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3 Pedagogy of Imperialism: Indirect Rule and HKU 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 Englishlanguage education system turned out to be a seedbed of discontent. According to Chirol, schools and colleges that provided English-language education shifted away from cultivating “good English scholars, good Christians, or good subjects of the Queen” to “the avenue to lucrative careers” through “mere cramming of undigested knowledge” (Chirol 1910). In contrast to the Anglicists’ high hope that English-language education would be “the best and surest remedy for political discontent and for law-breaking” and would help form “a class who may be interpreters between us [the British] and the millions whom we govern” (Macaulay 1835), the study of English literature seemed, in Chirol’s eyes, to have merely succeeded in creating a class of mediocre “Babus,” who were “intellectually hollow, uprooted from their own tradition, and imperfect imitators of the West” (Chirol 1910). No Western power had ever fully colonized China; yet, the spread of Western thought under the West’s imperialist dominance coincided with waves of political and intellectual discontent no less severe than the crises that developed in the British colonies. Western political ideas inspired the Chinese reformists Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, who put forward a constitutional reform program in 1898; the failure of this program resulted in the rapid emergence and growth of radicalism, and proponents of these new ideas called for a revolution that would overthrow the Qing dynasty. This unrest culminated ch.03(p.57-75).indd 57 5/21/09 11:08:24 AM Collaboration and Institutions 58 in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, which ended when the Eight Allied Forces — in which British troops played a leading role — occupied Peking (Beijing). The rebellion and its outcome fractured the partnership between the Qing Empire and the Western powers, a partnership that had developed during the Western Affairs Movement. With the upsurge of Han nationalism, which targeted the Manchu ruling aristocracy, the Qing Empire was on the brink of total collapse. Meanwhile, anti-foreign sentiment was growing among the young Chinese literati. These and other China-based movements placed great pressure on the Qing Empire to reform itself, and this pressure gradually generated actual reforms in the first decade of the twentieth century, despite the previous failure of the reform proposal put forward by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. The Qing government drafted several plans in preparation for a future constitutional government; one of the most drastic measures that had eventually been put into effect was the abolition of the Imperial Civil Service Examination (ke ju) in 1905 (Franke 1960; Wang 1979). As an almost total overhaul of the social and ideological underpinning of the Qing dynastic regime, the act soon proved to be a hasty one, for it exacerbated discontents. Frustrated by the collapse of the traditional channel of upward mobility, and having no effective new institutional system that could replace the channel, students easily gravitated to radical ideas and to the revolutionary movement (Sang 1991, 1995). These rapid changes in China brought about several different implications for colonial governance in Hong Kong. On the one hand, the upsurge in Chinese nationalism raised the anti-foreign consciousness of Hong Kong Chinese, which indirectly posed a challenge to British rule (Tsai 1993). On the other hand, with the breakdown of the Qing regime in view, revolutionaries turned to the Western powers, either seeking possible political alliances or other forms of support or looking for new intellectual resources by which the revolutionaries might gain a perspective on, and knowledge of, a post-imperial China. Despite all the anti-foreign rhetoric, the humiliation that foreign powers had inflicted — during successive wars — on China had not deterred the enthusiasm of Chinese students for Western learning. For example, the first decade of the twentieth century saw massive growth in the number of students studying in Japan, which many Asian people considered a successful copy of the West; and it is ironic that this growth occurred...

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