This thesis investigates the mainland Chinese visitors’ observations, perceptions, and interpretations about Hong Kong, as a modern city developed under the British colonial rule, from a nationalistic perspective in the 1920-30s. Since the 1990s, scholars of Hong Kong cultural studies began to study Chinese nationalistic imagination about the city of Hong Kong. Most of the discussions raised by these scholars were about how those visiting mainland Chinese intellectuals had criticized Hong Kong’s various features which were, in their understanding, contradicting with Chinese national interests and ethnic identity (e.g. that the Hong Kong Chinese never felt themselves belonged to China). They did not pay much attention to how those mainland Chinese intellectuals observed and engag...[ Read more ]

This thesis investigates the mainland Chinese visitors’ observations, perceptions, and interpretations about Hong Kong, as a modern city developed under the British colonial rule, from a nationalistic perspective in the 1920-30s. Since the 1990s, scholars of Hong Kong cultural studies began to study Chinese nationalistic imagination about the city of Hong Kong. Most of the discussions raised by these scholars were about how those visiting mainland Chinese intellectuals had criticized Hong Kong’s various features which were, in their understanding, contradicting with Chinese national interests and ethnic identity (e.g. that the Hong Kong Chinese never felt themselves belonged to China). They did not pay much attention to how those mainland Chinese intellectuals observed and engaged with the modern features of colonial Hong Kong. Moreover, those historical materials to which they referred are mostly from one book published in the early-1980s that complied of some forty pieces of Chinese intellectuals’ writings written between the 1920s and 1941, and the views of these mainlanders about Hong Kong were largely negative. By utilizing a wider source of evidence, many of them have not been cited before, this thesis elaborates diversified experiences of mainland visitors in Hong Kong. It argues that Hong Kong’s modern features not only brought the mainland visitors sensational stimulation, but also took Hong Kong as their learning target in terms of civic culture, business operation, etc.; the viewpoints and attitudes of mainland visitors’ towards Hong Kong were more complicated than what many scholars have suggested in the past. Furthermore, travelogues sometimes contained incorrect information about Hong Kong and visitors also wrote with cultural or political bias. By referring to historical materials of Hong Kong, this thesis reviews these mainland visitors’ writings to see how much of those writings about Hong Kong are factually correct.