On Reflection | In Hong Kong, China should learn from India’s healthy attitude to the British Empire

Empire’s critics often fail to understand that imperial subjects are not passive recipients of coercion. They can make imperial structures their own

The structures of British rule in Hong Kong – its legal system and free media – have become a way of life not as foreign intrusions, but as another way of being Chinese

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A depiction of the Battle of Amoy, fought between British and Chinese forces during the First Opium War. Image: Getty Images

Published: 9:30am, 22 Aug 2020Updated: 10:11am, 22 Aug 2020

The ghosts of empire keep appearing across the globe. This summer, Britain was rocked by the Black Lives Matter movement, members of which pulled down the statue in Bristol of the slave trader Edward Colston and dumped it in the river. Next to fall may well be the statue of arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes outside Oriel College, Oxford.

In Tokyo, this month’s 75th anniversary of the end of World War II was marred by some prominent politicians paying respects at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, where remembrance is held for leaders who defended Japan’s wartime empire.

And even Hong Kong has recently seen the temporary return of colonial symbols, when political protesters last year unfurled the old colonial flag that was retired at the end of British rule in 1997. Nobody runs empires any more, or at least not officially. Yet decades after formal imperialism has come to an end, the legacy of empire still shapes politics across Asia and Europe, usually in terms defined by rhetoric rather than the nuances of history.

The British Hong Kong colonial flag makes an appearance at a protest in Tsim Sha Tsui. Photo: Edmond So

In the summer of 2020, the debate over empire in Britain has concentrated on the question of whether it was good, bad or something in between. At one level, the question doesn’t really make sense. Empires depend on coercive power; they are not republics, nation-states or democracies and by definition depend on inequality. Defenders of the British Empire argue that it brought good things in its wake, such as rule of law (as if conquered countries had no legal system of their own) or railways (as if countries that resisted conquest could not have bought or built railways). Those arguments have a flavour of the old philosophical conundrum: if you rob a bank and give the money to an orphanage, does that excuse the robbery?

The ethics of empire cannot be understood without understanding the nature of power. That is the first principle that needs to be understood when judging empire.