Then & NowColonial Hong Kong’s ‘creative’ approach to lending to ex-China shipowners
While tycoons cried racism, their ships were breaking the UN embargo on trading with China – and their mainland families were under threat
Solid, cross-checked, independently sourced facts and equally solid, broad-based interpretations drawn from them are the gold standard for any historical writing. A challenge with corporate memoirs – and company histories – is that an author’s claims about the past tend to go unchallenged, with few external filters to mitigate errors. After all, apologists maintain, it is their version of events, so who can gainsay them?
This flaccid approach is especially prevalent in Hong Kong, where whatever dribbles forth from the chairman’s lips – especially in his later years – is uncritically licked up by those whose living depends on humouring him. There has never been a shortage of underemployed, ethically flexible hacks prepared to bash out a “history” or “biography” for the right price, with no inconvenient questions asked. And so the line between historical facts and self-serving corporate fantasies blur even further.
One recurrent whine in Chinese tycoons’ memoirs is the difficulties allegedly faced in the 1950s when seeking direct finance in Hong Kong, especially from mainstream local banks HSBC and Standard Chartered.
All too often, such complications were sourly attributed to Western racism. Petulant grumbles about colonial arrogance, while seldom completely unfounded, deflect attention from the reasons for institutional reluctance to deal with them directly. Such hesitancy was coldly pragmatic in origin, not racial.