Re: Empire Earth Ii Heaven
Baltasar Tae
266 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 1998 Barbara-Sue White, editor. Hong Kong: Somewhere between Heaven and Earth. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1996. xviii, 278 pp. Paperback HK $135.00, isbn 0-19-587696-2. Since the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984 that restored China's sovereignty over Hong Kong on July 1, 1997, there has been a boom in publications , conferences, and exhibitions devoted to this vibrant Asian city, widely called the "Pearl of the Orient." But in the flood of books and articles that seek to explain this historic handover and its history, it is rare to see new information presented or novel ideas advanced. Barbara-Sue White's Hong Kong: Somewhere between Heaven and Earth, a recent addition to the ever growing list of studies, offers a new approach and a variety of new materials; however, it also has a number of shortcomings. White's book is an anthology of sixty extracts about Hong Kong, a collection ofletters, diaries, poems, speeches, reports, and short stories penned largely by foreign visitors who arrived in the colony at different times and recorded their impressions and feelings about this exciting city. The volume is divided into an introduction and ten sections, each of which represents a different period of Hong Kong's history. It begins with the Tang dynasty in the eighth century, when this tiny fishing village was still an "outpost ofthe celestial empire," and ends with the 1990s, when the British would soon lower the Union Jack in the prized colony, one of the last remnants of their vast empire. The author shows a keen eye for selecting distinctive pieces; she is also to be applauded for her success in unearthing rare and previously unpublished writings garnered from extensive research in archives and libraries in Hong Kong, Britain, and the United States. The anthology is fun to read on four counts. First, it is full of refreshing, personal voices; their chatty tone makes them seem as if their authors are engaging in a dialogue with us. Second, it chronicles the constant changes of a city bursting with high energy and boundless hope. Third, the extracts feature a host of colorful characters: from Queen Victoria to Hong Kong governors, from renowned authors to an American ship's doctor whose work took him accidentally to the colony, and from a British army chaplain who was also an irrepressible storyteller to POWs interned by the Japanese during World War II. Finally, the collection presents a multitude of arresting stories, including festivities at the Man-mo Temple on Hollywood Road, the police pursuit of gangsters and criminals, and 1998 by University the hellish worlds of opium-smoking and child slavery. Some of the selections are ofHawai'i Pressespecially delightful to read, such as an enchanting poem by Sir Cecil Clementi, an intellectual governor of Hong Kong in the 1920s, who spoke fluent Chinese and whose elegant translation of Zhao Ziyong's Yue ou {Cantonese Love Songs) re- Reviews 267 mains a standard piece ofscholarship today. The information assembled here no doubt suggests that the best way to understand Hong Kong and its checkered history is through a close scrutiny ofprimary sources. Ironically, the major strength is also the primary weakness ofthe book. White's diverse range ofsources, or what she terms "a kaleidoscope of Hong Kong" (p. xv), is so eclectic that these sources render no coherent picture. The selected pieces often appear more like an assemblage of anecdotes and fleeting observations than as presenting a consistent theme. Altiiough interesting connections are occasionally suggested by the author (for example, "the vivacity and rapid pace of the colony," on p. xii), they are never sufficiently demonstrated or systematically delineated. The selections also appear uneven. They are long on Hong Kong's early history but short on its recent developments, especially in the crucial period after the Communist takeover in China in 1949 (only two of the total ten parts are devoted to diis phase), when Hong Kong's citizens began to develop a sense ofbelonging to the place, and the city gradually emerged as one ofworld's leading financial centers. Although White is wise in...
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Although the bi-annual procession consisting of thousands of eunuchs and ministers no longer takes place, The Temple of Heaven and Tiantan park are still a delightful place to visit.
The Temple was completed in 1420 and was originally a platform for the Son of Heaven (the emperor) to perform sacrifices and solemn rites. Among the gods worshiped were the god of earth, the god of water, the god of agriculture (who has his own hall in the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests), the god of the military, the god of religion and the god of civilians. Offering sacrifices was a serious task, as was atoning the sins of the people. The entire empire relied on the emperor for good fortune and abundant harvests so he had quite a responsibility! The Temple was opened to the public in 1912 and commoners who had previously been banned from even watching the bizarre procession pass through the city to Tiantan, were now permitted to visit the Temple themselves.
Claims regarding political nuances in Paul's writings are not difficult to substantiate, but they are somewhat ambivalent, given the context. Politics and religion were simply not such categorically divided notions as modern people generally hold them to be - another topic receiving attention below. Furthermore, citizenship often was a sought after commodity, not taken for granted as much as legitimate childhood. Still, sonship in particular, was not simply the outcome of birth. So too, citizenship was not simply about birth or residence in a certain place. Intimations in the Pauline letters regarding responsible citizenship, on the one hand, are not focussed on keeping the polity honest, but indicate rather a sceptical and resistant attitude towards the authorities of the day. On the other hand, New Testament authors can be shown to have availed themselves of imperialist discourse, taking it over for their own purposes. This article investigates faithful discipleship - as shorthand for life in Christ2 - and responsible citizenship in the Pauline letters, which evidently did not exist independently of one another. These notions were tied up in socio-ideological discourse of the time, but through translations and rather one-sided theological readings made to disappear from view. My argument is that, rather than faithful discipleship and responsible citizenship, the Pauline letters show a rhetoric of faithful citizenship!
The value of Roman citizenship largely derived from the benefits attached to it, compared to non-citizens.3 Developments in the Hellenistic period already saw citizenship gain a more technical political significance which it did not have earlier. With the Greeks the city became a political entity and citizenship started to involve carefully protected privileges.4 This trend continued in Roman times.5 Roman citizenship built on archaic and classical Mediterranean traditions, but was, nevertheless, unusual in comparison to the Persians and others who identified people as subjects rather than as citizens (Woolf 2012:27). Woolf (2012) further notes that:
The crucial point is that Romans did not use citizenship as a way of creating a hard boundary between themselves and aliens. Instead they used the language of citizenship to express a set of statuses and relationships through which individuals might be involved in the community in different ways, and also to various degrees. (p. 220)
Citizenship often proved to be the link between people and gods in antiquity. For ancient people, religion was thought of in terms different from modern categories. The importance of religion was connected directly to ethnic ties and the antiquity of religion; meeting the obligations of your people's gods; participating or at least showing respect to public cult activities; and, last but not least, 'the importance for public security of maintaining the pax deorum, the concordat between heaven and earth that guaranteed the well-being of city and empire' (Fredriksen 2006:601).9 Such connections rested on the family type relationships that people, as part of larger groups, saw themselves having with gods. Family relationships with gods depended on descent. Thus, kings of Israel such as Alexander the Great and various emperors were deemed the 'son' of some god.10 Hellenistic and Roman representatives constructed intricate relational webs between cities through appeals to kinship established through deities.11 Fredriksen (2006:591) laconically remarks, 'Divine connections were politically useful.'
The close relationship between people and their gods had a number of implications. Firstly, gods and their human followers regularly came in contact with each other. By simple equation, the greater the political unit, the greater the diversity and plurality of people and their gods. Diversity of gods and peoples meant a corresponding diversity of cultic practices.13 Secondly, people assumed the existence of many different gods given the existence of many different people and therefore the existence of outsiders' gods was not problematic. Paul, too, accepted the existence and influence of other gods, but insisted that, in order to be included in the coming redemption, they should worship only Israel's God and not others (2 Cor 4:4; Gl 4:8-9; 1 Cor 15:24). Thirdly, the register for cult respectability within the 1st-century Mediterranean world was precisely ethnicity and antiquity (Fredriksen 2006:592).
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