This article looks at the livelihoods and lives of African traders coming to Hong Kong and Guangzhou. These traders are practising “low-end globalization”, involving small amounts of capital, and semi-legal or illegal transactions under the radar of the law. The article first considers who these traders are, portraying them as, typically, members of the upper crust of their home societies. It then considers these traders in Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong, a building that is an entrepot between China and the developing world. Finally, it looks at traders’ livelihoods and lives in Guangzhou, South China, and traders’ efforts to succeed in mainland China. The article argues that one essential economic role China plays today is in manufacturing the cheap, sometimes counterfeit goods that enable Africa and other developing-world regions to experience globalization; the African traders who come to China help make this possible.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/186810261204100205

How Africans Pursue Low-End Globalization in Hong Kong and Mainland China

Author(s): Chu, Cecilia Louise | Advisor(s): AlSayyad, Nezar | Abstract: This dissertation traces the genealogy of property development and emergence of an urban milieu in Hong Kong between the 1870s and mid 1930s. This is a period that saw the transition of colonial rule from one that relied heavily on coercion to one that was increasingly "civil," in the sense that a growing number of native Chinese came to willingly abide by, if not whole-heartedly accept, the rules and regulations of the colonial state whilst becoming more assertive in exercising their rights under the rule of law. Long hailed for its laissez-faire credentials and market freedom, Hong Kong offers a unique context to study what I call "speculative urbanism," wherein the colonial government's heavy reliance on generating revenue from private property supported a lucrative housing market that enriched a large number of native property owners. Although resenting the discrimination they encountered in the colonial territory, they were able to accumulate economic and social capital by working within and around the colonial regulatory system. Meanwhile, the growing stake of Chinese capital in Hong Kong's economy was perceived as a threat by local British and European residents, who tried to maintain their privileges via discriminatory legislation.A central goal of this study is to elucidate how particular forms of urban development predicated on opportunism and a "liberal governmentality" came to be consolidated within a racially divided, highly unequal, but nevertheless upwardly mobile, "modernizing" colonial city. By focusing on speculative building practices and the changing administrative framework that sought to regulate urban forms and social norms, this dissertation aims to illustrate some of the inherent contradictions in colonial development between the liberal, laissez-faire ideology that propelled capitalist expansion and the exclusionary impulses that clung to a hierarchical spatial order. Although this bifurcated milieu helped legitimized different rules for different peoples, it also opened up new channels for cultural and political negotiations. The examination of the competing discourses about the city and its development in Hong Kong's early period also provides a crucial explanatory framework for the so-called "Hong Kong economic miracle" in the postwar era and the prevalence of speculative property activities that continues to the postcolonial present.

/pdf/speculative-modern-urban-forms-and-the-politics-of-property-42sdzo2y4m.pdf

Speculative Modern: Urban Forms and the Politics of Property in Colonial Hong Kong

Acknowledgements Note on Chinese Characters List of Figures Prologue 12 ‘1930s and 1940s Shanghai’: A Socio-Musicological Inquiry Chapter 1 50 International Settlement (Treaty Port I), ‘Trying to listen to the music’: Shanghailanders, Parks, The Shanghai Municipal Brass Band Chapter 2 89 French Concession (Treaty Port II), ‘Aucun instrument de cuivre’: Colonial Rule, Licensed Venues, Musical Soundscape Chapter 3 124 Japanese-Occupied Shanghai, ‘Die gute Unterhaltungsmusik’: Landscape, Refugee Cafés, Sounds of ‘Little Vienna’ Chapter 4 174 Nationalist Shanghai, ‘Nightclub Café’: Taxable Eateries and Claims of a Distinct Musical Sound Epilogue 210 Beyond ‘1930s and 1940s Shanghai’: Reproduction Maps, Repositories, Archival Musicology

Western music and municipality in 1930s and 1940s Shanghai

This thesis is concerned with how the Second World War is memorialised in Perak, Malaysia. It considers memoryscapes (or memory practices and sites) within the state dedicated to the war, established not only by state agencies but also grassroots actors. In terms of findings, the thesis first highlights how the Perak state has sought to ‘postcolonialise’ (read: ‘nationalise’) public representations of what was an event that took place when Malaysia was still part of ‘colonial’ Malaya, and the issues associated with it, particularly how, despite efforts to make the war (and its attendant memoryscapes) something its people could identify with, the state has been criticised as exclusionary of ‘local’ war stories and partial to a ‘foreign’ audience, thus alienating its population and reproducing much of how war commemoration in Perak was when Malaysia was under British rule before. Generally, the thesis demonstrates the fraught nature of memoryscapes and how there can be fundamental limits to which such ‘postcolonialising’ projects may be successfully realised on the ground. 

The second concern of the thesis is on the ways in which war narratives of the war that are marginalised within official representations may still survive in other forms and on other sub-national scales. In interrogating these memoryscapes ‘from below’, the thesis reveals that, while some locals prefer to mark the war in a more private fashion so as to covertly resist state tendencies to be exclusionary, or out of fear of reprisals from the state (due to remembering controversial aspects of the war past), the most widely-cited reason is still the simple desire to remember according to local customs, religious beliefs and socio-cultural norms. In doing so, it showcases alternative forms of memory-making that problematises traditional understandings of war commemoration common within prevailing literature, and highlights ways in which contestations against elite memory and heritage practices may not always emerge in oppositional fashion or enacted in clearly overt and public ways but also through the absence of voice. Additionally, the thesis also challenges the tendency to celebrate grassroots practices of memory-making as necessarily ‘recuperative’ of official exclusions of the past. As the situation in Perak exemplifies, these too can be just as political and exclusionary, where, in many cases, the locals themselves may represent barriers to emergent war memories as much as they can be the champions.

Lastly, the thesis touches upon the ways in which ‘the material’ may be appropriated towards forgetting the war, not only officially by the state but also by those who went through the war as ordinary civilians. It then illustrates how, despite efforts ‘to put the past behind them’, sometimes memories of war can still ‘emerge unbidden’ to involuntarily force individuals to confront the war past even when they would rather not recall it. In doing so, the thesis demonstrates how material legacies of the war can be utilised not only to presence, but also to absence, the war, although at times ‘the material’ too can undermine efforts to render the past passe. More broadly, the thesis thus contributes not only to debates about postcolonial memory-making and politics, and the complex nature of grassroots remembrances, but also the role of materiality within processes of forgetting, specifically in showing how ‘the material’ can at times exercise agency on humans as much as the reverse is possible. The thesis is based on data collected via textual analysis, participant observation and interviews.

'Tense pasts, present tensions' : postcolonial memoryscapes and the memorialisation of the Second World War in Perak, Malaysia

Shaping Modern Shanghai provides a new understanding of colonialism in China through a fresh examination of Shanghai's International Settlement. This was the site of key developments of the Republican period: economic growth, rising Chinese nationalism and Sino-Japanese conflict. Managed by the Shanghai Municipal Council (1854–1943), the International Settlement was beyond the control of the Chinese and foreign imperial governments. Jackson defines Shanghai's unique, hybrid form of colonial urban governance as transnational colonialism. The Council was both colonial in its structures and subject to colonial influence, especially from the British empire, yet autonomous in its activities and transnational in its personnel. This is the first in-depth study of how this unique body functioned on the local, national and international stages, revealing the Council's impact on the daily lives of the city's residents and its contribution to the conflicts of the period, with implications for the fields of modern Chinese and colonial history.

Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China's Global City

New Frontiers: Imperialism's New Communities in East Asia, 1842-1953

The Japanese Occupation of Malaya 1941-1945: A Social and Economic History@@@Food Supplies and the Japanese Occupation in Southeast Asia: Studies in the Economies of East and South-East Asia

In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia

Abstract:Scholars often portray colonial medicine either as exemplifying the triumph of progress or as a means of expanding imperial authority. Adding to these views a consideration of the range of activities present on the ground reveals activities consistent with both perspectives, but points also to limitations inherent in perceiving these efforts in these two ways. A more focused view also acknowledges the inherently abusive side of the colonial project, underscoring the potential to become categorically worse should the historical context shift. The Japanese imperialist effort in Manchuria in the first half of the twentieth century exhibits this range clearly, resulting as it did in particularly extreme behaviour.Résumé:Les chercheurs décrivent souvent la médecine coloniale soit comme un exemple du triomphe du progrès, soit comme un moyen d'étendre l'autorité impériale. Outre ces points de vue, l'examen de l'éventail des activités présentes sur le terrain révèle des activités compatibles avec les deux visions, mais il souligne également les limites inhérentes à la perception de ces efforts sous ces deux angles. Une analyse plus ciblée reconnaît le côté intrinsèquement abusif du projet colonial tout en soulignant la capacité de ce dernier à devenir catégoriquement pire si le contexte historique change. Les efforts impérialistes du Japon en Mandchourie au cours de la première moitié du vingtième siècle illustrent parfaitement ce tableau, donnant à voir des comportements particulièrement extrêmes.

Bill Sewell

Papers

New Frontiers: Imperialism's New Communities in East Asia, 1842-1953

The Japanese Occupation of Malaya 1941-1945: A Social and Economic History@@@Food Supplies and the Japanese Occupation in Southeast Asia: Studies in the Economies of East and South-East Asia

In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire: Imperial Violence, State Destruction, and the Reordering of Modern East Asia

Japanese Public Health Concerns in Treaty-Port Manchuria