One of the Centre’s missions is to nurture a new generation of Hong Kong historians.
An Early Career Scholar Network was created under the Hong Kong History Centre in June 2023. It is intended to help create a community of Hong Kong historians and offer a platform for face-to-face interaction and academic exchange among young scholars. Research students and fresh doctoral graduates working on socioeconomic, political and cultural history of Hong Kong and its global relevance are welcomed. We usually meet thrice a year (February, June and October) with participants taking turn to present their works in each meeting. Financial support is provided for our network members attending these sessions.
Please write to Prof. Ray Yep, Research Director of Hong Kong History Centre, at rekmy@bristol.ac.uk, if you are interested in joining this Network.
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In this post, we would like to introduce Ryan Choi, a member of the Network.
Ryan Choi is a PhD student in The University of Edinburgh. In the note written by him below, he shares with us his reflections on his academic journey and current project on Collaborationism in Wartime Hong Kong: The Cultural Production of Hanjian (Traitors) under Japanese Occupation, 1941–1945.
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To begin with, I would like to express my gratitude for the opportunity to join Bristol’s Hong Kong History Centre as a visiting postgraduate student in 2024. My two-month stay there was genuinely enriching, offering invaluable experiences, particularly the chance to present my research to the Centre’s directors and PhD fellows, as well as to receive constructive feedback. I am also pleased to be part of the Early Career Scholars Network, which allows me to share my work in this post.
My earliest interest in Hong Kong’s history and culture, as far back as I can remember, began somewhat unexpectedly with the city’s 1980s goeng-si (literally ‘stiff corpses’) film franchise, especially the 1995 television series Vampire Expert (殭屍道長). At first glance, the show’s whimsical blend of Taoism, Catholicism, folklore, and supernatural battles on screen might seem worlds apart from the period dramas that typically ignite an interest in history. However, the series’ post-occupation setting sparked my curiosity about the preceding period of Japanese rule from 1941 to 1945, often known as the ‘three years and eight months’ (三年零八個月) in Hong Kong’s historiography.
Apart from the show’s righteous protagonist, played by my childhood hero Lam Ching-ying, who donned the robe of a Taoist priest while battling vampires, two other characters still linger vividly in my memory: a Japanese colonel-turned-ghost and Mr. Yu, a despicable Hong Kong businessman and traitor (hanjian 漢奸) who had worked hand-in-glove with the occupying forces. This storyline was my first encounter with the term hanjian—a concept I could not fully grasp at the time. All I knew from the show was that Mr. Yu, who desperately attempted to conceal his quisling identity from his family and the public, was loathed by both Hongkongers and the Japanese, and was depicted as an embodiment of evil, deserving every misfortune and censure he suffered for betraying his own people.
Since my initial encounter with the term in that popular television series, my understanding of the concept of ‘traitors to the Han Chinese’ has deepened. Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor, highlighted the existence of a moral grey area occupied by victims who, under duress, compromised and collaborated with their oppressors to varying degrees, often in exchange for preferential treatment. Similarly, upon closer examination, the responses of the Chinese—particularly those of cultural workers under Japanese rule—were far from Manichean.
Building and expanding on the scholarship on cultural production in occupied China and colonial Taiwan, my PhD thesis, titled Collaborationism in Wartime Hong Kong: The Cultural Production of Hanjian (Traitors) under Japanese Occupation, 1941–1945, examines the notion of cultural hanjian in the context of occupied Hong Kong and its resultant legacies. Specifically, my thesis focuses on Hong Kong writers like Ye Lingfeng 葉靈鳳 and Lu Mengshu 盧夢殊, who not only managed prominent propaganda publications for the Japanese but also actively produced a substantial body of literary work through the newspapers and magazines they edited during the occupation.
I believe my interest in the interwoven nature of literature and history is rooted in a frequently cited adage found in critiques of Chinese classics, which asserts that ‘wen’ (文) and ‘shi’ (史) are ‘subjects not to be separated’. Having developed an interest in both since my youth, I am inspired by this conviction to explore the historical contexts and sociocultural milieus that shaped modern Hong Kong writers and their works. Throughout my undergraduate studies, I often encountered the term hanjian in literary criticism, particularly in discussions surrounding notable modern Chinese writers who earned the epithet ‘traitorous literati’ (漢奸文人) such as Wang Jingwei, Zhou Zuoren, Eileen Chang, and Su Qing. Nevertheless, much scholarship on occupied Hong Kong has primarily focused on the island’s political, military, and economic history. Even though Japanese rule did not entirely suppress cultural expression in Hong Kong, writers during the occupation have often been regarded as being ‘on the wrong side’ of the city’s literary history, resulting in a lack of studies on their works, apart from the recent rediscovery of Ye Lingfeng’s writings.
Prior to developing my current PhD project, my final undergraduate semester refined my research orientation through Professor Shih Shu-mei’s course on postcolonial and Sinophone studies. I have acquired critical theories and frameworks that allow me to move beyond a China-centric literary history and situate Chinese-language cultural productions from Hong Kong within a transnational (post)colonial context. Inspired by her teachings, I decided to pursue further studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where my research on the literary history and cultural landscape of occupied Hong Kong became more focused and nuanced.
One memorable coursework during my time at SOAS involved selecting modern-era documents from the Sinophone sphere and analysing its historical significance. While exploring the SOAS Archives & Special Collections, the Public Records Office in Hong Kong, and the Special Collections at Hong Kong University Libraries, I discovered an abundance of images and texts from magazines and newspapers from the occupation years. I became particularly interested in the Hongkong News (Chi. Hongkong Yat Po 香港日報, Jap. Honkon Nippō), the only trilingual newspaper of its time, which became the focal point of my project. Having gleaned insights from these archives, I examined the Japanese colonial government’s policies on literature and art (bungei文芸) and the ways in which local writers responded.
To gain a deeper understanding of modern Hong Kong’s occupation history through cultural and literary perspectives, it is perhaps necessary to move beyond the grand narrative surrounding the War of Resistance against Japan, which often portrays resisters as victims and collaborators as perpetrators, thus creating a stark divide between heroes and villains. On one hand, Hong Kong cultural workers produced wartime propaganda for the occupiers; on the other, they adeptly connected the island to the broader East Asian cultural sphere, all while their creative output reflected the harsh realities of Japanese atrocities during the Pacific War.
Therefore, while acknowledging the resistance of the people of China and Hong Kong against the Japanese, I seek to explore another facet of history by reconstructing the often-overlooked literary and cultural landscape of the island, shaped by the so-called traitorous literati during the occupation. By examining the complexities of cultural collaboration, my research aims to shed light on this neglected chapter of Hong Kong’s history and uncover the diverse literary voices that emerged during this time.