Politics can be a profitable business as can be found in Republican era Canton amidst a politically fragmented China. Competing merchant groups in Hong Kong sought to finance the regional Canton government in return for financial concessions. This patronage system made commercial endeavours dependent on politics and embedded business in politics.
Overseas Chinese in the People’s Republic of China examines the experiences of a group of persons known officially and collectively in the PRC as "domestic Overseas Chinese". They include family members of overseas migrants who remained in China, refugees fleeing persecution, and former migrants and their descendants who "returned" to the People’s Republic in order to pursue higher education and to serve their motherland. In this book, Glen Peterson describes the nature of the official state project by which domestic Overseas Chinese were incorporated into the economic, political and social structures of the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s, examines the multiple and contradictory meanings associated with being "domestic Overseas Chinese", and explores how "domestic Overseas Chineseness" as political category shaped social experiences and identities. This book fills an important gap in the literature on Chinese migration and Chinese transnationalism and will be an invaluable resource to students and scholars of these subjects, as well as Chinese history and Asian Studies more generally.
This book focuses on Lam Woo, a wellknown, highly successful Chinese building contractor whose company was based in Hong Kong at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is also about the marginal group of people he exemplifies, those who joined the Chinese diaspora because of poverty and political turmoil and were later driven back home because of discrimination and other difficulties. An important contribution to Hong Kong Studies, this book provides a window onto the sociopolitical conditions in Hong Kong leading up to and following the 1911 revolution that established the Republic of China and the following two decades. In studying Lam Woo's life and family, we catch a glimpse of the lives of a unique segment of the Hong Kong Chinese community—namely, the educated, westernized Chinese, mainly Christians, some of whom supported the revolution to overthrow the Qing dynasty and helped to establish Hong Kong's influential YMCA. Professor Chan, who has written several books on Hong Kong History, draws on rich archival sources, and historical photographs to illustrate the life of a man who was a pioneer builder of majestic heritage buildings throughout Hong Kong such as St. Paul's Church, St. Paul's Coeducational College, the Diocesan Boys' School, and St. Stephen's College, all of which remain in use today. This book is a significant historical study that rediscovers an important but less studied part of Hong Kong's development during the early twentieth century. For instance, the book details Lam Woo's efforts in rebuilding the port facilities and docks that helped the colony's transformation into a glamorous, international port. The author also discusses how Lam Woo's contributions to the building of the roads encircling the New Territories and the bridges linked different parts of the territory with mainland China, where water and food supplies would later come from. In the later part of the book, the author highlights how Lam Woo, a devout Anglican, contributed to the expansion of the Chinese Anglican Church community. As one of the founders of St. Paul's Church, he promoted the establishment of the Hong Kong YMCA, with its emphasis on character training in "the development of body, mind, and spirit" for young people. The book emphasizes that his most lasting legacy for Hong Kong and his native Guangzhou was through his philanthropist activities in education. Lam Woo supported education for girls and founded St. Paul's Girls' School, the forerunner of the notable St. Paul's Coeducational College, founded a primary and a secondary school in his native village, and donated extensively to Lingnan University.
This book aims at providing an accessible introduction to and summary of the major themes of Hong Kong history that has been studied in the past decades. Each chapter also suggests a number of key historical figures and works that are essential for the understanding of a particular theme. However, the book is by no means merely a general survey of the recent studies of Hong Kong history; it tries to suggest that the best way to approach Hong Kong history is to put it firmly in its international context.
This book is the first to use local primary sources to explore the interaction between foreign and native merchants in Asian countries. Contributors discuss the different economic, political and cultural conditions that gave rise to a variety of merchant communities in Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore and India.
Written by three academic specialists on Hong Kong cultural identity, social history, and mass media, this book explores Hong Kong's cultural relation to the Chinese nation and state in the recent past, present, and future.
Yeung examines 'overseas' Chinese capitalism in East and Southeast Asia in a time of accelerated globalization and the evolution of Chinese capitalism through the participation of political and business elites in the global economy.
A study of the complex role of the seaside as a leisure space in colonial Hong Kong. British sports were in many respects more meaningful in the empire than literature, music, art, or religion. They served as an instrument of cultural association and later of cultural change, promoting imperial union and then postimperial goodwill. Poon analyses the ways in which British colonists and Chinese leaders, backed by the rhetoric of public health and nationalism, respectively, transformed the Hong Kong seaside into a leisure space. She argues that the growing popularity of seaside resorts and sea bathing as a preferred form of leisure activity across the social and ethnic spectrums served an important role in shaping the racial relationship between Westerners and the Chinese population, as well as the Chinese people’s perception of the female body and the seaside, during the colonial period. The popularity of British leisure forms in colonial Hong Kong does not necessarily mean the triumph of “Britishness.” This book will be of great interest to historians with an interest in leisure and in Empire and Colonialism, as well as historians of Colonial Hong Kong and Modern China.
Global Hong Kong locates Hong Kong in the contemporary globalizing world. Hong Kong, as the authors argue, is an archetypal place, sitting at the intersection of East and West. It is also a major center for global capital flows and world trade. Moreover, in recent years, the island's global cultural power has become increasingly evident, as Hong Kong popular culture has spread to the West via a booming film industry. While looking at issues of postcoloniality, transnationalism and economic globalization, Wong and McDonogh focus on the new cultures and social formations of contemporary Hong Kong, as well as the transformation of the physical city itself. They also trace the new interconnections - economic, demographic, social and cultural - between Hong Kong and other parts of the worldthat have benn fostered by globalization. Books in this series look at how nations and regions across the world are navigating the tumultuous currents of globalization. Concise, descriptive, interdisciplinary, and theoretically informed, they serve as ideal introductions to the peoples and places of our increasingly globalized world.
