Interrogating Hong Kong’s Cold War settlement: a Christian perspective

ABSTRACTThis article explores Ronald Owen Hall, the Anglican bishop of Hong Kong, as an unlikely critic of the city’s Cold War settlement in the 1950s. By examining his sermons and writings and putting them into dialogue with pronouncements of the Hong Kong government and the colonial governor Alexander Grantham, it reconstructs a moral counterpoint to a sociopolitical project that pitched the colony as an economic city and as the “Berlin of the East”—an enclave of capitalist “freedom” on the doorstep of Communist China. Grantham and his administration saw the city’s Chinese population as a source of capital, labor, or security threat. Local residents, including those who recently crossed the border from mainland China, were not so much citizens as either contributors to industrial development or potential fuel for Communist menace. Hall, on the other hand, saw communism as less a threat to the colony than a sign of the society’s inability to provide for the poor and the weak. He extolled his flock to embrace Chinese nationhood instead of languishing in an atomized, profit-pursuing society. Set against the social context the colonial state created for Hong Kong, Hall offered an alternative vision that transcended Cold War binaries, capitalist values, and the nation-state logic based on his locally-embedded Christian faith.KEYWORDS: Ronald Owen HallAlexander granthamChristianityMoral criticismCold warCommunismNationhood Special termsTableDownload CSVDisplay TableNotes1 This article uses “communism” to refer to ideals that individuals embraced and “Communist” to identify members of actual Communist parties, particularly the Chinese variant. This distinction is important as not all individuals who embraced communist tenets were members of Communist parties. Exceptions are made for original texts cited and in observance of grammatical conventions.2 See Hon and Chan in this issue.3 Elite Chinese in Hong Kong had throughout the twentieth-century worked closely with British rulers, thus buttressing colonial power. Collaboration took institutional forms such as social services and education, but it also, Law Wing Sang (Citation2009) stresses, found its way into cultural expressions and national identities. Law stresses that complicity with colonial power was not antithetical but could rather inform collaborators’ Chinese nationalism. Hall was obviously not ethnic Chinese but the schools and philanthropic organizations he oversaw contributed to this type of collaboration. This article echoes Law in moving beyond strictly political examination of colonial rule and submits that the cleric’s musings on the nation complement and complicate Law’s inquiry into the dynamics of colonialism and Chinese identities.4 Indeed, as Alan Smart (Citation2006, 3) convincingly argues, one critical motivation of the Hong Kong government to resettle victims of squatter fires in publicly built apartments—celebrated in colonial propaganda as state benevolence—was to counter interventions by Beijing and Guangzhou in response to their plight.5 The association between Jews and the evil of money has been a longstanding antisemitic trope in European societies, both Christian and secular, and Hall was not immune to its influence.6 Like any foreign dignitary visiting the People’s Republic in the 1950s, Hall’s tour was curated by the Chinese state, covered multiple locations, and aimed to impart on the guest a cursory but favorable impression of “New China.” Hall’s visit lasted for less than one month from 30 May to 24 June 1956, covering six cities. Hall’s fellow senior Anglican cleric Hewlett Johnson (1874–1966), who was the Dean of Canterbury, received similar treatment. For a detailed itinerary of Hall’s visit, see Wu (Citation2017, 146–147).Additional informationFundingThe work described in this article was supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project no. PolyU 15602321).Notes on contributorsBrian TsuiBrian Tsui is Associate Professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. A historian by training, he is interested in Chinese revolutionary politics, ideologies of the radical right and China’s inter-Asia relations. He is the author of China’s Conservative Revolution: The Quest for a New Order, 1927–1949 (Cambridge, 2018) and edited, with Tansen Sen, Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and Asia, 1840s–1960s. He is currently studying how “New China” inspired intellectuals and activists from Britain and its empire in Asia to imagine a decolonial world beyond Cold War dichotomies.