Hong Kong people’s images of mainland China and UK may be changing
- Greater familiarities with Shenzhen and beyond through weekend visits and with Britain through BN(O) migration are likely altering their perceptions of both places in fundamental ways
I have never read a truer passage about human perception or misperception than this one from Public Opinion by the great political writer Walter Lippmann. It’s from the first chapter titled, “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads”.
“[People] trusted the picture in their heads…,” he wrote. “Looking back we can see how indirectly we know the environment in which nevertheless we live. We can see that the news of it comes to us now fast, now slowly; but that whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat [it] as if it were the environment itself.”
The actual world and our pictures of it don’t usually coincide, but hopefully, they don’t diverge so much as to be completely disconnected. Usually, the news media, movies, politics and popular culture in general filter and edit those pictures in our heads. We are too trusting of those highly processed pictures that may not be the most faithful representation of reality. Westernisation, Sinicization or what not – they are all the same process, and differ only in installing different pictures in our heads to make us think this or that is the “reality”.
For a long time, I could not understand why so many Hongkongers applying as British Nationals (Overseas) have been willing to risk and leave behind everything to move to Britain. Fleeing political persecution? Well, that’s what many Hong Kong people say they fear, but look at what they do.
After the crackdown following the 2019 riots and the end of Covid restrictions, people flock to Shenzhen and beyond for shopping and entertainment. Online tickets for the first three high-speed sleeper trains from Hong Kong to Beijing sold out in hours on Wednesday, while people queued at West Kowloon station for tickets for the new train service before counters opened. Well, I guess they were just eager to visit the totalitarian mainland where freedom dies.
Or is it simply that the mental pictures they have of mainland China have been changing drastically post-2019?
As for myself, after some introspection, I am beginning to think that I have very different images in my head about Britain from many people.
When Queen Elizabeth died, many Hong Kong people queued outside the UK consulate in Admiralty to pay respects. Quite a few were in tears. One woman actually broke down.
I can’t say I felt anything for the notional head of state of a former coloniser. In any case, the image I had of the late Queen was long associated with the British punk rock band, the Sex Pistols, as in:
“God save the queen/She ain’t no human being/There is no future in England’s dreaming/Don’t be told what you want, don’t be told what you need/ No future, there’s no future, no future for you.”
Perhaps thanks to Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten, I never wanted to live in the UK or raise a family there.
I wonder if over time, or perhaps it’s already starting, more BN(O)ers and Hongkongers are acquiring more realistic pictures of the UK than before in their heads, now that some have lived there for a time.
Old scandals dating back decades in the UK are only now being revealed in full public view, for example, the Horizon (Post Office), NHS and tainted blood scandals. I wonder if they may make people think twice about emigration. Perhaps those scandals represent a very different side of the UK usually hidden from view.
Last year, more than 100 UK schools had to close due to the risk of dangerous concrete collapses. Those schools are quite different from the majestic ancient school halls modelled after Christ Church College at Oxford in those Harry Potter movies.
About 30,000 National Health Service (NHS) patients were given blood infected with hepatitis C and HIV between 1970 and the early 1990s. NHS buyers and US sellers knew about the blood contamination even at the time, and it was subsequently covered up.
The Horizon was a faulty computer system supplied by the Japanese to the British Post Office. As reported by the BBC, “More than 900 sub-postmasters were prosecuted for stealing because of incorrect information from a computer system called Horizon. It has been called the UK’s most widespread miscarriage of justice.
The Post Office itself took many cases to court, prosecuting 700 people between 1999 and 2015. Another 283 cases were brought by other bodies, including the Crown Prosecution Service. Many sub-postmasters went to prison for false accounting and theft, and many were financially ruined.” A few committed suicide. The computer glitch was again known at the time, but was covered up.
In what is referred to as the Mid Staffs scandal, according to the Guardian, “between 400 and 1,200 patients died as a result of poor care over the 50 months between January 2005 and March 2009 at Stafford hospital, a small district general hospital in Staffordshire.
“The often horrifying evidence that has emerged means ‘Mid Staffs’ has become a byword for NHS care at its most negligent. It is often described as the worst hospital care scandal of recent times.”
Then there are the maternity care scandals such as the “dead babies’’ outrage that occurred under the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust between 2004 and 2012; the Grenfell fire scandal; and the Windrush immigrant scandal … You can google their details yourself. The famed NHS has turned out to be a rather different beast. As Hamlet might say, something is rotten in the state of Britain.
How’s this for a mental picture: the grass is not always greener on the other side.
