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Murray MacLehose, the 25th Governor of Hong Kong, was the longest-serving Governor in the history of Hong Kong. MacLehose proposed and implemented a series of policies that brought significant reforms to Hong Kong. These reforms included housing, transportation, anti-corruption, welfare, and education. The reforms did not only improve people's living standards, but also created for Hong Kong people a sense of belonging to the colony. While the mainstream of Hong Kong society claimed MacLehose was a respected governor, was MacLehose's ten-year-governorship in actual fact praiseworthy? This article will revisit MacLehose's governorship and show that MacLehose was not as perfect as the locals think – he was even reluctant to implement some reforms, particularly political reforms, anti-corruption and social security. However, this was because he was trying to balance local and British interests within the colony. He indeed worked hard to perform his duty and defended well Hong Kong's interests during his governorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes a collection of photographs that belonged to Douglas Crozier, Hong Kong Director of Education from 1951 to 1961. These include 879 professional photographs produced in print form for publicity purposes and 1167 slide photos. I demonstrate how photographic prints were part of the official record. These were circulated to reinforce Sino-British exchanges in pursuit of diplomatic aims, and are thus valuable sources on behavioral protocols in British and élite Chinese social networks. The slides, which were taken by Crozier and his family, are by contrast vernacular images, revealing the functioning of the imperial gaze in domestic space. Photography in both forms was intrinsic to capitalist lifestyles in late colonial Hong Kong. However, images from the period have been under-researched. Reasons for their neglect include the degree to which they now implicate those who own them in colonialism, and the fact that the apparent mundanity of vernacular shots conceals their value as sources for the study of colonial photography as a genre. Through close examination of the apparent indifference to Douglas Crozier's photographs of those who inherited them, this article tackles this imbalance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2017 election of Hong Kong's chief executive has been the catalyst for recent campaigns for social justice. The date marks twenty years since the handover of British colonial rule to China (through the 1984 Sino–British Joint Declaration) and democracy itself is again being questioned. Ultimately, Hong Kongers are concerned with universal suffrage and specifically that the chief executive is elected from just 1,200 members of an electoral committee in a city of more than 7 million people (Census 2011). Occupy Hong Kong took hold of several areas of the city in 2014, with campaigners employing the use of nonviolence and civil disobedience to challenge social and political injustice; their mantra was “Occupy Central with Love and Peace” (OCLP). Through a postcolonial lens, this article analyzes the political engagement of fifteen white Hong Kong city workers. The biographies of the research participants differ: Some are permanent residents1who are the children of pre-1997 expatriates,2and others more contemporary economic migrants. Underpinning this research is the Cantonese termgweilo, which is particularly useful in explaining “whiteness” in Hong Kong, and I use it to investigate claims about their apparent apathy. Its nuanced definitions and meanings are especially significant in the postcolonial era and contribute to broader discussions of citizenship and social justice in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the experiences of two generations of intellectuals that migrated to Hong Kong in 1919 and 1949.* The earlier generation included the former Qing remnants Lai Jixi (賴際熙) and Chen Botao (陳伯陶), and the latter included Tang Junyi (唐君毅), a prominent advocate of Neo-Confucianism. Although they shared a similar ethnic pride, they developed divergent attitudes about the colony of Hong Kong. The former Qing remnants all harmoniously related with the local Chinese elites and businessmen in Hong Kong and, thus, successfully integrated with the mainstream Chinese community. They maintained their traditional Chinese culture while working together with the colonial government even as the cultural gap between Hong Kong and Mainland China expanded. In 1949, significant political changes caused by the creation of the People’s Republic of China created a second generation of immigrants, including Neo-Confucianist Tang Junyi, who shared similar attitudes about traditional culture with the earlier immigrants. However, they developed totally different ideas about Hong Kong with respect to nationalism and colonialism. Although Tang and other immigrants like him all claimed to be proponents of traditional Chinese culture and to promote orthodox traditions, they also held different ideas about culture. This study investigates how Tang Junyi’s nationalism and critical attitudes towards coloniality developed, while also explaining the limitations of his efforts to re-establish China’s national culture without participating in the local culture. This examination not only facilitates our understanding of how elites and intellectuals in Hong Kong saw Chinese culture through different periods but also helps us reflect on the roles and functions of Hong Kong during the historical and cultural development process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1920s, cultural nationalism in Hong Kong was imbedded in Confucianism, having been disappointed with the New Culture Movement and Chinese revolutionary nationalism.1 It also inspired British collaborative colonialism. This study attempts to explain the link between Hong Kong and the Confucius Revering Movement by analysing the essays on Hong Kong of Lu Xun (1881–1936), the father of modern Chinese literature and one of the most important revolutionary thinkers in modern China. The Confucius Revering Movement, which extended from mainland China to the Southeast Asian Chinese community and then to Hong Kong, formed a highly interrelated network of Chinese cultural nationalism associated with Confucianism. However, the movements in these three places had different cultural and political roles in keeping with their own contexts. Collaborative colonialism’s interference with the Confucius Revering Movement is one way to understand Lu Xun’s critical reading of Hong Kong. That is, Hong Kong’s Confucius Revering Movement was seen as an endeavour of the colonial authorities to co-opt Confucianism in order to deal with influences from China. This article argues that Hong Kong’s Confucius Revering Movement should be regarded as one of the main perspectives through which to understand Hong Kong’s educational, cultural and political histories from the 1920s to the late 1960s. Lu Xun enables us to see several links. The first link is the one connecting the Confucius Revering Movement in Mainland China, Hong Kong and the Chinese community in Southeast Asia. This leads to the second link, that is, Lim Boen Keng (Lin Wenqing), the leading figure of the Confucius Revering Movement in the Southeast Asian Chinese community who later became the President of Amoy University, where Lu Xun had taught before his first visit to Hong Kong. The third link is the skilful colonial administrator Sir Cecil Clementi, who came to British Malaya in February 1930 to become Governor after being the Governor of Hong Kong. We can observe a network of Chinese critical/resistant and collaborative nationalism from these links. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Humanitas Taiwanica is the property of National Taiwan University, Humanitas Taiwanica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A pressing question during the first half-decade of the third plague pandemic (1894–9) was what was a ‘suitable soil’ for the disease. The question related to plague’s perceived ability to disappear from a given city only to reappear at some future point; a phenomenon that became central to scientific investigations of the disease. However, rather than this simply having a metaphorical meaning, the debate around plague’s ‘suitable soil’ actually concerned the material reality of the soil itself. The prevalence of plague in the working-class neighbourhood of Taipingshan during the first major outbreak of the pandemic, in 1894 in Hong Kong, led to an extensive debate regarding the ability of the soil to harbour and even spread the disease. Involving experiments, which were seen as able to procure evidence for or against the demolition or even torching of the area, scientific and administrative concerns over the soil rendered it an unstable yet highly productive epistemic thing. The spread of plague to India further fuelled concerns over the ability of the soil to act as the medium of the disease’s so-called true recrudescence. Besides high-profile scientific debates, hands-on experiments on purifying the soil of infected houses by means of highly intrusive methods allowed scientists and administrators to act upon and further solidify plague’s supposed invisibility in the urban terrain. Rather than being a short-lived, moribund object of epidemiological concern, this paper will demonstrate that the soil played a crucial role in the development of plague as a scientifically knowable and actionable category for modern medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The civility of Hong Kong protesters during the 2014 Umbrella Movement was often remarked on. Rather less known were the more playful and witty dimensions to the protests. Humour has always been a familiar and febrile strand in Hong Kong protest culture: puns are immensely popular, as are parodies and moments of surreal comic juxtapositions and appropriations that then take a life of its own. This article will examine two examples of madcap levity in the Umbrella Movement, including the use of the ‘Happy Birthday’ song to counter vocal on-site critics and a later and more significant shift to the Shopping Revolution, with its play on the Mandarin phrase, 購物 gòu wù (to go shopping). Humour’s specific potency here comes from an irreverent revoicing that wrests control away from dominant discourses. By redirecting attention and power away from establishment voices, marginalized and local points of view are empowered. Given recent political developments, however, humour has receded more into the shadows; the structure of feeling has altered considerably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little research has paid attention to the Anti-Moral and National Education (Anti-M&N) movement during 2011–12 in Hong Kong, which, to a large extent, provided the resources and tactical preparations for the 2014 Umbrella Movement. In this study, the author unfolds the mobilization of the 2012 Anti-M&N movement: the dynamics of different organizations as well as the processes of accumulating and integrating movement resources. Studies of movement resource mobilization have focused on material resources and professional-based human resources. In recent years, much research has claimed that the new technologies have transformed the way movements are mobilized. Founded on the resource mobilization premise, this study unveils how the mobilization process has become hybrid, as the existing social movement organizations (SMOs) and their coalition networks and online channels collectively drive the evolution of activism in terms of format and scale. Visual resources were also manufactured by organizers as a way to increase the affective connection among the general public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an ethnographic exploration of the Umbrella Movement that occupied and re-spatialized the arterial streets of Hong Kong in late 2014. It examines how communities made up of hamlets of tent-dwelling demonstrators evolved, in particular, out of the Admiralty occupied area. Through a sense of communitas exercised among these communities, occupied areas were infused with ‘pure potentiality’ and transformed into liminoid spaces. As a result, the previously undifferentiated space of roads took on new meanings and was redefined to facilitate the discursive needs of these communities. Such transformation of space also reveals the tonality of life among the communities, and how they relate to each other through the moral idiom of care. While short-lived, the communal re-spatialization of the Umbrella Movement articulated images of a utopian Hong Kong as well as a critique of Hong Kong’s political plight, often through irony and humor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sporting events have become the focus of government interest in Hong Kong in recent years. The Hong Kong Games (HKG) in particular is aimed at promoting sports participation and community cohesion within the 18 districts. Since the debut of the HKG in 2007, no academic research has been conducted to explore the actual impact of the Games on sustainable sports participation in Hong Kong. This paper addresses the underexplored issue of the links between hosting the HKG and the perceptions of the social and economic impact of such events within the framework of social exchange theory. A total of 532 questionnaires were collected from sports students undertaking tertiary education in Hong Kong. The statistical results clearly indicated a lack of community support for the HKG. Hence, this paper makes recommendations on the integration of the ‘sports-for-all’ concept in the wider community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Studies on migration often assume that members of the same ethnic category are less likely to develop exclusionary attitudes toward each other. In order to explain why many Hong Kong people exhibit exclusionary attitudes toward granting social rights to Chinese immigrants who share the same ethnic ancestry with them, we conducted a phone survey to examine four important factors: (1) economic threat; (2) social threat; (3) negative stereotypes; and (4) contact with immigrants. We find that the economic threat-either at the societal or individual level-perceived by respondents does not explain their exclusionary attitudes. The results are consistent with alternative explanations emphasizing cultural and non-economic concerns commonly associated with ethnocentrism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong is the property of Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the 1980s, as the end of the millennium approached, the production of nostalgia exploded all around the world. For Hong Kong, nostalgia became a reminder of the golden age that had transformed the city into one of the "Four Asian Tigers" in the decades following the end of the Second World War. While yearning for the better days of the past, Hong Kong coincidentally experienced destabilisation. As the rest of the world, especially the "baby boomers," mourned the end of a productive era, Hong Kong locals were disturbed by the affirmation of the handover to China in 1997. In the context of these events, a creative rush to nostalgia in cultural manufacturing swept across the city. In the hope of highlighting the uniqueness of nostalgic production in Hong Kong, this study analyses two sets of TV commercials produced by local beverage company Vitasoy. Through the deconstruction of selected historical events, Vitasoy successfully reinvented its brand and, in contrast to general criticism of the concept, generated a positive connotation for nostalgia on the path towards Hong Kong's search for an identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining the history of the Hong Kong Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, this article addresses larger issues concerning British imperial power and naval strategy in the years surrounding the Second World War. It reveals how Britain attempted to overcome the restrictions of the Washington Naval Treaty and economic pressures of the interwar period by devolving more naval responsibilities to its colonies; how war in Europe divided Hong Kong society, fueling racial prejudices regarding Chinese loyalty which inhibited the naval force's efficiency in the face of Japanese invasion; and the Cold War legacy of these suspicions as the People's Republic of China emerged to exacerbate British insecurities about its ability to defend its colonial position in a world of declining influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Britain's colonial cities benefitted greatly from town planning practices that originated in the mother country. Hong Kong, one of many British colonial cities, grew from a small fishing village to an international metropolis. Urban development in the colony from 1841 to 1941 was continuous and systematic but ended abruptly with the Japanese invasion in World War II. The period was marked by rapid urban growth which brought with it many problems for the colonial management. This paper reviews the urban history of Hong Kong over the 100-year period from 1841 and explores the development motives of the colonial administration. The colonial government appointed British professionals for specialized roles and their services were apparent in significant milestones in the city's town planning and construction. The paper highlights the contributions of a few significant personnel: A.T. Gordon, C.G. Cleverly, Osbert Chadwick, David J. Owen and Wilfred H. Owen. By describing the works of these British colonial professionals, the authors hope to illustrate their impact on the development of Hong Kong, linking history to the present and filling gaps in the study of Hong Kong's early town planning. Both archive research and on-site study were employed in the preparation of this paper which is expected to complement other studies of colonial city planning in Asia and Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although petroleum exploration is being conducted in the Hong Kong region, high-quality hydrocarbon source rocks have never been found in this area. The Ping Chau Formation is only Mesozoic-Cenozoic sedimentary rock exposed in Hong Kong and its surrounding areas. The hydrocarbon source rock of the Ping Chau Formation is very rich in organic matters, which has an average total organic carbon (TOC) of 1.9% and chloroform bitumen "A" range from 0.14% to 0.24%. The total hydrocarbon content varies from 880 to 1800 ppm and the transformation ratio is specific from S to 9. The index of pyrolytic hydrogen is up to about 600 mgHC/gTOC. These data demonstrate the characteristics of the high-quality hydrocarbon source rock. The lamalginite is the major maceral of the source rock of the Ping Chau Formation, and geochemical characteristics also suggest that the organic materials of the source rock are of type I and type III, with abundant gammacerane, γ, β-carotane and C24 tetracyclic terpane, which indicate that it was formed in the salt water and brackish water sedimentary environment, and the source rock has evolved into a mature phase. The organic inclusions are found within calcite veins in cracks of the source rock, indicating that hydrocarbon has been generated and a secondary migration has happened. The source rock in the Ping Chau Formation is about 200-300 m thick, thus having considerable hydrocarbon potential. The discovery of the high quality hydrocarbon source rock in the Ping Chau Formation will certainly pro- vide insight on hydrocarbon resource exploration in the South China Sea area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the efforts to exteriorise and communalise Hong Kong in the public celebrations marking the 1997 ‘handover' from British to Chinese rule. Using Bhabha's notion of the colonial stereotype, I document the importance of commodifying history and the fusion of both epitaphs to Empire and invocations of Chinese nationalism as twin forms of colonialism. The repetition of stereotypes is traced to a transnational logic aimed at marketing events to a global television audience. I conclude that the dominant representational reliance on repetition functioned to prolong the constitutive anxieties provoked by the handover, preserving them in the public domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]