Interrogating Hong Kong’s Cold War settlement: a Christian perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores Ronald Owen Hall, the Anglican bishop of Hong Kong, as an unlikely critic of the city’s Cold War settlement in the 1950s. By examining his sermons and writings and putting them into dialogue with pronouncements of the Hong Kong government and the colonial governor Alexander Grantham, it reconstructs a moral counterpoint to a sociopolitical project that pitched the colony as an economic city and as the “Berlin of the East”—an enclave of capitalist “freedom” on the doorstep of Communist China. Grantham and his administration saw the city’s Chinese population as a source of capital, labor, or security threat. Local residents, including those who recently crossed the border from mainland China, were not so much citizens as either contributors to industrial development or potential fuel for Communist menace. Hall, on the other hand, saw communism as less a threat to the colony than a sign of the society’s inability to provide for the poor and the weak. He extolled his flock to embrace Chinese nationhood instead of languishing in an atomized, profit-pursuing society. Set against the social context the colonial state created for Hong Kong, Hall offered an alternative vision that transcended Cold War binaries, capitalist values, and the nation-state logic based on his locally-embedded Christian faith.