Tag: Empire

On Henry Lethbridge (Part 2)

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By Vaudine England

I’m still hoping to be proven wrong in claiming that just two serious articles were published in the 20th century on the subject of Eurasians in Hong Kong. The first was Sir Challoner Grenville Alabaster’s ‘Observations on Race Mixture in Hong Kong’. The second is Henry Lethbridge’s ‘The Best of Both Worlds?’, in which Eurasians were described as ‘a natural by-product of the colonial era’. His main point was to note how dramatically the position of Eurasians had changed since the end of World War Two. Their position, he wrote, was in many ways ‘now an advantageous one, despite the fact that the great pre-war Eurasian families seem to have declined in political and economic importance’.

The first assumption Lethbridge knocks on the head is the old stereotype that Eurasians are usually the product of lower class liaisons. Even if it was ever wholly true, he said it was now — in 1968 — certainly no longer true. Lethbridge noted it was Eitel who saw Eurasians as ‘almost exclusively’ the product of liaisons between European men and brothel workers, most of whom were allegedly Tanka boat women. Modern scholarship has discounted this and as Lethbridge observed, ‘prostitutes normally do not seek to raise a family now are they usually sought as marriage partners. It seems likely, then, that our Eurasian population derives from all dialect groups and races in Hongkong and not solely from some wayward females of the boat population.’

He then surveyed the available data on Eurasians, noting once again how incredibly sparse it was (and is). A few exceptions stand out of Chinese men marrying European women (Sir Ho Kai Ho and Alice Walkden) but the majority of pre-war mixed marriages were entered into by soldiers, sailors and technical workers. Higher status men such as taipans and managers at ‘The Bank’ were prevented from formalising whatever local liaisons they might have enjoyed, by rules of the job. Lethbridge noted the earlier generations’ bigotries and prejudices: ‘Government, for example, discouraged a cadet from choosing a Chinese wife because it feared that his position in public service would be exploited by his wife’s kinsmen; businessmen and bankers worried that a junior would give up the healthy sports of cricket and golf, generally go “native”, and thus be eliminated from the European merry-go-round.’

I wonder if Lethbridge didn’t have his own prejudice against white women, at least in history, as they are continually blamed for the worst of attitudes. No doubt some European wives were jealous, petty and insecure; perhaps many were provincial suburbanites. But can it be true that the majority were so pathetic, and that the women in weak European marriages were entirely to blame, for the alleged greater attractiveness of the Orient? Cannot the men be blamed too? In Lethbridge’s piece: ‘the greatest resistance to mixed marriages came from European females whose usual custom was to snub or patronise Chinese girls and cold-shoulder their husbands.’ Was it only European females who snubbed and patronised local women? Hard to believe. And what about how European women were themselves snubbed and patronised, by both European and Chinese men, and perhaps some women too?

Perhaps we must blame the lack of data for the prevalence of so many sweeping statements on the subject. However, the more closely I read Lethbridge on the subject, the more I wonder about him — or was it simply the male analytical culture of that time — as he again promulgates the view that ‘Certainly many corseted European wives found svelte young Chinese women a sexual threat to their marriages, and reacted violently…’ What violence he had in mind is hard to imagine. And what of the sexual threat posed by svelte (and/or voluptuous) European women to the sanctity of some Chinese marriages?

Surely what we’re talking about here is the attraction of the Other. And perhaps a way in which the discourse of the 21st century on this subject can be conducted is without the ready cliches of the 1960s.

Usefully, Lethbridge analysed available census data from 1901 and concluded that ‘in the past a large number of Eurasians were re-absorbed or married back into the Chinese population — and thus lost a separate identity’. Those identifying as Eurasian were a small minority and either married among themselves or into the European community. ‘Thus there was a constant tendency for the Eurasian community to lose members to either the Chinese or Europeans. The decision to move toward one or other of the predominant groups or to remain Eurasian was a delicate one and was governed by a large number of factors.’

Lethbridge pointed out that there is no biological or any other evidence to suggest the products of mixed marriages deserve any sense of aversion — on the contrary — however, prejudice can create peculiarities. He was then happy to conclude that mixed marriage was becoming ever more prevalent. Ultimately, he put this down to how Europeans and Chinese are gradually beginning to see each other as less alien or depraved.
‘In the 19th century Europeans regarded Chinese as members of an effete and moribund nation, doomed to disappear before the play of world evolutionary forces. But China has regained its position as a great Asian and world power — if anything the Chinese now suffer from an overdose of ebullience.’ And whereas most Chinese met in the West in the past were labourers, now they were students and professionals as well as restaurant workers. ‘Likewise, a growing percentage of Hongkong Chinese is discovering that members of the pink-skinned race are not radically dissimilar from themselves.’ Eurasians could now be seen as a product of a more balanced, healthy ‘cultural give-and-take’, helped along, no doubt, by ‘a decline in the feeling of white superiority, once fostered by concessions, extra-territoriality and the existence of the British Empire’.

Lethbridge was hopeful, in 1968, that future mixed marriages and their offspring would grow up in worlds less obsessed by problems of ancestry; he believed industrialisation made ancestry increasingly irrelevant. Of course prejudice persisted, restrictions remained, ‘Yet racial exclusiveness and bigotry are luxuries that few can afford in a commercial community’.

Amusingly, as I wrote this piece, I bumped into a bold blonde friend at Hong Kong University. She had been walking out recently with her Chinese husband and had enough Cantonese to understand the crunched little old Chinese woman who assailed her husband to congratulate him vigorously on his ‘big face’ in scoring such a Western prize as his partner. That’s almost half a century on from Lethbridge’s comments and helps puncture a few more myths, (not least that one about how of course we are all less racist and sexist than in the past!)

An interesting point for further thought is that Eurasians, first as a product of empire, would learn to garner empire’s benefits: ‘In the past being a Eurasian was a state of mind; and, paradoxically, the Eurasian maintained his identity through the privileges he enjoyed over the Chinese, privileges which marked him off as being different, for by working for a European firm he could command a higher salary than if he was pure Chinese’. However, now, he said, it was the apparent end of empire which promised to liberate Eurasians even more.

SOURCES:

Lethbridge, Henry J. ‘The Yellow Fever’. Far Eastern Economic Review (2 May 1968).

Lethbridge, Henry J. ‘The Best of Both Worlds?’ Far Eastern Economic Review (10 October, 1968), 128-130.

Lethbridge, Henry. ‘Caste, Class and Race in Hong Kong Before the Japanese Occupation’. In Marjorie Topley (ed.), Hong Kong: the Interaction of Traditions and Life in the Towns, 42-64. From a Weekend Symposium 25-26 November 1972. Hong Kong: Royal Asiatic Society, Hong Kong Branch, June 1975.

Eitel, E.J. Europe in China [with an Introduction by H.J. Lethbridge]. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1983 (1st ed Kelly & Walsh 1895).

On Henry Lethbridge’s ‘The Yellow Fever’ & ‘The Best of Both Worlds?’

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By Vaudine England

In my last blog I expressed a hope to be proven wrong in claiming that just two serious articles were published on the subject of Eurasians in Hong Kong in the 20th century. The first was Sir Challoner Grenville Alabaster’s ‘Observations on Race Mixture in Hong Kong’. The second came almost half a century later, thanks to the sociologist Henry Lethbridge, just about the only writer in English to consider all those lesser-known but vital aspects of Hong Kong history. By these I mean the existence, condition and status of poor white people; of Eurasians; the way of life in Hong Kong during Japanese occupation; and his broader work on many aspects of class and race in Hong Kong.

In 1968, he penned two pieces for the Far Eastern Economic Review. One, entitled “The Yellow Fever”, announces that the subject of Europeans in Hong Kong was just as worthy of study as the Chinese. His second piece, “The Best of Both Worlds?”, honed in on the subject of Eurasians.

Let me digress from Eurasians for a moment to ponder: could an article headlined “Yellow Fever” even be published today? Nowadays we may forget that for many men, a major motivation in coming East was to sample the alleged delights of Oriental women, an interchange aided by vast ignorance and no little amount of money from one side and guile from the other. It is not unusual to seek cross-cultural partnership, regardless of money or duress being involved. But only one generation ago, men who expressed such appetites enthusiastically were seen as having caught a dose of Yellow Fever; this was not the same as Going Native, but might of course lead to it.

Lethbridge did not take as his task an analysis of white male behaviour in the mystical cornucopias of Wanchai or beyond. No. He was concerned that Europeans as a group had not been given the study they deserved, nor their interactions with Chinese that were, naturally, producing Eurasians. He noted how Hong Kong, by the 1960s, had become a mecca for Western social scientists obsessing over China, its society and culture. Few of these scholars paid any attention, then, to the life of foreigners in the Chinese world. Lethbridge firmly rebuffed the assumption that Europeans simply led European lives. He said European life in Hong Kong ‘is not necessarily a stale replica of life in Europe and the United States. Something is lost and something is gained on the way. The transformations that occur are always interesting and sometimes bizarre.’ Look around and we can probably see what he meant.

First he sought out numbers, and concluded that the European population in Hong Kong in the late 1960s was between 25,000 and 30,000, inclusive of about 7,000 British troops. Among those ‘Europeans’, British were by far the largest sub-group, followed by Americans, Dutch, German, French and Italian in that order. He also noted that these numbers were likely to be more accurate, coming from a By-Census, than pre-war numbers garnered by counting the amount of night-soil collected.

As in the sparse accounts of 19th century Hong Kong life, Lethbridge saw European society as layered with internal divisions: ‘Status seeking, the display of conspicuous consumption and the desire for exclusiveness, have not declined to any notable extent.’ However, the growing size of the foreign population of Hong Kong, with tourism and American troops, was allowing more people to ‘live full social lives without feeling obliged to enter their names in the visitors’ book at Government House or having to cultivate taipans’. (Phew!)

That post-war decolonisation feeling (if not yet reality in Hong Kong) had stripped the former ruling class of its special allure; Europeans were now more diverse, had starkly different interests and were able to pursue less constrained or conventional interests than ever before.

‘Yet, paradoxically, Europeans pre-war were probably more aware of and knowledgeable about things Chinese than they are today,’ said Lethbridge. He pointed out that pre-war Europeans often took short leaves in China, had relatives or friends working up the coast, and in the absence of jet travel spent far larger chunks of their lives in Hong Kong, which was more intensely Chinese. He was writing, of course, when travel from Hong Kong to China was almost impossible, during the Mao Tse-tung era, before the late 1970s opening. He also enjoyed describing how the lower class Briton transplanted to Hong Kong almost invariably enjoyed a jump in status where Hong Kong became a kind of Surbiton with servants. He also noted, amusingly, that frustrated expatriate wives took as often to the brush as to drink ‘so that there are more exhibitions of bad paintings, on sale at conceited prices, than anywhere else in the world’. Army or missionary families existed, as always, in their own enclaves.

Meanwhile, Americans were having to move on from their earlier condemnation of Hong Kong imperialism now that the only alternative was communism on the mainland. ‘Hence Hongkong has acquired virtue. Like a reformed tart, it has changed its status: it is now part of the “Free World”.’ Among the cultured French, Germans, Italians, not forgetting the Dutch who ‘used to the tropics range widely in their pursuits’, were growing numbers of what Lethbridge called Australasians. Presumably he meant those of us from New Zealand and Australia, ‘who are less caste-bound and class-conscious than their English cousins’.

On Grenville Alabaster’s ‘Some Observations on Race Mixture in Hong Kong’

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By Vaudine England

Just two serious articles were published on the subject of Eurasians in Hong Kong in the 20th century. A bold claim – and one on which I’d be delighted to be proven wrong!

The first came in 1920, from the Hon. Sir Challoner Grenville Alabaster, OBE, Member of the Legislative Council. This China-born former British Consul in China was the interpreter who accompanied Ye Mingchen throughout most of his imprisonment and exile by the British. A lawyer, he moved to Hong Kong where he was Acting Attorney General no less than four times before achieving the full post in 1931 until 1946. He was also acting Chief Justice in 1937. ‘In 1942 he was one of the three senior government officials who instructed Robert Kotewall to cooperate with the Japanese occupying forces in order to protect Hong Kong residents.’ A survivor of the Stanley Internment Camp during World War Two (perhaps thanks to the sunglasses he wore perpetually), ‘his meticulous and allegedly rather bureaucratic personality [meant] he was not universally admired.’ (Source: DHKB pp1-2.)

Alabaster’s ‘Some Observations on Race Mixture in Hong Kong’, warning of the onset of a race problem in the wake of China’s republican revolution, has long outlived the sunglasses. Published in the (albeit now defunct) Eugenics Review, he expressed surprise at the lack of any laws ‘bearing upon the problem of race mixture, certain laws declaring marriage between certain races invalid or a punishable offence, or at least certain decisions as to the degree of blood making a particular person a member of one race or of another.’ There were laws granting privileges to or discriminating against Chinese, regarding will validation, and registration of persons, and even laws requiring the Registrar of Companies to decide what might properly be described as a Chinese or non-Chinese business partnership. But nothing about Eurasians.

‘If a reason is sought for the absence of any such legislation, it will probably be found in the fact that until as recently as 1911 the Eurasian problem did not exist; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that before that year classification could be effected easily without too close an inquiry into a person’s pedigree.’

What he meant became clearer as he described Eurasians of Hong Kong before 1911 as falling into roughly three groups – Portuguese, Chinese or British. After 1911, he believed, rising Chinese nationalism and the greater education of more Chinese in Hong Kong would change definitions radically, faster.

Generalising Eurasians in Asia

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By Vaudine England

Looking at how other colonies’ histories have tackled the topic of Eurasians gives useful clues to how researchers might tackle Hong Kong’s Eurasians.

An early effort looking at South East Asia was Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff’s Minority Problems in Southeast Asia, of 1955. This states baldly that all Eurasians under colonial rule ‘have faced the same handicaps, reacted to them in identical fashion, and displayed similar communal characteristics’ (p. 135). Can such a sweeping statement be true? It goes on to say that all Eurasians are city dwellers and white-collar workers. As a group, they have been ‘snubbed’ ‘and only a handful among them has been able to surmount the obstacles which the color bar has placed in their way’ (p. 135). The authors place the ‘irresponsibility of their European fathers’ alongside the barriers erected by the European community as a whole  as the major impediments to Eurasian advancement. Those barriers were real, with some jobs, residential areas, schools, clubs, even hotels closed to them.

Of course these authors were writing in 1955, the year that the Non-Aligned Movement first met in Bandung, Indonesia, when the issues of post-colonisation were of pressing daily importance across South East Asia. As is often the case in scholarship about Eurasians, the focus is largely on the sprawling Dutch East Indies, and on the impact of the diaspora from a crumbling China. Those major historical forces, with ramifications around us to this day, have their echo in Hong Kong of course, but can also be useful to highlight what makes the Hong Kong situation unique.

Still, in Thompson & Adloff, here are too many generalisations. Another one on offer is the allegedly striking contrast between the product of an (Overseas) Chinese father and a native Malay/Indonesia/Burmese, which they judge as most likely to be successful, and the product of a European and native mother which they judge to be invariably less successful. Apparently the injection of Chinese other-ness brought a physical stamina and pride in heritage to the mix, unavailable to offspring of European fathers!

Overall, Thompson & Adloff paint a somewhat tragic picture of a people forever stuck in between. Above them in social and financial status are the Europeans with whom they identify; below them are the ‘native’ Asians whom they allegedly despise: ‘While they have received less from the Europeans than they feel is their due, they have enjoyed in Asian eyes a privileged position as regards employment and standard of living’ (p. 136).

However, the survey marks key changes affecting Eurasian communities of South East Asia. Prior to World War Two they retained a privileged role as often the only (half) native people who had become proficient in the European colonialist’s language (Dutch, English, Portuguese, French). They could thus take higher positions in the colonial bureaucracies and business worlds. They mostly identified as Europeans and were strongly loyal to the European power even though they knew they would never have equality with wholly European friends and colleagues. During the war, those Eurasians identifying or identified as European suffered disproportionately at the hands of the Japanese across South East Asia.

As empires fell, through war and decolonisation, the privileged position enjoyed pre-war now evaporated. Unless they had worked to maintain fluency in local languages and norms, they lost out in the brave new post-colonial tropical world. They then faced invidious choices – to stay or go; and if to go, then where? Often the dream was the European ‘homeland’ which they had never seen; only the Netherlands offered any kind of assistance to their Eurasians, the Indos, with many others left in limbo. Wrote Thompson & Adloff: ‘the Eurasians are a rootless, frustrated, and divided minority — foreigners in the land of their birth, yet unable to move elsewhere’ (p. 136).

Reference is made to the idea of a homeland for Eurasians, such as the Jews found in Israel. This may sound very odd to a modern ear, but an attempt was made by Indonesian Eurasians (or ‘Indos’) to settle in New Guinea, on the far eastern edge of Indonesia. This apparently failed due to lack of agricultural skills and finance. Others thought of migrating to Brazil.

How much do these generalisations, experiences and ideas apply to the specific experience of the Eurasians of Hong Kong?

REFERENCE:
Thompson, Virginia, and Adloff, Richard. Minority Problems in Southeast Asia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1955.  See: Chapter 3 – ‘Indigenous Minorities – The Eurasians’.

East Meets West: Where Do Eurasians Come From?

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By Vaudine England

For a place which has so often been so eulogised for being such a marvellous meeting of East and West, the detail of the most intimate connections between east and west is surprisingly uncovered. Fiction has largely carried the burden of revealing aspects of the Eurasian existence. Richard Mason’s The World of Suzy Wong is the obvious example, and Han Suyin’s Love Is a Many-Splendoured Thing. But where are the histories of Hong Kong’s real Eurasians?

Several important family memoirs have been produced. Peter Hall, the former company secretary of Hongkong Land took this furthest with his In the Web, followed by Eric Peter Ho’s Tracing my Children’s Lineage. Irene Cheng and Jean Gittins both wrote family memoirs. Vicky Lee has investigated the writings of three Eurasian women and reflected on what it means to be Eurasian. These are all interesting works, but none can be called a history of the Eurasians of Hong Kong. So far, just one thesis has been done on the subject – back in 1975! This was Stephen Fisher’s survey of Eurasians as a marginal group. He is more sociological than historical and of course time has passed. Many more family papers are now, hopefully, available for consultation by serious researchers. With, too, the diminishing stigma attached to being of mixed race, it is hoped more will feel able to talk about and discover more Eurasian history.

In the meantime, where could one begin to consider such a history? Defining the word might help. Dictionaries cite its earliest use from India in the late 18th century and early 19th centuries; many of the same dictionaries say it now refers more to American-Asian than to European-Asian mixtures. In Hong Kong parlance, it can also refer to the mixture of two different Asian races, such as the Kotewall family which was a mixture of Parsee and Chinese.

In Britain’s Indian empire, confusingly, it was the British who had lived a long time in India, often generations, who proudly called themselves Anglo-Indians, and so this term was not available for use by literally mixed race Anglo-Indians until permission was granted in the early 20th century. Instead, they were called ‘half-castes’, ‘East-Indians’, ‘Indo-Britons’ and ‘Eurasians’. Richard Symonds, in his Eurasians Under British Rule, divided the history of Eurasians in India into three periods: until about 1785 they were able to assimilate with the British and suffered no discrimination; from the 1790s to 1835 they were excluded from government service as either British or Indians; from 1835 until the end of British rule there in 1947 they were seen as Indian for purposes of employment but British in terms of education and defence, employed mostly in intermediate positions in central government services, the railways, telegraphs and customs.

Symonds refers to the sole comparative study made of people of mixed race under the British and other empires, namely Half Caste, by Cedric Dover, published in 1937. This was an angry polemic by an Anglo-Indian biologist and entomologist of Calcutta, written partly to combat then-current fascist theories of race. A vast literature exists on the mixed race people of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). There is almost nothing about mixed race people under British rule, in all its variations.

Symonds also makes important points about how the caste of Indian women marrying East India Company men was replaced with their husband’s standing in the company. This meant that some Eurasian offspring married British aristocracy; mixed blood trails can be traced into the prime minister’s office on three occasions. In Calcutta, an Upper Orphanage was established for the Eurasian children of British officers and a Lower Orphanage for those of other ranks. But later restrictions on offspring from the orphanages against gaining higher education in Britain radically affected their chances of employment.

The early 20th century was perhaps the worst time to be Eurasian in India, writes Symonds. A new moralism decreed mixed race children to be the product of ‘vice’; in practical terms, doors to education and employment were successively closed. These Eurasians looked with envy across to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) where the Burghers, as Eurasians were called, were much more integrated with the Dutch. A foreshadowing of British talk during Hong Kong’s 1922-25 strikes and boycotts — when support from the local elite’s Eurasian leaders was needed to restore stability — is heard in the 1810 wish of the British in Ceylon to conciliate the Burghers as much as possible in order to consolidate British rule.

Attitudes towards Eurasians were contingent upon time and place; categories and definitions were neither fixed nor certain. The British might have been peculiar in the hedging about of their mixed race subjects with varying restrictions over time. As Symonds notes: ‘It is interesting that the British, themselves hybrids, should have placed so much emphasis on race in the style of rule’, (p 41).

One theme here which emerges across any historical survey of race in empire is that of how ideas about it changed during the course of empire. In those rampant early days of explorers and swashbuckling entrepreneurs, cohabiting, if not marrying and starting families, with local women was considered the ideal way to move in on a new society. Portuguese, Dutch, French and British all enthusiastically engaged with the local populations they intended to trade with, convert or exploit. Divisions and the breaking into hierarchies involving race as well as religion and class, seemed to come when government bureaucracies became more involved in the colonial enterprise in the mid-19th century onwards. As any reader of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities can cite, the emergence of nationalism as an idea from the late 19th century on would dramatically affect notions of self and harden divisions along ethnic and other lines.

To my mind this must give cause to consider so many post-colonial blanket assumptions. That the British empire was founded on racism, for example, could do with some re-examination. Given the wide variations between colonies within that empire (in their founding, construction, management and much more), it seems logical that the role of race and thus the place of Eurasians within each colony might also differ markedly. That we even know now what people meant about race then, and which ‘then’ we are talking about, are also assumptions that need testing. Definitions we impose now may not have been how people saw themselves then. Nor are all modern ideas about race and tolerance necessarily the most advanced or progressive ideas over time.

REFERENCES:

Allen N.J., Gombrich, R.F., Raychaudhuri, T., and G. Rizvi (gen. eds). Oxford University Papers on India, Volume I, Part 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Chapter 3: Eurasians Under British Rule, by Richard Symonds, pp 28-42.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso Books, 1991.

Cheng, Irene. Clara Ho Tung: A Hong Kong Lady, Her Family and Her Times. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1976.

Fisher, Stephen F. Eurasians in Hong Kong: A Sociological Study of a Marginal Group. PhD Thesis, University of Hong Kong, 1975.

Gittins, Jean (Hotung). Stanley: Behind Barbed Wire. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1982.

Hall, Peter. In the Web. Wirral: Hurst Village Publishing, 1992 (2012).

Hall, Peter. In the Web. Birkenhead: Apprin Press, 2012 (earlier editions 1992, 1993).

Han Suyin. Love Is a Many-Splendoured Thing. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952.

Ho, Eric Peter. Tracing My Children’s Lineage. Hong Kong: Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Hong Kong, 2010.

Ho, Eric Peter. ‘The Welfare League, The Sixty Years 1930-1990’. A pamphlet held by HKU Library Special Collections (HKP 361.763 W46 zH). The Welfare League was formed specifically to provide aid and welfare to Hong Kong’s Eurasians and was thus a first public statement of the existence of a mixed race community.

Lee, Vicky. Being Eurasian: Memories Across Racial Divides. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004 (also, her PhD HKU 2001).

Mason, Richard. The World of Suzy Wong. London: Collins, 1957.

Race Memory Puzzles in China, Japan War Histories

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By Vaudine England

This week (on 3 September) the Chinese government has decreed a special one-off public holiday (and vast military parade) to mark what it calls China’s victory over Japan 70 years ago. As with all anniversaries, a plethora of frantic re-writings of history is now underway to mark this moment. One can debate if it really was China or the impact of Hiroshima that defeated Japan, and the argument over whether it was China’s communists or nationalists who fought most, suffered more, are most responsible for the victory, will rumble on.

This blog looks back at a supposed racial impact of the war, specifically of the ignominious defeat of the British followed by Japan’s occupation of Hong Kong. Both then, and more recently, the view has been expressed that Japan’s appeal to the Asian populace for the overthrow of Western imperialism was attractive, and encouraged versions of collaboration among particularly Eurasian as well as Chinese Hong Kongers.

A gentle look at the first point comes in Asia for the Asiatics, by Robert Ward, published by the University of Chicago Press just before the war ended. Ward had been a consular officer for the United States, stationed in Hong Kong, and was interned for six months before being repatriated. He witnessed the early efforts of the Japanese to establish an empire in Asia ‘for the Asiatics’.

This was, according to Ward, a calculated, brutal and systematic process, of which the initial outbursts of rampant disorder, rape and looting was an integral part. Ward claims this had the effect (and so Ward assumes the intention) of forcing the local Hong Kong elite into submission. Leading figures such as Shouson Chow and Robert Kotewall, members of the Li (Bank of East Asia) family, and others did consent to take roles in committees set up by the occupying Japanese powers. No doubt they did so for self-preservation but it is also on record that departing British senior civil servants had specifically asked Chow and Kotewall to deal with the Japanese to help feed the people.

Ward’s primary concern was to consider what the post-war landscape will be in East Asia, after this idea of Asia for Asians has taken hold. Writing in 1945, he doubted that the brutality and subjection imposed by the Japanese would entirely neutralise the power of the pro-Asia ideal.

The overwhelming fact for many writers, then and since, has been the shaming collapse of the white man, of white power, seen in Japan’s rapid takeover not just of Hong Kong, but other British colonies such as Malaya, Singapore and Burma. These defeats would leave a residue, the impact of which would change post-war Asia forever.

All this was true, of course, but it is interesting to examine now the extent to which the collapse of British military power in the East did Not mean an end to British rule in Hong Kong, nor to Western impact and roles in East Asia’s post-war development. It is also interesting to note that, according to many Hong Kong people’s recollections, the brutality of Japanese rule did in fact fatally damage that ideal of Japan-led Asia for the Asians.

Perhaps race was simply less of a defining characteristic for people struggling to survive than some theorists would accept.

A more dramatic version of the view that colonial racism met its nemesis with the Japanese can be found in Gerald Horne’s Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire, published in 2005 by New York University Press. Amusingly, reviews from the United States academic community laud this book as a radical retelling of the war, an unflinching survey of race and empire, and a fabulous study which shows where global history can go. At the same time, a detailed, calm and considered blog by a member of the community of people apparently so oppressed by Horne’s British colonialists — the Eurasian historian Brian Edgar — shows how full of holes the Horne thesis is.

According to Horne, the Japanese were appreciated, admired, and supported by the majority of Hong Kong’s population, at least at first, for Japan’s overturning of white supremacy. Several ideas seem to be involved here — that the British empire was founded (solely) on racism and thus that Hong Kong was too, and that British assumptions of racial superiority produced a vast and violent discriminatory universe of abuse and exploitation of the ‘non-pure’. On such ground, a fertile appeal of Japanese inversions of white rule could be imagined.

But as Brian Edgar points out, the detailed realities of daily life made Horne’s thesis ‘dead in the water’. Yes, Eurasians faced discrimination, but from the Chinese as well as from the British. Yes, some Eurasians were discriminated against at work but others were among the colony’s richest people. Edgar goes on to point out various pockets of Hong Kong life which were ‘relatively race-free’, some intellectual and some in sports; I would add most of business was multi-cultural too. But of course white racism existed — the argument is over whether this made Eurasians (and some Hong Kong Chinese) vulnerable to Japanese ideology and rule. As Edgar notes, Horne fails to cite one single Hong Kong Eurasian who was not part Japanese who can be proven to have joined the Japanese after Christmas Day 1941. On the contrary, people like the young (Eurasian) women, Phyllis Bliss and Irene Fincher escaped and Irene even married the race enemy, a British policeman who was working with the Chinese resistance. One fascinating case, Laurence Kentwell, is the subject of research by Baptist University’s Catherine Ladds, and he is an exception to every theory.

Edgar then tackles the case of Sir Robert Kotewall and laments that Horne has clearly failed to take note of British exonerations of the Executive Council member’s work under the Japanese. According to Edgar, Kotewall did shout ‘Banzai’ several times at public meetings but otherwise did little but ‘hedge’ while trying to help poor Chinese get fed. Tony Banham, author of the excellent http://www.hongkongwardiary.com/, regards Kotewall as ‘selfless’ and the charges of collaboration unfounded.

As Edgar notes, one has to be careful about jumping to conclusions. Amid the hoopla of a Chinese Communist Party-organised exercise in creating nationalism today, it is even more interesting to discover where the historical record makes clear not a nationalist narrative, but the nuance.