HIST7008 Chap.2 Hong Kong-Centred History and Rethinking Place
Hong Kong-Centred History and Rethinking Place
From stand-in to subject
Hong Kong history did not start out as a field with its own questions. After 1949, anthropologists who wanted to study Chinese society but could not work on the mainland settled for the New Territories, treating its lineage villages as the nearest available version of rural China.
Hugh Baker's account of these fieldworkers, beginning with Barbara Ward's arrival in 1950, shows how much they relied on earlier civil servants, missionaries, lawyers and the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, revived in 1960. Jack Potter, whose 1968 book studied a major lineage village, admitted he would rather have been working in a Chinese commune.
The first anthropology department in Hong Kong did not open until 1973. The work was serious, but the territory itself was rarely the point.
The Hong Kong-centred turn
From the 1980s a group of scholars reversed the direction of the question.
Carl Smith's Chinese Christians reconstructed an organised Chinese community of mission-educated middlemen, compradors and contractors, using land records, wills and newspapers alongside the colonial archive. Christopher Munn later grouped Smith with Hayes, Sinn and Faure as a Hong Kong school that put residents ahead of governors.
James Watson described New Territories lineages and their emigrants on their own terms, and Hugh Baker's Hong Kong Man described a restless urban type that was neither British nor simply Chinese.
A distinct place with elites of its own
John Carroll pushed the argument back in time.
He contends that Chinese business elites had made Hong Kong a place in its own right by the late nineteenth century, through charity for China, displays of imperial loyalty and a hand in writing the colony's official history. His evidence includes a 1901 petition from leading Chinese residents asking for a school for their own children, which led to St. Stephen's College.
The relationship he describes between these elites and colonial officials is collaboration mixed with social segregation, and he uses it to challenge binary models of colonizer and colonized.
Connected, plural and imperial
More recent readings keep Hong Kong at the centre but trace the lines running out of it.
Peter Hamilton follows mobile elite families who reached the colony after 1949 and built American educational and commercial ties, making Hong Kong a node in postwar globalisation. He notes that roughly 700,000 people moved to the colony during the communist transition, and that by the mid-1970s Hong Kong sent more foreign students to American colleges than anywhere else.
Caroline Plüss studies Parsee, Muslim, Sikh and Hindu migrants caught between a British political majority and a Chinese numerical one.
Bobby Tam reads a colonial cemetery as a British sacred space defined by exclusion, and Leo Shin argues that every telling of Hong Kong's story competes with others backed by London or Beijing.
Four reasons and what they mean for your essays
The course frames the field through four motives for doing the work: being in Hong Kong more or less by circumstance, beginning from a present concern, finding or re-reading sources, and joining wider historical debates.
A strong methods essay treats these as lenses on each reading. Say what the author inherited, what evidence or question changed, and what the reading still leaves out, then let the next scholar answer that gap. The lecture adds a caution drawn from E. H. Carr: historians are shaped by their own times, so each reading also reflects the moment it was written.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Anthropologists and Hong Kong as a window on China
- 02
Non-academic researchers and the Royal Asiatic Society branch
- 03
Carl Smith, middlemen and the Hong Kong school
- 04
Hong Kong Man and the question of belonging
- 05
Carroll and the colony as a cultural-historical place
- 06
In-between place and transpacific networks
- 07
Indian migrants and a multicultural colony
- 08
Four reasons for doing Hong Kong history, and how to use them
Worked example · free
Placing Carroll against the stories he corrects
- 2Name the earlier habit Carroll targets: using Hong Kong as a lens on rural China or on China's modern history.
- 2State his counter-claim and the period it covers, with the elites who carry it.
- 2Give one piece of his evidence, such as the 1901 school petition or the centenary writings of 1941.
- 2Close on a limit that points to later work on non-elite or non-Chinese residents.
Key terms
- Window on China
- A research stance that treats Hong Kong as a substitute site for studying mainland Chinese society, common among anthropologists after 1949.
- Hong Kong School
- A label Christopher Munn gives to historians such as Smith, Hayes, Sinn and Faure who foreground Hong Kong residents and use previously untapped sources.
- Middleman
- A Chinese go-between, often educated in English at a mission school, who carried knowledge and deals between Chinese and European communities.
- Hong Kong Man
- Hugh Baker's name for an urban social type he saw emerging by 1983: flexible, competitive, self-made and living in the short term.
- Cultural-Historical Place
- John Carroll's term for a location given distinct meaning by the people who lived there, applied to Hong Kong before 1949.
- Hong Kong-Centred History
- An approach that studies Hong Kong on its own terms, asking how its residents lived and organised themselves, rather than using the colony as a lens on China or as a chapter in the story of British rule.
- Kuashang
- Peter Hamilton's name for mobile Hong Kong elites, or straddling merchants, who built business and educational ties with the United States.
Hong Kong-Centred History and Rethinking Place FAQ
What does Hong Kong-centred history actually mean?
It describes scholarship that asks what happened to the people of Hong Kong themselves instead of using the territory to explain China or British policy. Carl Smith's study of Chinese converts, compradors and contractors is the classic case, because it rebuilds a Chinese community from wills, land records and newspapers.
Centring Hong Kong does not mean ignoring links outward; Smith's own subjects moved along the China coast and overseas.
Why did anthropologists study the New Territories instead of mainland China?
After the communist victory in 1949, fieldwork in China became impossible, so researchers went to Taiwan and Hong Kong instead. Jack Potter openly described the New Territories as the closest he could get. The resulting studies of lineages, boat people and religion were valuable, and later scholars such as Watson used them to show that rural Hong Kong had its own history, including large emigration to Britain.
How do I use the idea of Hong Kong as an in-between place in an essay?
Use it to show how a local subject connects to migration, trade or empire beyond the colony. Peter Hamilton, citing Elizabeth Sinn, treats Hong Kong as the hub linking China with Chinese communities in Southeast Asia and the Americas, then follows elite families into American networks after 1949. In a methods essay, set this against earlier accounts that saw the territory only through China or only through Britain.
Assessment move
Pick two readings from different columns of the chapter map, for instance Watson and Hamilton. For each, write three short lines: the earlier view it answers, the new evidence or question it brings, and one group it leaves out. Then draft a single linking sentence that explains how the second reading changes what the first can claim. Keep this sheet beside you when planning your methods essay.
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