Whose Hong Kong? Views and Movements Local and Global

The three titles under review belong to markedly different genres of recent works on Hong Kong. The first volume is a personal memoir by a key functionary of its economy, the second is a collective volume by three sociologists delineating the migratory experience of Hong Kong families, and the last is a reflective cultural recognizance of the city by an intellectual historian and renowned scholar of modern Chinese literature. All three books are by, for, and on Hong Kongers who are endowed with nonlocal experiences and informed by external perspectives far beyond Hong Kong. The Hong Kong—with all its images, scenes, sights, sounds, persons, institutions, moments, events, processes, phenomena, and sentiments—that these authors have attempted to remember, observe, analyze, and portray for the readers, emerges as a densely woven fabric of the historical and contemporary place. Individually and collectively, they have combined to present and convey to their readership, including Hong Kongers residing both in and outside of the city, many fascinating facets, darker undersides, hidden dynamics, rarely magnified realities, unwelcome truths, and unique personal insights to yield a vividly engaging, three-dimensional, real-life Hong Kong story, or rather stories.

The Kwan Volume

The first book by banker Stanley Kwan (1925–2011), a third-generation Hong Konger, spans almost a century, from the 1910s (when his uncle began work in a Chinese native-bank [yinhao] in the colony that started the family tradition of banking service that engaged his father and himself), through his own experience of growing up and working in Hong Kong (punctuated with a 1942–1945 interlude of wartime service in mainland China), to 2009, which closes with his reflections on life as an immigrant in Toronto, Canada, since 1984, upon retirement from Hang Seng Bank and thirteen years ahead of the city’s July 1, 1997, retrocession to Chinese sovereignty. An earlier Chinese version of this volume was published in 1999 by the University of Toronto–York University Joint Centre for Asia Pacific Studies. With the collaboration of his niece Nicole Kwan, an updated and much expanded English version, the volume under review here, appeared a decade later, as the sixth title in the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Studies Series with Hong Kong University Press.

In the Kwan volume, readers are treated to a feast of continuously forward moving sequences of richly textured and very direct firsthand narratives of persons, places, events, processes, and circumstances, not only of colonial Hong Kong but also the China mainland and the East Asia–Pacific region as a whole that shaped the life and work of the author and his extended family—grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts, siblings, cousins, in-laws, and other close relatives who have been dispersed over time across continents. Surfacing through the pages are his friends, classmates, wartime comrades, American allies, Hong Kong banking colleagues, and even, yes, Beijing’s united front functionaries and handlers (his mainland tour guides). More than viewing specific developments and sweeping trends from the perspective of the author’s individual or family experience, Kwan’s storylines are often framed in a considerable broader historical context of modern China’s tumultuous transformation from the late Qing dynasty, through the republican years, to the twists and turns under Communism of the Maoist phase, the Dengist reform period, and its current global ascendancy.

Kwan’s account starts during the mid-nineteenth-century Opium Wars (that yielded, among the other effects of Western imperialist assaults, British colonial rule of Hong Kong in 1841) through wars and revolutions to...