Disclaimer: Please note that the views expressed below represent the opinions of the article’s author. The following work does not necessarily represent the views of the Synergy: Journal of Contemporary Asian Studies.
Abstract
Established in 1842, British Hong Kong was purportedly colonized with the expressed intent of building and maintaining trading routes and posts in East Asia, especially in China. Where non-interference with Chinese social and cultural practices was part of the colonial government’s framework as long as the people did not violate English official or social laws, this paper works to dismantle this claim of cultural recognition and celebration. Instead, by examining the Contagious Diseases and Venereal Diseases Ordinances around prostitution in the 1850-60s and the contestation and regulation of the mui tsai system in the 1920-30s, this paper questions the suggestion of benevolence to reveal the amorality of a colonial administration that historicized Chinese customs and relegated Chinese girls and women to the bottom of intersecting social hierarchies. Rather, the colonial administration opted in favor of assured stability and support from elite and economically powerful Chinese families, in order to protect British welfare and so-called morality.
Keywords: mui tsai, prostitution, regulation, morality, colonial Hong Kong
Annexing Hong Kong as a military and trade centre in the Treaty of Nanking, signed in 1842, the British administration declared that traditional Chinese customs would be allowed to continue, provided that they were deemed by the English in the metropole and in the colony as not contradictory to the official or social laws of England.[1] A seemingly laissez-faire policy, this clause gave the colonial government the ability to deprive the local population of its sociocultural history and redefine its practices against an English rulebook and societal purview in areas of gender, morality, sexuality, race, class, and more. This is not to say that the colonial administration did not improve the livelihoods of the people of Hong Kong. However, it is crucial to understand when, how, and why the colonial authorities decided to intervene as they did. With the introduction of the Contagious Diseases and Venereal Diseases Ordinances in the 1850-60s and the contestation of the mui tsai system in the 1920s, the registration of women and girls falling under either category was mandated. This policy was not implemented with the social security and welfare of the Hong Kong people in mind. Rather, policies related to mui tsai echoed legislations imposed on prostitute women for the provision and protection of so-called English moral sanctity and social enjoyment. Through the layered lenses of morality, race, and sexuality, this paper will therefore argue that sex, trade, and disease underscore the hypocritically amoral tones and regulations affected for the mui tsai in the 1920-30s, rooted in the prostitution ordinances of 1857 onward.
(Mis)managing the mui tsai
Located at the mouth of the Pearl River Delta, Hong Kong was already an important, if not illegal, site of trade for pirates between China and the rest of Asia prior to English occupation.[2] Since colonization, trafficking continued, and among the pillaged items were women and girls, many of whom were kidnapped or sold by their families who struggled to make ends meet. Where Chinese culture favoured boys on the basis of filial piety, heredity, physical labour, family posterity and pride, girls were often placed in the workforce to help support the family. Other daughters were given in exchange for money, necessities, or the son’s well-being.[3]
Reaching Hong Kong, however, many of these daughters, often young children, found themselves sold into servitude as mui tsai, or female bondservants. They were compelled to complete domestic chores for middle and upper-class households in return for shelter and food. Turned into objects for transactions in bondage, the mui tsai were further smothered by the belief that “they were bound to obey their masters.”[4] Conceived by both the Chinese community and English administration as a traditional practice, mui tsai in Hong Kong were not afforded any legal rights, protection, or wages. Instead, their status and treatment as commercial goods was upheld by a constant supply of unwanted daughters and a mirrored demand for bondservants by the elite Chinese, who saw their participation, in part, as an act of Confucian benevolence. Moreover, the mui tsai’s use value was finite. While Norman Miners correctly notes that being purchased as a mui tsai was significantly more secure and safe than being sold into prostitution, although the servant girls were also susceptible to sexual abuse and exploitation within the household, Miners also acknowledges that a number of them would end up in prostitution anyway. After a certain age, the mui tsai were often sold off once more into marriage, concubinage, or prostitution.[5]
Despite occupying Hong Kong for more than half a century, the British colonial administration did not investigate the slave-like conditions of the mui tsai system until the early twentieth century. After the system was briefly condemned as “slavery” in 1879, a defensive petition from the powerful Chinese elite, who would eventually form the Po Leung Kuk, minutely detailed the discrepancies between kidnapping for prostitution and the domestic servitude of the mui tsai. The elites’ stance was later backed by the governor, and the trafficking of women as mui tsai, prostitutes, and concubines continued.[6]
This blatant oversight is reflective of the government’s skewed conception of morality. While Hong Kong was colonized with the goal of forming “‘a little miniature representative’ of all that was good and progressive in the mother country,” the acceptance of the elite Chinese community’s subjugation of young girls and women to unpaid, demanding, and constant emotional and physical labour was incongruous with the home state’s own abolition of slavery years prior to Hong Kong’s occupation.[7] Instead, as David Faure notes, the British administration tended to match its policies to its colonial aims, more so than to the policies practiced and realized in England. A closer examination reveals that the colonial government frequently cited its promise to not intervene in cultural customs as an excuse to dismiss concerns over the working and living conditions of mui tsai girls. Perhaps more significantly, the colonial government also used the defense of cultural customs to mask its fear of a social or economic uprising by the elite Chinese core, who stood in staunch support of the mui tsai system.[8] In order to establish Hong Kong as a successful commercial and trade centre, it would not have been in the British government’s best interests to anger the strongest supporters of mui tsai – the Chinese population’s economic heavyweights. Moreover, while Great Britain had formally abandoned slavery, its modernizing and civilizing intentions had not changed. Whether as domestic slave or adopted though inferior daughters, historicizing the mui tsai system in China’s cultural heritage further primitivized and orientalised China, thus further strengthening the perceived benevolence and necessity of Hong Kong’s colonization.[9]
Regardless of oppositional murmurings abroad, the mui tsai system continued to operate quietly but pervasively. Although the guardianship of girls involved was mandated to the Secretary for Chinese Affairs in 1910, before the turn of the decade, the governor discerned that “practically every household that could afford the expense possessed a mui tsai.”[10] In fact, concerted opposition did not appear again until 1917, when an inquiry into the legality of mui tsai from a visiting member of parliament catalyzed widespread campaigns across Hong Kong and England by European residents, officials, and media.[11] The administration’s constant denial of mui tsai as a form of child slavery not only suggested a departure from the reformed English conception of slavery as morally wrong, but also worked against its own hegemonic legitimacy in Hong Kong as the British sought to acquiesce the Chinese elite and “secure local compliance.”[12]
Despite the rejoice of campaigners in England after the adoption of the 1923 Female Domestic Service Ordinance, the ordinance did not expressly abolish the mui tsai system. Instead, the ordinance merely clarified the legal position of mui tsai as bondservants, rather than enslaved property. The ordinance opened a heavily conditioned application for release to girls “who have reached years of discretion.”[13] Now facing much less criticism, the colonial administration continued to undermine ordinances for the registration of mui tsai. Initial inspection teams that could not and would not fully investigate households were ineffective. Legislation was also poorly enforced and not made known to many mui tsai, and well into the 1930s, punishments for unregistered girls or abuses were as lenient as a $20 fine. While Secretary of State Winston Churchill’s 1922 call to abolish the mui tsai system was legislated, local authorities delayed concerted enforcement, as Governor Edward Stubbs feared that the flooding of mui tsai into the streets would only fuel prostitution. However, although registrations and punishments were policed more rigorously in later years, more than 3,000 mui tsai remained registered and in service in 1940. The number of girls who continued to be treated as mui tsai but listed as adopted daughters, or yeung nui, by their masters is unknown.[14]
While Stubbs’ concerns have merit, they “proved to be groundless,” as Miners notes: no applications were received, and organizations such as the Po Leung Kuk that existed to support, house, and educate these girls and women opened their doors to very few runaways.[15] With the multiple anti-slavery and women’s movements in England, it is also unlikely that such organizations would not have offered further support if asked.[16] On the global consciousness, too, was a growing sentiment that condemned slavery as an immoral violation of human rights.[17] The administration’s flagrant disregard for the welfare of the mui tsai, in order to appeal to the economic security and cooperation of the Chinese elite, then calls into question the hypocritical moralism of Hong Kong’s colonial government. Even if one returns to the suggestion that the administration sought to fix what Faure describes as a “cultural wasteland” created by “the sluggish persistence of cultural China,” without an official denouncement and enacted abolition of perceived anachronisms, this historicizing outlook contradicts the home government’s desire to mould Hong Kong into “a little miniature representative” of England. [18] [19]
The treatment of the mui tsai issue is then two steps back from the English’s claim to a moralistic civilizing mission. The first step violated England’s pledge to intervene in customs that ran contrary to domestic laws, as the mui tsai system did in its commercial and non-consensual parallels to the slave trade and slavery, abolished and denounced across the empire by 1833 and nearly a decade before Hong Kong’s occupation.[20] The second was in the local government’s adamant refusal to acknowledge the abject conditions that mui tsai lived in, even going so far as to align them with familial situations. While Harriet Samuels rightfully criticizes the essentializing parallel of mui tsai as child slaves for turning these girls into victims who could not be saved without a colonizing hand, the colonizing officials also destabilized England’s moralistic image. The colonial authorities did so by assuming the stance of the Chinese elite who advocated for the mui tsai system, and by prioritizing economic progress over a modern Christian moral civility that expressly decried abuses against the individual. [21] [22]
Underwritten by the significance of elite Chinese compradors in fostering and maintaining economic interactions between mainland Chinese and European firms, Faure accurately observed that the administration “did not bulldoze its way in social policies,” instead preferring to secure England’s trade ties with China.[23] However, what Faure fails to consider is that by “not bulldoz[ing],” the administration undermined its own authority. An overly cautious attitude toward the Chinese elite and a constant return to a subjectively-kept pledge trapped the local government between a rock and a hard place at the protracted expense of the mui tsai. Faure’s accurate summation of colonial policies rings even truer: the enactment of policies and the lack thereof both sought to protect and enhance the colony’s role as an entrepôt of trade, whether in goods or people, legal or not. Financial gains clearly overrode moral ones.
Protected in Prostitution
The colonial administration’s hypocritical amorality was not unique to or the worst in the mui tsai situation, however. Protracted resistance to and debates with the English government’s policies and rulings had been at play for almost as long as Hong Kong had been an English colony. Established primarily as England’s East Asian military base through the 1850s, Hong Kong had garnered a reputation as “a microbial as well as a human clearing house,” especially as crews of every ship passing through Victoria Harbour were debilitated, purportedly all by venereal diseases. [24] [25] Compounding this medical disaster was the fact that a majority of the European men afflicted were involved in local and regional military operations in some capacity. For the administration, this medico-military disaster was alarming. It was thus the fear of weakened security and debilitated military personnel that prompted the passage of the Venereal Diseases Ordinance in 1857 and its later revision as the Contagious Diseases Ordinance in 1867.
In an intricate matrix of sexuality, race, morality, medicalization, class, criminality, and cultural relativism, the Venereal Diseases Ordinance and revised Contagious Diseases Ordinance came together to police the apparent threat of the racialized prostitute’s sexuality. Where policies surrounding prostitution involved registration and mandated medical surveillance, such regulationist schemes of biopower worked in the name of public health to reduce women morally through their sexuality.[26] Rules instituted include but were not limited to: interrogation by the registrar-general followed by the registration of prostitutes; formalized identifying certificates which the women were legally required to have on-hand at all times; weekly inspections by European doctors, “typically using the vaginal speculum;” isolation in lock hospitals for those found with venereal disease; publicly updated listings of inmates visible in the brothel and submitted to the registrar-general; licensing of brothels and accommodation houses, subject to inspections that were often conducted without prior notice and sometimes circularly paid for by levies placed on brothel keepers and prostitutes; and commercial zoning for geographic control over prostitution, made all the more nuanced by racial segregation of the clientele permitted by the 1867 ordinance, which allowed for the punitive management of unlicensed and unregistered ‘sly’ brothels and prostitutes. Keeping these rules in check were a ‘morals police,’ whose position placed them above the law in some respects, sanctioning otherwise illegal activities including breaking and entering.[27] Even when the 1867 ordinance narrowed its medical examination mandate to women serving in European brothels only, because many Chinese prostitutes serving Chinese men protested the indignity of these exams, especially by European doctors, discretionary powers afforded by London to colonial authorities in the 1890s allowed premodern methods of coercion to continue. Threatened with forced closure if a worker with venereal disease was harboured on-site, brothel keepers were compelled to continue sending their prostitutes for checkups.[28] Most disconcerting, however, is that the entire administrative operation was overseen by the registrar-general, later titled the Secretary for Chinese affairs and colloquially known as the “Protector of Chinese.”[29] Rather than protecting these Chinese women involved in the sex trade, the registrar-general governed their detention and oppression.
Perhaps most disconcerting for women in prostitution was the fact that all brothel keepers were also women.[30] Amidst their subjugation, it was not clear that the prostitutes could trust and rely on the women around them. While brothel keepers were legally responsible for ensuring that all their brothel inmates met the government’s regulations, prostitution also created opportunities for entrepreneurship, property ownership, and financial independence that likely encouraged adherence to the laws. Supported by an unchecked trafficking system, these women were complicit in the business of prostitution and the continued trafficking of women and girls. However, one can also argue that these brothel keepers provided the prostitute women with some degree of protection. Especially on legal grounds, brothel keepers ensured that the women adhered to the ordinances and were not forced to solicit clients or attend unregistered brothels. Regardless, as Elizabeth Sinn asserts, the majority of women in prostitution were treated and punished as property by their keepers and as sexual objects by their clients.[31]
Aside from the problematic regulationism embedded in the ordinances, one must also recognize what this legislation was not intended for. An unsurprisingly overwhelming presence, the male Chinese population had swelled to more than 78,000 by the 1870s, migrating from China and primarily Canton as cheap labour to send money home to their families. At least three times as large as the female Chinese population, a significant portion of these men travelled to Hong Kong alone.[32] Consequently, predominantly Chinese women prostitutes streamed into Hong Kong through legal immigration, trafficking, or kidnapping, to balance out the trade.
Although there were 26 Chinese men for every European man in Hong Kong at the time, the protection of Chinese male sexual health and safety, and even of prostitute women, was secondary to the plight of the minority white men.[33] In fact, the administration would later use this very Chinese population to defend Hong Kong’s need for invasive surveillance policies. Through the implementation of the Contagious Diseases Ordinance by law, white and ‘clean’ Chinese women in first-class brothels exclusively served the European population and could not be accessed by Asian men. Asian males could only be received at middle or third-class brothels.[34] A revision in this same ordinance, while supported by some Chinese prostitutes, also officially deregulated medical examinations for brothels that were exclusively Chinese or Asian in clientele and inmates. In other words, the government only sought to ensure the sexual safety of European patrons. Authorities, however, took no issue with “prosecuting women on prostitution-related charges.”[35] Although women appeared in court much less frequently than men did, by virtue of sheer numbers, female presence in court was more often than not for cases regarding prostitution or mui tsai.[36]
Philippa Levine identified “hygiene as a site of modernity.”[37] The dehumanizing medicalization and racial segregation of sexual regulation was trivialized as a civilizing policy based on social and physical public health. By burying the racialized and sexualized realities that these ordinances imposed on sex workers, the administration placed the onus of venereal infections on prostitute women, and justified its reductive classification through intrusive and panoptical inspections. As tangible representations of colonial biopower over the sex trade, these inspections defined what Levine calls a “socio-sexual… hierarchy of respectability,” premised on sanitation, sexual pliability, physicality, and racial appearance. For example, Japanese women held more rank due to their paler skin, which at the time was suggestive of more modern women who were not required to work outdoors.[38] This hierarchy then further abstracted and essentialized the prostitute woman’s identity, determined by her willingness to be regularly probed for the protection of the men who desired only her sexuality. Also interlaced in this dynamic are Eldridge Cleaver’s meditations on interracial sexuality from the Black Power movement, in which he posited that the racialized woman was shaped to service both the colonizing white and the racialized, in this case, Asian man.[39] Culminating in a sanitized, gendered, sexualized, and racialized regulatory system, R.J. Miners notes that, to the colony, this system was a success. It addressed the perceived key fault of Hong Kong’s prostitution networks: “the provision of clean Chinese women for the use of the English soldiers and the sailors of the Royal Navy.”[40]
The influence of the purported moral degradation of colonized persons on the creation of these ordinances is also evident. Experiences in the formation of and rule over other colonies suggested that the morals of the modern man could deteriorate by merely existing in the same physical spaces as local peoples. The English further complicated this matter by suggesting that physical and sanitary proximity – or even worse, contact – would infect the English person with an immoral disease inherent to the local person.[41] As such, fears of moral contamination through sexual contact arose. Not only were the English afraid of becoming diseased by Chinese prostitute women, they also feared indirect infection from the Chinese men with whom they might share these women. Simultaneously, it was inconceivable that colonial women might be involved in the sex trade to allay these concerns. Rather, as the commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police commented: “as there must always be prostitutes it is perhaps less demoralising to have foreigners than English women” fill that role.[42] This statement is alarming and contradictory to the supposed enlightenment of the English, often invoked to justify colonizing practices and ordinances. In contrast, the significantly graver and more real dangers faced by women in China and Hong Kong were unaddressed by legislation. The risks facing Chinese women, namely that of kidnapping and trafficking to maintain the prostitution industry, incarceration, impregnation, and physical and sexual abuse during prostitution were of little concern to the colonial authorities. Indeed, a 1921 commission from Britain determined that “the artificial value put on the Chinese girl by the system of recognised brothels is the main inducement to the kidnappers.”[43]
Furthermore, these surveillant structures were not intended for the supposed civilizing betterment of Chinese society. Rendered in opposition to mandated repeals of the 1867 ordinance by the home government in the 1930s was a tale that embedded prostitution intimately in Chinese cultural values and tradition. Historically, according to Governor William Peel, the Chinese looked upon prostitution with a “more lenient eye.” If this cultural custom were to be violated, it would “arouse great resentment” among the Chinese population, especially as the government promised to “respect Chinese customs generally.”[44] Prefaced by the suggestion of a precarious Chinese community that is unreceptive to modernizing morality, the cultural relativism colouring Peel’s fantasy replicates the reasoning employed in the 1910s to defend the mui tsai system, once again reflecting the hypocritical amorality underscoring colonial justifications. The administration considered itself merciful and respectful toward an “alien civilization” by religiously instituting a system of prostitution that classifies and discriminates in service and clientele – an act that is paradoxical at best. As Miners points out, Peel’s final concession to shut down the seven brothels serviced by European prostitutes did little to remedy this problem, as the authorities were already in the habit of periodically removing European prostitutes from Hong Kong to maintain the image of European prestige in Asia.[45] If one follows this logic, it would then seem that the administration allowed and even endorsed the defiling of Chinese women prostitutes, morally, socially, and physically. The Chinese prostitute is then victimized by the very civility that the English purported to spread.
Sex, Trade, and Disease
Hong Kong had been a key point of piracy and illegal trade into and out of China long before the English arrived. Where “trade not conquest” was the overarching goal of English imperialism, the colonial administration built on Hong Kong’s natural environment and strategic position to make it conducive to continuing and creating industries of cheap labour, finance, and human trafficking.[46] Under the colonial administration, concerns over human trafficking and its victims did not arise until the English themselves felt invested in or affected by the moral implications of mui tsai and prostitution. However, where the domestic servitude of young girls was eventually deemed morally reprehensible, due to the delegitimation of slavery and colonialism in global contexts, the exploitation and abuse of women’s bodies and sexuality through prostitution continued to be viewed as an inevitable part of modern society. Where Harriet Samuels appropriately cautions against the delimiting imperial feminist view that moulds the mui tsai and the prostitute as “‘victim’ subject of her uncivilized culture,” it is equally important to understand that this paper does not desire to define her as a victim subject of civilizing culture either.[47] Instead, this paper seeks to expand discourses on the use of panoptical regulationism in essentializing and policing marginalized groups. In the racialized and patriarchal setting of colonial Hong Kong, the Chinese girl or woman fell to the bottom of the socio-sexual hierarchy, where she was at once the subject of manipulation and violation from the most intimate levels to the broadest systemic ones.
While one must be careful not to homogenize the views and opinions of the local Chinese population and the colonial and domestic English communities, the protracted continuation of the mui tsai system and prostitution, despite periods of agitation in England, reflects the colonial government’s official stance prior to Japanese occupation. Between its regulation of mui tsai and prostitutes, sex, trade, and disease, or STDs, underscoring colonial Hong Kong’s racialized and sexualized sociocultural setting highlights the hypocritical amorality of the civilizing mission. While one could make the case that the administration suffered from an island mentality, wherein Hong Kong’s sheer physical distance from the home state afforded it superior knowledge about how to manage the “alien civilization” and police its inextricable barbarity, the institutionalization of policies and punitive measures that were not endorsed by the English government or the public reveals the disconcerting pre-modernism of later colonial states to justify and maintain their superior patronage of colonized people and places. In fact, Philip Howell argues that the entwining of the colonial government’s regulatory systems in Hong Kong verged on a “full-blown crisis of government” and the “breakdown of English ‘liberal’ rule.”[48] Where England as the imperial power was purportedly superior to the colonized state and therefore assigned the duty of (re)educating the Chinese population in the modern, moral ways of the West, the STDs pervading its authoritative methodology were rather coercively and threateningly pre-modern. This highlights another paradox wherein the English necessarily could not modernize the local Chinese population. The culturally relativistic approach to the subjugation of girls and women as mui tsai and prostitutes was necessary for the maintenance of a power dynamic that left the Chinese wanting of development and improvement.
Julie Shi is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto. She is working towards an English specialist, a History minor focusing on East Asia and the Asian diaspora, and a Book and Media Studies minor.
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[1] David Faure, “Hong Kong, Colonial Society,” in Documentary History of Hong Kong (Hong Kong University Press, 1997), 7.
Norman Miners, “The Attempts to Abolish the Mui Tsai System in Hong Kong,” in Hong Kong: A Reader in Social History, ed. David Faure (Oxford University Press, 2003), 466.
[2] T.N. Chiu, “The Physical Setting,” in The Port of Hong Kong: A Survey of Its Development (Hong Kong University Press, 1973), 1.
[3] Chiu, “The Physical Setting,” 11. Miners, “The Attempts to Abolish,” 463.
[4] Miners, “The Attempts to Abolish,” 465.
[5] ibid, 464.
[6] John M. Carroll, “A National Custom: Debating Female Servitude in Late Nineteenth-Century Hong Kong,” Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 6 (2009): 1471-74, 10.1017/S0026749X08003648.
[7] C. Munn, “‘Anglo-China’: The Opium War and English Acquisition of Hong Kong,” in Anglo-China: Chinese People and English Rule in Hong Kong, 1841-1880 (Curzon Press, 2001), 22.
[8] Carroll, “A National Custom,” 1468.
[9] Miners, “The Attempts to Abolish,” 464.
[10] ibid, 465.
[11] ibid, 469.
[12] Harriet Samuels, “A Human Rights Campaign? the Campaign to Abolish Child Slavery in Hong Kong 1919–1938,” Journal of Human Rights 6, no.3 (2007): 369, 365, doi:10.1080/14754830701560764.
[13] Miners, “The Attempts to Abolish,” 470.
[14] Miners, “The Attempts to Abolish,” 469-82.
[15] ibid, 470.
W.K. Chan, “The Emergence of Leadership among the Chinese Population, and the Tung Wah Hospital,” in The Making of Hong Kong Society, (Oxford University Press, 1991), 91.
[16] Samuels, “A Human Rights Campaign?” 368-69.
[17] ibid, 363, 371.
[18] Faure, “Hong Kong, Colonial Society,” 7, 9.
[19] Munn, “‘Anglo-China’,” 22.
[20] Samuels, “A Human Rights Campaign?” 369
[21] ibid, 376-79.
[22] ibid, 380.
[23] Carl T. Smith, “The English-Educated Chinese Elite in Nineteenth Century Hong Kong,” in Hong Kong: A Reader in Social History, ed. David Faure (Oxford University Press, 2003), 269.
Faure, “Hong Kong, Colonial Society,” 2.
[24] Munn, “‘Anglo-China’,” 23.
[25] Philip Howell, “Race, Space and the Regulation of Prostitution in Colonial Hong Kong,” Urban History 2 (2004): 235, 10.1017/S0963926804002123.
[26] Howell, “Race, Space and the Regulation of Prostitution,” 231.
[27] Philip Howell, “Prostitution and Racialised Sexuality: The Regulation of Prostitution in England and the English Empire before the Contagious Diseases Acts,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 (2000): 323, 329, 10.1068/d259.
R.J. Miners, “State Regulation of Prostitution in Hong Kong, 1857 to 1941,” Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 24 (1984): 144, http://www.jstor.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/stable/23902771.
[28] Miners, “State Regulation of Prostitution,” 148.
[29] Elizabeth Sinn, “Women at Work: Chinese Brothel Keepers in Nineteenth-Century Hong Kong,” Journal of Women’s History 19, no. 3 (2007): 89, 10.1353/jowh.2007.0062.
[30] Sinn, “Women at Work,” 92.
[31] ibid, 100-102.
[32] Chan, “The Emergence of Leadership,” 64-65.
[33] Miners, “State Regulation of Prostitution,” 143.
[34] Philippa Levine, “Modernity, Medicine, and Colonialism: The Contagious Diseases Ordinances in Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements,” positions 6, no. 3 (August 1, 1998): 688, doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1215/10679847-6-3-675.
[35] Philippa Levine, “Orientalist Sociology and the Creation of Colonial Sexualities,” Feminist Review 65, (Summer 2000): 7, myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/docview/1300490323?accountid=14771.
Maggy Lee, and K. Joe Laidler, “Gender and Imprisonment in Hong Kong,” in Punishment and Incarceration: A Global Perspective (Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, Volume 19), ed. Mathieu Deflem (Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2014), 262, https://doi.org/10.1108/S1521-613620140000019011.
[36] ibid, 262.
[37] Levine, “Modernity, Medicine, and Colonialism,” 687.
[38] Levine, “Orientalist Sociology,” 9.
[39] Jared Sexton, “Race, Sexuality, and Political Struggle: Reading “Soul on Ice”,” Social Justice 30, no. 2 (92) (2003): 30, http://www.jstor.org/stable/29768182.
[40] Miners, “State Regulation of Prostitution”, 145. Sinn, “Women at Work,” 91.
[41] Levine, “Modernity, Medicine, and Colonialism,” 675.
[42] Levine, “Orientalist Sociology,” 10.
[43] Miners, “State Regulation of Prostitution,” 151.
[44] Miners, “State Regulation of Prostitution,” 155.
[45] ibid.
[46] Munn, “‘Anglo-China’,” 31.
[47] Samuels, “A Human Rights Campaign?” 363.
[48] Howell, “Race, Space and the Regulation of Prostitution,” 236.
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