Hong Kong History Centre Speaker’s Series: Dr. Gina Anne Tam, Trinity University (online only)
April 27, 4:00-5:30pm (BST)
Gender and Agency in Hong Kong’s History of Activism: The Case of the 1978 Golden Jubilee Secondary School Protest
In May of 1978, several hundred students and teachers from the all-girls Precious Blood Golden Jubilee Secondary School in Kowloon, Hong Kong, left their classrooms to stage a sit-in in front of the Governor’s Mansion and the Bishop’s House. Spurred by claims of financial malfeasance, lack of transparency, and the ill treatment of students by school administration, the protests lasted for days, attracting widespread attention throughout the colony. In response to these students’ calls for dialogue with both the Precious Blood Order and the Hong Kong colonial government, the Education Department, instead, abruptly closed the school altogether, claiming that the protests had escalated so far out of control that the school itself could not be saved. Today, this protest is largely forgotten in the history of activism in Hong Kong, and the protests’ main participants– the students of the all-girls school– are largely remembered in the historical record as “brainwashed” young women with no voice of their own. In this presentation, we will re-examine the history of this girl’s school protest, using it as a way to talk about how gender affects the ways we assign agency and leadership in grassroots activism.
Dr. Gina Anne Tam is an Associate professor of Chinese history and co-chair of Women and Gender Studies at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Her first book, Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960, winner of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians’ Best Book Prize (Cambridge University Press, 2020), explores the significance of local Chinese languages such as Cantonese and Shanghainese to the making of Chinese national identity. In addition, her work has appeared in venues such as Twentieth-century China and Comparative Studies in Society and History, and she has written about the relevance of her work to current events in Foreign Affairs, The Nation, and Dissent. She currently serves as the Book Review Editor for the Journal of Asian Studies, and she is a Public Intellectual Program Fellow through the National Committee on US- China relations and a Wilson China Fellow. Her next book, Women Activists and the Making of Post-War Hong Kong, explores the role of women in the history of grassroots activism in Hong Kong from 1950 through 1995.
This talk will be held online, and please register for the event in advance on Eventbrite to receive the zoom link for the talk. If you have any questions, please email hkhistory-project@bristol.ac.uk.