This week’s reading was something that was faintly familiar for me. I did read exploration set 1 this week again, which included chapters 25 and 26 from the textbook. As I read through the chapters I found myself being reminded of old stories that my parents would tell me when I was a kid. These stories weren’t the regular history lectures that my Dad would drown me with but were instead from their past and things that they had experienced. As I continued to call on my memory of these stories, I saw more and more connects between these and what I was reading in the textbook. So, with this week’s post I thought I would give those reading my post an insight into my parent’s experience with some of the events that we read about.
My parents moved from Australia to Hong Kong (before I was born) in 1992 as young lawyers. Moving to Hong Kong was an experience unlike any other they would have in Australia and would be something that would be temporary. Reading the textbook this week and thinking back to this time in my parent’s lives, I wonder if they ever felt their field was affected by the ban that mainland China had on the legal field prior to the 1980s. As although Hong Kong was still under the control of Britain, I can imagine that they interacted with companies and clients in mainland China as well.
My parents stayed in Hong Kong and thoroughly enjoyed living there until 1997 when they visas were about to run out and they decided to move with their jobs to New York. In 1997 however, as we read this week, Britain was transferring ownership of Hong Kong back to China. Reading the details of the treaty of Nanjing in which ownership was initially transferred and the China’s refusal to renew the deal with Britain was quite different to my parent’s experience. As although my parents were aware of the ‘takeover’ they described such a time in Hong Kong as a celebration. My Dad even went as far as to say that “it was the biggest bloody party I have ever been to.” Reading the textbook, I would not have guessed that there was such huge levels of celebration in China as it seemingly was the beginning of the end for Hong Kong’s democratic and capitalist systems.
Reading this week’s chapters and living vicariously through my parents experiences/stories made this week a lot of fun for me and made me think about how COVID (although far from a celebration) is something that someday my kids will probably be learning about and I will get to share my experiences with them.
Sources:
- Spence, Jonathan D. The Search for Modern China. Third ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.
- Chapters 25 (Levels of Power) and 26 (Testing the Limits)
