Q: Can I ask you first why you decided to go down the road of anthropology after graduating from the Far Eastern Department?
B: To answer this question I must first make clear the different directions that research took before and after World War Two. Before the war, no matter whether you were a university student or a university teacher, you would certainly be very upper-class. University teaching and research was like a hobby to be pleasantly pursued by highly-placed "gentlemen" who were not short of money. Perhaps we can say that this kind of sinologist has disappeared.
The classes in post-war society were not so obvious. The universities were funded by the government and teachers received a salary. This meant they had to carry out research, write theses and direct their students, as well as having to deal with trivial executive work.
The post-war period also saw the rise of the Social Sciences. In 1962 I graduated from the Far Eastern Department of SOAS but had to money to do research work. There were grants available in the Social Sciences and Anthropology so I applied to do fieldwork in the New Territories on a London-Cornell joint programme. I had to make a living!
Q: Was that the first time you went to the Far East? How did it feel and how did you prepare?
B: I had already been to Hong Kong, so it was not my first time in the Far East. However, I had grown up in the city, so Sheung Shui was the first time I had lived in the countryside.
At that time Britain still had national service and I was assigned to Hong Kong for two years. In fact, if I had not done national service then I could not have attended university and studied Chinese. When I was in Hong Kong, I felt that I had a kind of empathy with Chinese people and I decided that I would definitely find a way to get into university and study Chinese.
Q: Why did you select Sheung Shui to do your research?
B: In 1963 my supervisor, Professor Maurice Freedman, spent three months doing fieldwork in the New Territories. When he came back he told me very excitedly that it was like a living nineteenth-century museum. At that time the rest of the Chinese world had changed, with land reform in Taiwan, not to mention the series of movements on the mainland. Freedman was studying Chinese kinship and I joined him with great interest.
At the end of 1963, as soon as I arrived in the New Territories, my supervisor's interpreter drove me everywhere to look for a suitable village. I finally arrived at the Liao clan village of Sheung Shui with a population of about four or five thousand. The village headman was very good and seemed very clear about what I wanted to do. He also had an incredible understanding of kinship customs.
On the first day I was reading in my room with the door open. My strategy was that if I was too active and went out to talk to people, they would be afraid of me, so it was better to wait for people to come to me. The first comer was the landlord's sister-in-law, who bravely brought a thermos of hot water without looking at me, put it on the table and left. After a few weeks she decided to open her mouth.
Then there were the children. Seeing the open door, they ran and laughed outside the room, shouting "kueilao", to which I replied "Hello", until they got used to me and came to chat.
Q: What did you gain from those eighteen months?
B: That was a very happy period in my life. 1 made a lot of friends, chatting all day with people. When I finished my research and it was time to leave, they told me that they had originally thought I was sent by the government as a trainee District Officer.
When I began to do my anthropological research, the Social Sciences were all the rage and History was not such a priority; you only had to have a rigorous training and analysis, then you could arrive at objective results. But in this kind of traditional village, if you did not have an intimate knowledge of its history, then you would simply be blind and deaf in your observations. Right up to the present I still believe that History is of paramount importance. Now the tendency of sinologists is to go back to History and the Classics.
The greatest result was, of course, to complete my PhD thesis and fieldwork. The title of my research was A Chinese Lineage Village. Sheung Shui, and it was a look at how the kinship system worked from a historical perspective. After my various observations of village life and customs over these eighteen months I felt that I had arrived at a different understanding of life. My deepest impression was of funerals--for Chinese people this is a great event, unlike the tragedy of death for westerners. Every time there was a funeral they would run to me and shout, "Hurry! Hurry and take photographs, there's a funeral!"
Q: Having gone through this experience you must have a special view of cross-cultural understanding. Not long ago I read a review of a television programme on Hong Kong which said that a pregnant English woman collapsed in a Hong Kong post office. Someone said to her: "A pregnant woman should not go out, it is too dangerous because Chinese people think it is unlucky, so they do not want to help you. . ."
B: I think that such misunderstandings are all problems of the ability to communicate, which is the same in all societies. Once I was in Bangkok with a colleague who was a scholar of Thailand and we passed Chinatown. He warned that it was too dangerous to enter because, "The Chinese are dangerous." I could only laugh. Anywhere in the world I only have to look at Chinatown and I feel safe, because I can use Cantonese to communicate. Later, however, I thought that if this had been "Thaitown" then I would probably have felt unsafe while he would have happily ventured in. People are always cautious with the unknown.
Q: Apart from study and research, you have also written for newspapers, broadcast on the radio, published nonspecialist books and advised the well-known television documentary The Heart of the Dragon. How did you avoid importing stereotypes in doing all this?
B: If our study is only to supply academic discussion then it is not that useful and cannot help most people understand. Because of this we should encourage reaching out to raise the level of knowledge of ordinary people. Some colleagues accuse me of "academic prostitution" but I do not accept the criticism. I might not be a great British scholar, I know I am not, but I want to reach out to help ordinary people understand. I think this is a good point, not a bad one. When I worked on The Heart of the Dragon and other programmes, my principle was that behind every image there must at least be some historical or cultural background.
Q: Although television has had good programmes like The Heart of the Dragon, there are also programmes like Yellow Thread Street which are full of stereotypes portraying the (Hong Kong) Chinese as violent gangsters. The people of Hong Kong are also made out to be only interested in money and material things. What is your view of Hong Kong people?
B: I have a lot of very good friends in Hong Kong and I am very sympathetic concerning their future. The prosperity of Hong Kong over the last twenty years has come from the toil of the Hong Kong people themselves, just like Taiwan. Nobody has given it to them and it has not fallen from heaven. Now they want to enjoy it and that is their right.
The importance of money to people it Hong Kong is not for its own sake but because of hunger, it is that simple. There were only 600,000 people in Hong Kong in 1945. When the huge number of mainland immigrants arrived in 1949 there was no accommodation or work. What could a million people do? Work! Hong Kong has no natural resources, without working hard there was only death. If you ask me whether or not I like this kind of society then I can say no. But I respect the people of Hong Kong.
Q: Many British people are worried about the effects of trying to absorb 250,000 people from Hong Kong into British society. What is your view?
B: The real problem is that post-war Britain has had to absorb a huge number of immigrants from the colonies and cannot digest any more. London has serious unemployment and accommodation problems, so people are worried and newcomers are a convenient scapegoat. Nevertheless, I think that the Hong Kong people will be a great help to the British economy, Australia and Canada are struggling for Hong Kong investment!
Q: Can anything be done to prepare for their arrival?
B: Unfortunately not. In this respect Britain has an organizational problem. When the Vietnamese came here in the 1970s, even though they were only one or two thousand, it was chaos. Twenty years later they are still not settled.
Of course the Hong Kong refugees are not the same. I also doubt whether many really want to come here. Britain has no money and the weather is bad. I think that they will probably come here to get their British passports and then go to live in other European countries. The problem is that the British government is still giving passports to maintain confidence in Hong Kong, and it is therefore a preparation for them not to come!
Q: Peking was very clear following the visit by Francis Maude, the Foreign Office minister, that the British passports would be about as valuable as pieces of paper. This kind of "guarantee" will make people leave Hong Kong as soon as they have their hands on a passport. So why is the British government so weak in its dealings with Peking?
B: In 1997 there will be no case for not handing the New Territories back to the Communists, then Hong Kong and Kowloon will not have air links or water, or anything. The Communists are very clear about this, so when we went to discuss the problem of Hong Kong we did not have a card to play and there was no way we could ignore Peking's demands.
The Joint Agreement looked very good--no change in Hong Kong for fifty years. The British and western governments were happy because they did not understand the Communists or Hong Kong. The Communists were also delighted and felt very generous because they did not understand what "noninterference" meant. Everyone had confidence in the agreement--apart from the people of Hong Kong. There is no need to say what happened after Tienanmen.
Q: SOAS used to be known as the "colonialist cradle" and has produced three Hong Kong governors. How can you say that the British government does not understand Hong Kong? Should not SOAS take some of the responsibility?
B: (laughing) I think we do not have this responsibility. The era of the colonial cradle has long since gone. Britain does not have many colonies left and the political influence of British scholars is not like that of their American counterparts. Our relationship with the Foreign Office is to provide language courses and to provide a little historical and social background.
Q: What advantages are there for scholars at SOAS?
B: SOAS is in the centre of London and the library has the best Chinese collection in Europe. There is also the British Museum and the Public Records Office nearby. Moreover, SOAS has some twenty experts on Chinese literature, geography, sociology, anthropology, oracle bones and so on. The most in Europe.
Q: Can you give students a good reason to study at SOAS?
B: I think the collections at SOAS and in Britain as a whole are a good enough reason. Most of the Chinese students here are research students and do not attend classes in the School. In fact, Taiwanese students do not have to come here only to study China. Do not forget that we were the "colonial cradle," so our resources for studying Asia, India, Africa, the Middle East and other places are also abundant. If Taiwan wants to expand its foreign relations over the coming years then it will certainly need personnel in these areas.
[Picture Caption]
Hugh Baker graduated from the Far Eastern Department in the 1960s and has now become the department's head and its only professor of sinology.
Mementoes of China adorn Professor Baker's study at SOAS.
The young researcher struck up a good relationship with the villagers of Sheung Shui. (photo courtesy of Hugh Baker)
"Hurry and take photographs! There is a funeral!" Photographic records were an important part of research at Sheung Shui. (photo courtesy Baker)
The new head of the department wants to "reach out" and spread a general understanding of China.
The library at SOAS has the biggest collection on modern China in Western Europe.
A heavy workload means arriving each morning before the School has even opened.
Mementoes of China adorn Professor Baker's study at SOAS.
The young researcher struck up a good relationship with the villagers of Sheung Shui. （photo courtesy of Hugh Baker）
"Hurry and take photographs! There is a funeral!" Photographic records were an important part of research at Sheung Shui. （photo courtesy Baker）
The new head of the department wants to "reach out" and spread a general understanding of China.
The library at SOAS has the biggest collection on modern China in Western Europe.
A heavy workload means arriving each morning before the School has even opened.
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