The Great Difference: Hong Kong's New Territories and Its People 1898-2004

11 - Identities: Staying Chinese during the Lease

11 Identities: Staying Chinese during the Lease In the century of the Lease, two events stand in sharp contrast to each other: the heroic support for the Allied cause during the Japanese wartime Occupation, and the overt support for the Communist opposition to the Hong Kong Government during the Disturbances in 1967. This was, on the face of it, one more curious paradox. What went wrong in the intervening twenty years? Or despite appearances, had there long been an undercurrent of dislike and disaffection, harking back to the armed opposition to the British take-over of the New Territory in 1899, and even reaching further back in time? And what of the effect upon local allegiances of the Chinese Revolution of 1911, which had encouraged nationalism and led to major anti-foreign incidents in the 1920s, including the Seamen’s Strike and a General Strike in Hong Kong?1 The Communist success in wresting control from Chiang Kai-shek, with its intention that China should once more “stand up” as a nation, was another and later factor; for many a source of quiet pride, but in itself of great concern for the Hong Kong authorities. Assuredly long and complex, the background to the 1967 Disturbances in the New Territories, as in the Colony at large, will bear fuller examination; to include a scrutiny of Anglo-Chinese relationships in and through Hong Kong.2 CANTONESE XENOPHOBIA The prevailing anti-foreign spirit in the Canton Delta in the 1870s and 1880s was vouchsafed by an American missionary, Rev. B. C. Henry, who by reason of his extensive travels knew the province and its people better than most:3 146 The Great Difference The ruling classes, the officials and the gentry … are opposed to innovations and reforms of every kind. They are exclusive to the extremest degree, and would never have had intercourse with other nations had they not been compelled to do so … . It is enough to say that a thing is not Chinese, especially in matters of ethics and religion, to stamp it with disapproval. ... Intercourse with the aggressive nations of the West has developed this indifference into active hostility, and made hatred of foreigners a prominent characteristic of the influential classes, and, to a great degree, of all classes.4 Rev. Henry especially emphasized the bitterness of feeling against the foreigner in Canton, a view shared by a bishop of the American Methodist Church with previous service in China, after a visit to the mission field in 1878.5 Nor was the situation much improved by the end of the dynasty in 1911.6 Some of this feeling must have been carried over by those Cantonese electing to go to Hong Kong in search of work before and after 1898. Although, thanks partly to Lockhart, relations with the Chinese elites in the older parts of the Colony were close and amicable, this was decidedly not the case among the labouring class. A decade later, Governor Sir Henry May (1912–1919) was decidedly frank on the subject, telling the Colonial Office in London that “the real feelings of the mass of the population towards Englishmen in this Colony”, could be described in one word, “animosity”; and how the animosity against foreigners, “always existent in the Chinese mind”, had been inflamed by the recent [Chinese] revolution.7 A BAD TIME TO BE HANDED OVER The Lease had come at an unfortunate time in Sino-British relations. By then, the British had become accustomed to lording it over China and Chinese. The expatriates’ approach had attracted Lockhart’s criticism as early as 1890: “They regard themselves from first to last as teachers, not learners, and the attitude they assume with regard to China [‘that old fossil’] is entirely onesided”.8 Another observer of the contemporary scene, the long-serving American missionary Bishop R. H. Graves of Canton, also complained of the “assumption of superiority and authority”, which constituted the standard Western approach to most things Chinese, and of “the overbearing manners Identities 147 [his emphasis] of so many foreigners”, which in his view had “created a prejudice against Western civilisation”.9 Grounded in complacency and pride in scientific progress, these attitudes were encouraged by the failure of China to modernize, and had been reinforced by her recent ignominious defeat by Japan in 1894–95, which had increased colonial and commercial adventurism in China by the great Powers.10 To be a...