Then & Now | Uncomfortable truths about Hong Kong’s pre-war Eurasian community

One significant challenge for serious students of the past is that its flesh-and-blood inhabitants often didn’t think, speak or behave in ways that present-day scholars wish to ascribe to them. Attempts to evaluate earlier times – and the people who lived in them – through the distorting lens of today’s very different value systems are doomed to failure. Nevertheless, many continue this futile endeavour.

One illustrative example is that, right across pre-war colonial Asia, many Eurasian communities were politically right-wing and flagrantly racist towards other “Asians”. This little evaluated sociological curiosity is downplayed by post-colonial studies academics, who have forged good careers from unipolar “white = bad; coloured = good” research themes. Such “scholars” have considerable trouble dealing with uncomfortable nuances in the real experiences of “intersectional” communities, especially when general group behaviour patterns do not follow their preferred theoretical perspectives.

In Hong Kong, probably the rudest anti-Chinese racists before the Pacific war, and for several decades afterwards, strutted among the Eurasian and local Portuguese communities. Perversely, these same people were the first to whine should they be subject to discriminatory treatment by Europeans.

Whether racial discrimination directed towards them was actual or merely perceived hardly mattered. Martyrs on the lookout for something to feel wounded about – whether racism, sexism, homo­phobia or class-based slights – inevitably find what they are seeking. But when the boot was on the other foot, they behaved just as badly themselves – and frequently worse.

Japanese militarism, with its adminis­trative efficiency, love of order and ready tendency to “put the Chinese in their place”, was perversely admired by many Eurasians in pre-war China and Hong Kong. This last desire was especially acute by the mid-1930s, as a sizeable cohort of Western-educated Chinese showed a diminishing inclination to accept discriminatory treat­ment and a correspondingly increased job threat. Admiration for the Japanese was quickly shattered when it was their turn to be kept down, and they no longer had the white man’s trousers to hide behind.