw upon the notion of multiple or overlapping identities to argue for the existence of this distinct Hong Kong identity which might have seated together with the Chinese identity to which many in Hong Kong also vowed allegiance. However, the idea of multiple identities does not help us to look into the problems carried by a complex identity formation such as Hong Kong. The historical examination of colonial Hong Kong��s English-language education, however, shows that Hong Kong��s collaborative-colonial formation had long over-determined language as a contestable site for identity formation. On the one hand, Hong Kong��s collaborative-colonial formation perpetuated the privilege that the English language had obtained; on the other hand, it re-assertively situated the ��Chineseness�� of Hong Kong .rmly within the British imperial embrace. These facts tell us not only that the form of collaborative rule in Hong Kong changed at the beginning of the twentieth century but also how a distinct Hong Kong identity failed to establish itself along linguistic lines. In other words, instead of taking the emergence of a Hong Kong bourgeoisie as epitomizing the inception of a distinct Hong Kong identity, my question is, to the contrary, why and how the colonial conditions in which such a bourgeoisie grew up indeed impeded the maturation of a full-.edged Hong Kong identity in dissociation from that of the Chinese.
My discussion so far shows that the racial exclusion sought by Hong Kong��s Europeans was in perfect agreement with Hong Kong��s elite Chinese, who also desired social class exclusion. With colonial racial politics translated into class politics of the indigenous, the complicity between the colonizers and the elite Chinese in Hong Kong indeed inaugurated a gradual shift away from the Anglicist position. Instead of attaching cultural ideals and values to the English language, English culture and literature were increasingly con.ned to a small elite stratum. That means even though the English language commands a dominant and of.cial status in Hong Kong it has never become a popular and commonly used language in everyday life. Without any project attempting to incorporate all Hong Kong Chinese into the culture of the colonizers, Hong Kong remained as a place where Chinese cultures and languages could exist and develop. However, the indigenous appropriation of the English language as cultural capital to mark class distinction displaced the colonial project without having the asymmetric cultural hierarchy reversed. Such indigenization of colonial power is socially divisive rather than helping to fortress an independent identity.
The socially and politically divisive character of language use and language education in pre-1997 Hong Kong constitutes a thorny legacy not easily resolvable in Hong Kong��s post-1997 ��mother-tongue�� education program (Chan 2002). For one thing, multilingual Hong Kong considers the meaning of a ��mother-tongue�� language to be highly ambiguous; for another, the majority of Chinese parents in Hong Kong perceive its Chinese-language schools to be inferior and therefore persistently shun them. In the 1970s, anti-colonialist movement in Hong Kong once upheld Chinese nationalism obliging the colonial government to grant of.cial status to the Chinese language (I will discuss this issue again in Chapter 6). But the dominant status of the English language can still hardly be undone now. The post-1997 educational reforms, which are often described as upholding the principle of ��mother-tongue education��, are indeed aggravating the segregation principle by restricting the English language to be used as the medium of instruction only in a few selected schools. Such divisive policy has stirred up many more grievances and frustrations than before because, with British colonial in.uences now gone, competition among the parents to tag the class marker of receiving English language education on their children is getting even stronger.
My analysis in this chapter shows that fetishism of English language education in Hong Kong is largely attributed to the desire of class segregation among the Hong Kong Chinese community. It is then not dif.cult to understand why the dominant status of the English language is coupled with the absence of imposing British cultural in.uences on Hong Kong daily life. Such antinomy is often casually depicted as a kind of instrumentalism but its roots in the collaborative-colonial setting are worthy to be exposed for their profound historical implications. On the one hand, dominant status of the English language has never meant that British culture has ever enjoyed signi.cant cultural hegemony beyond the restricted circles of the elite Chinese collaborators. The extensive and largely unregulated use of Cantonese in mundane daily life in Hong Kong has indeed saved Hong Kong Chinese from the nationalistic cultural programme such as the coerced use of putonghua (or the national language) at the expense of the vernaculars by both Republican and Communist Chinese regimes. Therefore, ironically enough, colonial rule in Hong Kong left a space in which the Cantonese language and culture could and did .ourish continuously throughout the twentieth century. On the other hand, Hong Kongers are thus deprived of a common language (neither Chinese nor English) of their own and, consequently, .nd it dif.cult now not to be subdued in another potentially colonial situation wherein much of society treats putonghua as the language of the new master, if not ��the carrier of his arrogance and brutality�� (Searle 1983: 48). Unable to assert a distinct identity in terms of language use, Hong Kong is equally ambivalent about both the current dominance of English and the nationalistic urge to uphold the status of the Chinese language. In this light, the failure of the ��mother-tongue�� education program in post-1997 Hong Kong testi.es both to the impasse of anti-colonialism��s binary logic and to the intricate coloniality that is unique to Hong Kong��s collaborative colonialism �X whose legacies refuse to fade away.the controversies of church dominance and national education in England, see Best (1956); Curtis and Boultwood (1966); Curtis (1967); Wardle (1976).
3
Pedagogy of Imperialism: Indirect Rule and HKU
L
ate-nineteenth-century Hong Kong witnessed the rapid development of its English-language education. But it was also a period when many other British colonies cried out in alarm about crises in their English-language education systems. Valentine Chirol (1910), for example, reports how Macaulay��s famous Minute on Indian Education in 1835 inaugurated a highly successful system of English-language education (especially during its .rst three decades) that produced ��men of great intellectual attainments and of high character��; yet in the wake of student-associated political agitation all over India, its English-language education system turned out to be a seedbed of discontent. According to Chirol, schools and colleges that provided English-language education shifted away from cultivating ��good English scholars, good Christians, or good subjects of the Queen�� to ��the avenue to lucrative careers�� through ��mere cramming of undigested knowledge�� (Chirol 1910). In contrast to the Anglicists�� high hope that English-language education would be ��the best and surest remedy for political discontent and for law-breaking�� and would help form ��a class who may be interpreters between us [the British] and the millions whom we govern�� (Macaulay 1835), the study of English literature seemed, in Chirol��s eyes, to have merely succeeded in creating a class of mediocre ��Babus,�� who were ��intellectually hollow, uprooted from their own tradition, and imperfect imitators of the West�� (Chirol 1910).
No Western power had ever fully colonized China; yet, the spread of Western thought under the West��s imperialist dominance coincided with waves of political and intellectual discontent no less severe than the crises that developed in the British colonies. Western political ideas inspired the Chinese reformists Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, who put forward a constitutional reform program in 1898; the failure of this program resulted in the rapid emergence and growth of radicalism, and proponents of these new ideas called for a revolution that would overthrow the Qing dynasty. This unrest culminated in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, which ended when the Eight Allied Forces �X in which British troops played a leading role �X occupied Peking (Beijing). The rebellion and its outcome fractured the partnership between the Qing Empire and the Western powers, a partnership that had developed during the Western Affairs Movement. With the upsurge of Han nationalism, which targeted the Manchu ruling aristocracy, the Qing Empire was on the brink of total collapse. Meanwhile, anti-foreign sentiment was growing among the young Chinese literati. These and other China-based movements placed great pressure on the Qing Empire to reform itself, and this pressure gradually generated actual reforms in the .rst decade of the twentieth century, despite the previous failure of the reform proposal put forward by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. The Qing government drafted several plans in preparation for a future constitutional government; one of the most drastic measures that had eventually been put into effect was the abolition of the Imperial Civil Service Examination (ke ju) in 1905 (Franke 1960; Wang 1979). As an almost total overhaul of the social and ideological underpinning of the Qing dynastic regime, the act soon proved to be a hasty one, for it exacerbated discontents. Frustrated by the collapse of the traditional channel of upward mobility, and having no effective new institutional system that could replace the channel, students easily gravitated to radical ideas and to the revolutionary movement (Sang 1991, 1995).
These rapid changes in China brought about several different implications for colonial governance in Hong Kong. On the one hand, the upsurge in Chinese nationalism raised the anti-foreign consciousness of Hong Kong Chinese, which indirectly posed a challenge to British rule (Tsai 1993). On the other hand, with the breakdown of the Qing regime in view, revolutionaries turned to the Western powers, either seeking possible political alliances or other forms of support or looking for new intellectual resources by which the revolutionaries might gain a perspective on, and knowledge of, a post-imperial China. Despite all the anti-foreign rhetoric, the humiliation that foreign powers had in.icted �X during successive wars �X on China had not deterred the enthusiasm of Chinese students for Western learning. For example, the .rst decade of the twentieth century saw massive growth in the number of students studying in Japan, which many Asian people considered a successful copy of the West; and it is ironic that this growth occurred only a few years after the Qing navy suffered a humiliating defeat orchestrated by the Japanese, whom the Chinese had long condescended to as only people of a tiny island (Shu 1927; Lin 1976; Saneto et al. 1982). Caught between political currents running in different directions, Hong Kong experienced two noticeable developments. First, the British increased their surveillance over schools, in a bid to enhance the colonial state��s control of education and to curb the growth of a nationalism that might threaten colonial governance. Second, Hong Kong continued to experience a growing demand for English-language education, as the volatile political situation of the late Qing dynasty reinforced Chinese aspirations to acquire Western learning. Against this backdrop, collaborative colonialism took on a renewed form.
In this chapter, I discuss how the general educational crisis, which emerged in many colonized societies, shaped the way in which British imperial authorities employed English-language education in Hong Kong and China. By focusing on Frederick Lugard��s project for the establishment of the University of Hong Kong (HKU), I examine how English education emerged as a new colonial governmentality, both as a response to the crisis situation wherein the old Anglicist belief that the English language embodied moral superiority was on the wane, and as an occasion for the rise of educational managerialism. I also demonstrate that such a recon.guration of the imperial ��civilizing mission�� would have been impossible without the enthusiasm of both Chinese collaborators in China and Chinese collaborators in Hong Kong, all of whom were involved not only in shaping the post-Qing Chinese political order but also in the continuation of the British imperial mission in the new Republican China.
Western Learning and an Imperial University for China
After the two Opium Wars, a consistent aim of British policy was to establish modern British educational institutions in and for China, in an effort to bring her into the British imperial domain. In the same year as the establishment of Central School in Hong Kong, the Qing government established an elementary-level foreign-of.ce interpreters�� school named Peking College. A similar institution, the Tung-wen-kuan (Translation School), already existed in Canton (Fairbank 1978: ch. 9). Sir Robert Hart, the delegated British Inspector-General of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, persuaded the Qing government to open these institutions, giving himself the power to .ll vacancies in the teaching staff and even to dispatch his customs of.cers there on teaching assignments (Bredon 1909; Wright 1950; Bennett 1967; Spence 1969). In the process of its reorganization after 1867, there grew a movement to turn it into a Western-style university (variously referred to as Imperial University, the University of Peking, the College of Western Sciences and Literature, and otherwise). Similarly, in 1872, the Rev. Hutchinson of the Church Missionary Society voiced the need to build a university in Hong Kong (Endacott 1962; Harrison 1962; Ng 1984). In 1880, Governor Hennessy appointed Eitel to head a commission to consider raising Central School to the collegiate level. Although the proposal was .nally considered to be premature, calls for a higher-learning institute for Chinese Hong Kongers lingered, despite occasional opposition from branches of the British government.
However, over the next two decades, British-directed educational reforms in China did not go as smoothly as expected. Owing to the opposition of conservatives among Qing of.cials, the whole Western Affairs Movement was con.ned to limited sectors where training in handy technical military and industrial knowledge was offered. Even a series of proposals to introduce mechanics and mathematics into the of.cial examinations failed to gain acceptance (von Gumpach 1872; Mellor 1980). However, in the British colony of Hong Kong, the acceptance of Western medicine by ethnic-Chinese residents was gradually advancing.
In 1887, inaugurating the new Hong Kong College of Medicine for the Chinese, Patrick Mansion, its .rst Dean, did not forget to mention China. He bemoaned certain events:
Twenty years ago the Taiping Rebellion was suppressed. Those of us who were in China then thought that surely now a new era is beginning; and we waited from day to day and year to year for what is called the opening of the country. In [our] imagination we saw a network of railways and telegraphs rapidly spreading itself over the land; hospitals and schools of science rising in the towns; public works going on everywhere; there was to be better government, better food, better clothing, better houses, more security and comfort for every one. Everything was to be squared to the foreign model�K The desirability of all this was very manifest to us, and we could not understand why it was not set about immediately.
(Mellor 1980: 9�V10, my emphasis)
Some years later, Sir Charles Eliot, a famous Orientalist and the then vice-chancellor of the University of Shef.eld, complained, during a vacation visit to China, of
great talks�Kof reforms and representative government. Boards and Commissioners are appointed to study foreign constitutions, armies, and systems of education. Everyone is reporting on something or other, and the of.cials of the Empire seem likely to turn into living Blue Books�K I am not sure that all this indicates a real desire to do anything, for I have been an of.cial myself, and I know that the object of asking for a report on a question is generally to get rid of it.
(Eliot 1907; quoted in Mellor 1980: 10, my emphasis)
Yet, Eliot��s dismay was outdated that same year, when Hong Kong Governor Frederick Lugard (1907�V1912) declared a project to build a university for China in Hong Kong. Eliot was eventually to become the university��s .rst vice-chancellor.
Looking More to the West
The revival of the idea of building a university in the small colony of Hong Kong would not have been possible were it not for the rapid deterioration of the situation in China. The dying Chinese empire��s resistance to China��s adoption of Western learning was quickly draining away. By the turn of the century, the yearning for Western knowledge by Chinese was no longer con.ned to a particular reformist circle within the bureaucracy: the yearning was giving rise to waves of intellectual movements that posed challenges to the old regime. After the Empress Dowager led a coup d��etat that sti.ed the Hundred Days Reform, Chinese intellectuals broke into three different factions: ultra-conservatives, exiled reformists, and revolutionaries, each faction propagating its own ideas. Reformists like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao called for a constitutional monarchy; the revolutionaries clamored for a Western-style republic; but both invoked Western theories and experiences to support their calls. Successive Qing military defeats at the hands of Westerners paradoxically both produced Chinese society��s admiration for anything foreign and preserved Chinese society��s general xenophobia. In those days, when studying abroad was a rare experience, literate Chinese would study with scholarly reverence even casual travel writings about Western countries (Kang 1985; Liang 1985). Through translated books, newspapers, and intellectual journals, Western ideas were propagated as ready-made formulas that would facilitate China��s resurrection (Fairbank and Liu 1980: ch. 5). Under these circumstances, those Chinese who had studied in the West emerged as new intellectual .gures. For example, Yen Fu, through his voluminous works of translation, imported positivism, Darwinism, Adam Smith��s political economy and J. S. Mill��s liberalism into China, all of which he had learned about during his few years of study in Britain (Schwartz 1964).
With subsidies from the government or private sources, droves of Chinese students soon turned to foreign countries such as Japan, Belgium, Germany, France, Russia, and the United States for further education (Lin 1976). Chinese society no longer discriminated against Western learning or con.ned it to limited sectors of the political hierarchy; indeed, Chinese intellectuals expressed great admiration for this learning. The Chinese students brought home far more than mere technical knowledge: they also brought to China, on the one hand, various progress-oriented ideologies and hopeful visions and, on the other hand, Western-tinged anxieties and fears. Compared to the percentage of Chinese who studied in Europe and America, the percentage of Chinese who studied in Japan was huge, and quite a number of these students drew inspiration from the radical ideas .ourishing there (Reynolds 1993). Chinese revolutionaries, newly in.amed by these radical ideas, joined various types of secret political societies, and even ordinary study-abroad Chinese students were described as ��returning to China armed with the new learning, openly despising their country and their parentage, hybrid Europeans with a veneer of foreign manners badly laid on a Chinese framework�� (Mellor 1992: 35). Western learning .ooded into China and contributed to the collapse of traditional moral controls, much as moral crises erupted in full colonies. However, precisely because people believed that the educational crisis derived from returning study-abroad students, they attributed the crisis not to any particular foreign power but to the fact that the students had been uprooted from their native soil. On top of the high cost incurred in sending students abroad, fear of producing an unruly new generation in an alien environment increasingly created favorable conditions for the establishment, on Chinese soil, of Western-based education institutions. There was then a virtual scramble among foreign powers to establish universities in China. The Americans were the most energetic foreigners to make use of the huge Boxer Indemnity Fund and swamped China with all sorts of educational initiatives; they were followed by the British, the French, the Germans, and the Italians (Mellor 1992: ch. 4).
A ��Truly Imperial Mission�� as a Collaborative Enterprise
In 1905, the year the educational reform in China materialized in the form of the abolition of the Imperial Civil Service Examination, the idea of establishing a university in Hong Kong appeared in an editorial in the China Mail. The editorial was in response to a protest that some Chinese students, studying in Japan, had leveled against the Japanese government, which, upon request from the Peking government, had tried to impose certain controls on the students. The students had threatened either to withdraw en masse and establish a new university whose location would be Shanghai and whose faculty would consist of European professors or to continue their studies in Europe or America. The editor asked why Hong Kong might take up the matter (China Mail December 19, 1905). A small debate then emerged over the suggestion that Hong Kong be the site of a new university, a suggestion that the editor considered ��a truly imperial mission��. Bateson Wright, the second headmaster of Queen��s College (formerly Central School), chided the editor, saying it would be a ��local white elephant��; he was against the idea of spending enormous sums to educate ��the sons of an alien empire�� (Mellor 1992: 39�V40). Governor Lugard, however, picked up on the idea almost as soon as he took of.ce in 1907. With a donation of funds from Mody, a prominent local Parsee merchant, the scheme soon started rolling. Although Lugard was the prime mover behind the project, he cautiously avoided calling it an of.cial government scheme. Instead, he carefully managed to steer the project as a community enterprise, the support for which was expected to come from private benefactors. Believing that the project should be collaborative among Britain, China, and local and overseas Chinese communities, he appealed for support and funds from a wide range of sources, reaching out simultaneously to the Secretary of the State, the Viceroy of India, the Governor-General of Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces, the British Minister to China, the Shanghai Municipal Council, former Inspector-General of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Sir Robert Hart, and others. Although initially his enthusiasm did not meet with equivalent keenness from the Colonial Of.ce, he found encouragement from Ho Kai, who then helped to solicit support from the local Chinese elite, who raised funds from local and overseas Chinese communities (Harrison 1962; Mellor 1980, 1992; Ng 1984). Overcoming the initial inertia, the project later obtained enthusiastic endorsements from Chinese circles, including Chang Yujen, viceroy of southern Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces, where the Hong Kong Cantonese had deep connections.
Lugard��s insistence on steering the project as a collaborative enterprise, even down to the community level, does not imply that he treated the project as an amateur pursuit or as a matter of routine administration. His supporters, too, did not fail to treat the project as an important political and governmental move, for while the Chinese exhibited demand for Western learning, they were suspicious and doubtful of the side effects of such enthusiasm for it. Although they had not held Western learning responsible for the ��erosion of discipline��, they could sense that new craving for Western knowledge among young Chinese learners was already posing a threat to the existing political order in China. Ideas, which were considered by some conservatives as ��too progressive��, were already spreading too fast, causing grave concerns among Chinese authorities. In this regard, the British, who perceived themselves as saviors of an ailing empire, had a new formula that could both quench the Chinese thirst for Western knowledge and quell the disturbances that surfaced as the thirst��s chief side-effect. After the Empress Dowager issued a hasty decree to establish universal education in China, the editor W. H. Donald wrote in a China Mail editorial in 1907,
It would be the acme of folly for her to attempt to revolutionize a system which has endured for so many centuries without the aid of foreigners. At the present time China has in her service many able and devoted foreign instructors�K Those students who go to Japan, or at all events a large percentage of them, return with a mass of half-assimilated knowledge and political ideas which prepossess them in favour of revolution. If China had ef.cient Middle Schools, Technical Colleges, and Universities of her own these students would complete
their education and they would not be subject to the anti-dynastic
in.uences which begin to affect them directly they get to Tokyo.
(China Mail October 2, 1907; quoted in Mellor 1992: 52)
However, there was no consensus for this secularist panacea; dissenting voices appeared, especially within British religious circles. ��A con.ict between materialism and Christianity�� was the conclusion reached by the All China Christian Conference held in Shanghai in 1906; the view concerned, whether actual or not, an emergency situation caused by the impending scramble for educational reform in China. In London, a China Missions Emergency Committee was formed and called on Christian missions to create, in a united effort, a self-governing native Church in China. This initiative later turned into a ��united-universities scheme,�� which involved a plan for a new university located in China and rooted in Christian morality (Christian Education in China 1922; Mellor 1992; Perham 1968: 341). Even Eton College in England was planning a crusade against the dragon of materialism (in other words, the moral crisis that allegedly threatened China) and proposed to set up an Eton Mission in Chengtu to give the Qing Empire the bene.t ��of the best education and of learning Christianity�� (Mellor 1992: 39).
A Marriage of Materialism and Morality
It was obvious that the churchmen took the educational crisis in China to be a vindication of their earlier disapproval of the secularist tendency. In sharp contrast, Lugard tried to rescue the imperial mission of education through the managerialism he had gained in his long years in colonial government. He proposed a university in Hong Kong rather than in China. The location was of crucial importance for Lugard, as he believed that only under full British control could the university be ensured proper organization and continuity of policy, which in turn would maintain the high standards of the university��s degrees. He pointed to the desire of the Chinese for ��authentic�� Western education and doubted whether ��degrees issued by a mission university not incorporated under any local law would ever command Chinese con.dence�� (Mellor 1992: 105). However, unlike the kind of English-language education that the British colonial government in India had instituted there, the Western learning that a new university in Hong Kong should offer would neither Christianize its students nor privilege literary studies. He thus retreated from his previous ambition to build ��Oxford and Cambridge in the Far East�� (Perham 1968: 339) and turned to ��Birmingham and Leeds�� for his models (Mellor 1992: 172). The university would be secular and practical, would offer its Chinese students degrees only in .elds such as engineering and medicine, and would remain under tight British control.
Lugard��s plan was seen as a threat to the missionaries. Defending his idea, Lugard debated acrimoniously with William Cecil, who had his own program for a Christian university in China. Cecil warned Lugard that his secular university would promote ��education without religion, morality without faith�� and would risk ��producing men without principle, without truth, and without honesty�Kmaking the name of the West odious to all right-minded men�� (Mellor 1992: ch. 11). In rebuttal, Lugard attacked Cecil��s project for its incoherence, since a university in China could not be subject to effective British quality controls; neither would the Chinese welcome such a university��s religious nature. The debate was furious and went far beyond a comparison of the viability of the two projects.1 Cecil wanted a university to provide the full range of Western knowledge, including those ��departments of western thought less concerned with things material��; Lugard pointedly referred to the Indian example, arguing that the dissatisfaction exhibited by a large section of educated Indians was precisely due to the teaching of such subjects. ��Moral crisis�� was their common concern, yet their responses ran in exactly opposite directions.
Despite undeniable personal enmity and considerations of realpolitik, the exchanges tell us much about an important moment in Hong Kong educational development. To a certain extent, both Cecil��s project and Lugard��s project could be considered collaborative, as the two re.ected efforts to institutionalize Western civilization within China through an institute for higher education. Lugard��s project differed from Cecil��s insofar as the former stressed a colonial model; the stress was not only on full British control, possible only in a colony, but also on the authenticity of Western learning, which Lugard believed was much desired by the Chinese. His project corresponded to the then-dominant Chinese intellectual perception that the term ��Western civilization�� was a catch-all phrase meaning nothing but material wealth and power. It was on these grounds, rather than through the more con.ict-ridden approach of Christianization, that collaboration between the British and the Chinese, regardless of their inclinations, could take root. There were certainly some Chinese parents and of.cials worried about the loss of Chinese identity that Western learning might bring about. But according to Lugard, an education system that educates Chinese students in Hong Kong would do less harm to further ��denationalize�� the students than would an education system that educates Chinese students in Christian schools on Chinese soil (Perham 1968: 349).
Character Formation: Searching for New Colonial Governmentality
Indirect rule functioned in two key ways: it re-af.rmed the superiority of a colonial model and it emphasized the need for a colony to avoid denationalizing the natives�� identity (Lugard 1906, 1923; Fitzpatrick 1924; Perham 1934; Crocker 1936; Mamdani 1996; Hechter 2000).2 Therefore, it should not be surprising that Lugard appeared, on certain occasions, to play the role of an unyielding imperialist and, on other occasions, to play the role of a cultural relativist. He was indeed candid in admitting that ��the impact of a purely secular western education upon eastern peoples has�Ka tendency to deprive students of their national religion and to substitute nothing for it�� (Mellor 1992: 172). However, he refused to attribute the ��moral crisis�� to the removal of religious teaching from Western education; still less did he consider it possible that the religious educationalists could supply a code of morality to the Chinese by substituting a united Christianity, or any particular Christian creed, for ancient indigenous codes. For him, the ��moral crisis�� was simply a problem of ��character formation,�� a point that he put bluntly in a paper to a congress of all the universities of the British Empire: ��the problem before us in opening a University in Hong Kong is how to train character�� (Mellor 1992: 173). People should rede.ne the problem of the ��moral crisis,�� Lugard argued, as a governmental problem that the educational institutions could solve through ��training�� rather than doctrines, through practice rather than content, and through institutions rather than a set of empty codes. He quoted and endorsed Sir G. Clarke��s point of view:
The educated European may throw off the sanctions of religion but he
has to live in a social environment which has been built upon the basis
of Christian Morality and he cannot divest himself of the in.uences
which have formed his conscience�K The Oriental, educated or
partially educated in western thought, has no such environment and
the restraints of ancient philosophies have disappeared and there is
nothing to take their place.
(Mellor 1992: 175)
As yet more proof that natives lacked the capability of self-government, Lugard��s remark was indeed an interesting variant of the colonialist discourses. Lugard announced not the supremacy of Christianity but the natives�� vulnerability to inauthentic forms of Western superiority. In his eyes, the Europeans could keep their morality even after throwing off its daily sanctions; but the native races would only get off track in the presence of half-baked Western teaching because they were detached from ��preconceived ideas adapted to nations which are the outcome of 1,900 years of Christianity�� (Mellor 1992: 173). Lugard articulated here a typical Fanonian anxiety over the ambivalence of mimicry captured in his nicely quotable phrase, ��the white, but not quite�� (Fanon 1968). Not a few early-twentieth-century colonialists feared that incomplete colonialism would unleash awful destruction in native communities. Therefore, more colonialism would save such natives from themselves: natives whose levels of Western learning and of cultural growth remained insuf.cient to the civilizing agenda. And what was this agenda? Purportedly, it was for colonialism to create natives who could establish their own ��responsible governments.�� The colonizers�� emphasis on more colonialism explains why Lugard insisted that a university for China should be built in Hong Kong, which was a full colony, and not in China, which was just a semi-colony. Only in a full colonial situation could the colonial state properly micro-manage educational details like the operation of hostels, the selection of text-books, and the hiring of teachers.
Liberal Governance of Colonized Men
Ian Hunter has demonstrated for us how, in the 1830s, people like David Stow and James Kay-Shuttleworth redeployed technology for the ��governance of the soul�� in order to institute the ��governance of men��: these and other individuals invented such mechanisms as classrooms and playgrounds that, above all else, enforced discipline and instituted moral training (Hunter 1994). Lugard, as well as most educators in the British colonies, understood that the reliance of schools on teachers as modern-day pastors was precarious, indeed. In the colonial context, classroom teaching��s enormous failure to produce morally disciplined natives prompted the students to regard textbooks with suspicion, to look outside the classroom for improvements, and to turn to character-formation mechanisms of a more easily measurable type (hostels, playgrounds, gymnasia, roll-calls, meals, and hygiene) (Lugard 1923: 433). According to many colonizers, the classroom was a dangerous place that served not to inculcate Western learning in natives but ��to undermine eastern beliefs, and thereby to disorganize much of the social life,�� ��to deprive students of their national religion and to substitute nothing for it,�� and ��to .re the immature imaginations of imaginative races,�� as Lugard put it. He noted, also, that
[the] study of the philosophic theories of the West, of political
economy, and of Western History with its outstanding examples of the
emancipation of the people from oppressive control, are all�Kto impel
them to conclusions destructive alike of the family in.uence on which
the social system is so largely based, and of all constituted authority.
(Perham 1968: 172, my emphasis)
In other words, the natives should condemn Western learning because it posed dangers disproportionate to its bene.ts. So, what was the solution to this dilemma? As a harbinger of contemporary ��citizen education,�� Lugard, quoting the 1904 Governor-General in Council��s Resolution on educational policy, stressed that the ��remedy for the evil tendencies�Kis to be sought, not so much in any formal methods of teaching conducted by means of moral text-books�� as by placing pupils ��continuously�� in an environment of ��carefully selected and trained teachers, a high standard of discipline, the institution of well-managed hostels��: this type of environment would nurture students�� respect for and practice of rule abidance, loyalty, and co-operation (Perham 1968: 172). Anyone who knows how English public schools run will not respond with surprise to the fact that Lugard warned colonial boarding-schools to keep their distance from the ��squalid surroundings�� that were native towns.
As a proto-multiculturalist, Lugard had an idea that hostels and boarding-schools could support an educational regime in which different religious organizations would evangelize the colonized souls. Perhaps, in this regime, the role of religion was no more and no less than a cultural technology to train and discipline character; whatever the case, Lugard saw no compelling reason not to adopt the utmost degree of religious tolerance. He even came to suggest that the Chinese, if they so wished, ��could establish a hostel in university to inculcate among Chinese the tenets of Chinese religious beliefs, equally with Christian creeds�� (Mellor 1992: 173). It was beside the point that the hostel, a speci.cally British invention, was totally alien to any Chinese religious institution. For Lugard, a hostel tolerant of many religions was a new formula by which secular Western education would not deprive students of ��the powerful aid which religious sanctions give�� (Mellor 1992: 173); compulsory religious instruction would then be largely redundant. Lugard carefully balanced secular education and moral training by putting hostels at the center of his new pedagogical framework. For these efforts, Lugard earned himself a glorious chapter in his biography, which depicts him not only as a soldier-general but also as an educationist. Wherever he went thereafter, he could claim to have made the University of Hong Kong a model for other colonies, a marriage between materialism and morality.
Lugard��s experiment was controversial among the British. However, some of his Chinese sympathizers were more eager than the British to see, in China, a kind of Western learning that would not further threaten the dying dynastic rule. Other Chinese supported the project for a different reason: they projected a future Republican state onto the HKU model of the material-moral hybrid. But despite their different political orientations, the Chinese gave much-needed impetus to Lugard��s project, which was .nally adopted. The university opened in 1911 �X the realization of a ��truly imperial mission�� that coincided with the inauguration of the Chinese Republican era.3 The university was a collaborative project supported by both traditional Hong Kong communities and new Hong Kong communities, by both an Eastern regime and a Western regime. Lugard thus made his mark on a moment in colonial history, a moment when indirect rule was not just a political idea but also very much a cultural and educational one. Just as enthusiastically, he demonstrated in his colonial governorship that education �X or, better, the business of ��character formation�� �X was henceforth nothing more than a governmental matter that spanned different cultures and religions. Yet, nothing was more important to him than the vindication that his was a moral project. Much to Lugard��s delight, at its decennial meeting in 1921 in China, the Commission on Christian Education .nally of.cially acknowledged Lugard��s university to be a moral institution (Mellor 1992: 170).
Indirect Rule as Education Philosophy
Lugard was famous as a person who effectively articulated the principle of indirect rule throughout the colonial world. His earlier career as a soldier-explorer and his rich experiences in suppressing native unrest in various places across Africa and Asia overshadowed his later style of governance in Nigeria and Hong Kong. He was acutely aware that successful colonial rule could not be divorced from education, which provided for the foundation of indirect rule. Perham, Lugard��s biographer, writes,
He saw the life of the people he was administering as whole and his own policy as a total response to their needs. Far from regarding education as no more than one part, however important, of these needs he saw that it must govern their whole future development.
(Perham 1968: 489)
Of course, what Lugard considered important was both the ��whole future development�� of each native person and the development of the native people conceived ��as a whole��. In this regard, he later spelled out quite clearly his educational philosophy while speaking about education in Nigeria:
The primary function of education would in my judgment be to .t the ordinary individual to .ll a useful part in his environment with happiness to himself, and to ensure that the exceptional individual shall use his abilities for the advancement of the community and not to its detriment or to the subversion of constituted authority�K It should be the aim of our new system to train up a generation who shall exchange this bitter hostility for an attitude of friendly co-operation, and who shall be able to recognize and achieve ideals of their own, without a slavish
imitation of the European and be proud of a nationality with its own clear aims and future.
(Lugard 1914: 4, my emphasis)
Neither Macaulay nor Lugard were scholars, yet the two men laid the foundation for the history of British colonial education. Lugard was a very late post-Victorian colonialist, and what set him apart from the earlier Anglicists such as Macaulay was his recognition that, for colonial rule to be successful, the colonizer must simultaneously avoid a ��class of persons, [native] in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect�� and create a generation of natives who possess a ��nationality�� of which they can be proud. Yet, it would be a glaring error to interpret Lugard��s remarks as an unconditional endorsement of the native��s autonomy. So that such a generation might emerge, circumstances must satisfy at least one necessary condition: under the tutelage of the colonizer, either the colonizer or the colonized or the two, together, must preserve a certain ��constituted authority��. The colonizer��s key duty was to clearly determine how and when natives would achieve their national end.��
Although such a meticulously elaborated new colonial philosophy re.ected colonizers�� attempts to justify the preservation of colonial authority, we may recognize the genuine conceptual breakthrough by which colonialism and nationalism emerged more as each other��s pre-conditions than as two opposing discourses. This philosophy of colonialism pre.gured a certain form of nationalism, which theorists and practitioners, alike, had excluded from previous imperial visions. By emphasizing the imperialist project��s moral authorities rather than the project��s superior morality, Lugard opened the way for managerialism to displace imperialism but left unchanged the basic structure of the colonial-power hierarchy. This discursive shift helped colonizers like Governor Cecil Clementi (see Chapter 5) manipulate their relations with traditional Chinese authorities. The colonizers believed that, under managerial guidance, colonialism and nationalism were compatible, and this belief laid the foundation for the collaborators�� appropriation of colonial rule (see Chapter 6). We may examine how these possibilities germinated from Lugard��s thoughtful colonial-pedagogical model.
By abandoning the text-centered pedagogical approach, Lugard transcended the spurious debates between Anglicists and Orientalists. And by focusing on the effects of different character-formation methods, Lugard conceptualized the means by which the British Empire could constitute and preserve a colonized people��s identity �X their subjecthood and their nationality �X without banishing colonialism from the equation. Colonialism could negotiate for itself a dominant space in a colonized people��s political identity. In his celebrated book The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1923), Lugard explains how modern education, when a part of colonial governance, can help foster and preserve a native system of power and authority:
The education afforded to that section of the population who intend to
lead the lives which their forefathers led should enlarge their outlook,
increase their ef.ciency and standard of comfort, and bring them into
closer sympathy with the Government, instead of making them unsuited
to and ill-contented with their mode of life�K As regards that smaller
section who desires to take part in public or municipal duties, or to
enter the service of Government or of commercial .rms, education
��should make them ef.cient, loyal, reliable and contented �X a race of self-
respecting native gentlemen.��
(Lugard 1923: 425�V6, my emphasis)
In this conception of ��education for the advancement of community as a whole,�� Lugard��s prescription of the colonial proto-national model of popular education extended even to the ignorant masses; yet the colonial premises of government also compelled him to carefully differentiate different models of colonial education that could be provided. Lugard argued that the British Empire had previously erred in indiscriminately introducing its colonies to an overly egalitarian type of English-language education and that this type of education had prompted the natives to embrace the illusive conception of universal citizenship in a Christian Kingdom. The colonizers�� enlightenment of the colonized had gone too fast and too far, and had .red up the ��immature imaginations of the imaginative races.�� Lugard sought to avoid the dangerous situation in which a class of educated natives would compete with the once-accepted rulers and would, thereby, endanger the cohesiveness of the native community. In Dual Mandate, he highlighted these dangers and the urgency with which colonizers should offset the dangers by providing education to the sons of native rulers (1923: ch. 21). In other words, so long as native rulers and their offspring possess the same royal character as the colonizers, Western education will threaten nobody and Western knowledge could be easily shared among the colonized natives. The essence of Lugard��s brilliant doctrine of indirect rule centers on the doctrine��s strategy by which colonizers might tap native rule and integrate it into colonial rule. Perhaps this strategy explains why Chinese Hong Kongers responded with more enthusiasm and donations than did British Hong Kongers to an educational project whose executors described as an ��imperial mission�� (Lugard 1928).
Control through Support of Vernacular Education
Lugard��s policy of linking education to colonial rule did not stop with the establishment of a university. Drawing from other colonies�� bad experiences, wherein the British colonizers had promoted English education at the expense of vernacular education, Lugard unusually extended his support to vernacular education and, thereby, widened the scope of colonial state control. As I discussed previously, the late-Qing era was one of political chaos in which conservative impulses and reformist impulses resulted in a highly unstable composite. The Qing government hastily drafted several ill-conceived measures that, rather than reform education, pointed to the Qing state��s imminent collapse. Mushrooming new schools could neither satisfy the Chinese people��s demand for new education nor placate the growing ranks of reformers and revolutionaries. Ironically, many of these schools became places where alienated teachers and students propagated revolutionary ideas (Sang 1991, 1995). Between 1901 and 1909, Lugard promulgated .ve successive policies that detailed the government��s control over school education (Wang, F. 1979). Because overseas Chinese communities increasingly intervened in Chinese affairs, and because Chinese nationalism was spreading fast in these communities, the Qing state extended its regulation of education to them. Many Hong Kong Chinese schools also became sites for revolutionary activities (Ng 1984: ch. 6). Lugard was more acutely aware of the importance of vernacular education to the stability of colonial rule than any of his predecessors had been. Like his Chinese counterpart, he tried to bring all private vernacular schools under state regulation and supervision. He delegated the Supervisor of Government Schools, R. C. Barlow, to conduct a thorough survey of all the 300 private (mainly Chinese) schools in Hong Kong. In 1911, the colonial government formed the semi-of.cial Board of Vernacular Education, whose chief duty was to promote ef.cient vernacular-Chinese education. These policy moves led to the 1913 Education Ordinance, another product of Barlow��s Report (Fang 1975; Ng 1984: ch. 6; Educational Report 1912). This ordinance conferred great power to the colonial government so that it could control the organization and the curriculum of private schools. According to the ordinance��s loose de.nition, a school was ��a place where ten or more persons are being or are habitually taught, whether in one or more classes�� (Ng 1984: 110). In draconian fashion, the Director of Education could refuse to grant registration to any school �X and he could do so at his discretion; any unregistered school was unlawful and liable to closure. The ordinance��s endowment of almost unlimited power to the colonial state was unprecedented and unparalleled in Britain, where the 1902 Education Act signaled the beginning of national control over education and allowed for a high degree of decentralization. In justifying the Hong Kong ordinance, Director of Education E. A. Irving declared,
The public is entitled to protection as far as a government department can give it. ��If mines and factories cannot be left without supervision, neither can schools�� (Bishop Weldon)�K There is the further argument that state expenditure on education cannot be economically controlled unless the extent of that private educational effort is known, which it professes to supplement. Without compulsory registration this knowledge is unattainable. In Hong Kong, there is the further reason that schools are liable to become cover for unlawful propaganda.
(Irving 1915: 12)
Although one reader of the local Hong Kong Daily Press described it as ��the most autocratic and inquisitorial legislation�� (Hong Kong Daily Press June 13, 1913), the government passed the ordinance without opposition. And although the ordinance was a clear assault on Hong Kong-based political activities attributable to Republican revolutionaries and their leader Sun Yat-sen, Ho Kai, a known supporter of Sun, unreservedly backed the ordinance in the Legislative Council. Ho said,
I heartily sympathize with the desire on the part of the government to bring all schools in the Colony under control �X at least, under their supervision, so that they may know what is being taught to the younger generation of this Colony in any or all of these schools.
(Hong Kong Hansard 1913; quoted in Ng 1984: 110)
Ho Kai was the son of Rev. Ho Fuk Tong, James Legge��s .rst trained Chinese missionary. He was also the strongest advocate of Lugard��s plan for the University of Hong Kong. His remarks above may be the best annotation that illustrates the type of person to which the term ��native gentleman�� referred.
A Beacon on the Threshold of the Desert
At the ceremony for the laying of the University of Hong Kong��s foundation stone, Lugard made the following statements in his speech:
Mr. Chamberlain�Kcalled himself a ��Missionary of Empire�� and bade us ��think Imperially.�� Let us then exercise an Imperial imagination in regard to this University and not con.ne our view to the horizon of the immediate present. We are endeavouring not only to afford the highest educational facilities to the citizens of Hong Kong, but also to hold out the hand of friendship and to assist China to educate her sons without exposing them to long exile and the risk of denationalisation�K The justi.cation of the British Empire lies in its results. So long as it stands for impartial justice, so long as its aim is to raise and to educate the peoples who are subjects of our King, or who are contiguous to his boundaries�Khistory will record of it that it was founded on something higher than territorial conquest or national aggrandizement�K It has happened to me in past years that I have been the humble instrument by which the con.nes of the Empire were enlarged in some directions. Those days are past. It is no longer an age of acquisition in which we live, but an age of development�K And if this Colony becomes�Kthe centre of educational progress in South China, you will have achieved a nobler extension of the principles which underlie the British Empire than any which accompany territorial expansion.
(Lugard and Mody 1974: Appendix III)
Despite the presence of several delegates from the viceroys of Nanking and Canton, and also representatives from the Chinese army, Lugard went on to say,
Its staff must be�Kmen like those who have carried through a similar undertaking at Khartoum founded in memory of Gordon, where on the very scene of the cruelties of slave-traders and the oppression and misery of ages, a centre of British education stands like a beacon on the threshold of the desert and trains its students to carry light and healing into the darkest places of Africa�K [The] graduates of this University�Kwill be ��Missionaries of Empire.�� Not�Kwith distorted conceptions and theories of government antagonistic to the established order of their country, but imbued with that genuine patriotism whose only aim is to make their country better and greater�K [This] scheme�Kshall stand as a proof that the citizens of a British Colony are not solely engrossed in the pursuit of wealth�KThat Hong Kong shall lead the way among Crown Colonies is proving anew that the British Empire is not merely a vast trading corporation, but has still the sacred .re of Imperial responsibility and is content to cast its bread upon the waters, without looking to immediate gain, assured that it will return after many days.
(Lugard and Mody 1974: Appendix III, my emphasis)
In the above sections, I demonstrate Lugard��s pervasive display of pride in
British imperialism; yet, what is remarkable in the statements is the almost
seamless substitution of ��genuine patriotism�� for ��Imperial responsibility��, the
eloquent metonymic sliding between ��empire�� and ��missionary.�� This scenario, in which the heroic .gure of British imperialism successfully
establishes the University of Hong Kong, exempli.es the way in which the
turn of the century was a watershed in the history of imperialism. Imperialism
was changing from the late-Victorian ideas of ��mission,�� ��obligation,�� and ��trusteeship�� toward ideas buttressed by the idea of a ��voluntary association of free states in the form of a Commonwealth�� (Thornton 1959; Eldridge 1973; Smith 1998). Amidst the pervasive ��moral crisis�� discourse, Lugard��s central innovation was twofold: to create a coherent governmental philosophy that reconciled imperial pride, English supremacy, and utilitarianism; and to make way for the emergence of a post-imperial, yet still colonial, governance. The discourse of the crisis of English education marked the moment when character formation and moral regulation became a domain of government. Paradoxically, because of such a shift, British imperialists and the Chinese nationalists found new common ground. This achievement is particularly remarkable insofar as the Chinese nationalists had at .rst found themselves beset by cultural imperialism. With the establishment of the new common ground, the distinction between indirect rule the British colonizers had devised initially in the service of colonial control and Chinese nationalism (which had originally emerged in resistance to colonialism) became increasingly blurred. When the Republic of China was born, the support and enthusiasm of the revolutionaries for the British imperial project amounted to vivid evidence that the formation of collaborative colonialism was taking a clearer, more modern shape.
With regard to the colonial authorities�� co-option of native leaders and to the principle of liberal government, Lugard took a crucial step beyond James Legge, for whom the success of the imperial mission depended on both the triumph of British civilization and that civilization��s ability to complete the moral project of Christianizing China. The decisive break of Lugard from Legge marked the end of the religious-moral project of imperialism and inaugurated the rise of secularist moral governance, but did not emerge out of the putatively invincible power of imperialism. Rather, the transformation of colonialism into a civilizing pedagogy, in which education became an instrument of indirect colonial rule, emerged, under Lugard, from a rampant moral crisis within the British Empire. It was at this juncture that all conditions were ready for the further localization, indigenization, or even nationalization, of colonial power �X its transplantation into the ideology of liberal nationalism and the project of nation-state building.
II Hong Kong In-Betweens
4
Double Identity of the Colonial Intelligentsia: Ho Kai
P
ostcolonial studies have dispensed much ink on the ambivalent state that colonial rule perhaps left to the colonized people in the ��contact zone.�� Frantz Fanon��s famous ��black skin�Vwhite masks�� metaphor re.ects his effort to capture the miserable split identity of the colonized: he asserts that colonial authority is so overwhelmingly dominant that it works whenever colonized subjects try to mimic the colonizer��s culture. Homi Bhabha, in contrast, argues that mimicry undermines colonial authority as much as it does other in-between states of hybridization or creolization in which resistance is not just possible but always embedded, as well. In short, Fanon considers the ambiguous identity of the colonized to be one of wretched misery, whereas Bhabha considers the ambiguity to be a facilitator for the emergent and the new. However, many critics have already pointed out that these claims about colonialism��s universal effects should be quali.ed by closely examining the speci.c contexts of the events in question. For example, Ella Shohat (1993) suggests that we need to discriminate between diverse modalities of hybridity, by which she means that we should give contextualized treatments to different types of hybrid state. Arif Dirlik pushes that criticism further by disputing against the overemphasis of colonial discourse analysis upon the determining power of discourse without taking the wider institutional structure into consideration; thus, he warns that the ��condition of in-betweenness and hybridity cannot be understood without reference to the ideological and institutional structures in which they are housed�� (Dirlik 1994: 342).
In many ways, late-nineteenth-century Hong Kong manifested the cultural characteristics of a colonized contact zone. Compared with the Hong Kong of earlier eras, the Hong Kong of this era had a generation of English-educated Chinese students, thanks to the English education system put in place by Legge, Hennessy, Eitel, and their followers. The Western Affairs Movement also cultivated similar breeds in other coastal cities in China; in many ways, the Chinese who lived in these contact zones were caught in a colonial or semi-colonial situation where their identity was constantly put in doubt. They commanded English or other European languages; they were equipped with all sorts of Western learning that granted them expert status in certain professional .elds; they had different cultural outlooks, aspirations, tastes, habits, and moral values that might mark them out from the traditional Chinese literati. They were the equivalents of the Indian Babus or, in the pejorative Chinese idiom, ��fake foreigners�� (jia yang gui zi). However, although useful in some aspects, neither Fanon��s nor Bhabha��s notions about colonial ambivalence can offer us enough tools with which we might understand either the colonial (or, to be exact, the semi-colonial) situation of these coastal cities in general or the political or cultural mindsets of the colonized natives in particular. Among the colonized, there was, no doubt, widespread mimicry of the West; hybrid or creolized cultural forms were also burgeoning in every quarter, yet it is still far from adequate to invoke the associated or presumed colonizer-colonized couplet as a way to start assessing the effects of the speci.c power formation. In this chapter, I will roughly follow Dirlik��s lead by delineating the ideological and the institutional conditions of the speci.c mode of cultural and political in-betweenness that were contingent on the collaborative colonial formation that was, itself, grounded in but not con.ned to Hong Kong. I will demonstrate also, how this power formation extended across Hong Kong and China and played its part in fashioning the new order of post-imperial China both in real terms and in imaginary terms. Outlining competing post-imperial political visions and programs, I will take Ho Kai, a prominent Hong Kong .gure who also occupies a pronounced position in modern Chinese intellectual history, as an example that illustrates a line of mercantilist-reformist politics at the eve of Republican China. In unveiling the political and the cultural dynamics involved, the case of Ho Kai will enable us to .rmly grasp not only the interests and world-views of the emergent Chinese comprador-merchant class but also the formation of a collaborative-colonial intelligentsia��s subjectivity at this unique historical juncture.
China studies have paid attention to the new coastal urban public that emerged in the treaty ports and have debated what effects this public had on the rise of modern China. Scholars have different assessments of this new social group and identify them by different names: for example, Cohen (1976) calls them ��coastal reformers,�� Esherick calls them the ��urban reformist elite�� (1976), and, with particular reference to Hong Kong, Linda Pomerantz-Zhang calls them the ��colonial intelligentsia�� (1992). Although their occupations varied, ranging from merchants and compradors to lawyers, translators, and interpreters for the government or for Western .rms, they invariably had close relationships with the local mercantile bourgeoisie in one way or another. Chinese merchants were the .rst social group in China to experience the .erce competition of foreign powers in trade. However, the new urban public��s interests had never found full articulation in political terms until the Qing empire felt compelled to seek reforms after the crisis of the Taiping Rebellion (1851�V1864). The Western Affairs Movement gave ample opportunities for the merchants and the reform-minded intellectuals to grow as prototypical bourgeoisie. Scholar-generals like Li Hongzhang, Zeng Guofan, and Zuo Zongtang soon formed their own mu fu (think tanks) and recruited reform-minded intellectuals and experts to help in the launching of various yang wu (Western Affairs) programs: for example, the development of basic industries, communication, transportation, and a modernized military. The reform movements also had their cultural and educational projects such as large-scale publication plans involving the introduction to China and the translation into Chinese of diverse .elds of Western learning. The Chinese government opened special schools in the larger cities and established arsenals, factories, and shipyards there according to Western models. And the Chinese government or individual or community initiatives enabled batches of students to study abroad. The reforms instilled in many Chinese the hope that China, in its embrace of Western practical methods, would experience a national regeneration. Redressing China��s previous isolationism, the Qing government also adopted Western diplomatic practices and was more receptive than before to the Western-dominated protocols of international law.
Commercial War and Mercantilist Reformers
Amid the new tide of reforms, Hong Kong��s colonial intelligentsia were at the forefront of making their reformist views public, not just locally but indeed to China at large. For example, Wang Tao and Wu Tingfang were among the pioneers of modern Chinese journalism; Zheng Guangying and Ho Kai were famous critics who aired their analyses of and proposals for reform (King and Clarke 1965; Cohen 1974). As the growing economic clout of the Chinese merchants mismatched their existing political status (both in colonial Hong Kong and in China), they made a particular effort to push for institutional reforms that would enhance the power of merchants. Whereas conservative of.cials such as Zhang Zidong still envisaged a super.cial reform program, limited to purely technical, engineering, or military arenas, Hong Kong��s colonial intelligentsia issued bold calls for deeper institutional reforms, especially in political and cultural arenas. These calls inevitably necessitated a vision that went beyond a simple regenerating of traditional Qing dynastic rule.
Hong Kong��s colonial environment encouraged the colonial intelligentsia there to join in China��s reform movements for several reasons. In this regard, scholars always point to the obvious: namely, that thanks to British rule in Hong Kong, the colonial intelligentsia had a deeper understanding of the merits of Western institutions of which they could take advantage. Yet, it is also true that the colonial structure��s deep-seated racial discrimination strictly limited the colonial intelligentsia��s political development in Hong Kong. Hong Kong Europeans�� hostility to the appointment of Wu Tingfang as the .rst Chinese legislative councilor testi.es to the obstacles that educated Chinese had to overcome if they were to achieve parity within a colonial framework (Pomerantz-Zhang 1992). Yet, his career swiftly ascended after he joined Li Hongzhang in foreign affairs. This accomplishment exempli.es how the elite standing that he attained
�X sometimes with bitter experience �X in a colony was easily comparable to the elite standing of a Chinese of.cial. For this matter, the colonial intelligentsia, even after they joined the Qing of.ces, seldom harbored a deep grudge against the whole colonial system; indeed, they usually embraced the imperialist idea that Great Britain was the standard of civilization. Although they might have grievances about individual issues such as racial discrimination, they never openly questioned Britain��s right to rule Hong Kong.
Upholding the superiority of Western institutions and their principles, the colonial intelligentsia strongly believed that China could not borrow Western technologies without reforming related institutions according to a new set of principles and concepts that (1) were equally Western and that (2) the traditional Chinese literati could not thoroughly comprehend. What the colonial intelligentsia envisaged, therefore, was a series of reforms modeled on Great Britain��s reforms, if not Hong Kong��s. However, on economic affairs, the intelligentsia usually held mercantilist-nationalist views wherein China could only bene.t from more Sino-Western trade, which would generate pro.ts that could, in turn, support other China-strengthening projects. The intelligentsia strongly felt that, to facilitate the promotion of commerce, a strong state should support and protect Chinese merchants in this trade. For this reason, the intelligentsia��s reform proposals were explicitly or implicitly founded on the vision of a .ercely fought ��commercial war�� (shangzhan). The commercial-war vision encouraged the intelligentsia to form their own political vision. They advocated widespread legal and judicial reforms for the new economic order because they considered themselves among China��s most-needed groups in the .ght against the old system��s frequent abuses of power. They held the view that, only by providing these favorable conditions to Chinese merchants could the Chinese people, as a whole, win this commercial war. Moreover, the intelligentsia argued that, to support these legal and judicial reforms, and to accommodate persons with Western-styled education, the Chinese government should revamp the traditional educational system and the traditional administration-recruitment policy, which were based on the Civil Service Examination.
Among the colonial intelligentsia, Wu Tingfang stood out as one who possessed the best knowledge of British legal and administrative systems and expertise in international law and diplomacy (Pomerantz-Zhang 1992; Ng 1983). He was a barrister educated in Hong Kong and was the .rst Chinese (Hong Kong) to receive appointment to the position of legislative councilor. As such, he drafted the .rst company law for China (Shin 1976; Chung 1998); Zheng Guanying, a comprador from Hong Kong, gained fame for popularizing the slogan ��commercial warfare�� among reformers (Wang 1966; Hao 1969; Wu 1975; Sigel 1976); Sigel considers Zheng to be ��probably the most in.uential reform writer of the early 1890s because he re.ected the attitudes of the developing mercantile class in the treaty ports and it was this community that played the most prominent role in the adoption and implementation of a more nationalistic conception of foreign affairs�� (Sigel 1976: 273). Tang Tingshu and his brother Tang Shaoyi, educated at missionary schools and with early experience serving the Hong Kong government as clerks and translators, established (under Li) the .rst Chinese steamship, mining, and spinning companies, doing so with capital collected through personal networks in Shanghai, Canton, and Hong Kong.
The two brothers realized that the healthy expansion of commercial activities depended on a powerful state��s strong backing thereof. They invariably became Chinese nationalists, clamoring for the abolition of extraterritoriality, the reclamation of tariff autonomy, and the exclusion of foreign vessels from domestic shipping. On top of that, they cared far more about institutional building and exercise of statecraft �X that is, an ef.cient state cognizant of the need to expand and protect its sovereign rights �X than about establishing a coherent cultural conception, either linguistic or religious, of the Chinese nation. The sought-for mercantilist assertion of sovereignty by the Qing government had long-term rami.cations for China��s relationships with its former tributaries and autonomous kingdoms. For example, Tang Tingshu, who founded the Kaiping Mines and Tang Shan Railway, vigorously urged the Qing government to gain dominance over Korean affairs in the 1880s and the 1890s. His brother Tang Shaoyi was active in advising Yuan Shikai, who headed another reform faction within the Qing government, to establish a Chinese imperialist presence in Korea and to transform Korea into a Chinese protectorate (Sigel 1976).
Commercial war, as a political imaginary, was a desire of both liberalism advocates and strong-state advocates. The success of European imperialist conquests in Hong Kong or in other treaty ports appeared to many Chinese as a manifestation of a new world order characterized by commercial competition among states. Therefore, the reformists�� utmost concern was not the pursuit of free-market growth but the development of a strong state. In this regard, the Western Affairs Movement comprised pursuits of power in different areas: marketplace, industry, technology, and politics �X all at once and with government power as the prime mover. The deep involvement of governmental power in these pursuits de.ed the narrow technicist vision of the Western Affairs Movement, initially fostered by the old conservatives precisely because the whole movement was shot through with a strong political emphasis. In other words, the reforms were never simply about transfers of foreign technologies or the transplantation of ideas and knowledge; as a matter of fact, the eventual economic reforms authorized regional coastal leaders to act as patrons who would protect and promote modern industrial and armory enterprises (Teng and Fairbank 1954; Wright 1966; Fairbank 1978: ch. 10). To put these new economic ventures under state control, the government instated a special arrangement, called ��of.cial-supervision, merchant-management�� (guandu shangban), which endowed some selected regional bureaucrats with the enormous power to breed their own networks of political patronage. Exercising their political skills, regional reformist of.cials negotiated with the central government for the charters, monopolies, and tax concessions needed by their new industrial enterprises. The merchants were responsible for management and used their personal networks to raise capital, but in some situations, the of.cials might also act as entrepreneurs to raise part of the required investment fund (Wu 1975; Chan, W.K.K. 1977; Godley 1981). Under such arrangements, which a Chinese Marxist perspective may describe as components of burgeoning Chinese ��bureaucratic capitalism,�� economic investment and political investment became barely differentiable.
As businesses were embedded in politics, the emerging Chinese merchants and Chinese industrialists were equally intent on making ��political investment�� as economic investment (Chung 1998: 15). They hoped to have more room for development and, consequently, had to ��invest�� in certain options: for instance, they had to pursue relaxed bureaucratic regulations or to draw bureaucrats into the sharing of related interests and pro.ts. These political investments in colony-based reforms, knowledge, training, and experience were transformed into vehicles that, together, constituted a mercantilist program by which China could strengthen its statecraft. As one important version of contemporary Chinese nationalism, the mercantilist imaginary was a crucial one, since it played a signi.cant role in consolidating for the dying Qing Empire a program by which the empire might transform itself into a uni.ed modern state. That mercantilist-nationalist vision very much derived from the imaginary space that emerged when China experienced defeats at the hands of European imperialists and when China experienced European-led colonialism in Hong Kong and in other Chinese treaty ports.
Constitutional Monarchists and Revolutionaries
The effects of the mercantilist vision still easily make themselves felt today; however, their programs and demands were later eclipsed by or absorbed into the subsequent Chinese nationalist programs. The advocates of the mercantilist vision were nationalistic in economic affairs and were pioneering in their calls for political reforms, but they had dif.culties in delineating a distinct cultural vision for modern China. These dif.culties posed a stumbling block for the comprador-merchants, who sought to lead the nationalist movement. Reform-minded literati, such as Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei, pursued a reformist course for constitutional monarchy and did so with a cultural and religious agenda that was much clearer than that of the mercantilists; consequently, these literati soon became beacons for a reformed Qing state (Cameron 1931; Fairbank and Liu 1980: ch. 7). Although they were Cantonese, the ties that Kang and Liang had to Hong Kong or to commercial interests in treaty ports were much weaker than those of the mercantilists; however, their eminent accomplishments in traditional Chinese scholarship and their loyalty to the Qing court won them privileged access to young Emperor Guangsu. Emulating the Meiji model in Japan, they attempted to transform the emperor into a national symbol of unity, and an integral part of the project to build a modern Chinese nation-state. To a much greater extent than the of.cials leading the Western Affairs Movement, these constitutional monarchists were concerned about the threat that foreign powers posed to China; also, they stressed the importance of establishing a distinct Chinese cultural identity and thus subscribed to a strong cultural nationalism, which was lacking in the mercantilist-nationalist imaginary. For the above reasons, Kang and Liang, known in Chinese as the weixin clique (constitutional monarchists), attacked the comprador-merchants as well as the colonial intelligentsia, criticizing the limitations of the Western Affairs Movement. To appropriate some of the conservatives�� cultural concerns, and to integrate these conservatives into a uni.ed nationalist enlightenment program, Kang, in particular, tried to re-interpret Confucianism and transform it into China��s national religion, much as the Meiji Restoration had done with Shinto in Japan. In this way, China��s constitutional monarchists targeted both the conservative Qing bureaucracy and the foreign powers and, therefore, came into con.ict with the colonial intelligentsia like Ho Kai, as well as with the revolutionaries (more below).
While the Western powers were intensifying their demands that the Qing government concede greater shares of the Chinese market to Western interests, Chinese capital was becoming internationalized, a process that brought to China much overseas-Chinese capital. Much of this capital came from migrants who were returning from Australia and the United States and who had gone overseas through the coolie trade of earlier decades.1 The reform implemented by Yuan Shikai brought with it a new commercial law code that spurred the coalition of overseas Chinese capital by permitting the formation of joint-stock companies with limited liability. This new form of capital formation gradually replaced the old state-supervision system (Cameron 1931).2 Cantonese, particularly the natives of the counties of Siyi (Enping, Kaiping, Xinning, and Xinhui) and Xiangshan, accounted for a large percentage of the returned migrants in the Southern provinces and Hong Kong. They quickly grew into a sizeable group, and, united among themselves by strong ethnic ties, engaged actively in both business and politics (Hong 1982). While these wealthy businessmen established ties with both the Hong Kong and Chinese governments, a number of small merchants, laborers, and intellectuals took a more radical political stance against both the Qing state and the aggression of the foreign powers. They organized successive campaigns to boycott American (1905�V06) and Japanese (1908) goods; such political activism among the Siyi minority in Hong Kong and in China gradually brewed a radical nationalist cause and inspired revolutionary leaders like Sun Yat-sen. Sun was a medical student who hailed from Xiangshan County in Guangdong and who had studied in Hong Kong (Cantlie and Jones 1912; Feng 1947, 1969; Ng 1985, 1986). As he admitted later in his life, it was his experience of living in Hong Kong that inspired him to lead a revolution (China Mail February 20, 1923). In a sense, Hong Kong was not only an organizational base of revolutionary activities but also the breeding ground of the ideas that led to the outbreak of the 1911 Revolution (e.g. Lo 1961; Chan, Mary M. Y. 1963; Chan, Lau K. C. 1990; Fok 1990; Tsai 1993; Ng 1985).
The mass mobilization that preceded the Republican Revolution was an unmistakable expression of China��s political nationalism and was echoed by the economic nationalism that characterized these newly established consortiums of overseas Chinese capital. The consortiums could bene.t from the rising nationalism, which stressed the slogan of ��rights recovery�� and which advocated a boycott of foreign goods. Thus, it was in this politically charged context that the consortiums could rapidly get into the business of steamships and railways and could, at the same time, aggressively pursue banking and other forms of .nancial business (Chung 1998). Their political activism and formidable power even made the Hong Kong colonial government feel threatened: Governor Henry May once called them ��The Young China Party�� (Tsai 2001: 87).3 Sun��s Republican Revolution would not have been possible had Hong Kong not supported this so-called Young China Party, which was comparable to the Young Turks, active in the Near East��s similarly dying Ottoman Empire. Backing Sun��s increasingly mature political vision of a post-imperial republican order, the Siyi faction was to become the backbone of the southern Republican government after 1911, when Qing imperial rule over China .nally came to an end (Tsai 1993, 2001; Chung 1998). The Republican Revolution that brought an end to the Qing dynasty was more like a coup d��etat �X at any rate, it was nothing like the mass revolutions of 1789 in France or 1917 in Russia. With the decisive pressure coming from General Yuan Shikai, Emperor Xuantong abdicated in 1912, and Sun became the provisional president of the Republic of China. He was sancti.ed as the Father of the Country (guo fu), but the factional struggles among warlords denied Sun much real political power for the decade that preceded his leadership, in 1926, of the Civil War for uni.cation (Hsu 1975: 552).
Although leading a revolution, Sun had not made his radicalism incompatible with the mercantilist-nationalism that he had .rst learnt from Hong Kong. On the contrary, by following a line that took parliamentary democracy and economic liberalism as its policy core, Sun gained his supports mainly from wealthy overseas Chinese. It was for this linkage that the Leftist-Marxists who emerged much later in China reckoned that Sun��s revolution had been an ��old democratic bourgeoisie revolution,�� with neither mass participation nor any agenda of social revolution.
The Father of the Country and His Patron in Hong Kong
One important .gure of the colonial intelligentsia who overlapped with Hong Kong��s Chinese merchants and with whom Sun associated was his teacher at the Hong Kong College of Medicine, Ho Kai, who had once become a patron of Sun and who lent support to his revolution. But in his own life, Ho Kai was never an overtly radical person. As shown in previous chapters, Ho Kai was perhaps one of the most central personages in the colonial regime on the eve of the Republican Revolution. He was the son of Ho Fuk Tong, the .rst ordained Chinese pastor of the London Missionary Society led by James Legge. Besides being a pastor, Rev. Ho Fuk Tong was also a successful land speculator (Smith 1985: 130; Chan, W.K. 1991: 75, n. 3); his son Ho Kai served as the only Chinese Legislative councilor, from 1890�V1914. I am going to devote the rest of this chapter to this central .gure of Hong Kong to examine how the colonial intelligentsia thought and acted at this important historical juncture.
Although Ho Kai was both a prominent Chinese leader in Hong Kong
�X with the former Kai-Tak International Airport named after him (and after another businessman, Au Tak) �X and a vocal China critic, historians usually treat his colonial-establishment affairs in isolation from his close connections with the leaders of the Republican Revolution.4 Works by Hong Kong scholars such as Choa (1981), Chiu (1968), and Lo (1961) often stress rather narrow biographical interests; Mainland Chinese Marxist historians such as Ren (1958), Hu (1964), and Xiong (1986) adhere to a rigid historicist interpretative framework, into which they force Ho Kai to .t. Within this framework, Ho Kai is read purely as a reformist thinker who made marginal, though timely, input into the late-Qing reform movement, and he is measured according to his contributions to China��s early absorption of progressive Western bourgeois political ideas. These works barely acknowledge Ho Kai��s involvement in the British colonial system; and they neglect Ho Kai��s colonial involvement in association with Sun Yat-sen
�X a .gure whom contemporary of.cial Marxist historiography commend, with cautious reverence, as ��the harbinger of revolution.��
As early as 1887, Ho Kai, in association with his close ally Hu Liyuan, started to convey their political vision through polemical essays criticizing the Qing ambassador to Great Britain and Russia, Zeng Jize (Ho and Hu 1887). Ho Kai came up with more detailed reform plans in his later works that were published during and after the .rst Sino-Japanese War (1894�V1895) and that include Discourse on the New Government (1894), Foundation of the New Government (1897), and Administration of the New Government (1897). As China reverberated from its humiliating defeat by the Japanese navy, Ho articulated pungent criticisms that condemned conservative thought and scornfully derided the anti-foreignism exhibited by Chinese of.cials after the military defeat. Originally, Ho Kai wrote all these English-language essays either as ��letters to the editor�� of the leading English Hong Kong newspaper, the China Mail, or as personal correspondence to Hu Liyuan, his old classmate at Central School. In them, Ho Kai clari.ed his position as a member of the colonial intelligentsia and offered a comprehensive overview of his political thought (Ho 1887; Ho and Hu 1895, 1898a, b, 1899). Against the tide of Chinese nationalistic outrage over the West��s imperialist invasion of China, Ho Kai acclaimed the foreigners for the bene.ts they brought to China. To supplement his condemnation of the corrupt and inef.cient Qing government and of the government��s inhumane and lawless treatment of suspected criminals, he prescribed a detailed plan for reform of the Qing government. The plan touched on almost all policy areas ranging from recruitment of of.cials, administration of the army, and civil servants�� salaries to .scal policy of the tariff system and the establishment of suf.ciently autonomous local councils. In spite of the xenophobic fervor rising all over the country, he ridiculed the groundless arrogance revealed in China��s attempts to assert its imperial rights in outlying territories such as Manchuria, Mongolia, and Eastern Turkistan. He wrote that the Qing government had only themselves to blame, since they had exhibited no ability needed for rule over these far-.ung territories, whereas the British government could effectively control overseas territories such as Canada, Australia, and India (Ho 1887).
Intended initially for English readers of the China Mail in Hong Kong, Ho Kai��s acrimonious attack on the Chinese bureaucracy won the laudation of the editor; Ho Kai��s articles were soon translated into Chinese, were published in the Hua zi ri bao (Chinese version of the China Mail), and circulated widely in China; they were also republished in Shanghai (Ho and Hu 1887). Hu Liyuan, Ho��s translator, did a better-than-required job by supplementing the essays with beautiful Chinese Mandarin phrases and by making extensive elaborations and embellishments that rid the essays of their tone of colonial conceit.5 As historical documents, Hu��s translations might exemplify translingual (mis)reading (Liu,
L.H. 1995) for they wonderfully conceal the traces of coloniality and paint a very patriotic picture of Ho Kai. As far as Chinese publications on Ho Kai are concerned, these translated essays in Chinese usually and almost seamlessly place Ho into a category of ��modern Chinese thinkers�� and accord him a legacy wherein he heroically pioneered pro-China reformist political concepts (e.g. Ren 1958; Hu, B. 1964; Xiong 1986).
History and the Enlightenment of the Nation
Apart from the interesting translation problem between languages, the reason that explains why the complexity of Ho Kai��s collaborator role does not emerge in many Chinese publications has a strong connection to the intricate relationships between nation, modernity, and history. Addressing such an issue in Rescuing History from the Nation, Duara (1995) argues that ��national history secures for the contested and contingent nation the false unity of a self-same, national subject evolving through time�� (1995: 4).6 He also explains that national history, as a rei.ed history derived from the Enlightenment��s model of linear, teleological history, will inevitably exclude other modes of .guring the past because this national history
allows the nation-state to see itself as a unique form of community which .nds its place in the oppositions between tradition and modernity, hierarchy and equality, empire and nation. Within this schema, the nation appears as the newly realized, sovereign subject of History embodying a moral and political force that has overcome dynasties, aristocracies, and ruling priests and mandarins, who are seen to represent merely themselves historically. In contrast to them, the nation is a collective historical subject poised to realize its destiny in a modern future.
(Duara 1995: 4)
Duara argues that this uncritical adoption of the Enlightenment mode of historical writing has underlain the constitution of a continuous Chinese national subject. This phenomenon is most strongly evident in relation to the early twentieth century, when social Darwinism took root among the Chinese intelligentsia, who argued that biological evolutionism, extended beyond biology, was ��showing the way for the Chinese nation to struggle out or up from its dependent position in the global capitalist system�� (Duara 1995: 48).7
I am not going to dwell on the larger issue of how this modern project of writing Chinese national history reconstructed Chinese historiographical traditions (see e.g. Dirlik 1996; Schneider, A. 1996; Weigelin-Schwiedrzik 1996b, 1996a; Fitzgerald 1997; Lie 1997).8 Yet Ho Kai��s appearance in Chinese historical-writings remains an interesting case for my purpose: to show how the dominance of the Enlightenment mode of history-writing �X the theme of national awakening �X has obscured the coloniality of modern China.
As Fitzgerald elegantly describes it, ��awakening China�� is not a simple historical narrative, but one linked to the emergence of a political technique to ��awaken�� Chinese people through various cultural apparatuses (Fitzgerald 1996). The genre of ��modern Chinese intellectual history�� operates as a kind of pedagogical and cultural instrument that facilitates the placement of modern Chinese thinkers into neat categories according to their attitudes or contributions to the project of ��awakening China.�� This type of historical writing is highly politically sensitive and is usually entangled with overtly partisan evaluations of, re.ections on, and criticisms of current political situations. However, although divergences along various political lines are obvious, the historiographers are quite united in mapping intellectuals and politicians onto a spectrum ranging from the conservative through the reformist to the revolutionary. Thus, they portray the history of modern China as a series of stages in which the awakening process takes various forms and in which the vicissitudes only further ��correct�� the method (or political line) that awakens the Chinese to their nationhood. A prototypical case of such a portrayal of awakening is Chen Duxiu��s narrative of ��our last awakening,�� which identi.es the tortuous path that modern China was taking as a linear progression from ��academic awakening�� through ��political awakening�� to ��ethical awakening�� (Chen 1922: 49).
The linear narrative of China-on-its-way-to-awakening promises to measure the degree of China��s awakened national consciousness. However, historiographers often neglect the fact that this trope of ��awakening�� originated with the missionaries �X those accomplices of Western imperialists (see e.g. Martin 1907). Within this scheme, yang wu (the Western Affairs Movement), weixin (the constitutional monarchist reforms), and geming (revolution) function not in a mere chronology but as different moments of a historical logic �X a logic that was unfolding over the past century. With their ��due�� historical roles to play, the measure of each moment derives from what came next: the writers normally criticize the Western Affairs advocates for their inability to look beyond the limitations of technological-economic reforms; and they criticize also the Constitutional Monarchists for their naivete in placing their hopes on an irredeemably rotten dynasty; however, they argue that the latter �X because it pushed the awakening process one step further �X was better than the former. Although different writers might assess each .gure differently, this basic ��May Fourth�� evaluative frame remains essentially the same and underpins both Marxist historiographies and non-Marxist historiographies.
The Making of a Reformist Patriot
It is within this common evaluative frame that Xiao Gongquan, a non-Marxist historian, states, ��Although Ho Kai was deeply in.uenced by Western culture, he held deep patriotic feeling for his homeland and tried to apply what he had learned to save China from her crisis. Therefore, he wrote to continuously clamor for reforms�� (Xiao 1954: 816). Echoes of this tone surface in Ren Jiyu, a Marxist historian, who credits Ho Kai for the ��contribution�� he made by attacking the Qing regime. He states,
Same as other reformists, Ho Kai and Hu Liyuan were not thinking of taking over the government but were hoping that the rulers would open up the government to satisfy the demands of the people. They were one step ahead of other reformists by bringing up the concept of ��peoples�� rights�� or democracy which was not even mentioned by the others�K They had de.nite anti-imperialist sentiments, but they were afraid of imperialism: hence they adopted a compromising attitude towards imperialism. They were against feudalism, but because of the weakness of their class, they were unable to develop radical thoughts against feudalism.
(Ren 1958; quoted in Choa 2000: 244, my emphasis)
Within the ��awakening�� discourse, the key theme is the enlightenment of the Chinese mind to ways of superseding the feudalism to which the Qing regime still clung. In this reckoning, Ho and Hu��s efforts to bring the idea of ��people��s rights�� to the Chinese have constituted the two men��s single greatest contribution. Yet, in glossing over Ho��s service to the colonial regime in Hong Kong, Ren has to speculate about Ho��s psychological state in order to arrive at the conclusion that Ho was ��afraid of imperialism�� and that he held ��anti-imperialist sentiments.�� In other words, Ho Kai��s ideas are taken out of context in order to weave them into a seamless nationalist narrative that charts the path on which the ��awakeners�� trod. All the awakeners appear in an orderly line, from which they enlighten the Chinese and thus carry China through its darkest dynastic period into a daylight lit by revolution. Ren��s Marxist position might explain his treatment of Ho Kai: Ren .ts Ho into a linear developmental narrative in order to justify the inevitability of communist revolution as the last crucial awakening. But non-Marxist scholars who have detailed the events of Ho Kai��s life and his in.uential published works are still not quite ready to accept Ho Kai in his own right. For example, in one essay, Tsai Jungfang takes Ho Kai to be mainly a .gure who achieved a ��syncretic fusion of Chinese and Western ideas and values�� (Tsai 1978). In another essay, he calls Ho Kai and Hu Liyuan ��comprador ideologists�� in the title of his article, yet names them ��comprador patriots�� in the text (Tsai 1975). Unlike Ren��s work, Tsai��s careful writings squarely face Ho Kai��s deep involvement in British colonialism, but still praise Ho and Hu as ��nationalists.�� To reconcile the con.icts between Ho��s words and deeds, Tsai appeals for a rede.nition of terms and argues that ��patriotism and compradorism are not necessarily mutually exclusive�� (Tsai 1981: 196). He also makes the following argument:
There are different types of compradors, just as there are different types
of ��nationalists.�� There are different degrees of compradorism, just as
there are different degrees of ��patriotism.�� A person may have a certain
degree of comprador tendency, and others may have more, depending
on the degree and nature of one��s connections with imperialism.
Furthermore, a person can be a comprador on one occasion, and a
patriot on another. Indeed, a person can be paradoxically a ��comprador
patriot�� �X he may collaborate with the imperialists at the sacri.ce
of some sovereign rights in the hope of eventually building a strong
nation to resist imperialist aggression.
(Tsai 1981: 195)
Tsai stretches the meanings of nationalism or of patriotism to the point where they become almost interchangeable with ��subservience to imperialism.�� In this way, Tsai risks completely overhauling the commonsense meaning of the phrase ��Chinese patriot��: namely, one who upholds China��s sovereign rights against any imperialist infringement. However, my point here is not to dispute whether a patriotic act can or cannot be disguised under some tactical calculations commonly found in crisis situations. Rather, what one may .nd striking is the ease with which a .gure like Ho Kai, who Tsai himself admits frequently contradicts himself, undergoes a recuperative identi.cation as a nationalist, even though the identi.cation might dilute the conceptual meaning of the term ��nationalist��. Even more interesting is Tsai��s effort to save Ho Kai��s patriotism, an effort that leads Tsai to neutralize the meaning of ��compradorism��. He states that ��the term comprador may be used in a descriptive and not necessarily derogatory sense, and emphasis may be placed on the objective roots of�Kcompradorism�� (Tsai 1981: 195).9
I am not disputing the invaluable contributions that Tsai has made by articulating the ambiguities that indeed mark Ho��s deeds. My contention is only that Tsai might have missed the opportunity to draw from Ho��s case a paradigmatic crisis of modern nationalist historiography. Unfortunately, Tsai reacts to the disputable Ho��s deeds by rede.ning the associated terms and thus restoring the problematic conventional conceptual scheme. An oxymoron may sometimes justi.ably be a kind of Weberian ��ideal type��; yet, I think that scholars should not treat colonial ambivalence as a license for conceptual haziness. The only textual evidence to which Tsai points in justifying his characterization of Ho as a nationalist seems to be the following statement:
I am not without my nation [sic] pride, and I revere the land of my fathers; but I cannot conscientiously go to the length of stating that the French restored our invaded territory, when they had got everything they desired at Tonquin and the Province itself, which had for many generations been a vassal state of China�K I must honestly state that although I am apt to be proud with a just pride, I must confess that, had the French not been so half-hearted, and cared to send a few more ships and several extra regiments of picked soldiers, I should have been anxiously concerned for the whole of the Chinese empire.
(Tsai 1981: 205, my emphasis)
Yet, Ho in Tsai��s next quote appears to have identi.ed Chinese as ��them�� rather than ��us��. He states,
Let those Chinese who have a mind to raise themselves and their nation along with them .rst .nd out the true cause of their country��s degradation and then apply the proper remedy. Do not rely too much upon the reorganization of your army, nor the increases of your navy, nor upon your new forts and guns.
(Ho 1887: 3, my emphasis)
This article was published in China Mail, which, as the mouthpiece of the foreign community, usually conveyed the opinions of the Hong Kong Europeans. This critical prose, exceptionally long for such a text as written by a Chinese, targeted the foreign-policy statement delivered by Zeng Jize, the Chinese consulate to Britain and Russia. In the article, Ho rebutted Zeng��s intention to re-af.rm China��s imperial rights in the remaining tributaries and quite disparagingly exhorted China to ��set your own house in order .rst.�� In a Chinese version published later, he even wrote that the ��the changes which may have to be made when China comes to set her house in order can only pro.tably be discussed when she feels she has been thoroughly overhauled�� (Ho and Hu 1887; my emphasis).
Tsai is de.nitely not the only scholar to .nd it dif.cult to make sense of the contradictory statements; other historiographers have also been tempted to resort to speculation about Ho��s state of mind. However, what they tend to exclude is this possibility: the .ssure that they try to gloss over derives indeed from their oft-used interpretative scheme, which operates on the assumption that it was Ho��s inborn Chinese identity that governed his mind. In other words, Ho��s contradictions may re.ect the historiographical nationalism of which the historians�� writings are a part. The .ssure invites an alternative reading that breaks away from the nationalist paradigm. In this regard, Foucault states, ��Contradictions are neither appearances to be overcome, nor secret principles to be uncovered. They are objects to be described for themselves�� (Foucault 1972: 151). Rather than explain (or explain away) the contradiction, it might be more pro.table to describe the discursive conditions of its possibility. In our case, it is the nationalist making of a ��comprador patriot�� that needs to be undone.10
Value of a Queue: The Usefulness of Chinese Identity
While assertions of Ho Kai��s patriotic heart abound in all these studies, we can hardly ever .nd hard proof that he was ever baf.ed by any sense of ambiguity about his identity. He consistently called himself a British Chinese subject, or a ��British subject of Chinese parentage��. When Lord Beresford was touring the major Chinese cities and Hong Kong on behalf of Britain��s Associated Chambers of Commerce in 1899, Hong Kong Chinese leaders attended a related meeting. Eight of the attendees, including Ho Kai, wrote a letter to Lord Beresford, stating,
We think that there is a mighty force available for the British Government, a force which has been hitherto lying dormant and undeveloped �X either willingly neglected or perhaps never dreamt of. That force is the unchallenged commercial acumen of the Chinese. By a proper system of organization and greater encouragement to British subjects of Chinese parentage, they can be made an arm of strength to Great Britain commercially, and that proud position that she has held in China can yet be maintained despite the rivalry and underhand schemes of her enemies. We humbly suggest that Britain��s Chinese subjects be sent to the interior to occupy every possible source of trade and to act as commercial scouts or living channels of communication to the different Chambers of Commerce. Well organized and instructed to make inquiries within their tradal spheres or to penetrate further, if need
be, into the interior or any special region, these intelligent merchants
may perform wonders and help to maintain the commercial supremacy
of Great Britain.
(Beresford 1899: 231)
What made Ho Kai and his fellow Chinese leaders so con.dent of the commercial-scout role that the British Chinese subject could play was the Chinese merchants�� meticulous understanding of market needs and supplies. They reassured Beresford that they could be the middlemen who could ��visit places where Europeans would only arouse suspicion; they [could] extract information where foreigners would only close the natives�� mouths�� (Beresford 1899: 232). However, they maintained strongly that they, as middlemen, had to remain Chinese �X if not in other aspects, at least in outlook �X because ��where Chinese of the interior would willingly interchange views with British subjects of Chinese parentage and Chinese dress, foreigners would have to be content with vague and evasive answers given grudgingly and with circumspection�� (Beresford 1899: 232).
Possessing the privilege of shuttling between different identities, Ho, the collaborator par excellence, was extremely aware of the use-value of each one of them. As a matter of fact, the .rst complaint that the eight signatories made to Lord Beresford concerned a loss of Chinese-cultural appearance. The perceived loss stemmed from the British policy wherein the British granted protection to their Chinese subjects in the interior of China only if they followed the rule of distinctive appearance: for example, cutting off their queues and changing their long-accustomed mode of dress. The signatories, presumably the most prominent Hong Kong Chinese merchants, forcefully argued that the wider Chinese communities whose members usually wore queues should consider the advantages of remaining culturally Chinese. However, equally forceful was the signatories�� plea that the British protect from corrupt and vengeful Chinese Mandarins those Chinese subjects whose courage to participate in public life hinged on whether their British status could effectively maintain itself.
In short, what Ho Kai and the British Chinese subjects wanted was nothing less than a double-identity: culturally Chinese and politically British. This was not a matter of a split consciousness, which colonialist psychology would depict as arousing guilt and internal dissension (e.g. Memmi 1967; Mannoni 1990), but the license to shuttle between two worlds. In arguing that this license of double-identity was necessary, the signatories relied on the premise that the British Empire needed to expand its commerce and that the empire��s Chinese subjects were instrumental precisely in satisfying this need to ��penetrate further�� into the Chinese interior. In other words, the bicultural con.guration could work well only under the conditions of colonialism. Ho Kai put this impeccable union of British Chinese subjects and the British Empire as follows:
with the support and goodwill of these British subjects of Chinese
parentage, with the removal of the likin [transportation tax] barrier
and other obnoxious Customs regulations, British goods, assisted by
superior carrying powers, can supply the Chinese market, and there
would be such a rami.cation of British commercial interests in the whole
Chinese Empire that China, in its entirety, would become a complete sphere of
British in.uence, which as Great Britain is a nation of free traders, may
be considered as synonymous with the ��Open Door.��
(Quoted in Beresford 1899: 232, my emphasis)
Lord Beresford��s account of his visit to China summed up China��s situation just before the Eight Allied Forces invaded China to suppress the Boxer Rebellion, in which rebelling Chinese had killed numerous missionaries and had destroyed many foreign interests (see Esherick 1987). The Allied Forces drove the Qing emperor out of Peking, and the invading European forces burned down the Summer Palace of the Empress Dowager; at that time, the European powers�� dissolution of China��s governmental structure was a matter of political determination, rather than of ability. As a sign of the times, Beresford entitled his published report of his journey to China ��The Break-up of China�� (Beresford 1899). Ho Kai did not resort to any explicitly patriotic grounds in defending his advocacy of the Open Door option, which was also favored by the British. Rather, Ho .gured that the alternative solution �X the partition of China �X would bring about only a scramble for each and every sphere of in.uence among the European powers. Ho Kai and the Hong Kong Chinese elite assured Lord Beresford that the British empire would bene.t most by choosing this Open Door option, since the empire had the trust of the Chinese, who would offer their assistance to the British but not to other powers. The Open Door option would in effect make the whole of China a sphere of British in.uence.
After the turmoil of the Boxer Rebellion, the Qing Empire remained at the mercy of the eight invading powers. It would probably be a speculation, if not an assertion, to say that the British exhibited restraint because of Ho Kai��s advice. But his highly intriguing ��patriotic�� call, in itself, reveals how one of the most important Hong Kong Chinese perceived and deliberated the integrity of the Chinese nation during the most acute crisis in China��s contemporary history.
Colonialism for the Enthusiastic Collaborators
Ho Kai��s advocacy of a liberal monarchical system in his 1898 series of essays has led almost all historians of the .eld to classify him as a moderate reformer. However, this classi.cation does not mean that Ho Kai neither entertained nor even promoted the prospect of radical change in China. What he insisted on rather, was a British takeover of the Qing��s imperial administrative authority. Indeed, well before he wrote his essays calling for reforms, Ho Kai helped organize the .rst meeting of the revolutionary Xing Zhong Hui (Society for the Revival of China), of which Sun Yat-sen, his student, was an active member (Tse 1924; Schiffrin 1968; Rhoads 1975; Choa 1981; Tsai 1993). When the Boxer Rebellion broke out in 1900, Ho Kai, together with other revolutionaries, plotted to persuade Li Hongzhang, the governor-general of the southern provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi, to proclaim the independence of southern China. Ho Kai��s role was to win the consent and support of Hong Kong Governor Henry Blake (1898�V1903). A proclamation entitled ��Regulations for Peaceful Rule�� was drafted to address to foreign countries. The document detailed a plan to take over the governing authority of southern China: it includes proposals for the establishment of a parliament, for the restructuring of Chinese governing bodies at all levels under the tutelage of all the foreign powers, for the opening up of China to all the commercial interests of foreign countries, and the establishment of a school system and a judiciary based on Western models. With Li��s hesitation and London��s lukewarm attitude, the plan was not carried out (Schiffrin 1968: ch. 7).
The drafting of this proclamation happened only one year after Ho Kai had openly argued against the partition of China in his letter to Lord Beresford. Shifting from the defense of a united China to the instigation of provincial independence, Ho Kai left unchanged his insistence that China be subsumed under the guidance of the British Empire. What some scholars may interpret as a patriotic act that was meant to prevent China��s collapse was, according to Ho Kai himself, the best outcome of Lugard��s indirect rule: the collaborators, with the help of their masters, would run China better than the Western powers by themselves. Ho Kai summed up his view in an open letter to John Bull, published in the China Mail just a month after the attempted proclamation of southern China��s independence had failed:
You must capture not only Peking, but also the lawless band of mandarins and their confederates the leading Boxers�Ktake it that you are well agreed upon the principles so fearlessly propounded by your Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs that China shall be for the Chinese, and there will be no partition of the Middle Kingdom by the Foreign Powers. The
Indianising of China you will not have, but then you must not go to the other extreme to leave China severely alone and permit her to get along as before.
(Ho 1900; quoted in Choa 2000: 229, my emphasis)
Apart from the passionate call in the above statement, today��s readers might also be surprised to .nd in this amazingly well-argued open letter how eloquent Ho Kai was in dispelling, one by one, the myths that might have misled the British to act less ��vigorously, .rmly and fearlessly.�� Those myths included the allegations that it was the indiscretions of foreign missionaries that had stirred up the Celestials and had caused the Boxers�� massacres; that the Boxers�� violence was excited by a deep cultural difference between Christianity and ancient Chinese beliefs; that the Chinese �X on the basis of Chinese customs of propriety �X were irritated by the mixing of the sexes in the missionaries�� places of worship. The list of myths went on. In his point-by-point rebuttal, Ho Kai was at pains to reveal how distorted these Western conceptions of the Chinese were. The nationalists would read the open letter as evidence of Ho Kai��s patriotic defense of traditional, authentic images of China. However, his presentation of these ��positive�� images of China was followed by an invitation to foreigners asking them to complete their civilizing mission.
Ho Kai was quick to rebut what the Europeans thought about the Boxers and the violence. He maintained that such biases �X that we may today call ��Orientalist�� �X concealed the real causes of the Boxer violence. From then on, he blamed the corrupt Chinese Mandarins and the conservative literati of being fearful of the ��principles of good government, the necessity for reform, the rights of personal liberty and [the right to resist] unjust demands and impositions.�� Ho Kai commended both the content and the sincerity of the missionaries�� evangelistic teachings, for without them, the Chinese would not know the values of these principles. Unfortunately, these principles posed real threats to the of.cials who preyed upon the ignorance and superstition of the people. In Ho Kai��s eyes, the Boxers were no more than uncivilized and excited masses manipulated by of.cials and ultra-conservatives like the Empress Dowager and her allies.11 Appealing to the ��white man��s burden,�� Ho Kai strongly urged the British to come forward and help reform the Chinese government by taking over its administrative power. He put the matter forcefully to John Bull the Englishman:
Does it not seem rather sel.sh of you to merely make your fortune in
China without doing something to ameliorate the miserable conditions
of its inhabitants? Do not your religion and civilization demand more of
you?
(Ho 1900: 3, my emphasis )
Ho Kai asked Britain and the United States for ��deliverance from the yoke of an oppressive and corrupt government�� (Ho 1900). His wish was so intense that he would have been totally disappointed if the Allied Forces sought mere peace with China. Ho Kai states,
It will not do after having vindicated your honour to make a hollow
peace with the Chinese Government, exact an indemnity, sign a new
treaty, have some more ports opened to trade, get more concessions,
and then let the Manchus Government do as they like thereafter.
(Ho 1900: 3)
Ho Kai urged the British not to be fooled by ��inexperienced persons or by interested parties�� into believing that China needed a strong central Chinese government, backed up by a large and disciplined army maintaining order throughout the territories. As he said, it was ��foolish as well as dangerous at all times to teach naughty children the use of .re arms or to put into their hands dangerous weapons and implements�� (Ho 1900: 3, my emphasis). Here, Ho Kai was blatant in mobilizing the colonial trope of the adult-child distinction to conceive the relation between Britain and China. Such a prevalent colonial trope assumes that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny �X that the development of individuals mirrored the development of the wider species or community. He was not only putting himself totally into the colonizer��s world of racist fantasy but also into what Mangan calls the ��schoolmaster syndrome�� (Mangan 1985: 112): Ho Kai thought that the Chinese might need a good dose of British public school-style discipline.
At the other extreme was the argument wherein post-reform China would become so strong that it would threaten the world. Ho Kai rejected this argument by defending the peace-loving nature of the Chinese people in a manner reminiscent of Nandy��s (1983) distinction between ��childlike�� (loveable innocence, susceptible to education that will facilitate maturity) and ��childish�� (uncultured brute requiring control and authoritarian rule). To relieve the foreign powers from the Yellow-Peril fear (of a future childish rebellion), Ho Kai explained how China was indeed just childlike. Yet, it is most interesting that Ho Kai also tried to convince the British that the intervention of foreign powers in China was unnecessary. He says,
Chinese of different provinces have their several distinctive
characteristics, and in the distant future they are more likely to separate
into distinct states than to unite into an immense nation.
(Ho 1900; quoted in Choa 2000: 230)
Though, in Ho��s eyes, China would fall apart anyhow, the task of helping to reform China was a worthy but tremendous pursuit. To lessen the British fear of the white man��s weighty burden, Ho soothingly reminded them that ��many of her intelligent and gifted sons are most enthusiastic over it�� (my emphasis) (Ho 1900; quoted in Choa 2000: 230). As I stated in the previous section, Ho facilitated his prediction that China would collapse by plotting, with the revolutionaries�� help and with Governor Henry Blake��s consent, the independence of southern China.
The above quotes, missing from most studies on Ho Kai, make it quite clear that there is a great difference between Ho Kai��s ideas of nation, patriotism, and imperialism and the way modern Chinese nationalist historians normally conceive of these terms.12 To say that contradictions riddle Ho Kai��s thought is to overlook another possibility of conceiving colonial history in the twentieth century and how this colonial history produced a different type of colonial mentality. One might call this new type a colonialism of enthusiastic collaborators. Ho Kai was not just a victim of British imperialism, one whose gross psychic contradictions manifested themselves in a double-identity. On the contrary, as the son of the .rst converted Protestant Chinese minister, Ho Kai was perhaps the paragon of what Lugard called the ��native gentleman�� (see Chapter 3). Fully, if not overly, identifying with British imperialist ideals, he did more than merely represent the gap between the British civilizing mission in China and the British commercial mission there. His startling interrogation of his colonial master �X ��Do not your religion and civilization demand more of you?��
�X was certainly more than what Homi Bhabha describes as a moment when Ho returns the colonizer��s gaze (Bhabha 1984, 1994b). The question was a protest, an enactment and a re-enactment of colonial authority; but what is most important, the question was also a ��strategic redirection of the process of domination�� rather than, as Bhabha would have it, a ��strategic reversal�� of the power-bearing gaze. Collaborative colonialism was not a simple binary structure of the colonizer and the colonized.13 The colonial psychology of the collaborator was de.nitely neither a case of passive ambivalence nor a discursive form of unconscious, subjectless subversion; underlying the psychology were conditions in which the formation of the collaborator��s subjectivity augmented the colonizer��s values.
Colonial Subjectivity of the Collaborator
Bhabha��s type of postcolonial analysis stresses on analyzing the ��retroactive�� effects of the authorless reiteration of colonial discourse but he, obviously, glosses over the subjectivity of the collaborator. In his essay The Postcolonial and the Postmodern, Bhabha rightly asserts that ��cultural and political identity is constructed through a process of alterity�� (1994a: 175). On the basis of this assertion, he adopts the postcolonial prerogative of supplementarity in order to ��af.rm and extend a new collaborative dimension, both within the margins of the nation-space and across boundaries between nations and peoples�� (1994a: 175). However, he cuts short the cultural logic of the process of alterity by prematurely asserting that there is ��a certain defeat, or even an impossibility, of the ��West�� in its authorization of the idea of colonization�� (Bhabha 1994b: 175; my emphasis). From the case of Ho Kai, we learn that the collaborator��s reiteration of a colonial discourse would, rather than defeat the West as the authority of coloniality, give rise to the collaborator��s different uses of the colonial discourse.
Bhabha argues that collaboration is only a text-based phenomenon; that the agent of collaboration appears only retroactively. In this sense, Bhabha misses the real collaborator, whose subjectivity develops through processes of conscious intervention. The collaborator usurps and yet augments the authority of the West by invoking colonial discourses to posit the collaborator��s (compatriot) other. With regard to Hong Kong��s ambiguous colonial heritage, one may be inspired by Bhabha to pursue the ��third term�� between the colonizer and the colonized to characterize Hong Kong��s culture. But if the case of collaborative colonialism of Hong Kong is foregrounded, such a ��third term�� should no longer be treated as an innocent arena exempted from the real process of alterity. The ways the ��third term�� or the ��third arena�� operate in the constitution of the subjectivity of collaborator in Hong Kong still premise on excluding, subsuming or containing its other. The China that ��cannot be left alone�� or the ��naughty children playing with .re arms�� is Ho Kai��s other. The politics of supplementarity for the collaborator �X as a subject �X means that it is not so much a case of the native��s reply to the master, with the effect of displacing or destabilizing his authority, as one in which the colonizer��s authority is redirected toward the other and, thereby, strengthens, rather than weakens, the colonial power.
In other words, even though colonial discourses are the culture-power conditions that subject the colonized into voiceless submission, these discourses do not deprive collaborators of agency. In concrete terms, the colonial setting for Hong Kong��s colonial intelligentsia did not easily trap them in an ambivalent situation where they agonized about their cultural identity. The truth is that this colonial setting enabled the colonial intelligentsia to place themselves between two competing imperial systems and to maneuver.14 From this perspective, we may understand that the Britons�� pampering of the intelligentsia in the last two decades of the nineteenth century was as much a consequence of a strategic shift in British colonial governance as it was a consequence of the intelligentsia��s willful deployment of their own cultural capital within either or both of the two imperial systems. It is this fact that made colonialism a collaborative enterprise in Hong Kong. Within such a collaborative-colonial formation, novel use of the colonial discourses need not constitute a discursive act either of resistance or of domination involving only the West and the non-West. Instead, conventional colonial discourses can be redeployed, in many different ways, to establish new relationships of alterity �X that simultaneously blur and reaf.rm the distinction between the self and the other. Moreover, people��s use of these discourses always involves power-oriented strategies that surface in speci.c contexts �X beyond the strict divide between the West and the non-West.
In this chapter, I have demonstrated that collaborative colonialism emerged in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century as both a cultural formation and a power formation. These two formations regulated the new .ows of national and international capital and ideas. Characterized from the late nineteenth century onward as no longer a matter of direct colonial rule, but as commerce under the dominance of military and economic means, collaborative colonialism involved different categories of colonial social agents. One key category was of the colonial intelligentsia, who not only represented the interests of Western imperial powers but also actively transformed such power into a new ideology that pre.gured a certain form of nationalism �X which might have exhibited a mercantilist, revolutionary or hybrid face. In this light, the category of national subject can never be taken for granted. My analysis of Ho Kai has put in doubt the presumed unity of the Chinese national subject that features prominently in nationalist historiographies. The presumption of historiographies of this unity often obscures the existence of collaborative colonialism and its associated subjectivities. Scholars who want to re-examine the connections between Hong Kong and the Republican Revolution of China should consider revisiting Ho Kai. This revisit could open up alternative and fruitful views of the modern Chinese nation.
5
Chinese Cultural Nationalism and Southern Localism
I
n contrast to the one-China conception in dominance now, regionalism was indeed a key theme of early Republican Chinese politics, as there was no stable central Chinese government until Chiang Kai-shek led the Northern Expedition in 1926. The lingering regional rivalries were partly a continuation of the late-Qing situation. The southern provinces, largely out of reach of Qing imperial control, could be used by various forces as testing grounds for new projects such as reformist experiments in building Western-style institutions and the revolutionary mobilization of migrants returned from overseas. In this regard, the southern provinces were the place where different political forces sought support from foreign powers. In contrast, the northern provinces fell under the control of traditional imperial bureaucrats and, therefore, remained relatively uncontested in cultural and political terms. The Republican Revolution of 1911 elevated the political status of the southern provinces signaling the rise of southern in.uence. According to a writer of the popular Travellers�� Handbook for China, published in 1913,
The Chinese have a saying ��everything new originates in Canton.��
This is especially true of things political. It was in the narrow streets of
this southern city that the plots that resulted in the recent Revolution
were hatched, and during that brief but dramatic struggle, the principal
parts were played by Cantonese.
(Crow 1913: 178)
However, the distinct political importance of southern China did not mean the end of the traditional northern dominance �X dominance that had come into being long before, in the imperial past. After the abdication of Emperor Guangxu in 1911, there was no fully legitimized Republican government for one and a half decades. General Yuan Shikai was in command of several cliques of military power in the North, while Sun Yat-sen held Canton as his base. Some military leaders of Yunnan and Guangxi who commanded their provincial troops (known as ��guest troops��) effectively dominated and controlled Guangdong; they pledged lip-service loyalty to Sun (MacKinnon 1973; Lary 1974; MacKinnon 1980; Sutton 1980; Lary 1985).1 Amid constant military clashes between different factions of warlords during this era, which was politically characterized by a rough North-South divide, intellectual efforts were devoted to the search for a solution to the political problem of forming an effective central government that could enforce an acceptable Republican constitution. Against the old imperial ideal of maintaining a uni.ed China under a strong central authority, some people conceived federalism as the foundation of a genuinely democratic China because regional autonomy, so the conception went, would facilitate the participation of the local people. According to this proposed preparatory stage for a future uni.ed China, each province was to come up with its own independent local constitution. This stable provincial autonomy would then provide the basis for the negotiation of a federalist Chinese state structure. Ou Qujia, in a pamphlet New Guangdong, called for Guangdong��s autonomy (Ou 1981); Yang Shouren, another Republican revolutionary, echoed Ou in a similar piece that called for Hunanese autonomy (Yang, S. 1981). Although the word ��autonomy�� (zili), and not ��independence�� (duli), commonly appeared in this literature, it strongly argued for unhindered local rule in the respective provinces, which only later would be linked through liansheng zizhi (federal self-government) (Li, Jiannong 1956: ch. 13; Chesneaux 1969; Schoppa 1977; Hu 1983; Li, Dajia 1986). These advocates of federal self-government movements conceived of a federalist China as a realization of progressive politics and held that the principle of local autonomy related closely with the concept of popular sovereignty (Duara 1995: ch. 5, 6). When Mao Zedong joined the independence movement of Hunan province in the early 1920s, he even suggested that the idea of Zhongguo (��the Central Country,�� the very name of China), which implies unity under a center, was the fundamental cause of the people��s misfortunes (Mao 1920b, a, c; McDonald 1976).2
These impulses for local autonomy were well received in the South, which has had close economic and cultural connections to Hong Kong. For example, Chen Jiongming, commander of the Guangdong army and former governor of Guangdong, drove out the intruding Guangxi army under the banner ��Guangdong people rule Guangdong�� (yueren zhi yue). He was an enthusiast for anarchism and socialism but held an elaborate idea of Chinese uni.cation under democratic federalism (Chen, Jiongming 1928; see also Tung-yueh-fou-sheng 1922; Duan 1989). During the brief periods (in 1912 and 1913) when he controlled Canton, he achieved some quite remarkable reforms and received praise from both Hong Kong residents and the colonial government; however, Sun Yat-sen ousted him with the help of Yunnan and Guangxi troops (Chan, L.K.C. 1990: 151�V152).
These localist or regionalist versions of Chinese nationalism did not survive the Northern Expedition, which the KMT army launched to wipe out all so-called warlords �X including Sun Yat-sen��s former ally Chen Jiongming
�X whom the KMT leadership blamed for all the chaos that had beset China. Increasingly, Sun Yat-sen invested hopes for a new revolution; he established the Huangpo Military Academy to build a Bolshevik-style army. He gradually abandoned his early Han nationalism, which had favored self-rule for Hans and Manchus, and emphasized the power that belongs to a state whose origins derive from a revolutionary party. He rede.ned the goal of Chinese nationalism as an affair not merely of Han people but indeed of the Chinese as a distinct race with no unbridgeable ethnic differences. In this reckoning, advocates of regional difference were providing platforms for warlords.
Sun the centralist thus conceived China both as a dormant power that needed an effective state to guide it to its own awakening and as an already uni.ed national subject waiting only for his party and government to represent it (Fitzgerald 1995, 1996: ch. 3�V5). Sun now opposed local attachments not amenable to the service of the uni.ed state; if there was still no such state, a party should exercise the power and the determination to create it. Such changes in Sun��s thinking materialized in his reform of the KMT according to the Bolshevik model; his interest in the Soviet Union also led to his controversial policy to admit Communist Party members into the reorganized KMT. In the .rst KMT Congress in January 1924, Sun explained that he no longer proposed to ��govern the state through the party (yi dang zhi guo)�� but to ��build the state through the party (yi dang jian guo)�� (Li, Jiannong 1956: 617�V618).
Sun��s radical statist turn surprised many of his old associates, especially members of the KMT among overseas Chinese, party journalists, and professional politicians (Fitzgerald 1982). Afraid that Sun would target old members of the KMT as enemies of this new radical nationalism, as warlords in collaboration with the imperialists, the old members left in droves (Fitzgerald 1989).
Hong Kong was engulfed in this rising tide of radical nationalism, as evidenced by the Canton-Hong Kong General Strikes of 1925�V1926.3 Sun directed anti-imperialist sentiments against the leader of Guangdong��s provincial self-government movement, Chen Jiongming, whom Sun accused of betraying the Republican Revolution and of having colluded with the British colonial authority of Hong Kong (Chen, L.H. 1988; Chen, D. and Gao 1997).4
In short, the radical Chinese nationalism of the 1920s broke the old harmonious relationship between comprador-merchant communities, returned Chinese migrants, the Hong Kong colonial authority, and the southern regime of Republican China. In its place, a new type of collaborative relationship emerged and exceeded the limits laid down in the previous era.
Colonial Traditionalism: The Legacies of Clementi
In contrast to the late-Qing revolutionaries, who had striven chie.y to overturn the Qing imperial regime��s political power, the young generation of Chinese radicals who emerged in the 1920s was always radical in cultural, as well as political, senses. Some joined revolutionary parties in order to realize their political goals; some developed radical cultural critiques of political parties�� corrupt practices or established political institutions.
Overwhelmingly in.uential among the young intellectuals was the cultural radicalism of what is known as the May Fourth New Culture Movement (Chow 1960). The role of culture in modern nationalistic politics emerged as an urgent issue because students�� protest experiences in 1919 led the students to believe that old Chinese traditions, especially Confucian moral doctrines, were responsible for the failures of all past political reforms and revolutions. Therefore, young intellectuals believed that the agenda to radically reconstruct Chinese culture was an integral part of the nationalist struggle. Through a series of literary, artistic, and everyday-life revolutions, they attempted to abolish traditional learning and the old curriculum. For example, the May Fourth intellectuals promoted a new written vernacular language (baihua) that would replace the classical written Mandarin (wenyan).5
Feeling threatened by these waves of new Chinese nationalist ideologies purportedly imported from the North, which bore the banners of both anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism, the Hong Kong Chinese elite responded by hanging onto traditional Chinese values and teachings. Sharing this interest in maintaining Hong Kong��s status quo, the British colonial authority also actively came forward to help defend ��Chinese traditionalism�� (Pennycook 1998: 123). After the strike-boycott of 1925�V1926, Secretary of State for the Colonies R. H. Kotewall addressed Hong Kong Governor Cecil Clementi about the role of the European inspectorate of the vernacular schools and emphasized the need for the Hong Kong government to carefully monitor vernacular education, as the schools had become ��breeding grounds for sedition��. According to what he referred to as the ��wisdom�� gleaned from experience in Malaya, Clementi declared then not only that English inspectors should be in place to prevent the spread of anti-British teaching, but also that the government should directly intervene in Chinese-language curriculum to stress Chinese traditional teachings. He wrote,
The Chinese education in Hong Kong does not seem to be all that it should be. The teaching of Confucian ethics is more and more neglected, while too much attention is being paid to the materialistic side of life�K In such a system great stress should be laid on the ethics of Confucianism which is, in China, probably the best antidote to the pernicious doctrines of Bolshevism, and is certainly the most powerful conservative course, and the greatest in.uence for good�K money spent on the development of the conservative ideas of the Chinese race in the minds of the young will be money well spent, and also constitutes social insurance of the best kind.
(CO 129/455�V456; quoted in Pennycook 1998, my emphasis)6
The colonial government quickly adopted this policy, which promoted the traditional Chinese values of hierarchy, loyalty, and subservience, and did so to establish a counterweight to the rise of radicalisms including both Chinese nationalism and its counterpart, communism. Bernard Luk Hung Kay recorded how the Hong Kong Chinese elite soon came to join the British authority in building a fortress of conservative traditionalist Chineseness in Hong Kong (Luk 1991: 659). Clementi, as both a long-time administrator in Hong Kong and an eminent student in the cadet service directed by James Legge, was well trained in Oriental knowledge and was both a scholar of Chinese folk songs and a .uent speaker of Cantonese. He was perhaps the best person in the colony to promote traditional Chinese culture. According to Luk��s account, he gave a tea party at Government House in 1927 and invited all the most senior literati then in Hong Kong �X men who had held imperial examination degrees and court ranks in the now-defunct Qing Empire. The members of this old literati had lost their status in the rise of republicanism and had found themselves further alienated when the May Fourth New Culture Movement, clamoring for ��science and democracy�� and an ��end to Confucianism and feudalism,�� swept the country. Yet, in Hong Kong, the British colonial government treated the literati not as mere honored guests but as persons endowed with an important cultural mission. Luk describes the occasion on which Clementi met the senior Chinese literati:
He welcomed these dignitaries with a speech in Cantonese, extolling traditional Chinese learning and morality, emphasizing how important it was that the Chinese should treasure their ancestors�� learning and live up to the ancestral moral code, rather than follow any fad from abroad. He invited them to join him in projects to interpret traditional scholarship for the younger generation so that they would know what to follow and to propagate Chinese morality and scholarship throughout the world so as to remove all barriers to understanding and friendship between foreigners and Chinese.
(Luk 1991: 659)
Clementi��s move to exploit traditional Chinese culture and scholarship was accompanied by the government��s active intervention in vernacular education;
consequently, a new government Chinese-language school was established. Later, the 1935 Burney Report advised the government to change the English-dominant ��one-path system�� and called for greater public provision of primary vernacular education in order to establish, through Chinese-language teaching, the conservative moral authority. To support this dual system, the University of Hong Kong established a Chinese department in 1927. The establishment of such a department was unprecedented in the university modeled on British universities; but it was also strategic, for it helped form the Chinese curriculum to be used in Hong Kong schools.
In the collusion between Chinese traditionalists and the colonial authorities, the latter appointed the former to positions of honor, pro.t, and in.uence at the university. Chinese literati were directors, teachers, and librarians there, and senior members of this clique even accompanied Vice-Chancellor William Hornell on a tour of Southeast Asia to raise funds for the Chinese Department (Lo, H. L. 1961). In the early twentieth century, donations from wealthy Southeast Asian Chinese were to be important funding sources for educational projects in China. A famous case is that of Tan Kah Kee. In Fujian Province��s Amoy treaty port, he invested a huge sum of money in the establishment of the University of Amoy (Yang, J.F. 1980; Yong 1987; Chen, Jiageng 1989; Li, Y. 1991; Tan 1994). Through their contributions to educational projects, wealthy overseas Chinese could make connections with Chinese governing bodies. The use of these contributions has been widely seen as a continuation of a similar practice, wherein ��political investors�� donated money to support either the late-Qing reforms or clandestine revolutionary activities (Chung, S.P.Y. 1998). In those earlier days, both reformers such as Kang Youwei and revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen were vying for .nancial support from the overseas Chinese, and the two factions bene.ted greatly from the support. After the establishment of Republican China, educational projects received generous funds from overseas Chinese. Yet such investments came with strings attached: the educational projects normally had to promote certain cultural ideals, which might or might not be congruous with what was going on in China itself. Thanks to Kang Youwei��s enthusiasm, before the Republican Revolution, to promote Confucianism as a state religion, which was part of the project to establish a constitutional monarchy in China, attachment to Confucianism took root chie.y, as an irony, in the overseas Chinese communities rather than in the Mainland. In turn, the .nancial clout of the overseas Chinese enabled Confucianism to .nd channels through which it could re-import itself to China in the 1920s. Clementi was simply tapping these resources to protect Hong Kong from the possible damage that radical Chinese nationalism could bring about.
Thus we can see that the con.icts between different historically embedded versions of Chinese culture played out in Hong Kong, the place where the past and the future met: while the Mainland��s new intellectuals who .ooded into Hong Kong cherished a modernist ideal, overseas Chinese focused on maintaining Chinese identity by grasping the roots of a purportedly Confucian-based tradition. Western modernist aspirants who wanted to see the whole Chinese outlook revolutionized stood against aged Confucian scholars who taught wenyan to young students, who in turn learned merely to compose poems in classical styles. These competing conceptions of Chineseness led to legendary clashes between radical Chinese intellectuals and the conservative educational establishment supported by the overseas Chinese. For example, Lu Xun��s serious clash with Lim Boon Keng soon after he took up a teaching job at the University of Amoy led to a massive resignation of young lecturers from the university (Hong 1990). Lu Xun��s bitterness continued as he paid his .rst visit to the University of Hong Kong and witnessed for himself how Hong Kong had turned into a sanctuary for an anachronistic and defunct literary style (Abbas 1997: 112�V116).7
Colonial Construction of Chineseness
It is commonly noted that in the case of India, the impulse to distinguish between the national culture and that of the West ��is combined with an aspiration to modernity that can be de.ned only in terms of the post-Enlightenment rationalism of European culture�� (e.g. Chakrabarty 1987). According to Chatterjee (1986), these contradictory impulses are evident in each phase of the development of nationalist thought. In order to cope with the contradiction, nationalist thought would have to de.ne, again for each phase, an ultimate self-referent for the nation. Chatterjee sets out, in his Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, to trace the successive phases in which the self-referents of the Indian nation were de.ned (Chatterjee 1986). Yet, here, I am interested neither in the question of whether Chinese nationalism can be similarly de.ned according to a linear progression of successive phases, nor in the question of how the self-referents of the Chinese nation can possibly be de.ned. Rather, what is immediately relevant for my analysis here is to locate the conjuncture at which the contradictions of modern Chinese nationalism became manifest in the clashes between the different conceptions of Chineseness developed overseas and in the Mainland. In addition, I want to identify how these different conceptions of Chineseness intertwined with different versions of colonial power.
In the 1920s, this competitive encounter of different versions of Chineseness occurred in Hong Kong owing to the intervention of the British colonial authority there. Whereas during Lugard��s governorship in the .rst two decades of the century, Hong Kong��s educational institutions functioned as governmental instruments, Clementi��s educational policy in the 1920s drove Hong Kong education along a path that brought Hong Kong ever deeper into Chinese culture and politics. Rather than follow Lugard��s model of breeding ��native gentlemen�� both within the medium of English language and under the tutorship of the British, Hong Kong��s educational system, after Clementi, entered into a bitter contest over what Chinese identity should mean in Hong Kong, and perhaps elsewhere in China. The young nationalist-modernists in mainland China considered the old Chinese tradition of the literati to be obsolete. In Hong Kong, however, the colonial government preserved the tradition and indeed resurrected it as an instrument with which they might quash the tides of radical nationalism. However, one should not draw the premature conclusion that the change from Lugard to Clementi signi.ed a move away from the imperial ideas that the former had laid down, insofar as his indirect-rule principle does include the promotion of traditional values where bene.cial to colonial governance. Clementi made only one inventive variation: the basis of Hong Kong��s constructed Chineseness was to be a kind of Chinese tradition, namely, the high-literati tradition, which had, in fact, never previously existed in Hong Kong.
Clementi��s policy to promote traditional Chinese morality came too late to counter the rising tide of modern Chinese nationalism. In retrospect, the policy proved to be a poorly devised strategy for exerting British in.uence in China. Compared with the much more aggressive approach of instilling China with a whole set of technical knowledge and knowledge of the humanities to modernize China��s nation-state building process, the British approach was sluggish and mean. While Americans invested huge sums of money in ventures that provided Chinese students with U.S.-based study-abroad opportunities (Christian Education 1922), the University of Hong Kong, in sharp contrast, was trapped in a .nancial crisis in the late 1920s, as the British government refused to heed the vice-chancellor��s call to use the Boxer Indemnity Fund to support the university (Mellor 1980).
After Clementi left for Malaya, the promotion of traditional Chinese did not develop beyond the original scope of his plan. However, we can see the long-term effects of Clementi��s promotion of Hong Kong��s Chinese education if we look at the massive growth of Chinese schools throughout the 1930s (Turnbull 1984; Wong, C.L. 1996). The Chinese curriculum used by these Chinese schools adhered to the old classical tradition, which was increasingly at odds with the rapid development of literary and language revolutions inspired by the May Fourth Movement. Throughout the Republican era, Hong Kong was a site where the teachings of the traditional Chinese literati and the new Chinese nationalism, which was overwhelmingly in.uential outside the of.cial establishment, co-existed. As the Republican government tried to incorporate Hong Kong Chinese education into its educational system, some Chinese schools were registered both in China and in Hong Kong and tried to share the Chinese national curriculum of China��s schools (Wong, C.L. 1996: ch. 6). This aggressive approach to incorporate all overseas Chinese education under the Nationalist Government leadership elicited a strong reaction from Clementi �X who, ironically, on becoming governor of Malaya, curbed the spread of Chinese education for fear of the growth of Chinese nationalism in Malaya (Turnbull 1984). This abrupt change shows clearly that, not unlike other Orientalist approaches in the old British colonial establishment, Clementi��s approach to the Oriental learning that he personally cherished was unwaveringly over-determined by his of.cial commitment to colonial rule. However, Clementi��s legacies were well entrenched in Hong Kong. The in.uences of the conservative Chinese curriculum were reaf.rmed, when in the 1950s, the colonial government found it useful to appropriate Chinese traditionalism to counter the in.uences of communism, another tide of radicalism brewing in schools (Luk 1991). All these colonial efforts to maintain Chinese traditionalism are now an indelible part of Hong Kong Chinese identity, for the efforts left not only an entrenched conservative brand of Chinese studies in the Hong Kong education system (whose curriculum remained largely unmodi.ed into the nineties) but also a living institutional tradition in which collaborative colonial rule through cultural governmentality is given full play.
Imported Cultural Nationalism
In sharp contrast to Malaya, where the British colonist Clementi could stem the spread of Chinese nationalism by wielding brute force, the cultural scene in Hong Kong became dominated in the early half of the twentieth century by immigrant Chinese mainland intellectuals who were often categorized as ��South-bound intellectuals�� (nan lai wen ren) (Wong, K.C. et al. 1998b, c). Immigrant Chinese intellectuals came to Hong Kong in massive numbers after 1937, when the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out. Some of them were running away from the war; others came to Hong Kong under a relocation plan, organized by the Republican government, to save them from falling into the hands of the enemy. These exiles brought with them their institutional technology: publishing houses, newspapers, journals, and the like. They appeared on the scene suddenly and brought to Hong Kong a totally new set of modern nationalist cultural conventions, the most important of which was the standardized national written vernacular, baihua. They also introduced various modern literary forms of expression such as the novel, modern drama, and .lm. With these institutions supported strongly by the institutions of the Republican government, the newcomers�� contribution to the establishment of a modern Chinese literary tradition in Hong Kong was tremendous. In newspaper columns and other venues of literary writing, the local writers, educated in bilingual or English-language Hong Kong schools, disappeared almost over night. According to Zheng et al., this rapid ��Central-Inlandisation�� (zhong yuan hua) annihilated completely the possibility of developing a local literary subjectivity of Hong Kong (Wong, K.C. et al. 1998c: 21�V32). The transformation happened just as Chinese migrant intellectuals in Hong Kong were congratulating themselves for having rapidly built up Hong Kong as another cultural centre for China.
This change in the cultural landscape, however, had a smaller effect on the local educational system. Although the in.ux of Chinese intellectuals numerically overwhelmed the older literati, whom the Hong Kong government had co-opted, the overall educational structure and orientation set by the latter remained unchanged. However, without the support of the local Hong Kong government, the newcomers managed to establish a Chinese education system parallel to the dominant English one, although it could not really compete with the elite English schools in terms of status and recognition. These Hong Kong Chinese schools called themselves ��Overseas Chinese�� (huaqiao) schools and registered under the Education Ministry of the Republic of China; but in fact, they were caught in between the two different systems.8 Except for a few of the better-organized Chinese schools, most of them could not meet the standard prescribed by the Chinese national curriculum. They did not give suf.cient weight to the teaching of the Chinese language and emphasized wenyan over baihua. A further irony is that although wenyan, the old language for the study of Chinese classics, was taught in the Chinese schools, the teaching of the Chinese Classics (guoxue) carried less weight in the schools�� curriculum (Wong, C.L. 1996: 313�V314). In fact, the problem of baihua versus wenyan occupied a central position in the Chinese nationalists�� new image of Hong Kong. The nationalists often perceived a simple binary relationship between the old and the new, but the actual situation was more complicated than this perception, and I will deal with this issue later in this chapter.
The massive displacement of cultural elites to Hong Kong not only boosted its status as a cultural center for China but also sharpened the cultural con.icts and exposed the internal contradictions of the newly emerged national identity. No longer treated as a source of Western ideas bene.cial to the modernization of China, Hong Kong��s ��colonial yet parochial�� characteristics became a sore point for those Chinese intellectuals who were highly charged with patriotism and who were struggling for a modern and strong Chinese nation.
Hong Kong: A Political Colony and a Cultural Desert
In the eyes of the Southbound intellectuals, the existence of an anachronistic traditional Chinese culture under the protection of the British authority, together with a local popular culture peripheral to the forward-marching Chinese nationalist culture, made Hong Kong a culturally backward and abhorrent place. The intellectuals often called Hong Kong a ��cultural desert�� and disparaged the island for its colonial atmosphere and conservatism. This anti-imperialistic sentiment espoused by the Chinese intellectuals seriously diminished Hong Kong��s image. Previously, the Chinese had seen Hong Kong as a place where Sun Yat-sen had drawn inspiration from a well-managed progressiveness �X an inspiration that formed Sun��s revolutionary fervor to save China. However, by the 1920s, most Chinese considered Hong Kong a .lthy corner of an unreclaimed Chinese territory that could give rise only to misgivings or bad feelings. Lo Wai Luen, a veteran Hong Kong writer, has collected a number of mainland writers�� descriptions of Hong Kong written mostly in 1930s. In the descriptions, the writers complained about how dislocated they felt while living in this ��Chinese�� city. Topping the list of their grievances was the unease they felt in not being able to communicate easily with people in Hong Kong. Hu Shih, a famous contemporary Chinese intellectual, wrote,
Parents hope that their children could learn English at an early age, and at the same time, they also hope that they would learn more Chinese. The conservatism of the Guangdong people is the cause of their infatuation with the Chinese classics, and schools refuse to use textbooks written in the national language (guoyu)�K [he] is a superintendent of the Chinese schools. He said he worried that baihua is not the spoken language of the Cantonese. It might not be any easier or more useful for Cantonese children to learn baihua than wenyan�KI told them they are getting it all wrong�K I hope they can accept the new trend of the Mainland and be forward-looking rather than regressive on matters of developing ideas and culture�K I don��t understand how Canton, the base of revolution, can be as conservative as that.
(Hu, S. 1935: 58; my translation)
Hong Kong, or indeed all the southern areas, including cities like Canton, presented a tarnished image in the eyes of the new Chinese intellectuals. The
South was no longer the place from which national political revolutions sprang; on the contrary, it was lagging behind, blamed now for a cultural conservatism that kept it immune to the new round of revolutionary changes.
Yet, according to these critics, the most repugnant aspects of Hong Kong lay elsewhere. In comparison with the ��pure�� Chinese national body, Hong Kongers were lamented for their sexual and moral unpredictability, which was seen as responsible for the ethnic hybridity exempli.ed by the many cases of miscegenation there. Lu Danglin, a writer closely connected with the KMT, wrote,
Many students can speak .uent English like Europeans and Americans, but as for the Chinese language, they cannot write even a short essay or family letter of a few hundred words. They can��t even speak the national language (guoyu). They and their elderly may think that they can learn knowledge all over the world, ancient and modern, by getting to know how to speak a few English words. But their education, even that taught by the higher institute, can at most allow them to know something but never teach them to think�K The most unseemly sight one sees on the street is a Chinese woman walking with a westerner. These women love western meals �X you may think they are prostitutes, but they may not be; on the other hand, if you think they are pure, some of them may indeed be prostitutes�K If [women of this kind] foster mixed-blood babies, it won��t be a Chinese citizen, nor will it be considered a citizen by its father��s country�K they can only be victims of their mothers.
(Lu 1939: 143�V147; my translation)
The perception of women��s loss of chastity irrevocably corresponded to the perception of a place being colonized �X it was the colonization that underlay Hong Kong��s moral decay:
Hong Kong has long been a territory belonging to other people �K Although there are Chinese everywhere in Hong Kong and the foundation of Hong Kong people is still built upon the Chinese, Hong Kong lacks the Chinese spirit and has lost its Chinese soul�K I really have doubts about the nationality of some Chinese who are born and raised here in Hong Kong�K There is no place that gives me a worse impression. I might be a bit too extreme, but the revolting, unnatural foreignism in some places, and the basest possible slavishness is nonetheless real.
(Tu 1939: 157�V160; my translation)
The concern of these writers about losing the national soul was of course not accidental to any nationalist discourse; yet in Hong Kong, this typical anxiety of Mainlander intellectuals, expressed through the metaphor of lost chastity, coincided curiously with the long-held prejudice of British colonial of.cials against Eurasians. In the collaborative-colonial setting of Hong Kong, cultural and ethnic differences even more easily galvanized into bipolarity, an outcome that often rei.ed both the Chinese and the Western. Even the Eurasians themselves, such as the famous comprador Ho Tung, was highly vigilant in posturing himself as a protector of traditional Chinese morals, customs, and tastes in dress (Lee 2004: ch. 3). However, if the old fear of miscegenation was an easy ally of a kind of cultural conservatism, Chinese cultural nationalists in the late 1930s and after often criticized Hong Kong��s hybridity as a mark of Hong Kong��s decadence and backwardness. In short, critics could invoke cultural hybridity to explain what was, in their eyes, Hong Kong��s cultural infertility.
For example, in the literary circles increasingly dominated by the new migrant Mainlanders, critics launched a series of attacks against the writing style of young Hong Kong writers �X writers whom the critics considered to be indulging in ��sentimentalism�� (feng hua xue yue). Lambasting the supposed immature writing technique of these writers, the critics then turned to blame what they thought of as a cultural environment colonized by American culture, popular music, and so on: the cultural barrenness of Hong Kong. Other critics came to the defense of the young people:
It is not that they were averse to progress. Hong Kong��s cultural life is
still just a sprouting bud. Peking has had the New Culture Movement
for twenty years; Shanghai has had more than ten years of the Social
Sciences and New Arts Movement. Hong Kong��s cultural life began
just two or three years ago. Its achievement (so far) is acceptable, but
could be better.
(Yang, G. 1940: 172; my translation)
What is truly revealing in this remark, apart from its arrogance, is the author��s comparison of Hong Kong with the northern Chinese cities. ��Cultural life�� in Hong Kong was denied in comparison to that of Beijing and Shanghai, which were twenty or so years ahead, according to like-minded critics. Newly established baihua canons had become the sole yardstick for the measurement of cultural excellence. The charting of cultural advancement precisely rendered national culture synonymous with modernity; in other words, cultural level was measured according to the degree to which it had been severed from the past. And it was according to this new set of parameters that Hong Kong was increasingly becoming the Chinese nationalists�� internal other �X backward, vulgar, and colonized.
The Margin Criticizes ��the Margin of the Margin��
Wong Wang Chi, in his reading of collections of Chinese mainland writers�� impressions of Hong Kong, underscores the coincidence that they were written mostly by Shanghainese (Wong, W.C. et al. 1997: 62). He points to the implicit comparison of Hong Kong and Shanghai in these writings. What is most striking to Wong is that Shanghai, which was a treaty port dominated by colonial powers, had thus attained rapid development. The existence of extra-territorialities in Shanghai and the massive in.ltration of foreign interests into the city could not possibly have left Shanghai immune to foreign culture and consumerism nor could it have closed the city to more open attitudes toward sex. Thus, Mao Zedong described China as a ��semi-colony,�� referring especially to the ��decadent�� cities controlled by imperial powers (Mao 1939). The only rationale for the critics�� derogatory remarks of Shanghainese writers was that Hong Kong was a full colony formally ceded to the British. The criticisms of a colony came from a semi-colony, so that what one had was a tale of two rival cities (Lee 1995).
Leo Lee describes the mentality of the semi-colonized Chinese mainland��s urban literati-cum-intellectual stratum as possessing an inland-centrism. Though they enjoyed the rapid development of Shanghai, their egos were severely hurt by their own marginal status. In this regard, we should remember that Shanghai was still not yet fully governed by foreigners. Hong Kong was thus not only marginalized through colonialism but a ��margin of the margin,�� as well �X from a Shanghainese perspective, a subordinated place, completely devoid of culture (Lee 1995). This nationalistic criticism of Hong Kong��s coloniality is a criticism of the ��margin of the margin�� by the margin (Wong, W.C. et al. 1997: 65). Wong concurs with Leo Lee��s point, and states,
They did not know about their own marginality. On the one hand, they
identi.ed themselves with the colonial rule in Shanghai and were proud
of the prosperity and powerful status this colonial rule had brought to
them. On the other hand, they criticized Hong Kong��s colonial rule. As
a matter of fact, they had forgotten their own position.
(Wong, W.C. et al. 1997: 65�V66; my translation)
What I .nd truly revealing in this cultural antagonism between two differently scaled colonized places is less a competition for scarce dignity (as Lu Xun wrote, the weak could only demonstrate their strength by attacking the still weaker) than a transformation of status, through a perverse logic of identi.cation with the colonizer, from that of victim to that of dominant cultural power �X a transformation that has been integral to the formation of contemporary Chinese nationalism. The following quotation manifests how easily a salvationist anti-colonial critique can slide along the path of refashioning the cultural and political logic of a civilizing mission as a nationalist logic. A mainland writer, Yang Yanqi, states
The coming of wai jian lao (men from the provinces outside Guangdong) is no doubt a pivotal change for Hong Kong. The low standard of the culture of the Hong Kongese that one could witness three or four years ago is pathetic and laughable. Although recently wai jian lao brought in Culture for this place, local people still appear to be ridiculous in every way. I have a joke that I am fond of telling: they don��t even know how to eat pork; they only eat cha-shao [Cantonese BBQ pork]�K They always wear tight black trousers with white servant uniforms, just like the Chinese waiters who appear in Hollywood movies. Now I understand Hong Kong is a foreign land. Of course, Chinese in a foreign country should have that slavish-look. Before, I was not pleased seeing this look in movies. Now I see the truth in the motto ��China in a foreign country.�� (Now I no longer blame Hollywood moviemakers.)
(Yang, Y. 1983: 207; my translation)
This image of ��China in a foreign country�� has indeed vividly captured the ambiguous status of Hong Kong in modern Chinese nationalism. But this status is not just abstract ambivalence; it is also legitimized exoticism. This writer��s judgmental observation re.ects both the absence of solidarity among Chinese (between Shanghainese and Hong Kongese) and the dearth of his sensitivity to the historical reality wherein both of these populations were subjugated compatriots. Borrowing a tourist-like gaze from the West, this southbound intellectual ironically con.rmed the actuality of the image of the subjugated Chinese �X an image that the discourse of the Chinese national self tried to disavow. At the same time, the writer effectively rationalized the legitimacy of an Orientalist exoticism, which framed the Chinese nationalist��s gaze on its internal other. Such a nationalist imaginary was ironically built on a colonialist imaginary. And however bizarre the nationalist imaginary may be, it �X in congruity with similar discourses about the lack of a national soul �X legitimized a national pedagogy to civilize/nationalize the wretched colony of Hong Kong. Yang��s surprise encounter with Chinese in Hong Kong con.rmed what Fitzgerald describes as ��the relative ease with which Chinese nationalists accepted the colonial representations of John Chinaman as the foundation for fashioning a ��new kind of people���� (Fitzgerald 1997: 61).
Certainly, plenty of examples in contemporary China reveal ��the nationalist capture of the colonial�� (Fitzgerald 1996: 139). Although, in a recent exchange on why the Chinese were, in general, more ready than the Indians to incorporate key tenets of imperialist ideology in their programs for national revival, Duara resorts to the need to have ��the Other [being] principally internalized in the self�� in order to nurture the ability to criticize the self (Duara 1997: 68; see also Fitzgerald 1997; Bulag 1997). However, the internalized-colonial image exempli.ed here invalidates the optimism that Duara may espouse. Criticism of the national self need not merely entail an individual��s introspection; the criticism can also displace hostility toward the other, who is still embedded deep in one��s own self. In our case, the hostility sprang from internalized humiliation that transformed itself into a nationalist pedagogy characterized by a nostalgic paternalism. The writer Tu Yangci wrote emphatically,
Although Shanghai also hides numerous crimes and is .ooded by evil
currents�Kit still, in certain aspects, sprouts new buds �X unlike Hong
Kong, which is already deadwood with rotten roots and branches�K
Poor Shanghai, deprived of parental care and guidance: I hope you can
do your best to care of yourself. Don��t follow Hong Kong, the homeless
ragamuf.n, and sink into bad habits.
(Tu 1939: 157; my translation)
In addition to the images of the ��lost soul�� and ��raped chastity�� we came across above, the ��stray child�� also exempli.ed the Chinese nationalist images of Hong Kong, once anti-imperialism had become the main form of Chinese nationalist rhetoric.9 Yet, despite the critique of political imperialism, colonial representations of John Chinaman remained and, indeed, became the basis of a spatial hierarchy on which the inland-periphery relationship of subordination, handed down from the Chinese imperial past, revived. This imagined spatial hierarchy gradually emerged as the archetype of the inter-colonial relation between China and Hong Kong and gave rise to a paternalistic discourse about a Hong Kong waiting to be rescued. This inland-centrist discourse (da zhong yuan zhu yi) framed Hong Kong people as ��almost �X but not yet fully
�X Chinese��; the narrative about Hong Kong as either a stray child or raped chastity entered into the modern Chinese nationalistic imagination as a test of China��s virility. According to this imagination, Hong Kong is doomed to its coloniality and possesses merely a Chinese body, not a Chinese soul; Hong Kong is in the grip of an utterly irredeemable slavish mentality, and therein, Hong Kong lacks the quali.cation to belong to, or to choose, a different nationality. This embarrassing contrast between appearance and reality, between surface and substance, caused some Chinese immigrant writers in Hong Kong great anxiety during the anti-Japanese wars of the 1930s and the 1940s (Cen 1938; Mu 1938; Tu 1941). Presuming that participation in the resistance was the duty of all Hong Kong Chinese, the writers lamented the Hong Kong intellectuals�� lack of real enthusiasm for participation therein. But these nationalist writers never coherently explained which community it was to whom Hong Kong people owed this presumed citizen��s duty (Wong, W.C. et al. 1997: 55).
Apparently, the writers�� anxiety stemmed from the absence of a clear de.nition of citizenship in Hong Kong. Even as subjugated natives under British colonial power, Hong Kong Chinese lacked a clear sense of who really constituted the foreign power that exercised colonial dominance over the island. Although the radicalized Chinese nationalism that developed after the 1920s re.ected a widespread effort to instill into all of its imagined Chinese citizens a Chinese national consciousness within an all-embracing anti-imperialist discourse, the term ��Hong Kong Chinese�� (xianggang huaren) could not, as a category, justify the full dedication of a citizen��s duty and loyalty. The conjugal term ��Hong Kong Chinese�� (without a hyphen in between) can mean both Chinese living in Hong Kong and Hong Kong people with a Chinese ethnic origin. Huaqiao (Overseas Chinese) is the Chinese term prevalently used in the Republican period to refer to ethnic Chinese living in Hong Kong; it puts Chinese in Hong Kong together with overseas Chinese inhabiting Southeast Asian and other countries. In effect, the term implied even greater recognition of the foreignness of Hong Kong than either ��Hong Kong Chinese�� or ��Chinese Hong Kongers�� (huaji xiangangren). The of.cial usages of the term Huaqiao were indeed at odds with the then-prevalent Mainlander practice of treating Hong Kong simply as part of China. The radical nationalism that emerged in early Republican China started to hold back this recognition of foreignness, so that the practice of calling Hong Kong Chinese tongbao (compatriot with consanguinity) gradually replaced the categories huaren and huaqiao.10 Increasingly, those referred to differences between Hong Kong and China as differences between ��the national�� and ��the local.��
Now that we grasp how both Chinese traditionalist culture and modern nationalist culture came into con.ict in Hong Kong, we may ask a few more important questions: How did Hong Kong feature in the con.ict-ridden processes of China��s nation-building? How did Hong Kong, throughout the Republican era, relate to China culturally and politically? How did different directions of cultural .ow and different political dynamics across Hong Kong and China leave their marks in the con.guration of the nationalist imaginary of China?
It is impossible in the context of this study��s framework to present comprehensive answers to these questions. However, I will in the remaining half of this chapter, focus on a discussion of dialect literature, which surfaced as an all-China issue in the 1930s and the 1940s. I focus on these debates on dialect literature because it once provided China and Hong Kong with a theoretical platform on which the cultural politics of modern Chineseness played out. I .rst present how such debates on dialect literature �X also known as the ��national forms�� debates �X emerged before I inspect closely how these debates treated Hong Kong. My objective is to argue against Wang Hui, who represents a recent and subtle attempt to hold onto a certain modernist-nationalist logic underlying modern Chinese literary historiography.
National Forms and Local Forms: Whose Vernacular?
As Japanese aggression toward China was gathering pace in the 1930s, China��s need to raise the Chinese people��s support for China �X to forge national solidarity �X posed new challenges for Chinese intellectuals, especially for those on the left. A large-scale geographic movement of Chinese writers, from cities to peripheral regions, reversed the century-long historical trend wherein literati congregated increasingly in urban areas (Wang, H. 1998a, b). Several factors explain why this relative shift away from urban areas occurred: for example, the Japanese invasion of China and particularly of its cities forced some Chinese writers to .ee to rural areas; the CCP encouraged and organized other writers to go to far-.ung Chinese regions to serve as propaganda teams for the War of Resistance. The rapid relocation of intellectuals from China��s urban areas, where lifestyles were already quite Westernized, exposed the serious drawbacks of the modern radical nationalist cultural ideal of making baihua a ��common language�� for China: forced to face the tremendous dif.culties of crossing the boundaries of different spoken languages, many Chinese writers began to recognize the importance of grasping locally vibrant folk cultures and varieties of local languages.11
Baihua as a written vernacular was a product of print culture, which emerged because China��s rapidly developing urban areas were home to intense cultural activity and a pronounced expansion of readership. As a symbol of the desire to break away from the classical language, wenyan, the anti-traditionalist intellectuals who emerged during the May Fourth Movement of 1919 considered formalizing baihua, applying grammatical rules of some European languages to it, and turning it into an important tool of Chinese nationalism. Along with linguistic reform came the call for developing a new literature in the new language (Chow 1960; Grieder 1970: ch. 3; Fairbank 1978: ch. 8,9). Rejecting the old wenyan of the old literati, supporters of baihua declared that a new anti-aristocratic common language for a new literature should be plain and simple and should thus function as the Literature of the Common People. Both the new language and the new literature gained popularity in the early Republican era through school textbooks and the numerous publications of young writers, with strong backing from the state��s educational and cultural institutions.
However, the rapid population .ow within China was altering the cultural and linguistic landscape of China. This .ow exposed the chief limitation of the May Fourth modern-nationalist project: the new written vernacular could not but remain out of touch with the majority of the national population, situated as they were in a wide variety of local realities and endowed with different cultural sensibilities. Baihua featured the same set of characters that wenyan featured, and so the ease with which the poor and largely illiterate masses learned baihua was not much greater than the ease with which they learned wenyan. The New baihua literature centered on urban life, to the exclusion of peasant life, and on Han people, to the exclusion of China��s wide variety of non-Han minority nationalities. In short, although advocates of the baihua movement constantly invoked the idea that in vernacularism, ��one writes what one speaks,�� China possessed no common Chinese vernacular.12
Chinese Marxists were at the fore in attributing the shortcomings of baihua to the New Cultural Movement of May Fourth, which was wrongly biased toward the urban bourgeoisie. The Marxists tried to gain the high ground of nationalism and pronounced the need for a more radical and political agenda for language reforms. Qu Qiubai, who took a decidedly Stalinist-internationalist stance, clamored in 1931 for a New Literary Revolution that would account for the development of folk languages and dialects and that might even lead to the development of different regional written languages (Qu 1932). Mao Zedong, in his famous Yan��an speech, broached the same issue and re-framed it as a search for a ��national form�� that would be rid of ��foreign dogmatisms,�� abstract tones, and abstract doctrines and that would possess a lively ��Chinese style and .avor.�� The exploration of Chinese national forms raised a number of issues beyond those of Qu��s conventional Marxist critique of class because, for the .rst time, the modern Chinese intellectuals recognized locality as an important constituent of the Chinese nation (Mao 1938). In subsequent rounds of debate over national forms and local forms, both Qu��s and Mao��s positions were interchangeably invoked.
Gradually, views polarized into two camps. Those defending the May Fourth standpoint of Literature in the National Language, and the National Language in Literature criticized local and regional expressions as contaminated by feudal remnants. They took a skeptical view of local forms and held that these forms would be acceptable only after being restructured. The sympathizers of the folkloric and the local, on the other hand, condemned the metropolitan and Westernizing nature of the new baihua orthodoxy. Rejecting the anti-aristocratic claim, they held that baihua was no less aristocratic than the old wenyan; some even described baihua simply as a new wenyan. In response to the upsurge of interest in local forms, which risked boosting local and regional identities, prominent CCP-related writers such as Pan Zinian, Huang Sheng, and Zhou Yang tried at different points to hold back the criticism and to re-af.rm the May Fourth��s purported commitment to modernity. The writers tried to steer the discussion to prevent it from going beyond the much-limited problematic of popularization (Huang, S. 1939; Zhou 1940; Pan 1944).
Logic of the Nation-state?
Although the local-forms debates constitute one of the least researched areas in modern Chinese literary history (for exceptions, see Li, Huoren 1973; Liu 1980, 1981; Dai 1982), the debates have recently caught the attention of some scholars. In his recent study therein, Wang Hui tries to speak for a unitarian view of language by deriving it from a ��logic of the nation-state.�� As Wang asserts, unity of the nation-state could risk collapsing if there were too great an emphasis on locality (Wang, H. 1997, 1998a, b). In Wang��s view, nation-state is a product of modernity, which is governed by a logic of universalism that requires a nation-state to possess a national common language. Such a need would inevitably subordinate all local expressions and dialects. Wang Hui��s argument is not based on a putatively general trend of modernization; rather, he tries to posit the development of modern-Chinese-language against China��s own historical speci.city �X for which, Wang argues, the development of China��s modern language had to run counter to the European model of vernacularism, which seeks a complete correspondence between the written word and the spoken vernacular. Wang��s study tries argue against both Derrida and Kojin Karatani: the former asserts phonocentrism �X the idea that sounds and speech are inherently superior (or ��more natural��) than written language �X to be an exclusive feature of the West; the latter, on the contrary, disputes that vernacularism, a model for national languages, constitutes an issue that has ��arisen in all parts of the world, without exception�� (Derrida 1974; Kojin 1996: 94; Wang, H. 1998: 26). For Wang Hui, neither Derrida nor Kojin can explain China��s path of language reforms. Although the May Fourth New Culture enthusiasts once copied from Europe and pursued an idealized vernacularism as a model for Chinese-language reform, the correctives made possible by the Leftist criticisms in the 1930s set the enthusiasts on the right path, one that would lead to a national language based on written characters rather than on a spoken vernacular.
Wang recapitulates how CCP theorist Hu Sheng attempted a cautious balance between two tendencies: on the one hand, the May Fourth��s tendency to reject ��outmoded, uncreative folk forms,�� which were ��full of fatalistic and feudal reactionary thought�� embodied in ��poisonous languages��; and, on the other hand, the counter-tendency to disavow baihua for its being ��the possession of the high bourgeoisie and the educated class,�� which would risk producing a Europeanized ��comprador writing system�� (Wang, H. 1998b: 43�V45). But Wang tries to add more weight to Hu��s line of argument. Rather than merely strike a balance between the two, Wang Hui takes them as successive stages of a dialectical movement: as a negation of a negation of the May Fourth modernism. This dialectic also animates a line of criticism that started off as Marxist criticism in terms of class and that ended as an imperative of the nation. In this regard, Hu Feng indeed wrote in a more aggressive manner:
Popularization cannot be divorced from the May Fourth tradition,
for at all times it must conform to the demand for realist re.ection of
and critique of life. Nor can the May Fourth tradition separate itself
from popularization, for in its nature it tends towards union with the
masses.
(Hu, F. 1941: 442; quoted and translated in Wang, H. 1998b: 48�V49)
Hu Sheng��s cautious balancing act was once put in Hu Feng��s own celebratory battling tone when he said that ��the cultural struggle of the national citizenry and the masses has become joined��. But one should also note that Hu Feng had therein made an important slide from a Marxist position to a nationalist one. Wang��s argument seems to provide a rationalization of such a shift as if it is an utterance predetermined by a ��structural logic�� (Wang, H. 1998b: 48�V49). Wang then endorses Hu��s conclusion, made in 1940, that the national-forms debates should be de.ned as chie.y concerning popularization. De.ning the debates as ones about how national-forms should encompass, or be enriched by, local-forms, Hu takes the gap between the modern written language and the different spoken languages as bridgeable by the invention of a new pronunciation written out in pinyin phonetics. As planned, these two language types, together, would form a generalized language �X a Putonghua �X and a corresponding common speech. As neither the mythical origin of vernaculars nor any existing form of spoken language would be the basis of the modern Chinese national language, Wang proceeds to claim that the logic of ��staunch and unwavering universalism�� was not only nationalistic but also ��internationalist,�� or ��cosmopolitan�� (Wang, H. 1998b: 47).
However, it is obvious that Wang Hui��s cultural historiography of modern Chinese language rests on his re-enactment of a common Hegelian impulse: reading history as an unfolding of a dialectical logic in search of a national subject that will come into its full consciousness and being. While Wang may successfully prove that there is certain historical speci.city concerning the development of Chinese linguistic nationalism, he manifests himself to be operating within an all-too-familiar Hegelian historicist paradigm: such historicism is indeed premised on the reproduction of a discursive structure that unre.ectively assigns a spatial hierarchy, involving the central-inland sphere and its periphery, to representations of the national-local relationship. In other words, an unre.ective af.rmation of baihua, the product of the May Fourth New Culture movement, as the sole legitimate parameter of Chinese nationalism risks glossing over the complex struggles between destabilizing forces �X struggles that fomented repeated competing claims for the constitution of a Chinese nation. Through these claims, the present construction of the national and the local has established itself in Chinese history. As a corollary to this line of thought, one argument that Wang makes is of particular interest. Wang argues that the modern Chinese language��s unwavering commitment to universalism
�X which explains its internationalist or cosmopolitan characteristics �X is seldom found in either the European or the Japanese experience of nationalism-as-vernacularism. However, this commitment reveals itself to be untenable once its con.ictual and unstable nature becomes apparent.
In the following part of this chapter, I examine how the conceptual categories of the national and the local are, at best, efforts to .t Hong Kong into the Chinese-nationalist narrative. I argue that behind the apparent display of Wang��s putative ��structural logic�� of nation-state are indeed suppressed or marginalized depictions of the Chinese nation, as well as diverse representations of the nation��s pasts. The whole issue involves a far-from-simple negotiation between the national and the local. I illustrate my argument by referring to the debates over dialect-literature that re-emerged in Hong Kong between 1947 and 1948 and that Wang Hui has ignored.
Hong Kong Popular Cultures: Local Forms or Vulgar Forms?
Hong Kong has no doubt been an arena where different forms of metropolitan cultures have competed with each other. The implantation of particularly urban northern modernist Chinese cultural forms in Hong Kong did not change the fact that Hong Kong was a place rich in folk customs and local artistic work that had originated in the southern provinces. Hong Kong��s local cultural forms were always interacting with various new popular consumerist forms that were connected closely with mass media and different folkloric forms of cultural expression. For example, the traditional wenyan language was not just classical and elitist; it had already gone secular and folklorist, and hybridized with the new baihua to become something called half-wenyan-half-baihua (ban wen ban bai), which is evident in many social satires and in much erotic .ction.13
In Hong Kong, con.uences and interbreeding of global and local cultures has caused great anxiety among cultural nationalists.14 In 1937, the nationalists�� antagonistic attitudes toward local popular culture culminated in a plea urging the Republican government to impose a ban on the production of Cantonese movies, most of which occurred either in Canton or in Hong Kong (Xu, F. 1937). The nationalists worried about what they saw as the vulgar tastes to which these Cantonese movies appealed and about the movies�� consequent potential threat to morality; strong protests and disagreements erupted, as a result, in both of the cities.15
For right-wing nationalists, Cantonese cultural products owed their appeal to the vulgar tastes, the sensationalism, and the eroticism characteristic of the decadent colonial environment. The leftists, who saw the importance of popularity, made a parallel argument: just as Cantonese culture failed to counter negative external in.uences with a home-grown culture, they considered that Hong Kong culture lacked a local form that might facilitate the development of a new, healthy, progressive national form. Therefore, although leftist mainland writers in Hong Kong were keen to talk about Hong Kong��s appropriation of old forms and about Hong Kong��s insertion of new contents into those forms, the writers tended to stress the importance of ��eradicating poisonous cultures�� and of even ��sanitizing�� them (Wong, K.C. et al. 1999c: 12�V18).
Speak No Dialects; Contemplate a Different Nation
As an originator of the dubious concept of local forms, Hong Kong did not take any prominent part in the national-forms debates, although many of the debates were published there. However, the issues .ared up again in 1947. After a long silence during the peak period of the War of Resistance against Japan, the revival of this debate gained the active support of prominent Chinese cultural bureaucrats such as Mao Dun and Guo Moruo (Wong, K.C. et al. 1999b: 101�V 151). This revival would not have been possible if not for the highly tolerant environment that resulted from the CCP��s strategy of alliance politics, which sought to win over the urban middle class and intellectuals during the high tide of the Civil War between the CCP and the KMT. As usual, the CCP��s cultural leaders attempted to steer the debates toward the problematic of popularization and played down any tendency to search for local cultural identities. Still, by admitting the importance of the local speci.city of cultural expressions, they made concessions that were both remarkably unprecedented and explicitly political.
For example, Mao Dun, a famous leftist writer, admitted that the May Fourth��s slogan of Literature of the National Language was improperly in.uenced by both a philosophy of imperial ��unitarianism�� (da yi tong) and dominance by force; and that baihua literature was based solely on northern language and should properly be treated as the literature of northern dialects only. He went on to unveil the political logic behind the cultural contestation and admitted that the dominant position of northern language as the ��language of literature�� was due to extra-literary reasons, such as political and economic factors (Mao, D. 1948).
However, the enthusiasm of the local writers for exploring local literature broke with the restrictions of this of.cially endorsed popularization discourse and continued to produce dissident viewpoints even after the CCP cultural leadership tried to make a concluding remark to the heated discussions (see Feng and Quan 1948). For example, one writer plainly stated that ��baihua to many Guangdong people was just another foreign language�� (Jing 1948: 119). He once again referred to Qu Qiubai��s call for a New Literary Revolution and to alleged models of vernacularism that arose during the Renaissance in Italy and the Romantic period elsewhere in Europe.16 Qu regarded the current dialect-literature movement as a genuine vernacular movement and thought that rigorous crossbreeding of the emerging dialect literature of various regions could give rise to a future national language for China (Jing 1948: 125). In arguing for his vision of multilingualism within the paradigm of leftist cultural criticism, Qu referred to the example of the USSR:
Dialect literature is not ��exclusivist.�� It has to prosper alongside other dialect literature and the literature of the common speech [Putonghua]�K In the USSR, other than Russian literature, aren��t there dozens of other types of dialect (minority) literature? Their critics or arts theorists take this as something to be proud of. As a matter of fact, only scenery blooming and blossoming with thousands of different colors can symbolize the development of people��s arts and cultures. Why do we hang onto the sight of dreary, monotonous yellow-earth plateaus or freezing winters? As to the question of the so-called ��uni.ed national language,�� the language doesn��t, as a matter of fact, currently exist�K If it is referred to as a future possibility, it has to wait until convergence occurs among different languages. It is irrelevant here to invoke it as a reason to stop the development of the urgently needed dialect literature.
(Jing 1948: 125; my translation)
Despite the overshadowing effect of Hu Feng��s problematic of popularization, we can witness a fundamental challenge to the conceptual binary of the local and the national. Indeed, the repeatedly invoked need of the leftist nationalists to popularize literature provided the ��localists�� with the leverage to employ the rhetoric of radical criticism and to unsettle the alleged consensus about the essence of the Chinese nation. Rather than admit that dialect literatures are constitutive parts of a national literature, some ��localist�� writers even disputed the label ��dialect literature.�� In an article entitled Abolishing the Labels of Dialect Literature and Dialect Art, the author states,
I once wrote something in Chiuchow words and sent it to Chiu Chow. I got a response that said, ��It is written in Chiuchow words, so why call it ��dialect��?... The so-called dialect literature and dialect art have already presupposed the existence of dialect; correspondingly, there is a kind of ��literature and arts of the of.cial language.�� But what is that? Is it baihua? That is the northern dialect. Is it the so-called national language, guoyu? That is still the northern dialect recognized merely through the [invoking] of a paper document from the government�K The so-called [idea of] dialect cannot gain any recognition from the people, for if Cantonese is a dialect, all [languages] from other places are dialects, too. Otherwise, [if we] recognize all languages of other places as baihua, then when is Cantonese not a kind of baihua, too?
(Yan 1999: my translation)
Refusing to be bound by the discourse concerning dialect literature, the author called for a cultural politics of localism that would go beyond either the adoption of more dialect vocabulary in literary writing or the writing of literary works in dialect; rather, he overturned the legitimacy of the new orthodoxy of a binary between the national and the local. The author contended that Cantonese and Chiuchowese were vernaculars; a person��s treatment of their written forms should not differ from the person��s treatment of written baihua. The author pushed the logic of vernacularism to its extreme and thus challenged the legitimacy of the modern Chinese nation-state. He wrote,
In the North, one may take [their] dialect as guoyu [national language]. This is straightforward. But in foreign countries, Cantonese has become ��Tongshanwa�� and represents China. (The fact that some years later, somebody exported a prefabricated national language was, of course, an exception. We should stick to the original perspective of the Chinese migrants overseas.) ��Tongshan�� means ��Tong state��.17 [It] saw the northern language as the language of the foreign provinces (wai jian hua). There are different positions a language can take. Different concepts of locality and foreignness can thereby emerge. Northern people may not accept it when others take their language as a foreign language; similarly, southern Cantonese people cannot accept it when others take their language as a dialect�K Isn��t it a joke to classify Dream of the Red Chamber as dialect literature of the Wu region? To consider Shui Hu Chuan as dialect literature of Shangdong is not appropriate either.
(Yan 1999: my translation)
When the ��localist�� writer employed the rhetoric of Qu Qiubai��s New Literary Revolution, the leftist logic of vernacularism-as-popularization triggered a movement that did not stop after turning the Chiuchowese language and the Cantonese language into useable local forms simply to enrich the alleged all-China national form. Rather, the movement opened a venue in which he could produce a different historical account of the Chinese nation. The author explained his logic of cosmopolitanism by tracing when and how China had emerged as a nation. To him, the national imaginary of China �X as Tongshan �X had a different origin unrelated to how the urban Westernized Chinese intellectuals mimicked a .ctive European vernacular model of national language or the intellectuals�� devising of a baihua based on a grammar modi.ed from European languages (Kubler 1985). On the contrary, what the writer has referred to is an alternative memory of the Chinese nation��s origin �X a memory rooted in the cultural encounters experienced by early migrants in the coolie-exporting provinces of Tongshan.
Different Memories of Chinese Pasts as Another Cosmopolitanism
We now can see how the ��localist�� writer in the dialect-literature debates presented a cosmopolitanism different from that asserted by Wang Hui. Behind this different cosmopolitan imaginary lurked a different conception of the Chinese nation; such a conception of Chineseness not undoubtedly differs from the Shanghai cosmopolitanism or the Chinese cosmopolitanism recently discussed by Leo Lee (1999). Having survived China��s violent changes of political and cultural domination, this migrant Tongshan cosmopolitan experience differs markedly from what the Shanghai modernist intellectuals have espoused. The latter aspired to a modern Chinese culture committed to an imagined Europe
�X a monolithic universalism, which we should be able to see as a semi-colonial mimicry that had grown out of their curiosity about the West as a symbol of power. In contrast with this May Fourth intellectual anti-traditionalism, the leftist invocation of the popular elicited, in the now peripheralized South, a different, multicultural imaginary of Chinese nationalism. This non-inland logic of migrant cosmopolitanism did not quite follow the nation-state logic, itself merely a derivative discourse of colonialism (Chatterjee 1986); nor was the conception of the Chinese nation associated with this migrant cosmopolitanism simply pirated from language nationalism, as theorized by Benedict Anderson (1991). Rather, such a migrant-cosmopolitan voice was faithful to the ideal of the vernacularism pleading respect for people��s daily language, their daily expressions, their daily sentiments, and their lifelong memories. Accompanying this alternative conception of a national language and a subaltern insistence on the participation of different vernaculars in the formation of the nation was a proto-federalist conception of an ideal Chinese state. Within such a competing nationalism, premised as it was on a rival image of cosmopolitanism, the Hong Kong writer refused to be localized:
Only the local language spoken by the people is the people��s of.cial
language; only a transformed language merging together languages
of all places should be treated as China��s orthodox national language.
Only that language can be the national language. In the process of
striving for this, we should not belittle ourselves by putting a stigma
of dialect on [our] literature and arts. Nor should we con.ne ourselves
to an enclave, treating dialect-literature and dialect-arts as merely local
things. All those ideas should be abandoned as soon as possible. The
reasons for doing so are substantial and strong.
(Yan 1999; my translation)
In his attempt to reveal the logic underlying the project to establish the modern Chinese nation-state, Wang Hui concludes his review of the national-forms debate by asserting that ��it is no accident that in the end the issues of ��local forms�� and ��vernacular dialects�� could only constitute a secondary question in the debate about ��national forms���� (Wang, H. 1998b: 49; my emphasis). However, I would contend that it is not so much a nationalist logic that renders the legitimacy of certain cultural forms secondary, but the unre.ective national/local opposition that render some forms secondary to some others.18 In short, it was the exclusion of a certain proto-federalist nationalist imagination that rendered a certain vernacular merely a subordinate local dialect.
The dialect-literature debate was short-lived. It is believed to have been cut short in accordance with the general political trend to curb localism during the early days of the new Communist China (Jin 1998; Wong, K.C. et al. 1999b: 15�V16). Early advocates of the dialect-literature movement returned to silence after 1949, when the People��s Republic of China (PRC) was founded. However, under British colonial rule, the local Cantonese dialect survived the ensuing waves of campaigns for language uni.cation and radical linguistic reform and was employed widely in popular cultural forms, such as those of cartoons, satire, romantic literature, erotic literature, and other typically disparaged forms of literature, and also in ideologically charged artistic expressions (Wong, K.C. et al. 1999c).
Modern Chinese cultural nationalism remained strong after 1949. However, despite efforts to bring to Hong Kong a national pedagogy, modern Chinese cultural nationalism could not subdue the threatening existence of ��other�� cultural forms in that city; nor did the former successfully subject the latter to the .ne category of the local. To say that Hong Kong has developed a local identity in distinction from the national Chinese one is as misleading as the assertion that Hong Kong is a hybrid product of the more stable Chinese or Western culture: neither Chinese identity nor Western identity is more stable than Hong Kong identity. The modern identity of China is very much a result of the contradictory discourse of European nationalism grafted onto the revitalization project of an old Chinese empire. The European vernacularist principle �X one that inspired Chinese intellectuals in the 1920s to create a national language for all Chinese
�X became, in the late 1930s and the 1940s, increasingly threatening to the pan-Chinese universality claimed by the nationalists. In this regard, the presence of Hong Kong, together with the unending southern localist sub-narrative of Chinese nationalism, testi.es not only to the existences of what Duara (1995) may treat as fragments of Chinese pasts �X fragments that may be weaved together to show the possibilities of alternative Chinese nationalism �X but also, perhaps, more to the impossibility of suturing the necessary vacuity of the Chinese national-popular. As Laclau and Zac (1994) argue, national identity, or any political identity, comprises its constitutive split within, and the processes of identi.cation are what politics is all about: the identity politics between Hong Kong and China should never be treated simply as a tussle between the local and the central (also see Zizek 1993). Negotiations and contestations over different memories of the Chinese past and diverse visions of the future are indeed what really unite all Chinese, including those in Hong Kong, under the .oating signi.er ��China��.
6
Cultural Cold War and the Diasporic Nation
G
lobal politics after World War II included the decolonization of many former colonies; yet, at the same time, the global politics of this time ushered in the Cold War, which lasted for the next half century. Many former colonies fell into the categories of either developing nations or underdeveloped nations and found their independence in a world deeply divided. This state of affairs meant not so much that the former colonies would embark on autonomous development as a new kind of dependence that played into the hands of either one, or both, of the hegemonic powers. Culturally, national independence also posed, for the newly independent territories, dif.cult questions about national identities �X questions that persist today. Interested parties ask questions about national identity and try to answer them by looking back on the alleged historical roots of the nation; however, in the wider reality of the Cold War, these efforts could not possibly divorce themselves from global hegemonic contestations. The Cold War divided some regions and nations, yet also helped to integrate others; it redrew boundaries in real and imaginary terms. In all cases, its in.uences ran much deeper than a polarization of the world into two political camps.
The People��s Republic of China (PRC) gained control over mainland China in 1949 in a mood of exuberant anti-imperialism that resulted in the reclamation of all treaty ports and coastal concessions, with the only exception of Hong Kong. However, the Korean War (1950�V1953) broke out soon thereafter and dragged China into a Cold War confrontation with the United States; Hong Kong��s decolonization was held in suspension, for China had to take advantage of Hong Kong��s free-port status to break the U.S.-imposed trade embargo and to acquire foreign exchange vital for the new regime��s survival. For the following three decades (until the 1980s), the issue of a decolonized Hong Kong largely escaped intense scrutiny in international politics, and strategists on all sides instead turned Hong Kong into a Cold War battle zone. Remnants of the defeated KMT military and other former Nationalist Government af.liates constituted a sizeable part of the refugee population in Hong Kong; upon their arrival, they confronted pro-communist leftists, who enclosed themselves in separate enclaves. Hostility between the two communities abounded, and Hong Kong��s social stability was largely at their mercy as they respectively and repeatedly organized or instigated protests, strikes, and riots during the .rst two postwar decades.
As the Cold War was a protracted economic, geopolitical, and ideological struggle between communism and capitalism, contestations on the cultural and ideological fronts were at least as important as arms races or regional military con.icts. In Hong Kong then, one would .nd the leftist-rightist divide among Chinese from all walks of life and in all settings: from newspaper establishments, bookstores, schools, and cinemas right down to soccer teams. In this chapter, I take the Cold War as the most important background against which there emerged a cultural and political imaginary about a diasporic Chinese nation. Manifested in notions such as Overseas China or in intellectual currents such as Neo-Confucianism, the connections of these currents of thought with the controversial Cold War cultural infrastructure are the subject of an analysis here that reveals how the latter pre-conditioned the materialization of a distinct type of Chinese nationalism in Hong Kong �X one that has become a core element of Hong Kong identity, as it is now known. There is also a common belief that the rise of Hong Kong identity in the 1970s is attributable to the political awakening of Hong Kong��s postwar baby-boomer generation to colonial oppression. However, in this chapter, I take issue with this view. Analyzing the ��return to China�� discourse in terms of the complex discursive shifts that occurred between the left wing and the right wing in Hong Kong over the future of an imagined homeland, I bring to light certain overshadowed aspects of Hong Kong consciousness. I want to demonstrate, with examples, that underpinning Hong Kong��s emotional, intellectual, and political turbulence, which .ashed with youthful impulses of radicalism and nationalism, were also instances in which colonial power was indigenized or localized. The chapter takes the indigenization of colonial power as the main motif informing and underlying the writings and the other practices of some of the latest members of the colonial intelligentsia. These practices illustrate how such people �X bidding farewell to the old while embracing the new �X could make the continuity of colonial rule across 1997 as smooth as possible.
Diasporic Nationalism and the Cultural Cold War
In a sense, both Hong Kong and Taiwan could not be what they are now had the Cold War not dominated global politics. The American intervention in the KMT-
CCP con.icts across the Taiwan Strait had the consequence of turning both Hong Kong and Taiwan into a strategic bulwark against the spread of communism over Southeast Asia. In order to contain the spread of communism on cultural fronts, American dollars came pouring into East Asia in support of academic, educational, and other cultural activities that might possibly impede the growth of radical ideologies (Huang, A.Y. 1996; Wu 1999: 18). There was a huge refugee population in Hong Kong during the 1950; traumatized by wars, famines, and political persecution, the population constituted easy prey for the cultural Cold War. In Hong Kong, ��Greenback,�� anti-communist publications mushroomed in formats ranging from news journals, cultural magazines, school textbooks, and children��s literature to college newspapers and pictorial weeklies. These publications occupied, from the 1950s onward, almost every possible niche of the cultural life of ordinary Hong Kong people, and posed a strong challenge to the previous predominance enjoyed by the pro-CCP leftist cultural establishment.1 Roughly identi.ed as right-wing institutions, many of these publications were manned by exiled intellectuals who had .ed the Mainland to Hong Kong after 1949.
The Asia Foundation, which was the chief American agent for such funding, supported three major publishing houses: You Lian (United), Jin Ri Shi Jie (Today��s World), and Asia Press. The Asia Foundation was connected with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); Jin Ri Shi Jie was a branch of.ce of the United States Information Service (USIS) (Wu 1999: 18�V20, n. 4). While all of these institutions supported anti-communist intellectuals �X be they essayists, philosophers, or moviemakers �X by subsidizing their research projects or study plans, the You Lian Press also established a research institute to gather information about Communist China. Quite a number of tertiary colleges hosted exiled scholars as lecturers. Thus, a sizeable population of writers settled in Hong Kong; they taught, researched, and published extensively, as well as wrote in Hong Kong, yet only a few could get into the more privileged institutions recognized or funded by the colonial authority. With exiled Chinese, whether in Hong Kong or elsewhere, as their target readers, the writers drew from their experiences and their knowledge of mainland China to provide the readers with valuable strategic information about or analyses of China��s communist regime, which, at that time, exercised extremely strict information control; indeed, the divide between the PRC and the rest of the world was named the Bamboo Curtain. The writers considered themselves engaged in ��studies of the bandit regime�� (fei qing yan jiu), despite the fact that the China watchers and the Western journalists to whom the writers fed information might not end up writing books or reports whose anti-PRC message was as virulent as that of the KMT.
In addition to research work, the You Lian Press supported cultural activities that were less politically colored and that included magazines run by scholars and writers who took students of all ages as their readers.2 To bring up a new East Asian generation of cultural and political leaders who would espouse American values, You Lian developed numerous scholarships and exchange programs that enabled students and academics to pursue further studies in the United States. To be sure, American exertion of cultural and political in.uence on China through educational and academic activities did not start with the Cold War era; as mentioned in chapter 3, the Americans began to take the lead over the British in building collaborative educational projects in China as early as the 1920s. However, with Communist China now turning into an enemy of the United States, diasporic Chinese communities became major targets of those U.S.-based endeavors. As pan-Chinese anti-communist solidarity was serviceable in the Cold War, Hong Kong did not just offer its own refugee population as targets for U.S. Cold War policy, but also served as a geo-strategic center for such maneuvers. For example, the You Lian Research Institute published Chinese textbooks for private secondary schools in Hong Kong, as well as for Chinese schools in Southeast Asian countries.3 Many anti-communist writers who associated with the KMT regime in Taiwan were also involved in the Hong Kong-based publication of journals.
Although the Cold War was about ideological con.icts, the effects of the Cold War rivalry would not be entirely about either the political values that the two sides tried to safeguard or the systems that the two sides respectively advocated. Cold War funding made possible a cultural infrastructure that, in Hong Kong, functioned not so much to re-af.rm the strong anti-communist tendency already there among the refugee population as to facilitate connections between areas populated by exiled or emigrated Chinese. Consequently, Cold War culture profoundly in.uenced the immigrants�� sense of self in relation to membership in a Chinese community and thereby helped con.gure Hong Kong Chinese subjectivities. There has always been a leftist interpretation of the Cold War that stresses the insidiousness of Cold War institutions and that accuses intellectuals in the frontline states of being ideological dupes of Americanism; my analysis below, however, traces, in Hong Kong, the nuances that characterize how people experienced, negotiated with, and contested Cold War effects.4
The Political Imaginary of Overseas China
Whereas in the 1950s, refugee publications funded by American dollars operated like functionaries of the Cold War propaganda machine, a more varied range of
opinions gradually emerged in the 1960s. In these later refugee publications, some editorialists suggested a Third Way beyond the KMT and the CCP; some proposed a United Chinese Government; still some others called for a revival of Chinese democratic movements. All these suggestions re.ected a changing sentiment that increasingly rejected not only communist dictatorial rule but Chinese authoritarian regimes of a non-communist persuasion, as well. In this regard, the plethora of divergent opinions tells us how disoriented the communities of exiled intellectuals were. One writer, Zhan Buji, depicted how the predicament of the multiple dislocations of overseas Chinese led him to call for an Overseas China as a political alternative:
Ever since the communist takeover of the Mainland, twenty million huaqiao (overseas Chinese) have been treated merely as moving property of the communists in foreign countries; a huaqiao means no more than foreign exchange5�K Taiwan authorities are deeply fearful of communist in.ltration�Kall the Chinese qiaobao (overseas compatriots) living overseas are no more than ��people who hold Chinese passports from Taiwan without the right to go to Taiwan���Kthey had better keep silent on everything or organize a few tours every year to celebrate Chiang Kai-shek��s birthday or go sightseeing in Taiwan�K When foreign friends ask us whether we are Mainland Chinese or Taiwanese Chinese, how should we respond? One hundred percent of Chinese huaqiao (except Taiwanese huaqiao) were born in mainland China. We cannot recognize ourselves as Taiwanese�K in all honesty, in the eyes of the overseas huaqiao, Taiwan is just the familiar name of a geographical area and is not even as much of a home as Hong Kong or Macau are. How can they whole-heartedly support a ��country�� without real feelings�K So, why can��t we organize an Overseas China? Neither the CCP nor the KMT can do anything to us.
(Zhan 1968; my translation)
The imaginary unity of different overseas Chinese communities did not succeed in the manner of a democratic and critical project as Zhan had expected it would. Instead, a chauvinistic nationalism always overwhelmed the putatively asserted solidarity among diasporic Chinese communities; in other words, the communities seldom worked to relate the all-China issues to each and every locality; on the contrary, the communities marginalized local issues.
For example, although people has always exalted the presence of both the communist press and the anti-communist press in Hong Kong as evidence of a free press in Hong Kong (see, e.g., Chan et al. 1996), the scope of journalistic attention has never reached beyond the Cold War imaginary political map. These refugee anti-communist publications seldom reported information about Taiwan; news about Taiwan invariably re.ected the perspective of the new mainland migrants to Taiwan (wai sheng ren) or was simply a reiteration of the KMT regime��s doctrines. There was no reportage of any political sentiments of the local Taiwanese (ben sheng ren) because Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong were either pro-KMT or pro-CCP. They held an equally nationalistic attitude in condemning or silencing any move hinting at a subversive cry for Taiwan independence. In a way, although Hong Kong was not under KMT martial law, as Taiwan was, local Hong Kong news effectively submitted to daily censorship from the KMT news-and-information control bureaus.
Under martial law in Taiwan, writing novels was the only way for dissident voices to make themselves heard. Hong Kong readers could read Taiwan-published books to circumvent news controls and Cold War propaganda and to glimpse what people in Taiwan felt and thought. However, such literature always exhibited the fanciful projection of Chinese unity that was characteristic of diasporic Chinese nationalism. One episode demonstrates how such nationalist imagination maintained an apparent pan-Chinese unity, while the people in each locality of this imagined China refused to listen to each other. In 1968, KMT authorities in Taiwan arrested writer Chen Yingzhen for political reasons. A young writer in Hong Kong, Shum Yat-fei, impressed by Chen��s talent and also perhaps by the social consciousness in his novels, recorded in print his deep worry over Chen��s fate during the several months of news blackout that followed the arrest (Shum 1968b).6 Shum recorded how he had tried initially to rally both support for Chen and opposition to the KMT��s unjust detention of him. But Shum grew deeply disheartened as rumors circulated that Chen had been arrested for his support of Taiwan independence. Shum considered the rumor to be more alarming than the arrest itself; he then described his decisions and the resulting agony he experienced:
However much we are dissatis.ed with the Chiang Kai-shek regime,
Taiwan cannot go independent. Taiwan��s independence deserves no less
opposition than Chiang��s dictatorship. And if these two oppositional
positions get intertwined and bring out con.icts, we would rather lean
toward Chiang than side with Taiwan independence.
(Shum 1968b; my translation)
He later expressed his relief upon learning that KMT authorities had accused Chen not of being a supporter of independence but of being a communist. Of course, we now know that, far from being a supporter of independence, Chen Yingzhen has always had a strong socialist inclination and has always been a staunch uni.cation advocate. The novels that he wrote in the 1960s relayed his skilful and pungent criticisms of Taiwan society under Chiang��s dictatorial rule, but failed to impress his Hong Kong readers as much as Shum, who lacked even the basic information necessary to judge how Chen would position himself in regard to an issue as important as Taiwan independence. Nationalist chauvinism, in the form of the motto ��Better dictatorship than a divided nation�� represented the Hong Kong Chinese nationalist viewpoint during cultural Cold War conditions and stopped a youth like Shum, who could still appreciate writers�� critical talents, from listening to what might lie beyond the imaginary united China. For the younger generation in Hong Kong, the Cold War structured a diasporic nationalist imagination within a statist conceptual scheme, and this imagination compelled them to limit their own political choice to either the CCP or the KMT. Despite this narrowing of the political .eld, members of the younger generation professed that they were heroically struggling against the two regimes, with favor toward neither one.7
Diasporic Chinese nationalism was also closely associated with the nationalists�� emotional investment in a Cold War victory. Such a connection enabled global geo-strategic thinking to become an indispensable part of the nationalist imagination. For example, Cold War rhetorical support for democracy allowed Lao Siguang, a famous anti-communist historian, to admit that the Taiwan independence movement could be seen as the Taiwanese people��s reaction to the Chiang Kai-shek regime��s oppressive and corrupt rule. However, he categorically rejected the course of Taiwan independence as unfeasible. To avoid the inconsistencies that emerged among his principles, he stated,
We should be concerned about Taiwan as much as we are concerned
about China; but Taiwan��s fate can��t be changed. It will stay under
the protection of the United States until mainland China changes. A
new, non-communist Chinese government will then recover Taiwan.
If I am right, Taiwan is no more than a place where people can retire
and escape from the war. I haven��t talked much about Taiwan recently
because I am not going to retire soon.
(Lao 1968; my translation)
This wishful statement might not have taken into account the fact that the Taiwan independence movement was also grounded on indirect American support and on its tacit endorsement (Wang 1999); yet the statement illustrated how Cold War geo-strategic consideration had built itself into a diasporic nationalist discourse. Apart from wishful assumptions regarding the military might of the liberal camp, diasporic Chinese nationalism in Hong Kong was also homologous to the sancti.ed moral meanings that the immigrant Chinese found in their lives in exile. This moral dimension of diasporic nationalism was re.ected in, and interwoven with, the discursive and academic practices of Neo-Confucianism, which originated at New Asia College in Hong Kong.
National Spirit in a Colony: Neo-Confucianism
New Asia College was founded to host exiled Neo-Confucian scholars. For this project, an initial offering of help from the KMT government was followed by American funds. Scholars at New Asia College believed that their life in exile carried with it a special cultural responsibility that was open to philosophical justi.cation. Tang Junyi (T��ang Chun-I), one of the pre-eminent Neo-Confucian philosophers of New Asia College, poetically described the turmoil that he and others experienced as a tragic tale of ��the scattered .owers and the withering fruits of Chinese Culture�� (zhong hua wen hua de hua guo piao ling) (T��ang 1974: 1�V 29). In existentialist terms, he held that what every intellectual in exile faced was a personal choice between authentic personhood, grounded in nationality, and a life permanently alienated from its identity. He described the endeavors of people to .nd authenticity amid the hardships of exile as a project of ��planting one��s soulful roots (ling gen zi zhi) in the long stream of Chinese Culture, which was to be preserved and made imperishable�� (T��ang 1974: 30�V61; my translation).
Tang was a great .gure among the Neo-Confucianists. His critical investigations, as much as his self-critical and soul-searching investigations, were very much an outcome of the Cold War formation, within which the relationship between the Western powers and exiled Chinese nationalists was shot through with tensions and contradictions. He examined the sad reality of academic dependency, whereby the exiled nationalist scholars had to rely on the West for .nancial aid that would go toward living spaces and opportunities to develop academically. This collaboration was grudgingly arranged, despite the fact that the writers and the West shared an opposition to communism. The exiled Chinese scholars and researchers grew increasingly anxious that they might lose both their national identity and their control over academic agendas: they eventually realized that they were of value to Western (mainly American) academies mainly as mere native informants. In other words, although they espoused a high-.ying ambition to teach Western Culture so that it should learn from Eastern Culture,8 they began to question whether the migrant intellectuals could really go beyond ��the studies of the bandit regime,�� which served only Cold War political and military agendas.
Tang issued a rather heroic call to the exiled intellectual communities when he profoundly criticized the craving of Hong Kong youths to study in the United States as a prelude to gaining American citizenship. His criticism revealed his unease about the way in which the British colonial master who hosted these youths had been planning to amalgamate New Asia College into a tightly controlled mainstream educational system (Report of the Fulton Commission 1963).9 His agony was great as he bid farewell to the college before resigning in protest of the government��s move:
The educational goal of New Asia was originally to offer knowledge
and learning to China. It is painful that what we hoped cannot be
realized. We can only bear our pain if we do not give up [the educational
goal of New Asia]. That��s the true New Asia Spirit. However, if the
federal structure of the Chinese University of Hong Kong cannot be
maintained, our New Asia Spirit will disappear. If everyone knows only
the international world and Hong Kong but not China, we cannot even
keep our pain. Our lives will become either those of the innumerable
and lifeless wandering international souls or simply those of obedient
men in Hong Kong. This will truly be an absolute pain.
(T��ang 1981; my translation)
For decades, Neo-Confucian scholars had been known for their persistent criticism of the instrumentalist view of knowledge, which was allegedly intrinsic to Western cultures (Chang 1976). Their cultural conservatism ran counter to the unre.ective embrace of Western modernity commonly found in the heirs of the May Fourth Movement. The founding fathers of Neo-Confucianism sought an alternative path of national development for China: Xiong Shili was a great-revolutionary-turned-great-scholar; Liang Shuming, linked closely Xiong��s anti-modernity critiques with the ��village-reconstruction movement�� (a kind of grassroots community-building initiative based on Confucian teachings) (Alitto 1979). Having inherited these legends and being surrounded by the historical aura captured by the phrase ��New Asia Spirit,�� New Asia College became the next in a chain of legends about a stream of rare but courageous traditionalists.
Over the years, the New Asia Spirit was a repository for all kinds of idealistic associations and projections and has been the subject of many different re-interpretations, some of the most prominent being persistence against communism; the spirit of humanity; the spirit of Chinese culture; and an educational ideal. However, although Neo-Confucianism in Hong Kong had inspired quite a few young students, it was itself imbued with many contradictions. In contrast to its predecessor in China, the intellectual agenda of Neo-Confucianism in Hong Kong changed substantially to harmonize with the Cold War anti-communist struggle. Detached from Hong Kong society, as their teachings and concerns were about a great Chinese cultural tradition (the opposite, in many ways, of Hong Kong culture), the Neo-Confucianists became isolated scholars who immersed themselves in a pure philosophical pursuit of moral subjectivity and who did not fully realize the spirit of praxis-engagement, as emphasized in the Confucian classics. Indeed, their criticism of Western modernity was blunted �X given the fact that few, if any, continued to criticize science or democracy, the May Fourth icons for Westernization. Instead, they premised their defense of Neo-Confucianism on a belief that Confucian teachings might supplement Western modernity. Therefore, they made most of their efforts launching inspections of Chinese culture, with an idealized notion of how Western culture might exhibit the ways in which Neo-Confucianists might modify Confucian philosophies so that they .t a Western mode of modern life.10 As members of the Cold War chorus, the Neo-Confucianists criticized the triumph of the undemocratic rule of communism far more than they criticized colonialism in Hong Kong. However, in functioning as a credible tool for the Western liberal camp, their anti-communism also legitimized their disengagement from the local Hong Kong colonial reality. Therefore, Neo-Confucianists could offer no tangible social criticisms that might help local students re.ect on the immanent coloniality they faced. In other words, the Neo-Confucianists failed to develop an organic relationship with the colonial Hong Kong society that hosted them.
As the existence and the development of Hong Kong��s Neo-Confucianism were largely at the mercy of the colonial government, none of these Neo-Confucianists fancied that the colonial government would really value their merits. So while raising not only the question of national af.liation but also the moral spirit of Hong Kong��s young Chinese, the Neo-Confucianists earned less and less of.cial support, a trend that was especially pronounced after the Cold War confrontation started to ease up in the 1970s. Thus, Tang��s battle to defend New Asia College��s autonomy and the New Asia Spirit could not help but be a lonely voice, a hopelessly quixotic resistance against the colonial host. A contradictory situation such as the one in which the Neo-Confucianists found themselves caught up could not help but generate a moral and cognitive gap between high morality (a nostalgic longing for an imagined China) and accommodating attitudes and practices toward the rather oppressive colonial reality of Hong Kong.
This palpable gap was indeed embarrassing, but it was precisely the gap that gave rise to what Laclau calls the ��surface of identi.cation,�� through which new political identity can emerge (Laclau and Zac 1994: 13). In 1971, when Chinese nationalism started to engulf the students in the wake of a territorial dispute over the Diaoyu Islands, a New Asia student Lau Mei-mei wrote a passionate open letter in which, by quoting passages from the moral teachings of Tang Junyi, she criticized the political acquiescence of New Asia scholars and queried how her teachers could match their teachings with their deeds (Lau,
M.M. 1971). This letter, entitled Cry New Asia, aroused heated debates, and was reprinted in and reported by many other youth publications (CSW October 1, 1971).
The challenge that Lau Mei-mei posed to the empty notion of New Asia Spirit soon culminated in the re-appraisal and re-interpretation by local students of the notion from the point of view of different political concerns and aspirations. The students increasingly disarticulated the notion from anti-communist nationalism and re-articulated it as a starting point for an anti-colonial nationalism. A student spoke of his new understanding in 1974:
If we want to implement the New Asia Spirit, we cannot just uphold
Chinese culture in academic pursuits; we should implement it by
opposing the colonial government. But for these twenty years, this has
not been done. Teachers of New Asia must be in agony over the lack
of national consciousness of Hong Kong��s youth. In fact, the colonial
government was the real cause. Student movements that have emerged
recently are anti-colonial and are driven by Marxism and Trotskyism.
They supplement the lacuna left by the New Asia Spirit.
(SUNA 1974: 33; my translation)11
The contradictions that emerged out of the Cold War formation carried with them the students�� uneasiness concerning the teachers�� complicity with colonial power. It testi.ed that the diasporic Chinese nationalism the exiled scholars had brought to Hong Kong appeared as a narrative about a nation with a traumatic void rather than as a coherent ideology. To the extent that this nationalism succeeded in arousing students to assert for themselves an autonomous political identity, it sowed the seeds of its own destruction, as its own Cold War complicity with the colonial establishment became more and more unacceptable. As a philosophy about one��s lost national roots, this exile nationalism began to come apart even as it started to take root in Hong Kong. Thus, the discourse about the traumatic void of the exiled generation was not just a constitutive lack (in the Lacanian sense) but also inscribable, for it offered an empty space in which different national imaginations could .ourish (Laclau 1990; Laclau and Zac 1994). So, when the Neo-Confucianists failed to offer moral principles consistent with a practical vision for the future and, thus, failed to .ll the void, the locally grown nationalist aspirants sought to innovate the Chineseness that, according to the old nationalist scholars, they did not possess.
Innovating Chineseness
In the midst of the worldwide student radicalism of 1968, the buzzwords ��identity crisis�� appeared in many publications for young audiences. The concept itself recalled both many radical ideas from the West and the nostalgic voices of the older generation of exiled intellectuals. There is no better example that illustrates this urge to re-invent Chineseness than that of the group of young writers and artists who launched the new cultural magazine Panku. They not only focused the new magazine on cultural and political criticism, but also organized activities among its readers by pushing the Campaign for Lifestyle Innovation.12 Their motto was ��Let��s live more like Chinese.�� They grouped together a number of college professors, artists, poets, musicians, doctors, and journalists who were to design a whole new set of Chinese customs, including New Year wall posters, greeting slogans, and festival board games; they even devised new rituals for festive celebrations and choreographed new folkdances. One of the participants recorded how their idea of Lifestyle Innovation came up. He wrote,
[Someone] suggested that people should send greeting cards to friends at the Moon Festival. Pao thinks it is a good idea. Yeung says that cocktail parties in foreign countries follow a set of .xed rules but that the Chinese feast, regardless of whether it is big or small, is always totally chaotic and messy. Wu holds the same opinion and says that he can��t stand going to those wedding feasts or whatnot because, other than eat, drink, and play mahjong, there is nothing to do. As for funerals, [the Chinese] go to church and then call the Buddhist monks to chant. It��s unfathomable. We got really excited talking more about these messy phenomena and came to the realization of how serious the matter is.
(Shum 1968a; my translation)
The campaign brought together, all at once, three important factors: the youths�� impulses to modernize; the traditionalists�� grief over the fall of the Chinese national spirit; and intellectuals�� May Fourth-style thrill of playing a vanguard role in designing a set of cultural codes for the people they claimed to represent. Although this cultural re-invention campaign did not materialize into what they had expected (namely, a popular movement that could go beyond the circle of a handful of intellectuals), it epitomized an important moment in the transformation of diasporic nationalism.
By claiming to reinvigorate in Hong Kong a Chineseness that Hong Kong putatively lacked, the campaign simultaneously opened up a space in which young Hong Kong intellectuals could imagine themselves at the very center of a national revival. The diasporic imagination of China, which had taken no concrete Chinese soil as its reference but which had emerged within the Cold War power formation, subtly reversed the previous conventional center-periphery hierarchy of China and Hong Kong. This shift had a profound effect on what shortly emerged as a massive movement for a return to China that I discuss later.
Renegotiating Cultural Nationalism in Hong Kong
First, however, let us discuss how such an immanent identity crisis had the effect of concomitantly clearing the way for the emergence of a Hong Kong identity. I illustrate the complex discursive negotiations involved in this emergence by analyzing Chinese Students Weekly (Zhongguo xue sheng zhou bao) (CSW, hereafter), a high school student magazine that had a readership of over 30,000 and that was in print from 1952 to 1974. Like all the examples we have discussed above, CSW was a product of the American-dollar culture, although CSW��s manifest commitment was supposedly to the ideals of modern Chinese nationalism (Ip 1997; Wu 1999: 18). CSW was considered one of the most successful student magazines during the three decades it was published.13 Both because it circulated widely and because it provided young persons with the space in which they could learn about various new artistic or literary trends and theories, CSW earned the reputation among local scholars as the cradle of the new generation of Hong Kong cultural workers (Xiaosi 1997).
With young secondary-school students as its intended readers, CSW was relatively light on the repetitive anti-communist propaganda often found in other political publications. Yet in the .rst two decades of its publication history, it produced as much Cold War rhetoric regarding communist China��s status as a total Other as any other anti-communist publication. Using many sensational reports or stories of refugees, CSW employed a softer approach than other publications, yet consolidated the familiar heaven-and-hell framework regarding the relative merits of Hong Kong and mainland China. In the early 1950s, when the left was mobilizing Hong Kong students to go back to China for further education, CSW ran numerous articles to dissuade them from being ��deluded�� and reported on the hardships of studying in China (CSW August 15, 1952; September 12, 1952). As most of the Chinese magazines and newspapers published during that period were oriented along some partisan line, an acrimonious war of this type of propaganda was almost part of daily life.
In these respects, CSW was no different from the other refugee publications that I have discussed so far. However, unlike the others, which could cover all the abstractions of China for adult readers without even referring to any aspect of local society, CSW targeted a younger generation that was largely locally born, and so CSW could not avoid frequent characterizations of Hong Kong society that would bring the publication closer to the experiences of its young readers. When it made these characterizations, however, CSW had to gloss over the colonial reality of Hong Kong society and put it into the category of the ��free world,�� as I discuss below. Although Hong Kong in the 1950s and the 1960s was still a repressive colonial society in many aspects, with very strict police control and with no effective democratic elections for any signi.cant governmental bodies, most CSW writers described the city as part of the liberal-democracy camp, a ��fortress of free culture�� (CSW August 22, 1952). As Ip Iam-chong observes, many of the CSW writers used iconic phrases of Cold War rhetoric to refer to Hong Kong. For example, many claimed that CSW itself exempli.ed the ��free press,�� that Hong Kong education was ��free education,�� and that Hong Kong was part of the ��free world.�� All these claims stood in contrast to what they described as the hellish environment of mainland China. They depicted Hong Kong as the only place where Chinese students could breathe ��free air��; it even described Hong Kong as one of the last few places that taught the culture and history of the Motherland, China (Ip 1997: 22�V24). In order to elaborate on both the ��freedom�� that Hong Kong enjoyed and the .ourishing of Chinese culture in this ��free�� environment, CSW was not only apologetic about the colonial government and its educational policies but, in every way possible, either buried the actual experiences of life in a colonial regime or re-inscribed them as part of life in a harmonious bicultural society. For example, when in 1963, the writers debated among themselves whether or not the co-presence of Chinese and English middle schools was desirable, some young authors accused the English-school students as being unpatriotic; those students were a disgrace to the Chinese people (CSW 585/1963).14 As a rebuttal, an English-school student wrote a confession in which she recounted her experience at a Chinese primary school, where she had suffered discrimination at the hands of senior schoolmates for her poor English. She wrote that, rather than feel bitter, she turned the experience into a determination to learn both English and Chinese really well. She said it was a responsibility incumbent upon her because she felt proud to be Chinese when she made friends with foreigners; therefore, speaking good English was a matter of Chinese pride (CSW 590/1963). CSW��s editors promptly wrote an editorial comment praising her determination and af.rmed it by reiterating the importance of bilingualism in Hong Kong. The editors directly appealed to Chinese national pride rather than argued from any other position. Yet, their intention was also obvious in steering the discussion on nationalism not to reach an anti-colonialist conclusion.
As an in.uential youth magazine with literature and arts as its main content, CSW expressed political messages that were strong enough to impress its young readers, and this persuasive capacity enabled CSW gradually to creep toward a renewed interpretation of Chinese nationalism �X one that no longer took the Chinese language as the paramount embodiment of Chineseness. Incidents such as this bilingual affair were numerous in CSW and marked gradual but signi.cant shifts in the Chinese cultural-nationalist discourse in Hong Kong. On almost every National Day of the Republic of China (which falls on October 10 and which is known also as the Double Ten), CSW ran articles commemorating Sun Yat-sen��s Republican Revolution; however, the publication made an increasing effort to celebrate certain aspects of the Hong Kong way of life. The result of this shift in emphasis was to dampen those differences between Chinese cultural nationalism and the lifestyles of this colonized city, which Chinese nationalists had heavily criticized since the 1930s (see Chapter 5).
A Cold War Turn of Collaborative Colonialism
As previously mentioned, the strategic needs of the West��s Cold War anti-communism assigned to Hong Kong a frontline role in stamping out the spread of communism. Chinese cultural nationalism was instrumental in this strategic consideration; the only condition was that the role should not jeopardize the colonial governance of Hong Kong. Therefore, to reverse the antagonism between Chinese nationalists and British colonial rule, the task became one of forging a new ideological hegemony that would reconcile potential con.icts between Hong Kong��s colonial reality and Hong Kong��s aspiration for national autonomy. A re-fashioned Chinese cultural nationalism, exempli.ed by CSW, was thus neither conservative and atavistic nor anti-imperialistic, radical, and utopian; for the nationalism was contained within a Cold War framework in service to the West. In place of the new-old dichotomy or the progressive-traditional binary, relationships between colonialism and nationalism within the Cold War framework now all took second place to the two-camps rhetoric of here-there, free-dictatorial, us-them.
Ip Iam-chong describes how the mutually accommodating relationships between Chinese cultural nationalism and colonialism led, eventually and by means of an invoked Hong Kong identity, to a social conservatism. He states,
Fanon discusses both how the identity of native nationalists was indeed continuous with that of the colonizers and how the native nationalists longed to occupy the space previously occupied by the colonizers�K In Hong Kong, cultural nationalism did not con.ne itself to the frame left by the Western colonizer. Rather, the two were, in different areas, complicit with each other in establishing colonial rule. Cultural nationalists called for the solidarity of Hong Kong society in the name of ��the people�� and ��social interest�� �X out of which it was hoped that a formative ��civil society�� would be born. However, far from being an arena in which resistance against the authoritarian state would be launched, this civil society was subjugated to the social order of stability and prosperity, to the advantage of the colonial regime.
(Ip 1997: 33; my translation)
Ip��s remark may overlook the implicit criticism that Neo-Confucianists like Tang Junyi once leveled against academic (colonial) dependency, but he is certainly right to highlight how discourses about Hong Kong identity were initially offshoots of the cultural Cold War formation. The pro-colonial-establishment notion of Hong Kong identity came out markedly in the social unrest that erupted in the mid-1960s. The CSW collective was one of the .rst groups to lend their vocal support to the government��s tough enforcement of law and order. Their reaction was so partisan that even when some members of the editorial board suggested that they should organize essays to write about the social causes of the riots, the senior member simply refused (Liu 1988; Ip 1997: 28).
The Cultural Politics of Imagining Hong Kong
Precisely at the time when the colonial government hyped ��Hong Kong belongingness�� to encourage nationalist mobilization in Hong Kong and, thus, to stem the dangerous tides of radicalization, CSW��s Cold War collaborative ideology was put to its greatest test. CSW��s readers were expressing a burgeoning interest in Hong Kong, and CSW responded to its readership��s changing focus by undergoing a process of localization: it assigned some of its pages, for example, to social issues, to reports on student movements in the West, and to introductory articles on foreign literary and .lm theories (Lo, W.L. 1996a: 54�V73). Relaxing itself from the customary anti-communist style, CSW joined discussions concerning the identity-crisis problem and, thus, echoed changes at other journals such as Panku and Jianhuang. Dogmatic anti-communist phrases gradually disappeared; Hong Kong became the CSW writers�� focus; poetry, prose, and novels about Hong Kong mushroomed. Having emerged as a ��coherent community,�� Hong Kong was both ��sensationalized�� and ��aestheticized�� by the young writers of CSW (see Ip 1997: 31). Lo Wai Luen, in her personal memoir, gives her summary of both the co-existence of multiple voices and the contradictions manifested in CSW��s later years:
From 1954 onward, Qiu Zhenli wrote an irregular column. He demonstrated what national consciousness really means, from the perspective of a Chinese intellectual; he loved talking about his nostalgia, ideals, scope of knowledge, cultural tastes, personal cultivation, and so on. He became an iconic .gure for young Hong Kong students. From 1963 onward, He Zhen wrote the column Notes of a Teacher. He always wrote from the perspective of what a Hong Kong teacher felt and thought; he used to re.ect on local re.ections from a global perspective, as [Hong Kong] was situated at the crossroads between Chinese and Western cultures. He no longer adhered to the tradition of Qiu Zhenli and therefore drew much criticism; but he considered that criticism to be re.ective of precisely the critics�� imprisonment in a static mode of knowledge. From 1969 onward, Xiaosi wrote the column Speaking on the Way. The concerns therein were extremely narrow, no longer touching on traditional culture; nor was there any new Western knowledge. The column focused solely on the youth themselves, treating the dilemmas they faced and their state of mind. It pretended to offer some very super.cial solutions, addressing the boredom and the frustration that the youth then faced. But it avoided touching on the radical social campaigns that were taking place out there in society. This meek slothfulness was very safe on the surface; in reality, it was another kind of control.
(Lo, W.L. 1996a: 66�V67; my translation, my emphasis)
Although Lo was not prepared to accept criticism that CSW had been only a pawn in the Cold War, she herself could witness how diasporic Chinese nationalism was increasingly out of touch with the fast-changing concerns of the readers. This small piece of personal memory demonstrates vividly the ambivalence of the CSW anti-communist nationalists toward the emerging Hong Kong identity: on the one hand, they wanted to see Hong Kong��s distinctiveness safeguarded against communist cultural and political intrusion; on the other hand, they sensed that, by itself, the rise of such local consciousness would inevitably expose all the problems of colonial society that they themselves were reluctant to criticize. Neither the nationalist intellectuals�� lofty pathos nor the cut-and-dried package of handy Western theories could help inquisitive young adults deal with the concrete and local colonial reality �X although both pathos and Western-in.uenced theorizing were characteristic feats of modern Chinese nationalists�� intellectualist practice. To catch up with the outburst of social and grassroots campaigns in Hong Kong, CSW was .ooded, in its later years, with reports and essays of social issues, although some readers criticized this upsurge of social concerns as super.cial, emotional, and non-engaging. The in.ux of critical discourses indeed exceeded the limits that a cultural magazine, whose initial function had been as a pro-West Cold War tool, was supposed to maintain. The editors felt surprised and disoriented as the social and cultural concerns that they had originally encouraged young Hong Kong readers to develop started to turn back on the publication.
In some ways, CSW��s more local-oriented discourses of diasporic nationalism ran into a predicament in the 1970s, as did Neo-Confucianism. Just as the obsession of Panku writers with inventing the Chineseness revealed the huge gulf between the ideality of the imaginary homeland and the philosophers�� lack of engagement with the colonial reality, CSW��s incapacity to lead the campaign for Hong Kong youth��s identi.cation with Hong Kong pointed to a general failure for the old non-leftist cultural leaders to identify a proper perspective from which the youngsters could confront Hong Kong��s colonial reality. The demise of diasporic nationalism ushered in a period replete with social and cultural discontents of different types. Many people believed that this period, remembered as the Red Era (huo hong nian dai), would be the beginning of the end of Hong Kong��s colonial past: the refugee mentality was gone; a new Hong Kong identity was budding.
III Lingering Colonialism
7
Indigenizing Colonial Power and the Return to China
I
t is nowadays a commonplace to characterize the 1970s as a monumental break for Hong Kong. While many praise the economic take-off, quite some others point to the cultural and social transformation that happened then. The rise of political activisms and radicalisms among the university students is often referred to as an important cause of those profound changes, which gave rise to the new political outlook of the postwar��s generation of locally born Hong Kong Chinese. Their growing interest in political participation is often taken as the manifestation of an emerging local consciousness which resulted from the identity crisis that surfaced after the failure of the Cold-War non-leftist diasporic Chinese nationalism to address the rather frustrating colonial reality that denied democratic participation of the local Chinese populace as well as their national belongingness. As a result, student radicalisms of the 1970s had the legitimacy of British colonial rule in Hong Kong shaken and it paved the way for the call for its return to the China Motherland. While I basically agree that the 1970s can be treated as a time when locally born Hong Kong Chinese considered themselves for the .rst time as historical subjects seeking a future and an identity of their own, I am not that sure about the signi.cant ��break�� with the past that the student radicalisms of the 1970s indeed achieved. For one thing, such a narrative obscures the continuity between diasporic Chinese nationalism and various later attempts to construct Hong Kong identity. Furthermore, it does not explain why and how a society that overwhelmingly loathed the communist instigators of the 1967 riots would, in the early 1970s, turn out a group of elite university students who would feverishly identify with Communist China and pursue Hong Kong��s return to China.1
In this chapter, I am going to examine the discursive shifts and the discursive displacements that led to a complex con.guration of identity politics between Hong Kong and China. I argue that although the change of political orientation was dramatic, we may notice signi.cant continuity between the Cold War-affected diasporic Chinese nationalism and the emergent subjectivity of the young Hong Kong elite. Such an analysis of what I will term the Return discourse should begin with a review of the postwar education system from which student movements emerged, for it constituted a prominent part of what Appadurai calls the ��ideoscape�� of 1960s and 1970s Hong Kong (Appadurai 1996). It will then move on to a few glimpses of how the Return discourse crystallized an about-turn of the political orientation among the Hong Kong Chinese intellectuals. Revealing the ideological re-orientation as one that was underpinned by the new managerialist vision which lent credence to the desires either to justify communist rule over China or to legitimize colonial governance in Hong Kong, this chapter addresses the question of how and why conditions were already there in Hong Kong for colonial power to be indigenized before the transfer of sovereignty from Britain to the PRC was realized in 1997. Such a process of the indigenization of colonial power can help explain why decolonization �X in political and cultural terms �Xis still an objective to be longed for a decade after the Chinese authorities had resumed their governmental power in Hong Kong.
The Left Turn of the Identity Crisis: The Return Discourse
Over the years, the University of Hong Kong (HKU) remained at the peak of the colonial elite education system. Since HKU was founded, four decades of political chaos in Republican China and receding British in.uence in China rendered Lugard��s grand plan to nurture a new generation of native gentlemen for China an unful.lled dream. Yet HKU �X until 1964, the only elite university �X remained a breeding ground of loyal civil servants for the colonial government and of professionals such as doctors and lawyers. The in.ux of refugees from the Mainland boosted the development of Chinese schools and led to the establishment of an informal private Chinese-language education system. However, as the university would admit only students coming from Hong Kong��s English-language schools, the Chinese-language schools were considered inferior. The formation of the bilingual Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 1964 symbolized, for the exiled intellectuals, the colonial government��s recognition of Chinese-language education; and some of them celebrated it as a signi.cant step away from English-language supremacy. During its .rst two decades, CUHK was the only alternative to the colonial educational system and received positive mention in some Hong Kong Chinese-language newspapers and magazines (Lau, J.S.M. 1971; Lee 1971; Nanbeiji 1971).
To be sure, CUHK did not initially promote itself as a radical institution that would destabilize the colonial establishment; nor did its students show any anti-colonial sentiment. On the contrary, conservative student political attitudes prevailed at the two universities. For example, both HKU and CUHK student leaders supported the government��s measures to suppress the street protests, demonstrations, and riots of 1967. Apolitical attitudes abounded on the campuses, and laments over cynicism and decadence were typical themes in student publications. Skepticism about politics reigned; everyone was suspicious that all occasions of political discussion were vulnerable to political agitation, that all campuses were in.ltrated by career students. This apoliticism in the depressed atmosphere of the 1960s gradually thawed, thanks to the political opportunism of some loyalist Chinese community leaders who tried to mend the cleft between the Chinese residents and the colonial government by launching a campaign that called for the government to increase its use of the Chinese language and to recognize the Chinese language as another of.cial language.
This act of self-promotion was no more than a grab at social support for personal advancement in the colonial co-optation structure, but it soon animated the imagination of elite university students, as they were also eager to increase their participation in university administration. To emulate the 1960s student movement in the West, elite students at HKU began to talk enthusiastically about the student��s role in politics. The call of the loyalist Chinese elite, for the government��s recognition of the Chinese language soon gained the active support of the students and turned into a wider civil and student campaign. The ragtag alliance of the Chinese Language Campaign did not win for the loyalists much credibility in the eyes of their colonial master, because other activists usurped the issue of the Chinese language as a platform to advance a wider Chinese nationalist course. Although limited, the Chinese Language Campaign was the .rst post-riot social movement that pitted Chinese identity against the colonial government (Hong-Kong-Affairs Group 1982; HKFS 1983).
Radicalizing Overseas China? �XThe Defend-Diaoyus Campaign and the Red Era
With its rather moderate demands, the Chinese Language Campaign, however, opened a can of worms regarding the ambiguous political implications of Chinese identity. The campaign��s limited goals and visions were soon superseded by the high nationalist fervor among elite students of the early 1970s.2 The event that triggered the dramatic change was the sovereignty row over the Diaoyu (Senkaku) Islands, which involved China, Taiwan, Japan, and the United States (The Seventies 1971; Kwan 1997).3 While neither of the two regimes that claimed to be the sovereign representative of all China would stand .rm in defending the sovereign rights of a tiny group of uninhabited islands, Chinese students from Hong Kong and Taiwan came forward to protest, despite the fact that there was virtually no response from the tightly controlled Mainland. Although scholars have yet to carefully assess the long-term effects that the Defend-Diaoyus Campaign (biao diao yun dong) has had on Taiwan and Hong Kong respectively, one thing is certain: undetermined sovereignty over uninhabited islands was, as an issue, the ideal leverage with which the overseas Chinese could assert and de.ne the identity of Overseas China. It symbolized perfectly the unnamable trauma of diasporic nationalism and lent support to a phantasmagorical structure that would provide a historic role for overseas Chinese.
In Hong Kong, the law enforcement��s violent suppression of a peaceful nationalist-student demonstration left the colonial authority open to wider criticism from Chinese nationalists, even though the British government was actually not involved in the territorial dispute. As a result, nationalist aspirations that the old anti-communist nationalists had nurtured soon evolved into anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism, which had great resonance with leftist radical ideologies, including anarchism, Trotskyism (as in Western student movements), and Maoist radicalism (pushed by the CCP in Hong Kong). Though none of these new radicalisms took root in Hong Kong society, the collapse of the old Cold War hegemony irreversibly made changes to local ideological discourses. The lukewarm attitude of the students�� teachers toward the Defend-Diaoyus Campaign indicated the young students�� urge to seek new perspectives beyond the framework of anti-communism. As we have previously discussed in relation to the publication of Cry New Asia, the right-wing cultural nationalists�� credibility was greatly drained. The students interpreted their acquiescence as a demonstration of hypocrisy; later, they challengingly asserted that their nationalist teachers were complicit with the Western imperialists.
The ideological disarray gave rise to severe competition among different radical positions: while the ��social-ist �� faction (she hui pai) (including Trotskyists, anarchists, and liberal democrats)4 tried to transform the discontent into energy for society-wide citizen-rights campaigns and labor movements, a strong anti-mobilization force from the homeland-ist faction (guo cui pai) was there to push the movement in the opposite direction. This homeland-ist faction advocated a much milder movement, focusing solely on national identity and taking advantage of the identity crisis. Rather than actively challenge colonial rule by, for example, organizing local labor unions or community groups, they avoided such political agendas and attempted to steer a student movement that would be more cultural in orientation. The homeland-ists arranged visiting tours to China in a bid to enhance student patriotism toward communist China, which they considered the hope for the future of socialism. Thus, although Maoism, revolution, and socialist ideals were the new trump cards in the ideological battles among young elites, the ideal that held sway was de-radicalization. There is an easy structural explanation for such duplicity: a radical Hong Kong was not in CCP geo-strategic interests.5 The blatant political opportunism of the young elite student leaders was no doubt another factor. However, such a homeland-ist stance was popular across university campuses, where the guo cui pai was a dominant faction. Such a dramatic turn of ideological orientation merits a closer look. It emerged initially not as a political ideology of the left but in the discursive space of diasporic nationalism that we have been considering throughout this chapter.
Return as Spiritual Redemption
The trope ��return�� appeared .rst in Panku, which a group of exiled Chinese nationalist intellectuals founded in 1967. The slogan was then hotly debated in the mid-1960s in different political journals, well before the young university students tried to put it in practice in the 1970s. Panku was a magazine with a rather high pro.le, wide-ranging political and cultural interests, and sharp theoretical and social concerns. It was geared toward learned persons who professed both a taste for intellectual matters and an open-minded willingness to shoulder responsibility for the nation. Started as a non-partisan intellectual and cultural magazine, it gathered together the youngest and most energetic writers in Hong Kong. However, although some HKU elite students were its readers, the magazine, like other refugee publications, circulated mainly within exiled Chinese intellectual circles in the private tertiary colleges that constituted the non-mainstream Chinese education system.
The topic of Return marked a watershed in the magazine��s development. As little as .ve years after some writers raised the problem of return, Panku changed from an anti-communist magazine to an ultra-leftist journal, and even became the command post of the Maoist pro-CCP left-wing student movement in the 1970s. During its initial stages, the pages of Panku were .lled with refugee literature, anti-communist articles, introductions to Western literary theories, and criticism of the leftists�� participation in riots; yet in 1972, it ran articles with Red Guard-styled attacks on ��rightist professors,�� ��stinking intellectuals,�� ��imperialist running dogs,�� and ��intellectual compradors�� (Panku Editorial 1972). This dramatic shift resulted not from an editorial coup d��etat but from a gradual transformation of the editorial position, which began in 1968, when the issue of return set the tone for the subsequent change of intellectual current.
A series of highly controversial but in.uential articles co-authored by Bao Cuoshi and Chen Qi, plus others, vividly illustrate the magazine��s ideological transmutations, which were underpinned by complex metonymic substitutions and displacements (Bao, C. 1967a, 1968; Bao, Y.M. 1968).6 Throughout these processes, the discourse of Overseas China that I discuss earlier was transformed into the discourse of Return.
In the 1980s and the 1990s, the term ��return�� normally referred merely to the process wherein the sovereignty of Hong Kong would transfer from Britain to China in 1997, but in the 1960s, the term had much wider philosophical meanings and strategic considerations. The concept then referred to a social and psychological process, in which the identity crisis of diasporic Chinese intellectuals could, putatively, be solved: namely, one should go back to one��s Chinese cultural roots. Thus, the concept of ��return�� was indeed a derivative from the Overseas China discourse that I have addressed. In a way, when Bao and Chen .rst raised the concept of ��return��, they used it as an answer to Tang Junyi��s rather pessimistic call to spiritual redemption, as depicted by the image of ��scattered .owers and withering fruits�� (hua guo piao ling). Tang described Chinese culture as undergoing a process of self-strengthening in one��s present suffering and rootlessness. In this regard, Bao and Chen metonymically read the call for return as a ��return to one��s roots.�� They were indeed quite elaborate about the philosophical meaning of ��return�� and linked the term up with Tang��s criticism of the idea of Taiwan political independence. They wrote,
All human life is but a movement for return, within which one brings one��s own nostalgia, contributions, and needs in order to return to the human arena where one belongs. All happiness and suffering are but the foam of these currents of return�K ��Who is Chinese?�� The question can indeed be put as: ��Who in this world is suitable to commit himself at all levels (emotional, cognitive, technical, or any other concerning everyday life) to his ability to .t himself into and, thus, to belong to a Chinese society with all its given conditions of existence, in terms of its cultural, material, geographical, and historical speci.cities as well as those related to social values and directions of social development? Only when [we] confront the fatal hindrances of this movement of return would the Chinese, with their pre-determined [fates], search for substitutes and plunge into the vacuity of human life in order to conceal the frustrations faced by their belongingness. All loss, helplessness, splitting away, and independence constitute a response to [the fact that] we cannot return.
(Bao, C. 1968: 4�V6; my translation)
Invoking an image of a predetermined Chinese identity, the authors dwelt on a highly emotional depiction of primordial ties, the severing of which were
solely accountable for the exiled intellectuals�� pathetic sense of detachment and their vain desires ��to go independently.�� In other words, they characterized the whole Taiwan-independence course as pathetic and attributed this characteristic to their loss of self-identity, which is recoverable only by a sui generis return to one��s home.
Return as Rational Choice and Application of Modernization Theory
There is another narrative �X one that ran parallel to the passionate and emotional .ow of moral appeal. What really set Bao and Chen apart from Tang Junyi, with his ardent call for intellectual responsibility, was their innovative argument: namely, that Return was also a rational choice based on a callous analysis of comparative historical sociology. In their words, because of its glorious past, China is ��a nation worthy of one��s commitment��; and because of its glorious present, ��modern Western civilization provides by far the best direction of change�� (Bao, C. 1968: 7). Invoking the imaginary schema of social evolution, they asserted that China must learn from the West ��in order to reach the ��primate�� stage of modern Chinese culture�� (Bao, C. 1968: 7). As Bao and Chen say, it was not a matter concerned solely with moral values. They claimed ��the task lies not in abstract ideas such as democracy but in its ��dynamic aspects��
�X known as social mobilization�� (Bao, C. 1968: 7). Thus, the West exempli.ed the best experience in successful ��social integration and social mobilization, for the secret formula for societal survival was the triad: nationalism, industrialization, and national education.��
This formulaic equation invoked by Bao and Chen seems nothing new to sociology students now. Anyone can get it from a sociology textbook. However, in the 1960s, this formula provided Bao and Chen with strong rhetorical ammunition that they used to .ght a two-front battle. On the one hand, they shook the traditionalist rearguard interpretation of nationalism; on the other hand, they relentlessly attacked all-out-Westernization advocates because, insofar as they prematurely insisted on implementing a democratic system in China, they voiced an unrealistic desire to skip a stage of social evolution. Bao and Chen defended a standard path of social evolution, on which mobilization precedes a full-scale adoption of Western values, and repeated the unsurprising Chinese-Marxist criticism that liberals are ignorant of Chinese reality. Bao and Chen declared that liberals were intellectual compradors, who did no less harm to China than bureaucrats, landlords, and warlords. The most curious feature of this barrage of charges was that not a single Marxist or Maoist term was used; instead, Bao and Chen borrowed both the analytical framework and the vocabulary from either Neo-Confucianism or Western modernization theories. Readers of Tang Junyi would doubtless recognize Tang��s criticism of the infamous reality of academic dependency. Because of this dependency, the exiled intellectuals could sell the West only a hackneyed knowledge of China that was the product of the fei qing yan jiu (��studies of the bandit regime��) industry. However, Bao and Chen armed the leftist critique of intellectual compradorism with the weapon of evolutionary historical sociology; for only the latter could offer terms (the level of social mobilization) by which one could rigorously measure, and thus legitimize, the achievements of the communist regime. Only through such a re-articulation of the Overseas China discourse could Hong Kong��s diasporic nationalism change its orientation from the right to the left. Apparently, such a shift was simply a swing from one political position to another by some of the intellectuals; however, we should further examine the content of such a leftist turn to understand its implications.
From Studies of the Bandit Regime to Studies of the Nation
In another article, Bao and Chen pleaded for all overseas Chinese intellectuals to abandon fei qing yan jiu and set out for new guo qing yan jiu (studies of the nation) (Bao, C. 1967a). By shifting further away from high principles and moral burdens, Bao and Chen, however, subtly displaced the moral authority of the Neo-Confucianist notion of national spirit. They also somewhat sarcastically attempted to persuade all overseas Chinese scholars to engage in studies of the nation, as it was bound to be a vogue and have a huge cash value. Believing that there would be a new fad to probe into the secret of the Chinese model of development, they predicted that guo qing yan jiu would become a new knowledge industry, and they tried to lay down its methodological principles:
Knowledge is only the result of those methodological processes in which natural or human events are symbolized and put into the chain of causality and logical relations, through which the unknown becomes known�K What we have learnt from foreign countries is that there are other methodologies for data analysis, and we should then .nd some new data to produce knowledge. We should not denigrate ourselves as the classiest Peking duck, .lled with the junk of past Chinese events�K The best students studying abroad (liu xue sheng) are those who read a lot and travel a lot but who eventually go back to Chinese affairs, using new scienti.c methods to dig up and re.ne new-found data.
(Bao, C. 1967b: 35; my translation)
Targeting the liu xue sheng community, whose members were often guilt-ridden by their comprador position as structured by Cold War intellectual dependency, Bao and Chen called for a new nationalist scholarship and, thereby, met head-on the Orientalist-comprador complex. Their whole set of rhetorical feats was to add therapeutic value to the exiled intellectuals�� vocational crafts, by re-articulating their desire for knowledge into a new intellectualistic discourse within which the Chinese intellectuals could redeem their ��lost soul�� without abandoning the cultural capital they had accumulated in the Western academies: namely, scienti.c methodology. It was in China that they could not only re-discover their cultural roots but also discover treasures never before noticed. Bao and Chen wrote,
When the vagrants who beg for knowledge in the foreign academies suddenly realize that their own home is indeed piled with mountainous fodder for knowledge, they should feel exhilarated. Unfortunately�K many liu xue sheng treat that nice garden as a desert and produce only knowledge of the bandits (fei qing), thereby leaving a vacuum that allows foreign scholar experts to make distorted judgments and reports that mix half-knowledge with sincerity.
(Bao, C. 1967b: 35; my translation)
China��s undiscovered treasures can make one rich, can create knowledge (particularly in the form of scholarship), and can even transform one��s identity. Therefore, Bao and Chen state,
Liu xue sheng always dream of Westernization and are fond of anything new�K [Yet] from the viewpoint of bringing about new things, mainland China is an unprecedented cultural theater in history, Chinese or Western�K Even with their intentions to test the taste of foods cooked according to Western recipes, they can still have their heart set in the East and do some effortless guo qing yan jiu; they might .nd out later that China does not need Westernization. It might be the case that liu xue sheng themselves need some Sinicization. But it would not be too late for Sinicization if one has one��s heart set in the East.
(Bao, C. 1967b: 35; my translation)
Uneasy about Bao��s call for a Return to the PRC, Lao Siguang, a prominent anti-communist philosopher teaching in CUHK, joined the ideological contest. He composed a rejoinder in which he endorsed their critique of the liu xue sheng��s irresponsible attitudes. Many of these students apparently cared more about getting foreign �X especially American �X passports than about their own society. Lao argued that this critique was applicable mainly to Taiwanese liu xue sheng. He declared that Hong Kong students were less fanatical seekers of U.S. citizenship, that they bore a greater sense of responsibility for China, and that they were less subservient to Western Chinese experts. However, what Lao might not have realized was that he and his anti-communist intellectual allies had to address
�X at the level of its epistemological foundations �X the criticism of the Cold War structure of intellectual dependency. To neglect this task was to open the .oodgate, before which anti-communist nationalists could no longer hold any moral high ground against the leftist tide. This was exactly what happened in the 1970s, when the diasporic cultural nationalism increasingly weakened itself as an anti-communist moral and social critique and became a discursive domain dominated by a leftist version of modernization sociology.
Ethics of Social Mobilization
Sociological reasoning legitimized the discourse of modernization, which in turn acted as a defense for the CCP��s achievement of a fully mobilized Chinese nation. The ethics of mobilization annulled the proclaimed Cold War value hierarchy, which, for instance, had put democracy above dictatorship. The young Chinese intellectuals�� active incorporation of modernization sociology into the CCP apologetic, as manifested by Bao and Chen, realized itself, ironically, in the mid-1960s, at the height of the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China, when the Red Guards were delegitimizing sociology for its philistine, bourgeois, and Western roots. In the following decade, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping each suffered political fallout stemming from their advocacy of the modernization program; despite this, the curiosity that Hong Kong students displayed for China in the Red Era was fuel for an upsurge of sociological interest in the developmental model of New China. According to its programmatic design, learning to know (ren shi) China would bring about identi.cation (ren tong) with China. Having already laid out this path, Bao and Chen believed there should never be anything standing between one��s study of the nation and one��s being a patriot. Even those overseas intellectuals, who initially studied China out of merely rational or utilitarian motivations, would eventually value the motivations that drove them to solve their existential puzzles, and embrace patriotic value commitments.
However valid and interesting Bao and Chen��s assertion that there should be a bridge between positivistic studies and hermeneutical studies, their foresight concerning intellectual Return-ism was more than a stunt exercise of dialectical synthesis; it was, indeed, also about a possible shift from value commitments to utilitarianism; from patriotism to instrumentalism. And it was precisely this scenario that unfolded over the following three decades: Increasingly, the overseas intellectuals soon realized that Return was an advantageous fad.
From the epistemological and political structure of the Return discourse, we can learn that the Cold War was never merely about ideological con.icts. Nor did positivistic and functionalist sociology work solely for the American Cold War allies in their opposition to the Third World or to the socialist camp. In the same vein, the Return discourse was never simply cultural nationalism. If the Neo-Confucian cultural nationalists such as Tang Junyi were deeply agonistic about a perpetually ��unsettled Chinese Nation forever in the limbo of a travelling life��, the comparison of the overseas Chinese to the Jews was bound to arise. Indeed, in the 1960s, struggle of the Jews to return to their so-called homeland garnered great admiration among exiled Chinese communities in Hong Kong, who constantly invoked the Jewish Return; however, the focus of these communities�� interest, herein, was not the religious and moral basis of the Jewish Return but the practical establishment and development of a territorial state by the Jews.7 The sociologization of the diasporic Chinese intellectuals�� relationship with China effectively compromised the philosophically unsettled national spirit fostered by the philosophers �X a territorialization of the de-territorialized spirit of the Chinese diaspora. The sociological axiom of value-neutrality arrested the anxious, critical national spirit. For example, Cheung Tak-shing, a radical student beaten by police during the Defend-Diaoyus Campaign, wrote re.ectively in 1972 on Hong Kong��s young generation��s underlying ignorance of Chinese culture and on the dif.culty that he had experienced when weighing the pros and cons of communist rule in China (Cheung, T.S. 1972). He ended up with an equally weighted balance but said it was proven that communism at least could be a strong instrument for making ��the state rich and the military strong�� (fu guo qiang bing). Then he concluded that there were actually two types of return: one of action, and another in spirit. For him, to return-in-action, one had to endure great personal sacri.ce and to do so in the absence of any guarantee that one will earn the high regard of others or will be really useful. Therefore, one should feel ��comfortably at ease�� in choosing to work outside the home country. Cheung asserted that to feel comfortably at ease would no longer mirror comparable feelings from the past: the actual return that one had conceived to be a possibility took the form of a spiritual accomplishment now.
However, the breakdown of the Cold War anti-communist ideological hegemony did not always end up in the moral neutralism of the type exempli.ed by Cheung��s prudent sociological balance sheet. Those more eager to contribute to the reconstruction of the shattered worldview after the cultural Cold War in Hong Kong were more than comfortably at ease with intellectual aloofness. For example, Lau Siu-kai painfully argued for a heroic modernization crusade that would root out impediments to Chinese modernization. He wrote,
On the road to modernization, where old thoughts, institutions, and
habits have to be destroyed and cleared away, pain is inevitable and
unavoidable for us Chinese. We Chinese have to have determination
to realize this great goal and accept every dif.culty and challenge,
striving to build our country into the world��s strongest state.
(Lau, S.K. 1969: 17; my translation)
Neither Lau Siu-kai nor Cheung Tak-shing returned to China ��in action�� (in Cheung��s phrase). Yet, both of them later became well-known sociologists in Hong Kong. Cheung��s comfort in a spiritual return effectively supplemented Lau��s more aggressive statism, as well as his interest in statecraft. With all kinds of student and general publications�� growing interest in sociological, economic, and political-scienti.c analyses of China, both the old anti-communist magazines such as Jianhaung and the ideologically disoriented CSW were in decline.
Charged with a new faith in the Mainland��s CCP regime for its ��remarkable record�� of modernization (ironically, still a heretical term to the CCP state in the 1970s), the new Hong Kong radicals soon placed atop their list of enemies the old anti-communists like Liu Shuxian and Lao Siguang, who had advocated the most illusory ��third road�� (Luo 1972; Zhao 1972). Panku magazine took an extreme left turn, showering Lao, Luo, and their like with relentless ad hominem attacks. Thrown in their faces were charges that their anti-communism was not only outdated and feudalistic, but also slavish to the foreigners and of a comprador nature; they themselves and their thoughts should be the objects of revolution. However, such a meager Hong Kong version of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was short lived. The left��s cultural-national fanaticism did not survive beyond the downfall of the Gang-of-Four in 1976, which ended the whole radical Red Era. The accompanying �X though, at any rate, secondary
�X tendencies of the radical idealism of Hong Kong��s elite students suffered a heavy blow because the idealized image of a motherland (zu guo) abruptly shattered as the ugly realities of Mao��s era surfaced rapidly after the downfall of the ultra-leftists; the student movements that had drawn their inspiration from the waves of radical idealism soon subsided. The collapse of ideology was accompanied by a loss of orientation; but the moral vacuum left behind was soon .lled by a new enthusiasm among the new generation for the CCP��s new program of modernization led by Deng Xiaoping. This was a program that both Hong Kong��s radicals and old pro-establishment conservatives were invariably eager to join.
However, this pendulum swing was not simply ideological; indeed, from a careful examination of the radical discourses, we can see that those young ex-radicals had discursively, effectively, and in advance prepared themselves for such a right-turn because their embrace of Red China served to realize, so it seemed, both their desire for a strong state and their utopian ideals. The pragmatic face of that radicalism became much more palpable when the radicalism itself subsided. Now, being on the left in Hong Kong was increasingly an index of one��s pro-PRC status rather than of one��s identi.cation with any progressive values; one was likely to appropriate the radical pasts of a generation as one��s political capital: that is, as records of one��s long-held patriotism.8 What took the place of idealism was the sociologist��s zeitgeist: national-statism plus managerialism. They emerged when the manifest Cold War ideological rivalry was coming to an end; the new Chinese patriotism took shape precisely in conjunction with both the demise of the national spirit and the moral agony of the exiled intellectuals. Such a recon.guration of nationalism illustrates the fact that an upsurge of radicalism, together with the in vogue anti-colonial rhetoric, did not constitute a genuine decolonization process in Hong Kong. What we can witness in the 1970s was a decisive turn foregrounding ideologically the localization of colonial power. Proactively preparing for such a turn by developing a socio-political discourse was Lau Siu-kai, who had been laboring to extend theoretical unity to the governmentality that straddled colonial Hong Kong and postcolonial Hong Kong.
Managerializing Colonialism
Lau Siu-kai is a political sociologist, trained at HKU and in the United States., and once a frequent political critic in public media before he became political advisor to the Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region) government in 2002. I consider Lau Siu-kai the paradigmatic case for late-colonial Hong Kong��s localization of colonial power because his political engagement and his academic works demonstrate only too patently his perhaps incomparably consistent efforts on two fronts: (1) to make the alleged success of British colonial rule in Hong Kong a rigorous theoretical and sociological issue and (2) to apply his insights, distilled from that colonial rule, to axial principles whose practical function would emerge when Hong Kong phased out its colonialism.
To be sure, localization of colonial power, as epitomized by Lau��s case, is not equivalent to decolonization, if the term ��decolonization�� refers to the efforts and the processes that bring an end to the colonial domination of natives. The termination of British colonial rule over Hong Kong was a matter resulting almost totally from secret diplomatic deals between the Chinese and the British governments. During the long transition toward the .nal handover of sovereignty in 1997, the two sides played up over-dominating political rhetoric that emphasized a stable transition (ping wen guo du) rather than cultural and political demands for an end to colonialism. In this light, Lau��s interest in theorizing the success of colonial rule in Hong Kong gained prominence when the Sino-British Joint Declaration about Hong Kong��s handover was signed.
Lau Siu-kai can trace his lineage back to members of the colonial intelligentsia such as Ho Kai and Wu Tingfang whom we discussed in previous chapters; however, he does not come forth as an apologist for British imperialism in terms of embracing the Empire��s civilizational ideals. Like Ho Kai, Lau also exhibited his own patriotism concerning the strengthening of China; his writings from his youth, as quoted in the above section, depict society-concerned students, who were common features of the Hong Kong landscape in the 1960s and the 1970s. However, Lau��s patriotic impulses are usually buried under the very aloof social science terminology that peppers his mature and well-known works. In his seminal book Society and Politics in Hong Kong (1982), Lau claims to have deciphered the secret codes of Hong Kong��s success and, in this regard, presents a theoretical framework that concerns Hong Kong politics and society and that, critics chided, was too clumsy. The key concept of the framework is utilitarian familism, proposed .rst in an earlier paper that discusses the attitudinal orientations of the postwar Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong. Lau inherited the legacies of Cold War East Asia scholarship, which Marion Levy and Lucien Pye exempli.ed. Asserting that familism comprises the essential cultural and psychological traits of Chinese, all of them took ��family�� as the de.ning social unit for Chinese. Referring to data generated from a questionnaire survey, Lau claims that Hong Kong Chinese have developed the social variant utilitarian familism, which stands in contrast to the stereotypical traditional Chinese familism. Considered by Lau to be ��an adaptation of traditional familism to the industrial, urban colonial society of Hong Kong�� (Lau 1981: 201), this variant of familism, rather than hamper modernization, can indeed bring it about, for the utilitarian aspect of this variant can guarantee that Hong Kong Chinese would concentrate solely on the pursuit of material well being. In other words, in lieu of utilitarian individualism, or the Weberian entrepreneur charged with the Calvinist work ethic, Hong Kong Chinese can follow their own roadmap to ideal economic success.
Moreover, Lau did not just join the chorus of the then-fashionable pursuit of East Asian economic miracles by simply repeating the cliche about the dependence of economic development on cultural contributions, which invariably invoke the stereotype of Chinese Confucian-familism. Instead, Lau had another political agenda. He argues in his works that Hong Kong Chinese focus on materialistic and utilitarian pursuits; therefore, the community often is inward looking and prefers to be left alone. This introspective isolation is, for Lau, a key component of the political culture distinctively prevalent in Hong Kong; and he uses it to account for what he sees as Hong Kong��s long-held political stability, which he states was particularly pronounced when the postwar refugee population .ooded the city. On the basis of these observations, Lau proposes another notion, the ��minimally-integrated socio-political system,�� to describe Hong Kong, a place where polity and society are said to be ��mutually secluded.��
This image of overtly materialistic people who lack class consciousness and who pursue short-term prospects is reminiscent of the Lewisian notion of a ��culture of poverty,�� hotly debated in the 1960s (Lewis 1959). However, a signi.cant difference between Lewis and Lau is that Lau��s culture has been emerging from poverty, whereas Lewis�� culture trapped the poor in a cycle of poverty. Indeed, a familistic culture of peasant immigrants was discussed in Ban.eld��s study on Italian cities, where he found a kind of ��amoral familist�� culture (Ban.eld 1958); yet, curiously, Lau has never acknowledged Lewis or Ban.eld in his writings. Lau resorts to a new variant of Hong Kong exceptionalism by claiming that utilitarian familism is unique to Hong Kong (Lau, S.K. 1982: 182). Also, where Ban.eld and Lewis point to the peasants�� maladaptation to city life, Lau��s version of the familistic personality is, interestingly, functionally related to colonialism and modernization. Lau states,
[Hong Kong] Chinese society can be considered as an inward-looking, self-contained and atomistic society with apolitical orientations and low potential for political mobilization. Such a society is a perfect complement to the ��secluded�� bureaucratic polity, and their coexistence as well as mutual avoidance provides a clue to the explanation of political stability in Hong Kong.
(Lau, S.K. 1982: 68, my emphasis)
Fred Y. L. Chiu (1997) criticizes Lau��s stereotypes about the Chinese family and his reliance on survey data. For Chiu, the modern Sinologist��s obsession with the Chinese family succeeds only in making the social and the political disappear. Chiu writes,
In the process of a contemporary manufacturing of ��positivist�� knowledge about Hong Kong, the history of political activity was concealed, preventing or obstructing the development of current political movements. Combining model-.tting post-hoc reasoning, question-begging, and a defensive apologia, researchers who claimed to study ��depoliticization�� were apparently depoliticized themselves. In the process, their research objects and objects of research were desocialized. And, as a corollary, the research subjects were hardly aware of what alternatives might be.
(Chiu 1997: 307)
I have no trouble with Chiu��s overall assessment of Lau. My only contention is that Chiu��s reading into Lau��s self-depoliticization is perhaps a bit far fetched, for Lau��s research, including his methodology, has never offered a full culturalist account of this colonial miracle. Lau��s theoretical discourse has, instead, a far too clear political agenda �X too clear perhaps for Chiu to interrogate Lau on whether alternative ways of understanding the Chinese self are available for Lau��s research subjects. In other words, Lau has not really concealed the political by following the Cold War China studies�� tendency to naturalize culture because, according to Lau, Hong Kong political culture has never been a purely cultural matter abstracted from the colonial institutional context. Instead, and as usual, he immediately extracts from survey data about people��s attitudes his own plot, wherein pure descriptions of political-institutional settings abound. First, he argues,
Hong Kong��s Chinese society is a product of the mutual adjustment of
an admixture of Chinese people who were divided by ethnic, territorial,
dialectal and ideological identi.cations and who are suspicious of one
another, all the while confronted with the pressing need to deal with
the birth pains of a rapidly industrializing society.
(Lau, S.K. 1982: 67, my emphasis)
Conceiving Hong Kong as a society of blended Chinese ethnicities, Lau invokes old colonialist imaginaries about unruly natives incapable of self-government. Then, he sneaks in a political argument for his sociological problem: it is because of colonial rule that Hong Kong can facilitate its own rapid industrialization and can thereby bring together again the already divided mainland Chinese, as if colonialism is what the Chinese themselves ask for. He asserts, therefore, that Hong Kong Chinese exhibit a hidden proclivity toward subservience to the British colonizer. In explaining the legitimacy that the colonial government enjoys, Lau states,
There is a certain a priori character to colonial authority. In the .rst place,
it is very natural for the Chinese subjects to transfer their traditional
conception of authority as a ��given,�� a .xture in the cosmic order, to
their colonial master. (My emphasis)
(Lau, S.K. 1988: 20)
Rightly highlighted by Chiu, Lau��s diagnosis of the Chinese people��s innate political apathy is nothing original. It echoes almost exactly Report of the Working Party on Local Administration (1967), which was composed by the colonial government just prior to the left-wing labor and urban riots of 1967. The report discusses the Chinese political view: ��The people must impose their full trust and con.dence in their rulers, and have cause to oppose them only if the regime fails to provide the conditions of peace, order and security to which the community is entitled�� (quoted by Chiu 1997: 295). The same image of politically apathetic Chinese appears also in works by N. J. Miners (1975) and Ambrose Y. C. King (1972); the latter adhered closer than Lau to the culturalist paradigm of East Asian capitalism and, almost a decade before Lau, labored on the similar Orientalist perception of Chinese. However, I see Lau��s writings as texts whose problematic differs from that of the conventional culturalist �X or, in Ludden��s (1993) words, of the ��Orientalist empiricist.�� Lau insists on Hong Kong��s distinct character, particularly in relation to the managed city life and the urban structure of Hong Kong. In short, a close reading of Lau��s texts will show that underpinning his presentation of empiricist data and his jugglery of concepts is indeed a particular urban-political imaginary through which he arrives at a complete phantasmagoric bird��s eye view of successful colonial rule in Hong Kong.
Urban Society and Depoliticization
Lau stresses the important role that Hong Kong��s urban setting plays in his theoretical project about the city��s colonial modernity:
First, the insigni.cance of a rural sector in Hong Kong distinguishes it from other developing countries where the sharp contrast between the urban and the rural sectors is a highly destabilizing force... Second, geographical mobility and the relaxation of social control in an urban society make the continuation of Chinese families founded on traditional principles impossible, thus allowing utilitarianistic familism to .ourish... Third...as a municipal government, these [public] demands [for urban services], when they are forthcoming, are of such a nature that confrontation between the government and large organized groups in society can in the main be avoided. This is because of the ��divisibility�� of urban services, which discourages the formation of broadly-based demand-making groups.
(Lau, S.K. 1982: 180�V181)
For Lau, the politically (though de.nitely not economically) self-contained city of Hong Kong managed to weaken its ties to traditional Chinese familism, which he conceived as unfavorable to modern economic development. Yet the radical transformation of Chinese national character �X which is imputed by many writers like Lau to its long and prevalent life of the peasantry �X would still have been unsuccessful had it not been for the ways in which the colonial government administered the city��s life. In Lau��s view,
The non-ideological nature of urban service demands renders them amenable to pragmatic administrative resolution. The fragmentation of demands for urban services makes aggregation of demands over a large geographical area dif.cult; therefore, they can be easily dealt with by the bureaucracy, particularly when the level of demands is as generally low as it is in Hong Kong. The urban nature of Hong Kong thus contributes to pragmatic, ad hoc and piecemeal issue resolution.
(Lau, S.K. 1982: 181, my emphasis)
The piecemeal nature of urban issues, as understood by Lau, plays a crucial role in his framework of managerialism. He argues that it is only such a small urban society that can minimize people��s demands, to which the responses constitute only ��boundary politics.�� In this style of informal and non-institutionalized politics, only incremental changes are possible. As a result, a fuller integration of bureaucratic polity and Chinese society can be avoided; such integration is asserted by Lau to be detrimental to political stability. Lau states,
Through the selection of enforcement or non-enforcement of rules, the dampening of issues by means of persuasion, compromise, co-optation, bargaining, cajoling, assuming threatening postures or deliberately setting up informal rules, the government is able to avoid formal restructuring of the political institutions in the colony. As informal concessions granted are usually couched in secrecy and are highly diversi.ed and individualistic in nature, they usually fail to aggregate into system-changing forces.
(Lau, S.K. 1982: 169)
Lau��s quite idiosyncratic conception of city life may be stretching the teachings of urban sociology; but, as a narrative device, it constitutes the essential part of an imaginary landscape in which an aversion to any rural hinterland corresponds to an image of a backward but turbulent China. By characterizing the Hong Kong colonial system as an urban system, Lau abstracts out the rationalities that have underlain postwar-war colonial rule and reconstitutes them as a set of aptly applied governing technologies, with which local power aspirants can indigenize or re-appropriate colonialism. However, the indigenization of colonial power also requires Lau to redeploy the usual Orientalist stereotypes. Displacing the Orientalist dichotomy between the traditional-unlawful-mysterious East and the modern-legal-rational West, Lau metonymically slides onto another internal-Orientalist binarism, at one end of which is traditional-rural-unruly China and, at the other end, modern-urban-dutiful Hong Kong. In Lau��s hands, this new set of contrasts, already made possible by the whole Cold War discourse of modernization, undergoes a re-articulation that includes an apologetic justi.cation of colonialism. Much Cold War propaganda constantly and rhetorically reminded Hong Kong of its stable urban status quo; however, Lau��s theorization of Hong Kong��s modernization reinforces the ideology that colonial governance is the essential ingredient in the magical formula that a Chinese society must take to shake off its backward and despotic rural traditions. Lau equates the governance of a small city with the political tricks of ��persuasion, co-optation, bargaining, cajoling�� and other strategies common to undemocratic colonial governments. In so doing, Lau, with a sleight of hand, not only legitimizes colonial governance but also asserts that it is necessary sustenance for the urban-citizen identity of Hong Kong Chinese. Lau paints a picture of how rural obstacles to modernization have ceded to a small-scale bureaucratic government that can remain small precisely because it has been a detached colonial authority. Only through this institution has Hong Kong avoided rural nightmares such as regionalism, ethnic con.icts, and the .ooding tides of political demands. In short, Lau argues that Hong Kong��s possession of both a colonial status and an urban status has structurally privileged the territory in comparison with differently colonized or less developed places.
At any rate, Lau��s apparent need to re-articulate the colonialist stereotype of binary opposites, rather than present a coherent theory of urbanism, compels him to meander along with the concept of city. However, Lau��s dystopian vision of the city sits uneasily with his admiration of traditional Chinese society��s familistic values. At one point, Lau expresses his anxieties in a rather nostalgic tone by warning against the secular process of disorganization that Chinese society is undergoing. In one of his essays written in the early 1980s, he warns against ��the process of industrialization, commercial growth, and the rise in living standards, urbanization, and Westernization�� (Lau, S.K. 1983: 552�V553). Moreover, Lau insists on shouldering the government with these problems, as they cry out mainly for accelerated expansion of governmental services. But no matter how effective the government is in dealing with these problems, they upset the colonial-political formula that Lau set for Hong Kong because, he argues, they will erode Hong Kong��s alleged delicate balance between polity and society.
As a matter of fact, the ��mutual seclusion of polity and society from each other��, or the clumsier neologism of a ��minimally integrated socio-political system,�� is the founding myth of Hong Kong enshrined by Lau; he repeatedly makes use of this myth to legitimize the colonial rule of Hong Kong as essential in buttressing a ��depoliticized haven,�� however much the serious historical scholarship on Hong Kong (cited in Chapter 1) has already contradicted this entrenched myth. Lau is certainly not the .rst person to circulate a counterfactual fable. Ambrose King, in his early work, makes use of another neologism �X ��administrative absorption of politics�� �X to characterize the operation of the colonial state. King compares Hong Kong��s colonial rule to what Fairbank calls ��synarchy,�� traceable to a long tradition of alien rule allegedly fostered by China throughout its long history. Seemingly, Lau, King and Fairbank share among themselves cognate terminologies and concepts. But, for our present purpose, it is worth looking critically into their subtle differences.
Tani E. Barlow (1997) analyzes how Fairbank��s historiographical narrative set in motion an essential difference between the notion of a commonsensical, universal, but static West and the notion of an endlessly fragmented, marginal China; yet by making China and the West two ��internally friable, externally discrete, boundaried, patterned, concrete�� entities, instead of organs and sites of a world system integrated by colonial relations, Fairbank conditions how colonialism disappears in his text. Therefore, a semi-colonial treaty port setting would become, for Fairbank, just a lamentable type of hybrid rickshaw-culture where the two sides rule collaboratively and on equal terms. The logic of this binary fusion allows Fairbank to bypass colonial power relations as a key issue and thus to play at the rhetorical level with words and metaphors like symbiosis, diarchy, and bilateralism (Barlow 1997a: 391�V393). To Barlow, Fairbank��s conceptual constellation is indispensable to Cold War China-studies scholarship, which constantly put colonialism under erasure. The criticism that Barlow leveled against Fairbank can also apply to the case of King because King��s technical ideas regarding, for example, the administration��s absorption of politics, had the same effect of making colonialism disappear.
However, it is worthwhile to look closer into Lau��s thought. In Barlow��s eyes, Lau is undoubtedly the heir of Cold War China-studies scholarship as constituted by its three main founders: Marion Levy, Lucian Pye, and Fairbank. Yet, in the case of Lau, what is interesting is not that he perpetuates the basic tenets of this dominating Cold War Sinological hegemony (surely he does) but that he makes a managerialist twist on the hegemony �X a twist that allows him to get beyond the vague and slightly romantic concept of synarchy, which best .ts the Westerners�� nostalgic longing for collaborative rule in the treaty ports. If, according to Barlow, the main problem with the whole .eld of Cold War China-studies scholarship is that it erases China��s (semi-)colonialism by treating it as non-colonialism, King��s project and Lau��s project, representative of the late-colonial local elite, mark themselves off from Fairbank��s project by running an opposite course: rather than put colonialism under erasure by denying its existence, King and Lau try to explicitly valorize colonial experiences and the colonial system by neutralizing them with a set of different terms. Barlow is certainly right to characterize Fairbank��s project as a kind of modern discourse that always plays upon the system of logocentric binary oppositions and that always inscribes ��othering�� relations on its very foundation. As such, Fairbank has no control on how these ��othering�� exercises can be furthered. Such a legacy is clearly detectable in Lau��s effort to reformulate, along the urban-rural axis, the self-other relation under colonialism �X an attempt to revalorize the colonial hierarchy by mobilizing the Orientalist anxieties internalized in the body politic of Hong Kong. Lau��s managerialist turn is crucial to ending the old colonialist fantasy and to inaugurating an era marked not by the independence or autonomy of the decolonized natives but by the indigenization or localization of colonial power. It is understandable that Lau��s writings host a conceptual play and that this play, informed by his managerialist-Machiavellian vision, submits wholly neither to a positivist paradigm of knowledge nor to the conditions of a consistent culturalist argument per se. Rather, what concerns him most is the mechanics of social and cultural engineering, which work to put every variable governable under the indigenized colonial power.
The Grand Political Design of Colonizer(s)
In the early 1980s, the menace of a disorganized metropolis once prompted Lau to speak as a reformer when he criticized the restricted and ineffective extent of local administrative reforms recommended by the 1980 Green Paper (Lau, S.K. 1983: 562). He made his own proposal, wherein he gave careful consideration to the restoration of familistic Chinese society��s self-regulatory capacity and to the substitution of a modern outlook for the defunct traditionalist intermediate organizations. To this end, he recommended that Hong Kong society run the moderate risk of limited politicization. He wrote,
The insertion of an intermediate layer between the government and
the people will necessarily be depoliticising because it is comparatively
easier to co-opt a limited number of local leaders into the political process
than to control a huge, unruly mass of people.
(Lau, S.K. 1981: 883, my emphasis)
This passage describes perfectly the spirit that characterized the local administrative reforms of the early to mid-1980s. In other words, it was during the next-to-last decade of British colonial rule in Hong Kong that the colonial government launched these reforms. And by that time, Lau was already an informal advisor to the colonial authorities, so his theory cast a dark shadow on these reforms �X in terms of ideas, if not of actual operative calculations. The limited reforms re.ected a conservative move of the late-colonial government to introduce, at a staggering pace, a cumbersome and inegalitarian system of ��functional constituency�� which is seldom found elsewhere in the world.
Relying no more on the motivational support derived from utilitarian familists, the reformers sought to better integrate the government into society and vice versa; yet, by boosting the growth of interest groups (e.g., different professional, sectional, or other lobby groups), the approach fragmented the emerging civil society �X divided it into different functional castes. Informing all the reforms was an urge to continue the colonial governing strategies: co-opt the elite and approach nothing like democracy. Such a design was shot through with the colonialist assumption that the natives are never ready for self-government. Well short of thorough democratic electoral reform, functional constituencies, which had been forming themselves politically for the past decades, scrambled to squeeze into the narrow categories available for seats on the Legislative Council or other political bodies. Such rapid politicization of social sectors has left Hong Kong, even after 1997, trapped in the same old colonial situation of divide-and-rule. At the same time, Hong Kong can turn to neither an of.cial colonial master who would curb the ever rising tides of sectoral political demands nor a parliamentary democracy and a party system that might effectively integrate social demands into government.
In the late 1980s, when the decline of British rule was imminent, Lau wrote a number of in.uential articles to win for himself a new career that, under the newly con.gured Chinese authorities, might .ourish. For the fame he won by writing these essays, he was co-opted by the Chinese authorities to give advices on the drafting of the mini-constitution (Lau, S.K. 1988). Extending his thesis of the political docility of Hong Kong Chinese, he sold the Chinese side a new package of ideas on the architecture of future postcolonial governance. The principle that society should make the best use of colonial governmentality continued to guide Lau, who put aside his previous contradictory diagnoses of the modernizing city and proposed to build a new governing coalition that would consist of the old and new power elite and that would serve post-1997 Hong Kong. Believing himself to have perceived the essence of Hong Kong��s political culture, he was more unequivocal about the managerialist desire underpinning his analysis. He concluded, in one of his essays, that it was only by ��following the development of Hong Kong, [that] the relation between the polity and the society should be tackled more skillfully�� (Lau, S.K. 1988: 117; ; my emphasis). Amid the tide of changing political allegiances during Hong Kong��s late transitional period, Lau��s covert apologies for colonialism were relatively less repugnant than the statements of many scholars in his .eld. Therefore, Lau gained a scholar��s reputation owing to the neutral analytical languages with which he theorized Hong Kong and from which anyone could observe and essentialize Hong Kong. The great success that has accompanied Lau��s efforts to convince his supportive readers of the transposability of colonial experiences explains why the Chinese state so readily picked up on Lau��s ideas. The Basic Law, effective after 1997, proscribes a political system that denies Hong Kong citizens basic liberal democratic rights such as universal suffrage; but from that point forward, the Law mixes different cumbersome and arbitrarily selected forms of representation and co-optation that target nobles and notables. The system has proved itself to be a disaster, a fact that one may verify by witnessing Hong Kong citizens�� mass demonstrations against the National Security Bill (Article 23 issues) during the Tung Chee-hwa administration of the HKSAR government. The crisis cried out the need for a decolonization that was far beyond the prediction of Lau and his likes.
The National Project of Recolonization
Despite the nationalist rhetoric about Hong Kong��s ��return�� to its motherland in 1997, public discourses obsessively draw parallels between Beijing and the old British colonial master. For example, Stephen Vine (1998) hesitated not at all to describe Hong Kong as ��China��s new colony.�� And as the new masters of Hong Kong, the PRC leaders often display a much greater interest in keeping the colonial governance system intact than in ��liberating�� (as the old nationalist cliche goes) Hong Kong compatriots from the British colonial misdeeds. The keenness of the PRC leader to learn the secret of colonial governance in Hong Kong, itself illustrates the irony and the tension inherent in the Chinese nationalist modernization project. In this sense, the subject merits our reconsideration. Insofar as Chinese nationalism has already lost its moral appeal once in the past century, re-conceptualizations of the current political reality are in line. Johnson and Chiu note that:
As the colonialists vacate their spaces of control, the colonial has gone
native in the bodies of a stratum of the colonized. Nested within the
positional structure of the imperial, the original and continuing power
of the core states, a sub-imperial relation between the dominant of the
dominated and their periphery emerges.
(Johnson and Chiu 2000: 1)
Chiu also de.nes ��sub-imperial�� as ��being colonized while seeking to colonize�� (Chiu 2000: 104). To be sure, the sub-imperial cannot be treated as a simple equivalent of the imperial, for the imperial �X whether before or after �X is bound to overshadow, in speci.c ways, the historicity of each sub-imperial relationship. Therefore, while conventional criticisms of imperialism, which focus often on economic exploitation or dependence, can explain very little of Hong Kong��s current subjection under the new sub-imperial order, Hong Kong��s special (post)colonial problems might be explainable in terms of a psychoanalytic reality embedded in the wider symbolic order.
It is commonplace that Hong Kong cannot exist in isolation from its relationship with China. Yet, conversely, we may also see that China, in particular the ruling CCP, cannot do without demonstrating to the world that they can successfully incorporate Hong Kong into their nation. Therefore, in light of China��s eagerness to complete the nationalist-sub-imperial project of reclaiming territories ��lost�� under the humiliating conditions that past Chinese regimes endured, we may describe Hong Kong as China��s indispensable ��other�� �X to be recovered as well as to be recolonized. As a result, the discursive and symbolic logic underlying this order may have less to do with deconstructive tendencies (in Barlow��s sense of erasing the reality of colonialism) than to do with fetishist ones: namely, China has had to both disavow and af.rm Hong Kong, as well as its colonialism.
Translated into a political and cultural logic, the perversity of such sub-imperial fetishism presents itself as the dilemma of whether or not China should let go of the coloniality that constitutes Hong Kong. Tailoring Hong Kong to a thoroughly Chinese style �X that is, imposing stringent restrictions on Hong Kong��s political and cultural autonomy �X could no doubt demonstrate either the Chinese people��s capacity to overpower and dominate a city on their own or China��s ability to eradicate its own colonial shame. However, what is sui generis Hong Kong �X dynamic city life, cosmopolitan orientation, and modernity as such �X would, thereby, risk its own destruction. In contrast, allowing Hong Kong to pursue Western liberal ideals, which the British colonial presence had both taught to and denied to Hong Kong, could trigger demands for genuine decolonization. And this pursuit of self-government would threaten the psychic stability of the new paternal master, beset by the paranoid belief that an outsider (the Western powers) will again encourage the ��returned�� child to leave the family.
This dilemma underscored the anxiety that the Chinese of.cials showed as 1997 was fast approaching. And the best demonstration of this anxiety centers on a metaphor used by Chinese reformist leader Li Ruihuan. He warned that communist hardliners�� mishandling of Hong Kong affairs could result in the mindless destruction of Hong Kong as it is. He likened Hong Kong and its values to the tea stain that gives the Yi Xing teapot its renowned traditional taste: only the dilettante would buy a precious antique teapot and be foolish enough to clean away the stain, which was precisely the source of the tea��s unique taste. The nightmarish scenario about the unconscious drive to keep the teapot clean alludes to a real enough possibility: in an urge to demonstrate the triumph of nationalism, the hardliners might overdo it and rush to introduce the PRC��s system and style of governance into Hong Kong. Li��s metaphor might be a shrewd euphemistic expression of criticism against PRC dogmatists on the left. Nevertheless, according to Li��s metaphor, China feels ungraceful desires toward Hong Kong because China, throughout its glorious past as a central empire, regretfully missed out on Hong Kong��s colonial experience.
The teapot metaphor can have greater resonance than the transitional politics of the 1980s and the 1990s. Hong Kong, as a gateway to Western modernity via colonialism, is too important to sacri.ce for China��s quest for modernity. It is also the fragility of Hong Kong as a teapot that speaks of the illusory character and double-edged nature of the national-sub-imperial fantasy held by China. Hong Kong can be of use to China so long as it remains useful as a teapot; but a broken teapot would be a terrifying disaster. Therefore, the current project of re-colonization, which is to say, the replacement of the old colonizer by the new, is complicated by the combination of China��s triumphalist, revengeful mindset with her own inferiority complex; in these circumstances, China has often viewed Hong Kong as a threat.9 Rosaldo describes ��imperialist nostalgia�� as one��s desire to have back the other or the others that one has participated in destroying (Bammer 1995). For China, the impulse to destroy and the counter-impulse to embrace Hong Kong run simultaneously; colonial legacies are hated and loved at the same time.
In Beijing��s eyes, the measure of Hong Kong��s patriotic devotion rests not in the participation by Hong Kong citizens in street demonstrations against the Japanese appropriation of the Diaoyu Islands but in Hong Kong��s ability to teach its coming ruler all about Hong Kong��s colonial rule.10 Within this sometimes ambiguously redoubled colonization project, the positioning of the local elite is less ambivalent, however. Arguably, Lau Siu-kai��s actions and positions differ little from those of Zheng Guanxing, Ho Kai, and other members of the colonial intelligentsia: a century ago, they pursued their own grand political designs by offering political advice to of.cials. But if Zheng��s and Ho��s clarion call for excellent statecraft and for superior civilization belonged to a genre of enlightened thinking, Lau��s counsel to the colonial governmental that it adopt technologies and skills to sustain the political acquiescence of native Hong Kong Chinese might make him kin of the muchacho �X the Indians who cooked other Indians, who helped the whites massacre other Indians, and who used their local knowledge and skills to gain the colonizers�� acceptance (Taussig 1992; Chiu 2000). Johnson and Chiu state that the muchacho, a rather extreme type of collaborator, was ��not the mute tool of the colonizer but an active agent who used the cultural capital bestowed by the colonizer to create a region of agency, a space of control over the savage majority�� (Johnson and Chiu 2000: 2). Lau is just one case symptomatic of a larger trend wherein the local elite tried to shift their political loyalty away from the previous anti-communist or British loyalist stances toward Beijing��s coming dominance. This trend is evident in the academies no less than in other social arenas.
Sub-imperialism needs its collaborators as much as imperialism does. Li Ruihuan��s metaphor of the tea stain, however, implies the necessary existence of muchacho without naming it. Regarding the tea stain, sediment from numerous uses is a treasure only to connoisseurs; the inexperienced master would need pro.cient experts to guide the formation of good taste. This reliance on mastery explains why managerialism, as the ideology of the experts in colonial governance, has to mediate between .agrant colonialism and paternalist nationalism while the new, non-colonial power follows a decidedly colonial course. Managerialist political discourse has thus become the basis of the post-1997 untouchable principle of (so-called) administrative-led governance and provides Hong Kong with a set of translated scripts for a re-staging of the same old drama of collaborative colonialism.
8
Northbound Colonialism: Reinventing Hong Kong Chinese
H
ong Kong��s colonial subjection to the Western powers in the past has not denied the space for Chinese national identity of most of its citizens to grow and transform. The co-evolution of colonialism and Chinese nationalism, the strong continuity between nationalist and colonial governmentality, etc., have almost made themselves indistinguishable from each other in many ways. Critical scholarships, couched in all too simple binary opposite terms are, therefore, hopelessly inadequate to grasp the complexity of coloniality manifested in Hong Kong and China because dominance and resistance have always happened within an ever-changing matrix of colonial power. This is especially true today when the rhetoric of nationalism and modernization circulating across the Hong Kong-China border is usually the product of complicity between power-holders in both Hong Kong and China. The anti-colonial rhetoric sometimes invoked by this new bloc of power-holders often serves, ironically, no more than as a camou.age for the continuous exercise of the localized colonial power.
To make matters worse, unre.ective recycling of rei.ed categories, which regurgitate older imaginaries or fantasies, often smother public political discussion and re.ection. Even those categories that are invoked by those who wish to move beyond conventional conceptual binaries, or to break down certain essentialisms �V for instance, certain ideas borrowed from post-colonialism or post-structuralism �V risk being appropriated or misplaced, and may only mystify the obscure circuits of coloniality. In the run-up to 1997, Hong Kong was inundated by nationalist propaganda professing Beijing authorities as the best warrant for the future of Hong Kong. The British authorities also exploited the opportunity to paint for itself a benevolent .nal image of their long imperialist history. Both sides exploited the continuation of their respective versions of imperialist and anti-imperialist History as an excuse to ignore local political and cultural demands.
During that crucial transitional period toward sovereignty handover, citizens of Hong Kong became increasingly concerned about their political rights as well as their cultural identity. They were, however, barred from joining in the political process by which they might negotiate with the present and future power-holders on the issues of the forms and structures of their preferred ways of life. Making their situation even harder was the fact that the issue of 1997 overshadowed, perhaps, too strongly at the expense of other independent or critical thinking as well as political practices for the obsession with interstate politics rendered these critical practices highly marginal and ineffective in dealing with the reality of exploitation and domination in everyday life �V which, paradoxically, were derived from the much deeper structure of the collaborative-colonial power con.guration. Within the mainstream mass media, in academic circles, in circles of leading politicians, and in extended organs of the (CCP) party-state camou.aged as civil associations, political thinking and debate were strongly in.ected and framed within a ��1997 discourse�� which absurdly reduced all kinds of hope, imagination and politics to matters of rivalry, conspiracy, and treachery between the two (imperial) states. The complex and complicit nature of colonial power and the collaborative nature of Hong Kong��s colonialism has been buried within the renewed con.guration of global and regional powers; such novel power structures have been structured by processes and .ows that unsettle and refashion in different ways existing spatial entities and their mutual relationships.
Struggling to break from the con.nes of obsolete conceptual frames �V unfortunately reinforced by the 1997 discourse �V critical intellectual practices in the late transitional Hong Kong sought to take up the unheroic struggles in cultural criticism to disrupt the hegemonic self-image of Hong Kong shared by both the power establishment and the loyal opposition. In this chapter, I will illustrate these postcolonial cultural politics by drawing upon a few examples from a special issue of the Bulletin of Hong Kong Cultural Studies (BHKCS) published in 1996 �V one year before the handover. The publication of this special issue aroused concern and discussion both inside and outside Hong Kong academies. These articles emerged as a response to the sti.ing political and intellectual atmosphere of ��1997 politics��, in which Hong Kong people, though excluded from any meaningful negotiation, were bombarded daily by hollow Chinese nationalist rhetoric and British hypocrisy. They took to task the unre.ective transplantations of some critical frameworks onto transitional Hong Kong, as those frameworks did not properly deal with Hong Kong colonialities. Although the impact of the critical and dissident young authors cannot compare with that of heads of state, high of.cials, or local political leaders, they provided something new to our understanding of Hong Kong��s coloniality �V not just of its past, but also of its changing face.
Against Marginality, Down with Hybridity, No More In-between
The .rst article from the BHKCS I will analyze is Ip Iam Chong��s Phantom of Marginality and Hybridity. In this article, Ip criticizes the arbitrary characterization of Hong Kong as a product of hybridity, for it conjures an unjusti.ed image of Hong Kong as a helpless victim, or place suffering from its marginal status. He takes to task the poet Leung Ping-kwan, who describes Hong Kong as a place without its own story; where almost every attempt to tell its story fails, in the end, to tell any stories other than ones internalized from elsewhere. In Leung��s eyes, Hong Kong��s story can only be told as one ��within the narrow gap emergent in-between other grand narratives��, the results of which were always rendering Hong Kong as exotic, bizarre or ��othered�� (Ip 1997). Basically echoing a common discontent found among local critics, with the southbound intellectuals�� imposition of cultural stereotypes on Hong Kong, this claim of marginality is unacceptable to Ip �V although he admits the existence of such Mainlander hauteur. He contends that ��southbound intellectuals might have constructed an outdated cultural map that misguides, the one marked with all self-designations of marginality cannot claim to be any better�� (Ip 1997: 46).
Ip also draws on the works of .lm scholar Esther Yau to substantiate his critique of the misguided conceptual dichotomy of Hong Kong and China as a simple self-other relationship. Yau, in her study of mainland China��s presence in Hong Kong cinema, talks about a collective anxiety derived from the uncertain political return to China. Using the theme of cross-border crime which appeared in the movie Long Arm of the Law (dir. Johnny Mak 1984), Yau illustrates her analysis of 1997 political anxiety, and in doing so attempts to capture the un.xed identities of Hong Kong and China (Yau 1994). Although Yau uses the movie to support an idea of a .uid psychoanalytic dynamic between Hong Kong and China, Ip points out that yet another unre.ective binary assumption frames this analysis: namely, the opposition between ��developed�� and ��underdeveloped�� societies. Ip criticizes Yau for her unconscious perpetration of a cultural stereotype in which Hong Kong and China are always characterized by their relative positions on a spectrum of economic development. Cliched images of Hong Kong and China, thus derived, are not con.ned to the ��cross-border crime�� genre, which usually evokes fears about Mainlanders, but are also prevalent in the genre of ��nostalgia��, in which the ��home�� in China is portrayed as full of love.
Thus, either as a dangerous source of violence or as a realm of tranquil and backward villages, China��s image remains within a self-other structure underscored by a discourse of modernization. In other words, China is framed invariably as an essentialized other, whose economic underdevelopment compares with Hong Kong��s development. To break away from such binary stereotypes that risk being complicit with a modernization discourse, Ip calls for a revised reading/viewing strategy, in order to re-map the power relationships between Hong Kong and China.
Complicit Postcolonialism?
Following on from his interrogation of the uses of center-periphery spatiality in such identity-building projects, Ip criticizes the notion of in-betweenness as found particularly in the then-in.uential writings of Rey Chow, who had put forward the thesis of Hong Kong as a ��Third Space�� (Chow 1992). Ip concurs with Chow��s criticism of Chinese nationalism, which rightly points out the danger of ��nativism��, seeing the longing for authentic native values and viewpoints as no more than an excuse for the self-pity of an imagined victim; yet Ip departs from Chow when she tries to valorize Hong Kong as a ��Third Space�� between two colonizers, for this amounts to committing the same error she tries to attach to the others.
Admittedly, Chow, who rejects both the closure entailed by the nativist urge to restore national authenticity as well as the naivete she sees as marring post-modern hybridities, is fully aware of the political implications of cultural writings as writing the self. In her politically conscious project of the self-writing of Hong Kong, she thinks it of paramount importance to reject the illusory association of the postcoloniality of Hong Kong with a rediscovered nationalism. According to Chow, Hong Kong cultural expressions which emphasize a kind of interstitial in-betweenness exemplify a search for a Third Space to emerge which would be neither nationalist nor post-modern. Following upon that assertion, Chow lays out a cultural project of self-writing which is fully aware of its own hybridity �V one characterized by the impossibility of returning to a native past. This cultural self-af.rmation would be bene.cial not only for Hong Kong: Chow argues that Hong Kong can serve as a model for China, as the city represents postcolonial awareness. The truth of this modernity-as-postcoloniality is not within the intellectual range of many mainland Chinese intellectuals because they are still, unfortunately, under the spell of national and nativist illusions. Chow writes:
First, in being a colony, is Hong Kong not in fact a paradigm of Chinese urban life in the future? If we accept that it is in postcoloniality that the modernity of Chinese cities, like the modernity of other non-western cities, is most clearly de.ned, then Hong Kong has for the past 150 years lived in the forefront of ��Chinese�� consciousness of ��Chinese�� modernity, while the reality of modernity-as-postcoloniality has been repressed in mainland China precisely by the illusion of the ��native land and the folk itself.��
(Chow 1992: 158)
Although Chow has tried somehow to distinguish this ��postcolonial awareness�� from ��a naive fascination with ��the West�� as such��, allegedly held by many mainland Chinese intellectuals, Ip is disturbed by the teleological connotation carried in such a characterization. Ip writes:
At this point, which Chow .rst takes as ��crucial to the understanding of this Third Space��, Hong Kong seems to be a pioneer. In this way, Chow indeed runs parallel to what is commonly found among those who trumpet for modernization. They, following postwar American modernization theories, take the U.S. as the ��model�� of modernization to measure the degree of development of all other societies. They do so to push forward the game of simulating U.S.-centered modernization. Now all Rey Chow does is substitute the brand name Hong Kong in this game, adding ��postcoloniality�� as the footnote, and omitting all the complicated colonial relationships.
(Ip 1997: 36; my translation)
If postcoloniality means a justi.cation for a trans.gured version of modernization rather than a deep re.ection of colonial relations, then the pitfalls of Hegelian teleology in absorbing all others into the constitutive process of the self will be repeated. Rey Chow��s version of postcolonial cultural politics would thus be yet another rendition of the modernization discourse that has been haunting the local younger elite generation since the 1970s (see Chapter 6). What is at issue here is the omission of all traces of ��the Others�� in the project of establishing a Hong Kong identity premised upon an image of Hong Kong as being doubly victimized by the two dominating state powers. Granted the reality of the absence of local voices in the ��politics of transition��, Chow��s notion of double victimization is indeed at odds with the postcolonial critics�� grammar of neither-nor. As played out in Chow��s notion of the Third Space as ��in-between two colonizers,�� this notion indeed makes a mockery of Chow��s own criticism of the nativist strategy of imaging victimization. As Ip asks in his essay: if China, as conceived as a nationalist/nativist entity, is essentialized and .xed, and thus ripe for deconstruction, why should Hong Kong be exempted from a similar postcolonial deconstruction? If Hong Kong is not, as it is argued, fully subordinated as a colonized city, but is only a space in-between, the ethical position of such criticism cannot be justi.ed by: .rst attacking the Chinese only to follow up by attacking the British. Insisting on the vulnerability of this self-pitying image, Ip concludes his essay by appealing for an unveiling of the kinds of multiple and interlocking colonial relationships which Nicholas Thomas describes as ��localizing colonialism�� (Thomas 1994). Ip argues that it is only through such concrete analyses that we can avoid merely substituting Manichean division of colonial antagonism for decontextualized notions of postcolonialism remotely related to local cultural politics and struggles. Without tying the analyses to potential situations of changing (neo)coloniality, these analyses run not only the risk of perpetuating the idea that colonialism is solely concerned with domination from outside and thereby ignoring how ��Others�� are constituted and distorted in the process of building a postcolonial self; but also the risk of themselves becoming involved in a kind of ��complicit postcolonialism�� (Ip 1997: 50).
The concern to make cultural criticism accountable to the political context prompts Ip to end his essay by alluding to how the Hong Kong mass media transposed the victimized image of Hong Kong onto small Hong Kong capitalists in China. Though notorious for the awful working conditions in the factories they own, their responsibilities are always evaded because they appear more often than not in the Hong Kong media as the ones who are forever being bullied and intimidated by a ��backward�� Chinese bureaucracy. Ip quotes the example of a terrible .re hazard in a Hong Kong-owned factory in southern China, which led to heavy loss of life. What .ooded the mass media was a barrage of sentimental reports depicting how heroic and risky the Hong Kong investors were in putting their effort into commercial ventures �V just as the new generation of white settlers help to open a barbaric frontier in the present wild China. The image of helpless but hard-working small businessmen, resonating with the image of a politically powerless Hong Kong, helps almost to legitimize acts of negligence. The ��free press��, it seems, only has enough freedom to deal tangentially with the sweatshop-style exploitation perpetuated by Hong Kong investors in China. This blatant evasion of responsibility would not be possible without the common belief that Hong Kong is always a victim, lost in an in-between zone with ��other�� state powers on either side. Therefore, Ip concludes that it is indeed perverse for cultural critics to keep on recycling this victimized in-betweenness, a mythic fate that generates unearned sympathy for Hong Kong.
Northbound Colonialism in Popular Literature
The theme of complicit postcolonialism is pursued further in Hung Ho Fung��s critique of Leung Fung Yee, a popular female .ction writer. Basing his analysis
on the narratives of several novels selected from Leung��s voluminous oeuvre, Hung sets up his task as stripping away the ideological structure of northbound colonialism in his essay entitled Preliminary Exploration of Northbound Colonialism (Hung 1997). As a rising star among the ��whizwoman�� writers, Leung excels not so much in literary skill as in her unique focus on life and desire within the Hong Kong business sector. Often attributed with the creation of a new .ction genre called the ��business novel��, Leung successfully combines three ideological themes in her imaginary world, ��China-loving��: ��Hong Kong-loving�� and ��capital-loving.�� The protagonists of her novels are always business tycoons who, having gone through various trials and vicissitudes, in the end make the ��right�� choice to stay in Hong Kong. Romance, life struggles (especially of businesswomen) and moments of grace or heartbreak are all integrated against the backdrop of historical political changes, with the business world as the main stage. Leung��s novels read like the autobiographies of strong women like the author herself, but at the same time attempt to be epic Hong Kong stories that capture the feelings and sensibilities of the new red capitalist class. This emergent group of notables constitutes the pro-Beijing political camp, praised by the Chinese authorities as truly ��patriotic and Hong Kong-loving�� (ai guo ai gang), a term invoked to label those who are considered loyal enough to safeguard and support of.cial Chinese policy in Hong Kong. Recognized as faithful compatriots, they are appointed to various political positions, which bestows upon them the responsibility to realize the glorious objective of Deng��s mission to let ��Hong Kong people rule Hong Kong�� (gang ren zi gang). However, they are in fact more a cross-border bourgeois class than a group of local capitalists. Unlike the educated middle class, they do not face dilemmas in choosing their identity, although most of them either have their children sent abroad or hold passports issued by western countries.
Leung��s novels express the zeitgeist and national attitude of this emergent class, in which the pro.t motive and patriotic loyalty have been so seamlessly intermingled. In her .ctional world, almost every decision of the characters to invest more in China or Hong Kong is acclaimed as having been made from patriotic callings, or from the (re)discovery of the pride of being Chinese. The impending uncertainty of 1997 is only a backdrop to these awakenings of patriotism and identity. However, one must note that the novels do not just repeat the familiar nationalistic theme of tales of heroic personal sacri.ce which emerged from the massive return of the patriotic overseas Chinese in the late 1950s, when Mao��s socialist experiments did, in fact, move numerous patriotic hearts from different social strata and throughout the globe. Instead, every celebration of such patriotic acts is without exception accompanied by an equally passionate championing of Hong Kong for its miraculous capitalist development, together with a disdain of China��s own past. Here we .nd many characters who, in early life, suffered from political turmoil and extremist movements, often ending up as illegal exiles in Hong Kong or as migrants overseas. Leung��s heroes and heroines invariably succeed in the end as business tycoons, strutting across the borders between Hong Kong, China and even the western world.
In Zui hong chen (Drunk in the Red Dust), her most ambitious political allegory, Leung develops a saga around a mongrel character, an abandoned child born after the tragic end of an almost impossible interracial marriage in the early nineteenth century (Leung, F.Y. 1990). With this the image of the ��stray child��, which we discussed in previous chapters, Leung comes up with a variation of the victim theme. As an illegitimate son of political rape consequent to the historic Sino-British clash, the hero, Wei, has been discriminated against throughout his life. Having prevailed through grim struggles, Wei turns himself into a big shipping baron presiding over a huge business empire. For Wei, this commercial success brings about not only monetary rewards but also prominent political status recognized by both the Chinese and the British Hong Kong governments. With his enormous .nancial clout and the unique advantage of bridging the two cultures as well as the two governments, he becomes the de facto ��Czar of the South.�� If a super.cial reading of this story tempts readers to recognize a silhouette of Tung Chee-hwa, the shipping tycoon-turned present Chief Executive of the HKSAR, Hung de.ects this by disclosing here the psychoanalytic structure of a northbound colonialism which, although indiscernible in front-stage politics, is salient in the cultural realm. Displayed in this political allegory, Hung argues, is a social fantasy incorporating the trauma of a bastard and his triumphal comeback. Pure opportunity seeking is rewarded indiscriminately as personal striving; frauds are credited as expediencies to success. By hook or by crook, the curse of illegitimate birth is .nally transformed into blessings. Wei��s dual identity no longer implies a self that is torn, but ironically, promises privileged access to the two centers of power, giving the lie to the denigration of miscegenation. Read as a political allegory, as Hung means it to be, it tells us about the beginning and the end of an imagined Hong Kong. The author fantasizes a commercial empire, which acts as the centre of both the world of China and that of Hong Kong, and weaves them together with a hero who alone can stride freely between these two worlds.
Contrary to the image of a grievous and tragic fall of Hong Kong, we .nd here a chauvinistic self-assertion. The aggrandized self, in no way, is cringing for the mercy of the national sovereign to grant living space to Hong Kong��s ��way of life.�� Instead, for the new breed of Hong Kong red capitalists, the vast hinterland of China is an unlimited space, a new virgin frontier for capitalist colonization. Border-crossings between one��s self and other, past and present, material interests and spiritual redemption, etc. are possible within the imaginary business empire where locality, nationality and global citizenship are all negotiable terms. The foundation of all this is the smart hardworking Hong Kong character. The af.rmation of a Hong Kong identity is concomitant with the assertion of an imperial desire. By imagining themselves as the steam engines for Chinese modernization, capitalist bigwigs have every justi.cation for shifting their loyalty from the British colonial masters to the new ones, and the novel quickly supplies them with a new kind of patriotism. However, they cannot conceive of a patriotism which runs counter to their religious belief in business success �V they have to de.ne money-loving as country-loving, and vice versa. Thus, we witness the re-emergence of the genre of the legendary business tycoon, which was popular in the 1970s. The only difference is that now the legendary heroes are highlighted by their Chinese contacts and political clout. Tales of their industrious entrepreneurship, perceptive foresight and brilliant grasp of opportunities go hand in hand with the celebration of their skills in seeking political patrons and allies. The additional virtue of these exemplary citizens of Hong Kong is now captured in a catchphrase: ��political wisdom�� �V being all things to all men.
Double talk is thus the highest of post-idealist ethics, and the major .gures in Hong Kong are those who know which way the wind blows. In the language of postcolonial criticism, this extraordinary politics of hybridity in Hong Kong would posit a hybrid space of displacement, in contradistinction to its pure, .xed and separate antecedents. That is why the story of an ever-changing and dynamic Hong Kong can be told in conjunction with a history of a static but lovable China, and why both are af.rmed in Leung��s imagined world. For the emergent ��red capitalists��, such a realpolitik displaces their past animosity to communism and their af.liation to the British colonial regime �V so much so that they were indeed the .rst to attempt to dissuade China from reclaiming Hong Kong. The ��mother-child�� imaginary dynamic, in which Hong Kong gains its self-recognition as a ��holy son�� by relating to China as a loving mother, is indeed a reversal of the image of the ��stray child�� discussed previously �V where Hong Kong was treated by the Chinese cultural nationalists as a poor decadent city deprived of the love of its mother(land). Such a long-held trope is re-inscribed within Leung��s phantasmagorical world in such a way that the mother love is now melodramatically returned. Growing older and older, she is looking fearsome and despotic but always imbued with great feelings. Both poor and backward (waiting only for more capital investment to bring her out of poverty), the mother(land) now opens her embracing arms to welcome the love of her ��returning�� son who has gained his strength and independence for the wealth he possesses. The latter��s masculine power of capital, i.e. the conceit and arrogance of the new generation of nouveau riche �V is vividly demonstrated in Leung��s novels as lurking behind the creolized rhetoric of Hong Kong-styled patriotism.
The Gospel of Patriotic Capitalism
To be sure, the ideological content of such archetypal versions of the Hong Kong story is not something concealed from people��s consciousness, to be discovered through a detached psychoanalytic reading. Rather, it is explicitly manifested in Hong Kong��s daily life. According to Hung, this chauvinistic sense of pride in relation to a backward China is so widespread as to constitute a hegemonic popular class ideology within which hatred and aspiration, anxiety and complacency, are articulated. As we may note in the lyrics of the popular song of Smart Ah Lec, a sense of frivolous superiority is unleashed in the shameless applause given to Hong Kong businessmen for their competence in getting-rich-quick across the border. This pride is never a matter of populism because even the most elegant and pungent political criticisms are invariably imbued with evocations of the same self-image of Hong Kong people: ��successful�� economic animals. Even the sternest skeptics of the Chinese communist regime .nd solace in being able to discern a Hong Kong cultural presence embodied in all the commercial icons found in Chinese cities and other, more backward, places.
As a result, Hong Kong northbound colonialism is successfully under way, as a creeping civilizing mission lacking only a church and clergy although, to be sure, it is not short of missionaries and even crusaders, especially when it can secure the sanction of the state. To this extent, northbound colonialism is certainly not an imposition, but a variation, or an emergent aspect, of the historical, continuously evolving cultural formation of collaborative colonialism that dates back to early colonial Hong Kong. As an ideologue of this lay church, suffused personally with a sense of mission, Leung offers her life and career as an example, as she preaches the gospel of this ��patriotic capitalism.�� Her books command huge sales in Chinese markets, and win acclaim from across the social spectrum �V from the ordinary public to the established literature bureau in China. She has successfully built huge networks of guanxi with both powerful organs of the Chinese state (such as the New China News Agency) in Hong Kong and with cultural establishments in Beijing, as well as with bodies in many provinces of China. Thanks to her buddies in the bureaucracy, her books are celebrated not only as quality literary works but also quite simply as guidebooks to .nancial knowledge which can be put to good use in the booming speculative Chinese .nancial markets (Qinjiayuan 1992).
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