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Fabio Lanza reviews Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past

Hang Tu. Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past. Harvard East Asian Monograph Series. Harvard University Press, 2025. 326 pp. Hardcover $52.95

In Sentimental Republic, Hang Tu reframes the complex intellectual and political landscape of the post-Mao decades, shifting emphasis away from what he describes as “ideological” positions and focusing instead on the role of emotions. He asks, “How does emotion—as a constellation of affective intensities, moral sentiments, and political judgments—factor in the post-Mao political debates about China’s revolutionary past?” (3) Tu argues that, “By analyzing how rival memory projects stirred up melancholy, guilt, anger, and resentment, the polemics surrounding the country’s past cannot be properly understood without reading for the emotional trajectories of the post-Mao intelligentsia.” (8)

The book attempts to answer why “emotion” is a good entry into this material. Each of the five chapters is devoted to a set of intellectual/literary figures of the post-Mao era as well as a corresponding set of emotional attachments and sentimental approaches to the Maoist past. Tu moves from Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu’s differing conceptions of enlightened emotions, one based on pleasure the other on guilt (Chapter 1), to the elevation of the scholar Chen Yinke into a liberal martyr and a symbol of scholarship against politics (Chapter 2). Leftist melancholia is the topic of chapter 3, examined through the connection between Taiwanese writer Chen Yingzhen and Shanghai novelist Wang Anyi. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to the “right” of the political spectrum and focus on conservative thinker Liu Xiaofeng and the neo-nationalists of the China Can Say No phenomenon.

Tu starts by postulating that previous scholarship has viewed the intellectual and political articulations of the post-1978 era as produced solely by “rational deliberation” or logically embraced political ideologies. That, in turn, has produced an artificial separation between the rational and the emotional, and reduced the debates of the 1980s and 1990s to “stark polarities: liberty versus equality, modern versus anti-modern, and forgetting versus remembering.” (13)  Against this backdrop of hyper-rationality, Tu proposes instead to analyze those various -isms not solely as the product of rational deliberation, “but also as sensorial, affective, and emotive utterances deeply informed by personal desires, shared feelings, and moral sentiments,” (15) in particular the feelings connected to the legacy and the memory of the Maoist revolutionary past.

This emotional-rational dichotomy is largely a straw man. Few scholars frame political positions as simply the result of “rational deliberation” or the appeal of political ideology simply in terms of logical choice. Even less is this true for the post-Mao period, where the emotional legacy of the past has loomed very large and of course has contributed to the political choices actors make. So why does Tu need this false dichotomy? Postulating a fake dichotomy between reason and emotion, ideology and feelings, Tu successfully removes politics – as collective practice, shared experience, and communal ideation – from the post 1978 debates. He thus successfully depoliticizes not only the post-Mao era but the Maoist revolution itself. If mass politics is the site of irrational passion, depoliticizing allows historical actors to be rationally emotional without being political. And in that, Tu’s re-proposition of the emotion-rational dichotomy reprises its long and fraught history in Cold War orientalism, when it was deployed to separate the logical, democratic, appropriately thoughtful West and the irrational, emotional, and unruly East.

As Tu states, throughout the book, “Mao’s revolution” serves as “a generic term to designate a constellation of sociopolitical events, values, and memories” (4). Maoism is described as a quasi-religion, as brainwashing, as trauma, and Tu also repeatedly mentions something called the “Maoist sublime,” without ever explaining what that might have been.  This is a way to erase the complex historical experience of the Chinese revolution and to empty that experience of any political significance. This is most evident in the first chapter on Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, who famously and explicitly bid “farewell to revolution.” Tu uncritically espouses Li’s concept of “the double bind of enlightenment and national salvation” (30) and accepts the completely ahistorical view that connects May Fourth iconoclasts to the children of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, who “both sought a ‘cultural-intellectualistic approach’ to political ills, fueled by ‘obsession with youth’ and “destruction of the past.” (47-48). The decades-long Chinese revolution is flattened by erasing any historical difference (1919 becomes 1966) and by reducing politics to irrational youthful emotions and destructive feelings.

Tu actively embraces Li’s politics of depoliticization, even when he cites the Chinese New Left’s criticism of Li and Liu’s thesis “as a thinly disguised neoliberal schema to ‘depoliticize’ radical thinking and legitimatize ‘end-of-history’ liberal triumphalism.” (47) Interestingly for a book about the debates of the post-Mao era, the New Left is left to haunt the books as a specter, appearing here and there, usually as a critical voice, only to be dismissed and banished to oblivion. Indeed, any direct engagement with the Chinese New Left would require taking the politics of the Maoist revolution seriously as politics, and not only as memory, trauma, or emotional attachments.

Does Hang Tu consciously adopt the politics of depoliticization and Sentimental Republic? I cannot say. But with the excuse of recovering an emotional dimension to post-Mao China that nobody actually has ever denied, Tu effectively flattens historical complexities into a story about the passions of a few individuals. To be clear, there is nothing wrong in an approach that centers affects and emotions, and there are excellent histories of emotions; here however, this approach serves mainly to produce a simplified and depoliticized depiction and to reduce profound political and intellectual differences to emotive responses. It’s all about the vibes.

In addition to the flaws in the main argument and analysis, I also want to highlight a glaring omission: Tu does analyze the work of one female writer, Wang Anyi, but he does so only through her relationship with Chen Yingzhen. That relationship developed after their participation in the 1983 Iowa writing program. Curiously, nowhere in the book does Tu mention that Wang went to Iowa with her mother, Ru Zhijuan, an important writer and editor in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s; nor does he mention that Wang and Ru wrote a memoir together about that trip. In a book ostensibly about the political memory of the Mao period, this critically relevant source is never mentioned. Instead, Wang Anyi’s approach to the revolutionary past is refracted through her relationship with the (male) Taiwanese leftist, Chen Yingzhen.[1] To be sure, this was a crucially influential relationship, but Wang and Ru’s own words, which are available, are absent. The silence about Wang and Ru is quite significant, especially in what is already a male-centered book.[2]

This review was originally commissioned by Twentieth-Century China, but it was rejected (in a slightly different version) as too harsh and straining “the bounds of collegiality.”

Notes

[1] Carlos Rojas, “Mothers and Daughters: Orphanage as Method,” Chinese Literature Today, Volume 6 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2017.1375283

[2] Tu’s evident neglect of gender issues is on display again, for example, on p. 3, where he labels the speech of the famously emotional Chai Ling on the eve of the June Fourth massacre as “hysterical.”

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P. Kerim Friedman, Yes, “Taiwan Can Help,” but not if it continues to ignore Palestinian voices

On July 6th, according to a report by Jordyn Haime in the South China Morning Post, Taiwan’s official representative to Israel, Abby Ya-Ping Lee, pledged to support a medical center in a settlement community in the occupied West Bank. After the report became public, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) told United Daily News that the matter was still under discussion and that funds had not yet been promised. That is fortunate, because if they had, it would be a gross violation of international law as well as international norms.

It would not be the first time that Taiwan and Israel found themselves standing together in defiance of these norms. During the Cold War, Taiwan was paired with the apartheid states of Israel and South Africa as a trio of “pariah states.” South Africa and Taiwan have since shed their authoritarian pasts, emerging as liberal democracies. They have also each undertaken a process of transitional justice in order to reckon with these histories. But while South Africa has extended that reckoning to the international arena, accusing Israel of apartheid and leading the charge against Israel’s genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Taiwan has limited its own version of transitional justice to domestic politics.

As a result, Taiwan’s Cold War legacy still haunts its international relations, leaving it unable or unwilling to speak out against the genocide in Gaza, even as it offers support to Ukraine against Russia. As an American Jew who is also a Taiwanese citizen, I have repeatedly tried to speak out against this silence. I would like for my fellow Taiwanese to be confident enough in their place on the world stage, in the vibrancy of their culture, and in their democracy that they could find the voice to support the Palestinian cause. Instead, I find Taiwan seemingly willing to break international law in order to provide direct support to the occupation.

Why this disconnect between Taiwan’s stated values and its behavior in the Middle East? Some possible answers suggest themselves. One is that Taiwanese see Israelis as kindred spirits. They see in Israel’s ability to stand up to its Arab neighbors a model for their own struggle against China. There is also a pragmatic angle: like Israel, Taiwan is dependent on US military support and weapons sales to protect their border. They dream of a Taiwanese “Iron Dome,” even though it would be unlikely to work against China.

But there is another reason as well. Anthropologists talk about a process called “schismogenesis,” by which groups seek to differentiate themselves from rivals by taking up contrary cultural practices and political alignments. Think of the Yooks and the Zooks in Dr. Seuss’s The Butter Battle Book: one eats their toast with the butter on the top, the other with it on the bottom. I think something like this has hurt support for Palestinians in Taiwan. If the Chinese are for it, the logic goes, then Taiwan must be against it. While it is true that China has been a vocal supporter of a ceasefire, and has helped broker an agreement between Hamas and Fatah, the reality is far more complicated, given China’s long-term, close relationship with Israel. Chinese tech firms are involved in the surveillance of the occupied Palestinian territories, deploying technologies that were first tested in East Turkistan, as part of policies that were, in turn, inspired by Israel. 

Unfortunately, such complexity gets lost in Taiwanese discussions of the matter. One can laugh with netizens who scoff at China’s support for Palestinian sovereignty, asking why they don’t support a “two-state solution” for Taiwan and China? But such a framing has the effect of erasing Palestinian voices from the discussion. The idea, put forward by one opinion writer, that China and Hamas have formed an evil and mutually beneficial alliance is not far outside mainstream discourses in Taiwan. A MOFA official went so far as to suggest that Haime’s story was deliberately timed to undermine Taiwanese sovereignty because it was published on the eve of a pro-Taiwan statement by the Israeli parliament. 

This obvious effort at deflection should give Taiwanese pause. It is reminiscent of how the  anti-imperial left in the US downplays Taiwanese voices when talking about cross-strait relations, reducing everything to a power play between the US and China. “Policide” refers to efforts intended to destroy or deny the existence of a political entity. It is what China is trying to do in Tibet, East Turkestan, and Taiwan, and it is what Israelis are trying to do in Palestine. Just as wearing a keffiyeh or a watermelon pin is an actionable offense on US college campuses or at work, so too is waving a Taiwanese flag at the Olympics or anywhere in China. Both countries are victims of efforts to suppress overt symbols of their sovereignty. Similarly, when pundits and politicians flatten geopolitics to a great game between world powers, they aid and abet this process of policide. Taiwanese should think twice before participating in such erasure.

True, one should be careful not to exaggerate the similarities. Taiwan is a highly functioning, democratic state with a thriving economy and de facto political relations with most of the world’s nations, while Palestine is under direct military occupation, divided between two geographic entities (Gaza and the West Bank), each with different ruling bodies, and even during times of relative peace can hardly be said to function as a truly independent state. Despite that, China has actually been much more successful in restricting expressions of Taiwanese statehood than Israel and America have been able to do with regard to Palestine. 146 out of 193 nations recognize Palestine, while only 13 UN states (and Vatican City) recognize Taiwan. 

The success of such policide in the international arena is concerning because it is laying the groundwork for something much more violent, just as the policide of Palestine makes possible the continued genocide in Gaza. The related term, “politicide,” refers to the genocidal destruction of the people associated with a political entity. Politicide does not always follow policide, but policide can certainly make politicide easier. The Palestinian exception to free speech enables the genocide, just as denying Taiwan a seat in the UN makes it that much easier for China were it to decide to take the country by force.

Taiwan’s exclusion from the World Health Organization (WHO), a form of policide enforced by China, became a major issue during the COVID crisis. In response, Taiwan used its excess capacity in producing personal protective equipment (PPE), as well as its effective pandemic response experience, to promote itself as a “force for good in the international community.” They even coined the slogan “Taiwan can help.” Viewed in this light, MOFA spokesman Hsiao Kuang-wei’s蕭光偉 claim that donations to settler hospitals are simply part of Taiwan’s ongoing strategy of providing humanitarian medical aid is almost understandable. That is, until you realize the context. In 2024 the UN International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory “not to render aid or assistance to illegal settlement activities, including not to provide Israel with any assistance to be used specifically in connection with settlements in the occupied territories.” Although Taiwan is not a member of the UN, it does generally seek to respect international legal norms, and it seems clear that financial assistance to the Nanasi Medical Centre at Sha’ar Binyamin would be in violation of those norms.

The “Taiwan can help” slogan was designed to fight against Chinese policide of Taiwan which, among other things, excludes Taiwan from a seat at the World Health Organization. So it is ironic, to say the least, that this very same policy would help serve Israel’s politicide of Palestinians in the West Bank. How can Taiwan hope to be seen as a “force for good” when it undertakes such actions against the backdrop of the ongoing genocide in Gaza? Taiwan needs to stop acting as willing participants in Israel’s policide of Palestine. Silencing Palestinian voices will only hurt its own battle to be heard over Beijing.

P. Kerim Friedman (傅可恩) is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University(NDHU) in Taiwan.

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BDS Korea, Manse to Intifada: A Report on March 1, 2025 from Palestine Peace Solidarity in South Korea

Known as the March First Independence Movement, an unprecedented wave of mass protests with people shouting dongrip manse 독립만세 (long live independence) swept across Korea on March 1, 1919. On this day, religious leaders and students stood against Japanese colonial rule and declared Korean independence, sparking uprisings far and wide. The movement lasted for three months, with an estimated 1,900 protests all over the country. Met by violent and brutal repression from Japanese colonial authorities, the movement did not immediately lead to Korean independence, but it served to inspire and give hope to independence fighters and activists beyond the Korean Peninsula. 

Palestine Peace Solidarity in South Korea (PPS), also known as BDS Korea, observed the 106th anniversary of the March First Movement in 2025 by inviting Saleh, a Palestinian refugee currently living in Korea, to speak about Palestinian prisoners. People gathered at SALT, a community space located only a few hundred meters from Seodaemun Prison (today a historical site and museum), where an estimated 3,000 Korean independence fighters had been held, tortured and killed. The goal of the gathering was to connect the Palestinian liberation movement to Korea, showing that history is not simply past, but remains relevant, affecting the material conditions today.

After all, what does it mean to celebrate the March First Movement in the present day, when survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery and forced labor from the Asia Pacific War have still not received a proper apology or compensation from the Japanese government? What does it mean to celebrate the March First Movement when in 2023, then-President Yoon Suk Yeol repeatedly emphasized the need to hold hands with Japan and put the wounds of the past behind us? Without proper reparations for historical injustices, the past cannot be put to rest.

On the occasion of March 1st, 2025, Saleh shared the fact that there are more than ten thousand Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli jails. Thousands are held under administrative detention without charge or trial for terms that can be renewed indefinitely. Prisoners are subjected to physical and psychological torture, including sexual violence, solitary confinement and medical negligence. The longest serving Palestinian prisoner is a man named Nael Al-Baghouthi who was first imprisoned in 1977. He served 34 years before being released and then re-arrested, for a total of 45 years behind bars. Some Palestinians are even given sentences that are thousands of years long. Israel is also notorious for trying minors in military courts.

The occupation uses imprisonment as a way to break people’s spirits and crush the liberation movement. However, Palestinian prisoners not only survive, but find ways to sustain life and hope even from their cells. As Saleh explained, although the occupation “may succeed in shackling bodies, it remains powerless to imprison minds and willpower.” To give an example, Hassan Salama, serving a life sentence for his pro-Palestinian activities, managed to get engaged while in prison. Gufran Zamil, a Palestinian woman inspired by his story, proposed to marry him, though they had never met and may never meet. This has given Hassan renewed strength and inspiration, to know that there is someone waiting for him on the outside, that there is life beyond prison.

In a similar vein, there are prisoners who smuggle out their sperm in order to start a family (even from prison). While imprisoned for two decades, Abdel-Fattah Kamel Shalabi and his wife were able to conceive through such methods using artificial insemination. In 2024 upon his release, Shalabi was able to meet his ten-year-old son for the first time. Israel seeks to deprive Palestinian prisoners of freedom and life, including the ability to get married or have a family. But through these acts of resistance, Palestinian prisoners claim their right to life and demonstrate that their spirits will not be broken. 

Many Palestinians also engage in hunger strikes, as one of the only ways to assert their agency in prison. Khalil Awawdeh was arrested in 2021 initially with a 6-month administrative detention that kept being renewed with no trial or charge. He went on a 127-day hunger strike, until he received confirmation from Israeli authorities that his administrative detention would not be renewed. He was released in 2023. 

It is not difficult to draw parallels between the situation of Palestinians and Korea’s independence movement. Many Korean independence fighters were also labelled terrorists, tortured and killed for their actions. One well-known independence fighter, Nam Ja-hyeon, went on a hunger strike after being tortured by Japanese prison guards for six months. She was eventually released, but died soon after. This March 1st, we remembered these anti-colonial fighters who gave their lives for Korean liberation and independence, and we honored their legacy by standing in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance.

Despite Korea’s painful history of colonization, experiences that still inform today’s political landscape, the South Korean government under Yoon Suk Yeol chose to align itself with perpetrators of colonial and imperialist violence. In fact, the far-right, anti-impeachment, pro-Yoon protesters are often seen holding the South Korean flag alongside the American flag, and increasingly the Israeli flag. Supported by ultra-conservative Christian sects, the Korean political right fully aligns itself with the US, believing that US imperialism keeps them safe from the so-called bogeymen, namely North Korea and China.  

Beyond such symbolic displays, South Korea actively profits from supporting US imperialism. South Korea is one of the many countries that supplies weapons to Israel, and is one of the only countries that actually increased their weapons sales to Israel during the ongoing war against Gaza. Korean conglomerate Hanwha Aerospace, known as the “Lockheed Martin of Asia,” signed partnerships with Israeli defense companies, Elbit Systems and Elta Systems, in 2021. Its market value jumped 69% in 2023 to $7.8 billion. Other South Korean companies have also profited from the Israeli occupation, notably HD Hyundai, whose excavators are being used to destroy Palestinian homes and build Zionist settlements. 

It is shameful that the South Korean government, a nation with its own history of colonization, would align itself with the US and aid and abet the Israeli occupation of Palestine. This is precisely why Korean solidarity with Palestinian liberation is rooted in mutual struggle against imperialism. Though South Korea is in collusion with the US empire as a client state, it is simultaneously a victim of US imperialism. Just as Israel serves as a US proxy in the Middle East, South Korea too serves as a proxy in the Indo-Pacific region. The US military has maintained its presence and influence in South Korea ever since the liberation (and division) of Korea in 1945. This not only led to the Korean War, but the violent suppression of protests and civilian massacres such as the 1948 April 3rd Jeju Massacre were aided and abetted by the US military in Korea. In more recent times, the presence of US military camptowns has also led to sexual violence against women, as well as environmental destruction due to base constructions. 

These are not issues of the past but ongoing ones that impact the here and now. In fact, as recently as March 2025, a bomb was “accidentally” dropped on the South Korean city of Pocheon, during the US-ROK joint military exercises, damaging 163 buildings and injuring over forty people. Though Koreans are supposed to accept US military presence because it allegedly makes us safer, what actually happens is that bombs are dropped on our own land and people. The US missile defense system, THAAD, is another case in point. Despite being useless in defending against missile attacks from North Korea, it was deployed in 2017 while former President Park Geun-hye was undergoing her impeachment trial. Through its advanced radar capabilities, it is able to spy on China, serving US interests. In short, THAAD benefits US security priorities, while the Korean people are the ones who pay the price, especially those subjected to state violence for their sustained resistance against THAAD’s deployment. 

Despite national liberation from Japanese occupation in 1945, Korea remains divided in a precarious state of truce with an ongoing US military presence on the peninsula. Koreans, therefore, know very well that a ceasefire in Palestine is only the beginning. A lasting peace requires the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestine, a permanent lifting of the blockade, and a complete dissolution of Zionism as a political project whether within Israel or beyond. Only a fully free, self-governing, autonomous Palestinian state can bring about true decolonization and liberation. 

This requires the end of US support for Israel. So long as the US has vested security interests in the region, it will continue to find proxies in the Middle East, just as it has with Korea in the Indo-Pacific. In fact, the largest overseas US military base is located in South Korea, near Pyeongtaek. This is precisely why our struggles are interconnected. As long as US interests govern the region, the Korean Peninsula can never freely and autonomously exercise its sovereignty. Korean activists therefore strive to sever links to US imperialism, not only for the sake of Korean self-determination, but also for the liberation of Palestine.

In this vein, BDS Korea’s main goal is to serve as a bridge between Korea and Palestine since its formation in 2003. Members travel to Palestine to organize with activists on the ground. BDS efforts range from pushing South Korea to impose a military embargo on Israel, to boycotting Israeli products, and severing Korean academic and business ties with Israel. Though Korea and Palestine are geographically distant, and our respective national issues may seem unrelated on the surface, not only do we share histories of imperialist violence but our current-day struggles are deeply intertwined. BDS Korea, along with other organizations in Korea and beyond, will continue the struggle from this corner of the world until Palestine is free from the river to the sea. 

BDS Korea is a feminist organization that stands in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement. Since its founding in 2003, BDS Korea has aimed to bridge Korea and Palestine, working tirelessly to inform South Korean society of Israel’s colonization, apartheid and military occupation of Palestine.

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Gail Hershatter, Gao Xiaoxian: A Short Remembrance

I first met Gao Xiaoxian in 1992 at a conference at Peking University, but even before that I had heard about her extraordinary work with the Women’s Federation and her deep knowledge of life in the Shaanxi countryside. In our first conversations, we talked about our shared interest in the history and changing social landscape of rural China in the 1950s, and we decided to work collaboratively to investigate the changes that those years had brought to farming women. Beginning in 1996, we made six interviewing trips to various villages in Guanzhong and Shaannan, talking to women about farming, childbirth, marriage, childrearing, social roles, and the profound changes in women’s lives brought about during the collective era.

The rural women we interviewed were some of my best teachers, but the most astonishing aspect of this project was the chance to work with Xiaoxian. Her curiosity, enthusiasm, intelligence, and deep sense of care for the people whose lives she was investigating were extraordinary. For me, she became the model of an ethical engaged scholar-activist, devoted to getting to the root of problems that continue to make women’s lives difficult, but also delighted by the variety and creativity that she found among women in the villages. 

After a day of interviewing, we would take long walks in the evening and discuss what we were learning, and with almost every sentence she spoke I would learn something about a new way of looking at the world. She was a talented teacher. She also helped to make the lives of countless women better with her work on gender and development, her training programs on domestic violence, and the many research projects she organized both during and after her time at the Women’s Federation.

Gao Xiaoxian has left us too soon. But as I think about the many people she taught and influenced and inspired, I can truly say that she lived a life of great significance. I grieve her passing and I honor her presence in the world. May her memory be a blessing to all of us.

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Chris Chien reviews Florence Mok, Covert colonialism: Governance, surveillance and political culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966-97

Covert colonialism: Governance, surveillance and political culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966-97. Florence Mok. Manchester University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781526158192. Price: £85.00  | Reviewed by Chris Chien

Florence Mok’s monograph Covert Colonialism: Governance, surveillance and political culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966–97 is an important study of how the British colonial regime aimed to foster a sense of local identity as a strategy to subdue the threat of revolutionary anti-colonial movements that swept through the Third World during the Cold War. Mok examines why Hong Kong stood apart as a bastion of relative colonial stability amongst the decolonizing tumult of the early Cold War through case studies of political flashpoints in the period after the city’s twin anti-colonial uprisings of 1966 and 1967. The book’s central contention is that British colonial statecraft of this period centered on impeding domestic political ferment by creating pressure valves for grievances through the creation of avenues for Hong Kong people to communicate directly with the government.  

This is what Mok calls “covert colonialism,” which took the form of surreptitious measurings of public opinion on controversial social issues and government policy by MOOD (Movement of Opinion Direction) and Town Talk survey programs, which were successful in re-instilling colonial state legitimacy as the guarantor of social stability in the eyes of the Hong Kong people. This bureaucratic instrument allowed the state to project the appearance of genuine responsiveness to public opinion, which generated a distinct and local civic identity that transformed encroaching revolutionary fervor, incited by both PRC Maoists and KMT Nationalists, into a largely subdued political culture that often took the form of stability-seeking conservatism. Mok argues that the creation of informal avenues for political participation contradicts the traditional sociological characterization of Hong Kong as a “minimally-integrated social-political system,” where the colonial regime was largely unimpeded in its governance and society was composed of apolitical “utilitarianistic familism” dominated by self-interest and family interdependence rather than reliance on the state (11). In encouraging Hong Kong Chinese to engage with the colonial state, covert colonialism, in Mok’s rendering, created the conditions for a more confident and outspoken Hong Kong political culture. 

The foremost strength of the book is Mok’s archive: a newly declassified trove of government records centering on a largely ignored covert colonial domestic surveillance program. The book’s introduction and first chapter establish the framework of covert colonialism and explain how Mok understands it to relate to Hong Kong political culture through the construction of the concept of “public opinion.” Mok’s focus on the 1970s in Hong Kong political culture, less analyzed than the sensational riots of the 50s and 60s, results in a unique set of case studies through which to explore covert colonialism in the subsequent seven chapters. While Mok engages popular episodes such as the movement for Chinese as an official language, she also eschews well-documented events such as the 1966 Star Ferry and 1967 Riots so as to focus on more subdued developments in the city’s political culture at large, such as the 1973 campaign against telephone rate increases. This is a valuable collection of lesser-known histories of resistance in Hong Kong history that, in Mok’s rendering, demonstrate how “covert colonialism” was a central mechanism through which colonial officials could sincerely consider public opinion and Hong Kong people could influence the outcome of government policy. Rather than coopting social struggle, covert colonialism, Mok argues, was a more effective avenue for affecting colonial decision-making in contrast to overtly political practices such as rallies, sit-ins, and hunger strikes that were unacceptable to officials and in a society largely allergic to the tumult of the 1960s.

Issues arise with two central concepts to Mok’s analysis: decolonization and democratization. Mok adopts the historiographical framing common within Hong Kong Studies and forwarded by scholars such as Leo Goodstadt, John Darwin, and Chi-kwan Mark that characterizes the city as having been “decolonised” at various points in the Cold War because of the British “loss of means and will” to exercise power or the slow but formal “devolution of power” from the imperial core to the local government (7). Throughout the text, Mok describes covert colonialism’s effect of opening more direct avenues for communication between state and society as reflecting the colonial regime’s genuine willingness to be influenced by the opinions of the populace. She characterizes this as indicating “some degree of ‘decolonisation’ in the bureaucratic mentality” (26; quotation marks in original). The unqualified use of the quotation marks suggests that she is deploying a different conception of the term decolonisation, one that is unique to Hong Kong and which describes more of a top-down “decolonising” initiative compared to the bottom-up revolutions elsewhere in the Third World.

The concept that colonial rulers make political calculations based on maintaining stability and not angering too large a portion of its subjects is not particularly novel for colonial contexts. This consultative mechanism—or even the notion that officials included public sentiment in their political calculations more generally—does not indicate that Hong Kong people became a “part of the policymaking process” (25) and certainly does not necessarily indicate a “decolonising” of or by the colonial state. Given that Mok intends to examine, in part, why Hong Kong was not swept up in the wave of radical decolonizing movements of the Cold War period, it might have been better for Mok to clarify how this concept is being used in the context of the book.

For instance, in Chapter 2, which covers the Chinese language movement, Mok suggests that covert colonialism’s ability to absorb select public opinions to inform policy indicated “widened channels of political participation and the potential for ‘decolonisation’ of the mentalities of bureaucrats” (78; quotation marks in the original). In this way, she attributes decolonisation to the reformist colonial state’s flexibility in accommodating equity and inclusiveness. Acceding to the movement’s demand for Chinese language equality in governance made it so that, according to Mok, “more Chinese-speaking could now serve the government,” which was a precondition for “a more open political culture” (78). To be sure, one could understand this as the success of a specific political campaign by Hong Kong people but it is certainly not clear that it is decolonisation by any measure. Mok’s focus on Hong Kong’s unique ‘decolonisation’ that eschewed the forms of revolutionary nationalism more familiar in other parts of Asia and Africa also gives short shrift to radical groups of working class organizers, youths, and students who were engaged directly with the radical decolonization movements of their times such as the 70’s Biweekly group.[1] Mok only gestures to this broad gathering of Maoists, anarchists, and Trotskyists (who frequently enacted staunch anti-colonial and decolonizing actions) twice in passing during her discussion of the anti-corruption movement (Chapter 3) and the campaign against telephone rate increases (Chapter 4).[2] A more thorough meditation on what decolonization means in the book and how it is being deployed would help to avoid a demand for more coverage of actual anti-colonial forces in Hong Kong in this period.

A similar slippage occurs when discussing the concept of “democratisation” in Hong Kong. Mok notes that the covert solicitation of public opinion constituted “a substitute for representative democracy, enabling the undemocratic colonial government to widen the channels of political participation for ordinary people in a state-controlled manner without provoking China’s resistance nor politicising the Hong Kong Chinese” (17). Taking the British at their word—that they wanted to democratize Hong Kong but they were hamstrung by the PRC and that a wide swath of Hong Kong society said in surveys that they were against the potential chaos of such a process—suggests an implicit trust in the good intentions of the colonial regime. At base, Mok argues that British-initiated consultative governance in the form of covert colonialism, when it ignored popular opinion, did so largely against its will: “The wider interest of the British government and the state of Sino-British relations outweighed the importance of shifting popular sentiment in the policymaking process” (256). And, even as it developed from surveillance programs into the creation of local advisory bodies, in essence covert colonialism “pave[d] the way for further democratisation” (234).[3]

While it is valuable to understand the ruling elite’s view of these political episodes and how they evolved over time, such characterizations should not be taken at face value, as is often the case throughout each chapter. Moreover, even sections on political culture and grassroots actions still rely largely on characterizations from colonial reports rather than the political actors themselves. This citational practice has the effect of centralizing an understanding of the events through British bureaucratic perspectives. This is especially troublesome since Mok helpfully goes to great lengths to detail the logistical and methodological difficulties and unscientific nature of these qualitative, covert surveys in the first place. For instance, in the discussion of the anti-corruption movement in Chapter 3, Mok implies that changes in social attitudes towards speaking out directly to colonial officials was possible under a flawed but more open system of British liberalism. Thus, a development in Hong Kong political culture required a relatively straightforward path out of the “fatalism inherited from traditional attitudes formed by experience under successive Chinese governments…” under which [middle-aged and elderly groups] did not question “the wrongs of officialdom, or contest its actions.”  These are phrases Mok pulls directly from a colonial MOOD report, which takes at face value colonial officials’ sweeping, racialized generalization of Chinese social relations to the state. These merely echo the narrative of “Oriental tyranny” that Chinese must transcend, or out of which they must be benevolently lead. A more critical stance towards characterizations made in colonial surveillance reports, along with a broader array of secondary sources, would add depth to an analysis that is largely dependent on the subjective perceptions and renderings of whichever colonial bureaucrat assembled the report.

What I find most provocative and useful in Mok’s book is the subterranean contention that covert colonialism was, on balance, a net positive for Hong Kong society. She crucially traces an understudied period in the development of Hong Kong’s historical identity (the liberal faction of which rose to prominence in the protest movements of the 2000s and 2010s) and thereby provides another missing piece in the fuller picture of Hong Kong’s sometimes puzzling political culture. Assessing “positive” outcomes of European colonization is not novel: Arif Dirlik, in one of his last writings, discussed the way in which Taiwan was “the land colonialisms made.” He argues that for Taiwan and Hong Kong, the experience of successive colonialisms as a “source of historical identity” is largely antithetical to the anti-hegemonic impulses of postcolonial studies, which often obscures how “the colonizer’s culture did indeed transform the colonized, setting them in new historical directions, even if the directions taken were not what the colonizers had expected them to be.”[4]  For Hong Kong, this has often manifested as colonial nostalgia, but as Dirlik notes, the struggle against colonialism itself is also part of this potential wellspring of colonized historical identity. The study of the development of political culture under colonization, as with Mok’s book, has the potential to prepare a people to put robust democratic and other liberatory practices into action.

Though contemporary politics is beyond the purview of her book, Mok does gesture to the present in her conclusion. In Hong Kong’s current era of intense political repression and social movement abeyance, her work encourages us to adjust our gaze toward the way in which political cultures can and do develop outside the familiar containers of political parties, rallies, and riots. As many in Hong Kong are now forced underground to recuperate, read and collectively build political consciousness (whether through the study of histories of Third World decolonizing radicalisms or not), Covert Colonialism is a welcome reminder to look beyond recognizable forms, and that no matter the repression, political culture is not dead in the city after 2020—just transforming.

 

Chris Chien is a Postdoctoral Associate in Transnational Asian Studies at Tulane University and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Global Asia Program at Simon Fraser University. His book project examines commodities, logistical infrastructure, and visual regimes across the transpacific in order to critically assess the continuities and disjunctures of the Cold War with today’s so-called “New Cold War” between the U.S. and China. His writing has appeared in Amerasia, Verge: Global Asias, positions: asia critique, The Funambulist, The Nation, and Jacobin. He is an organizer and editor with Lausan Collective.

Notes

[1] Lu Pan’s recently released edited collection on 70’s Biweekly (along with her earlier articles about 70’s) provides a powerful history of grassroots anti-imperialist and anti-colonial activism in the city. See: Pan, Lu, ed. The 70’s Biweekly: Social Activism and Alternative Cultural Production in 1970s Hong Kong. 1st ed. Hong Kong University Press, 2023 and Tam, Gina Anne. “Gina Anne Tam Reviews The 70’s Biweekly: Social Activism and Alternative Cultural Production in 1970s Hong Kong.” positions politics: praxis (blog), November 27, 2023. https://positionspolitics.org/gina-ann-tam-reviews-the-70s-biweekly-social-activism-and-alternative-cultural-production-in-1970s-hong-kong/.

[2] Scholars such as Au Loong-yu and Promise Li have also chronicled the activities of 70’s Biweekly. These sources could have helped to supplement an understanding of the development of anti-colonial political culture in Hong Kong’s tumultuous 70s. See: Au, Loong-Yu. Hong Kong in Revolt. London: Pluto Press, 2020 and Promise Li, “The Radical ’70s Magazine That Shaped the Hong Kong Left.” The Nation. April 17, 2020. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/hong-kong-leftists-1970s/

[3] An interesting comparison, in this respect, would be the former democratic centralism of the Cold War PRC as well as the contemporary PRC’s system of consultative democracy and “whole process people’s democracy.”

[4] Dirlik, Arif. “Taiwan: The Land Colonialisms Made.” Boundary 2 45, no. 3 (August 2018): 3. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-6915545