Knowledge circles in colonial Hong Kong, 1945-1997

Date(s)： 2026/06/11

Time： 14:00~16:00

Venue： Archives 2nd Conference Hall

Host： Prof. Chen Chien-shou（Associate research fellow, IMH, AS）

Speaker：Prof. Sebastian Veg（Professor, EHESS）

Organizer： IMHWestern Learning and China Research Group, EFEO

Abstract,
How and by whom was knowledge produced in post-war colonial Hong Kong? This project investigates how academics, journalists, writers and students produced and circulated knowledge about social, economic, political and historical issues during the colonial era, and how they engaged broader communities of readers. The focus is on the role of institutions within Hong Kong society that served as vectors for the knowledge produced by intellectuals, in particular newspapers, journals, universities, civil society organizations, as well as the reading publics that intellectuals reached through their writings. A variety of ideological and epistemic systems played a role in these institutions, in particular Cold War liberalism, Chinese cultural nationalism, and colonial ideology.
The timeframe is organized around the changing knowledge regimes in three periods. In the post-war years (1945-66) there were two main strands of intellectual activity. Within the colonial establishment, liberal elites formed groups advocating for a higher degree of self-governance, while refugee scholars and journalists from China leveraged US support to advance their own liberal or conservative agendas. In the second period (1966-1979), the moral authority of the post-war humanistic elites was challenged by social movements dominated by various forms of anti-colonial ideas. In the third segment (1979-1997), after governor MacLehose’s visit to Beijing, professionals and academics debated the respective merits of the colonial status quo and “democratic reunification” (democratizing both Hong Kong and China). With the gradual rise of social sciences within the academic establishment, public opinion was now construed by different sides as the key to determining Hong Kong’s political status.
 
Bio
Sebastian Veg is a professor of intellectual history of 20th century China at EHESS (School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), Paris. He is also currently editor of the International Journal of Asian Studies at the University of Tokyo. He was previously director of the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC) in Hong Kong from 2011 to 2015.  He has written on Chinese intellectuals from May Fourth to the present, the memory of the Mao era, and on social and intellectual movements in Hong Kong. His most recent monograph is Minjian: The Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals (Columbia UP, 2019).