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By the nineteenth century, with the advance of British colonial activities, British corporate laws had been transplanted to maritime Asia with varying degrees of vigour. In British Hong Kong, these laws often clashed with native customs. Through a reconstruction of the legal disputes found in urban Hong Kong, this paper discusses how British and Chinese business traditions interacted with each other during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before assessing the historical implications and consequences of these legal decisions, this paper will also explore whether the Chinese institution of tong is compatible with British law in urban Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For autoregressive moving average (ARMA) models with infinite variance innovations, quasi-likelihood-based estimators (such as Whittle estimators) suffer from complex asymptotic distributions depending on unknown tail indices. This makes statistical inference for such models difficult. In contrast, the least absolute deviations estimators (LADE) are more appealing in dealing with heavy tailed processes. In this paper, we propose a weighted least absolute deviations estimator (WLADE) for ARMA models. We show that the proposed WLADE is asymptotically normal, is unbiased, and has the standard root-nconvergence rate even when the variance of innovations is infinity. This paves the way for statistical inference based on asymptotic normality for heavy-tailed ARMA processes. For relatively small samples numerical results illustrate that the WLADE with appropriate weight is more accurate than the Whittle estimator, the quasi-maximum-likelihood estimator (QMLE), and the Gauss–Newton estimator when the innovation variance is infinite and that the efficiency loss due to the use of weights in estimation is not substantial.The authors thank the two referees for their valuable suggestions. The work was partially supported by an EPSRC research grant (UK) and the Natural Science Foundation of China (grant 10471005). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British reactions to China's increasing engagement with Africa in recent years have been manifested in particularly negative and reductive ways tending to depict China's presence in Africa as destructive and self-serving, in contrast to Britain's more enlightened, supportive approach. However, more recently official discourse has begun to stress the shared outlook between British and Chinese objectives, emphasising Chinese moves towards a more constructive, development-focused approach in Africa. This article discusses the ways in which China in Africa is viewed in British political circles and assesses the degree to which such views resonate with the British sense of its own idealised identity. It suggests that the two narratives represent two sides of a dual ‘liberal’ approach to the problem of ‘non-liberal’ actors in international politics: first the tendency to reject and see them as outside the international order; and second the attempt to rehabilitate them and bring them within it. The article concludes by exploring a number of reasons for the particular ways in which Britain, China and Africa are configured, arguing that this dual conception represents a sense of ambiguity about the potential universality of liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses debates about Chinese female bondservants ("mui-tsai" or "meizai") in late 19th-century Hong Kong and how they reflect the changing politics and culture of the British colony. Competing views among colonial administrators from Great Britain are discussed, with some seeing this form of involuntary domestic servitude as a violation of the British ban on slavery, and others seeing it as an outdated custom that would fade with the modernization of China. Also discussed is the rise of Chinese elites with enough power to defend the "mui-tsai" system as a respected Chinese custom.

The article discusses the sinking of a British steamship "Kowshing" by the Japanese navy in July 1894. At the time of the sinking, the article indicates, China was leasing the ship to transport troops to Korea. The author focuses on the period after the sinking including Great Britain's diplomatic efforts to have China pay for the damages related to the incident. Topics include the British Foreign Office, international legal experts, and British commercial interests. China's payments to Great Britain for the damages are also discussed.

Reviews the legacy of British administration in Hong Kong, which closed on June 30, 1997. Importance of the preservation of the legal system to most Hong Kong people; How the court proceedings in civil and criminal litigations were held; Concern surrounding the start and progress in English and Chinese codification; Details on the British legal system; Illustration of cases which depicts the perils and predicaments of the Hong Kong legal system; Conclusions reached.

Describes the extraterritoriality negotiations between Great Britain and China in 1943. British policy on the abolition of extraterritoriality before April 1942; Issue of the future of Hong Kong; British policy towards Hong Kong after January 11, 1943.

Examines Great Britain's attitude towards Hong Kong and the rise of Chinese communism. British Empire, China and Hong Kong in the post war world; Cold war politics and Britain's China and Hong kong policies; Impact of the Korean War on the British attitude towards China and Hong Kong; Sino-British declaration in Hong Kong.