The funeral of Szeto Wah highlighted one of the central ironies of Hong Kong: the fact that the democrats who are hated by Beijing and not allowed to set foot on mainland soil were the original leaders of patriotic movements in the former British colony.
Szeto was a leading example. He and his associates were never pro-communist but they were very much Chinese patriots. And they were very different from underground Communist Party members here who supported the Beijing government.
The Communist Party claims to represent the interests of the working class, and Szeto, who led a teachers' strike in 1973 and then helped form the Professional Teachers' Union in 1974, certainly fought for the welfare of teachers.
His love of China was also evident in his other actions. He initiated a movement in the 1970s to make Chinese an official language in Hong Kong. He also promoted the use of Chinese as the medium of instruction in secondary schools even though most parents wanted their children taught in English, thinking that English proficiency was the key to a successful career.
It must have been really difficult for leaders in Beijing to depict Szeto as anything but a patriot. After all, he was a leader of the movement to defend the Diaoyu Islands, which are also claimed by Japan, and led protests to denounce changes in Japanese textbooks that whitewashed wartime atrocities in China.
Often, the British tried to tar Hong Kong activists with the communist brush since, by and large, Hong Kong society was very much anti-communist, with much of the population having fled communist rule on the mainland.
Szeto was more than once the target of a smear campaign by the British colonial authorities. In 1977-78, after an upheaval triggered by a two-day sit-in by students and teachers at the Precious Blood Golden Jubilee Secondary School over alleged large-scale misuse of school funds, a whispering campaign began that one of the teachers' leaders was a communist.