Then & NowBeyond treason: Hongkongers who collaborated with the occupying Japanese
- The reasons for working with the invading force were myriad but the main attraction, as always, was money
- While the wealthy and well-connected avoided prosecution, those lower down the social scale were often arrested and tried
Collaboration with an enemy occupation happens for complex reasons. Economic advantage; political ideology; long-smouldering personal vendettas and jealousies; socio-economic or racial grievances; a repressed desire for revenge on those who once had power, and used it to the disadvantage of those now seeking vengeance – all of these factors can coalesce to create the Quisling type.
Hong Kong, from its mid-19th century urban beginnings, was the kind of society that encouraged collaborators; the most successful Chinese businessmen were those prepared to shamelessly operate under a foreign flag for their own benefit. Personal motivations – however much their descendants may wish to rewrite family pathways to prosperity – were basic. Financial gain and the Devil take the hindmost summed these people up.
In any filthy body of water, scum rapidly rises to the surface when stirred up, and so it has always been in Hong Kong. It was much the same a century later, during the Japanese occupation period.
In The Hidden Years: Hong Kong 1941-1945 (1967), author John Luff noted, “There were those who valued their skins, whatever their colour, above patriotism and decency. These people did not turn on their countrymen but merely turned their coats.” Others, motivated by a complex web of simmering personal grudges, deep-seated racial animosities, a sadistic enjoyment of power – especially over the weak and vulnerable – and the ever-present inducement of easy financial gain, made good wartime stooges.
Among the vilest collaborators was George Wong. For the pre-war manager of a Kowloon motor garage, financial inducement was a key factor. He became a driver for the Koa Kikan – the Japanese secret intelligence service – then a paid Chinese agent/informer, and eventually evolved into the chief local thug for the Kempeitai, the Gestapo-trained Japanese secret police.