Search

Using declassified colonial and British records in Hong Kong and London, as well as memoirs of former leftists and newspapers, this article explores the strategies the Hong Kong colonial government employed in a propaganda campaign to garner political support of the rural population in the New Territories, a porous land frontier during the Cold War. It also analyses the varying political orientations of migrant farmers, who often had received economic benefits from both the colonial government and the leftist organizations. This article reveals that the colonial government established the Vegetable Marketing Organization (VMO), a state-owned enterprise, to first nationalize the vegetable wholesale market in the immediate post-war period, and subsequently used it to combat increasing political influence and anti-government activities of the communist-controlled Society of Plantations. Despite the improvement of the livelihood of immigrant farmers, the VMO Scheme failed to out-compete the Society economically, which was ultimately eliminated by draconian measures. Through studying the agrarian politics and economic contestations in Hong Kong's rural area, this article provides a lens on how the Cold War was played out at a village level in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key to understand a place is to explore the geographies of population, physical environments, socioeconomic entities and their interaction over time and space. By examining the archived company directories of Hong Kong during the period of 1900–1930, this study reconstructed its historical geography of legal functional units and explored their spatiotemporal relationships with social, economic and political functional units. The study found that in the early 1900s, legal practitioners scattered around nowadays Central and began more clustered over time. Among the lawyers, barristers were more clustered than solicitors. Moreover, the cluster of legal units moved from western Central to eastern Central with a transition splitting into two smaller clusters between 1910 and 1920. The results from regression analysis and local entropy mapping suggest that the spatial associations between legal and social, economic and political functional units changed over time, reflecting the evolving emphases of the legal professionals in serving the economic sectors in this commercial-based city. This work also demonstrates, methodologically, a space–time framework of parametric and non-parametric analyses appropriate to study historical geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon archival documents and previous scholarly works, this article investigates the invocation of Emergency Regulations Ordinance (Cap 241) (ERO) in colonial Hong Kong against the broader historical context connecting China, Britain and Hong Kong during the interwar and Cold War periods to make three main arguments. First, it argues that in comparison with similar statutes in other British colonies, the ERO was much easier for the Hong Kong Government to invoke to the extent that it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, for any challenge of its constitutionality to succeed. Second, China factors, be they factors related to China under Nationalist or Communist Party rule, were crucial in almost every occasion on which the ERO was used throughout Hong Kong's colonial history. Finally, partly because of the nearly unchecked freedom that the colonial government enjoyed, it used the ERO not only to deal with grave political instability or legitimacy crises but also to tackle the inconveniences of domestic governance, thereby effectively "ruling by decree". Accordingly, the number of times the ERO was invoked exceeds the figure we would expect if its use had arisen only on "occasion of emergency". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English law is central to the history of colonial Hong Kong. Traditional colonial historians conceptualise it as a gift to the colonised, and it is still widely acknowledged by Hong Kong citizens today as a core contributing factor to the city's continued growth and prosperity. The traditional narrative is that the rule of lew, which embraces the principles of judicial independence and offers such safeguards of individual liberty as freedom of expression, is the most important legacy of British colonial rule, a legacy that is very often cited to distinguish the legal and societal development of Hong Kong from that of its neighbour across the border, mainland China. This article, drawing on unexplored archival materials, challenges this widely accepted narrative, thereby severing the link between common law's legal past and present in Hong Kong. Through a close reading of a widely reported court case concerning students' anti-Japan movement in 1919, the article further argues that the common law system practised in pre-World War II Hong Kong played a more important role in reinforcing an authoritarian form of colonial law and order to achieve the British Empire's strategic aim of maintaining its overseas territorial and economic possessions than in safeguarding individual liberty and the impartiality of the judicial process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, drawing on a wide range of archived materials, and using one of the earliest sets of English business law imported to Hong Kong – the Bankruptcy Ordinance of 1864 – as a case study, argues that the transplantation of the English bankruptcy regime into early colonial Hong Kong was contrary to the business interests of both the European and Chinese communities and wrongfully displaced the traditional Chinese business norms and practices that had contributed to the health of the colonial economy prior to the regime's introduction. This article constitutes one of the first empirical studies to place English business law and its widely acknowledged contribution to the economy of early colonial Hong Kong under scrutiny. From the perspective of the relationship between English law and former British colonies’ development of business modernity, the findings presented herein contradict the readily accepted notion that English business law provided a solid legal infrastructure upon which colonial Hong Kong's prosperity and economic growth were built and call for more nuanced studies of the positive role of Chinese legal traditions in Hong Kong's development of business modernity in its early colonial period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Examines the role of face in organizational relationships in Hong Kong, China. Derivation of the concern for face from a socialization process; Perceptions of executives on the role of face; Use of shaming techniques to inculcate high sensitivity to group belonging; Analysis of narrated face incidents.

Focuses on the 2002 International Conference on Structured Matrices in Hong Kong, China. Purpose of the meeting; Topics and subject matters discussed; Presentation of papers on structured matrices with applications which cover different aspects in the research area.