Re my longread (here) in the South China Morning Post weekend mag on John Le Carre, his visits to HK in the 70s & the resultant novel The Honourable Schoolboy. There are of course a number of memorable scenes set in the old FCC including the gents urinals. A view to the harbour immortalised here…
I realise many of you (for reasons of being not in Hong Kong, or women) may not be familiar with the gents toilets at the FCC on Lower Albert Road & so will not have seen the long installed photo of the view from the old Sutherland House FCC (long demolished) on Chater Road.
My latest long read for the South China Morning Postweekend magazine deals with the two visits John Le Carre made to Hong Kong in the early 1970s and how those trips lead to the cast of characters and plotlines of The Honourable Schoolboy (1975)… click here
Drawing on a rich set of original oral histories conducted with retired factory workers from industrial centers across the country, this book provides a bottom-up examination of working class participation in factory life during socialist and reform-era China. Huaiyin Li offers a series of new interpretations that challenge, revise, and enrich the existing scholarship on factory politics and worker performance during the Maoist years, including the nature of the Maoist state as seen in the operation of power relations on the shop floor, as well as the origins and dynamics of industrial enterprise reforms in the post-Mao era.
In sharp contrast with the ideologically driven goal of promoting grassroots democracy or manifesting workers’ status as the masters of the workplace, Li argues that Maoist era state-owned enterprises operated effectively to turn factory workers into a well-disciplined labor force through a complex set of formal and informal institutions that functioned to generate an equilibrium in power relations and work norms. The enterprise reforms of the 1980s and 1990s undermined this preexisting equilibrium, catalyzing the transformation of the industrial workforce from predominantly privileged workers in state-owned enterprises to precarious migrant workers of rural origins hired by private firms. Ultimately, this comprehensive and textured history provides an analytically astute new picture of everyday factory life in the world’s largest manufacturing powerhouse.
About the author
Huaiyin Li is Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Village China Under Socialism and Reform: A Micro-History, 1948-2008 (Stanford, 2009).
A few years ago I blogged about Charles Eisenberg, aka Shanghai Red, a merchant marine sailor originally from Philadelphia who, after serving in World War 1, passed through Shanghai in the early 1920s, liked it, opened a bar, later returned, around 1935, to San Pedro and opened Shanghai Red at #433 Beacon Street. Shanghai Red died in 1957. Looking around a bit the other day I found a picture of the sad end of the bar… both below
Eisenberg became known as ‘the Mayor of Beacon Street’
Shanghai Red ejecting a troublesome patron from his San Pedro bar
This week on The China Project Ultimate China Bookshelf – Tim Clissold’s Mr China (2004) was a masterclass in how to raise and then lose a LOT of money in China in the 1990s, and yet retain your sense of humour and love for the country…. click here…
Wang Jingwei, poet and politician, patriot and traitor, has always been a figure of major academic and popular interest. Until now, his story has never been properly told, let alone critically investigated. The significance of his biography is evident from an ongoing war on cultural memory: modern mainland China prohibits serious academic research on wartime collaboration in general, and on Wang Jingwei in particular. At this critical juncture, when the recollection of World War II is fading from living memory and transforming into historical memory, this knowledge embargo will undoubtedly affect how China remembers its anti-fascist role in WWII. In Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times, Zhiyi Yang brings us a long overdue reexamination ofWang’s impact on cultural memory of WWII in China.
In this book, Yang brings disparate methodologies into a fruitful dialogue, including sophisticated methods of poetic interpretation. The author argues that Wang’s lyric poetry, as the public performance of a private voice, played a central role in constructing his political identity and heavily influenced the public’s posthumous memory of him. Drawing on archives (in the PRC, Taiwan, Japan, the USA, France, and Germany), memoires, historical journals, newspapers, interviews, and other scholarly works, this book offers the first biography of Wang that addresses his political, literary, and personal life in a critical light and with sympathetic impartiality.
Nineteenth century China Trade painting, gouache on paper, Clipper Eagle Wing (built by James O. Curtis at Medford, Massachusetts in 1853), off Hong Kong. Artist unknown.
