Given the racial homogeneity of Hong Kong's population, it's little wonder there isn't a history of blatant celluloid stereotyping along the lines of Hollywood's mammies, squaws and blackface minstrels.
But while there has been a steep decline in such portrayals in US cinema in the past 50 years and many movies that have tackled the issue across the Pacific, the 'non-issue' of non-Chinese on Chinese screens indicates an even more pervasive, if less virulent, strain of the racism bug here.
It's been that way since Hong Kong movies began. Despite being a British colony with an influential and visible European and Asian presence, the communities rarely mixed on films made years before and after the second world war. Occasionally, one might have seen a Sikh guard, usually played by a Chinese with dark makeup, or a group of Caucasian revellers, such as the customers who joined nightclub singer Grace Chang or a chorus of 'Jajambo' in Wild, Wild Rose (1960). For a more multifaceted approach to Hong Kong's expats, you'd have to look at Hollywood features such as Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955) or The World of Suzie Wong (1960), which unsurprisingly presented a western view of the Orient.
In the postwar era, the Japanese were the only non-Chinese ethnicity to enjoy a relatively steady if schizophrenic presence in Hong Kong movies. The relationship was very much of the love-hate variety, with formulaically sadistic soldiers a staple of war sagas, while Sino-Japanese romances blossomed in contemporary tales like A Night in Hong Kong (1961) and Hong Kong, Tokyo, Hawaii (1963).
In terms of rabid stereotypes, Hong Kong films were far more benign than their counterparts on the mainland. In the newly founded People's Republic, the US was the great enemy, and movies did their best to demonise the western devils. A typical example is Friendship (1959), a Korean war drama that included such inflammatory scenes as snarling GIs (played by heavily made-up Chinese extras) gunning down pregnant peasants.
Most curious of all was Window of America (1952), based on a Soviet play and filmed on studio sets in Shanghai, in which the entire Chinese cast portrayed New Yorkers dismayed by the vicissitudes of capitalism.