Hong Kong University Press – serie

The book provides an account of the 1967 riots in Hong Kong and the social background to the disturbances. It also details the impact of the riots, ranging from forcing the colonial government to introduce long overdue social reforms and adjust its governing strategy to reinforcing the cleavage between the left wing and the mainstream society.

This book is an inter-disciplinary study of the subject of anime, a popular form of Japanese animation. Using a variety of research methods and spanning a period of nine years including intensive fieldwork conducted in Japan and other parts of Asia, the study aims to provide an alternative account of the growth of the medium-genre particularly from an Asian perspective.

The Buddha's nirvana marks one of the pivotal moments in the history of Buddhism. My book explores how this event was made into a powerful allegory of survival in premodern China through the nirvana image. In diverse settings, the motif compelled devotees to redefine what the Buddhist faith meant in their lives.

China Bound and Unbound recounts how one woman's hope of building a new China gradually turned to disappointment, disillusionment and despair, reflecting the minds of China's intellectuals at the time.

This is the most serious study to date on the topic of male same-sex relations in China during the early twentieth century, illuminating male same-sex relations in many sites: language, translated sexological writings, literary works, tabloid newspapers, and opera.

Ruan Ling-Yu: The Goddess of Shanghai tells the story of one of the greatest Chinese movie stars of the silent era from humble origins to tragic death at the height of her career. Shanghai between the two world wars was a city of intrigues, political change, corruption, vice, social disparities, and creativity. It was here in the Yangtze River Delta that Chinese movie-making reached its peak. Feeding off the decay of their ancient civilization, and inspired by the frenzy to build a new one, the Shanghai filmmakers captured a crucial transition in Chinese history. Shanghai films of this period established the basic tones, themes, and techniques that would affect the future of the Chinese film industry. In order to appreciate Chinese cinema and its most famous actress, it is essential to understand this rich, formative period when the industry established its standards for creativity and social commentary. The individual whose films best reflected the turbulent times of the period was Ruan Ling-yu. Her life and work symbolized the social currents of Shanghai and the tragedy of China during its long downfall.This book provides context by describing the political and social conditions of life in Shanghai during this period. It covers Ruan's production company Lianhua and her directors as well as touches upon her fellow performers. The conclusion discusses the legacy of one of the most important actresses of the silent screen. The book contains photographs from Ruan's most creative films that demonstrate the visual sophistication of her work. It also includes a complete filmography of all of Ruan's films, a bibliography, a list of film archives that have her films, information about where to obtain film copies and pertinent websites.

The extent to which the law ought to preserve a distinctly private realm is a pressing concern in our surveillance society in which personal information is increasingly collected, transferred, and stored.

This is a practical project management tool kit for the construction industry, as well as a textbook for students. It provides both the theories and the practical guidelines for every step of construction project management operations, and is written in simple and easy to understand English.

This is an introduction to professional people and policy makers who are eager to under the logic of economics and its versatile applications. It is a user-friendly text which is devoid of higher mathematics but provides a convenient guide to Coasian transaction cost-based institutional economics.

This book presents the nature and significance of Ashes of Time, and the reasons for its being regarded as a landmark in Hong Kong cinema.

The book gave detailed account of Hong Kong's church-state relationship in metamorphosis. It should be an important text for students in both political science and China studies, and especially in the history of Hong Kong.

Above the City: Hiking Hong Kong Island is a unique comprehensive guide to walks and hikes on Hong Kong Island. Many Hong Kong residents and visitors enjoy a few famous hikes, but then are at a loss to find more routes.

This book consists of six papers by the scholars and the artists in China and in the UK, discussing contemporary Chinese art with the influence from the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

This book recounts the banks' painful struggles to adapt to dramatic economic and political changes in China and Hong Kong between 1935-85. It identifies how misguided government decisions led to recurrent banking crises. Nevertheless, the banks almost single-handed financed first the manufacturing takeoff and then the post-industrial economy.

This book was centrally important to the growth of Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, a classic tale of loyalty and bloody betrayal.

This book reveals how, with his fellow soldiers, Barman became a prisoner of war, but he continued somehow to maintain his diary at the end of the battle. He spent most of the war in the Argyle Street camp and provided the most complete coverage of life there.

This novel describes the growing up a small girl in Shanghai at a time when traditional values are turned upside down and new values have yet to be established. This small girl is mature well beyond her age, and the novel records her perceptions of the adults around her.

Hong Kong Internment tells the story of the more than three thousand non-Chinese civilians: British, American, Dutch, and others, who were trapped in the British colony and interned behind barbed wire in Stanley Internment Camp from 1942 to 1945. From 1970 to 1972, while researching for his MA thesis, the author interviewed twenty-three former Stanley internees.

This book provides valuable and informative insights into the controversies involving appropriate responses to the protection of life and property in any community when it comes to that ever contentious topic - the weather.

In winter 1902, in the ruins of post-Boxer Uprising Beijing, two women from two different worlds joined hands in friendship-the former concubine and legendary tyrant Empress Dowager Cixi, and the Midwest-born, devoutly Christian diplomat's wife Sarah Pike Conger. Together, they made history.

Examining the deployments of gender and sexuality over the past five decades in Taiwan, this book chronicles a queer historiography that illuminates the production of sexual identities and the formation of sexual modernity. Through primary research and historical investigation, Hans Tao-Ming Huang offers a contextualised study of Pai Hsien-yung's Crystal Boys, one of Taiwan's first recognized gay novels, as he critically engages disparate discursive fields of dominant legal and medical discourses of sex, lesbian and gay activism, as well as mainstream feminist politics. He shows that the construction of male homosexuality as a term of social exclusion is historically linked to the state's banning of prostitution, further delineating a moral-sexual order that has come to be buttressed by the hegemonic rise of anti-prostitution state feminism since the 1990s. In exploring the imbrications of male homosexuality, prostitution and feminism in Taiwanese national culture, Huang boldly ventures a politics of sexual dissidence that contests state-inspired heteronormativity.

Almost 2,000 British Prisoners of War were aboard the Japanese freighter Lisbon Maru when an American submarine torpedoed and sank her in October 1942. This book tells the story of those men, from the fighting in Hong Kong, through the sinking, and - for some - to liberation and beyond.

This book depicts gay paradises in Southeast Asia and the men who created them. It studies the obstacles gay men have faced in securing a voice as citizens, and how they used images of paradise in Bali, Bangkok, and Singapore to create a sense of refuge, construct homes for themselves, and dissent from typical notions of manhood and masculinity. For gender studies and Southeast Asian studies, it provides a "queer reading" of Walter Spies, a gay German painter who in the 1930s helped turn Bali into an island imagined as an ideal male aesthetic state. Secondly, the book provides a historical account of the absorption of Western notions of romantic heterosexual monogamy in Thailand during the reign of King Rama VI and the resistance to those notions expressed through an architectural paradise called Babylon founded by a Thai known as Khun Toc. Finally, it describes the "cyber-paradise" of Fridae.com created by a young Singaporean named Stuart Koe. Collectively, the study examines the pursuit of sexual justice, the ideologies of manhood they challenged, and the geographic and online spaces they created.

Tracing China chronicles forty years of fieldwork. The journey began from exploring rural revolution and reconstitutions of community in South China; it spans decades of persistent rural-urban divide and eventually uncovers China's global reach and Hong Kong's cross-border dynamics. Siu traverses both physical and cultural landscapes, examines how political tumults transform into everyday lives, and fathoms the depths of human drama amid China's frenetic momentum toward modernity. She highlights complicity, portraying how villagers, urbanites, cadres, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals-laden with historical baggage-venture forward. The question is: Have they become victims of the circumstances created by their own actions? The essays are woven together by key themes in historical anthropology-culture, history, power, place-making, and identity formation, informed by critical social theories, and characterized by a careful scrutiny of fieldwork encounters and archival texts. Stressing process and contingency, Siu argues that culture and society are constructed through human actions with nuanced meanings, moral imagination, and contested interests.She challenges the perception that social/political changes are merely linear historical progressions. Instead, she traces layers of the past in present realities.

Sir Alexander Grantham became Governor of Hong Kong in 1947 and served until 1957. His term of office saw rapid reconstruction and growing prosperity after World War II. Civil war and revolution in China drove hundreds of thousands of refugees into the British colony, while tense relations between Britain and the new People's Republic gave rise to difficult and potentially explosive incidents in Hong Kong. Plans for democratic reform were quietly dropped as Grantham instead crafted an authoritarian form of government that combined strong leadership with gradual social reform - a system that lasted almost to the end of colonial rule. In this elegant memoir, first published by the Hong Kong University Press in 1965, Grantham describes his thirty-five years in the British colonial service, which began in Hong Kong in 1922 and ended here in 1957; he also held senior positions in Bermuda, Jamaica, Nigeria and the South Pacific. Only a few of Hong Kong's former governors have published anything about their terms of office here, but Grantham's stands out as the most interesting and substantial. Via Ports is an important first-hand account of the workings of Britain's colonial system.It also contains vivid, often amusing anecdotes about life behind the scenes in Government House during the long twilight of the British Empire. A new introduction by Lord Wilson of Tillyorn, Governor of Hong Kong from 1987 to 1992, reflects on Grantham's contributions to Hong Kong.

Taiwan is a peculiar place resulting in a peculiar cinema, with Hou Hsiao-hsien being its most remarkable product. Hou’s signature long and static shots almost invite critics to give auteurist readings of his films, often privileging the analysis of cinematic techniques at the expense of the context from which Hou emerges. In this pioneering study, James Udden argues instead that the Taiwanese experience is the key to understanding Hou’s art. The convoluted history of Taiwan in the last century has often rendered fixed social and political categories irrelevant. Changing circumstances have forced the people in Taiwan to be hyperaware of how imaginary identity—above all, national identity—is. Hou translates this larger state of affairs in such masterpieces as City of Sadness, The Puppetmaster, and Flowers of Shanghai, which capture and perhaps even embody the elusive, slippery contours of the collective experience of the islanders. Making extensive uses of Chinese sources from Taiwan, the author shows how important the local matters for this globally recognized director.In this new edition of No Man an Island, James Udden charts a new chapter in the evolving art of Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose latest film, The Assassin, earned him the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015. Hou breaks new ground in turning the classic wuxia genre into a vehicle to express his unique insight into the working of history. The unconventional approach to conventions is quintessential Hou Hsiao-hsien.

This classic work, first published in 1971, explores the transition in painting styles from the late Sung period to the art of Yuan dynasty literati. Building on the pioneering work of Oswald Siren and James Cahill, Susan Bush's investigations of painting done under the Chin dynasty confirmed the dominance of scholar-artists in the north and their gradual development of scholarly painting traditions, and a related study of Northern Sung writings showed that their theory was shaped as much by the views of their social class as by their artistic aims. Bush's perspective on Sung scholars' art and theory helps explain the emergence of literati painting as the main artistic tradition in Yuan times. Social history thus served to supplement an understanding of the evolution of artistic styles.

During the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of Chinese men and women crossed the Pacific to work, trade, and settle in California. Making use of extensive research in archives around the world, Pacific Crossing charts the rise of Chinese Gold Mountain firms engaged in all kinds of transpacific trade, especially the lucrative export of prepared opium and other luxury goods. Challenging the traditional view that the migration was primarily a "coolie trade," Elizabeth Sinn uncovers leadership and agency among the many Chinese who made the crossing. In presenting Hong Kong as an "in-between place" of repeated journeys and continuous movement, Sinn also offers a fresh view of the British colony and a new paradigm for migration studies.