On the UK Riots

It is not easy helping most Chinese get their heads around the fact that the riots in Britain, to their euphoria, are nothing like a Jasmine Revolution in Europe.

First, British Prime Minister David Cameron doesn’t have a secret Swiss bank account with a few billion pounds he keeps for himself and his family. Second, the rioters in London, Manchester and Birmingham are nothing worthier than a bunch of young unemployed thugs, many of them offspring from some third world country unfortunately, who are more interested in “shopping with violence”—to borrow a saying from the leading historian and broadcaster David Starkey—than overthrowing the royal family and putting Queen Elizabeth II on trial. Third, there is so far no sign of the British army siding with these inner-city underclass anarchists who loot 46-inch HD TV sets, and turning their guns against the metropolitan police.

It’s not the least bit more “revolutionary” than, say, tens of thousands of cheap Shenzhen laborers pouring across the Lo Wu border and setting LV and other European retail shops ablaze on Canton Road, shouting Mao quotations while smashing the windowpanes at Chow Tai Fook and shoveling the diamond watches and jewelry into their bags. Even if that were the scenario, I asked my mainland Chinese friends, you would have no objection if the PLA were allowed a free hand to crack down if the local police wavered at such “people’s power,” would you?

My question was met with a confused silence. No, it is against my academic conscience to wrongly preach to my communist-indoctrinated friends that the British coalition government is the next domino to fall after Tunisia and Egypt, and that the David Cameron-Nick Clegg evil axis, joined at the hip by their imperialistic and colonial racist ambitions, are about to be overthrown if China sends its air force to raid London and turn it into another Tripoli.

To make them happier, I agreed to my countrymen that I believe the riots in Britain are karma for what the British Empire did to Africa, and particularly the burning down of the Summer Palace in Peking in the 19th century. Even if London is burning right now, I am confident that Chinese big-spending shoppers in South Kensington won’t take advantage of such savagery, but calmly pay with their credit cards for all the Chanel perfumes and Prada handbags while rioters are staging a “Les Misérables”-like violence set piece outside.

Then they nodded and smiled. To be a Hongkonger is always a challenge. We have to pretend to be more knowledgeable than those who live up north, while at the same time avoid being read the riot act when we tell the 100 percent truth. This balancing act is more difficult to strike than David Cameron trying to navigate throwing black rioters in prisons and not being called a racist.