The Maternalist Moment in British Colonial Policy: The Controversy Over 'Child Slavery' IN HONG KONG 1917-1941

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THE MATERNALIST MOMENT IN
BRITISH COLONIAL POLICY: THE
CONTROVERSY OVER 'CHILD SLAVERY'
IN HONG KONG 1917-1941*
According to Clara Haslewood, who told her story on every
possible occasion, she herself had encountered child slavery in
Hong Kong and could speak with authority. Mrs Haslewood had
arrived in the colony in August 1919 to join her husband Hugh,
a Lieutenant-Commander in the Royal Navy, now appointed
superintendent of the Naval Chart Depot there. One evening in
October, the Haslewoods heard a sermon at the Anglican cathed-
ral exposing the existence of 'child slaves' in Hong Kong — of
bonded female domestic servants known as mui tsai.1 Hugh and
Clara Haslewood were shocked; the thought of those little girl
slaves, Clara wrote, 'gave them no rest'. And in this restless state,
they had an experience that would galvanize them into almost
twenty years of agitation. They were living, Mrs Haslewood
recounted, in rooms over the house of a prominent Chinese
family. One evening, they heard one of the little girls in the
household screaming 'in absolute terror'. They duly went to the
British police station to report the incident; after the sergeant
there stated that the child was 'probably a slave girl', they con-
tacted the Hong Kong government's officer in charge of relations
with the Chinese community, the secretary for Chinese affairs.
But Mrs Haslewood did more. Convinced of the government's
culpable inaction, she published a blistering attack on the mui tsai
system and the colonial authorities in the colony's English-
language newspapers. She and her husband sailed for England
* Research for this essay was supported by a summer stipend from the National
Endowment for the Humanities and by the Milton Fund of Harvard University. I
have profited from comments at colloquia at Brandeis University, Princeton
University, the University of Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, and
the Bunting Institute of Radchffe College I am also particularly grateful to Ruble
Watson for her knowledgeable advice on sources regardmg Hong Kong and China,
and to Thomas Ertman and Bernard Wasserstein for their comments
1
1 have retained throughout this essay the renderings of Chmese words into English
as they appeared in the original documents
© The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2001

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162 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 171
in December, determined to rouse the conscience of the nation

to the evil perpetuated under its flag.2
The governor of Hong Kong, Sir Edward Stubbs, and his
secretary for Chinese affairs, E. R. Hallifax, left with the task of
furnishing some answers to a Colonial Office soon deluged with
parliamentary questions and letters of protest from the humanit-
arian lobbies contacted by the Haslewoods, told a rather different
story. Certainly the mui tsai system was widespread, the governor
wrote to Viscount Milner, colonial secretary in the Lloyd George
coalition government, but there was no evidence that such chil-
dren were mistreated: 'it is a matter of common knowledge that
the Chinese as a race are remarkably fond of and kind to chil-
dren'.3 Far from being a form of slavery, the transfer of girls was
essentially philanthropic, an appropriate solution to the problem
that many families were too poor to provide for their children.
He had indeed investigated Mrs Haslewood's report of an ill-
treated child, Stubbs wrote, and had found it to be groundless.
The child in question, adopted by a respectable family on the
recommendation of an archdeacon, had simply been forbidden to
go out one evening with her parents, 'and had expressed her
displeasure at the decision in the manner customary among chil-
dren of tender years both in the East and West by screaming for
two hours'. Mrs Haslewood was, Stubbs concluded, 'well-known
to be a person of unbalanced mind' and had deeply offended the
Chinese community by her intemperate charges. Indeed, he had
been so concerned that the Chinese would assume her views
carried official sanction that he had tried, without success, to get
Haslewood to curb his wife.4
Here we have, it seems, an almost stereotypical confrontation,
featuring two stock characters of imperial melodrama — the
warm-hearted but ignorant white woman reformer and the colo-
nial administrator intent on a quiet life. Even the subject of their
quarrel seems familiar, for no charge so aroused humanitarians,
or so set the teeth of imperial administrators on edge, as the claim
2
For Clara Haslewood's story, see Lt-Comdr and Mrs H. L. Haslewood, Child
Slavery in Hong Kong The Mm Tsai System (London, 1930), 9-24. See also her
speech to the conference of the British Commonwealth League on 5 June 1929, in
British Commonwealth League, 'Women and the Future' Report of Conference Held on
June 5th and 6th, 1929 (London, 1929), 30-3.
3
Sir Edward Stubbs to Viscount Milner, 10 July 1920. Public Record Office,
London, Colonial Office Papers (hereafter PRO, CO), 129/461, file 43493.
4
Ibid
'CHILD SLAVERY' IN HONG KONG 1917-1941 163
that the British government was — like its lesser continental

rivals — tolerating, or even profiting from, slavery.5 Yet for all
its predictable beginnings, the 'mm tsai controversy', as it came
to be known, mushroomed and mutated in unexpected ways.
What began as a conflict between an impassioned do-gooder and
an irritated governor had become, almost twenty years later, an
international cause celebre involving not only the Colonial Office
and British authorities in Hong Kong, the Straits Settlements and
Malaya, but also the League of Nations, the Anti-Slavery Society,
a range of feminist groups and a substantial slice of the House of
Commons. Their agitation, moreover, forced politicians to act.
Not one but three colonial secretaries — Winston Churchill in
1922, Sidney Webb in 1929, and William Ormsby-Gore in 1937 —
overruled the Hong Kong government and some of their own
permanent officials to force through measures that these advisers
warned would lead to disaffection if not outright rebellion. By
the late 1930s, British authorities in Hong Kong, the Straits
Settlements and Malaya had introduced systems of registration
and inspection designed to better — and ultimately to eradicate —
the status of mm tsai.
The importance of the controversy over mm tsai servitude has
been recognized by historians of Hong Kong, who have explored
its impact from the standpoint of local administration,6 the devel-
opment of social welfare institutions,7 and, more recently, the
changing status of women.8 Anthropologists studying family
5
There are many reasons why the metaphor of slavery continued to hold such
tremendous power for empire-builders and humanitarians alike, not least among them
the ways in which it legitimated benevolent intervention and normalized the ideals
of liberal political economy For some useful reflections on the construction of slavery
and freedom within colonial discourse, see esp Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories
Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge, 1990)
6
The fullest account of the mm tsai controversy (to which I am indebted), based
on Colonial Office records, is found in Norman Miners, Hong Kong under Imperial
Rule, 1912-1941 (Hong Kong, 1987), 153-91; see also Frank Welsh, A Borrowed
Place The History of Hong Kong (New York, 1993), 393-8
7
Susanna Hoe places the mm tsai controversy (to 1930) within the context of
European women's activities in Hong Kong in her The Private Life of Old Hong Kong
(Hong Kong, 1991), 232-46, 262-5 Hong Zhou places it within the context of a
study of the development of social work in Hong Kong in 'The Origins of Government
Social Protection Policy in Hong Kong, 1842-1941' (Brandeis Uruv. Ph.D. thesis,
1991). Both, however, rely very largely on the Colonial Office documents more
extensively exploited by Miners.
8
Maria Jaschok, uniquely, combined such archival research with oral history sources
to provide a fuller picture of the lives of transferred women in her Concubines and
Bondservants A Social History (London, 1988). More recently, Jaschok and Suzanne
Miers have brought out an extraordinarily valuable collection, which includes both
(cant on p 164)
structures and relations of servitude in pre-revolutionary China

have also sought to specify the particular character of the mui tsai
system.9 British historians, however, seem scarcely aware of this
long conflict — perhaps because Hong Kong's peculiar situation
within the empire, as leased trading post rather than proto-nation,
has made its history seem sut generis, without much relevance for
the empire more broadly. Yet precisely because Hong Kong was
something of a backwater in this period, with its political conflicts
relatively easily contained, debates over its governance could be
extraordinarily open. With imperial stability never really in ques-
tion, politicians and humanitarians used the mui tsai issue to argue
not only about the definition of 'slavery', but also about the wider
character and the obligations of British rule.
This essay will thus examine this controversy less for its impact
on the Chinese children it so obsessively scrutinized (although
this will also be discussed) than for what it can tell us about the
changing ideals and practices of British colonial governance in a
period marked by the slow elaboration of the doctrine of trustee-
ship. For the mui tsai controversy, I would argue, reveals not
only the extent to which reformers came to shape official views,
but also the central place of activist women in this process.
Especially after 1929, when Indian constitutional questions began
to dominate political attention and the numbers of women in the
House of Commons rose slightly, women's organizations began
to claim colonial policy as their own, insisting on their responsibil-
ity, as equal citizens, for the management and 'uplift' of women
and children in Britain's colonial empire. As the National Union
of Societies for Equal Citizenship (the successor to the main
suffrage federation) argued in a memorandum submitted to the
Colonial Office in July 1930: 'Women in Britain, having attained
their full citizenship, feel a certain responsibility for less fortunate
(n 8 com )
academic studies of the social relations of servitude in various Chinese communities
and personal accounts by mm tsai and by the early social workers hired to protect
them: see Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers (eds.), Women and Chinese Patriarchy
Submission, Servitude and Escape (London, 1994)
9
James L. Watson, 'Transactions in People: The Chinese Market in Slaves, Servants,
and Heirs', in James L Watson (ed.), Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Oxford,
1980); Ruble S Watson, 'Wives, Concubines, and Maids Servitude and Kinship in
the Hong Kong Region, 1900-1940', in Rubie S Watson and Patricia Buckley Ebrey
(eds.)j Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society (Berkeley, 1991)
women everywhere, especially in those lands where the British

race is predominant and its good name therefore concerned'.10
This women's activism over empire drew on many traditions
and ideals, but prominent among them was a strand we can label
as 'maternalism', a framework for action whereby educated and
usually well-to-do women, drawing equally on their faith in
women's superior moral and motherly capacities and on a long
experience of single-sex philanthropic and political work, sought
to represent and protect those women and children who were
presumed to be less fortunate or more vulnerable. 'Maternalist'
initiatives, as many scholars have now shown, provided an
important foundation for the expansion of social services for
women and children in Western welfare states; only recently,
however, have we begun to recognize the many ways in which
European women drew on similar ideals in the colonial sphere.11
Of course, even those who use this term — as I do — worry
about its capacious and often imprecise character, and certainly
not all women's imperial involvement should be seen in this
light.12 Even in the mui tsai campaign, the rhetoric of imperial
motherhood retailed by Mrs Haslewood and others constantly
verged on a more radical and politically destabilizing condemna-
tion of male sexual power across racial and national lines.
Yet the 'maternalist' focus did, in this case, prevail — and it
did so, I would argue, because it proved to be the form of female
activism most acceptable, even useful, to colonial administrators
seeking to demonstrate the benefits of British rule. For, to the
discomfort of such officials, women were not the only new group
to train their eyes on the empire in these years. Both the Labour
Party within Britain and the League of Nations from Geneva also
10
'Women of the Coloured Races', The Woman's Leader and the Common Cause,
xxu (18 July 1930), 183.
" For a survey of 'maternalist' initiatives in social policy, see esp Seth Koven and
Sonya Michel (eds.), Mothers of a New World Maternalist Politics and the Origins of
Welfare States (New York, 1993). Barbara Ramusack and Antoinette Burton have
traced 'maternahst' impulses in British women's engagement with India: see Barbara
Ramusack, 'Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies: British
Women Activists m India, 1865-1945', Women's Studies Internal Forum, xm (1990);
Antoinette Burton, 'The White Woman's Burden British Feminists and The Indian
Woman, 1865-1915', ibid.; Antoinette Burton, 'Fearful Bodies into Disciplined
Subjects: Pleasure, Romance, and the Family Drama of Colonial Reform in Mary
Carpenter's Six Months in India', Signs: Jl of Women in Culture and Society, xx (1995).
12
For a useful discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the 'maternalism'
paradigm across national lmes, see Lynn Y Werner (ed.), 'International Trends:
Maternalism as a Paradigm', Jl Women's Hist., v, no. 2 (1993).
sought to push colonial policy onto a more overtly humanitarian

track. As they did so, the Colonial Office slowly changed its tune,
turning to social policy to justify Britain's increasingly contested
imperial hegemony. As the mui tsai controversy shows, by the
late 1930s maternalism, in the modified form of expanded state
services for (and scrutiny of) women and children, had become
one element in the apparatus of trusteeship.
I
THE COLONIAL OFFICE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF
'CHINESE CUSTOM'
The Haslewoods could not have known in 1919 that they would
devote twenty years of their lives to the mui tsai question, but if
they had, it would not have deterred them, for both were highly
moralistic in outlook, disinclined to self-scrutiny, and tenacious
to a fault. Clara Haslewood had volunteered as a nurse in France
during the war and had also worked with the National Vigilance
Association to promote their 'sexual purity' ideals; childless and
now in her mid-forties, she threw herself eagerly into this new
cause. Hugh Haslewood, eleven years younger than Clara, had
resigned his Hong Kong post rather than restrain her; his career
now in shreds, he had little to lose.13 Once back in England, and
still smarting from their treatment by the governor, the two
quickly became the Colonial Office's most frequent and detested
correspondents. They had established, Hugh Haslewood wrote,
that girls were bought and sold in Hong Kong, both as prostitutes
and slaves; that they were treated cruelly; that there were 'ques-
tionable proceedings' in the refuge run by the Chinese Society
for the Protection of Women and Girls, the Po Leung Kuk; and
that the whole wretched mess was tolerated by the British govern-
ment.14 When Hugh Haslewood learned that the governor had
questioned his wife's sanity, his letters became more tendentious.
Did the Colonial Office agree that children were bought and sold
13
For some biographical information about the Haslewoods, see Hoe, Private
Life, 236-8.
14
H. L Haslewood to secretary of state for the colonies, 20 Feb 1920, 28 Mar
1920 PRO, CO 129/466, file 9362.
in Hong Kong or not, he asked? And were they implying that he

had behaved dishonourably?15
Had the Colonial Office faced questions from the Haslewoods
alone, they could perhaps have weathered them, but they were
soon confronted by newspaper articles in the Times, the
Manchester Guardian, the Spectator and elsewhere, and by a bar-
rage of parliamentary questions from across party lines.16 To
their further embarrassment, a run through the files revealed that
the mui tsai question had been raised at least twice before — once
under Sir John Pope-Hennessy's reforming governorship in the
early 1880s, when the Colonial Office had facilitated the formation
of the Po Leung Kuk,17 and again as recently as 1917, when one
Colonel John Ward, temporarily stationed in Hong Kong, had
passed his shocked discovery of trafficking in women on to the
General Federation of Trade Unions to be raised with the Colonial
Office. Ward was now back in England and (worse) in parliament,
furious to discover that nothing had been done. On 31 March
1920, Ward raised the issue of the mm tsai in a vote on adjourn-
ment, catching Leo Amery, Viscount Milner's under-secretary at
the Colonial Office, completely off guard, and driving him into
a feeble admission that there existed not slavery but 'another
practice, and I do not remember the Chinese term for it, which
is the adoption of girls and youths for domestic service, in which
case a lump sum is paid to the parent or guardian'. Amery could
15
H L. Haslewood to under-secretary of state, 10 Oct 1920 PRO, CO 129/466,
file 49987
16
See esp Clara Haslewood's letter in The Times, 4 Aug 1920
17
The status of the mm tsai caused controversy within the Hong Kong government
in the late 1870s When the chief justice, Sir John Smale, insisted that the mm tsai
were slaves and that government officers must prosecute their purchasers, Sir John
Pope-Hennessy was initially sympathetic; after receiving a deputation of prominent
Chinese, however, he agreed that a distinction must be made between this established
custom and the more serious problem of trafficking in young girls, and he authorized
the formation of a Society for the Protection of Women and Girls (the Po Leung Kuk)
to combat kidnapping The controversy eventually reached the Colonial Office, which
agreed to delegate the matter to the Po Leung Kuk On this earlier controversy, see
esp the account by E J. Eitel, who wrote the first expert report on domestic slavery
for the Hong Kong government, in his Europe in China. The History of Hong Kong
(London, 1895), 546-8; H J. Lethbndge, 'The Evolution of a Chinese Voluntary
Association in Hong Kong' The Po Leung Kuk', in his Hong Kong Stability and
Change (Hong Kong, 1978), 78-82, Elizabeth Sinn, 'Chinese Patriarchy and the
Protection of Women in 19th-century Hong Kong', in Jaschok and Miers (eds.),
Women and Chinese Patriarchy. On Pope-Hennessy, see esp. Kate Lowe and Eugene
McLaughlin, 'Sir John Pope-Hennessy and the "Native Race Craze": Colonial
Government in Hong Kong, 1877-1882', Jl Imperial and Commonwealth Hist, xx
(1992).
only assure Ward that he would look into the matter; one month
later, he said he had asked the governor to consider introducing
registration of all adopted children — thus himself raising what
would be for twenty years the campaign's key demand.18
Alerted by the Haslewoods, the Anti-Slavery Society also
weighed in, the doyen of the humanitarian lobbies, possessed of
friends in high places and adept at causing a political stir.19 Public
meetings were held, letters to the press planted, and a consistent
onslaught of parliamentary questions carefully orchestrated —
which extracted from embarrassed ministers the damaging admis-
sions that the mm tsai were indeed transferred for money, that
the transaction was accompanied by a contract, that they were
not paid wages, and that cases of cruelty had been exposed by
the press and the courts.20 For the Anti-Slavery Society, the issue
was clear: the practice was 'a disgrace and scandal under the
British flag, and the Colony ought to be freed from it'.21
But the Colonial Office dug in its heels. They had a standard
response to such charges, one based on the fact that slavery had
no legal status in the British empire: thus, they argued, mm tsai
could not be slaves because the law in Hong Kong 'does not
recognize purchase as conferring any title of right'.22 Yet officials
also deployed a long-standing argument about cultural difference,
at once repudiating the 'invidious and inappropriate use of the
word slavery'23 and defending the Hong Kong government's
desire to respect Chinese customs.24 With reason, local officials
18
Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 5th ser. (hereafter 5 Hansard), cxxvn, cols
1345-8 (31 Mar 1920), cxxvni, col 884 (26 Apr 1920).
"Travers Buxton to H. R Haslewood, 1 Apr 1921 Rhodes House Library,
Oxford, Anti-Slavery Society Papers, MSS Bnt Emp. S22 (hereafter RHL, ASSP),
box G361 See the running correspondence between Buxton and John Harris of the
Anti-Slavery Society and the Haslewoods in this and subsequent files.
20
See e s p 5 Hansard, cxxxiv, col 1000 (9 N o v . 1920), col 1174 (10 N o v 1920);
cxxxv, col. 2145 (8 D e c 1920); c x x x v m , col. 1649 (1 M a r 1921), cxxix, col. 64
(7 Mar. 1921); cxlv, col. 959 (1 A u g 1921), cxlvi, col 2 2 3 (9 Aug. 1921), cxlvm,
col. 4 4 4 (9 N o v 1921); cl, col 1015 (15 Feb. 1922), col. 1550 (20 Feb. 1922), col
1703 (21 Feb 1922).
21
Charles Roberts, speaking to the conference on mm tsai at the Caxton Hall on
15 Feb 1922, in Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines' Friend, xii (Apr 1922), 7
22
This formulation comes from a telegram from Governor Sir Henry May to Walter
Long, 14 May 1918 PRO, CO 129/448, file 23769/18. For similar statements, see Sir
Gilbert Grindle to H R. Haslewood, 3 Nov 1920- PRO, CO 129/466, file 49987,
statement by Leo Amery 5 Hansard, cxxxix, col 64 (7 Mar 1921)
23
H. Read to Travers Buxton, 22 Aug 1921 PRO, CO 129/472, file 40065
24
For the evolution of the Colonial Office's response, see esp Governor Sir George
Bowen to Lord Derby, dispatch no. 189, 15 Aug. 1883, and the report by Justice
Russell contained therein, 'Report on Child Adoption and Domestic Service among
(com on p 169}
preferred this 'cultural' argument. Staffed by cadets trained in

Cantonese and in constant contact with elite Chinese through the
Legislative Council and the District Watch Committee (a Chinese
police force which was presided over by the secretary for Chinese
affairs), the Hong Kong government could claim to have its finger
on the pulse of the Chinese community.25 Its authority lay in its
ability to interpret this alien culture to London, and it exploited
this power to the hilt, deluging the Colonial Office with erudite
memoranda likening Chinese family structure to the Roman
system of patria potestas,26 and warning of the dangers of listening
to ignorant cranks at home. It was not only in the case of mm
tsai that money changed hands, Hong Kong officials pointed out:
'whenever a Chinese marries a wife, institutes a concubine, adopts
a son or acquires a mui tsai, there is always a form of a sale'.27
Such an exchange might be repugnant to westerners but was not
the same as trafficking: concubines, adopted children and mui tsai
all had a recognized (if lowly) place in the families they joined
and were protected from the social — and, in the case of the mui
tsai, possibly physical — death that would be their fate outside
the structure of household and kinship.28
On this construction of 'Chinese custom' the Hong Kong gov-
ernment built a case against any compulsory system of registration
(n 24 com )
Hongkong Chinese', 18 July 1883: PRO, CO 129/211, file 16422. Sir Henry May to
Walter Long, 9 Aug 1918 PRO, CO 129/449, file 46037. Claud Severn (officer
administering the government) to Viscount Milner, 20 Mar. 1919: PRO, CO 129/453,
file 27402 Sir Edward Stubbs's dispatches of 10 July 1920 (PRO, CO 129/461, file
43493), 24 Nov. 1920 (PRO, CO 129/463, file 63753), 21 Dec. 1920 {ibid.), 14 Feb
1921 (PRO, CO 129/467, file 15545), 19 May 1921 (PRO, CO 129/467, file 38683),
and 27 July 1921 (PRO, CO 129/468, file 45146) Draft memorandum in answer to
Haslewood's accusations- PRO, CO 129/465, file 54487.
25
On the Hong Kong cadets, see Lethbndge, 'Hong Kong Cadets, 1862-1941', in
his Hong Kong, Miners, Hong Kong under Imperial Rule, ch. 5, Lennox A Mills,
British Rule in Eastern Asia. A Study of Contemporary Government and Economic
Development in British Malaya and Hong Kong (London, 1942, repr New York, 1970),
ch. 11. On the District Watch Committee, which both Lethbndge and Mills label the
'Chinese Executive Council of Hong Kong', see esp Lethbndge, 'The District Watch
Committee', in his Hong Kong. There was also Chinese representation on the
Legislative Council in this period and, from 1926, on the Executive Council, for
which see G. B. Endacott, Government and People in Hong Kong, 1841-1962. A
Constitutional History ( H o n g K o n g , 1964), 145-6.
26
For this comparison as made in 1883, see Russell, 'Report on Child Adoption'
PRO, CO 129/211, file 16422.
27
Sir Edward Stubbs to Winston Churchill, 19 May 1921, enclosing a memorandum
by S B. C. Ross, secretary for Chinese affairs: PRO, CO 129/467, file 38683
28
E. R. Halhfax, secretary for Chinese affairs, 'The Mui Tsai System', Nov 1921.
PRO, CO 129/473, file 2091. Hallifax and the Foreign Office's resident m Pekmg
/ami on p 170)
of transferred children. They had, of course, some practical argu-

ments as well. From a barren outpost with a few thousand resi-
dents in 1841, Hong Kong had by 1921 become an urban
conglomerate with a population of 625,000.29 Most of these resi-
dents were Chinese, but many were not permanent: several thou-
sand people entered and left the colony daily, and no one had
any way of knowing whether the figure of 8,600 mm tsai given
in the 1921 census was in any way accurate.30 The government
thus doubted whether it would be able to discover all mm tsat,31
and also pointed to the political dangers of this plan: registration
would, Stubbs argued, 'go far to alienate the feelings of one of
the most loyal and law-abiding communities in the British
Empire'.32 No one could have been more tender of cultural
difference than colonial officials: consistently they upheld the
view, as Viscount Milner put it, that it was neither 'possible nor
indeed desirable to enforce Western ideas upon the family life of
the Chinese'. Far better, then, to persuade some prominent
Chinese to address the mm tsai issue in their own way.33
And this the government of Hong Kong did, mobilizing the
Chinese members of the Legislative Council and other official
bodies to present an authoritative 'Chinese view'.34 Their most
important ally in this endeavour was the Po Leung Kuk, or the
Society for the Protection of Women and Girls, which had been
set up during the first controversy over trafficking in girl children
in the 1880s and which had come to serve as a model for similar
In 28 cont )
both insisted that t h e system protected girl children born to poor families from
exposure or starvation. See m e m o r a n d u m by A E Collins on Hallifax's visit, 10 M a r
1921: P R O , C O 129/470, file 10390 B Alston to Lord Curzon, 28 Feb. 1921 P R O ,
CO 129/470, file 18914.
29
Population figures are from Mills, British Rule, 387-90.
30
T h e 1921 census figures were mentioned by D r u m m o n d Shiels in 5 Hansard,
ccln, col 942 (11 M a y 1931)
31
This objection was repeated many times, although with 183 European officers
and perhaps three times that n u m b e r of Indian and Chinese, the Hong Kong police
force was one of the largest (in p e r capita terms) and best equipped in the empire
See M i n e r s , Hong Kong under Imperial Rule, 7 9 - 8 0 .
32
Sir E d w a r d Stubbs t o Viscount Milner, 10 July 1920 P R O , C O 129/461, file
43493.
33
Viscount Milner to Sir E d w a r d S t u b b s , 28 Sept. 1920. ibid. 5 Hansard, cxxxiv,
cols. 592-3 (4 Nov 1920)
34
Stubbs, for example, referred Milner to the opinion of Lau Chu-pak, the senior
Chinese Legislative Council member, who had described the mm tsai system as a
philanthropic solution to the fact that many parents were too poor to care for girl
children See 'Hongkong "Slavery" Interview with Mr Lau Chu Pak', Hongkong
Telegraph, 17 Nov 1919 (copy in PRO, CO 129/461, file 43493)
organizations in Singapore and a number of Malay towns. The

Po Leung Kuk, as both H. J. Lethbridge and Elizabeth Sinn have
noted, sought not to stamp out paid transfers of girls and women,
but rather to differentiate what it considered to be legitimate
transfers for marriage, concubinage or domestic service from the
widespread problems of kidnapping and sale into prostitution.
The society thus maintained inspectors to patrol the port and
rescue kidnapped girls and women, who were then housed in its
refuge until relatives could be contacted, homes found, or mar-
riages arranged for them; by the 1920s, many thousands of cases
had passed through its hands. An elite and prestigious body, the
all-male membership of the Po Leung Kuk overlapped with that
of the District Watch Committee and the Legislative Council,
and the Hong Kong government assiduously deferred to it in
questions of social welfare.35 Hallifax, who worked with the Po
Leung Kuk closely, bristled at the Haslewoods' allegation that it
was not doing its job: its members were, he said, 'the most
prominent and respectable gentlemen in the Colony', and its help
was inestimable, since it operated 'with an inside knowledge of
the Chinese mind'.36 Perhaps then, the Colonial Office suggested,
its members might write to the governor 'showing that the work
of supervision desired by reformers over here is actually being
carried out in the best possible way'.37
Having been given carte blanche to vent — even to solicit —
Chinese grievances, official dispatches from Hong Kong quickly
became more openly challenging. Possibly not even the governor
realized 'the indignation felt by the Chinese at the monstrous
charges made against them by ignorant persons at home', the
secretary for Chinese affairs wrote to the Colonial Office in July
1921. The District Watch Committee, he reported, often 'sits
dumb and I usually have to elicit opinions with a sort of verbal
bootjack'; at the last meeting, however, there had been a brisk
35
According t o Lethbridge, 'the establishment of the P o Leung K u k in 1878 must
be seen . . not only as an example of commendable benevolence on the part of the
affluent b u t as an attempt to maintain withm a British colony a Chmese custom which
had no basis in English L a w ' Lethbridge, Hong Kong, 82 Likewise Elizabeth Sinn,
while paying tribute to the dedication and hard work of the society's members,
nevertheless sees it as central to the preservation of patriarchal authority m Hong
Kong. Sinn, 'Chinese Patriarchy', passim
36
E. R. Hallifax, 'Report by the Secretary for Chmese Affairs on the Secretary of
State's Confidential Despatch of 16 Apr. 1920', 14 June 1920: PRO, CO 129/461,
file 43493.
37
M e m o r a n d u m b y A. E Collins, 10 Mar. 1921 P R O , C O 129/470, file 10390
discussion of the mui tsai question and the Chinese members had
decided to hold a mass meeting to protest against the allegation
'that they are dealers in prostitutes and owners of slaves'.38 This
protest meeting, organized by two Chinese members of the
Legislative Council, Ho Fook and Lau Chu-pak, established a
society to protect mui tsai; aware that this was being seen as a
'women's issue', the Hong Kong government saw to it that a
'ladies' committee', made up largely of wives of the members of
the Po Leung Kuk, was also formed.39 With this structure in place,
the Colonial Office felt able to say with confidence that any abuse
of mui tsai could be dealt with 'by social work in which the
Chinese themselves take part'.40
By basing their case for inaction on deference to the Chinese
community, the Colonial Office had certainly played to its
strengths; they had also established the framework that would
govern discussions of the mui tsai system for the next fifteen
years. This framework inheres within the official documents,
which position the Colonial Office and its allied 'representatives
of Chinese opinion' against the blundering and culturally insensi-
tive Haslewoods. But did opinion fall so neatly along racial and
cultural lines? In fact, a significant minority at the meeting
arranged by Ho Fook and Lau Chu-pak favoured not supervision
but abolition of bonded servitude and broke off to form the Anti-
Mui Tsai Society, which soon had over a thousand members.41
Chinese Christian organizations and Hong Kong's labour guilds
similarly supported abolition. Even more significantly, in 1927
the Nationalist government centred in neighbouring Canton itself
passed legislation converting all mui tsai into adopted daughters
and requiring that they be registered with the police. Chinese
opinion, it seems, was not so monolithic as the Colonial Office
claimed.
Remarkably, however, the government of Hong Kong was able
to call into question not only the good faith but also the
" S B . C Ross to Viscount Milner, 15 July 1921: PRO, CO 129/468, file 45146
39
M e m o r a n d u m b y S. B . C Ross, 27 Jan. 1921 P R O , C O 129/467, file 15545 5
Hansard, clx, col. 1876 (20 A p r 1921).
40
H . Read t o T r a v e r s B u x t o n , 22 Aug. 1921: P R O , C O 129/472, file 40065
41
Carl T Smith, 'The Chmese Church, Labour and Elites and the Mui Tsai
Question m the 1920s', Jl Hong Kong Branch Roy. Asiatic Soc, xxi (1981) See also
Lau Chu-pak and Ho Fook, report to the governor, 4 Aug 1921, and accounts of
the meeting m Hong Kong Daily Press, 1 and 2 Aug. 1921. both in PRO, CO 129/468,
file 719
'Chineseness' of such activists. The labour guilds, according to

the governor, were merely trying 'to exploit the situation for
political purposes',42 and the Colonial Office went to some lengths
to prove that the Nationalists' legislation remained a dead letter.43
Although later phases of the controversy would be triggered by
the activities of the Anti-Mui Tsai Society, this group was dismiss-
ed as 'not very representative of Chinese opinion'; by contrast,
the District Watch Committee, a body appointed by the governor
and unanimously opposed to abolition, was 'the body most repre-
sentative of Chinese opinion'.44 The point here is not that the
government got it wrong and that these groups supporting aboli-
tion were somehow more 'representative', but rather that the
whole concept of a 'representative Chinese view' was a politically
useful fiction. For the government itself identified such 'repre-
sentative Chinese': not surprisingly, they turned out to be men
like Ho Fook, chief Chinese agent for Jardine, Matheson and
Company; Lau Chu-pak, agent for A. S. Watson and chairman
of the Chinese General Chamber of Commerce; and Sir Shou-son
Chow, soon to become the first nominated Chinese member of
the Executive Council. Hong Kong's commercial success was
founded on a sensitive alliance between such prominent Chinese
businessmen and British authorities, and neither group saw any
reason to compromise the colony's stability by expensive or
offensive interventions into Chinese family life.
The Anti-Slavery Society, put on the defensive by the Office's
claim to represent local opinion, urged Mrs Haslewood to show
that the 'better class' of Chinese also opposed the mui tsai system.45
And indeed, the Haslewoods did try to do this, denounc-
ing as 'very wrong' the tendency of British officials to dismiss
Chinese efforts as 'mere eye-wash'.46 Yet British activists lacked
the Hong Kong government's ability to label one particular sec-
tion of Chinese opinion as authoritative, and their efforts were in
42
Sir E d w a r d Stubbs t o d u k e of D e v o n s h i r e , 6 M a r 1923, in Hong Kong Papers
Relative to the Mui-Tsai Question, Parliamentary P a p e r s , 1 9 2 9 - 3 0 [ C m d 3424],
xxiii, 42-3.
43
O n the operation of the Chinese law, see, Sir Cecil Clementi t o L e o Amery,
dispatch no 2 5 1 , 16 M a y 1929, including a report by W . Russell Brown, British
consul in Amoy: P R O , C O 129/514/2
44
Sir Cecil Clementi t o L e o A m e r y , 22 Feb. 1929, in Hong Kong Papers Relative
to the Mm- Tsai Question, 47—8.
45
Travers Buxton to Clara Haslewood, 10 Nov 1920: RHL, ASSP, box G361.
46
Clara Haslewood t o J o h n H a r r i s , 25 F e b . 1930: R H L , ASSP, b o x G 3 6 2 ; also
Haslewood, Child Slavery, esp. 53-63
any event undermined by their own belief in ineluctable cultural

difference. With few independent ties to Hong Kong and little
awareness of the nationalist and emancipation movements sweep-
ing China (and influencing Chinese women47), they too saw
Chinese culture as a drawback to be overcome and attributed any
change in Chinese views to contact with Christian religion and,
as the dean of Lincoln put it, with the 'very best ideals of the
West'.48 They believed firmly that Britain stood, as Colonel Ward
put it in 1917, 'for what is best, brightest and honourable in the
rule of coloured peoples',49 and were horrified to contemplate
that, 'instead of leading China in political morals relating to this
trade in human beings, we are lagging dolefully behind'.50
Especially at this stage, their campaign — which reached a head
with a meeting organized by the Anti-Slavery Society in the
Caxton Hall on 15 February 1922 — was concerned above all to
remove any possible stain on Britain's good name.
With the Hong Kong government monopolizing the rhetoric
of cultural understanding, and reformers defending 'British
ideals', small wonder that it was a colonial secretary uninterested
in cultural difference and convinced of the universal benefits of
British rule who finally broke ranks. In the wake of the Caxton
Hall meeting, and faced with continued parliamentary questions,
Winston Churchill, who had replaced Milner as colonial secre-
tary, informed his civil servants he was 'not prepared to go on
defending this thing'. They had better warn the governor that
he planned to ensure that the mui tsai were made completely free
to quit their employment at any time. 'I do not care a rap what
the local consequences are', he told his officials bluntly. 'I am
not going on defending it. You had better make it perfectly
clear'.51 Stubbs was instructed to issue a proclamation declaring
the mm tsai 'free', and informed that, 'so far as administrative
47
For which, see esp. Christine K. Gilmartin, 'Gender, Political Culture, and
Women's Mobilization in the Chinese Nationalist Revolution, 1924-1927', in Christine
K Gilmartin et al (eds.), Engendering China Women, Culture and the Stale
(Cambridge, Mass., 1994)
48
The dean of Lincoln Cathedral, speaking at the Caxton Hall meeting on 15 Feb
1922, Ann-Slavery Reporter, xn (Apr 1922), 10
49
Colonel J o h n W a r d to General Federation of T r a d e Unions, 2 9 A u g 1917,
forwarded b y W A. Appleton to Walter L o n g , 27 O c t 1917 P R O , C O 129/446
50
Colonel J o h n W a r d to W . A. Appleton, 5 Sept. 1917, forwarded b y Appleton to
Walter L o n g , 27 Oct. 1917 ibid
51
W i n s t o n Churchill to Masterson Smith, 21 F e b 1922 P R O , C O 129/478, file
8660
measures can make it, this freedom must be real'.52 Prevarication

and protests from Hong Kong followed, but Churchill would
have none of it.53 On 21 March 1922, he promised the Commons
that the system would be abolished within a year.54
The Female Domestic Service Ordinance, which prohibited
any further engagement or retransfer of mm tsai and stipulated
that those existing be registered and paid wages, was thus pushed
through the Hong Kong Legislative Council during two sessions
in December 1922 and February 1923. Under instruction from
London, the government stated it would use its official majority
to pass it, but made clear its resentment of — as Stubbs put it —
the 'offensive and foul-mouthed libels on the Chinese race which
have been a feature of the British Press on this subject'.55 Sir
Shou-son Chow was given a courteous hearing through a speech
deploring any general 'interference with the privacy of the home,
a thing repugnant to all free men',56 and the English unofficial
members scrambled to join the protest. In other countries, A. G.
Stephen told the Council, the British declined to interfere with
customs 'far less innocent and far less humane than the mui-tsai
system' because they knew that local opinion would not stand for
it. In the case of Hong Kong, however, the Colonial Office was
willing 'to set aside the wishes of the majority of the people in
this Colony' solely to 'shut the mouths of these stupid bores in
Parliament'.57
Yet the Legislative Council voted through this reform knowing
that it would be toothless, for the Hong Kong government, by
playing their final and most valuable card — the threat of colonial
rebellion — had made the Colonial Office back down. In early
September 1922, Claud Severn (who was administering the gov-
ernment during Stubbs's leave in England) had warned Churchill
that the bill was meeting with strong Chinese opposition;58
Stubbs, who was keeping in touch with Severn, then wrote to Sir
Gilbert Grindle, an assistant under-secretary and personal friend,
"Winston Churchill to Sir Edward Stubbs, 22 Feb. 1922. Hong Kong Papers
Relative to the Mm-Tsai Question, 3-4
53
Sir Edward Stubbs to Winston Churchill, 16 Mar. 1922; Winston Churchill to
Sir Edward Stubbs, 21 Mar 1922 ibid , 4-5
54
5 Hansard, clu, cols. 214-15 (21 Mar 1922)
55
'Extract from Report of Proceedings in Hong Kong Legislative Council', 15 Feb
1923. Hong Kong: Papers Relative to the Mm-Tsm Question, 4 2
56
'Extract from Report of Proceedings', 28 Dec. 1922. ibid., 32.
57
'Extract from Report of Proceedings', 15 Feb. 1923 ibid , 41-2.
58
Claud Severn to Winston Churchill, 5 and 9 Sept. 1922: ibid., 17-18
in something of a panic. 'The Chinese are for the first time setting
themselves against the government', he wrote. 'That is the begin-
ning of the end. I told you the other day that I believed we
should hold Hong Kong for another fifty years. I put it now at
twenty at most'.59 His representations — and, more crucially,
Churchill's replacement as colonial secretary by the duke of
Devonshire after the fall of the Lloyd George coalition in October
1922 — led the Colonial Office to agree to postpone registration;
six months later, Devonshire agreed — but neglected to tell the
anti-slavery campaigners — that it could be put off indefinitely.60
The Hong Kong government had thus won the first round:
although engagements of mm tsai were henceforth outlawed, the
legislation was neither promulgated nor enforced. In the long
run, however, the government's decision to raise the spectre of
colonial rebellion was a strategic blunder. True, in other coun-
tries — notably Kenya and India — efforts to alter domestic
relations or stamp out 'backward customs' did bring political
conflict, and especially heightened national consciousness, in their
wake. Nationalists could either affirm or repudiate the practice
in question: thus, whereas Kikuyu patriots reacted to a British
campaign against clitoridectomy by affirming the value of the
practice as a expression of cultural loyalty, Indian nationalists
responded to British campaigns against child marriage by pointing
to the government's long neglect of Indian women's health and
the nationalist movement's superior ability to tackle social issues.
In both cases, however, local political elites responded angrily to
such campaigns, finding in them further evidence of the need for
political independence.61
But the reforming campaign and subsequent legislation did not
really spur a nationalist response in Hong Kong, for the simple
59
Sir Edward Stubbs to Sir Gilbert Grindle, 16 Sept. 1922 PRO, CO 129/478,
file 46414
60
Duke of Devonshire to Claud Severn, 24 Nov 1922; Sir Edward Stubbs to duke
of Devonshire, 6 Mar 1923, duke of Devonshire to Sir Edward Stubbs, 2 May 1923
all in Hong Kong Papers Relative to the Mm-Tsai Question, 18-20, 45. Colonial Office
officials, while not precisely lying to the Anti-Slavery Society, did mislead it, passing
on the Hong Kong government's duphcitous report claiming that the ordinance was
workmg well and the numbers of mm tsai declining. For this correspondence, see
Anti-Slavery Reporter, xui (Oct. 1923), 130-2; xiv (Apr 1924), 5-6.
61
On Kenya, see Susan Pedersen, 'National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts The Sexual
Politics of Colonial Policymaking', Jl Mod Hist, lxiii (1991). On India, see Barbara
Ramusack, 'Catalysts or Helpers' British Femmists, Indian Women's Rights, and
Indian Independence', in Gail Minault (ed.), The Extended Family Women and Political
Participation in India and Pakistan (Columbia, Mo., 1981)
reason that the conservative Chinese elites most resistant to social

intervention had good reasons to avoid such rhetoric. The
Nationalist government, after all, had not only promulgated sim-
ilar reforms but also hoped to curb foreign business influence and
reincorporate Hong Kong into China. For the Chinese busi-
nessmen whose prosperity lay in their alliance with British and
American firms, and who cooperated closely with the Hong Kong
government to defeat labour unrest in the early 1920s,62 national-
ist rhetoric was thus something to avoid. However much they
objected to plans to register the mm tsai, then, in the end the
Chinese members of the Legislative Council voted with the
government.63
With the passage of this legislation, the campaign in Britain
died down. Yet the Colonial Office, by ignoring divisions within
Hong Kong and by leaving the legislation unenforced, guaranteed
that the issue would arise again — and on less favourable terms.
For the Hong Kong government, having warned of a rebellion
that never quite materialized, would not be able to cry wolf again;
later pressures for action would not be so easily dissipated. In
Hong Kong, then, the mui tsai were put back on the agenda in
the spring of 1927 when those 'unrepresentative' Chinese of the
Anti-Mui Tsai Society asked the government to begin registering
transferred children,64 and two years later the issue re-emerged
in Britain as well, when the government's failure to implement
the 1923 legislation was exposed in the Manchester Guardian.65
Leo Amery, now colonial secretary in Baldwin's Conservative
government and caught off guard for the second time, found
himself once again telegraphing the governor of Hong Kong
(now Sir Cecil Clementi) and facing another drubbing in the
Commons.66
62
O n t h e labour unrest of the 1920s, see Miners, Hong Kong under Imperial Rule,
esp 1 2 - 2 1 ; L e t h b n d g e , Hong Kong, 1 1 8 - 2 1 ; Welsh, A Borrowed Place, 3 6 9 - 7 3
63
Sir E d w a r d Stubbs to d u k e of Devonshire, 6 Mar. 1923, in Hong Kong. Papers
Relative to the Mui-Tsai Question, 4 2 - 3 .
64
See t h e reports of t h e revival of t h e A n t i - M u i Tsai Society in South China
Morning Post, 11 A p r 1927, and of the society's petition to the g o v e r n m e n t t o register
all mm tsai a n d all adopted d a u g h t e r s , ibid., 22 O c t 1928, repr. in Hong Kong Papers
Relative to the Mui-Tsai Question, 5 1 - 7 . F o r t h e collaboration between t h e A n t i - M u i
Tsai Society and British reformers, see J. D. Bush, Anti-Mui Tsai Society, to Travers
Buxton, 21 Feb. 1929 and 5 Mar 1929: RHL, ASSP, box G362.
65
Letter from J o h n H a r r i s , Anti-Slavery Society, The Manchester Guardian, 16 Jan.
1929, 12.
66
Leo Amery to Sir Cecil Clementi, 17 Jan. and 4 Feb. 1929: PRO, CO 29/514/2;
5 Hansard, ccxxiv, cols. 1381-4 (4 Feb. 1929).
All the old activists on the issue — the Haslewoods, the Anti-
Slavery Society, the Commons' humanitarian lobby — quickly
mobilized. In Britain, however, this second stage of the contro-
versy would take on a different and overtly feminist tone. Clara
Haslewood had in fact always seen the mui tsai as a 'women's
issue', attributing inaction to sexual solidarity among British and
Chinese men equally pleased to protect a system that left young
girls vulnerable to purchase. 'Knowing as I do the very low moral
standard which prevails in the [Legislative] Council', she had
written forthrightly to the Colonial Office in 1921, 'I am not
surprised that excuses are found for defending this infamy'.67
Sybil Neville-Rolfe of the National Vigilance Association, who
travelled to Hong Kong on a fact-finding mission in 1921 and
spoke at the February 1922 Caxton Hall meeting, had agreed
with her68 — as had Nancy Astor, then parliament's most out-
spoken feminist, who lent what support she could.69 In 1921 and
1922, however, with only two women in the Commons, such
arguments had emerged only occasionally; in 1929, by contrast,
Clara Haslewood found a range of women MPs and feminist
lobbies eager to take up her cause. The second round of the mui
tsai agitation thus began with, as Sir Gilbert Grindle put it fear-
fully, 'all the materials . . . present for a violent agitation . . .
and every prospect of the mui-tsai question being made a "test
67
Clara Haslewood t o Edward W o o d , 13 Oct. 1921 P R O , C O 129/473, file 51006.
Clara Haslewood was n o t entirely wrong, t h e minutes of t h e Legislative Council's
discussion of the mui tsai bill in 1923 reveal the spectacle of the Council's m e m b e r s —
British a n d Chinese — sharing a chuckle over w h e t h e r girls of eighteen could b e said
to have reached t h e age of discretion See 'Extract from R e p o r t of Proceedings', 28
D e c 1922, in Hong Kong Papers Relative to the Mui-Tsai Question, 39.
68
Sybil Neville-Rolfe travelled t o H o n g K o n g in 1921 with a commission organized
by t h e National Council for Combating Venereal Disease a n d submitted a report to
the Colonial Office charging that the committee members of the Po Leung Kuk were
using their organization to find themselves concubines Miners, Hong Kong under
Imperial Rule, 198-9 At the Caxton Hall meetmg she reiterated her view that the
system of licensed brothels in Hong Kong was itself creating a market in young girls
Anti-Slavery Reporter, xu (Apr 1922), 9 If the Hong Kong government's administrat-
ive reports can be trusted, Neville-Rolfe's charges were misleading While the Po
Leung Kuk did occasionally arrange marriages for girls in their care, they insisted that
the girl's consent was obtained in all cases, and in any case gradually ceased to perform
this role: in 1910, only 25 of 504 girls admitted during the year were given in
marriage; by 1926, only 4 of 299 were married off. See Hong Kong Government
Administrative Reports (Hong Kong, 1910), app. C, 'Report of the Registrar General',
p C44, ibid (1926), app C, 'Report of the Secretary for Chinese Affairs', p. C47
69
See Nancy Astor's correspondence with Clara Haslewood in Feb and Mar 1922,
in Reading University Library, Astor Papers, 1416/1/1/312
question" by the Feminist Societies'.70 With the Colonial Office

on the defensive, both the practice of colonial rule and the role
of activist women seemed ripe for renegotiation.
II
THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF
'FEMALE SLAVERY'
The revival of the mm tsai controversy in 1929 coincided with a
wave of interest among feminist organizations in the status of
women in the British colonies. Galvanized especially by the pub-
lication in 1927 of Mother India, Katherine Mayo's prurient and
politically tendentious inquiry into child marriage, both the
National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship and the British
Commonwealth League — which had been set up in 1925 'to
secure equality of liberties, status, and opportunities between
men and women in the British Commonwealth of Nations' —
began to devote themselves to questions of colonial policy. The
general election of 1929 also brought into parliament several
women MPs, including Eleanor Rathbone and Edith Picton-
Turbervill, with a strong interest in colonial issues. That same
year, Nina Boyle of the Women's Freedom League renewed her
impassioned effort to force the Anti-Slavery Society, the League
of Nations and the Colonial Office to label the practices of
arranged marriage and bride price in Africa as forms of slavery.
Debate over the mui tsai system thus re-emerged as part of a
broader discussion among 'emancipated women' over the status
of women in the colonies and about their own imperial responsi-
bilities. The problem of slavery was never far from their minds.
On 12 February 1930, representatives of forty women's organiza-
tions held a meeting in Caxton Hall, London, on 'domestic
slavery' (or the enslavement of women within the family) within
the British empire. Nina Boyle, the duchess of Atholl and Eleanor
Rathbone all spoke, on subjects ranging from bride price to
clitoridectomy, and Mrs Haslewood gave her usual exposition on
the status of the mui tsai in Hong Kong.71 In these meetings, and
in the deputations and memoranda that followed, feminist organ-
izations began to articulate a new and more expansive definition
70
Note by Sir Gilbert Gnndle, 10 Apr. 1929 PRO, CO 129/514/2
71
'Women Slaves in the British Empire', The Woman's Leader, xxii (21 Feb 1930),
22. The Woman's Leader covered the mm tsai controversy consistently. See C. L
( COM on p 180}
of the word 'slavery' and to construct themselves as a new eman-

cipatory force.72 Nina Boyle, in a series of prominent articles in
the National Union's Woman's Leader, put the issue bluntly.
Women in many colonies stood in a relationship of virtual slavery
towards their husbands and male relatives, she charged, and the
humanitarian lobbies that had campaigned vigorously against
forced labour had all but ignored their plight. Now, however,
British women must 'do for their sex what men did for theirs —
set them free'.73
But what did it mean to promise to emancipate women from
bonds that were domestic and familial — and hence, in many
minds, both private and natural? 'Unfreedom' was easy to define
in the case of men: it was the appropriation of labour power, so
that its disposition through free contract — and hence, liberal
theorists would say, moral growth itself — became impossible.
The slave, Sir Frederick Lugard wrote in his classic work, The
Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, was a man 'deprived of
the dignity of manhood . . . without responsibility and without
incentive to work'.74 As the Colonial Office had long been aware,
however, the 'slavery' of women was far more difficult to define.
'The question of female slavery is inextricably mixed up with
that of concubinage', Lugard wrote; the rights claimed over a
woman as a slave shaded confusingly into the rights claimed over
her as a wife or concubine.75 Freedom was supposed to be the
antithesis of slavery, freedom the normal state and slavery the
abnormal one. But if 'normal' marriage also involved the transfer
of women for what officials politely termed a 'valuable considera-
tion', how could anyone decide which women were enslaved or,
indeed, offer emancipation? Women could scarcely be slaves,
Lugard seemed to say, because there was no situation that, for
them, constituted freedom.
When government officials and experts on Chinese culture
declined to interfere with the mui tsai system on the grounds that
(n 71 com )
Haslewood, 'The Mui Tsai System in Hong Kong: The Present Position', ibid, xxu
(7 Mar 1930), 36-7, 'Child Slavery In Hong Kong', ibid., xxii (18 July 1930), 185,
'Child Slaves', ibid., xxii (23 Jan. 1931), 390, 'Child Slavery in a British Crown
Colony', ibid., xxm (22 May 1931), 123.
72
See, e.g., 'Slavery', The Woman's Leader, xxu (18 Apr. 1930)
73
C Nina Boyle, 'Slavery', pt 3, ibid., xxi (27 Sept 1929), 256.
74
F D. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh and
London, 1922; repr Hamden, Conn., 1965), 355
75
Ibid, 364, 377.
all Chinese marriage and kinship arrangements involved payments

and contracts, and argued that the most the government could
do was to insist that such exchanges carried no legal sanction,
they were abiding by the Colonial Office's long-standing prefer-
ence for limiting its intervention into accepted domestic and
sexual practices.76 Yet such a position was deeply unpalatable to
feminists. Victorian feminism had been shaped by the analogy
between marriage and slavery; in making their case both for
careers open to women and for married women's legal and prop-
erty rights, feminists had argued that only if women had the
ability to live outside marriage and had their rights preserved
within marriage could marriage be distinguished from slavery.77
When feminists after 1918 confronted practices like bride price
or mui tsai, then, they were quick to see within them the imagined
sexual slavery of their own past; Chinese custom came to stand
in for the servitude they had escaped. The issue of sex equality
was closely entwined with the issue of mm tsai, one speaker told
the British Commonwealth League, since 'the first step towards
securing [sex equality] was the destruction of the idea that the
head of the family could dispose of the women of the family at
will'.78 That the transferred girls might be well treated, or that
contractual payments accompanied other transfers of women, did
not remove the mm tsai system from the pernicious category of
'slavery' and place it in the benign category of 'custom'. Indeed,
if wives and concubines were also being treated as property, this
merely meant that they too should be guaranteed the right freely
to dispose of their persons.
In feminist hands, then, the campaign to outlaw mui tsai servi-
tude always threatened to become something more explosive —
a demand that colonial governments combat all 'customary' prac-
tices through which men exercised authority over the persons
and property of women. When attempting to cast the mui tsai
question in such terms, however, feminists faced an obvious
problem. For mm tsai were not only female, they were children
76
For this view, see Sir Cecil Clementi t o L e o A m e r y , 23 F e b . 1929: P R O ,
C O 129/514/2.
77
J o h n Stuart Mill, for e x a m p l e , argued in The Subjection of Women that w o m a n ' s
personal a n d legal subordination t o h e r h u s b a n d placed h e r in a lower position than
a slave See John Stuart Mill, 'The Subjection of Women', in John Stuart Mill and
Harriet Taylor Mill, Essays on Sex Equality, ed. Alice S Rossi (Chicago, 1970), 157-67.
78
British C o m m o n w e a l t h League, Report of Twelfth Annual Conference ( L o n d o n ,
1936), 54.
as well, and hence even more difficult to place in the dichotomy

of slavery and freedom. However legally free a mui tsai might
be, the Hong Kong government noted, 'her practical freedom
. . . is conditioned by her youth and inexperience and inability to
fend for herself'.79 Not even British children, Leo Amery pointed
out, 'can always get away as freely as they would like, and perhaps
that is sometimes a good thing for them'.80 As the Chinese barris-
ter, Dr Seen-wan Tso, argued, mm tsai — like other children —
needed not 'freedom' but guidance and discipline.81 Given Hong
Kong's active trade in girls, reformers also feared that the mm
tsai, if 'freed', would fall into the hands of procuresses. They
agreed, then, that 'freeing' a mui tsai meant vesting authority
over her in someone who would have her best interests at heart.
It was on this issue, however, that the racist inflection of some
feminist arguments became apparent, for British women were
loath to view not only the Hong Kong government's male offi-
cialdom but also either the receiving family or any Chinese philan-
thropic body as a reliable guardian for a mui tsai. Given that the
natal family was usually untraceable or unwilling to take the
child, it was hard to envisage any other alternative.82 When
British women spoke on this issue, however, they invariably
called for the appointment of women, and especially of British
women, to care for the mui tsai; Mrs Haslewood, for example,
constantly urged the establishment of a 'nice refuge, run by
English people' in contrast to that 'soulless place, which no timid
child would dream of going to', the Po Leung Kuk.83 In such
statements, and, even more, in the prurient accounts of ill-treat-
ment of mui tsai by Chinese men and women, we see British
women imagining themselves as a form of divine intervention,
able to interpose themselves between enslaved girls and those
alien beings who sought to abuse them.
79
Claud Severn t o Viscount Milner, 20 M a r 1919: P R O , C O 129/453, file 27402.
80
5 Hansard, cxxvn, col. 1348 (31 M a r 1920).
81
S W T s o to E R Halhfax, 13 D e c . 1929, in Sir Cecil Clementi to L o r d Passfield,
dispatch no 538, 18 Dec 1929: PRO, CO 129/522/6.
82
Thus, a joint committee of the Anti-Mm Tsai Society and the Society for the
Protection of Mui Tsai had concluded in 1922 that the only practical solution would
be to recognize the employer's rights to the girl's labour, so long as he paid her wages
and did not ill-treat her, and then to set up an inspectorate and build a 500-bed
'Industrial Home' so that she would have a place to go to if he did mistreat her. See
'Report on Mui Tsai', submitted to the governor on 29 May 1922, in Hong Kong
Papers Relative to the Mm-Tsai Question, 1 1 - 1 7 .
83
British Commonwealth League, 'Women and the Future', 32-3.
By defining the mui tsai system very largely as an abuse of
women by men, feminists elaborated both a justification for their
own role and a rhetoric capable of standing up to the Colonial
Office's defence of 'Chinese custom'. Yet their understanding of
the practice was, in its way, as idealized as that offered by the
Hong Kong officialdom. Mistrustful as they were of the sexual
drives of men, feminists tended to assume that the purchase of
girls for domestic service was inextricable from — and often a
disguised form of — purchase for sexual use; their main concern
was to protect Chinese girls by placing them under the control
of women. What they overlooked, however, was that the mm
tsai's singular powerlessness was often a consequence less of her
sexual exploitation by men than of the fact that she lived, usually
as a domestic drudge, almost entirely in a women's world.
Although the lives of such indentured children are difficult to
recover from a distance of more than fifty years, recent ethno-
graphic studies of Hong Kong, and especially Maria Jaschok's
oral histories of several mm tsai, reveal the manifold status distinc-
tions among women and the complex ways in which labour and
sex structured women's opportunities.84 Often brought into a
household to serve daughters, wives and concubines, the mui
tsai's best hope of escape from servile status lay in being given
in marriage or sold as a concubine or in establishing an independ-
ent sexual relationship with the master — as several of the more
determined and resourceful of the mui tsai whose histories Jaschok
reconstructed did.85 Without such an ability to barter sex, mm
tsai were entirely dependent on their mistresses, at best trusted
but lowly members of the household, at worst nameless extensions
of their mistress's body and will. If Jaschok's research uncovered
several cases of mm tsai who were able to displace the first wife
and family in the husband's affections, it also turned up the tragic
story of one mm tsai who, purchased as a sexual surrogate by a
strong-willed but childless wife, bore six children who then called
her mistress 'mother', while she herself was known only as 'Ma
Xin's mm tsai'.86 The essence of female slavery is captured in this
story — but it was an essence that feminists in Britain, consumed
84
J a s c h o k , Concubines and Bondservants, passim. F o r a n insightful account o f status
differences among women, see Rubie Watson, 'Wives, Concubines and Maids', also
Janice E. Stockard, Daughters of the Canton Delta Marriage Patterns and Economic
Strategies in South China, 1860-1930 (Stanford, 1989).
85
See esp the story of Moot Xiao-li, in Jaschok, Concubines and Bondservants, 7-44.
86
Ibid, 69-72, 76-7.
as they were by fantasies of predatory males held at bay by

protective white women, were slow to comprehend.
By 1930, then, the mm tsai issue had become embedded within
an 'imperial feminist' programme that sought to use state power
to remake domestic and sexual relations throughout the depend-
ent colonies. Pragmatically, the campaigners continued to focus
on children, calling on the government to give teeth to the earlier
legislation by registering all transferred children and establishing
a female inspectorate to protect them. Fortunately for them, there
were new ministers at the Colonial Office ready to hear then-
case. The general election in June 1929 had brought in a Labour
government, sustained in office with Liberal support. Sidney
Webb, now elevated to the Lords as Lord Passfield, replaced
Amery as colonial secretary. William Lunn, a strong supporter
of the Anti-Slavery Society, became under-secretary; in
December 1929 he was replaced by the even more energetic Dr
Thomas Drummond Shiels.
Labour was pledged to a vision of colonial policy that coincided
almost entirely with the views of the Anti-Slavery Society and
the League of Nations. It was pledged, in other words, to the
ideals of 'trusteeship': to develop local economies while safe-
guarding their benefits for local populations; to preserve indigen-
ous structures of 'indirect rule' while also gradually ceding self-
governing powers; and to put down energetically not only any
indigenous forms of slavery but also the abuses of forced labour
to which colonial governments themselves routinely resorted.
Most of these ideals would be challenged, and to some extent
jettisoned, in the long struggle to limit the power of the rapacious
settler community of East Africa; in Hong Kong, however, the
Labour government acted quickly and decisively. Sir Cecil
Clementi, who had disastrously responded to the renewed agita-
tion by citing the 'humane and benevolent' character of the mui
tsai system,87 was informed that abolition had been settled
government policy for years and was instructed to implement
87
Sir Cecil Clementi to Leo Amery, 22 Feb. 1929 PRO, CO 129/514/2. Even the
officials recognized that Clementi had erred In 1923 the Hong Kong government had
professed to abolish the mm tsai system, Sir Gilbert Grindle minuted, and now, six
years later, 'the Governor contributes a long argument to show that the institution is
a beneficent one That will not help' Mmute by" Sir Gilbert Grmdle, 10 Apr 1929
PRO, CO 129/514/2.
registration forthwith.88 To his officials' distress, Passfield also

ordered publication of most of the official correspondence on the
subject, thus laying Stubbs's prevarication, Devonshire's duplic-
ity, Amery's foot-dragging and Clementi's blank ignorance of
government policy open to public gaze.89 And when Clementi,
citing Chinese opposition, once again tried to sabotage registra-
tion, Shiels, overruling his officials, sternly ordered him to pro-
ceed.90 The civil servants and the Hong Kong government had
always been the main bar to action, Shiels admitted to John Harris
of the Anti-Slavery Society, urging Harris to press the govern-
ment as hard as he could.91
More than 4,000 mm tsai were thus registered in Hong Kong
in 1930. There was more resistance to the establishment of an
inspectorate ('children's lives are being sacrificed to bureaucratic
delays of masculine rule', warned the Woman's Leader92), but
continued parliamentary pressure forced the government's
hand.93 At the Colonial Office's insistence, in 1931 the Hong
Kong government took the first steps towards establishing a
system of supervision, appointing a police inspector in charge of
mm tsai and hiring two Chinese women to assist him. These
women visited each registered mui tsai every six months to ensure
that the girl was still at the same address, that she was not
ill treated, and that wages were being paid. Throughout the
1930s the government carried out between fifty and a hundred
88
Lord Passfield to Sir Cecil Clementi, dispatch no. 215, 22 Aug 1929 P R O ,
CO 129/514/2.
89
T h e seventy-seven-page command paper, Hong Kong Papers Relative to the Mui-
Tsat Question, was thus published in N o v e m b e r 1929, although the Colonial Office
did take the precaution of including Churchill's pledge and several other documents
as well, since, as Sir Gilbert Grindle p u t it, 'the more matter we p u t in, the less
attention any particular passage attracts'. Minute by Sir Gilbert Grindle, 3 Aug. 1929
P R O , C O 129/514/2
90
Sir Cecil Clementi to Lord Passfield, dispatch no 538, 18 D e c 1929 (with
comments by Edward Gent and Walter Ellis, 5 F e b . 1930, by Sir Gilbert Grindle,
13 Feb. 1930, by D r u m m o n d Shiels, 13 Feb. 1930, and by Lord Passfield, 14 F e b
1930); also Lord Passfield to officer administering the government, 5 Mar. 1930 all
in P R O , C O 129/522/6
91
John Harris to Clara Haslewood, 7 Feb. 1930 R H L , ASSP, box G362.
92
'Child Slavery in a British C r o w n Colony', The Woman's Leader, xxiu (22 M a y
1931), 123.
93
Further parliamentary questions were followed up by a more substantial debate
led by Sir John Simon (briefed by the Haslewoods) on 11 May and yet more questions,
see esp. 5 Hansard, ccln, cols. 925-57 (11 May 1931); also cols. 605-10 (House of
Lords debates, 26 Mar 1931). Clara Haslewood to John Harris, 8 May 1931: RHL,
ASSP, box G363
prosecutions annually under the mui tsai ordinance, mostly for

some technical contravention, but occasionally for ill-treatment,
assault or non-payment of wages.94 Finally, the Colonial Office
saw to it that legislation was passed and an administrative appar-
atus aimed at protecting the mui tsai established in other British
colonies with significant Chinese populations — including the
Straits Settlements, the Federated Malay States, and Johore.
What the Colonial Office did not insist upon, however, was
that the Hong Kong government set up a general system of
registration for all transferred children, for which the Haslewoods
and their allies were now clamouring. Thus, having declared the
practice of engaging any additional mm tsai illegal, after six
months the Hong Kong government duly closed its register,
defining the group on its books as a protected, but vanishing,
class. The government agreed, in other words, to 'protect' that
restricted group of girls whose employers had complied with (or
been aware of) the obligation to register them; what they declined
to do was to take responsibility for all minor children living apart
from their parents. Reformers, by contrast, were convinced not
only that unregistered mui tsai still existed but also that children
would continue to be purchased for domestic or sexual service so
long as transfers of minors per se were not regulated (and, judging
from Jaschok's oral histories, one would have to conclude that
their fears — if not their optimism about government interven-
tion — were justified). Yet the fall of the Labour government in
August 1931 had deprived the campaign of some of its most
stalwart voices in the House, while the Haslewoods had fallen
out with the Anti-Slavery Society over plans to celebrate the
centenary of slave emancipation.95 Increasingly isolated, the
Haslewoods used their occasional journal — titled, provocatively,
Slave Market News — to denounce not only the Colonial Office's
inaction but also what they took to be the Anti-Slavery Society's
sexual bias, calling on the Society to pay as much attention to the
slavery of women as to the slavery of men.96 By the mid-1930s,
94
See the reports on the working of the Female Domestic Service Ordinance in the
annual Hong Kong Administrative Reports, app C, 'Report of the Secretary for
Chinese Affairs'
95
There is a long and unpleasant correspondence running from February 1932
through 1933 in RHL, ASSP, box G363 'I wish the Haslewoods were not growing
into "scolds"', Lady Simon wrote to Harris in exasperation. Lady Kathleen Simon to
John Harris, 21 Oct 1933 ibid
96
Slave Market News, l ( A p r 1933), copy in P R O , C O 129/542/10.
then, there was something of a stalemate, with the women's

organizations and the Haslewoods unreconciled, the Anti-Slavery
Society quiescent, and the Hong Kong government blandly issu-
ing its biannual reports showing a steady decrease in the numbers
of mm tsai, as the girls registered in 1930 gradually grew up, ran
away or married.97
Ill
THE LEAGUE AND THE MATERNALIST MOMENT
If the first round of debate cast the mui tsai question as a conflict
between cultural relativists and reforming imperialists, the second
seemed to divide defenders of patriarchal authority from femi-
nists. Yet for all their ferocity, these arguments have an air of
unreality about them. Participants faithfully followed their
scripted parts, stressing either the obligation to 'uplift' native
populations or the impracticality, even danger, of efforts to trans-
form alien cultures. But for all the inclusion of women's voices,
the circle of debate remained a narrow one. In a decade in which
Indian and African political leaders travelled to Britain to state
their own case, no forum existed to confront parliament's meddle-
some humanitarians with those Chinese interests they claimed to
represent.
Yet such contacts and debates did begin to happen in the 1930s,
especially through the agency of the League of Nations, which,
Western-dominated though it was, nevertheless brought Western
and some non-Western governments together on terms of formal
equality. Nor were such discussions carried on by officials alone,
for the League was flanked by an array of advisory committees
on slavery, child welfare and the traffic in women — committees
staffed, not coincidentally, by precisely those anti-slavery activists
and feminists whom the Colonial Office was trying so desperately
to ignore.98 Such advisory committees had few formal powers,
but they could conduct inquiries, collect information, publicize
their findings and make recommendations, and member states
97
The number of mm tsai on the Hong Kong government's register fell from over
4,000 in 1930 to 2,263 by the end of 1934, and to 1,396 by the end of 1937; see the
statistics in the annual 'Report of the Secretary for Chinese Affairs' in Hong Kong
Administrative Reports.
98
On the place and work of the social committees more generally, see F. P. Walters,
A History of the League of Nations (London, 1952), esp. ch 16.
found their interventions difficult to control. If campaigners saw

their influence in the Commons decline, then, they found in
international organizations an alternative forum in which to raise
questions of imperial rule.
The Haslewoods and the Anti-Slavery Society had raised the
possibility of League action on the question of mui tsai with
officials in Geneva (and especially with Dame Rachel Crowdy,
the formidable head of the League's Social Questions section) in
the early 1920s and again in 1929." By the early 1930s, the
League was encroaching on the matter from two directions. First,
its Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women had moved
beyond an initial focus on European prostitution rings and
licensed brothels to begin investigating the question of the market
in girls in the East.100 The Colonial Office had in fact bowed to
feminist and League pressure and ended governmental regulation
of brothels and inspection of prostitutes throughout its Far
Eastern colonies by the early 1930s (with drastic effects on rates
of venereal disease in the Royal Navy), but trafficking was still
believed to be widespread.101 A three-person travelling League
Commission of Enquiry into the Traffic in Women, which
included one woman member, thus swept through Hong Kong
99
Crowdy was transparently eager to use her committees to force governments to
improve social conditions in the colonies. For early approaches to her, see Travers
Buxton to Clara Haslewood, 14 Dec. 1920, John Harris to Clara Haslewood, 23 Dec.
1920, and John Hams to Dame Rachel Crowdy, 14 Jan. 1921- RHL, ASSP, box
G361. John Harris to Dame Rachel Crowdy, 9 June 1921, and Travers Buxton and
John Harris to Eric Drummond, 15 June 1921: League of Nations Archives, Geneva
(hereafter LN Archives), box R654, file 12/13795/13795; Clara Haslewood to Dame
Rachel Crowdy, 21 Aug 1929 LN Archives, box R3056, file llb/25608/25608. As a
rule, the League would not respond to individual pleas, but it was difficult for
governments to bar League officials or advisors nominated by groups given statutory
representation from raising whatever questions they pleased — although they could
make it clear that these individuals did not represent the British government, as they
did with Sir George Maxwell in the early 1930s. The Colonial Office thus tried to
shape League officials' response to the Haslewoods' approach, see Malcolm Delevigne
to Sir H. Lambert, 23 May 1921, Sir Gilbert Grindle to Malcolm Delevigne, 7 June
1921: PRO, CO 129/467, file 25160.
100
See esp the following publications of the League's Traffic in Women and
Children Committee Minutes of the Seventh Session (Doc no. 1928.IV. 15, Geneva,
1928) 22-5; Minutes of the Eighth Session (Doc no 1929. IV 6, Geneva, 1929), 60-2,
Resolutions Adopted by the Assembly, the Council and the Traffic in Women and Children
Committee, 1920-1929 (Doc. no. 1929. IV 10, Geneva, 1929), 13-15
101
For this abolition in Hong Kong, see Mmers, Hong Kong under Imperial Rule,
ch. 10, Hoe, Private Life, ch. 21. British colonial authorities' regulation of brothels
and mspection of prostitutes in Malaya is well described m Leonore Manderson,
Sickness and the State Health and Illness in Colonial Malaya, 1870-1940 (Cambridge,
1996), 166-200
in 1931; its conclusions, issued a year later, were not designed to

ease the minds of either the British or Nationalist Chinese govern-
ments. Not only was there an extensive and well-organized
market in girls (and especially Chinese girls) operating throughout
the East, the commission claimed, but this traffic was organized
largely from Hong Kong. While the commission did conclude
that the mm tsai system, 'where it is carried out strictly in accord-
ance with . . . customs', did not serve as a form of recruitment
for prostitution,102 other forms of transfer did so: many prosti-
tutes were found to have been kidnapped or 'adopted' as children.
Registration of all transferred girls was thus back on the agenda
less because such girls could be disguised mui tsai than because
then: fate was likely to be (as the commissioners saw it) even
worse.
The League was involved from a second direction as well.
Through the Slavery Convention of 1926, all League members
had committed themselves to put down not merely the slave trade
but also slavery 'in all its forms'; in the 1930s, an Advisory
Committee of Experts met to assess their progress. Out of these
deliberations emerged a new consensus on what, precisely, consti-
tuted slavery and on the responsibilities of various governments
to combat it. This was not a consensus that pleased Nina Boyle,
for it differentiated sharply between women transferred for mar-
riage and those transferred purely for labour. The Advisory
Committee thus agreed (with Lord Lugard) that it would not
concern itself with 'native marriage' or concubinage: the payment
of bride price, far from being a form of slavery (it wrote in 1935),
constituted 'an essential guarantee that husband and wife will
respect their duties and thus tends to give a certain stability to
the family life'.103 The mui tsai system, however, was accepted
by the League to be a form of enslavement under the guise of
adoption,104 and in the mid-1930s the Advisory Committee began
102
League of Nations, Commission of Enquiry into Traffic in Women and Children
in the East, Report to the Council (Doc. no. 1932.IV.8, Geneva, 1932), 40 One member
of the commission also wrote a confidential report for the president of the League's
Slavery Commission, placing mm tsai in the context of the broader problem of
transferred children throughout China. See Dr Karol Pindor, 'Remnants of Slavery
in China', confidential note, 16 Aug. 1932, and Dr Karol Pmdor to Albrecht Gohr,
25 Aug. 1932- LN Archives, box R2353, file 6B/38636/2053.
103
League of Nations, Report of the Advisory Committee of Experts on Slavery (2nd
session of the Committee, 1-10 Apr 1935, doc no 1935. VLB. 1, Geneva, 1935), 17
104
This formulation had been adopted when the League first hammered out its
Convention on Slavery in the 1920s, see League of Nations, Temporary Slavery
(ami onp 190)
monitoring efforts to suppress it, not only in Hong Kong, but

also the Straits Settlements, the Malay States and China. Under
the aegis of the League, then, the mm tsai question lost some of
its feminist edge but also became more pressing, as an issue that
had aroused domestic controversy came to be redefined as a
legitimate focus for international action.105
With purchase for domestic service, but not purchase for mar-
riage, defined by international agreement as 'slavery', Sir George
Maxwell, Britain's representative to the Slavery Committee,
urged the British government to examine the mui tsai question
again. Maxwell had been British resident in various Malay states
for some twenty years and was acquainted with the mui tsai
system as practised by the Chinese communities there; a vain and
argumentative man, he was eager to find an issue through which
to make his name. Having decided that earlier attempts to abolish
such transactions had failed because all parties involved consid-
ered them valid,106 in 1934 he outlined a scheme that would have
treated the mui tsai contract as a form of indenture: the girl's
obligation to work for the employer would be recognized and
enforced, but she would be paid wages, allowed to redeem herself
through savings, placed under government protection and, in all
cases, freed at the age of eighteen.107 Maxwell sent his suggestions
to the Colonial Office, which, in view of his eminence, could not
but ask the governors of Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements,
and the high commissioner of the Federated Malay States, to
(n 104 com )
Commission, Letter from the Chairman of the Commission (Doc no 1925 VI B 1,
Geneva, 1925) It may have been accepted largely because the Colonial Office had
assured the League that the system had been abolished in Hong Kong and all mm tsai
registered, see League of Nations, Question of Slavery Memorandum from the British
Government on the Subject of 'Mm Tsai' in Hong Kong (Doc no 1925 VLB 3, Geneva,
1925) At one Commission meeting, Sir Frederick Lugard thus noted that the system
of mui tsai had been abolished m Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements but persisted
in China See the minutes of the meeting of 18 July 1925, in League of Nations,
Temporary Slavery Commission, Minutes of the Second Session (Doc. no. 1925. VI B 9,
Geneva, 1925), 56
105
See esp League of Nations, Report of the Advisory Committee of Experts,
45-79, 92.
106
Maxwell had already reached this view in 1929; see Sir George Maxwell to
William Lunn, 23 Sept 1929 PRO, CO 129/514/3
107
Sir George Maxwell to the Colonial Office, 20 Apr. 1934, enclosing memoranda
on the mm tsai system in Hong Kong and Malaya PRO, CO 882/16 Maxwell's
memoranda were reprinted in The Mm- Tsai System in Hong Kong and Malaya Papers
(1934-1939) (Foreign and Colonial Office, Confidential Prmt, Eastern Affairs,
no 169), 1-28
108
review them. The Hong Kong governor appointed a commit-
tee, the Commons got the Colonial Office to promise to publish
its report, and the ball was, once again, rolling.
Sadly for the Colonial Office, the governor's committee proved
to be the most nit-picking and tactless thus far: not only did it
conclude pessimistically that the sale of girls, while 'undesirable',
could not be arrested through government action, it also ques-
tioned Maxwell's expertise and delivered itself of the view that
further attempts at abolition 'are to be deprecated'.109 Maxwell
and the women reformers were furious,110 and J. H. Thomas,
who had taken over as colonial secretary in 1935, was fairly
shocked as well. Thomas made it clear in the Commons that he
did not agree that the system could not be put down,111 and in
March 1936 appointed a travelling commission to examine the
whole question anew. The three-person commission, which
included one representative chosen by the Anti-Slavery Society
and Edith Picton-Turbervill to represent the 'women's point of
view', was transparently constituted to deliver a strong report.
Thomas made it clear in the Commons that no concerns about
'Chinese customs' would prevent the government from acting.112
With the appointment of this commission the government
agreed to bypass its 'men on the ground' — yet it was the choice
of Edith Picton-Turbervill in particular that raised reformers1
hopes. 'We have often been in touch with & met Miss Picton
Turbervill', Hugh Haslewood wrote confidently to John Harris
of the Anti-Slavery Society, 'and feel she will be excellent'.113
Picton-Turbervill had been both a Young Women's Christian
108
'Mui Tsai: Certain Proposals (of Sir George Maxwell's) which Are to Be
Considered by a Commission Appointed by the Governor of Hong Kong', n.d . PRO,
CO 129/551/2, Cunhffe-Lister to Sir William Peel, 7 July 1934, in Mut-Tsai in Hong
Kong Report of the Committee Appointed by His Excellency the Governor Sir William
Peel, K.C.MG , K.B E, Parliamentary Papers, 1935-6 [Cmd 5121], vu, 37 (this
committee was known as the Loseby committee).
109
Mm- Tsai in Hong Kong Report of the Committee, 2 4 .
110
Maxwell responded at length to every objection raised by the Loseby committee,
see Sir George Maxwell to the earl of Plymouth, then under-secretary of state for the
Colonies, 13 Dec. 1935- PRO, CO 129/551/2 For feminists' responses, see esp. British
Commonwealth League, Report of Twelfth Annual Conference, 53-4.
111
5 Hansard, cccvm, col 1769 (19 Feb 1936)
112
John Harris to Sir George Maxwell, 18 Feb 1936- RHL, ASSP, box G364; 5
Hansard, cccx, cols 414-15 (18 Mar 1936).
113
H. R. Haslewood to John Harris, 19 Mar 1936: RHL, ASSP, box G364. Picton-
Turbervill also assured a deputation of women's organizations that the commission
intended to put a stop to the system of mui tsai. See British Commonwealth League,
Report of Twelfth Annual Conference, 54
Association mission worker in India and a Labour MP; robust,

deeply religious and determinedly single, she epitomized the
world of reformist feminism. When Eleanor Rathbone urged
J. H. Thomas to add a second woman to the commission, one
with a previous knowledge of China, Thomas responded drily
that he was sure 'that Miss Picton Turbervill will be able to hold
her own'.114 And indeed she proved utterly reliable: neither offi-
cial testimony, nor three months' travel to Hong Kong and
Malaya, nor the defection of her colleagues to the 'official view',
shook her belief that the colonial authorities must, whatever the
cost, ensure the well-being of all transferred children in fact as
well as in law. The issue, she told her colleagues, was not whether
the government was assiduous in prosecuting abuses that came
to its attention, but rather whether any adequate machinery
existed to detect and protect children separated from their famil-
ies in general.11S She had concluded that there was not and, to
the annoyance of her colleagues and the Colonial Office civil
servants, wrote a minority report recommending the registration
of all children transferred before the age of twelve, an extension
of police powers to detect the unregistered, and an expanded
staff to inspect and protect them.116
Picton-Turbervill thus supported the reform campaign's key
demands; in important ways, however, she rejected its assump-
tions. As we have seen, by the early 1930s, both feminist
reformers and the Hong Kong government's officialdom had
adopted a framework pitting feminist reform against a respect
for 'Chinese custom': the mm tsai system had, whether for good
or ill, been denned as an intrinsic — almost innate — aspect of
Chinese family life. Picton-Turbervill, however, questioned this
view, exposing the impossibly idealized and monolithic construc-
tion of 'Chinese culture' upon which it was based. 'I think that
as far as Hong Kong and Malaya are concerned, we must utter a
caveat in speaking of Chinese custom', she told her colleagues,
'because it happens in these days when things are in such a state
of flux, with western ideas pouring into Malaya and Hong Kong,
114
Rathbone clearly had her old friend Margery Fry in mind 5 Hansard, cccx, col
415 (18 Mar 1936).
115
RHL, ASSP, box G364, 'Verbatim Report of a Deputation from the Anti-
Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society to the Mui Tsai Commission', 12 Nov
1936, p 20
116
See 'Minority Report', in Mm Tsai in Hong Kong and Malaya. Report of
Commission (Colonial Office rept, cxxv, London, 1937), 214-48.
that Chinese customs are quoted by an authority and, in practice,

the opposite happens'.117 China and Hong Kong were not, in
Picton-Turbervill's mind, static societies, and her report was
relatively free of the orientalist flourishes that decorated the much
more elaborate exposition of her colleagues — one of whom
claimed privately to be motivated only by his 'genuine sympathy
with the savage'.118
But if Picton-Turbervill rejected the Colonial Office's assump-
tions of ineluctable cultural difference, she also tried to avoid the
racial reasoning and obsessive fixation on sex underlying the
reform campaign. Thus, unlike the Haslewoods, who deliberately
exploited reports of cruelty, Picton-Turbervill was careful to say
that she did not want 'to suggest that there is more cruelty in
Hong Kong and Malaya than elsewhere', only that children separ-
ated from parents were likely to suffer.119 Aware that she and
her fellow-commissioners had not learnt much from the Chinese
children they had sought (through interpreters) to interview, she
also had a realistic view of the limits to outsiders' effectiveness,
concluding that only 'a thoroughly experienced Chinese woman'
could win the children's trust.120 Even more remarkably, she
broke with the campaign's prudishness and sexual Victorianism,
forthrightly acknowledging that prostitution itself was neither
criminal nor necessarily coercive, and that reformers' concern
was justified only because girls were being 'adopted' into this life
when too young freely to choose it.121 An issue that had been
defined largely in terms of racial opposition or sexual exploitation
thus became, in Picton-Turbervill's report, one of the appropriate
treatment and care of children — and on the need for action in
this area, she insisted, the majority of both Chinese and English
witnesses were agreed.122
Picton-Turbervill's report provided a practical basis for
renewed activism, but it also reflected a wider shift in mood. In
the late 1920s and early 1930s, under the influence of Katherine
Mayo, Nina Boyle and Mrs Haslewood, feminist organizations
had been quick to blame women's subjection in the colonies on
117
'Verbatim Report of a Deputation', 12 Nov 1936, p. 13
118
W A Willis to Sir John Shuckburgh, 8 Dec. 1936: PRO, CO 825/21/5
119
'Minority Report', in Mm Tsai in Hong Kong and Malaya, 233.
120
Edith Picton-Turbervill, Life is Good: An Autobiography (London, 1939),
299-300.
121
'Minority Report', in Mm Tsai in Hong Kong and Malaya, 238-41
122
Ibid., 241-5.
colonial men; by the mid-1930s, however, having heard a good

deal of criticism from Indian women in particular, they began to
shift in a new and more culturally sensitive direction. Even at
feminist conferences, some women began to question Nina
Boyle's easy equation of bride price and slavery, and to ask
whether African women were, in fact, more effectively 'enslaved'
by the migrant labour and taxation systems operating in Southern
and East Africa.123 Moreover, as negotiations over constitutional
devolution in India proceeded and links between British and
Indian women's organizations multiplied, prominent MPs like
Rathbone and key organizations like the British Commonwealth
League became more pragmatic, working largely to improve
women's franchise within the new constitutional arrangements.
British feminists no longer assumed that colonial governments
could transform marriage practices and domestic behaviours by
legislative fiat, and looked instead to expanded social and welfare
services to improve (if gradually) indigenous women's opportun-
ities and power. Recognizing that more funds and better services
might do more for bonded girls than legislation alone, women's
organizations rallied behind Picton-Turbervill's report.
And if wider contacts and experiences had pushed reformers
in a more pragmatic direction, for the first time we can detect
fissures in the ranks of the permanent officialdom as well. William
Ormsby-Gore, who had succeeded J. H. Thomas as colonial
secretary in late 1936, told his officials bluntly that the commis-
sion's report had revealed 'practices which no Government
responsible to Parliament here can tolerate',124 but by early 1937
even some of those officials had changed their tune. Thus, while
H. R. Cowell, head of the Eastern Department, agreed with the
commission's majority that further registration of children would
be 'politically objectionable and administratively impracticable',
his colleague G. E. J. Gent ventured to suggest that these commis-
sioners had not been 'so realistic or so ready to face the substantial
123
See esp the attacks by Mrs Macgregor Ross, wife of the important anti-
lmpenahst William Macgregor Ross, on a British Commonwealth League resolution
equating bride price with slavery (which, she said, showed 'a complete misunderstand-
ing of African hfe')> and by Miss Quaynor, an African nurse, on Boyle's know-
ledge of Africa at a British Commonwealth League conference in 1936 British
Commonwealth League, Report of Eleventh Annual Conference (London, 1935), 37-9,
British Commonwealth League, Report of Twelfth Annual Conference, 36-8
124
Note by William Ormsby-Gore, 19 Mar 1937- PRO, CO 825/22/8
'CHILD SLAVERY1 IN HONG KONG 1917-1941 195
125
issue' as Picton-Turbervill had been. Divisions surfaced among
the colonial governors as well: although the Hong Kong govern-
ment, as expected, decisively rejected Picton-Turbervill's
report,126 in September 1937 Sir Shenton Thomas, the new gov-
ernor of the Straits Settlements, independently decided to support
it.127 'Personally, I think that Sir Shenton Thomas, who was
equally confronted with the adverse verdicts of the principal
Chinese representatives locally, has taken the right line', Gent
minuted.128 Ormsby-Gore agreed, and the Colonial Office began
to press the Hong Kong government to follow Thomas's lead.
How do we explain this final shift in policy? Certainly Picton-
TurbervilPs political skills helped to bring it about. Socially elite
by birth and on good terms with prominent politicians of all
parties, Picton-Turbervill proved remarkably adept, maintaining
a cordial correspondence with the Hong Kong and Straits gov-
ernors and mending fences with the Colonial Office — which,
although initially sceptical of her abilities and anxious about her
report,129 soon found her a welcome relief from the paranoid
Hugh Haslewood and the resentful and devious Maxwell.130 More
importantly, by placing the mm tsai question within the frame-
work of child welfare rather than sexual exploitation, Picton-
Turbervill offered officials a chance to respond to what had
become an international cause celebre without calling the entire
principle of patriarchal authority into question. Clearly identify-
ing the mui tsai with the commonality of 'at risk' children rather
than the commonality of subjected women, Sir Shenton Thomas
wrote to Ormsby-Gore that 'the principle laid down by Miss
125
Note by H. R Cowell, 27 May 1937 PRO, CO 825/23/3. Note by G E. J Gent,
8 June 1937: PRO, CO 825/22/8
126
N L Smith, officer administering the government, to William Ormsby-Gore,
17 July 1937, reporting the unanimous rejection of the 'Minority Report' by both the
District Watch Committee and the Executive Council: PRO, CO 825/22/9.
127
Sir Shenton Thomas to William Ormsby-Gore, 26 Sept. 1937 PRO, CO 825/22/9
128
Note by G E J Gent, 14 Oct. 1937: PRO, CO 825/22/9.
129
See note by Sir John Shuckburgh, 12 Dec 1936: PRO, CO 825/21/5
130
Permanent officials had learned in the 1920s to treat Hugh Haslewood with kid
gloves, and as they became aware of Maxwell's attempts to play off officials m Geneva
and Britain against each other, they also began to treat Maxwell with 'great caution'.
See notes by H R Cowell and Sir John Shuckburgh, 17 and 18 Mar. 1937: PRO,
CO 825/22/8 Picton-Turbervill herself expressed some frustration at her fellow
reformers' pnckhness and intransigence, admitting to Gent of the Colonial Office that
Haslewood was 'quite insensitive to any arguments', since 'if ever the Mui Tsai
problem were solved, he would lose his only interest in life', and to Cowell that there
was perhaps a 'lacuna' in Maxwell's intelligence. Note by G. E. J Gent, 23 Mar.
1937: PRO, CO 825/23/3; note by H. R CoweU, 21 Feb. 1939. CO 825/27/6.
Picton Turberville [sic] is that adequate protection should be

afforded to all children, not merely mui tsai, and there can be no
doubt that she is right'.131 In 1938 Sir Geoffry Northcote, the
new governor of Hong Kong, agreed. The problem was less the
specific institution of mm tsai servitude than the 'deliberate
exploitation of a large number of girl children' more generally,
he concluded — and he assured Picton-Turbervill privately of
his determination to intervene on behalf of all vulnerable children
and not merely the mui tsai.132 This new emphasis on child welfare
influenced policy even outside the formal empire. Thus, while
the Shanghai Municipal Council in 1937 responded to League
pressure by appointing Eleanor M. Hinder, an experienced social
worker, as a 'supervisor of mm tsai', after surveying local condi-
tions and reading the British reports Hinder also concluded that
'mui tsai were but one group of transferred girls' and had
her position and responsibilities widened to encompass child
protection more generally.133
Yet neither the new pragmatism in the reformers' camp nor
the appeal of the 'child welfare' framework alone can account for
the change in tone of the Colonial Office's internal minutes and
memoranda — a change audible in areas beyond the mui tsai
question.134 The evolving international context was important as
well: just as reforming women came to moderate their approach
to imperial questions when challenged by Indian women, so too
the 'official mind' responded to the winds of change blowing
from Geneva and the East. For the League's involvement in
questions of children's welfare had grown steadily throughout
the 1920s and 1930s, leading some of its officials and representa-
tives to rethink their earlier tendency to treat the mui tsai system
131
Sir Shenton Thomas to William Ormsby-Gore, 26 Sept 1937: PRO, CO 825/22/9
Manderson, writing on health policy in Malaya, points out that while colonial authorit-
ies paid some attention to issues of reproduction and maternal health from the turn
of the century, the Colonial Office itself became more interested in such questions in
the 1930s. See Manderson, Sickness and the State, 201-29.
132
Sir Geoffry Northcote to H R. Cowell, 1 Apr 1938, Sir Geoffry Northcote to
Edith Picton-Turbervill, 7 May 1938, and Edith Picton-Turbervill to William
Ormsby-Gore, 16 May 1938. PRO, CO 825/24/9.
133
Eleanor M Hinder, chief, Industrial Section, Shanghai Municipal Council, to
Dr E E. Ekstrand, Geneva, 21 June 1937 and 4 Jan 1939: LN Archives, box R4665,
file llb/643/643
134
Manderson, for example, notes that in the 1930s and (especially) after the
outbreak of war, officials had come round to the view that the continuation of the
empire would depend on Britain's ability to deliver social services and unproved
living conditions to colonial populations, see Manderson, Sickness and the State, 240-2
as an isolated and peculiarly egregious problem. By 1937 Maxwell

himself had decided that the whole question of transferred chil-
dren could be better addressed by the League's Advisory
Committee on Social Questions than by its Slavery Committee,135
and Dr Chi-tsai Hoo, China's permanent delegate to the League,
agreed. Clearly sensitive to imputations about China's modernity
at a moment when the Nationalists were already embroiled in
war with Japan, Hoo insisted that his government did not tolerate
slavery and wished henceforth to see any concerns about trans-
ferred children discussed under the rubric of child welfare and
by those League committees that included a Chinese representa-
tive.136 In 1939, then, the League's Advisory Committee on Social
Questions (of which Hoo was a member) announced that it would
begin looking at the mm tsai question in cooperation with other
League bodies.137
The Colonial Office, however, had nothing to fear from this
move. British officials had always taken the tactic of complying
with League requests for information, from the mid-1930s delu-
ging both the League's slavery and social committees with lengthy
reports on their efforts to suppress mm tsai slavery and protect
children throughout the Far Eastern colonies. Now, moreover,
by accepting Picton-Turbervill's report and committing them-
selves to further child welfare legislation, the Colonial Office had
retained the initiative and pre-empted any unilateral League
action. The League's permanent officials — if not Maxwell —
themselves acknowledged the British government's leadership on
the mui tsai question, asking privately for agreement from London
before following up on Maxwell's request for further scrutiny of
the issue.138
Aware that reforming zeal rather than respect for local custom
would be seen in parliament and Geneva as the best justification
for colonial rule, officials in the late 1930s were insisting on their
135
Maxwell's sensible argument that the Social Questions and Slavery Committees
could fruitfully collaborate on the mm tsai question was undermined only by his
typically ham-fisted treatment of League officials. See the extensive correspondence
with (and about) him in LN Archives, box R4151, file 6b/30224/2663
136
E. E. Ekstrand, 'Note de conversation', 11 Jan 1939, and Dr Chi-tsai Hoo to
E. E Ekstrand, director of the Social Questions section, 12 June 1939: LN Archives,
box R4151, file 6B/30224/2663.
137
E. de Haller, director of the Mandates section, to Sir George Maxwell, 4 July
1939. LN Archives, box R4151, file 6B/30224/2663.
138
E E Ekstrand, director of the Social Questions section, to S W. Harris of the
Home Office, 16 Mar 1938. LN Archives, box R4151, file 6B/30224/2663
commitment to social reform, even contrasting favourably then-

own activism on the mui tsai question with the record of the
Chinese government. They also, however, ceased to paint Chinese
culture as so monolithically conservative. Formerly only too ready
to defer to the combined entreaties of Hong Kong's government
and business elites, they now took more seriously the views of
those who warned, as the bishop of Hong Kong did, of the greater
danger of ignoring progressive Chinese opinion and of letting the
colony lag behind Nationalist China 'in courageous and far-seeing
reform'.139 Thus, when W. A. Willis, one of Picton-Turbervill's
fellow-commissioners, mounted a rearguard action against more
extensive child welfare legislation by reviving the old argument
about the government's responsibility to respect 'Chinese cul-
ture', H. R. Cowell, formerly one of his supporters, dismissed
him curtly as a 'die-hard' whose criticisms were 'not convin-
cing'.140 Since Cowell, along with most of the Colonial Office's
staff, had relied for decades upon just such 'cultural' arguments,
Willis might well have been nonplussed to hear them brushed so
lightly aside. By the late 1930s, however, officials had learnt that
they could best defend imperialism in a democratic age by appro-
priating a rhetoric of social progress — of which this new commit-
ment to child welfare formed just one, but not an insignificant,
part.
In 1939, then, legislation requiring registration of transferred
children was passed by the Straits Settlements Legislative Council
and several new inspectors were appointed.141 And even in Hong
Kong, where local opposition succeeded in limiting registration
to adopted daughters — some 3,000 were registered by 1940 —
the government did introduce a comprehensive system of inspec-
139
R O Hall, bishop of Hong Kong, to Sir John Shuckburgh, 12 Nov 1936: PRO,
CO 825/20/11
140
W. A Willis to Colonial Office, 6 May 1938, and note by H. R. Cowell, 31 May
1938 PRO, CO 825/24/9
141
Extract, Straits Settlements Legislative Council Proceedings, 24 Apr 1939, and
Sir Shenton Thomas to Malcolm MacDonald, 22 Sept. 1939. PRO, CO 825/27/6.
Although the child welfare service was strengthened — to the evident disappointment
of the Colonial Office, which pointed out that 'exceptional importance is . rightly
attached to this measure' — the Straits Settlements postponed registration because of
the war Telegram, Colonial Office to governor of Straits Settlement, 28 July 1941
PRO, CO 825/30/3 See also Lord Lloyd to officer administering the government,
Straits Settlement, 6 Dec. 1940 PRO, CO 825/29/6; Sir Shenton Thomas to Lord
Moyne, 13 Sept 1941. PRO, CO 825/29/7
142
tion and control. To carry out these tasks and indeed to take
over the supervision of all work concerning women and girls, the
Hong Kong government hired a new 'lady assistant' to the secre-
tary for Chinese affairs, who was put in charge of a staff of three
European police officers and five Chinese women inspectors;143
by 1940, the number of inspectors had grown to ten.144
'Maternalism', it seems, had triumphed: the Hong Kong govern-
ment had turned the care of women and children over to a British
woman, seconded by several Chinese women, who maintained a
system of supervision designed to protect their young charges
from kidnappers and procuresses. But then the war came, Hong
Kong and Malaya were occupied, and trafficking — albeit for
different clients — once again flourished.
CONCLUSIONS AND CAVEATS

Although scarcely remembered today, the controversy over the
mm tsai system in Hong Kong was one of the most protracted
colonial policy disputes of the years between the wars. The issue
was a persistent thorn in the side of most of the era's colonial
secretaries, involving them in many hours of parliamentary
debates and, at times, bitter quarrels with their Far Eastern
governors. It absorbed the attention of League committees, gal-
vanized established humanitarian lobbies, and strengthened the
determination of feminist leaders and women's organizations to
play a central role in the elaboration of colonial policy.
And in this effort, the anti-wwi tsai campaign gradually gained
the upper hand. Initially, Hong Kong officials were able to out-
manoeuvre their opponents by deploying a rhetoric of cultural
difference, but when they threatened a rebellion where none
could be manufactured, they seriously overplayed their hand.
'Imperial feminists', by contrast, were able to ally strategically
with other groups eager to make their influence felt and commit-
ted to a rhetoric of 'progress' — Labour in 1929, the League of
Nations in the mid-1930s, and the Anti-Slavery Society through-
out — to keep the issue alive. In time, such alliances — and, still
more, the developing contacts between women's organizations
142
For a comparison of legislation m Malaya and in Hong Kong, see Miners, Hong
Kong under Imperial Rule, 184-90.
143
On Phyllis Harrop, the new lady assistant secretary, see Hoe, Private Life,
264-5, Hong Kong Administrative Reports (1937), p. C3.
144
N L. Smith to Malcolm MacDonald, 21 Feb 1940: PRO, CO 825/29/7
throughout the empire — reshaped the feminist programme, with
an earlier call for a comprehensive assault by imperial authorities
on indigenous marital and sexual practices giving way to support
for a more gradual extension of social services for women and
children. And as reformers' rhetoric shifted and scrutiny by
international organizations grew, the Colonial Office itself came
to see the strategic value of intervention, ultimately introducing
measures designed to protect children across Hong Kong and
Malaya from domestic and sexual exploitation.
On one level, then, the campaign over the mui tsai question
appears significant because it resulted in the implantation of a
rudimentary system of maternalist social intervention into a colo-
nial setting. Yet if we are tempted to argue that this legislation
led to the sort of 'policing of families' that historians have docu-
mented in the welfare regimes of the West, recent ethnographic
work on Chinese family life in the Hong Kong area should con-
vince us of our error. For when Maria Jaschok began to interview
former mm tsai there in the late 1970s and 1980s, she found that
none of those purchased or transferred in the 1920s and 1930s
had ever heard of the mm tsai legislation, and only one — whose
master was a public employee and hence fearful of detection —
had ever been registered.145 The Hong Kong government had,
after all, never been much interested in such 'policing' — and
indeed, when the mm tsai commission visited Hong Kong in 1937,
they found no evidence that the proclamation 'freeing' the mm
tsai in 1923 had ever been translated into Chinese or made publicly
available.146 And while further research in Singapore and Malaya
as well as Hong Kong has brought to light the occasional case of
a mm tsai inspired to claim her freedom after contact with a
woman inspector,147 social workers themselves were well aware
of the very limited options available even to those who
'escaped'.148 At most, the new welfare legislation provided, as
did such Chinese institutions as the Po Leung Kuk, some recourse
145
Jaschok, Concubines and Bondservants, esp. 74-5
146
Mm Tsai in Hong Kong and Malaya, 64—5, 216
147
See, for example, Suzanne Miers ('with the cooperation of Janet Lim'), 'Mm
Tsai through the Eyes of the Victinv Janet Lim's Story of Bondage and Escape', ui
Jaschok and Miers (eds.), Women and Chinese Patriarchy
148
For which, see the fascinating recollections of one social worker who worked
among mm tsai in Singapore after the Second World War. Ko Choo Chin,
'Implementing Government Policy for the Protection of Women and Girls in
Singapore, 1948-66 Recollections of a Social Worker', in Jaschok and Miers (eds ),
Women and Chinese Patriarchy, esp 126—8.
for a particularly enterprising or fortunate child; it could not

transform, much less 'abolish', the servitude of children alto-
gether. From such research, and from corollary studies of Hong
Kong's hinterlands and the Canton Delta,149 one would have to
conclude that the practice of selling girl children declined only
gradually, and as much for economic as for political reasons.
Yet if the twenty-year effort of British reformers had only a
modest (if not insignificant) impact on the domestic relations it
was intended so thoroughly to reform, its impact on the percep-
tions and activities of political elites in Britain was a more pro-
found one. The Colonial Office and Hong Kong officialdom,
bested in this twenty-year battle, often viewed their rivals as 'a
lot of pretentious busy-bodies',150 entirely ignorant of imperial
interests and needs; had they taken a longer view, however, they
might have been grateful to them. Maternalist initiatives like
those over child marriage in India and bonded domestic labour
in China, I would argue, provided many members of Britain's
liberal elite with a basis for loyalty to and renewed engagement
with empire in an era in which empire was coming into question.
Judging from responses to the mui tsai campaign, the revulsion
from rule felt by George Orwell, Leonard Woolf and others was
very much a minority response; indeed, for many interested in
social reform, the empire appeared to offer a fruitful field tor
intervention. Women's activism, in other words, regardless of
specific outcomes, helped to make the interwar period into what
it was — a moment of intense and anxious engagement with
empire.
An account of their work fits, then, within a historiography
that is beginning to uncover the depth of that engagement. We
know that Britain's material interest in empire became ever more
significant as world recession forced an increased reliance on the
sterling area; lsl I would argue that its ideal interests were also
deeply engaged, if in new ways. The war, Amritsar, the emer-
gence of the League and the rise of colonial nationalism all posed
in stark terms the question of the meaning and legitimacy of
149
Ruble Watson, who conducted research in the village of Ha Tsuen m Hong
Kong's hinterland in 1977-8, also notes that mm tsai were found in village households
until after the Second World War. See Rubie Watson, 'Wives, Concubines and Maids',
esp 236, Stockard, Daughters of the Canton Delta, 27-30.
150
Memorandum by H. R. Cowell, 10 July 1934: PRO, CO 129/546/9
151
See P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism. Crisis and Deconstruction,
1914-90 (Harlow, 1993), esp. ch 10
empire: maternalism, the main track into which women's imperial

involvements were channelled during these years, helped to pro-
vide an answer. Maternalism was the feminine component of the
ideology of trusteeship, to which the League and the left were
devoted. Yet maternalism, like trusteeship, contained within it
an obvious tension. 'The problems of trusteeship', as the historian
Kenneth Robinson wrote more than thirty years ago, 'were the
problems of power, of the responsibilities of the strong to the
weak'.152 Faced with the problem of power, maternalists evoked
the ideal of protection, of power's responsible use. Steeped in
traditions of womanly social action, and (once enfranchised)
optimistic about the benevolence of the colonial state, maternalists
were quick to see systems of household visitation and bodily
inspection — precisely those systems they had deplored when
applied to British women — as reliable vehicles for social
improvement.
In this particular instance, the sheer incompetence of the Hong
Kong government, the support of progressive Chinese groups for
further mui tsai legislation, the involvement of the League, and
the unwillingness of more critical Hong Kong elites to strain
commercial alliances, meant that humanitarian and, later, official
intervention never appeared simply as a new stage in the deploy-
ment of imperial power. Neither administrators nor left-leaning
reformers were ever forced to choose between ideals of protection
and imperial stability, and maternalist intervention unfolded as a
relatively benign process. Shielded from political conflict, mater-
nalism metamorphosed into 'child welfare', a humanitarian ideal
retailed by international organizations and one that would win
the support of independent states once their colonial moment had
passed. In other contexts, however, maternalism could be an
explosive force, catalysing controversies over cultural integrity
and national self-determination that would only subside with the
demise of those ostensibly protective structures of imperial rule.
Harvard University Susan Pedersen
152
Kenneth Robinson, The Dilemmas of Trusteeship- Aspects of British Colonial Policy
between the Wars (London, 1965), 93

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© The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2001

in December, determined to rouse the conscience of the nation

that the British government was — like its lesser continental

structures and relations of servitude in pre-revolutionary China

women everywhere, especially in those lands where the British

sought to push colonial policy onto a more overtly humanitarian

in Hong Kong or not, he asked? And were they implying that he

preferred this 'cultural' argument. Staffed by cadets trained in

of transferred children. They had, of course, some practical argu-

organizations in Singapore and a number of Malay towns. The

'Chineseness' of such activists. The labour guilds, according to

any event undermined by their own belief in ineluctable cultural

measures can make it, this freedom must be real'.52 Prevarication

reason that the conservative Chinese elites most resistant to social

question" by the Feminist Societies'.70 With the Colonial Office

of the word 'slavery' and to construct themselves as a new eman-

all Chinese marriage and kinship arrangements involved payments

as well, and hence even more difficult to place in the dichotomy

as they were by fantasies of predatory males held at bay by

registration forthwith.88 To his officials' distress, Passfield also

prosecutions annually under the mui tsai ordinance, mostly for

then, there was something of a stalemate, with the women's

found their interventions difficult to control. If campaigners saw

in 1931; its conclusions, issued a year later, were not designed to

monitoring efforts to suppress it, not only in Hong Kong, but

Association mission worker in India and a Labour MP; robust,

that Chinese customs are quoted by an authority and, in practice,

colonial men; by the mid-1930s, however, having heard a good

Picton Turberville [sic] is that adequate protection should be

as an isolated and peculiarly egregious problem. By 1937 Maxwell

commitment to social reform, even contrasting favourably then-

CONCLUSIONS AND CAVEATS

for a particularly enterprising or fortunate child; it could not

empire: maternalism, the main track into which women's imperial

Harvard University Susan Pedersen

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