We talk to Ryan Choi who has been awarded a highly competitive fellowship to complete his PhD. PhD student Ryan Choi has been awarded a 23,000 EUR Doctoral Fellowship from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.Granted by one of the most important funders of Chinese Studies worldwide, the Fellowship is exceptionally hard to secure – only ten are awarded across Europe each year.The funding will enable Ryan to complete his doctoral research on “Collaborationism in Wartime Hong Kong: The Cultural Production of Hanjian (Traitors) under Japanese Occupation, 1941–1945”We spoke to Ryan about his childhood fascination with the Hanjian and how that led to his scholarly recovery of an often-neglected chapter of Hong Kong’s modern history. Hong Kong in the afterglow of screen's golden age “It all started with Hong Kong cinema and television” says Ryan, when asked how he became interested in the subject of his dissertation - the hanjian. The term ‘hanjian’ means ‘traitor to the Han Chinese’, and Ryan is interested in the many cultural figures who were labelled as such in Hong Kong while under Japanese occupation (1941 to 1945).“I grew up in the city during the afterglow of its screen industry’s golden age, watching a great deal of 1980s and 90s film and television drama on reruns, where the figure of the hanjian was an evil yet comical stock villain in stories set during the occupation.” “What struck me, even as a child, was the sheer hatred these so-called traitors attracted, and the question of why never left me. Years later, during my master’s at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, I went into the archives in Hong Kong to read what the collaborators had actually written, and found a reality far more complicated than the archetype I had grown up watching.” PhD in Chinese Studies candidate, Ryan Choi Coming full circle In his dissertation, Ryan is looking at the cultural production of the hanjian, both during and after the Second World War. His critical analysis takes in newspapers, magazines, fiction, and diaries, aiming to “recover an often-neglected chapter of Hong Kong’s modern history and rediscover the silenced voices that emerged from it.”Asked why he chose to do the work here, Ryan says “Edinburgh and I go back a long way. I first visited more than a decade ago, then found myself here again after completing my master’s, so choosing it for the PhD felt like coming full circle.”“Of course, the deciding factor was academic: my project sits precisely at the meeting point of my supervisors’ work. Professor Aaron William Moore is a transnational historian of modern East Asia who reads wartime literatures and personal documents across Japanese and Chinese, while Dr Christopher Rosenmeier has written extensively on popular fiction during the Second Sino-Japanese War.” For a thesis on what Hong Kong’s cultural collaborators produced under the Japanese empire, the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures provides me with the ideal supervisory team. My supervisors have supported me at every turn since, encouraging conference papers, journal publications, and visiting programmes that took me to the Hong Kong History Centre at the University of Bristol in 2024 and, most recently, to the University of Valencia, where I have worked with Professor Marcos Centeno on his research projects. Ryan Choi Ryan had been aware of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation’s Fellowship programme from early on in his postgraduate career. He planned ahead to ensure he had the best chance of being selected, for example publishing an article in Modern Asian Studies before his final year, demonstrating that his dissertation project was already producing peer-reviewed work.Under Professor Natascha Gentz, the Postgraduate Research Director for Asian Studies, he worked as a student representative to build a postgraduate research community; “a vibrant group in which we exchange ideas and present work in progress, learning from one another along the way.” He has also paid close attention to the potential impact of his work, asking why a study of wartime cultural collaborators might matter to readers well beyond his own discipline, as well as to current research on the Sinophone literary sphere. With only around ten fellowships awarded across Europe each year, securing one is a real vote of confidence. It signals that this under-studied chapter of Hong Kong’s modern history deserves serious attention, from scholars and the wider public alike. More than anything, though, I feel grateful, because the fellowship reflects the people around me as much as the project itself. Ryan Choi Are you interested in postgraduate research in Asian Studies?Our interdisciplinary community brings together specialists in the languages, literatures, cultures and politics of China, Japan and Korea with experts in East Asian and international relations. Working with colleagues elsewhere in LLC, and across the wider University, we are able to support research which crosses boundaries between disciplines and/or languages. Find out more about postgraduate research in Asian Studies Related linksRead Ryan's article in Modern Asian Studies [open access]Browse our directory of PhD student profiles Tags Asian Studies Postgraduate Research This article was published on Thursday 18 June 2026
