Why Hong Kong was glad to see the back of ‘white coolies’
The entitled, superior attitude of the Filth set – Failed in London, Try Hong Kong – helps to explain why, beneath the trepidation about Beijing’s intentions, many Hongkongers celebrated Britain’s departure
Late on the morning of Hong Kong’s first day under Chinese rule, following an evening of fireworks, pageantry and a torrential downpour, the streets were strangely quiet when I wandered out of my MacDonnnell Road apartment looking for a cab. It was like the entire city was sleeping off a hangover after an all-night bender.
I finally found a taxi driven by an elderly, white-haired driver who quickly started up conversation. Where was I from, he wanted to know. “America,” I told him. He smiled broadly, then said; “And you stayed!”
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For all the investment bankers, businessmen and consultants, there were thousands of others working in low-end jobs as bartenders and bouncers, construction workers, food deliverers, even shoeshine boys. Many were transients who came backpacking and bumming around Southeast Asia before taking advantage of visa-free entry and the right to work in one of Her Majesty’s last remaining crown colonies.
As the Chinese population grew more affluent, the Brits took some of the jobs the locals did not want to do. The Chinese sometimes derisively referred to them as “white coolies”, or by the insulting acronym FILTH, for Failed In London, Try Hongkong. But these Brits’ low-end employment rarely stopped them from often displaying a superior attitude toward the locals.
Many older Chinese here also remembered a time when discrimination against locals by the European interlopers was entrenched and systematic, and they consider that period deeply humiliating.
A few locals took out their anti-British sentiment in extreme ways. The year before the handover, a local artist named Pun Sing Lui was sentenced to 28 days in jail for splashing red paint on a statue of Queen Victoria in Victoria Park and breaking the statue’s nose with a hammer. Pun claimed to be launching a protest action against “dull, colonial culture in Hong Kong”.
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“It’s because we’re not white,” Legislative Council member Emily Lau told me back in 1996 for an article in The Washington Post. “Had the Hong Kong people been white, Britain would have still handed Hong Kong back to China, but we would have gotten a better deal.”
I was speaking with Lau to get her reaction after a visit to Hong Kong by then-prime minister John Major. In a speech here, Major said “Britain’s commitment to Hong Kong will continue well beyond the summer of 1997,” and that “Hong Kong will never have to walk alone.
China did breach the Joint Declaration, as the last British governor, Chris Patten, pointed out in a June 28 interview with The Guardian newspaper. But there was no mobilisation of the international community, and no legal action taken. Commercial interests have taken precedent over any commitment to Hong Kong’s freedoms. Hong Kong has had largely to fend for itself.
“That the joint declaration has been breached [by China] I have no doubt, I have no doubt at all,” Patten told The Guardian. “And occasionally it has been so outrageously breached – for example the abductions of the booksellers – that a British minister and the British government have tut-tutted loudly.”
Patten, in that soul searching interview, sounded like the one British official with regrets about the way the empire left its long-time colony. “That we could have done more, I have got no doubt at all,” he said. ■