People involved in the schools for workers’ children founded in the late 1940s
The surge in Hong Kong’s population after WWII ended produced a serious shortage of space in schools, and poorer children were the most affected. Many better-off children were in private schools, and also often in less crowded neighborhoods. Union leaders reached out to other influential figures in Hong Kong society for help in establishing schools for workers’ children. Among those who responded positively were Ronald Owen Hall, Sir Chau Tsun-nin, Lo Man-kam, and George She, also known as George Samuel Zimmern.
- Hall was the Anglican Bishop of Hong Kong, and a noted advocate of social reform. Early in his career, he had met Chinese Christians who were involved in the YMCA social reform movement, and who also believed strongly that Chinese Christian institutions should be run by Chinese and supportive of China’s struggles against imperialism; Hall sympathized with their views, and with the Chinese Revolution in both its Nationalist and Communist phases; he was appointed as bishop of Hong Kong in 1932. When the Japanese occupied Hong Kong in 1941, Hall was evacuated, and served as bishop of Kunming, in Nationalist-ruled Yunnan province. While there, he dealt with a shortage of qualified clergy by appointing Li Tim-oi to a remote parish: Li thus became the first female ordained Anglican priest anywhere in the world.
- Chau Tsun-nin was the son of wealthy Hong Kong merchant, and graduated from Oxford with degrees in both law and literature. He began work in Hong Kong as an attorney, but soon moved into banking and insurance, and then later into other fields as well, serving as a director of the Hong Kong Telephone Company, Hong Kong Power and Light, a Hong Kong shipyard, a Guangdong bank, a department store and other firms. He was for many years an unofficial member of both the Legislative and Executive Councils, serving longer in that capacity than anyone else, and also took on major administrative roles in the post-war government. He was also associated with a number of Hong Kong hospitals and other charitable organizations, and was honored as a Commander of the British Empire.
- Lo Man-kam was the son of a comprador for Jardine, Matheson, and studied law in London before returning to Hong Kong. In 1920, during a wave of strikes in Hong Kong, he served as legal advisor to the Chinese Mechanics Institute, which had helped to organize the strikes, and was involved in negotiating a settlement with employers. However, during the Hong Kong strikes that grew out of the May 30 Movement in 1925, which took an explicitly anti-colonial stand, Lo joined the Hong Kong Volunteer Defense Corps, which helped the British keep order. Lo later served on both the Legislative and Executive Councils, and was involved in efforts to end racial segregation in Hong Kong and to expand social services. He took a more ambivalent position on efforts in the late 1940s to expand self-government: efforts which were colored by both the world-wide movement towards self-government in the aftermath of World War II and by fear of the advance of the CCP on the mainland. (The specific proposals that emerged from those efforts were ultimately shelved by the British cabinet in London.) In addition to his involvement in educational reform, he was chairman of the board of Tung Wah Hospital, and of the Hong Kong Society for the Protection of Children, and a member of the University Council at HKU, among other roles, and was honored as a Commander of the British Empire. His brother, Lo Man-wai, was a director of Hong Kong Tramways; the two brothers had been law partners when they first returned to Hong Kong in 1916.
- George She studied law at Oxford and worked as a barrister, school headmaster, Anglican priest (later in life), and social activist; he was a canon of the Anglican church and a close ally and friend of Ronald Hall. He was heavily involved in trying to provide housing and education for the poor, helping to found both the Hong Kong Housing Society and the Street Sleepers Shelter Society, as well as a number of the schools for workers’ children.
- Li Xiaxiang, who was head of the school for tramway workers’ children, had a dramatically different kind of life story. She was born in 1920 to a large, poor family in Hong Kong; her father soon went to seek work in Southeast Asia, and was never heard from again. When she was about 4 years old, her desperate mother sold her as a bondservant to a wealthy merchant. She ran away at age 9 and began working in a factory; determined to get an education, she switched to working as a seamstress at night while attending school during the day. In 1937, when she was in middle school (and at the top of her class), she joined a student society dedicated to providing relief for victims of Japanese aggression on the mainland; through that work, she encountered CCP activists, and joined the Party in 1938. Soon thereafter she was sent to do underground work on the mainland; there she met and married the CCP military leader Huang Jingwen, who commanded troops in both Vietnam and southwestern China during the war. After the Japanese surrender, the Party sent Li (and her daughter, born in 1943) back to Hong Kong, where she soon became director of the school for tramway workers’ children, while carrying on other work for the CCP at night. She was evacuated back to the mainland in 1952 and was reunited with her husband in Harbin, after he returned from fighting in the Korean War. She later became head of a school for the children of soldiers in Heilongjiang, and eventually served on the provincial Party committee, as well as in various other party roles. She died in 2012.
