Crossing Boundaries and Negotiating Identities: The Politics of Secondary Education for Chinese Girls in Interwar Hong Kong

This chapter examines the politics of secondary education for Chinese girls in interwar Hong Kong through a brief review of three girls’ schools distinguished by language, class, cultural and political ideals. Adopting a transnational approach, it discusses the unique position of interwar Hong Kong as a colonial-diaspora space, and explores in what ways this social space facilitated the flow of people, funds, networks, and ideals underpinning the development of Chinese girls’ education beyond the confines of borders and regimes. It further explores the interrelated notions of nation-building, social mobility, cultural capital, and gender ideals underlying the expansion of the schools studied. The chapter also applies the analytical framework of intersectionality in analysing the negotiation of identities—gender, class, ethnic, cultural, and national—of the male sponsors, women educators, and students in a colonial context where the meanings of ‘Chineseness’ were being contested and redefined. Furthermore, the chapter demonstrates that the propagation of internationalism through the transnational youth networks the students engaged in, and the growing prominence of cosmopolitanism as a lived experience in urban Hong Kong, shaped the women’s and girls’ cultivation of a gendered, ‘modern’ self in the interwar period.