tim's experiment

A nasty little accident befell Mr Alex Lo the other day. Mr Lo has often provided provocation for a piece here, because the poor man has to write every day. This is a lot. Bernard Levin used to write three days a week. In my prime I could manage seven columns a month. Mr Lo has to do his thing on Page 2 five days a week, so thought is sometimes a touch hasty. Anyway on Monday he did a piece on the international story which announced that Hong Kong people were global leaders in racism. It then transpired that there was a mathematical error in the original information. So Hong Kong people are not racist after all. On Tuesday Mr Lo apologised and will, perhaps, be more sceptical about social science in future. Still, this is the sort of accident which could happen to anyone. As a columnist you comment on what appears in the news. If that turns out to be wrong then you comment may turn out to be unjustified. It’s a normal hazard.

However on the tail of his musings on racism Mr Lo wandered into another matter. Hong Kong people, he said, like to “direct their animus towards the mainland Chinese”. This was not racism by the dictionary, but “just as shameful”. And he went on “we think we are just morally, politically and culturally superior, mostly because we know little or nothing about what’s really happening on the mainland beyond cliched narratives found in the mass media.” I cannot resist the thought at this point that the last sentence qualifies as a cliched narrative in itself.

I am not sure which part of this to disagree with first. Let us start with the cliched narratives. Turning to the China pages on the same day we find stories on pollution in Beijing, graduate unemployment, the suspected hijacking of a fishing boat by the North Korean navy, local governments cracking down on environmental protests, an academic suggestion that the Chinese Communist Party would be healthier if there was an official way to leave it, a graft scandal, and a long story about a security equipment exhibition which notes among other things that China spends more on internal security than it does (officially) on defence. This is a normal day’s crop, I suppose. And it would, perhaps, lead Hong Kong people to suppose that in some ways we are superior, because we have the rule of law, fair elections and freedom to protest, and in other ways we are not. That does not look like a particularly misleading picture to me. China is a police state. That is not a cliched narrative; it is a fact.

In any case, why should we suppose that Hong Kong people get most of their ideas about the mainland from the mass media? Most Hong Kong people are free to visit the mainland any time. Many of them do so at least once a year. Some of them go much more often. Mainland friends, relatives, fellow students and recent immigrants are all over the place. It seems to me extremely unlikely that “we know little or nothing” except what we can glean from the media. In fact most people have no difficulty in detecting that the picture of the mainland presented in, say, the China Daily is missing some important features.

Trudging on through the errors we come to the claim that having a jaundiced view of mainlanders is not quite racism but just as bad. No it isn’t. Racism is a poison which leads to prejudice, discrimination and oppression. Having a derogatory stereotype about people from some parts of your own country is a minor sin as long as you can keep a sense of humour about it. Flanders and Swann’s satirical song about the superiority of the English over the other inhabitants of the British Isles can be found here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdY1Y5XNJBY&list=PLDF3C913CACF01915

Hong Kong people do, I agree, have a somewhat derogatory stereotype about mainlanders who turn up in Hong Kong. This has nothing to do wtih ignorance of the mainland. It is because of the spectacle of whole blocks of flats sitting empty while the mainland moneylaunderers who own them wait for prices to go higher, of whole streets devoted to selling overpriced luxury goods, and people behaving badly on public transport. Like all stereotypes this is unfair, and like most stereotypes it contains a grain of truth. Most of us have been elbowed aside by a pushy PTH-speaker on the MTR by now. But this sort of friction is an almost universal consequence of mass tourism. When I worked in Blackpool they had a thing about Glaswegians. The Glaswegian reputation for excessive drinking and ensuing violence was not entirely unjustified. During the relevant fortnight the Glasgow police used to send a deputation down to the Blackpool railway station so that those of their regular customers who were already fighting drunk when they got off the train could be sent straight back home. But on the whole people did not take this too seriously and sober Scots were treated just like anyone else.  The situation is more delicate if the visitors are conspicuously well off. As a student my favourite holiday playground was Yugoslavia, as it then was. It was important when visiting there to establish that you were not German. The Germans visited in large quantities and they were all much better off than the average local citizen. This does not go down well.

So in some ways it may be convenient that Hong Kong people are not too impressed by mainland visitors. At least we are not jealous. We love our locusts.