香港回归的历史"前奏曲"——1979年3月邓小平与麦理浩的"北京会谈"述略

1979年3月香港总督麦理浩的北京之行,代表英国方面以香港"土地契约"问题为"突破口"逼中国方面对过"九七"的"英国管治"作出让步,第一次将中英两国政府"长期搁置"的香港"九七"前途问题明朗化.而邓小平"叫香港的投资者放心"的正面回应,初步揭示了中国共产党和中国政府关于"九七"以后"香港还可以搞它的资本主义"的战略思考.以此为契机,中国共产党和中国政府开始初步调整当代中国"国家统一"的战略重心,将以"一国两制"的"新思维"解决香港问题的"时间表"提前,探索将"台湾版"的"一国两制"香港化".     

‘An Organic Part of the Whole Structure’: John Curtin's Empire

In March 1957 Harold Macmillan expressed to Dwight Eisenhower that the British government was ‘considering abandoning Hong Kong’. The hitherto unknown Hong Kong Question in 1957 grew primarily out of Britain's imperial decline, and particularly the difficulties of defending Hong Kong. During the Cold War Hong Kong was a colony too valuable for Britain to abandon in peace, and yet too peripheral to be worth committing scarce resources to for its survival at war. The British dilemmas were exacerbated by the 1956 riots in Hong Kong and the general defence review undertaken by the Macmillan government in 1957, both of which raised serious questions about the adequacy of a reduced garrison to maintain internal security. The United States also showed concern about the future of the British colony in the light of Anglo-American differences over the Suez crisis and China policy. As a result of the Bermuda and Washington conferences in 1957, the Anglo-American relationship was restored by Eisenhower and Macmillan, a restoration which, as the latter saw it, made Hong Kong ‘a joint defence problem’ between the two allies. Together with the Chinese communist policy of leaving the colony alone, the Hong Kong Question was thus resolved inadvertently.     

Britain,European Economic Community Enlargement,and ‘Decolonisation’ in Hong Kong, 1967–1973

Politicians and businesspeople in Hong Kong paid close attention to British efforts to join the European Economic Community (EEC). The British colony was exempted from most tariffs in Britain, an arrangement that could not survive EEC enlargement. EEC members were unwilling to extend to Hong Kong, a significant exporter of manufactured goods, the same trade preferences offered to other dependent territories. Instead, the unique provision the EEC made for the colony was limited inclusion into their Generalised System of Preferences scheme, which granted tariff concessions to developing countries. Historians of Hong Kong have shown how the colony experienced British imperial withdrawal in a number of ways, despite remaining under British rule until 1997. This article demonstrates that an important element is missing from this account: how global economic shifts led to an erosion of imperial ties. EEC enlargement from 1973 entailed the end of Hong Kong's privileged access to the British market, but for the colony, the importance of imperial economic links had already faded. At the same time, an assessment of Hong Kong's capacity to pursue favourable terms of trade in global markets independently from Britain offers a more tentative conclusion of the extent of the colony's autonomy.     

Maritime Raiding,International Law and the Suppression of Piracy on the South China Coast, 1842–1869

This paper explores how piracy was defined and eventually reduced in the South China seas between 1842 and 1869. In the early 1840s, a large increase in maritime raiding led British agents to complain about the unwillingness of Qing officials to suppress disorder and drove the Hong Kong administration to propose its own solutions. British metropolitan officials nonetheless rejected many of these measures, arguing that they ran counter to established international maritime laws that made the Qing responsible for policing Chinese waters. Attempts were made to write this responsibility into the treaty which followed the Arrow War in 1860, but it was changes in the Qing state in the 1850s and 1860s which led Qing officials to treat small-scale maritime raiding as seriously as that of large rebel pirate fleets. The new Imperial Maritime Customs Service created an incentive to prevent smuggling and piracy which could deter trade and hence decrease customs revenue. The case suggests, first, that the large reduction in maritime raiding rested on Sino–British compromise and, second, that Britain used international maritime laws as much to control the expansive ambitions of Hong Kong as to encourage changes in Qing practices.     

‘Hong Kong is my Home’: The 1940 Evacuation and Hong Kong-Britons

Who were the Hong Kong British, and where did they live? This question sat at the heart of anguished and angry debates prompted by the colonial government’s edict in June 1940 ordering the evacuation to Australia of all women and children of ‘pure European descent’. In this article, I focus on thematic strands in the debate on Hong Kong British identity, such as race, class, legal domicile, reputation and migration, to explore the complex character of such British communities outside the Dominions. This article aims to characterise what it meant to be British in the wider empire, and deepen our understanding about the place of such communities in the picture of colonial migration.     

The Last Stand of Colonialism? The Unofficial Members of the Executive and Legislative Councils and the Sino-British Negotiations Over Hong Kong, 1982–1984

ABSTRACT

As influential leaders in Hong Kong, the Unofficial Members of the Executive and Legislative Council (UMELCO) were arguably the only group of Hong Kong people permitted to take part in the Sino-British negotiations that defined the future of Hong Kong. But almost no studies have explored the broader significance of their participation in the negotiations. Using recently declassified British documents, this article argues that, in the wider history of decolonisation, UMELCO’s petition for British administration belonged to the less noticed voices that called for alternatives to independence. UMELCO’s participation also reveals how the negotiations challenged Hong Kong’s autonomy. Although governors at times advocated Hong Kong’s interests vis-a-vis London, the governor’s autonomy during the negotiations was restricted, so the appeal of UMELCO was further weakened. Although UMELCO wanted to preserve the existing system, their actions inadvertently boosted the rise of ‘Hong Kong people’ as an idea and encouraged local people to demand more democracy. The structure of ExCo, LegCo and the government was mostly inherited by post-1997 Hong Kong, while some of UMELCO shifted to the Chinese side, suggesting the irony that a supposedly anti-colonial China lived with a state that came largely from colonial rule.     

1967年香港反英抗暴斗争后中国对港贸易的恢复

1967年香港的反英抗暴斗争,是中英关系史和香港发展史上一次有重大影响的事件。因此次事件,中国内地暂停经香港的转口业务,港英当局对内地采取贸易歧视政策,美国、日本和中国台湾等乘机加紧对港澳市场的争夺。到1968年,中国商品占香港进口市场份额退居第二位,位列日本之后。在此背景下,中国政府采取强有力措施,迅速恢复和扩大对港澳地区的出口供应。透过历史的考察与分析,可以看出中央政府确保对港澳市场的稳定供应具有战略意义,体现出中央保持港澳地区长期繁荣稳定的方针是一贯的。在反英抗暴斗争中,中央政府坚持有理、有利、有节的斗争方针,在外贸总量同期大幅度下降的情况下,中英贸易没有受到太大的影响。     

论二战后期中英美围绕香港战后地位问题的交涉与斗争

在第二次世界大战后期,美国、英国和中国围绕香港的战后地位问题展开激烈斗争。美国政府支持战后由中国收回香港主权。罗斯福总统为此作出许多外交努力。英国拒绝战后将香港主权交还中国。这样,蒋介石将希望完全寄予美国的支持上。但是在战争结束前夕,美国与苏联开始进行冷战,美国需要英国的支持,因此放弃了原来的政策。其结果是英国在战争结束时重新占领香港。     

Middle-class childhood and parenting culture in high-rise Hong Kong: on scheduled lives,the school trap and a new urban idyll

This exploratory study seeks to understand childhood in Hong Kong in relation to the high-rise living environment and dominant parenting culture among middle-class professionals. The empirical results suggest that it is parenting culture rather than the built environment that creates children's busy, scheduled lives, high levels of adult supervision and limited outdoor play. Building on a strong portfolio is considered to be both necessary to enter the popular British educational system and to counterbalance a curriculum that is supposed to offer less structured learning compared to the local Cantonese schools. It is argued that this paradoxical situation must be understood in the context of parents' personal childhood histories and the highly competitive global labour market in Hong Kong. The paper ends with a reflection on new discourses of childhood that creates cities and its many consumption spaces as urban idylls for raising children.     

In the Wake of Political Intervention： British Hong Kong and the Lingnan Macroregion

This article attempts a preliminary exploration of the intraregional cohesion and division between British Hong Kong and the Lingnan macroregion. A deliberately overlooked locale in Skinner＇s macroregional model, Hong Kong developed from a periphery zone on the far eastern outskirt of Lingnan in its precolonial days to a thriving metropolis at the end of British rule. The transformation of British Hong Kong attests to the economic fundamentals of intraregional cohesion. More significantly it highlights the decisive power of political intervention, underestimated in Skinner＇s approach, which brought enduring changes to the shape as well as the internal and external relations of the macroregion.     

从《部门报告》看战前港英政府的社会福利事业

1909至1939年港英政府的《部门报告》是一份久为人所忽视的档案。该报告显示香港政府在社会福利事业上曾用力不少。与西方相比,其策划规模与客观成就并不落后。     

A ‘New Angle of Vision’: British Imperial Reappraisal of Hong Kong during the Second World War

This paper examines the involvement of British officials at the Stanley Internment Camp in Hong Kong in the perpetuation of imperial ideals during the Second World War, as well as in the eventual restoration of British rule to the territory. It highlights the debates that were conducted within the camp on issues of post-war reconstruction, as well as the strategies that were devised by the internees in anticipation of the new social, economic and political orders of the post-war colonial world. The paper also highlights similar discussions that transpired within the Changi Camp in Singapore and the Lintang Camp in Sarawak (Borneo) as supplementary case studies. Remarkably, many of these ideas ran in parallel with secret planning in London, where Hong Kong and Malayan governments-in-exile conceived revamped colonial administrations following the envisaged defeat of the Japanese. A number of these wartime schemes were even implemented after the Japanese surrender in August 1945, with significant impact on the phase of post-war British imperial revival.     

‘A Haven for Tortured Souls’: Hong Kong in the Vietnam War

The Vietnam War exerted a profound economic and social effect on Hong Kong. Between 1965 and 1970, the British Crown Colony annually hosted about 200,000 US ground and naval personnel on holiday. This influx annually earned Hong Kong about US$300–400 million (in 2012 dollars) and employed thousands of residents working in the colony's service industries. Using English- and Chinese-language archival materials from Hong Kong, the United States, and the United Kingdom, the article examines how US servicemen and the businesses catering to them became contentious issues in local society. Servicemen excited widespread interest, but their misdeeds and their stomping grounds provoked intense anxiety. Hong Kong residents’ ensuing debates exercised the colony's emerging public sphere, from newspaper battles to outspoken unions and neighbourhood associations. In tandem with the more commonly cited Star Ferry Riots of 1966 and the Communist agitations of 1967, US R&R was an essential ingredient in the emergence of a distinctive Hong Kong identity and citizenry during this period. While residents’ objections failed to curb the GIs’ haunts or holidays, Vietnam tourism and its reverberating effects pressed new sectors of Hong Kong people to grasp and articulate their investment as citizens in the territory's future.     

One Country Two Peoples?

This article weighs the demographic evidence for either assimilation or separation among Hong Kong residents who were born in British Colonial Hong Kong or Mainland China. Using successive waves of Hong Kong census data from 1991 to 2011, we show the effects of nativity on four indicators of social distance and differentiation: residential segregation, linguistic assimilation, wage inequality and educational opportunity. On the one hand, there is some evidence of assimilation in terms of residential location and home language. On the other hand, in terms of wage inequality and access to postsecondary education, our findings suggest that Hong Kong's population could become more divided depending upon birthplace.     

Imperial Outposts and the War Beyond: Singapore,Hong Kong and the British Empire’s Land Force Contribution to the Korean War

Histories of the British Empire’s strategic outposts in the Far East have traditionally focused on their traumatic loss to the Japanese adversary during the Second World War. Only in the past decade-and-a-half have historians begun to examine the post-Second World War importance of these outposts to the continued defence and security of Britain’s empire in the Far East. In taking this line of historical enquiry still further, the article examines how Singapore and Hong Kong were used to project British military power, specifically army deployments, across the Far East, and far beyond the imperial frontier, in support of Britain’s involvement in the 1950–53 Korean War and therefore in pursuit of the empire’s foreign and defence policy objectives. It adopts an essentially operational analysis to this end, relying on operational and army ‘ground-level’ sources from the records of the Colonial, Foreign, and War Offices at the British National Archives. It uncovers the hidden workings of the mechanisms of imperial military power projection through strategic outposts, which ranged from training to logistical support to the exercise of command and control, and how these mechanisms and outposts were utilised by the British Far Eastern land forces involved in the Korean War. In so doing, the article sheds much valuable and original light on the historical importance of these strategic outposts to imperial defence.     

Vancouver island in the empire

Colonised by sea from the British Isles half a century before it became a part of Canada in 1871, Vancouver Island is best understood as part of a worldwide system of island bases that included Aden, Bombay, Cyprus, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Malta, St Helena, Sydney and Trincomalee (Ceylon). Its character was formed by the Royal Navy as it moved into the Pacific and by other imperial personnel attracted by reports of cheap land in a picturesque landscape, good fishing and hunting, and a British civilisation. Surprising numbers of British officers and civil servants arrived from India and China as well as Britain. Historians from east of the Rockies, busy writing the Empire out of Canadian history, tend to approach the Island's history through an ideological cloud of nationalism. The result has been an unfortunate distortion of Vancouver Island's imperial past.     

From ‘Free’ to ‘Fair’ Trade: The Evolution of Labour Laws in Colonial Hong Kong, 1958–62

By the mid-1950s the Colonial Office was working closely with officials in a rapidly industrialising Hong Kong to improve employment conditions by extending statutory rights to factory workers. From 1958 it wanted to accelerate the pace of legislative change to respond to the demands of social and business lobby groups. The colonial administration in Hong Kong was reluctant to regulate industry more stringently but, as pressure from Britain intensified, it decided that it had to act. In 1959, it amended an existing ordinance regulating the factory hours worked by women and young persons, and in 1962 introduced a new one providing every factory worker with an entitlement to holiday and sick pay. Labour-law making within Hong Kong, however, required the government to forge alliances with business groups, a drawn-out political process that allowed employers to secure significant concessions.     

Hong Kong and Macao under Chinese Sovereignty: A Framing Discourse

A senior American specialist on China and noted geographer presents a framing commentary and analysis of three preceding papers (Yeung et al., 2008; Shen, 2008; and Tang, 2008) comprising a symposium on Hong Kong and Macao under Chinese sovereignty after Great Britain and Portugal ceased to govern these cities in the late 1990s. The paper commences with an historical overview, noting the years of colonial rule, discussing relations with Mainland China before and after its economic reforms were set in motion, and evaluating the post-handover period in light of the material and arguments in the preceding papers. Included in the paper is also a section on environmental degradation in Hong Kong. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: N950, O18, Q30, R11. 3 figures, 17 references.     

Inter-imperial Humanitarianism: The Macau Delegation of the Portuguese Red Cross during the Second World War

ABSTRACT

Focusing on the history of the wartime Macau Delegation of the Portuguese Red Cross (1943–46), this article aims to shed light on interactions between Macau and the occupied British colony of Hong Kong during the Second World War. It argues that the Macau Red Cross branch was a concrete example of Portuguese collaborative neutrality with the Allies, most particularly the British. In coordination with the International Committee of the Red Cross, this local branch played an important role in humanitarian assistance to many victims of the war, particularly refugees and POW dependants, in Hong Kong and Shanghai when British authorities were unable to negotiate an exchange with Japan or provide direct assistance in those occupied cities.

The wartime Red Cross in Macau was a small-scale and temporary endeavour but, nevertheless, a multi-dimensional one: it was a local creation, a delegation integrated in a national and colonial context, an inter-imperial institution and part of a transnational organisation with global reach.     

The red line over European colonialism: comparison of the Macao museum and Hong Kong museum of history after their return to China

Hong Kong and Macao were once European colonies. A unique, hybrid culture of East and West now flourishes in these two Special Administrative Regions (SARs) of China. Both cities opened new history museums in 1998, but they adopted remarkably different approaches in their representation of their complicated and politically sensitive history. The Hong Kong Museum of History (HKMH) represents history by closely following the orientation of traditional Chinese nationalism. The postcolonial characteristics adopted by the Macao Museum to reproduce history, in contrast, are likely amongst the richest of all history museums in China. What are the reasons behind the different historical representations by Hong Kong and Macao, which were both promised a ‘One country, Two systems’ policy by the Chinese central authority? This paper argues that both museums reveal two faces of a rising China; the one in Hong Kong emphasises national dignity, and the people’s identification with and loyalty to the nation when it is engaged in state building. The one in Macao emphasises the multiple roles in finding a balanced position to coexist with superpowers, forging friendships with developing countries and building an idealised image of a (re-)rising nation through historical construction. The difference between these two museums indicates the exceptional flexibility of China’s postcommunist regime in engaging in soft power diplomacy.