The Hong Kong clock - Public time-telling and political time/space

Public Culture

Volumn 9, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 329-354

  Hung, Wu ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0039329602     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9-3-329     Document Type: Review

References (48)

1. The construction and transformation of Tiananmen Square from 1949 to 1989 is the topic of my essay, "The Tiananmen Square: A Political History of Monuments," Representations 35 (Summer 1991): 84-117.
2. The Monument of the People's Heroes, another important structure in the Square, changed its meaning in 1976. Mao's Mausoleum constructed that year took over this monument's original role to represent the country's revolutionary past. The Monument then became superfluous in the official symbolic structure and was increasingly associated with a growing dissident public. See ibid., p. 106.
3. More precisely, Hong Kong became a British colony through the Sino-Anglo treaties of 1842, 1860, and 1898. The first two treaties ceded in perpetuity the island of Hong Kong and Kowloon respectively, and the third leased the "New Territories" up to the Shenzhen River and associated islands for ninety-nine years until 1997. From Beijing's view, however, all these were "unequal treaties" without an absolute legal status. Hong Kong is therefore a Chinese territory temporarily under British administration, and it should return to the motherland when the Chinese people decide to take it back.
4. From the inscription on the Monument, which Mao wrote on September 30, 1949. See Wu Hung, "Tiananmen Square," p. 98.
5. It is significant to note that although the exhibition of traditional Chinese History has been revised after the Cultural Revolution, the exhibition of "revolutionary history" after 1840 has remained basically unchanged.
6. Two large architectural projects in the Square during this period aimed at renovating and reinforcing the structure of the Great Hall of the People and the National Museum of History, and took several years to accomplish.
7. See Wu Hung, "Tiananmen Square," pp. 103-4, 107.
8. Ibid., p. 113.
9. In fact, these official installations, which often take the shape of auspicious animals or historical monuments, recall the temporary displays made for birthday celebrations of emperors or empresses during the Qing dynasty.
10. Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, trans. Daniel Moshenberg (New York: Semiotext(E), 1991), p. 22.
11. I say "symbolically" because Macao will remain under Portuguese administration after 1997.
12. For an English translation of this text with the original Chinese text, see James Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. 3, "The Shoo King" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1871), pp. 15-27. The passage cited here is translated by Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 3 (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959), p. 188. Although traditional Confucians attributed this text to Yao himself, modern scholars believe that it was probably written around the 5th or 6th centuries B.C.
13. For an English translation of this text with the original Chinese text, see James Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. 3, "The Shoo King" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1871), pp. 15-27. The passage cited here is translated by Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 3 (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959), p. 188. Although traditional Confucians attributed this text to Yao himself, modern scholars believe that it was probably written around the 5th or 6th centuries B.C.
14. I have discussed this architectural form and its symbolism in Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 176-87.
15. For the discovery and reconstruction of this building, see Wu Hung, Monumentality, pp. 177-78.
16. The most ingenious example of such a cosmological clock, completed by Su Song in 1094, has been carefully studied by Joseph Needham and his collaborators in Heavenly Clockwork: The Great Astronomical Clocks of Medieval China, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). The basic feature of this clock is summarized by David S. Landes: "It was designed to reproduce the movements of the 'three luminaries' - sun, moon, and (selected) stars - which were crucial to Chinese calendrical calculation and astrological divination. It did this by means of an observation alarmillary sphere - that is, an assemblage of rings representing the paths of these bodies as they presented themselves to an observer on Earth - and a demonstrational celestial globe, each rotating on a polar axis and appropriately inclined to the horizon. These in turn were driven off a pair of vertical transmission shafts, one of which also bore a series of superimposed wheels six to eight feet in diameter. These wheels carried jacks, little manikins that revolved with wheel and shaft in measured pace and showed the hours, the 'quarters' (k'o, each of which equaled fourteen minutes twenty-four seconds of our time), and the night watches by means of placards. The whole mechanism, which must have weighed tons and occupied a tower about forty feet high, was powered by a water wheel designed to turn intermittently at a stable rate." Revolution in Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 17-18. Landes has also noted the function of such hydraulic clocks as cosmological models. Ibid., p. 29.
17. The most ingenious example of such a cosmological clock, completed by Su Song in 1094, has been carefully studied by Joseph Needham and his collaborators in Heavenly Clockwork: The Great Astronomical Clocks of Medieval China, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). The basic feature of this clock is summarized by David S. Landes: "It was designed to reproduce the movements of the 'three luminaries' - sun, moon, and (selected) stars - which were crucial to Chinese calendrical calculation and astrological divination. It did this by means of an observation alarmillary sphere - that is, an assemblage of rings representing the paths of these bodies as they presented themselves to an observer on Earth - and a demonstrational celestial globe, each rotating on a polar axis and appropriately inclined to the horizon. These in turn were driven off a pair of vertical transmission shafts, one of which also bore a series of superimposed wheels six to eight feet in diameter. These wheels carried jacks, little manikins that revolved with wheel and shaft in measured pace and showed the hours, the 'quarters' (k'o, each of which equaled fourteen minutes twenty-four seconds of our time), and the night watches by means of placards. The whole mechanism, which must have weighed tons and occupied a tower about forty feet high, was powered by a water wheel designed to turn intermittently at a stable rate." Revolution in Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 17-18. Landes has also noted the function of such hydraulic clocks as cosmological models. Ibid., p. 29.
18. Joseph Needham et al., Heavenly Clockwork, p. 93, n. 1.
19. Cited from Etienne Balazs, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy, trans. H. M. Wright (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 69.
20. Landes, Revolution in Time, p. 69.
21. For the relationship between this system and the security of a city, see Balazs, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy, pp. 68-70.
22. A popular saying in Beijing described three kinds of beats: "Eighteen fast beats, eighteen slow beats, and yet another eighteen beats which are neither fast nor slow." This sequence is repeated once more to make a total of 108 beats.
23. Cited in Carlo Cipolla, Clock and Culture, 1300-1700 (New York: Walker, 1967), p. 86.
24. For example, in one of the major imperial halls in the Forbidden City called Jiaotai Dian, the emperor's throne is flanked by two enormous clocks. The one to the left is a traditional hydraulic clock and the one to the right is a western-style "self-ringing clock."
25. A witness of the 1860 looting reported: "A large majority of them [i.e., soldiers in the invasion army] were 'grown children' who were 'mainly tempted in the midst of all this unbelievable accumulation of wealth' by the extraordinary variety and number of mechanical toys and clocks, so that the whole area was 'one continuous symphony' with monkeys beating cymbals, rabbits rolling drums, birds singing, toy soldiers playing cornets and bagpipes, clocks chiming, and some four thousand musical boxes simultaneously tinkling their several tunes, and every now and then all this noise was 'drowned out by the easily amused soldiers roaring with laughter.'" Cited in Landes, Revolution in Time, p. 43.
26. For this reason, the building was renamed "Realizing Humiliation Tower" (Mingchi Lou) during the Republican Period. It seems that only from this time did the tower become a historical monument commemorating a particular event.
27. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), p. 264.
28. Robert M. Adams, Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western Technology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 23.
29. For the changes in space and time conceptions in modern and postmodern era, see Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 201-326.
30. Landes, Revolution in Time, p. 350.
31. Helga Nowotny, Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience, trans. Neville Plaice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p. 132.
32. During the Cultural Revolution, any connection with Hong Kong, regardless of its nature, could cause grave danger to a Mainland resident.
33. Private communication with the author.
34. Michael Yahuda, Hong Kong: China's Challenge (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), especially, pp. 61-82.
35. Sze-yuen Chung, a long-time Hong Kong politician and a member of both Hong Kong's Legislative Council (1965-1978) and Beijing's Preliminary Working Committee (1993-present), also reviewed the most important political events surrounding the transfer of Hong Kong's sovereignty. "What Has Gone Wrong During the Transition?" in Wang Gungwu and Wong Siu-lun, eds., Hong Kong's Transition: A Decade After the Deal (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 1-18.
36. This social group is sometimes categorized as the "Hong Kong man": "Quick thinking, flexible, tough for survival, excitement-craving, sophisticated in material tastes, and self-made in a strenuously competitive world. He operated in the context of a most uncertain future, control over which was in the hands of others, and for this as well as for historical reasons lived 'life in the short term.'" Hugh D. R. Baker, "Life in the Cities: The Emergence of Hong Kong Man," China Quarterly 95 (December, 1983), 469-79. For a discussion of the main attributes of Hong Kongers in the 1980s, see Lau Siu-kai and Kuan Hsin-chi, The Ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1988).
37. This social group is sometimes categorized as the "Hong Kong man": "Quick thinking, flexible, tough for survival, excitement-craving, sophisticated in material tastes, and self-made in a strenuously competitive world. He operated in the context of a most uncertain future, control over which was in the hands of others, and for this as well as for historical reasons lived 'life in the short term.'" Hugh D. R. Baker, "Life in the Cities: The Emergence of Hong Kong Man," China Quarterly 95 (December, 1983), 469-79. For a discussion of the main attributes of Hong Kongers in the 1980s, see Lau Siu-kai and Kuan Hsin-chi, The Ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1988).
38. See Yahuda, Hong Kong: China's Challenge, pp. 50-51.
39. Lau Siu-kai, et al. eds., Indicators of Social Development: Hong Kong 1988 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1991), pp. 177-8; see Lau Siu-kai and Kuan Hsin-chi, The Ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese, pp. 178-87.
40. Lau Siu-kai, et al. eds., Indicators of Social Development: Hong Kong 1988 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1991), pp. 177-8; see Lau Siu-kai and Kuan Hsin-chi, The Ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese, pp. 178-87.
41. Yahuda, Hong Kong: China's Challenge, p. 52.
42. See N. J. Miners, The Government and Politics of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, fifth edition, 1994), chapters 13 and 14.
43. Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 3 (1982-1992) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994), pp. 219-20. For the context of Deng's speech, see Yahuda, Hong Kong: China's Challenge, pp. 114-5.
44. Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 3 (1982-1992) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994), pp. 219-20. For the context of Deng's speech, see Yahuda, Hong Kong: China's Challenge, pp. 114-5.
45. Yahuda, Hong Kong: China's Challenge, p. 17.
46. For example, the Hong Kong art critic Oscar Ho Hing-kay wrote in 1993: "Time is running out: people in Hong Kong need to find their cultural heritage and to reassure their sense of identity, for in four years' time they might have lost it." "In Search of an Identity," Art AsiaPacific 1, 1 (1993): 14.
47. As David Harvey has pointed out, the reduction of regional identity is implicitly associated with the notion of social progress, which "entails the conquest of space, the tearing down of all spatial barriers, and the ultimate 'annihilation of space through time.'" The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 205.
48. Yahuda, Hong Kong: China's Challenge, p. 75. In particular, although Hong Kong's democrats have been shown to enjoy majority support in every election in the territory, they have largely been rejected by Beijing and been viewed as a political element dangerous to China's existing system.