A Victorian saying went like this: by acquiring Hong Kong, Great Britain had cut a notch in the body of China as a woodsman cuts a notch in a great oak he is presently going to fell. As a “notch,” Hong Kong, seized by the British navy in the First Opium War (1840–1842), has possessed a value that can never be measured in terms of territorial conquest. The British sought a place where they could establish an independent commercial and military base free from the bureaucratic Qing government and the Cohong system that restricted foreign trade to be conducted...

Poet and educationalist Chris Searle once wrote that “the English language has been a monumental force and institution of oppression and rabid exploitation throughout the 400 years of imperialist history… It was made to scorn the languages it sought to replace, and told the colonized peoples that mimicry of its primacy among languages was a necessary badge of their social mobility as well as their continued humiliation and subjection… The English language itself was the language of the master, the carrier of his arrogance and brutality” (Searle 1983: 48). Amidst Hong Kong’s post-1997 “mother-tongue” education controversies, educators in Hong Kong...

Late-nineteenth-century Hong Kong witnessed the rapid development of its English-language education. But it was also a period when many other British colonies cried out in alarm about crises in their English-language education systems. Valentine Chirol (1910), for example, reports how Macaulay’s famous Minute on Indian Education in 1835 inaugurated a highly successful system of English-language education (especially during its first three decades) that produced “men of great intellectual attainments and of high character”; yet in the wake of student-associated political agitation all over India, its English-language education system turned out to be a seedbed of discontent. According to Chirol, schools...

Postcolonial studies have dispensed much ink on the ambivalent state that colonial rule perhaps left to the colonized people in the “contact zone.” Frantz Fanon’s famous “black skin–white masks” metaphor reflects his effort to capture the miserable split identity of the colonized: he asserts that colonial authority is so overwhelmingly dominant that it works whenever colonized subjects try to mimic the colonizer’s culture. Homi Bhabha, in contrast, argues that mimicry undermines colonial authority as much as it does other in-between states of hybridization or creolization in which resistance is not just possible but always embedded, as well. In short,...

In contrast to the one-China conception in dominance now, regionalism was indeed a key theme of early Republican Chinese politics, as there was no stable central Chinese government until Chiang Kai-shek led the Northern Expedition in 1926. The lingering regional rivalries were partly a continuation of the late-Qing situation. The southern provinces, largely out of reach of Qing imperial control, could be used by various forces as testing grounds for new projects such as reformist experiments in building Western-style institutions and the revolutionary mobilization of migrants returned from overseas. In this regard, the southern provinces were the place where different...

Global politics after World War II included the decolonization of many former colonies; yet, at the same time, the global politics of this time ushered in the Cold War, which lasted for the next half century. Many former colonies fell into the categories of either developing nations or underdeveloped nations and found their independence in a world deeply divided. This state of affairs meant not so much that the former colonies would embark on autonomous development as a new kind of dependence that played into the hands of either one, or both, of the hegemonic powers. Culturally, national independence also...

It is nowadays a commonplace to characterize the 1970s as a monumental break for Hong Kong. While many praise the economic take-off, quite some others point to the cultural and social transformation that happened then. The rise of political activisms and radicalisms among the university students is often referred to as an important cause of those profound changes, which gave rise to the new political outlook of the postwar’s generation of locally born Hong Kong Chinese. Their growing interest in political participation is often taken as the manifestation of an emerging local consciousness which resulted from the identity crisis that...

Hong Kong’s colonial subjection to the Western powers in the past has not denied the space for Chinese national identity of most of its citizens to grow and transform. The co-evolution of colonialism and Chinese nationalism, the strong continuity between nationalist and colonial governmentality, etc., have almost made themselves indistinguishable from each other in many ways. Critical scholarships, couched in all too simple binary opposite terms are, therefore, hopelessly inadequate to grasp the complexity of coloniality manifested in Hong Kong and China because dominance and resistance have always happened within an ever-changing matrix of colonial power. This is especially true...