In September 2022, Queen Elizabeth passed away, and the member states of the British Commonwealth collectively mourned, and there were spontaneous memorial marches or rallies among the people.
In China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, many people gathered outside the British consulate to light candles to mourn the queen.
What is more unusual is that there are more young people in this mourning group, but most of them have no feelings about the British occupation era, and they are just infected by social media to join in the fun.
After all, in the long era of British occupation, the status of the Chinese in Hong Kong was not high, most of the Chinese lived in poverty, and the prosperity of the colony was dominated by the British and compradors.
What is the era of British dramas in Hong Kong? Film and television dramas have actually been revealed.
In Hong Kong's film and television dramas that reflect the old era, there is judicial darkness, police corruption, and gangsters are rampant, and the Chinese people at the bottom are struggling to survive, and there is almost no way to rise.
At that time, child labor was a problem of repeated prohibitions, basic health care was low, and the news media was officially restricted and heavily censored.
During the British colonial era, Hong Kong was actually no different from most colonies, and the top chief executive of the city came from the United Kingdom, and he could only be appointed by the British crown.
At that time, although there was a symbolic parliament in Hong Kong, it was like a place for foreigners and compradors to share cakes, and the British in Hong Kong regarded it as a club, and the Chinese had no right to speak. Most of the prosperity of Hong Kong, which was supported by the blood and sweat of the Chinese, was plundered back by the colonizers.
So what changes did the British government in Hong Kong make during the 150-year colonial period? How miserable was the life of the Chinese in Hong Kong at that time? How much wealth did the British plunder from Hong Kong?
Since Hong Kong Island was ceded to Britain in 1842, Britain has also encroached on Kowloon and the New Territories in turn, and has been in Hong Kong for 156 years.
Hong Kong has a very long colonial history and is one of the oldest colonies in Asia. Before World War II, the British government did not attach importance to Hong Kong, but only regarded it as a transit point and military port in East Asia.
In the early colonial years, the local Chinese were regarded as a "burden" by the British government in Hong Kong, and the government imposed a strict apartheid system, restricting the free movement of the Chinese, and the "curfew" alone was implemented for half a century.
At this time, Hong Kong was also a mixed area, with the local population relying entirely on immigrants, and a large number of displaced people entered the country from Guangdong and ate at the seaside.
Of course, the British didn't care about this, because what the British were doing in Hong Kong at that time was a business of reselling opium and population, and the local ecology of Hong Kong had nothing to do with them.
In the late 19th century, British India was the world's largest producer of opium, while the largest consumer market was China.
At that time, opium ships were parked around Hong Kong Island, and opium dealers from the mainland also went to Hong Kong to buy first-hand goods and ship them back to the mainland for sale.
After selling opium, the British bought the population, mostly young laborers, from gangsters in Canton, and shipped them to Southeast Asia and the Americas. These people are called "piglets" and work on overseas plantations, mines, and construction sites.
Before the "piglets" were sold to Nanyang, Hong Kong was one of their transit points.
In the first 30 years of Hong Kong's colony, more than 300,000 "piglets" were sold abroad through Hong Kong, and most of them never returned to the motherland.
At the same time, according to the writings of Davis, the governor of Hong Kong sent by the British, in Hong Kong at that time, except for British military and civil officials, almost all British immigrants were selling opium and seeking huge profits.
At that time, Hong Kong was chaotic and full of opportunities, so gang members were active, and local "triads" controlled the grassroots order, oppressing the people while grabbing territory.
The Chinese organization soon made the British jealous, and the British government in Hong Kong ordered a ban on Chinese gatherings, and even weddings and funerals had to be reported. Chinese were not allowed to go out on the streets at night without a reason, and if they did, they had to light lanterns to alert the British, otherwise they would be imprisoned.
What's more, compared with the British and even Indians, the Chinese in Hong Kong simply live in two worlds, and the Chinese have no right to participate in any public affairs in Hong Kong, but they have to bear labor and taxes.
Due to the great difference in treatment, people of insight among the Chinese have been campaigning for the British government in Hong Kong to allow the Chinese to serve as civil servants and even participate in the Legislative Council, the colonial parliament.
This demand represents the voice of more than 100,000 Chinese in Hong Kong, and the British cannot avoid it.
In the 80s of the 19th century, Wu Tingfang, who had a Western background, became the first Chinese parliamentarian in Hong Kong, but its symbolic significance was far greater than the practical significance, because the British government of Hong Kong almost never legislated, and all political, fiscal and taxation, and military orders came from the Hong Kong governor himself.
At the beginning of the 20th century, universal suffrage began to be implemented in Britain, but there was no trace of democracy in the colonies.
Of course, the Chinese patrolmen were not allowed to be armed, and they had to be monitored by the Indian police.
Today, Hong Kong is world-renowned because of its rise in the late 20th century as a world-renowned financial centre.
What is less well known is that until the 50s of the 20th century, Hong Kong was a poor small city in East Asia, and Western tourists even used the word "poor and sour" to describe Hong Kong.
The reason why this "poor" small town was later reborn was because the Chinese and Chinese capital had gained a foothold in Hong Kong.
The change in the situation in Hong Kong originated after World War II.
It turned out that during World War II, Hong Kong was occupied by Japan, British, American, and French funds were confiscated by the Japanese, and the governor of Hong Kong was driven away.
Especially after the Liberation War, Hong Kong, a small place, has become the only window of communication between China and the West.
Because of the huge business opportunities, large companies from Western countries set up agencies here, and although the mainland was blocked by the West for a long time at that time, the amount of goods smuggled into the mainland through Hong Kong and Macao was extremely staggering.
At this time, the order of Hong Kong was no longer under the complete control of the British.
In the first 20 years after World War II, when the West was recovering and developing, Hong Kong began to industrialize. Before that, Hong Kong was just a pure transit point, a "big wharf" between the East and the West.
In the early 60s, there were more than 5,000 factories and nearly 200,000 workers in Hong Kong, and industrial output replaced transit trade for the first time as the pillar of Hong Kong's tax revenue.
As the working class became stronger, under the influence of the new China, left-wing workers united against exploitation by the British government in Hong Kong, and the workers staged several large demonstrations in the mid-60s, the largest of which was the workers' movement in 1967.
This movement was called the "June 7 Riots" by the British government in Hong Kong, when the British military and police severely suppressed the demonstrations of Chinese workers and students, and the British army opened fire on the Chinese, causing bloodshed.
Although the march subsided, the British feared pressure from the Beijing government.
Since the old ways did not work, the British had no choice but to take advantage of the slope to promote welfare construction in Hong Kong and expand the Chinese civil service.
By the early 70s, one-third of the positions in the British government in Hong Kong were held by Chinese, and the Chinese police also became a front-line stability maintenance force.
After the 70s, the British government in Hong Kong decided to try out the "non-interference policy" in Hong Kong, that is, to replace the previous management method of "indirect management", and only count the money by itself, so that Hong Kong's economy and order could develop as freely as possible.
As a result, the 70s became the golden age of Hong Kong, with capital from all over the world coming to this unrestricted land, the financial industry booming, factories swelling to tens of thousands, and products exported to the world.
British civil servants also often come to Hong Kong to "cross the water", work here in their later years and enjoy happiness, and enjoy the Hong Kong government's pension after retiring in Hong Kong, so as to reduce the burden on the "mother country".
However, even though Hong Kong was already prosperous in the 70s, the vast majority of Chinese people still lived in hardship – nearly 200,000 workers generally worked overtime, working more than 10 hours a day, six days a week.
At the same time, the basic health care and education system has not changed from a few decades ago, half of the Chinese have not graduated from primary school, and child laborers in their early teens work with adults for a salary of more than a dozen yuan.
At that time, the wages of Chinese skilled workers were only a few dozen Hong Kong dollars, while the grassroots British civil servants earned thousands of dollars a month, a difference of 100 times, and they also enjoyed housing and medical services.
Although the arrival of people from the mainland provided impetus for Hong Kong's development, in the late 70s, the manufacturing industry of Southeast Asian countries grew by leaps and bounds, and Hong Kong's status was no longer what it used to be.
If it had not been for the beginning of reform and opening up on the mainland of the motherland, Hong Kong's development might have come to an abrupt halt in the 80s.
In the 1980s, the British government was so pleased with Hong Kong's development that it opened the Stock Exchange in Hong Kong, which became the second largest financial center in the British system after London.
With the integration of international capital here, countless investments have flowed into the Pearl River Delta region, opening more than 100,000 factories, creating five million jobs and making tens of billions of dollars in profits every year.
Immediately afterwards, a large number of Chinese billionaires appeared, who made money and speculated in stocks and real estate, creating an intoxicating Hong Kong bubble in the 90s. The Hong Kong stock market has risen year after year, real estate has only risen but not fallen, and everyone is investing, waiting to get rich.
At the same time, negotiations between China and Britain were also underway to reclaim the New Territories, with the 99-year lease of the New Territories expiring and China recovering the New Territories, Kowloon and Hong Kong.
At that time, the British were unwilling to spit out this "pearl in the crown", and kept pulling with the Chinese government, and even said that "Britain has never made a penny in Hong Kong".
The British, against their conscience, said that their taxes in Hong Kong were very low, and they invested almost all of them in welfare projects, and that the British government in Hong Kong was dedicated to serving the people.
But the reality is ironic.
Hong Kong's financial openness and low taxes are true. But the British are not philanthropic, they have long been deeply rooted in Hong Kong's economy - Hong Kong's big banks are all British and American holdings, and better-developed enterprises will also be actively invested by the British.
In the early 90s, 80% of the more than 1,000 well-developed enterprises in Hong Kong had British holdings, and the profits were as high as 100 billion pounds a year.
All this money went directly into Britain and was made by the big capitalists in the back. As for the British in Hong Kong, their wages are not their main income, and the income from corruption has long exceeded their wages.
According to Zhou Nan, deputy foreign minister and then head of the Sino-British negotiating delegation on the Hong Kong issue, it was only later in the Sino-British negotiations that British politician John Major admitted that Britain made an annual profit of 800-100 billion pounds from Hong Kong, which was equivalent to about 1 trillion yuan at that time.
This astronomical income is enough to leverage the financiers behind the British government, so there was a series of reforms of the British government in Hong Kong in the 90s, and even a so-called "universal suffrage" in the end, just to save Hong Kong.
However, the return of Hong Kong in the 90s was already a long-awaited thing.
Because until Hong Kong's return to the motherland, in the 150 years of history, the Chinese never enjoyed the same political power as the British, but there is no trace of this information in the Western-controlled media.
The influence of the United Kingdom on culture and law is also deep-rooted, and Hong Kong continues the legal system of the Commonwealth, as evidenced by the nondescript wigs on the heads of judges.
There is also British capital behind the Hong Kong media, who spread false news before and after the return of 97, such as "the imminent redistribution of rich property", which scared many wealthy Hong Kong businessmen to emigrate.
On the eve of the handover, the British government of Hong Kong also distributed passports to Hong Kong's upper-class elites, allowing them to freely choose to stay. These people formed the earliest "anti-return" group and have been inciting disturbances in Hong Kong or overseas.
Looking back over the past 20 years since Hong Kong's return to the motherland, there has been no shortage of conspiracy and turmoil, but any force that disrupts the reunification of the motherland will be crushed by the wheel of history.
After Hong Kong's return to the motherland, the process of democratization accelerated, the economy successfully transformed, and the bubble prosperity was precipitated.
The people of Hong Kong have finally been truly respected, rather than the bitter remnants of the colonialists, and more and more Hong Kong people have seen progress in history.
Supporting reunification and the motherland is the aspiration of the 7 million people in the SAR.
Literature / Shogakuno
Resources:
1. "Huairou Colonial Governance Model: Hong Kong's Unique Democratic Path", Lau Siu-kai
2. "Hong Kong Celebrities Say So - Who Created Hong Kong's Prosperity", Zhai Xingong
