Then & Now | The Sino-British Club, a unique inter-cultural initiative created in post-war Hong Kong

In today’s post-racial world, personal connections forged across diverse cultural backgrounds are taken for granted. Nevertheless, common points of contact must be found before meaningful friendships can evolve.

Given the human tendency towards easy, comfortable friendships, especially after a long week, coteries of like-meets-like are most people’s preferred recreational environment. This was particularly the case in small colonial societies, including the one in Hong Kong, and remains the case in expatriate circles here today.

Pre-war, the colony had few possibilities for a positive intercultural connection. Language – far more than race – was a major barrier towards greater understanding; then as now, few European residents (other than police, missionaries and some government administrators) could converse in Chinese, and the pool of Chinese who combined fluent English skills with a decent cultural understanding of the West was also limited.

After the trauma of the Pacific war and Japanese occupation, a group of pre-war Hong Kong residents decided to make a concerted effort to create a different, and hopefully better, society. As far as they were concerned, the world could not – and should not – ever be the same again.

One of the few positive effects of a major global conflict is the diversity of individuals who get to know one another in the turmoil, who probably would have never met in peacetime.

From these idealistic beginnings, one of Hong Kong’s forgotten post-war initiatives, the Sino-British Club (SBC), started life. Formed in 1946, early members were remarkable for their personalities, and the influence of the war years on their lives. Most had either been prisoners of war or were connected in some way with the British Army Aid Group, a multi-ethnic organisation drawn mostly from Hong Kong residents that operated in wartime China.