| As the gateway to the mainland for more
than 150 years Hong Kong’s geo-political position also made
the city a key China-watching centre.
None more so than in the cold war decades following the
start of communist rule in 1949 when refugees flooded across
the border seeking a safe haven in the British-ruled colony
during periods of upheaval and turmoil.
They brought with them news and personal accounts of monumentous
events taking place behind the bamboo curtain long before
they became public knowledge. And some of those events that
unfolded half a century ago are still shrouded in secrecy.
But details of these political and human dramas that affected
hundreds of millions of people, like the Great Leap Forward
(1958-62) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), were fully
documented by communist officials at every level of society.
And those details, covering everything from Politburo Standing
Committee meetings to permission to take a cow to market,
were all carefully written down and filed away in local,
county, provincial and national archives.
They have remained locked away since then, and in many
cases simply forgotten about.
But as part of a gradual relaxing of the rules controlling
access to the archives, many of these documents have now
been declassified allowing researchers to fill the information
void covering this period.
Across China, archives of all types are being opened up
to outside experts. For the first time academics and researchers
are able to read first hand accounts of what happened to
the people during the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution.
Frank Dikötter, Chair Professor of Humanities at the University
of Hong Kong and the author of a series of books on the
history of modern China, believes access to declassified
records is crucial to academics studying the mainland.
"It seems to me that the real great opportunity to
re-write the history of the People's Republic with the people
at the very heart of it is the opening of the archives,"
Professor Dikötter said.
"Archives sounds like a very stark term, a little
bit intimidating, but it's just paper. It's evidence. There
are archives where a large amount of material has been declassified
and you can literally read for days on end. Extremely interesting
reports which range from confessions of people to the secret
minutes of top leadership meetings, and private matters
written by ordinary people who wished to complain about
what was happening to them."
Professor Dikötter used his access to archives across China
as part of extensive research into his latest book, Mao’s
Great Famine, that was caused by the Great Leap Forward’s
failure and the diversion of labour from farming. The information
he gleaned allowed the historian to calculate that under
Mao’s direct orders 45 million people died in the devastating
famine.
As part of the overall research, Professor Dikötter’s colleague
Dr Xun Zhou conducted "insider interviews" with
famine survivors in their native dialects. Over a four-year
period Dr Zhou traveled to remote parts of China and recorded
more than 100 oral interviews detailing personal accounts
of the period, many for the first time.
"They wanted to tell somebody about what happened
to them but they never had the opportunity," she said.
As a result of the flow of information in the 1950s and
1960s Hong Kong became a China-watching Mecca for spies,
academics, journalists amongst many others. It was a window
for the West into an otherwise closed and little understood
authoritarian world.
Professor Dikötter believes the city is again well placed
to become a centre for research into China with the opening
up of the archives and that Hong Kong U is also well placed
to become a centre for historians, including Chinese academics,
as he explains is this video.
Professor Dikötter is the author of a series of books on
China including Mao’s Great Famine for which he won the
2011 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.
Related Links
|