To date, most scholarly work on historical Hong Kong policing has focused on the relationship between the governing and governed within a local setting. This approach explains policing solely within the confines of the juxtaposition of the authoritarian power of the colonial government on the one hand with the individual rights and liberties of the colonized on the other. This chapter, which draws upon archival documents from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries showing how public media in Hong Kong were systematically censored, placed under police surveillance, and prosecuted for political reasons, argues that collaboration among the imperial empires to safeguard their interests in East Asia contributed significantly to Hong Kong policing during that period. Hence, this chapter argues that Hong Kong policing was historically not solely a matter of domestic authoritarian governance but also an issue of global geopolitical relevance. Analyzing colonial Hong Kong policing based on the conventional framework of human rights or colonial inequality and racism without considering the bigger picture of global and regional politics is, this chapter argues, seriously inadequate. The bigger picture is the political-economic situation of China, China’s relations with the major world powers, and those powers’ China strategies over time, as this chapter’s archival discovery will discuss.

Chapter 4 provides an overview of how early Republican (1912-28) and Nationalist (1928-49) criminal and civil codes changed the focus of parent–child relations. Republican criminal law maintained some parental privileges in an attenuated manner where children’s physical offense against parents was concerned. At the same time, the Republican court and law enforcement reprimanded and punished abusive or irresponsible parents, and occasionally took away minor children from parents who were deemed disqualified based on neighbors' reports. Republican law also removed the label of filial rebellion from children’s accusation of parents, supporting children’s defense of their interests in defiance of parents. The Republican state’s exercise of parens patriae over minors and its endorsement of adult children’s challenge of parental authority indicate a new understanding of children primarily as rights-bearing citizens whose defining relationship was with the state, not with parents.

Chapter 5 focuses on women’s release from prison using petitions that convicted women or interested parties wrote to lords lieutenant for release from prison or a reduction in sentence, as well as letters that ex-convicts wrote to prison officials in an effort to secure the balance of their gratuities. Women and men directly connected with the prison took an interest in a convict’s plans on departure to maximise her chances of successful rehabilitation and to prevent habitual criminality. The first section outlines the groups and individuals who influenced decisions about a woman’s release. The second and third sections examine how the domestic and employment situations to which an inmate would return could inform her discharge. These two sections document the fates of women after release and the realities of life in nineteenth-century Ireland. The fourth section offers an insight into legislation and practices that developed around convicts and habitual criminals, and the lived experiences for some repeat offenders. The final part of this chapter examines experiences for those women who sought to emigrate. This chapter argues that women’s intentions not to again offend could be thwarted at home or abroad by the challenging circumstances to which they returned.