Browsing by Projects - Department "Department of History"

This proposed project aims to re-examine China as a historical reality—no matter how fluid and malleable—against the rising tide of deconstructionism. It takes the form of an intellectual conversation among internationally renowned scholars from mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Japan, England, and the United States, who will have an in-depth discussion of the changing nature of China as a viable historical entity as well as a modern state. The contributors to this project will engage in a discussion of historical China and the discourses of China from different angles and in different contexts. The participants will examine how contemporary China has effloresced from a historically transformative imperial, cultural, or spatial framework with both inheritances and ruptures. This project will organize a two-day international conference in 2025 on the campus of Hong Kong Shue Yan University that is open to both academics and the public.

The present research project investigates the introduction of film in Shanghai and its impact on city governance in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The arrival of cinema as a major pastime in the early twentieth century fascinated a wide spectrum of urban residents and thereby created a new type of crowd—filmgoers—despite the audiences’ diverse racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds. The blending of people of differing social standings in newly constructed movie theaters posed a challenge to the local authorities in Shanghai, who were impelled to respond to the rise of film—the most cutting-edge technology and a novel form of entertainment. In consequence, Shanghai’s colonial authorities—the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC) and Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP)— enacted new architectural codes and fire prevention rules, tightened up anti-crime and anti-prostitution measures, and, finally, established a censorial system to make films containing obscene and subversive elements inaccessible to the viewing public.

While the existing scholarship on films and film exhibitions in early-twentieth-century China focuses mainly on how the motion picture managed to make inroads into the city dwellers’ everyday life, lent experiences of modernity, and elicited modern sensibilities, scholars have paid scant attention to cinema’s role in reshaping a city. Likewise, students of urban history in modern China usually view the popularization of the motion picture as mere evidence of the triumph of modernism and cosmopolitanism but fall short of understanding it as a key player that refashioned the physical, administrative, legal/political, and cultural aspects of Chinese cities. Thus, this proposed study is inherently interdisciplinary as it stitches together two formerly disparate academic traditions—film and urban studies—to explore the dyadic relationship between cinema and city in the early decades of the twentieth century.

By exploring the legislative and reform efforts made by the local authorities in Shanghai in response to the dominance of the motion picture in the first three decades of the twentieth century, the present research project attempts to demonstrate how cinema and city were mutually constitutive: On the other hand, the prevalence of cinemagoing as a new pastime prompted the political authorities in Shanghai to reformulate their agendas of city administration by devising new urban plans, maintaining public safety, diminishing racial segregation, resolving racial/national conflicts, and achieving political stability. On the other hand, moral anxiety and political expediency caused by pervasive fears for the display of scenes of crimes and revolutions on the silver screen cultivated a preference for movies about family, romantic love, and the destinies of individuals that masked intense racial, national, and class clashes in the external world, resulting in the market success of melodramatic films, particularly those of D. W. Griffith (1875-1948), throughout the 1920s.

The project investigates China and globalisation, leading to a set of electronic teaching and learning tools for secondary schools.

This research project examines the multi-imperial dimensions—the intersection and juxtaposition of multiple imperialist powers—of Chinese treaty port cities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It centers on China’s two largest treaty ports: Tianjin and Shanghai, two cities that were divided into several colonial concessions alongside the Chinese districts from the 1860s to 1940s. Historically, Shanghai was characterized by its tripartite division of governance—the British-dominated International Settlement, the French Concession, and the Chinese municipality, whereas Tianjin was home to up to nine foreign-controlled concessions (British, American, French, German, Japanese, Russian, Belgian, Austro-Hungarian, and Italian). Situated at the intersection of modern Chinese history, history of empires, and urban history, the present research analyzes how these multiple imperialisms shaped, and were shaped by, these two cities. This project fills a critical gap in the existing academic literature on modern imperialism in China by foregrounding the history of various interactions among multiple empires in the context of Chinese treaty port cities from 1860s to 1930s. While much scholarship on modern global imperial history and colonial urbanism has focused on the bilateral relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, the present study on Shanghai’s and Tianjin’s colonial pasts underscores the multiplicity, multilateralism, and multilayered trajectories at the heart of the colonial experiences of both imperialist powers and the Chinese. At the center of this research is the mutual constitution between the dynamics of multi-imperial relations and the unique spatial configuration of these two cities. On the one hand, the multiple constellations of colonial powers, as well as their interactions, produced ad hoc spatial arrangements characteristic of these port cities, delineated the contours of tangled political landscapes, and exerted significant impact on these cities’ physical landscapes. On the other hand, the side-by-side presence of colonial concessions, along with Chinese municipalities, conditioned the ways in which imperial powers operated within these urban spaces and interacted with one another. Focusing on multi-imperial interactions at several historical junctures defined by domestic and international crises, the present research project demonstrates the density and concentration of crisscrossing imperial trajectories within cities while situating Chinese colonial history within a global comparative framework.

This proposed project will address the conflict and cooperation between two aspects of private Chinese maritime trade on the coasts and inland rivers of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces: customs clearance and the registration of steamships under the treaty port and modern maritime customs systems; and vague regulations and flexible business models for Chinese junks and steam launches under the triple maritime zones (foreign colonies, treaty ports and non-treaty ports) and dual maritime customs system (foreign customs, native customs and likin administration).

The proposed project will investigate the trade routes and business models of Chinese junks and steam launches across the porous Hong Kong–China border and the network of treaty and non-treaty ports on the Pearl River, and their significance to maritime trade and the efforts of Chinese players to defend domestic trade by including the Chinese local governments and private Chinese traders in the late Qing and early Republican periods.

This research aims to explore and review the policy on Chinese funerals and interment pursued by the Hong Kong colonial government between 1945 and 1997. In recent years, private columbarium niches and insufficient graveyards have become two highly controversial topics in Hong Kong society. These topics have undoubtedly aroused public interest in the history of the government's burial policy, and therefore it is meaningful to review the past government policy on Chinese burials. The funeral culture of contemporary Hong Kong can be broadly divided into two traditions: urban traditions and New Territories traditions. In the early days of colonial Hong Kong, owing to society’s immigrant nature in urban areas as well as the restrictions and inducements of government policies, urban residents gradually developed a funeral culture that was different from that of the local inhabitants of the New Territories. This division became more apparent after the Second World War. The Hong Kong government's strict restrictions on the disposal of dead bodies, the expansion of the public medical system, and many deaths in hospitals, changed the Chinese tradition of holding funerals at home. Unlike in mainland China, where there was forceful state intervention in death, in Hong Kong, the government adopted a "soft" approach to funerals, even providing support to Chinese people in various ways. The support measures included providing a free transport service for cremations in the 1970s, monitoring the daily operations of funeral homes and undertakers, providing more land to public cemeteries, and religious cemeteries for the building of niches for ashes. The limited land supply for cemeteries, combined with the declining religiosity and diminishing adherence to traditional Chinese values among the generations born in the 1970s onwards, resulted in the prevalence of cremation over burials and the simplification of Chinese funerals in Hong Kong. However, there is no comprehensive and systematic study concerning the colonial government's attitude and policy during the Post-war period; instead, there are only a handful of studies that are related to the government's burial policy towards the indigenous residents of the New Territories. This proposed study will adopt an empirical approach to investigate and analyse the Hong Kong government's policy on Chinese burials with reference to other case studies other than Hong Kong（e.g., mainland China, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan）, seeking to verify the truth or falsity of claims based on anecdotal evidence. The primary sources studied will include official data and statistics; relevant government reports and correspondence; the reports and minutes of the Urban Council, which was responsible for burial affairs before 1999; and the archives of the Tung Wah Hospital. Secondary source materials will include various reports in newspapers, popular magazines, and scholarly journals. The proposed research is expected to benefit researchers doing Hong Kong studies, the HKSAR government, the general public, and heritage conservationists. The proposed study could yield insights that could help government policy makers to formulate funeral and internment policies in the future. It could also help to enrich death education.

This research project examines the career of Dr. Wu Yi-fang (1893-1985) as president of Ginling College, a Christian higher education institution based in Nanjing. This research project focuses on two aspects of her personal life and work experiences to gain a deeper understanding of the long 20th century, during which China underwent momentous changes.
First, a case study of Dr. Wu’s professional career allows for a close investigation of the rise and fall of Christian universities and colleges during the tumultuous years of Republican China (1912-1949). In the late 1920s, the Nationalist government proceeded to secularize and Sinify Christian universities, paving the way for Wu Yi-fang’s ascendance as the first and only Chinese president of Ginling College. Dr. Wu reconciled the two seemingly competing threads of educational ideas: the Christian and the patriotic. Dr. Wu herself was a political activist whose political career culminated in 1945 when she represented China in signing the Charter of the United Nations. This proposed research project will significantly reflect the interconnectedness between Christianity and patriotism.
Second, the project highlights Dr. Wu as a pioneer of modern Chinese womanhood. She was an exemplar of a new breed of intellectual Chinese women in the first half of the 20th century. Her womanhood resulted from the newfound educational opportunities for women, along with career prospects, widely circulated and accepted feminist ideas, and the influence of Christianity. As a woman who remained single throughout her life, Dr. Wu’s womanhood was heavily tied to her career as a leading educator and political activist.