Daniela Schneider
PhD project: “Passed by the Censor. Press Censorship in the British Empire With a Special Focus on Hong Kong, 1938–1941”
The dissertation researches the administrative setup of colonial press censorship between the British Hong Kong government and the British administration in London between 1938 and 1941. While previous research on press censorship in the British Empire has focused on individual case studies (mainly on British India), this dissertation works towards understanding the larger Empire framework and the complex negotiations between London and the Colonial Office-administered colonies. Researching Hong Kong as one of the most intensely censored British colonies adds to a better understanding of the local practical embedding of censorship. The colonies’ Chinese newspapers were visibly censored and gave new insights into the censored newspaper content. Methodologically, the work combines traditional historical source analysis with close-reading and distant-reading approaches to analyse the quantity and content of Hong Kong Da gong bao’s (大公報) censored articles. Press censorship administration from London set the framework for the colonies’ local censorship embedding even though Empire press censorship was never central to the planners in London, causing problems already at the planning stage. The responsibility for implementing Empire press censorship was not clearly allocated and involved different institutions, leading to a lack of consistency. Similarly, all colonies implemented censorship individually, stressing the need to research them individually as findings for one colony do not apply to another. On various levels, censorship in Hong Kong differed from that in the United Kingdom and was adapted according to local needs. Analysing core dates in Hong Kong’s Da gong bao reveals a complex web of up to four intersecting layers of censorship, which depended on article origin, mode of transportation, time of sending and publication language. The visibly censored content from Hong Kong focused on anti-Japanese and anti-British material and was very specific. This illustrates how, despite differing views on censorship in London and Hong Kong, the censorship practices in Hong Kong reflected Britain’s political strategy of appeasing Japan, as exemplified by a censored newspaper.
Current position:
Researcher at Galaxy Freiburg
